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

she is around she’s always so disapproving, questioning my story ideas. She’s ambitious. Probably wants a Ukrainian Service job and a stint in London, but if she expects a good word from me she’s going to have to start providing some proper support.’

‘So,’ says Vee. ‘If I take Zoya out and get her drunk, will she tell me what you’ve been plotting with Sorin? I know you’re working on something!’

Lucas pulls a face of mock pity.

‘Good luck with that. I don’t think she drinks. Or if she does, she’ll drink you under the table. Anyway, I had a great time on my travels, thanks very much for asking.’

‘So what did you discover? Did you go down a coalmine in Donbas?’

‘I did, as it happens. The lift was terrifying – you leave your stomach behind and it’s so fucking deep and black – though, as you’d expect, everything else was stage-managed as usual and I didn’t need to go all that way to hear them deny the stats about stillborn births, unpaid wages and the rest. The whole of eastern Ukraine is an environmental disaster zone, but the old guard aren’t about to roll over and die. Crimea was more fun. I got some ranting vox pops from ethnic Russians and several bottles of sticky Massandra wine, as well as a few bulletins about the Black Sea fleet. It’s a weird mix – shifty, militarised with a seaside café culture. We should fly down there for a weekend, Rach – maybe in the summer. The coastline is to die for. We could stay in one of the state sanatoria, take Ivan for a paddle.’

‘Nice diversion, Lulu,’ says Vee, waving her fork, notching up a stroke on an invisible tally. ‘I’ve not forgotten there’s something you’re not telling me. You’ve got a story you’re keeping secret!’ She turns to Rachel. ‘Hey, you okay? You’re not eating! I hope you’re not on a diet. Have you seen how skinny that Suzie woman is getting? I bumped into her husband at the Interior Ministry, knee deep in shit, I bet. What a creep.’

Rachel remembers something about Rob and his trucks coming in from Finland. Suzie had told her he could get hold of anything. Perhaps he could find some Pampers.

‘I’m not hungry,’ she says. ‘Have some more chicken.’

‘Did you call your mum?’ asks Lucas.

Rachel pinches the skin on the inside of her wrist. ‘I forgot.’

* * *

‘Off to Russia. Pregnant.’ Rachel’s mother had expelled her daughter’s news like a pip or a piece of eggshell.

Rachel gazed out of the kitchen window, across her mother’s grey December garden to the bare, diminished shrubs and the bonfire patch with its tide of sticky ash where her father used to burn hedge trimmings and leaves. Lucas was out there having a smoke by the compost bin, flicking his butts into a pile of vegetable peelings.

‘It’s not Russia,’ she said. ‘It’s the Ukraine.’

‘How far gone?’

She shifted her weight so that her still-flat abdomen brushed against the edge of the sink. ‘Thirteen weeks.’

‘Well you can’t take a baby out there, whatever they’re calling it. Your husband has to concentrate on his job. You’ll have to stay here.’

Rachel hated the way her mother said ‘your husband’. She kept her hands in the washing up bowl, pushing them down so that her palms pressed flat against the base, the warm water her only comfort as its soapy meniscus clung to her forearms. Her mother’s irritation would expand, she knew, in the silence.

‘I’m going to have the baby in London,’ she said. ‘St Thomas’s. I’ve already had two scans. Lucas will come back for the birth. It won’t be a problem. Then we can fly out together.’

Her mother hadn’t moved, despite the fact that the dining table was still only half-cleared and the turkey carcass was waiting to be stripped and the Christmas place mats needed wiping.

‘But you’re not being sensible or responsible. You’ll be nursing the baby. You won’t get any sleep. The baby will need immunisations – polio, whooping cough, all of that. I’ll have to clear out your old bedroom. Honestly, Rachel! You’ve no idea about what you put me through. You never have.’

‘Mum,’ said Rachel, suddenly angry. ‘I’m going to Kiev and I’m going to love this baby. I’m not like you or Dad.’ She took a quick breath, then half turned as if to snatch the words back, but it was too late for that.

Her mother stepped up close.

‘I can’t help you, out there,’ she said, gripping the gravy boat with its residue of whitish fat.

Rachel took her time with the last plate. ‘Don’t worry,’ she muttered. ‘I won’t ask you.’

* * *

While Vee and Lucas go through to the living room and out on to the balcony to smoke, Rachel stays in the kitchen to give Ivan his night-time feed. Breastfeeding is more efficient, now – automatic even, and almost pain-free. Ivan pushes his shoulder up against her ribs with his dense, solid warmth. His hand rests proprietorially. His eyes roll back and his lids

droop.

As she holds him, her eyes drift to the Christmas card from Lucas’s mother. The picture is a painting by one of those old Dutch masters – Brueghel or Van something – a skating scene.

Ivan doesn’t know about Christmas, thinks Rachel. She looks down at the baby who came out of her, who is now so completely and utterly separate in his difference, in his vision of the world and everything he will ever experience or feel or understand. When she was a teenager, she used to lie on her bed beneath the window and look up at the sky through a frame she made with her fingers. Sometimes the sky was grey. Sometimes it was blue, or black. But she didn’t think you could tell, just by looking, whether it was ice cold and freezing, or hot and burning. You might be a girl in Eastleigh or a penguin in Antarctica or her dad with a new wife in Singapore, or maybe the sky wasn’t