‘I went over to Suzie’s today,’ she says. ‘You know, the woman who lives in the other block. Vee put me in touch with her. She’s invited us for dinner next week. To a restaurant.’
‘Great!’ says Lucas, but he is absorbed now, pressing one side of a set of bulky headphones against his ear and dialling the global filing number for Bush House. This feels okay, too, so she retrieves her book, picks up Ivan in his bouncy chair and decamps to the bedroom.
‘You won’t make a noise, will you?’ she whispers as she sits on the bed, opens her shirt and puts Ivan to her breast. ‘Daddy’s busy.’ She shuts her eyes, bites her lip until the pain subsides, then listens to the low, modulated sounds from the kitchen and drifts off for a few minutes to the rhythmic squeaking that comes from somewhere above the ceiling. Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy.
The mantra doesn’t work.
She opens her eyes. Lucas is shouting in the kitchen.
‘What’s the matter?’ she calls, leaving Ivan asleep on the bed.
‘Bush House won’t use my piece! They say they can’t strip out that noise from upstairs! That squeaking! I’m going up there. Some randy wanker… how am I supposed to get anything done in this place?’ He marches down the hall and slams the front door behind him.
Now Rachel doesn’t know what to do. She ought to go after him, she thinks. She ought to call him back, so after a few seconds she leaves the apartment, too, stepping on to the stale grey landing, past the rubbish chute and through the heavy door to the concrete stairs. She won’t take the lift.
The fourteenth floor feels strange. There are three doorways, the usual locks and quilted sound-proofing and spyholes, but one door has a rubber doormat outside, while another has a complicated bell. Lucas is already knocking. Rachel stands a little way behind him, not sure now that she wants the squeaking noise to stop.
‘Lucas…’
They hear a low muttering. Lucas knocks again. This time a cough, then suddenly the door swings open and an older man with a large belly steps out.
‘Shto?’ he says, aggressively. What?
Rachel doesn’t catch her husband’s reply. In the rectangle of electric light behind the man’s sagging outline she looks down a hallway that is exactly like their own. The floors are uncarpeted, with the same over-varnished parquet and she can tell that all the doors in the flat are open because more light spills out from them and into that light swings a boy on rollerblades. He is tall, with a child’s narrow chest, and he is naked apart from some old cotton pants that don’t quite cover a flaky red patch of skin on his hip. He looks twelve, maybe thirteen, and she realises she’s seen him before, perhaps in the lift or loitering near the kiosks by the Eternal Flame. The boy glides towards the old man’s back and just when she thinks he is going to crash into him he executes a sharp, squeaking turn and stumbles a little before pressing his hand against the wall and pushing off back down towards the bedroom.
The old man heaves up his trousers with his thumbs. ‘Koleni!’ he shouts over his shoulder, before turning back to Lucas. Rachel catches his eye, though she doesn’t mean to, and at that precise moment she realises her arms are unencumbered – she has left her son on the bed downstairs instead of in his cot and she cannot recall if she closed the door behind her. Her chest constricts, she imagines him falling, down through the parquet and the concrete and the joists, down like the nappies in the rubbish chute, crumpling and flopping and broken.
She utters a soft cry, turns and clatters down the stairs.
The boy, Stepan, sees two faces like pale moons in the darkness of the landing. The man is angry, affronted. The woman flees, but first she looks. He spins on his toe and pushes off from the wall with his hand. The rollerblades squeak on the parquet as he glides back to the bedroom. That woman, he decides, is being beaten by the man. Some days he hears her crying and, once, a muffled scream.
Mykola will want to know. Mykola wants to know everything.
Chapter 6
RESTORAN AMADEUS DOESN’T have a sign – not one that Rachel can see. She steps back across the pavement of the little side street that runs northwest from Khreschatyk and stares up at the stone facade. It looks like all the other downtown apartment buildings in the darkness: everything a little larger than it needs to be with its chunky corner blocks, chiselled grooves and deep, frowning doorways. Like the sets from Batman, she thinks: the mocked-up Gotham of a Saturday night TV show, except this stone is solid, and cold.
‘The new restaurants like a bit of mystery. Gives them an air of exclusivity,’ says Lucas, flicking away his cigarette and pointing down some narrow steps. Rachel leans forward and sees a blue neon treble clef glowing above what must be the entrance. She wants to get Ivan into the warmth. Her husband grasps the front of the pushchair while she grips the handles. The temperature has dropped to minus two or three and a feathering of hoar frost makes the steps dangerously slippery. She is concentrating so hard on conveying her son to safety that she doesn’t see the figure loitering at the bottom until Lucas backs into him.
A short burst of Russian ensues, with some protest from Lucas, who can’t set the pushchair down while the man, hands in the pockets of his bulging leather jacket, bars the way.
‘For crying out loud. He says we can’t take the buggy inside!’
Rachel hauls the pushchair back up the steps. She has already half-imagined a scene of some kind. When she was changing her clothes in the bedroom, tugging her pre-pregnancy silk shell top over her head, adding her blue lambswool cardigan with its slight pilling under her breasts and digging out a pair of dangly earrings that she hadn’t worn since the night she left her job with the travel publisher, it was easy to believe she would never pass muster. Anyway, she knows Ukrainians don’t like mothers. She’s witnessed it herself dozens of times – the stares, the refusal to make way, the casual acceleration of approaching cars when she crosses the road with her son. The men are as bad as the old women. It’s no wonder the population is in freefall.
‘He says the baby is okay, but not the buggy,’ translates Lucas, clouds of breath rising from the stairwell as he huffs his exasperation. ‘How does he think that’s going to work? Fucking ridiculous.’
‘I’m not leaving it outside,’ says Rachel.
‘Absolutely not,’ says a low, lilting voice. Rachel turns to see Suzie looking down into the darkness. ‘It’s all right,’ continues Suzie. ‘Rob will sort it.’
As she speaks, a stocky, square-headed man in a black padded jacket moves past her. At the bottom of the steps he murmurs quietly to the doorman. Nothing concrete is exchanged. Just words. Then they are all waved inside as though the problem has never existed.
‘Nicely done,’ says Lucas, as the four of them introduce themselves in the narrow foyer. The men shake hands. ‘You’ve been here before?’
Rob smiles as he helps Rachel and Suzie off with their coats. He has disconcertingly round blue eyes, freshly barbered hair and thick, short arms. ‘BBC, eh?’ he says, so that Lucas and Rachel both know this is his night and he is in charge of everything that may or may not unfold.
Ten minutes later, the four of them plus Vee, who has persuaded Lucas to invite her, are seated at a central table next to a brick pillar. Rachel had asked Rob if she could tuck Ivan and his pushchair somewhere unobtrusive, but Ivan was having none of it and started crying, so now he is propped up in her lap.