‘Rachel,’ exclaims Teddy, ‘you are beautiful and resourceful! We must have raspberries with ice cream. And meringue – Karl loves a Pavlova. I’m going to tell Vee that’s what I want at my leaving dinner. Not cherry dumplings. Dumplings are for winter.’
Rachel feels a little unsteady on her feet. She grips the handles of the pushchair.
‘Are you leaving?’
Teddy looks down at her, surprised. ‘Didn’t Lucas tell you? That boy is something else! Well, I’m off to Bosnia with Karl. New adventures! Hey, don’t look so sad! We’re having a last supper at Vee’s. Next Saturday. You better come – I refuse to sit next to anyone else!’
‘Dinner is difficult…’ murmurs Rachel. ‘With Ivan – now he’s older it’s harder to take him out at night.’
‘So let’s find you a babysitter,’ says Teddy. ‘How about that caretaker – the one who’s retired with a suitcase of cash. She’s fond of Ivan, right?’ He smiles, rueful, sympathetic. ‘Lucas needs to show you off.’
‘Lucas wants me to go back to London.’ The words rush out of Rachel before she can stop them; for a moment she doesn’t recognise the woman discussing her husband with a man she barely knows. But this is Teddy, she reminds herself. Not Mykola.
Teddy rubs his chin.
‘Then please come for my sake, and yours.’
Rachel thinks about Teddy’s suggestion as the trolleybus rattles up the broad boulevard of Lesi Ukrainky. She doesn’t want to leave Ivan with someone else, but neither does she want Lucas to visit Vee’s flat without her. Teddy knows something; he’s just too loyal to pass it on.
As she pushes Ivan across the waste ground she spies Stepan. He is lounging in the grass; she can just see his shorn head and shoulders through the tangle of stems and weeds. He is with that horrible man, his minder. That they are outside is not, Rachel reminds herself, so unusual. These days she often encounters bodies sprawled in the sunshine. Sometimes she passes lovers grappling silently, like molluscs, or she steers the pushchair round a pair of mottled legs sticking out across the path. Old men slump on the benches and chat softly or stare down at their hands. Young girls with their skinny arms and bright hair accessories sit cross-legged and play clapping games or chalk neat rows of sums on the concrete, and several times she has seen the same middle-aged couple enjoying a picnic of gherkins and sausage laid out on a blue handbag amongst the dandelions.
She could skirt around Stepan. She could remain out of sight, but she has things she wants to ask him and it is better to do it here, out in the open, than down in the basement or in the shadows on the stairs.
As she approaches, she wonders what the pair are looking at, for Stepan’s shorn scalp and the older man’s bulging neck both bend towards the ground. She is almost upon them when she sees the chick. It is golden brown and fluffy and it makes little cheeping sounds as it shuttles between them in the space they have flattened out in the grass. Yet what strikes her most is not the chick itself, but the way the two of them use their bodies to fence in the tiny bird. Stepan makes a wall with his legs, while the older man is squatting like a broody, dishevelled hen.
‘Ciao!’ says Stepan, raising his head. ‘Cik cik!’
‘Hello,’ says Rachel. She is facing the sun and puts her hand up to protect her eyes.
‘You want to look?’ he asks. ‘Show your baby?’
Rachel glances down at Ivan, who is nodding off in the shade of the pushchair’s canopy. ‘He’s sleeping…’
The older man doesn’t acknowledge her. He is wearing a grey vest and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The flesh below his jaw sags and glistens. He mutters a few words, then puts his hand to the ground, palm up. The chick obligingly steps on to it.
Rachel grips the pushchair handles. She hasn’t spoken to Stepan for weeks – not since she found him in the basement eating the Angel Delight her mother had sent. She wants to make sure he hasn’t stolen anything else, but her courage is quickly fading.
‘Have you seen Elena today?’ she asks.
Stepan shrugs.
‘Well, if you do see her, will you please tell her I need to talk to her?’ Rachel hopes the boy thinks she is going to tell Elena about the intercepted parcels. Stepan breaks off a stalk of grass and sticks it in his mouth; he looks like a drawing she once saw of Huckleberry Finn.
‘Okay Mum. You want baby-sit?’
Rachel frowns. He must have spoken to Teddy. She hates the way he knows what she wants. Before she can contradict him, however, the older man lifts his hand off the ground and curls his fingers around the chick.
‘Don’t!’ says Rachel, stepping forward, imagining the crushing of its tiny breast and bones.
Stepan’s companion takes no notice. Carefully, gently, he places the chick behind him in the long grass and lets it topple off his hand.
‘Cik cik!’ repeats Stepan as the chick shakes itself off and scoots out of sight.
Now Rachel wants Stepan to go after the chick and rescue it, because she knows it won’t survive alone in the killing fields of the waste ground with its starving strays and sharp-beaked crows. But Stepan doesn’t move.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she says, trying to sound self-assured. ‘Why did you open that parcel addressed to me – with the packets of pudding mix? Have you opened other parcels, too? I don’t understand why you would do that.’
Stepan sticks his tongue between his bottom lip and his teeth.
‘Someone tell me to,’ he says.
This is not what Rachel is expecting.
‘Who? Who told you?’
‘I don’t say,’ says Stepan. ‘Not someone. I make it up, like story.’
Don’t lie, thinks Rachel. She is still distracted by the lost chick, still looking for movement in the weeds behind him. ‘Was it someone called Mykola?’
Stepan shrugs. ‘No one!’
‘Him?’ she presses, nodding at the older man. ‘Did he make you? What else have you stolen?’
For the first time Stepan looks surprised.
‘Not stolen, Mum. I looking.’
Rachel feels the heat spreading across her neck. ‘Don’t call me “Mum”.’
‘Okay,’ says Stepan. ‘Queen Mum. Mrs Mum. Not you. You not Mum. I tell Elena Vasilyevna you want baby-sit.’
Sensing she is being dismissed, Rachel stares, exasperated, as Stepan lies back in the long grass and drapes his arm across his face. The older man grunts and rolls on to his side.
It isn’t until she regains the path that she sees a small thing skitter through the grass towards the dump bins and hears its plaintive cheep.
Elena is walking up the hill to the universam when she notices the car slowing to a crawl beside her. She doesn’t turn to look; rather, she does her utmost to ignore it. It is a foreign car – silver, with a long sloping bonnet and windows you can’t see through. A gangster car.
Elena isn’t feeling so well today. Her hips ache and now her stomach is upset. She doesn’t want to be out for too long in case her bowels loosen. It’s the new flat, she tells herself, with its strange echoes and hard floors. She keeps the windows open despite the flies, because she knows how the vents work in these apartment blocks and she doesn’t want to breathe in air that has incubated its germs in the lungs of a stranger.
The lights are green at the busy intersection, but the silver car doesn’t accelerate. Instead it continues to creep forward beside Elena, keeping pace with her slow shuffle, holding up the traffic behind so that other drivers lean on their horns. When the lights turn red it doesn’t brake, staying abreast of the pedestrians as they flow across the street.