Lola Smirnova - Twisted

‘Can’t you act like a grown-up, just once?’ continues Natalia, going down onto her knees and throwing my stuff back into the suitcases. ‘Why are you standing like a statue, Jul, when we have five minutes to get your ass, together with these suitcases, to the cab?’

But I can’t hear her. I am trying hard to concentrate and understand what is going on. I drop to my knees, too, like a zombie, repacking the clothes, tensely doing my damnedest to recollect at least something about last night. I notice my vanity case, which is also lying on the floor upside down, and heavily sigh, ‘No fucking way!’

I reach for it.

Of course, the black plastic bag into which I rolled all the money I withdrew from my account a few days before – all the money I’d earned in six months – is gone.

The blood rushes into my head and another bout of nausea fills my body. Natalia storms out to the kitchen and comes back with a glass of water. Then she goes back to packing and asks, ‘What the hell happened to you last night?’

I fight through the dizziness, look at her and whisper, ‘The money is gone… I don’t remember anything… Maybe I was spiked or something… I don’t understand how that could happen.’

I sob. A stream of hot tears starts running down my cheeks.

Natalia’s eyes widen as never before, but she remains quiet and doesn’t stop packing my stuff. As soon as she finishes and everything is ready to be tugged down to the cab, she looks at me calmly but scornfully, and throws, ‘Sure, as always…’

I stop crying, get off the floor and wipe the tears from my face. ‘And what is that supposed to mean, Nata?’

Her eyes are full of disgust and disappointment.

‘Haven’t you noticed, Jul, how bad stuff keeps on happening to you? And that it’s always somebody else’s fault? Don’t you find it strange? Huh? First the incident with Lena’s boyfriend, then all your drug and fighting stories, and now this?’

‘What? An incident ? This is what you’re calling that now? Was it my fault?’

An enormous ache hits my chest. It is unbearable, along with the pulsating kicks in my head. I think I would feel better after five rounds in the ring with both Vitali and Vladimir Klitschko at the same time.

Natalia just looks away, distant, heads to the door and hisses, ‘You have five minutes to get ready. We’ll be waiting in the cab.’ And before she walks out of the room, she adds, ‘I hope this you can complete without getting into trouble.’

We manage to get onto the plane in time. Neither Natalia nor I say a word all the way home. Lena tries to get us to talk and explain what happened, but soon falls silent as well.

I can’t stop thinking about what happened. Maybe it was not Ruslan’s fault at all, and he was also a victim of the robbery? I wish I could remember something. The only helpful idea that comes to me on the way home is to have a blood test as soon as I get there.

The check-up with the GP, plus the blood and urine tests, confirm that I have been poisoned.

‘After two days, it is difficult to say what exactly you were poisoned with, Julia. But I can tell you that something definitely happened, and considering your symptoms, I think it was Clonidine.’

The doctor is talking to me while writing something at his desk.

Then he stops and looks at me with eyes full of concern. ‘Who did you spend that night with?’

I explain what happened, insisting that Ruslan couldn’t have done it to me, and that I thought there was somebody else involved.

The doctor knits his brows and continues, ‘You are too naïve, young lady. He is a typical, experienced spiker. In 95 per cent of such cases, the victims think they know their beguiler very well and can trust him or her too. A Clonidine overdose is extremely dangerous, especially when consumed with alcohol. You are very lucky to be alive, Julia, and my suggestion to you would be to go to the police.’

While the doctor is giving his opinion, dizziness drowns me again and my head bursts with the pulsations in my temples. Vivid memories of Ruslan asking the ‘right’ questions to get the ‘right’ information to carry out his fucking brutal plan begin to run through my head as if I am awake but dreaming:

‘For how long are you going to be working still, Jul?’ ‘I guess it’s an exhausting job, Jul, but do you at least make good money?’ His always considerate way of never impeding my working schedule – to make sure I made as much money as possible. His phone call a few days before my departure, after I’d come back from the post office with my money, extracting details of how I spent my day and what I did, covering it with his ‘concern’ for how tired I must be. His coming up to my room on our last date and the drink that he spilled on his pants, to make sure I wouldn’t see him putting something into my glass while I went to the kitchen to get a cloth.

Everything is falling into place. It is becoming so obvious now!

Oh my fuck! It was him! That son of a bitch!

Without a doubt it was Ruslan who’d been hunting me down since the very first time we met.

Unfuckingbelievable! How stupid I was!

I go over and over our short but intense acquaintance, putting all the details together. He’d calculated everything, even the fact that I wouldn’t have time to look for him or to go to the police.

I continue, recollecting the tragic life story that the motherfucker had told me with tears in his eyes, realising that even his name was most likely fake, and that I was probably not the first – or the last – idiot from which he’d stolen money. I feel like screaming in anger and desperation.

Stupid! Stupid! I am so stupid!

Most painful is to think about the last evening we spent together. How could I have been so green, so blind?

For a few days I feel nothing but rage, which shifts to a real despair that I’d lost my money and the friendship I’d enjoyed so much. This deep self-pity then mutates into a numb depression, which crumbles and chews me up from the inside. I have no idea how to escape it.

I decide not to tell my parents and ask my sisters to keep quiet about it too. Bugger all could be done to get my money back anyway – my mom and dad would get worried and upset for nothing. My sisters keep giving me looks of pity – mostly Lena, of course – and can’t stop saying bullshit like, ‘Everything that happens in life happens for the better’, or ‘Money is not everything; the most important thing is that the bastard didn’t kill you,’ which drives me even more nuts. That is why I go for broke to spend as little time at home as possible.

I party and consume with my pals, sleeping over at my girlfriends’ places or with some random guys I hook up with in nightclubs, wasting the last of the money I have. When I was packing in Luxembourg I decided to take €1,500 out of the total I’d earned, in case I wanted to shop at the airport, and put it into my handbag. Luckily, when Ruslan had got his hands on the money in my vanity case, he’d been too generously lazy to search for more.

Oh, I hate the bastard! I hope all his limbs fall off, including his cock!

While I am busy trashing my depression and myself with booze and drugs, my sisters, after a little research and conversation with a few hooker co-workers, decide to go to France. The contract is only for three months and the waiting period can stretch up to seven weeks; what’s more, the impresario fees and travel expenses make it impossible for me to go on that run.

Aside from the fact that I can’t afford it, I really don’t feel like going anywhere with Natalia. Since the fight in my room in Luxembourg, we’ve spoken only a few times, growling at each other more than speaking. Even when she found out about the doctor’s explanation of what happened to me, she never came up with an apology, probably still thinking it was somehow my fault. I can’t get her words out of my head and don’t even try to pretend that it is ‘fine’ between us. It is not ‘fine’, and I am never going anywhere with miss-bitchy-perfection ever again.