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

Lucas is not feeling so open-minded.

‘A present? If you didn’t pay for it, and I hope to God you didn’t as there’s nothing left on the Visa card, then it’s a bribe. Jesus, Rach, it’s a fucking great bribe. He hasn’t even tried to disguise it. Something for the wife – very clever. Well, it’s going right back to wherever it came from. Just as well you didn’t let him bring it in – then we’d be in receipt.’

Rachel lowers her toothbrush.

‘It might not be a bribe,’ she says. ‘It’s only a second. Some Russian make.’ She thinks of Elena spitting at the delivery man, his black eye. And then she remembers how Mykola had looked at her, how he had put his hand on her son’s head.

Lucas knows none of this. Alarm is twitching across his face. No one gives washing machines away for no reason. Not even a damaged one.

‘What exactly did this Mykola guy say to you?’ he asks. ‘He doesn’t expect us to pay him for it, does he? And how did he know where to bring it?’

Behind Rachel, the day’s washing drips from the nylon line above the bath: Lucas’s shirts, Ivan’s yellowing vests and her own knickers and stained nursing bras. She wants the machine. She wants clean laundry, but she doesn’t understand what Mykola wants.

‘We don’t have to keep it,’ she says, following Lucas as far as the living room and flicking the light switch so that the view beyond the windows is obscured by bright reflections. ‘I didn’t pay anything. I didn’t sign anything.’

‘Okay,’ says Lucas, taking out a pack of cigarettes. ‘I’ll get Zoya to call the shop. You’ve got to be careful, Rach. You don’t know how these people operate – starting small, finding your weakness, inveigling their way in and then suddenly I’m expected to reciprocate in some way. What the hell is this?’

Lucas is peering at the balcony door and before Rachel remembers to stop him he grasps the handle and gives it a yank. The frame makes a sticky sound like an Elastoplast being pulled off a knee. He has broken Elena’s freshly made seal.

The lorries start thundering towards Rachel as cold air rushes across the floor. There will be consequences, now, tomorrow, or sometime. She cannot shut out the balcony. The balcony will not be shut out.

Chapter 12

The winter freeze deepens throughout January. As an Arctic front sinks down from Siberia dead crows drop out of the sky. On the afternoons when it snows, when the apartment blocks are shrouded and tiny flakes like splinters whip across the road, muffling the shrieks of the trams and swirling in dim halos around the streetlights, Rachel and her son stay indoors. Ivan pulls at her skirt hem and practises his rolling on the bedroom floor. When his erupting gums make him whimper, or his nappy rash flares up and he howls for three hours at a stretch, she rocks him on her hip in front of the mirror by the front door, or distracts him with a mobile made from bottle caps, but she never takes him into the living room. On days when the skies clear and the thermometer won’t nudge over minus ten, Rachel dresses him in five or six layers, with little zip-up bootees she bought near the football stadium and a pom-pommed balaclava on his head. Then she bumps him down the steps in his pushchair with the see-through rain cover pulled around him to keep out the worst of the cold that burns her nostrils and makes her eyes sting, and they walk around the car park or take a trolleybus to the ramshackle BBC office, where Zoya frowns her disapproval and Lucas lets him play with his keys.

The washing machine is still out there on the thirteenth floor landing. At first Lucas tries to get Zoya to have it returned, but she tells him she won’t do his dirty work and besides, everyone knows about Mykola Sirko’s dealings with the new racketeers. His shop is almost certainly used to launder their money.

‘Exactly!’ says Lucas, exasperated. ‘Why do you think I want it out of my hallway?’

Elena Vasilyevna, on the other hand, cannot leave the washing machine alone. She climbs the stairs almost daily, arriving after Ivan’s nap to watch the next episode of Simplemente Maria on Lucas’s TV. She’ll skip it if Lucas is at home, though most of the time he’s out and when Rachel opens the door to let her in, Elena bangs on the washing machine with her fist and mutters some curse in Russian.

The TV sits in a corner of the kitchen now – it is too big for the narrow space, but Rachel has balanced it on a box opposite the stove, telling Lucas it is too cold in the living room. This is true, but also she doesn’t want Elena to notice the broken seal on the balcony door. She is still wary of Elena and assumes the old woman wants to nose around the apartment and peer at her private things. Nevertheless, she is learning that Elena’s visits offer a crucial, if temporary, reprieve from the fear that on some days makes Rachel lock herself in the bathroom while Ivan naps. When Elena is around, her son is safe from harm – safe from treacherous hands that might pluck him from his cot, carry him to the open balcony window, dangle him out and let go. Soon Rachel finds herself anticipating Elena’s impatient rattle of the door handle. They cannot speak to each other and Elena wants the volume turned up loud, which always wakes Ivan, but when he’s fed and sitting in his bouncy chair or sliding around on the kitchen floor, the caretaker tickles him with the toe of her felt slipper. Ivan giggles, which sometimes makes him bring up his mashed potato or cough on his bread ring, though mostly the