Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

Arkady stood up, holding the file. “I do not give a fuck what’s right. Right means nothing to me.”

Grisha was also back on his feet, cigarette burned down almost to his inner-tube lips.

Arkady crossed to Henry and began unclasping the Englishman’s knuckles from the armrests of the seat. He bent down to face his flatmate, pausing for a moment to look into the vacancy of his pupils. Then he hooked the great magnitude of his hands under Henry’s armpits and hoisted him forward to the edge of the chair.

“I need some fucking shit, Arkasha,” Henry said, grimacing. Then again, half crying, half whispering: “I need some fucking boy.”

Arkady put down the file a moment, turned his back and squatted, and reached behind himself for Henry’s body. Then, grasping both legs, he dragged the Englishman from the chair and up onto his back. He bent awkwardly to gather the file and then stood up with the appearance of ease.

“Not this time,” he said. “Not today. Not while I am here.” He shifted his friend’s body. “And you know, Seva, that if this passport does not work, I will kill you myself.” He turned. “Grisha, open the door. We are going.”

Saturday night. Second night back in London. And already she felt different. The fury and the apprehension were still there, but the long free fall was over. She had money for three months—four, at a stretch. And she was determined. For far too long, far too much crap had clogged her mind. (Her own, she readily admitted, as well as everybody else’s.) And it was true, crap had a way taking over a person’s days, little by little, until there was nothing but crap. Now, instead, to face with sober senses the real conditions of her life and her relations with those about her. No more false starts. No more mythology. She heard her friend’s familiar voice calling up the stairs.

Five minutes later she stood in the large front room, two children at her knees, as Susan Thompson and her husband, Adam, backed parentally out of the front door onto Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town, London.

Susan spoke as she searched the pockets of her red coat for the house keys. “The terrible two will probably stay awake longer than normal, just because you’re here and they’re excited, but Joe should sleep straight. Fingers crossed. There are loads of books in their bedroom—you can refuse to read to them unless they get into bed. That’s what Adam does. They like anything with monsters and a good story.”

Adam shouted from halfway down the steps, “Monsters! Monsters do the trick. You’ll have to read until they are both asleep, though, or they won’t let you go.”

Susan, having found her keys, added softly, “Any problems, just call the mobile.”

“Same goes for you,” Isabella said wryly.

Susan smiled and rolled her bright green eyes. She had shoulder-length midbrown hair and was pretty in a plain kind of way, or plain in a pretty kind of a way; medium height, medium build, and English all the way back to pre-Roman Gloucestershire. The two had known each other since they were three or four. They went their different ways for a while, during Isabella’s turbulent college years, but they had also lived together for eighteen months before Isabella left for the States.

“Okay. So go. See you later on.” Isabella put her hand on the head of the eldest, Mark.

“Be good for Auntie Isabella, both of you. If I hear of any trouble, then…”

“Bye, Suze. Go. Go on, go.”

“See you later. Don’t wait up if we’re late.”

“Oh, I’ll be up. Jet lag.”

“Bye-bye.” Susan gave her children one more wave.

“Will you come on?” Adam shouted.

Susan widened her eyes as if to say “Poor man, he thinks he’s in charge,” and for a moment Isabella was aware of the curious effect of their shared surety of each other, something that seemed to affirm that long before Adam, the terrible two, or baby Joe, they were friends. A weird thing, Isabella thought as she shut the door, this sense of knowing someone of old. Seeing someone in the thick of her circumstances—woman, wife, mother—and yet being familiar with so much of what had led to these circumstances that the circumstances themselves seemed merely that: circumstantial.

Isabella followed the two children (already racing ahead) to their playroom upstairs, watched them go inside, and then entered Adam’s tiny office. She turned the computer on and waited for it to come alive. She was grateful that she had not been enlisted in the evening herself. Adam had cheerfully invited her, and Susan had been required to slip her deftly from the noose. There were going to be ten or so other guests at the dinner party, “singles as well as couples,” Adam had said encouragingly, so he thought. Increasingly, though, Isabella found the very idea of a couple annoying. Not because she herself was now “single”—another word she could hardly even think, let alone say, without retching—but because to her mind the whole (previously interesting) female dialectic between being part of a “couple” and being “single” seemed to have somehow metamorphosed into this sprawling, transatlantic, society-wide giant squid of a cliché that insisted on stinking and dripping all over more or less everything—most viscidly of all at dinner parties. It wasn’t the blithely impoverished fiction or the dumb TV series that killed her the most (though these were surely written by the soulless undead) but the fact that so many women she met seemed to reach so quickly for the tentacles of this mighty cliché, the better, they believed, to swing into their conversations. Indeed, so tightly did they seem to cling to these tentacles that it was as if the very fact of their being alive at all had become secondary to their being “single” or “coupled up” or married.

She had no good mail. An invitation to buy more Viagra so that she could go harder for longer more often, and a chance to own a pair of little Suki’s freshly worn knickers. She surfed some news sites awhile, then looked idly at one-bedroom flats to rent in North London, then went to Molly’s home page, then typed Molly a simple “Hi there, it’s me—made it so far” e-mail.

Feeling at a loose end and yet with too much energy, she got up, left the computer on, and went to check on the baby. He was safely asleep. She wondered for a moment why her own mother had not had any more children. Then she wondered who would be the father of hers. She bit her lip and half smiled. After all the remonstration and dissent, perhaps she would just offer herself to the most handsome and intelligent doctor she could find. Get the good genes and the delivery care all done in one go.

She shut the door quietly and returned to the playroom, there to behold the baffling multilayered miracle of her oldest friend’s son and daughter playing two characters in their computer game version of The Lord of the Rings.

She had a moment’s misgiving, trying to remember if they were allowed to play on the console, and if so, which games. But both children seemed so adept at what they were doing—butchering orcs—that she could only assume this was normal.

“Okay. You two. You’re allowed to play for another half an hour, then your mummy says you have to help me make hot chocolate and popcorn.”

Girl hit pause. Boy sighed.

“We’re not allowed.” This from Louise.

“What?”

“Popcorn.” This from Mark.

“Why not?”

“Mark made a right mess when we did it last time and spilled everything on the floor and nearly burned the whole kitchen down and the house.”

Mark made a face of profound older-brotherly scorn. “No I didn’t.”

“You did. Mummy basically had to ring the firemen.”