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

When she wakes she is disoriented. The furniture spins around her with a speed she cannot match. She sits up and Jurassic Park slides off the bed to the floor. She must have fallen asleep while counting so she’ll have to start again later. Ivan isn’t in his cot and now she hears noises – the opening of a cupboard, the judder of a tap. Lucas is home. She looks at her watch. Seven-thirty.

Her husband is standing at the kitchen counter with his back to her when she reaches the doorway. He is hacking at a pimply-skinned chicken.

‘Coq au vin,’ he says, with a wave of his knife. ‘I wanted to do chicken Kiev, but I couldn’t find a recipe.’ On the table sits a bottle of plastic-topped wine and some vegetables – carrots, onions – along with a sizeable heap of peelings. Ivan is sitting on the floor underneath waving a thin coil of potato skin. Rachel scoops him up, presses her lips against his hair and stares at the mess, still dazed from her nap. Back in London Lucas sometimes made dishes like lasagne or shepherd’s pie. He always wanted her to guess the secret ingredient he’d added – fennel, or coriander or something just as unfamiliar.

‘How did things go at the War Memorial?’ she asks. ‘Did you get what you needed?’

Lucas grunts dismissively. ‘There was no story. Just the usual reminiscences, rose-tinted recollections of comrades. Even the protests were half-hearted. People don’t want to remember the truth. There’s no mileage for me in that kind of self-delusion.’

Rachel thinks of the set faces on the trolleybus, the sagging shoulders and shuffling in the queues and feels a ripple of affinity with the city’s pensioners.

‘Elena has moved,’ she says. ‘The caretaker – she’s rented out her house to Suzie and Rob. She’s not working here anymore.’

‘So I heard. Funny to think of her as the landlady for those two. You did pretty well to get on the right side of her. She always looked like she wanted to murder me.’ He turns around. ‘Dinner will be a good hour or so. If you stick Ivan in the bath I’ll bring you a beer. I won’t do any more work tonight. We should talk.’ He pulls a long face for his son, then smiles, and Rachel sees that this costs him, which makes her both sorry and wary.

‘Okay,’ she says. Then, when she’s sitting on the loo seat with her feet on the edge of the bath and Ivan is kicking his legs in the yellowish water and shrieking with delight at the sound of his own echo bouncing off the tiles, she chews her lip and wonders what Lucas has planned.

Sure enough, when Ivan is asleep and the chicken has been eaten, Lucas asks her to come out onto the balcony while he has a smoke.

‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ he says. ‘Come and talk to me. Look at the stars.’

‘You know I don’t like the balcony,’ replies Rachel, trying to keep her voice even. But Lucas, who has already deviated from the script he has rehearsed, can’t leave it there.

‘I’m not asking you to take Ivan outside. Just us two. For five minutes.’

Rachel doesn’t move, doesn’t uncross her legs. This is what happens when you fall asleep, she thinks. There are consequences when you don’t read your pages.

Lucas scrapes back his chair, gets up, paces down the hall to the living room, then returns to the kitchen. ‘Look,’ he says, his voice tight. ‘I get the fact that the height gives you vertigo. Never mind that the balcony is perfect for some fresh air and sunshine and that maybe it would be nice to sit on a couple of chairs and drink a beer and not have to leave you to go out by myself for a smoke – I get that you don’t want to.’

Rachel stands up now. She has to do something, so she puts the kettle on the stove, tilting her head as she tries to settle the ringing sound behind her left ear.

Lucas ploughs on. ‘But what I don’t want is for Ivan to grow up with your – issues.’ He sucks in some air, as if drawing on a cigarette before blowing out the next words in a rush. ‘I don’t want him to be afraid of heights. I don’t want him counting shops or lampposts under his breath and I don’t want him getting a headache if something isn’t in a neat pile. I want him to be normal and healthy and happy. Why don’t you just do it? Why don’t you make yourself stand on the balcony? Fetch Ivan, do what any new-agey counsellor would tell you and take him out there, for all our sakes, Rach! I mean, what exactly do you think is going to happen if you do?’

Rachel’s fingers grip the kettle handle. Ivan, she tells herself, is safe in his cot in the bedroom; she remembers closing the door. A vision of her mother’s hardboiled egg slicer rises unbidden in her mind. You place the naked, glistening egg in the little hollow and push down the handle and the row of fine wires presses into the whiteness and all the way through. What you hope for is a perfect cross-section – no grey rings – just white and sunny yellow, still slightly warm, the fanned segments cradled by a leaf or two of lettuce, a dab of salad cream.

‘Things are fucked up,’ says Lucas, quieter than before. ‘I’m sorry – I know it sounds harsh, but maybe you should go back to England for a while.’ He clears his throat as if a cough might, even yet, make everything clear and right. In the old days Rachel would be crying by now. Then he could go to her – he’d know what to do, knowing she wanted it too. Now, though, he keeps pushing on, saying they both need a break and maybe