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

foot. ‘Dinosaurs. The dangers of men playing god with science. You read it a lot, but what does it say? I think it is rubbish.’

Rachel wishes the book had stayed at the bottom of the changing bag. She picks it up and flicks the pages slowly, as if the book is unfamiliar, until she finds one with the corner folded over. The fold is on page twenty-seven, marking the part where Elena the midwife leaves the window open at the clinic and the baby raptors climb inside and eat the newborn’s face. She must have counted the words of that section a hundred times at least.

‘I thought I needed this book,’ she murmurs.

‘And you have changed your mind?’ Zoya’s tone is neutral, but her questions, Rachel knows, are always loaded.

‘Elena helped me,’ she says. ‘I don’t need it anymore.’

‘Then get rid of it.’

Rachel thinks for a moment. Ivan is safe. Now when she looks at the cover it seems ridiculous.

‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’m going for a walk in the woods. You can come if you like, though I warn you, I’m taking the spade.’

Zoya offers a hand and pulls Rachel to her feet.

Up beneath the trees, the air is still and cool. They have left the wasps behind them and the ground is springy, made soft by decades of leaf fall. Light pools haphazardly between the birch trunks that stand white and straight like postulants stopped in prayer. Rachel feels as if she has stepped into a church.

Ivan, whom she has once again carried on her hip, is trying to get down, so she sits him on the weedless grass and looks around her.

‘Anywhere will do,’ she says, taking the spade from Zoya. She thrusts it into the earth near a small anthill. ‘Here.’

When a small hole is dug and the ants are scattering amongst the pale tree roots, Rachel tips her book inside, quickly, as if now she cannot wait to be rid of it, as if burying it is part of the ritual she never wanted, never craved. As an afterthought, she bends down and removes Ivan’s sodden nappy and drops it on top of the book.

‘There,’ she says, aware that Zoya is watching her.

‘You are killing two birds with one stone,’ remarks Zoya dryly.

‘Multi-tasking,’ says Rachel, as she kicks the soil back into the hole with her foot. ‘When I was little, we used to say, “good riddance to bad rubbish”.’ She pauses. A memory comes back to her, the love notes to the boy she’d left behind, hidden within those dark waxy sleeves. When her mother discovered one and confronted her with it, Rachel had collected up all the others and pushed them down amongst the chicken bones and broken eggshells at the bottom of the dustbin. ‘I hope it rots quickly.’

Rachel scoops up Ivan and the two women turn and walk back to the edge of the trees, where the sun is strong and bright, the air full of heat. They raise their hands to their eyes and squint down the slope towards the little hut and the stream. The place appears deserted, but then a small movement to the left catches Rachel’s attention and she sees Stepan peeing, directing the arc of his urine at a flat stone near the edge of the reeds.

Zoya sees him, too.

‘He likes to win, that one,’ she says. ‘If there’s no one to play against, he competes with himself.’

‘He seems very attached to Elena,’ says Rachel.

Zoya snorts. ‘She gives him money.’

‘Oh.’ Rachel remembers how the boy looks at her sometimes. She wants to feel sorry for him; she knows that back in London he’d be in and out of children’s homes or on the streets. He is alone, and lonely teenagers must, of necessity, probe the limits of their power. ‘He steals parcels from my mum. He eats the stuff she sends me. Why did you let him come with us today?’

‘Why not? You came.’ A pause. ‘I thought I would be here alone. Then you wanted to see and I thought, okay, but not just you. You are too much for one person by yourself.’

Rachel is never sure if Zoya means to offend her. ‘Well you know how to wind Lucas up,’ she says. ‘And I have to listen to him afterwards. So perhaps that makes us even.’

‘Ah, Lucas!’ Zoya lifts the spade and lets it rest across one shoulder. ‘He runs around Kiev, looking for his stories, listening in the wrong places . . .’ she stops, eyeing Rachel as if to gauge whether or not she has said too much.

Rachel is nodding her head, slowly. ‘That’s exactly what Vee says . . .’ Her voice tails off. She hasn’t thought of Vee or her husband all afternoon. Lucas’s longing for something better is a dead weight, dragging him under. She should have found a way to call him. She should have left him a note. Her flight would have arrived at Heathrow by now.

Somewhere through the trees, perhaps nearer the village, a bird screeches a warning.

‘Vee is a magpie,’ says Zoya.

‘Magpies steal.’

‘And this is what frightens you?’

Rachel blows a little soil out of Ivan’s hair. Without his nappy his bottom is small and bony. He feels light, almost weightless, like a bird.

‘I’m not frightened of Vee,’ she says. ‘But I should probably go back to Kiev.’

‘Now?’

‘Soon. After I’ve dipped Ivan’s feet in the stream. His first paddle.’

‘Tak,’ murmurs Zoya, as Rachel sets off down the hill. ‘At first I did not like you. Now I do.’

Chapter 25

Zoya has been driving for half an hour. Elena, sitting in the front with a bunch of cornflowers across her knees, snores gently, her chin bobbing against her chest. Stepan is sleeping, too, his head lolling against the dusty window as he sprawls on the back seat next to Rachel. His anorak lies discarded by his feet.

Rachel’s arms ache from holding Ivan. Her left elbow is wedged between the seat and the door and the basket on her right is