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

light and for a few moments the only sounds are the sighs and the soft clunks from the pipes that lead to and from the boilers.

‘I will try to find out something. Do not tell Lucas. He would not handle it well.’

‘I know,’ says Rachel. ‘He would be a nightmare.’

* * *

‘Opposites attract!’ laughed Lucas’s mother when Lucas and Rachel announced their engagement. And it was true, in a way, for both were curious about the other. Sometimes, though, in the first weeks of their marriage, Rachel felt herself peering into the cracks between them, fearing what she could not see.

Once they had a fight about a lottery. They had gone to Spain for their honeymoon. Not the package version, but somewhere Lucas called ‘undiscovered Spain’, the north-west corner, because Rachel had expressed a wish to visit the end of the world and he had a yen to indulge her. The fog hadn’t lifted since their arrival. They had stopped for breakfast in a café on the outskirts of Vigo, where the streets stank of cooking oil and diesel.

‘Christ,’ said Lucas, folding the copy of El País he was attempting to read and stabbing at an article with his finger. ‘People here go crazy for the lottery. “El Gordo”, they call it. The Fat One!’ He leaned back and stretched his legs out under the table, which wobbled and made Rachel’s pen jump across the postcard she was writing.

She looked up. ‘Pardon?’

‘The lottery. It’s plastered all over the place – posters on the windows, ads on beermats. A throwback to Franco, maybe. It gives people a little hope, stops them thinking about the big stuff.’

Rachel nodded. Nodding was becoming a habit.

‘There’s an old boy here who won a million pesetas,’ continued Lucas. ‘He died of a heart attack the next day. Poor bastard! Never even got the chance to buy a decent bottle of Cava.’

‘Oh, that’s awful!’ murmured Rachel, staring out past the peeling posters on the window to the ghostly cranes of a storage depot and longing for a sun-drenched beach. ‘I’d never buy a lottery ticket.’

Lucas put his arms behind his head.

‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’

‘Well, I’d never be able to decide what to do with the money if I won.’

‘Yes, you would. A big house, straight off.’

Rachel frowned. ‘I suppose . . .’

‘I know what I’d do,’ said Lucas, glancing over his shoulder for the bill as he slipped his cigarettes back into his shirt pocket. ‘I’d invest in a couple of properties, give some to both our families and put some in trust for our kids.’

‘Well, where would you draw the line?’ asked Rachel. ‘I mean, how much would you give your family? And where does ‘family’ end? You’ve got all those second cousins!’ She tried smiling but Lucas was busy rummaging for coins.

‘There’d have to be a cut-off, obviously. You’d have to be professional about it – get proper advice. A pot for personal use, a pot for family, a pot for other stuff.’ Now Lucas looked at her, ready to deliver his coup de grâce. ‘Because wouldn’t it be great to make a difference, you know? Give to worthwhile causes; give to charity?’

The woman behind the bar wasn’t bringing the bill. This time Lucas waved, making a little signing gesture with his hand, though Rachel wasn’t finished: all sorts of thoughts were tumbling around her head. Couples were destroyed by this kind of thing – you read about it all the time. Wills causing disputes; disagreements between siblings or parent and child – why didn’t you give me a bigger share? Why aren’t my needs as important as theirs? It was human nature, to want more, to have more. Money is power, and power corrupts, as her O-level history teacher had never tired of repeating while he scratched his litanies across the blackboard.

‘I wouldn’t claim it,’ she said, turning towards the window again. A young man in a leather jacket glistening with damp sauntered past, his hand quickly checking his flies. ‘Or I’d give it all away. I’d have to do it quickly.’

‘Thanks!’ Lucas rolled his eyes. ‘Never mind your wretched husband, pissing peanuts all day long to keep you in overpriced coffees!’ He stood up, scraping back his chair so that an old man at a seat in the corner looked across, then looked away. ‘We’re going to have to abscond to get some attention . . .’

He walked over to the bar, where the woman was re-filling a tray with some greasy-looking pastries in between flipping eggs on the griddle behind her. Rachel, meanwhile, looked around for a loo, not knowing how long it’d be before they found another.

The cubicle was tucked away behind a drinks cooler. When she emerged Lucas was impatient to leave. As he held open the door he pushed something into her hand.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I got you one. If you win, I want half!’

Rachel looked down in dismay at a slip of paper with a drawing of a church in coloured ink and the number 700321 above the words ‘Loteria Nacionale’.

‘I don’t want it,’ she said, but he wouldn’t take it back.

‘If you win and don’t claim, it would be an abdication of responsibility.’ He was teasing still – laughing and needling. ‘Think of all the anti-malarials it could purchase. Think of all the sex workers you could save or the slum children you could educate! Or maybe you’d rather do nothing? Now that would be something to feel guilty about.’

Rachel scrunched the ticket in the palm of her hand and thrust it into her shoulder bag. Lucas was right and he knew it and was already forgetting, moving on to the next thing, striding across the road, peering through the fog to the hire car. She, on the other hand, was culpable now, whichever way she looked at it.

The ticket stayed in her bag until the weekend. She checked the numbers at a roadside kiosk in La Coruña without telling Lucas and when she discovered she hadn’t won anything, she almost cried with