The apple man is leaning across his display, offering Lucas a slice of green apple on the end of his knife. Lucas takes it.
‘Spaseebo. You never know when you’ll need stuff like that. When you’re up against a deadline.’
Something swoops suddenly, almost skimming Lucas’s shoulder. Rachel ducks her head, but it is only a bird.
‘Where’s my book?’ she asks, her voice harsher than she intends.
‘What book?’
‘The book I was reading. The book in the kitchen this morning. You took it. Jurassic Park.’
Now Lucas remembers. His face is a picture of dissembling.
‘Oh – you weren’t still reading it, were you?’
‘Where is it?’
The apple man extends a piece of fruit to Rachel. His arm is perilously close to one of his pyramids.
‘Lady, Lady? You like? Poprobye yablochko, moya khoroshaya…’
Lucas waves the man away. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got it. One of the press officers asked if he could read it. The one who gave me the idea for my film feature, actually. Sorin, or Sarin… He’s a fan of Spielberg. I could hardly say no.’
Rachel can taste something sour at the back of her throat; her palms prickle with sweat. She needs to stay calm, conceal the danger, yet all she can think about are the pages she hasn’t read, the ten pages she must read before night comes.
She pushes her thumbnail into the tip of her ring finger. Hard. Harder.
‘You – you gave it to him?’
‘Well, yes. I thought you’d finished it. Come on, Rach, it’s just some crappy airport novel!’
Lucas has no inkling. He doesn’t know what he’s done. Rachel needs to make good the ritual, a ritual that has been nudging, soundlessly, at the edge of her consciousness but which now snaps into focus.
The balcony is waiting. Ivan is not safe. She is going to have to compensate.
When Rachel was fourteen she answered an ad in the local paper. Babysitter wanted, it said. For a girl and a boy aged six and three. One pound an hour.
The house was an old rectory and Rachel thought it beautiful, despite the spiders. The garden was rambling, the wallpaper on the stairs was sprigged with yellow roses, the bathroom had actual beams in it. When the parents went out for the evening, for drinks or ‘supper with friends’, she moved through the rooms touching the comfortable furnishings and stroking the family’s chocolate Labrador and all the while thinking how, one day, she would have a home like this one. The children had dark hair and blue eyes and she was bewitched by their fierce stares and quick fingers and high, mercurial voices.
‘You’re not the leader,’ said Alice, the six-year-old, on Rachel’s first visit. ‘I am.’
Then one afternoon she was asked if she’d mind staying overnight. The parents were driving up to London and wouldn’t return until two or three in the morning, too late really to run her back home. They’d pay her for her time, they said. They’d leave a telephone number. She jumped at the chance to sleep in the cosy little guest room. Her own mother didn’t object.
That evening Rachel chased the children round the garden to tire them out. She fed them fish fingers, though they didn’t put salad cream on theirs. She bathed them in the sloping bathroom, dried and dressed them in their brushed cotton pyjamas and gave the little boy, William, a piggyback to the bedroom their parents called ‘the nursery’.
Then something bewildering happened. Rachel had left her watch in the bathroom and as she went back to fetch it, she heard the nursery door close behind her. When she returned, the door had been locked from within.
‘Alice,’ she called, her hand on the door knob. Now she could hear whispering and the sound of bed springs from the other side. ‘Let me in.’
Alice didn’t answer. Rachel knelt down and put her eye to the keyhole. She couldn’t see anything – the key was still in the lock.
‘Alice, please come to the door and turn the key. You’ve locked me out! You told me you wanted a story!’
‘You’re not my mummy or my daddy,’ said Alice, as if from far away. That was all Rachel could get out of her.
For the first hour or so she tried to reason with the siblings, bribing them with biscuits they weren’t supposed to eat, but Alice wouldn’t let William approach the door. Then, when William started crying and his wails of distress increased, Rachel banged on the old pine panels and pushed against them with her shoulder.
‘Please, Alice. William is frightened. You’re being mean. Please, Alice. You can both sleep in my bed. Please…’
Eventually William’s cries faded to dry shudders. By about eleven, the sounds had stopped altogether and Rachel tried to block out images of him lying on the floor, slowly strangled by a sheet or stabbed through the eye with one of Alice’s carefully sharpened colouring pencils. She was too scared to phone the children’s parents because they were sixty miles away and a call would have repercussions that she didn’t want to contemplate. She would have to manage on her own.
She sat down on the floor, leaned her head against the door and made a loud sobbing sound. It wasn’t difficult; she was close to tears anyway. After some minutes, Alice turned the key. She opened the door and stared down at Rachel.
‘Why are you crying?’ she asked.
Rachel took the key and placed it on top of the fridge in the kitchen. When morning came, the father drove her home in silence. She was never asked to babysit at the old rectory again.
Zoya drops Lucas at the office and returns Rachel and Ivan to Staronavodnitska Street. All the way up Lesi Ukrainky, Rachel leans against the window and mutters syllables under her breath. Kee-nee-gee, ree-nok, kee-no-tay-ah-ter, sok-ee…
Back at the flats, the sky has darkened like a child’s charcoal smudge. Rachel walks quickly up the steps with Ivan in her arms, willing herself not to look up towards the blank windows and the balconies. Inside, the foyer is gloomy; she can’t see if the caretaker is sitting in her cubicle, though she feels the old woman’s judgement upon her: her contempt for Rachel’s presence and her baby’s foul detritus.
As Rachel passes the pock-marked metal mail boxes she smells burning paper.
‘Adeen, dva, tree, chityrie, pyat,’ she counts as she waits for the lift.
Later, when Ivan is asleep, Rachel pulls the empty After Eights box out of the bin in the kitchen, sits down at the table and opens the lid. She removes the corrugated lining and stares at the dark waxy sleeves, lined up like gills, still smelling faintly of peppermint.
She plucks out one of the sleeves, rubs it between her fingers, then, gently, squeezes its sides. The opening gapes a little. She wants to put something inside.
Slowly, frowning, she picks up a biro and writes some words on a scrap of squared paper.
The tropical rain fell in great drenching sheets.
She knows these words. She read them in the book that Lucas lost. She puts down the biro and folds the piece of paper three times, scoring the edges with her thumbnail. Then she slots it into the little sleeve and tucks it between the others. There.
The note is well hidden, but all the same it bothers her. After a few minutes she picks up the box and carries it into the hallway. Out on the shared landing, she shivers. Her reflection looms in the window by the rubbish chute. The iron handle is cold to touch and even before she pulls it towards her she can smell the sweet stench of rotting vegetables and the soiled nappies she threw away earlier. As the dark interior gapes, a rush of cold air blows up from below. The chute door clangs and she frowns as her deposit tumbles all the way down to the bin at ground level, to the caretaker who will no doubt finger it in the morning, sniff its strangeness, then toss it on the little fire she tends beside the cracked concrete path.