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

She starts with the bed. It is two singles pushed together; chipboard covered with a yellowish-brown veneer like every other piece of furniture in the flat. The mattress is hard and uneven. The blankets are heavy, boil-washed. Behind the bed, a large rug hangs on the wall. Not a traditional piece from Kazakhstan or the Caucasus but a factory-made brown rug with pink and red flowers. Opposite stands a wardrobe with her few clothes hanging neatly, not touching, where she placed them just two hours before. Lucas’s shirts hang beside them, with underwear hidden in a drawer. Ivan’s vests and babygros are folded on a shelf.

Now she turns her head to the two small bedside cabinets. The one nearest Rachel contains her evening primrose cream and her breast pads and contraceptive pills, neatly spaced on the shelf. On top sit two books: her copy of Baby’s First Year full of words such as ‘weaning’, and a novel, Jurassic Park, which she found on the plane. She isn’t in the habit of picking up other people’s things, yet no one else seemed to want it. She will read ten pages a day, she’s decided. This will take five and a half weeks. The calculation helps her relax.

Her eyes shift to the floor. The bedroom, the hallway and the living room are all coated in the same thick, uneven layer of varnish that reminds her of peanut brittle. Lucas says the landlord had it done so that he could raise the rent. The residue clogs up the gaps beneath the skirting.

The floor brings to mind things she cannot see. Under the bed is a pull-out drawer. If she leans over she can reach it, though you always save the best to last if you know what’s good for you so she focuses instead on the large window. This window doesn’t bother her, despite the fact that the glass is smeared, veiled with a sagging net curtain. There’s no balcony on this side of the flat.

Rachel looks down, still bewildered by the sight of her white arms cradling her son with the small brown spot above his right ear that will one day be a mole, his eyelashes like tiny scratches and his pink, almost translucent nostrils. Earlier, in the living room, she had glimpsed Ivan falling. Such visions, she knows, must be dismissed with a sharp shake of her head before they can fix themselves like premonitions, like memories, but Vee had been watching her, so she hadn’t moved. It’s a long way down from the thirteenth floor. Five seconds, she thinks. Maybe six. As the calculation freefalls, the impulse to lean over the side of the bed is something she can no longer ignore.

Without detaching Ivan she stretches out her arm and gropes under the bed for the drawer. Out it slides, smooth on its castors and she is ready to weep with relief. The nappies sit exactly as she placed them: one hundred and twenty-six Pampers in twelve neat piles; four full packs she lugged over from England. Lucas has bought lots of cheap nappies, rigid and scratchy, imported from Latvia or Poland but they’re not as white or as soft or as absorbent and their tapes don’t stick and she suspects that, even now, a seepage of Ivan’s runny yellow faeces is flowering up his back. She’ll eke out the Pampers as she’ll eke out her reading: one nappy per night. Lucas won’t be allowed near them. He can change Ivan with the cheap ones.

From the hallway beyond the door she hears footsteps. With a swift tap she rolls the drawer back under the bed, then wipes the sticky milk from her stomach and pulls her shirt across her chest. A soft knock, and Lucas’s face appears.

‘Asleep?’ he mouths. Rachel nods. Her husband slides into the room, closing the door behind him with exaggerated care. He is holding something in his hand. Dark green, rectangular, covered in shiny cellophane: a box of After Eights.

‘Vee brought them,’ he whispers, balancing the box on top of Jurassic Park. ‘For you. Can they come in and have a look?’

Rachel eyes the chocolates with suspicion.

‘You didn’t tell them, did you?’

‘Tell them what?’ asks Lucas, staring her down, not blinking in the way he always does when he’s guilty. Of course he’s told them. He’s always telling people how when she was eight she tucked love notes inside the little waxed envelopes and hid them all around her parents’ house in Swansea before convincing herself that she was having a baby. He thinks it is funny, and charming; at their wedding reception he turned it into his story, the story of how he knew she was the one he wanted to marry. ‘Christ, Rach! What’s your problem? It’s just a box of chocolates! People want to meet you, they want to get to know you!’ He sighs, walks over to the window. ‘Look, I know you’ve had a tough time – you’re exhausted. But what else should I say? Just tell me what you want me to say.’

Rachel stares at Lucas’s back, and strokes the plaster on Ivan’s thigh that covers the site of the immunisations he had at the clinic near Clapham Junction only two days before. In those weeks alone after the birth, the fact of her husband had wavered. She would wake in the night when her son moved or murmured, unable to remember how she had arrived in that empty bed in the ground-floor flat with the trains rumbling and the wild, abandoned whoops of the sirens.

‘You’re still going out then?’ she asks, removing Ivan from her breast with a scoop of her little finger. In her head the question seemed conciliatory, disinterested, but these aren’t the sounds that come out of her mouth.

‘Yes, I’m still going out. You could come too, bring Ivan – Zoya could give us a lift in the car. No one would mind.’

‘Or you could stay in. I’ve only