Savage heard hurried steps and hoarse, feverish breathing. Someone began to dig him out, scraping the garbage away, and soon there was a swollen, smiling face staring at him. The woman stroked his face, like a child's and, smacking her lips, she kissed him on the forehead. Then, she took a mouldy bread crust out of her pocket and stuck it in his mouth like a dummy. Savage groaned. His stomach ached so much it was like being kicked. Pulling Savage out, the woman piled the rubbish up again as though there was still someone underneath it.
«Let's go. I'll hide you,» she whispered, pulling him by the arm. «Come on. Be quick.»
Keeping close to the ground, they crept through the dump. The woman looked around all the time, afraid the other tramps would see them. She began to hit out at old, congealed rubbish with a stick, making something like a burrow in the pile.
«Get in. Don't go wandering off.»
She helped Savage climb inside and before she left she offered him the slimy greaseproof paper from a pack of butter.
«Don't eat it all at once,» she said, stroking him on the cheek.
Savage curled up in his burrow, closed his eyes and, sinking into a deep sleep, prayed that he wouldn't wake up.
In the morning when he climbed out of his sanctuary, he strained his ears, afraid the tramps would catch sight of him but the tip was quiet. Only the seagulls cried as they wheeled above the sea of rubbish as if above water. Savage was in his stocking feet. Broken glass and metal stabbed his feet so he bound them in rags and put packaging on top. He tried to find the gun he had put down somewhere along with the cartridges wrapped in deerskin. He dug down into the stinking garbage but he couldn't remember exactly where it was that the tramps had nearly killed him. First, he rummaged through the garbage itself. Then he started to lunge around, thinking he could see the barrel of the gun sticking out of the rubbish all over the place. In the end, in despair, he took his head in his hands and fell face down on the ground.
A hunched figure appeared on the horizon and Savage tried to get back to his burrow but he was lost and couldn't find it. No matter which way he turned, everything looked the same and he didn't know which way to run. He froze and hoped the person would turn aside without seeing him. Then, suddenly, he recognized the woman.
«Why did you run away?» she called.
Savage said nothing.
«Let's go back,» she begged. «Come on. I've got something to eat.»
Her pocket, packed with leftover food of some kind, was bulging and Savely obediently stumbled after her. The woman shared out the food then took out a quarter bottle of vodka from God only knew where. She offered it triumphantly and ceremoniously to Savage and, twisting it open, Savely took a swig. He choked and coughed. Everything swam before him and he fell, banging into the woman's knees. Laughing, she took the bottle from him, finished it in a single gulp and stretched out next to Savage, clinging to him. She quickly opened his trousers and Savage, drunk from that one mouthful, reckoned his new life was not so scary after all.
When he woke up in the middle of the night, however, when the woman had already gone back to the beggars' camp, he had a sudden vision of himself lying amid the rubbish, dirty and emaciated, being plastered with kisses by a drunken vagrant woman whose name he didn't even know and nausea rose in his throat. He bolted from the rubbish dump to where the forest was as dark, wet and safe as his mother's womb and lay for a long time on the ground, feeling the damp moss with his hands as if he couldn't believe that rubbish didn't grow in forests.
Savage wandered around the forest for a week. Then he went back to the tip, driven by hunger that was wringing him out like wet washing. He looked around and was picking at the rubbish when he heard a rustling behind him. Ready to run, he spun round to see the woman, skulking. He flinched, raising his arms in a helpless gesture and looked at her.
«What do you want?»
The woman came closer, her shopping bag clinking, a multi-coloured hedgehog of bottle necks sticking out of it. For the first time, Savage looked properly at her face. She wasn't even 40. Red hair speckled with grey poked out from beneath her hat and her wrinkled cheeks were dotted with freckles that jumped like fleas when she laughed.
«You coming?» she asked, lowering her eyes and adjusting her hat.
«I'm not going anywhere,» said Savage. The stammer he'd had in the past had suddenly returned. «I'm not going anywhere,» he said again, shaking his head.
The woman put her head on one side and made her fingers into a gun.
«I've found the gun…»
Savely grabbed her by the shoulders.
«Have you? Have you really? Where is it?»
The woman didn't answer, her mouth stretched into a smile.
«Where's the gun?» Savage shook her. «Have you found the cartridges?»
«You coming?» she asked again.
Savely pictured her stretched out on the ground, lifting her messy skirts, while he bent to slash her face with a piece of glass.
«Bring me the gun. I don't believe you.»
She shook her head.
«Bring me the gun or I'm not coming,» Savage snapped.
Shrugging her shoulders, the woman shuffled away, startling the pigeons that were pottering about in the rubbish. Savage stared at her back, imagining how he would shoot her if he had the gun right now. The woman stopped and beckoned to him and he ran after her, swearing.
Savage sat down next to the woman. He ran his hand over the red locks sticking out from under her hat and was surprised at how wiry they were.
He remembered Lyuba with her snub nose, her memory preserved in the buttons sewn tightly onto his jacket and an opaque layer of sadness that had settled on his soul. For days at a time, the grey-haired secretary tapped away on the type-writer in his boss's office and, every time he passed Savage would try to decipher what she had written. The typewriter sounded curt and demanding and what he heard was: «Savage, Savage.» On one occasion, however, he could make out, «sweetheart, sweetheart» and, unable to resist a look, he popped his head round the door. The typewriter had been replaced by a computer monitor rotund as the boss's stomach and а new young secretary was looking at Savage in surprise, her eyebrows raised in thin hyphens. Now whenever he passed the office, Savely would slow down to listen to the timid tapping of the keyboard, detecting words that made his throat dry. When he bumped into the secretary on the staircase, Savage dropped an armful of papers that scattered over the steps while she, with a cry, narrowly avoided falling by clutching at his jacket. She was left holding a button that had come off, so she pulled off Savely's jacket and rushed to sew it back on. «I've sewn the others on a bit tighter, too,» she said, peeping round his cupboard and holding out the jacket. Savely blushed to the tips of his ears. In that blush, she discerned his cold bed and a wife who fell out of love with him before she got to know him. Savage, looking into her grey-green eyes, could see the cramped single room she shared with her mother and little boy and her tear-soaked pillow. They started trying to go to the canteen at the same time, eating at the same table, unperturbed by the silence.
«I was never a talker even when I was little,» she muttered, embarrassed, playing with a tiny ball of bread. «It must be pretty dull for you…»
«There's a-a-always s-s-somebody to t-t-talk to. It's n-n-nice to have s-s-someone to be quiet with,» Savage answered, stumbling over the words and keeping his eyes down.
Lyuba didn't ask about his wife and said nothing about the father of her child and Savage reflected that loneliness has many faces but the same taste of bitterness. Savage began to see Lyuba home after work and on one occasion he was invited in. Her mother fussed in the kitchen, clucking like a frightened hen, then hastily threw on her coat and shot out of the house, her arms not yet in the sleeves. The room smelt of nappies and the kind of floral scent used as perfume by middle-aged ladies to take away the smell of old age. The baby cried and Lyuba kept jumping up from the table, spilling tea and rocking her son, and Savage wished he hadn't come. He thought about his dishevelled wife who came out in red blotches when they argued and his crying daughter, the nappies he'd had to wash because water makes your hands peel, and his mother-in-law who had been as sweet as Turkish delight until the wedding and afterwards was as sharp and biting as black pepper. Savage made his apologies by referring to the time and Lyuba, biting her lips until she drew blood, was barely able not to burst out crying.