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

his glass. ‘She has everything she needs. She likes to look good. But do you know the best thing about her? No? Well I’ll tell you. It’s that gap between her thighs.’

‘That what?’ Vee narrows her eyes.

‘That gap – you know, between a woman’s legs! Her triangle of light. I couldn’t be with a woman who doesn’t have one.’

‘Oh please . . .’

‘That’s just it,’ says Rob, leaning his elbow on the table and pointing a finger at Vee. ‘You think I’m making some kind of sick joke because I don’t talk a lot of righteous crap like you lot. But I know what I want and that’s the deal and Suzie understands that. See?’ He tugs on Suzie’s arm. Instead of pulling away again, Suzie rises jerkily to her feet, turns round and thrusts out her backside. She is wearing a pair of white jeans that stretch across her buttocks and pull tight between her thighs.

‘You bastard,’ Vee says. ‘Time to go.’

‘I’ll get the bill,’ says Lucas, thickly. He waves to the waitress, but she is staring at the wall.

Rachel looks at Suzie and fear fills her throat, because Suzie’s face has changed; it is closed and brittle now as she turns back towards her husband.

‘It’s sorted,’ says Rob, and he takes the remaining bottle of vodka, pushes back his chair and heads over to the shell-suited young men. ‘Jesus,’ he mutters over his shoulder. ‘You journalists should fuck off to Sarajevo.’

* * *

‘You could do it,’ says Vee, who seems remarkably cheerful after their sudden departure from the restaurant. She is sitting next to Rachel and Ivan on the back seat of the fume-filled Volga she flagged down to take them home.

‘Do what?’ asks Lucas, trying to turn round in the front passenger seat. He gives up and slumps back. The driver, a young man in a Dynamo Kyiv bobble hat, is hunched behind the wheel, eating sunflower seeds from a bag on the dashboard. His gearstick is sporting a jaunty crocheted cover and Rachel wonders if his grandmother, or maybe his girlfriend, made it for him.

Vee yanks on Lucas’s scarf.

‘The cost of living survey! For the UN! The job I was telling Suzie about. I thought she was going to say yes until that prick gave us the benefit of his misogyny. I should have thought of Rachel first.’

‘What?’ Rachel raises her head from where she was resting it against the freezing window. The night outside is dark and mysterious beyond the steady repetition of the streetlamps. They remind her of a zoetrope she once saw as part of a touring exhibition that came to the library in Lyndhurst. You were supposed to focus on the flickering pictures, yet all she saw were the shadows in between.

‘You’re a mom!’ persists Vee. ‘You’re going to need that stuff in the survey, and they’ll pay you five hundred bucks. Just visit a few stores and write down the ticket prices.’

‘Oh. The survey. Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Great.’ Vee sits back. ‘I’ll tell the woman at the mission to call you. They’ve been trying for a while to find a third party. You’re what they call an impartial expatriate.’

‘Okay,’ murmurs Rachel, but she’s not thinking about the survey. She can’t get Suzie out of her head. Suzie who bakes apple cake and wears white angora and speaks with a gentle Edinburgh accent. Refined Suzie. Except she isn’t those things at all. Or at least, she wasn’t tonight.

The apartment block is quiet when she and Lucas return. The lift appears when summoned and there’s no sign of the caretaker. Back on the thirteenth floor, Lucas retreats to the balcony for a smoke while Rachel feeds Ivan and settles him into his cot. In the bedroom, the full moon slides through the gap in the curtains and across the shiny parquet. Rachel undresses slowly; she hasn’t drunk as much as the others, but two modest shots of vodka leave her reeling a little. Her skin is white in the moonlight. She pulls open the wardrobe door and stands in front of the mirror in her knickers. Her stomach rolls over the top of the elastic and stretchmarks gleam their silvery trails across her hips. She turns, looks over her shoulder, twisting her neck, but all she sees is the drooping shadow in the overhang of her buttocks. There’s no thigh gap. No triangle of light.

‘Hey,’ Lucas says, stumbling in from the hallway as she climbs into bed. ‘We should do that again.’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Rachel, wondering if her husband had even registered what Rob had said.

‘I don’t mean see them. I mean just – go out. Meet people. Have fun. I worry about you, Rach. You need friends, especially when I’m away.’

‘What?’ Rachel raises her head, twisting round. Lucas has his back to her as he peels off his socks.

‘Ah – didn’t I tell you? I meant to tell you before dinner,’ he says. ‘The Ukrainian Service editor called – she wants voices from the regions. I couldn’t say no. It’s only a week – commissions guaranteed. Looks like I’m going on a trip.’

Chapter 7

The first proper snow falls on the morning of Lucas’s departure. While he packs, then shaves, stooping in front of the small mirror in the bathroom, Rachel pulls back the nets and stands at the bedroom window with Ivan in her arms. She watches as the shapes below her soften, the concrete paths become white ribbons and a small lorry fan-tails across the tramlines. When snowflakes drift out of the greyness they don’t always fall, she thinks. Sometimes, they rise. When you are already high in the sky, the air currents lift you and push you up against the building and out and round again. Perhaps you never reach the ground.

‘Lviv tonight and tomorrow,’ calls Lucas, above the whirring of his electric razor. ‘Zoya has the phone numbers. Then three days in the Donbas and a couple in Crimea. More if she can get me a permit for Sevastopol.