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

‘Mykola!’ the man says, helplessly, at which point Elena falls silent.

Mykola. Rachel recognises that name, but before her emotions have time to rearrange themselves, the man shrieks and puts his hand up to his face.

Elena has spat at his black eye.

* * *

Rachel knows all about consequences. As a child, these consequences had a physical presence; they bore down upon her like giant transport lorries, loads strapped tight beneath flapping tarpaulin. Her friends didn’t seem to share her fears; she faced this nightmare alone.

When she was six or seven her parents went away. She wasn’t sure where, exactly; to a funeral or on a holiday or perhaps they simply disappeared, walking out of her existence for a week. They left her in the care of some friends, a middle-aged couple with five children of their own, all of them older than Rachel. The family lived in Portsmouth, one street back from the sea, and while the two oldest boys were told not to let Rachel swim out of her depth, other restrictions were few.

The sun was hot the week she stayed there. It must have been the summer holidays, as the narrow beach was teeming with families and every day she and the others were given ten pence for a Ninety-Nine from the ice cream van near the entrance to Billy Manning’s. But the others didn’t spend their money on Ninety-Nines. Instead they ran underneath the Ferris wheel and made a beeline for the long, low shack on the far side of the funfair. The shack was called Tam’s Treasure Trove and when Rachel first stepped underneath the peeling sign she felt swallowed up by its darkness after the glare of the concrete and the bright, sharp shingle. The air smelled like a tidal cave and straight away she fell in love with the buzzes and bleeps, the flashing lights and the grown-ups huddled, intent, over the machines. They took no notice of her.

A sudden jangling crash to her right had made her jump, but the others just laughed and winked at each other.

One of the boys showed her how to hand over her precious ten pence piece to a man with purplish-green tattoos all over his forearms. The man sat up high on a stool in a narrow booth by the door. Neat towers of brown pennies had been lined up along the shelf in front of him, and when Rachel fed her coin under the window he pushed a stack of ten towards her without looking up. The older boy immediately took three of the pennies out of her hand and she followed him towards a long, brightly lit machine with revolving trays of money inside: thousands of pennies she could watch if she pressed her face against the sticky, curving glass.

The boy pushed one of her pennies into a slot. It rolled down a chute and spun on its axis for a second or two before the tray above it moved forward and knocked it flat. Rachel quickly understood that the penny needed to fall in just the right place, at just the right moment, if it was to be shunted onwards with any chance of toppling on to the tray below and perhaps starting a waterfall of pennies like the one she had witnessed when they first entered. All around her, people were scooping up coins from the dark holes underneath and pushing them back in. The jangling sound made her skin tingle and she wanted it to happen for herself. It wasn’t her lucky day, though. One penny in particular seemed to defy the laws of gravity as it hung lop-sidedly over the edge. She longed to see it fall. It wasn’t fair.

When her money was gone she wandered towards the back of the shack, where the smell of mould and vinegar made her want to pinch her nose and the machines only took five pence pieces. A woman in an orange dress leaned over a tall machine in the corner; it lit up her thin face and made her cheekbones stick out. The woman muttered something, then gripped the central rim with her fingers and rammed her hip against the glass. The machine tipped slightly and released its bonanza with a plashing cascade.

Rachel returned to her machine. She tried copying the woman, and when her child’s weight couldn’t shift it, she gave it a kick. The kick hurt her bare toe and still the coins wouldn’t budge, yet the man in the booth had seen her and he started banging on his window and shouting that he’d call the police. As she fled the arcade, Rachel saw him climbing down from his stool. She didn’t stop running until she got back to the house and though the others didn’t tell on her, she spent the next four days in bed, fear pushing her down into the mattress and under the pillow while she cried about a stomach ache and listened for the policeman’s knock at the front door. When no policemen came, she concluded that they hadn’t known where to find her. They were probably still searching, house to house. Those were the consequences. There is no such thing as an empty threat.

* * *

Now things are complicated. Elena has pushed Mykola’s black-eyed delivery man into the stairwell and sent him on his way. She strips the old green overalls off Rachel and picks up her bucket before disappearing downstairs herself. Rachel doesn’t know what to make of any of this, but she does know she hasn’t heard the last of it.

Lucas bumps into the machine when he comes home that night. He catches his hip on one corner and Rachel hears him cursing as he fumbles in the darkness by the front door.

‘What the hell is that?’ he asks, as she steps out of the bathroom, still brushing her teeth.

‘It’s a present, I think,’ she mumbles, wiping her mouth. ‘A washing machine. From Mykola, the man I met in the white goods shop.