Snegurochka by Judith Heneghan (best ebook reader for laptop .TXT) 📕

‘No, in here. The acoustics are cleaner – less echo – and the phone cable is long enough to reach from the hall.’ Lucas squats down and squeezes Ivan’s stubby foot. ‘If the quality’s okay then London doesn’t care where I file from and I could spend a bit more time with you two, maybe. It’s all coming together now, Rach – there’s an Interior Ministry day trip to Poltava next week and the news pieces are coming in, so I can’t avoid the press pack, but I can do most of the background for the film feature from home.’

He looks so convincing in his button-down shirt with his pen in his breast pocket. Rachel’s visit to Suzie’s has made her feel like someone else and so, for a few minutes with her book tucked away and while her husband sets the kettle on the stove, then untangles wires and fetches a black metal box from the hall with plastic knobs and little dials before withdrawing for a cigarette and a read-through of his notes, she believes him. She believes he is a good journalist, a serious journalist who thinks on his feet and understands what is required and how to get it done. This is his profession and she is his wife and the mother of his child, the woman to whom he comes home and for whom he makes coffee and smokes out on the treacherous balcony.

She watches him set up his microphone and adjust the levels. She even feels a little guilty that she won’t let him light up in the kitchen while he works. Maybe tonight it will be all right, if he is gentle, if his piece is well-received and they can play at being this straightforward couple a little longer. Crisp white sheets. Photos on the side table.

‘I went over to Suzie’s today,’ she says. ‘You know, the woman who lives in the other block. Vee put me in touch with her. She’s invited us for dinner next week. To a restaurant.’

‘Great!’ says Lucas, but he is absorbed now, pressing one side of a set of bulky headphones against his ear and dialling the global filing number for Bush House. This feels okay, too, so she retrieves her book, picks up Ivan in his bouncy chair and decamps to the bedroom.

‘You won’t make a noise, will you?’ she whispers as she sits on the bed, opens her shirt and puts Ivan to her breast. ‘Daddy’s busy.’ She shuts her eyes, bites her lip until the pain subsides, then listens to the low, modulated sounds from the kitchen and drifts off for a few minutes to the rhythmic squeaking that comes from somewhere above the ceiling. Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy.

The mantra doesn’t work.

She opens her eyes. Lucas is shouting in the kitchen.

‘What’s the matter?’ she calls, leaving Ivan asleep on the bed.

‘Bush House won’t use my piece! They say they can’t strip out that noise from upstairs! That squeaking! I’m going up there. Some randy wanker . . . how am I supposed to get anything done in this place?’ He marches down the hall and slams the front door behind him.

Now Rachel doesn’t know what to do. She ought to go after him, she thinks. She ought to call him back, so after a few seconds she leaves the apartment, too, stepping on to the stale grey landing, past the rubbish chute and through the heavy door to the concrete stairs. She won’t take the lift.

The fourteenth floor feels strange. There are three doorways, the usual locks and quilted sound-proofing and spyholes, but one door has a rubber doormat outside, while another has a complicated bell. Lucas is already knocking. Rachel stands a little way behind him, not sure now that she wants the squeaking noise to stop.

‘Lucas . . .’

They hear a low muttering. Lucas knocks again. This time a cough, then suddenly the door swings open and an older man with a large belly steps out.

‘Shto?’ he says, aggressively. What?

Rachel doesn’t catch her husband’s reply. In the rectangle of electric light behind the man’s sagging outline she looks down a hallway that is exactly like their own. The floors are uncarpeted, with the same over-varnished parquet and she can tell that all the doors in the flat are open because more light spills out from them and into that light swings a boy on rollerblades. He is tall, with a child’s narrow chest, and he is naked apart from some old cotton pants that don’t quite cover a flaky red patch of skin on his hip. He looks twelve, maybe thirteen, and she realises she’s seen him before, perhaps in the lift or loitering near the kiosks by the Eternal Flame. The boy glides towards the old man’s back and just when she thinks he is going to crash into him he executes a sharp, squeaking turn and stumbles a little before pressing his hand against the wall and pushing off back down towards the bedroom.

The old man heaves up his trousers with his thumbs. ‘Koleni!’ he shouts over his shoulder, before turning back to Lucas. Rachel catches his eye, though she doesn’t mean to, and at that precise moment she realises her arms are unencumbered – she has left her son on the bed downstairs instead of in his cot and she cannot recall if she closed the door behind her. Her chest constricts, she imagines him falling, down through the parquet and the concrete and the joists, down like the nappies in the rubbish chute, crumpling and flopping and broken.

She utters a soft cry, turns and clatters down the stairs.

* * *

The boy, Stepan, sees two faces like pale moons in the darkness of the landing. The man is angry, affronted. The woman flees, but first she looks. He spins on his toe and pushes off from the wall with his hand. The rollerblades squeak on the parquet as he glides back to the bedroom. That woman, he decides,