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

blue at all in someone else’s head, but red, or yellow or some other colour she couldn’t even imagine. No one could be sure. No one could see what she saw.

Now her baby must live in his own version of the world, just as she does. The thought is unbearable to her, and she wants to share something with him, help him feel less alone, even if it is the tired tropes of Christmas trees and carol singers and glowing log fires in pictures on cards, so she starts to sing, hesitantly, rocking him in her arms.

Silent night, holy night

All is calm, all is bright . . .

 

She can’t remember the next line, so she tries something else.

Oh come, all ye faithful . . .

 

Again the words are swallowed by the louder voice in her head, or maybe she never really knew the words at all, but instead sang them without thinking from a dog-eared hymn book in the school hall, rocking back on her heels, cheeks flushed red as she bellowed the last two lines.

Oh come let us adore him,

Chri-ist the lord.

 

* * *

Rachel and Ivan are both dozing off when the doorbell rings. The sound makes Ivan’s arms fly out and his newly erupted tooth bites into her breast. She hears Lucas open the door and say goodbye to Vee, then other voices murmur. Perhaps it is Zoya, she thinks, bringing news of a resignation or a scandal with that fierce pout of hers. However, next she hears some rapid Russian, and a boy’s voice speaking in halting English.

After a minute or two the front door closes and Lucas walks down the hallway.

‘Hey,’ he says, as he sits down and peels off the fingerless gloves he wears for smoking on the balcony. ‘It’s cold out there. Vee asked me to say goodbye – she didn’t want to wake Ivan. Happy Christmas.’

‘Who was at the door?’ asks Rachel.

‘The dezhornaya,’ says Lucas. ‘She doesn’t seem to realise that it’s past midnight, or that it’s Christmas in some parts of the world, or that I speak Russian. She brought that sulky-looking boy from upstairs with her to translate.’

Rachel cradles Ivan’s head with one hand as she rummages under her shirt for the clip on her bra strap. ‘I met her – the other day. We had a bit of a confrontation.’

Lucas looks alarmed.

‘Were you okay?’

Rachel doesn’t know how to answer this question. The old woman caught her trespassing in her cubicle. Rachel spilled her seeds all over the floor. The old woman cried, Rachel ran up the stairs with Ivan, then later the abandoned pushchair had appeared by the front door, a little dented, but otherwise still serviceable.

She nods.

‘Well, anyway,’ says Lucas. ‘She says she needs to come in next week to do something with the windows. The boy didn’t explain it very well – apparently it’s a condition of our rental.’

Rachel remembers the note left outside on the mat, under the dirty nappy. Close windows!

‘I might be out. The survey . . .’

‘She said she’d only come up when you are in.’ Lucas peers over the table piled with dishes, sees Rachel’s exposed breast, Ivan’s saliva still glistening and a milky dribble on his lips. ‘Come on, Rach, I’m knackered. You’re knackered. Let’s both go to bed.’

* * *

Zoya sits on the back seat of the Zhiguli. Ice is forming on the windows in two-dimensional fronds, strange pinnae unfurling across the glass. It is cold outside, colder than usual, a bitter, frozen, silent cold that will kill the homeless and the drunks caught out tonight, but her own breath swirls warmly around her face; she’s been cleaning vigorously for the past half hour.

She finishes her scrubbing and rests for a moment. This is where Lucas’s wife sits, she thinks. Rachel sits here with her baby on her knee and stares at the back of her head. Zoya breathes in through her nose, and sighs. The interior still stinks of fecal matter, layered now with the astringency of the lemon Jif she has used on the plastic seats. She wonders if she should leave the windows open, just a crack, to air it overnight, but car thieves are everywhere and while they’d steal the Zhiguli without such assistance, she doesn’t want to make their job easier. Besides, she thinks, the windows will have frozen solid by now. She ought to get out before the door freezes, too, but she lingers, despite the smell. It is a space she knows intimately, like any driver, yet without the engine running its silence seems to wrap her in something like comfort. Outside, the road is empty, inhospitable; a street light flickers weakly as the cold descends.

Up in Zoya’s apartment, her grandfather is sleeping at last. If she hadn’t brought the car home with her the previous week she would never have been able to drive him to the clinic when his temperature started raging, when his lips turned black and when, stretched out on the back seat of the Zhiguli with his thin legs folded up and his head against the door, his insides had started pouring out in a hot, steaming torrent.

Zoya had only been to the clinic once before. It is a private practice near the Dynamo stadium, with a receptionist and a waiting area and nurses in white rubber clogs. If she’d taken him to the public hospital near the bridge, he would almost certainly have died. When she arrived at the clinic with her grandfather they took samples and put him on a drip, but as soon as the diaorrhea slowed and his temperature dropped she signed his discharge slip and brought him back to the apartment. When Tanya came out to help carry him upstairs she told Zoya she ought to have left him there. Tanya thinks Zoya’s made of money because she works for a foreigner, but the daily rate at the clinic is a whole week’s wages. The new pills in the box with the German brand-name cost even more. In the end, though, it’s not about