Snegurochka Judith Heneghan (most read book in the world .txt) 📖

This is the last day of summer. Tonight, the temperature will plummet and people will wake in the morning, sniff the wind and dig out their winter hats. For now, though, the boy remains balanced on the bicycle, a memory of warmth on his skin as the leaves drop silently from the rowans by the tramline, and the air cools, and the Englishman at the window below mutters to himself and lights another cigarette.

The foreign journalists say the city is holding its breath, but for Stepan it is one long exhalation.

* * *

Lucas, the golden-haired Englishman, and Rachel, his wife, are standing in the kitchen of their flat in Building Four, Staronavodnitska Street. It is a narrow room with a small table at the far end, in front of the window. The floor is covered in shiny brown linoleum and the walls are papered with a pattern of orange swirls. The laminated chipboard cupboards look new and there’s a small freestanding stove in one corner.

Lucas is holding a Geiger counter.

‘The batteries are charged,’ he says, frowning at a leaflet. ‘The switch is on.’ A pause. ‘Nothing showing yet.’ He waves the device in a circle through the air before pointing it at Rachel. ‘So that must be good?’

Rachel stops biting the skin around her thumbnail and stares up at the ceiling, which is covered in the same swirling paper as the walls. There’s a noise above her head, a faint squeaking sound that travels backwards and forwards from the window to the hallway like the wheels of a hospital gurney.

‘Rach?’

Rachel turns her gaze to her husband. ‘I thought they gave you some training,’ she says.

‘The training was for Pripyat and Chernobyl.’ Lucas risks a smile. He has already spent five months in Ukraine, his first posting as a radio journalist on a retainer with the BBC World Service. Everyone agrees that it is perfectly safe for foreigners who weren’t in the danger zone when the reactor exploded back in 1986. ‘Trust me, Rach, I wouldn’t have brought you and Ivan out here if there were hotspots in the city.’

Rachel stares at the gap beneath the stove. It is dark there, too dark to see underneath. This is her first day in Kiev. She arrived from London in the morning, frayed after the flight with their fifteen-week-old son. The airport felt hostile: people pressing all around, the threat of disease or some muttered sanction on their breath. The drive from Boryspil in a car with no seatbelts had done nothing to reassure her.

‘What about seepage underground? Try pointing it at the tap. The water comes from somewhere else.’ She leans across the stainless steel sink and raises the lever. Water gushes, then slows to a brown trickle. There’s a clanking sound in the pipework under the counter. Rachel makes a noise through clamped lips and folds her arms beneath her swollen breasts; her eyes are rimmed red with tiredness and Lucas tries not to notice the dark patch that is spreading across her shirt. She’s leaking again.

‘Hey,’ he murmurs, reaching for her hand. ‘It’ll be okay. I’ll get Zoya to go through the instructions. I’ll get the caretaker to sort out the taps. Until then we’ve plenty of bottled water.’ He looks down at his wife, at her sad, soft face with its high forehead and crooked nose and gently receding chin and feels, not for the first time, a flutter of panic in his chest. They haven’t seen each other for nine weeks because of doctors’ appointments and immunisations. Now he wishes she’d tell him what she’s really thinking: that she can’t bathe their baby in brown water, even if it’s not radioactive; that the cot in which little Ivan has finally fallen asleep won’t pass any British standards of safety; that an amber-coloured cockroach scooted under the bath when she went for a wee; that the flat is on the thirteenth floor and he shouldn’t leave her to go out with his journalist friends tonight so that he can catch up on what he’s missed while he’s been fetching her from the airport. Perhaps nine weeks was too long. Or not long enough. She’s only been in Kiev for six hours and she’s shutting down already. The thought makes him flap at the net curtains above the windowsill until he finds his cigarettes.

‘Come out on to the balcony with me,’ he says. ‘You’ve not seen the view yet. Come out.’

Rachel remembers staring up at the block of flats when Zoya, Lucas’s fixer, had driven them here earlier. The grey concrete balconies looked like something she’d once made for a school project, with matchboxes that fell off as soon as the glue dried.

‘I need to change my shirt,’ she mutters, pulling away.

Then the doorbell rings.

* * *

Once upon a time, Rachel told Lucas a story. She was a little drunk, a little careless and she told this handsome, suntanned student who looked like a famous cricketer or a polo player or maybe the Marlboro Man with his long limbs and blue sleep-with-me eyes that when she was eight, she thought she was having a baby.

Lucas tried to sit up, though the beanbag he was sprawled across made this difficult.

‘What happened?’ he asked, tipping sideways until he could fix the girl with the wonky nose and the large, slightly bulging eyes and the nice arse in his sights.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprising herself as the words came skipping out. ‘I was in love with a boy at my primary school. His name was Charles. But my dad was an engineer and we moved to Swansea for a year for his job. So I had this old box of After Eights – you know, the chocolates with the little waxy envelopes? Well the chocolates were all gone, so I wrote ‘I love Charles’ on little bits of paper and folded them up and tucked them inside the envelopes. Then I took the box to Swansea and hid the notes