From then on they avoided one another and, if they did meet in the corridor, they turned away as if that evening had never happened.
«Lumpy, dumpy, grumpy,» Savage heard as he went past the office and this time when he looked in there was a new secretary, her mouth making a silly round «o». He never saw Lyuba again and was amazed that such a little town should be more than big enough for them both.
When he thought back to his failed romance, Savage realized that the sour smell of nappies and floral scent had been stronger than the murderous night-time attacks of loneliness. And now he lay, cuddled up to a down-and-out woman, on a rubbish tip among rotting food, yesterday's newspapers and broken furniture and no-one was closer to him than this woman whose name he didn't know.
«Have you lived here long?» he asked, stroking her wrinkled cheek with its smattering of freckles.
«A long time,» she nodded, rolling her eyes.
«A year? Two? How long?»
She shrugged her shoulders and put her head on his shoulder.
«Where did you live before? What did you do? Do you have any family?»
«A long time,» she said again with a wide yawn.
Savage hugged the red-headed homeless woman but she stood up, scratching herself, and with a nod of farewell, trudged off to join the rest of the tramps who were building a fire at the other end of the dump.
«Come back again!» Savage shouted after her.
It's possible to get used to everything even things that are impossible to get used to. Not so long ago, Savely had felt that it would be a disaster if he didn't have a job and an apocalypse he couldn't survive if he didn't have a roof over his head. Now, though, he recognized that the years had been spent in pointless toil doing a job he didn't like and in a marriage to a woman he didn't love. It had been a life without aim or meaning. He was scarcely any different from the down-and-outs who spent their entire day looking for food just as he had spent his trying to make a living. In the evenings, when Savage used to switched on the TV, the homeless people had lit their fires and seen more in the tongues of fire warming their frozen hands than he ever saw on the screen. Savage dreamt of going home, the day he killed Coffin erased from his life. He would give up work and spend entire days lying in bed, hands behind his head, looking at the patterns on the ceiling and picturing people or animals the way he did now in the clouds and then, strolling around town, he would acknowledge the people he met, known or unknown, and, shrugging his shoulders, would say instead of hello: «I've given up work, you know…»
«Having no purpose in life is worse than being on the road,» Savage told himself repeatedly as he wandered round the tip. A stranger, with a dark face and piercing stare, looked out at him from a broken bit of mirror. He had matted hair and a pine twig poking out of a wispy beard. Savage dropped the mirror but it was a long time before the stranger disappeared.
Savely collected glass jars and stood them on a battered chest of drawers without a door. Raising the gun, he aimed and the shot sent a flock of birds up into the air, clamouring and flapping their wings. He didn't hit a single jar and, in a fury, he knocked them down with the butt of the gun. There was an old sofa on the tip that had broken in half. Savage dragged over a broken TV and stretched out on the sofa, crossing his legs. He flicked through the pages of soggy newspapers and tried on a pair of worn-out trainers. Then, he stared at the television, pointlessly clicking the remote. The screen reflected the piles of rubbish, the sofa and Savage lying on it. Tossing the remote aside, Savely picked up a clump of barbed wire that scratched his hands. All he had to do was bite off the required length of wire and he could go into town. Savely had no idea how his plan would work out but the stranger in the mirror had it all sorted.
The street lamps that winked at passers-by cast scarcely any light on the central street and the side streets were dark as a forest
He made his way along the deserted street, keeping close to the houses and was almost picked up by a patrol car when he was caught in its headlights.
«Hey, you!» called a police officer, lowering the window.
Savage dived into a garden and, crouching down, he hid behind a tree. If the officer got out of the car, he was ready to run into the yard to hide in an entrance or an open cellar.
«Hey, mate! Get over here!» they yelled through a megaphone and the echo rolled through the yards. Savage breathed again. He could tell the officer didn't want to leave the car. «Oh, to hell with you!» cursed the officer for the benefit of the entire town as he drove off.
There was no guard on the block of flats but a code was needed to access the entrance hall. A chill wind played in the aerials and the cables were as tightly strung as nerves. Savage pressed buttons at random hoping to break the code but the door stayed shut.
An old woman was dozing in a chair in the hall. She wore felt boots even in summer and she couldn't pronounce the word «concierge» calling herself a «conserver» instead. There was a chipped and dirty saucer on a table in front of her. Antonov's wife had come up with it in an attempt to teach the neighbours about leaving tips. The innovation didn't catch on. People threw sweets in the saucer or stubbed out their cigarettes and only rarely dug a few coins mixed up with crumbs and crumpled receipts from their pockets.
When some drunk went inside, Savage propped the door open with a stone. He waited a bit and went in, past the old lady whose head drooped on her chest as she slept. Gingerly, he took a sweet from the saucer. With the sweet stuffed in his cheek, Savage stole up the steps, his ears pricked for the slightest sound but the flats were sleeping, their leaky pipes snoring. There were shelves on the landings, full of spades from the dachas, body-warmers and smelly pots of paint which Savely examined carefully, picking out anything that might come in handy.
Antonov had bought up all the flats on the top floor and turned them into one, which had more rooms than the fingers on both hands. A ladder went up to the attic. Savage smashed the lock and hid under the roof. It was darker than the forest in there. There were stained mattresses on the floor, bits of stuffing showing, discarded by unknown residents. Snuggling into them, Savage thought happiness was an empty attic to hide in and a heap of dirty mattresses. He was prepared to stay there forever, just lying on the floor, looking through the cracks between the floor boards, not thinking about anything. Kitchen smells made his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth, laughter and the murmur of the TV reached him from downstairs. The lift rumbled and Savely imagined it as a giant mouth gulping down the residents then spitting them out on another floor.
Savely spent several days living in the attic as if he had forgotten what he was doing there. He slept whole days at a time, waking up only to eat. He was sparing with his matches as the box was nearly empty. He found an old newspaper and lit a small fire then took a rotting mushroom out of his breast pocket. He burnt his fingers as he held it over the fire. He drank the water he had saved in a bottle and once again sought the oblivion of sleep. If the residents had left food in the attic, he would have spent the rest of his life there like a house sprite, preserving the inhabitants' peace. When he ran out of water some days later, Savage got down to business.