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

This is Lavrska Street, where assassins creep.

She walks on.

* * *

Lucas is out on the balcony. He is fixing his map of Ukraine to the side wall with pieces of chewed gum. It is taking him a long time to secure it; the gum won’t stick to the tiles.

‘Rach!’ he calls. ‘Rach!’

Rachel is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. She is giving her son his first taste of solids. Ivan is semi-upright in his bouncy chair in front of her, a bib under his chin and a panicky look in his eyes. Rachel is panicking, too. She has memorised the chapter on weaning in Baby’s First Year, poring over the photographs of artfully messy kitchens and smiling, hippy-ish parents in high-ceilinged Victorian semis. She has sterilised the spoon, boiled the water, measured out the baby rice she brought with her from England and mixed it to the texture of sloppy wallpaper paste.

‘Come out here, Rach! I want to take a photo of you and Ivan.’

Rachel wishes Lucas would go to his press conference. She nudges Ivan’s chair a little further away from the open doorway with her foot.

‘It’s too cold,’ she says over her shoulder.

‘It’s not cold!’ shouts Lucas. ‘January will be cold.’ A pause. ‘You haven’t been out here at all yet.’

Rachel suspends the plastic spoon in mid-air, but she can’t blink away the falling baby, the splayed limbs, the flopping head. ‘The height makes me feel dizzy,’ she murmurs, listening as the balcony door closes and her husband’s footsteps approach along the hallway. ‘I prefer going for walks.’

‘I’m sorry you’re not keen on the flat,’ he says, leaning against the door frame. A rare memory stabs at him, swift and bright: Rachel, his new fiancée on a weekend away in Paris, stretching her arms up into the air from a viewing platform on the Eiffel Tower, flushed and teasing, pretending to fling his passport over the top of the safety barrier. She’d not been dizzy then, he thinks, though his head had been reeling. ‘We can’t move again. I’ve paid for the year up front. We wouldn’t get the money back. Anyway, you should have seen the cockroaches in my last place, not to mention the lethal wiring. This place is brighter, and safer. In the spring we can put a table on the balcony, get some pots, grow some herbs like proper Ukrainians.’

Rachel nods, slowly, as if her husband has helped her to accept something she hasn’t previously understood; as if this is the last time he needs to mention the subject. She waits for Ivan to open his mouth, then slips the spoon between his lips.

‘He doesn’t like it much!’ says Lucas, peering over Rachel’s shoulder. ‘He’s just spitting it back out.’

‘He’s feeling it with his tongue,’ she murmurs, leaning forward and using her little finger to scoop a dribble back into her son’s mouth. ‘He’s not used to anything that doesn’t come from me.’ These are words she has memorised. They are easy to say. Easier than words about choking, turning blue, not breathing. She doesn’t know where the nearest hospital is. Lucas can’t tell her if there’s an English-speaking doctor and she wouldn’t be offering her son solids at all if he didn’t scream for milk every two hours. Her body needs a chance to heal.

Lucas straightens up, goes to the window, sees the nearly empty box of After Eights on the windowsill.

‘When did you eat these?’

Now Rachel really wants him to leave. She wipes Ivan’s chin with his bib. Lucas opens the fridge and peers inside; fingers the packet of baby rice. Then he picks up her copy of Jurassic Park and flicks through the pages.

‘Hey, you’re not still reading this . . .’ He doesn’t know about her ten-pages-a-day habit. He doesn’t know that six days ago she reached the part where the newborn’s face is gnawed by baby raptors who climb in through the clinic window while its mother sleeps in the next room. Sometimes when she’s finished her allotted words she goes back and reads that page again, three, four, five times, tapping each word with her finger, counting its beats to keep her own baby safe.

‘Look,’ Lucas says, turning towards Rachel, his tone softening as he tries to tackle her silent non-compliance. ‘I know it’s tough for you. You’ve been ill and you’re knackered and you’re doing everything for Ivan, washing his clothes, feeding him yourself, getting up in the night. I really think it would help if you went out more – I mean, come to the office sometimes, go into town. You’ve been here over two weeks. Which reminds me – you’ll never guess who rang the office number this morning. Your mother!’

‘Mum?’ Rachel pulls the spoon away from Ivan’s lips. ‘Why didn’t she call here?’

Lucas shrugs. ‘She’s never going to make it easy for herself, or you. I gave her the number for the apartment, but I think she just wanted to check the address. She said you’d left it on a piece of paper but she couldn’t read your handwriting. Maybe she wants to send you a parcel.’

Rachel thinks about the last time she saw her mother. She had made a great fuss over the journey up to London, but the afternoon had been dismal, her mother tutting over the state of the little basement flat. She’d not offered to tidy up or cook; she sat upright in the only armchair and turned down her mouth when Rachel took her grandson into the bedroom to feed him.

‘She can read my writing perfectly well,’ she murmurs, letting Ivan suck on her finger. He judders slightly and his eyes half close, his whole body focused on satisfying this need. The familiar tingling starts up in her breasts. ‘Did she ask about Ivan?’

‘She went on about boiling stuff and and not giving him unpasteurised cheese,’ replies Lucas. He looks at his watch. ‘Anyway, next week I’ll take some time off. We could go to a restaurant. Drive to