“Shut the door,” whispered Zhanna to Sofia, as if something very secret was going on here.
“Shut the door, yeah,” growled Venya in a low voice – that was the first time he’d spoken at all. “There won’t be enough good stuff for everyone…”
There was a telltale bittersweet scent in the kitchen.
“Doesn’t matter, seeing as she’s come in, let her have a drag too!” said Tolik brusquely – as if giving an order.
“No, I don’t want one,” said Sofia quickly, “I just came to get my coat…” and she hurried over to the pile of clothes in the kitchen corner.
“Where are you off to?” shouted Zhanna, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her towards the table. “It’s still really early! Come on, try it, it’s really groovy – it makes everything so clear. Everything is so funny. When will you get another chance?”
“I don’t want to,” objected Sofia, but she didn’t know why not – was it that she really didn’t want to or was it just because she was afraid, because she actually liked the scent and would like to try it, but was afraid because she was always so blindly cautious…
Suddenly Venya took the matter into his own hands: he forced her to sit down, her head under his arm, his fingers holding her nose, and with his other hand forced the roll-up between her lips… Sofia had never thought that she could be so enraged. At school no one had ever touched her, instead she herself had once hit Vitya on the head, well his ear and his smooth cheek, because he’d pinched Anna under her arm in what to Sofia’s mind was a completely indecent manner, and Sofia had been genuinely furious with him and had slapped him on the cheek, but later it was she who felt embarrassed about it all because Vitya had been so horrified, and he was such a fatty and sometimes he screamed like a girl… All that was now several years in the past… Vitya didn’t scream any more… But now Sofia was unexpectedly so stupefied by outrage, or rather stupefied by the rage rising inside her, that she became almost paralysed, stiff, held her breath – she felt she couldn’t breathe any more, that breathing was completely impossible… and then she collapsed as if into the soft depths of somewhere…
Then suddenly everything was so fantastically clear, and on two levels: she knew that she was lying on the floor and the others were around her and asking if she was dead or what, and Tolik was having a drag on the joint and holding it, smoking, under her nose and berating Venya – you’re an animal, you mustn’t do that to women, what if you’ve broken her neck… It was all so vivid, but so unreal, just like a vivid sharply drawn picture. But behind the picture was something completely different, a different, real yet highly shaded world and from there, as if from behind a curtain, ran a peculiar, spidery-legged, pointy-nosed green little man, tiny, barely knee-high; he ran giggling over the kitchen floor and disappeared into the wall…
Sofia began to cough and moved towards a chair.
“Look, she’s alive! She’s still alive!” everyone shouted happily.
“What did you think she was?” grumbled Tolik knowledgeably. “If anything like that happens, weed’s always a help – and it’s not a narcotic, it’s legal in Holland… It’s a medicinal herb…”
“I have to go home now,” said Sofia.
“Are you sure you’re all right to get yourself home?” asked Zhanna in concern, although actually, she looked like she would be pleased if Sofia actually left anyhow…
Sofia had no doubt whatever that she could get home on her own two feet without any mishap. But if she didn’t make it, it wouldn’t matter anyhow. Everything was so clear, still so clear. The lights in the apartment windows had mostly gone out, the buildings now stood like large boulders; the odd car swished past – with a susurration of cold air. She knew they were cars, yet they were like some kind of foreign object. She knew what they were called only by mere chance. They weren’t real.
The street lights cast sharply defined spheres of light; a few stars had punctured the dark sky and the occasional feathery speck of snow floated softly down. It was even more like a vividly drawn picture; she walked on into the picture and became part of it. How could anything happen to a plaything like this here in this play world, and even if something did happen? Even if it did, it wouldn’t be real… She didn’t know whether the little green man had been inside the picture or part of the next picture. And what was beyond it? Perhaps another picture? She began to feel afraid: if there was no reality, then was it all just one picture after another, each inside another bigger picture? So what was this? That was how it felt: it felt as if she wasn’t walking along the road, but in the air and there was nothing to grasp hold of if you fell…
But something or someone was real. Johnny Depp! The small, brown and white piebald cage-bound Johnny with his little pink fingers and sharp claws. So what if he died in a year’s time? Right now he was real simply because he didn’t know anything about not being real. Because his ignorance was reflected in his eyes. Cage-bound Johnny now felt much more real than the real Johnny Depp, he felt like the only real thing… And Sofia realised that if she managed to hold firmly on to that small, real, reality, then everything would be all right…
Rael’s dad was a big help anyhow: it transpired that he had connections at a factory; quite how, Rael was not exactly sure, she wasn’t interested, perhaps he was a shareholder or something… The factory was very small, nothing like the one where Natalya Filippovna had worked before, but they made more or less the same kind of things, although not for mobile phones, more for cars – Rael thought they were for cars, or other bigger machines. These days every moving thing, every actual machine, even washing machines, contained circuit boards for electrons to flow through, as if directed by a person unseen… And now Natalya Filippovna could resume soldering specks for the electrons on to boards…
Notice how the life of Natalya Filippovna, a grown woman on the large side, some might even say portly, had been guided by her young daughter, who was able to earn herself some money honourably and even found a job for her mum, a decent job. Natalya Filippovna hugged her daughter, in tears, because she was so sorry that she had berated her so severely only the previous weekend when she had sailed in after midnight from the she-knew-not-where party (although Sofia had said it was at Zhanna’s), her clothes stinking of smoke and the smell of drink on her still. All right if she was with one of the girls from school, but the thing that capped it all, capped having a drink and a smoke and doing who knows what else – although she’d never have thought Sofia capable of doing that – was getting drunk. Had she understood nothing? If truth be told she had scolded Sofia only out of fear – she’d always had the feeling that Sofia might disappear somewhere, that suddenly she would cease to be and then she would no longer have anything here in the world, nothing, everything would be empty, even Dmitri Dmitrievich would be nothing… That meant that the only thing she had been able to do while waiting for Sofia to come home was to pray soberly, without really realising it, just repeating the familiar words “Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy…” without taking in their meaning, in sheer panic and with a heavy painful stone in place of her heart, all the while expecting that when Sofia came through the door she’d feel great happiness and joy and peace, but when Sofia had actually finally arrived, she’d suddenly felt empty inside and then distressed, as if her controlled distress had to find an instant outlet, and as soon as she could breathe between whimperings she began to read Sofia the Riot Act – unable really to measure the words she was saying, both hugging and tearing into her daughter, so that ultimately she too burst into tears, sobbing with her head in her hands…