Henry turned back to face the room. “I could pay Zoya to give us whatever she has on file relating… relating to Maria Glover.” The name sounded horribly grating as he uttered it.
Arkady took off his cap, leaned forward, and balled it in his fist. “Zoya is bullshit. You leave message and message. She never phones you. She knows nothing. Because if she knows something, then she calls you back so you know she is ready to be paid again. This is how it works.” He raised his eyes and spoke through the fall of his hair. “She knows nothing. If you see her yourself and you pay her, you will only find this afterward. Forget Zoya. She is Gypsy scum. You should have made friends with the real bitch when you had your tongue in her ass.”
Henry sat back down on the sofa and seemed to fold in on himself like a bat trapped in a room too long in daylight. He did not know what to do, or how best to be, or help, or anything. And he was becoming agitated. It was past his time.
“This term is almost certainly paid,” he began again. “Therefore I reckon we need… we need twenty thousand dollars, more or less, to get you through to the end of the third year.”
Arkady was staring at the backs of his hands, which were still clasped around his cap.
So Henry continued. “Twenty thousand may not be so much to them. Or it may be that she has left it to you in her will. We should hold on. She’s only been dead a day or two. We should see what comes next. Her relatives might get in touch any time now.” His words were sounding prissy even to his own ear. He pressed on hastily. “We have until Christmas—assuming the money is settled for this term. We should wait for news.”
Arkady straightened up, the better to scoff. “We wait for nothing. We do something. Or we sit here playing with our balls like fuck-monkeys.” He turned around to face the keyboard. Slowly he shut the lid. “This family, they do not know me. Nobody knows me.”
Henry had never felt Arkady’s anger hang so full and naked in the room; the air seemed to be choked with emotional cordite. A power of projection he had not properly understood until now.
Arkady addressed the score open on the stand. “I do not continue if I cannot finish. I do not waste my time and my life anymore. It’s bullshit.” He stood up. “We write a letter to say I cannot play for a month. I hurt my hand. I will go only to theory lessons. And in the meantime, we do what we must do. This way we find out what there is to know. We get information. Then we decide. I am tired of wasting time.”
“But you can still play. You can still practice. Why do we need to pretend that you—”
“No.”
Henry’s right hand patted rapidly but softly at his knee. There was no point arguing anymore—about Arkady’s hand, about the plan, about anything; it was like disputing with the weather. “Okay. If you can do it without risk, then do it.”
Arkady went into his bedroom, then reappeared a moment later wearing his greatcoat. “I have to find a friend of mine and see what he is doing tomorrow night. A man called Oleg maybe will phone your mobile. Take his number.”
Henry nodded, hand still patting, conscious that the credit on his phone was running out. “You coming back before? Or shall I meet you at the ground?”
They had a long-standing plan to watch Zenit Petersburg play. Arkady, Yevgeny, and a few others were going.
“Meet there.” Arkady picked up and pocketed the few ruble notes that Henry had put down on top of the piano and then turned on his heel.
Henry listened to the Russian leave, feeling the sudden amplification of self-recrimination now that he was alone. He had no tolerance for his own emotions. He simply could not endure them, their terrible power to consume him. He rose quickly, passed into his bedroom, and closed the door.
14
The Ratchet
“Says it’s beef on the packs, Is, but we did an undercover defrost and it’s not.”
“What, then?”
“Larry says it could be some kind of rat from Peru. They got big fuckers out there.”
“Wish I had taken a year off. Sounds brilliant.”
“We’re going to try and write about it for the local paper.”
“Thought you wanted to be a theater director, not a journalist.”
“Larry’s secretly filming it—for a documentary. I’m telling him what to film. How is it going at college? What’s it—”
“So why write about it?”
“Fund the documentary.”
“Yeah… bet the local paper pays big for pieces from undercover student meatpackers. I’ll tell you when you get here.”
It was December 1991. Isabella had just (unofficially) dropped out of Cambridge—failed to complete even a single term, appalled beyond reasonable doubt by her fellow students’ staggering mixture of naivete and smugness. But she’d been home for only one strained (though mercifully meal-free) Sunday evening with her mother, who was clearly suffering from a fervently denied but virulent depression of her own, when the news came that Grandfather Max had died on an unholy bender in Scotland. A distillery tour, a walk on the Black Cullin, skinny-dipping. His heart.
Gabriel, meanwhile, was working double shifts with his friend Larry, packing frozen foods in Southampton, trying to earn money to fund what remained of his year-off travels, because “Dad won’t give me a penny and I wouldn’t take it from the bastard anyway.” Though Isabella calculated that by the time her brother had saved enough to make it across the Channel, it would be next September and he’d have just a month before he started at university himself.
Gabriel clicked his tongue. “I’ll be back Friday… I’ll just have to take the afternoon off. They’re not going to like it. We’re not supposed to have any holidays, and the bosses get their hard-ons from firing casuals. The service is definitely on Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, Is, it’s so brutal, isn’t it?”
“I just can’t believe he’s actually dead.”
“Do they know anything about what happened?”
“It was a series of heart attacks, apparently. Mum says that the people with him told her he kept trying to crawl across the mountain—even when it had started. He wouldn’t lie down. But he had been swimming or something, so he must have been half naked.” She paused. “I just wish I had gone to see him more often—you know.”
“Me too.”
She cupped the receiver. “I’m trying to persuade Mum to get Dad to pay for us to fly to Petersburg and deal with anything that needs to be dealt with. It’s an excuse, but—you know—I reckon that Mum will be allowed back soon. I can tell she’d love to go.”