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

‘I’m sorry Mum. How are you?’

‘I’m very well. How is my grandson?’

‘Fine! He’s got long legs, and a gorgeous smile, and he’s sitting! He sits in front of the washing machine, and if I leave the hall cupboard open he pulls all the shoes out.’

‘He ought to be crawling.’

‘He is, sort of –’

‘You’d better bring him home soon. I don’t know what you do out there. I never see your husband on the news.’

‘He’s not that kind of journalist, Mum. He’s radio. Not TV.’

‘Well you know what I think; you should never have gone.’

Now it is Rachel who says nothing. Instead she makes pictures in her mind’s eye, the old habit from childhood, in case her mother can still invade her head. The fifteen hundred miles between them really isn’t so far. Here I am going to lots of parties. See? I have friends here. I am living a grown-up life.

‘Is this call expensive?’ asks her mother. ‘It must be expensive.’

Rachel clears her throat. ‘Thank you for the Angel Delight . . .’

‘I shan’t send any more. Not if someone else is opening it. Is that the baby I can hear? He sounds fretful. You’d better see to him.’

‘What? Okay – well, bye-bye Mum . . .’

‘Bye-bye.’

There is silence, then a click as her mother replaces her receiver. Rachel can almost hear her sighing as she reaches for her cup of tea and settles back to watch her programmes. She stares at her three reflections in the mirror above the telephone, at her sagging corduroy skirt with its creases across her hips. Ivan is sitting at her feet, reaching for the edge of the low table. His fingers grip the veneer as he tries to pull himself up, a bubble of saliva shining on his lip.

‘That was your grandma,’ she says, scooping him up before he knocks his chin. There is something about his wide eyes, open, trusting, that reminds her of the hand-written notices on the lampposts on the road up to the monastery: all those flaps of paper, waiting to be torn off, waiting for someone to call the number on the slip, waiting for a connection. ‘She used to be a mind reader,’ she whispers, into his soft ear. ‘But not any more.’

* * *

A couple of days after Vee’s party, Rachel wakes up to a ringing sound.

‘Do you hear it?’ she asks Lucas, as he sits on the side of the bed to pull on his socks.

‘That’s tinnitus,’ he says. ‘I used to get it on night shifts when I was subbing. Like a worm in your ear. Bloody annoying.’

Rachel shakes her head. It is as if someone is standing by her shoulder, running a wet finger around the rim of a crystal glass. She thinks of Stepan, for some reason, though this is no squeak from a pair of rollerblades. The sound is most insistent when she reads Jurassic Park, counting the words and memorising entire pages. When she descends in the lift the ringing fades, and when she walks outside into the dense grey fog that has rolled up from the river it stops altogether. The sound isn’t unpleasant, but it does confuse her. ‘What?’ she asks Lucas, as he says goodbye.

When Elena arrives to watch TV Rachel turns up the volume, which in turn wakes Ivan from his nap. Elena draws a circle with her finger next to her temple in a gesture straight out of Simplemente Maria. ‘Vesna,’ she mutters as Rachel pads off to the bedroom. ‘Loco’. And perhaps Elena is right, perhaps Rachel has inhaled a little spring madness, because later that afternoon, before she can think twice, she is digging out the credit card that Lucas has asked her not to use and taking a trolleybus down to Khreschatyk to buy a pair of imported jeans from the place under the stone archway Suzie calls the ‘hookers’ boutique’. She can’t try them on because she has Ivan in the baby carrier, so instead she shakes them out, holding them against her legs and inspecting the seams, frowning and tutting like the women she has watched buying clothing in the musty corridors of the central department store. However, these jeans are not made of the cheap, bleached denim that everyone wears; they are cut from a dark indigo, good quality fabric, with tiny metal studs in the shape of a curvy ‘S’ on each back pocket.

‘One hundred twenty dollars,’ says a bored-looking young saleswoman with pushed-up breasts and piled-up hair.

Rachel’s hand shakes a little when she hands over her card; she must wait as the woman picks up the phone and reels off the long number, rolling her eyes at the incompetence of the operator down the line or maybe Rachel herself, who ought to know better than to waste her husband’s dollars on a tired, sagging backside.

Back at the apartment the jeans button digs in to the soft flesh of Rachel’s stomach and the fabric strains tight across her thighs. Nevertheless, when she squints she looks taller. When she closes her eyes she hears the high, ringing note, and imagines she is a Mexican polo player’s mistress, or a kohl-eyed violinist or a journalist throwing a party and smoking out in the hallway with someone else’s husband.

Chapter 17

The fog lingers across Kiev for five whole days. Like a cocoon, thinks Rachel, opaque and animal. The landscape is already morphing into spring by the time the sunlight glimmers through. A slick of green spreads between the apartment blocks. The lilacs that grow through the chain link fence by the military academy are in bud, and the air smells of wet earth and oily potholes and a more ancient smell – last winter’s thawing detritus, or maybe gas from the tunnels that once burrowed beneath the streets. The ground is sloughing off winter.

Lucas groans about the mud by the dump bins but otherwise pays little attention. His story about The Golden Promise is snagging – the general release