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

He walked upriver The water relieved his apprehension a little. Faintly he felt the stirrings of new desires, appetites he had not known before. In the underpass he shook his head at a homeless young guy begging, who asked him, “What’s so funny?” Then, all of a sudden, he came upon the exact picture he remembered from the history textbooks of his childhood. The bullshit Houses of bullshit Parliament. The light from the windows shimmering in the water.

Halfway across Westminster Bridge, he slowed and then stopped. The passersby were in hats and coats. He realized they must think it cold. He leaned on the rail. And he wondered if he had the nerve to stay—regardless. The water was black, but not as black as the Neva. The wind blew his hair this way and that.

Pat’s Place was grotty even by Russian standards. And his morale had fallen on the long walk back, the elation vanished, the map driving him mad and the night wind bringing with it a return of his sense of foreboding and vulnerability. His moods were like the weather. He lived within them. And he no more thought of asking why he experienced one feeling rather than another than he would have thought of interrogating the snow.

A collapse of drunks shouted something to him as he crossed to the door beside the minicab office. The two sitting on the stairs outside were users. Inside, another—Turkish by the look of him—was lying on the floor of the landing, pretending to have lost his key, but Arkady doubted that he had ever had one. Scum—everywhere, scum. Bosnian bullshit. Albanian sewage.

If he did not eat, go anywhere, or do anything, then he had enough money for ten nights. His flight back to Riga was booked for the Sunday fourteen days hence. So somehow he was going to have to find somewhere even cheaper, or join the Turkish bear-fuckers on the landing. Unless tomorrow’s reply contained the offer of an immediate meeting and plenty of money up front. Not fucking likely. Probably just a bullshit coffee and a bullshit conversation. In fact, the sooner this whole bullshit was over, the better… Why was he even here? What a joke. What an embarrassment.

He walked softly up the narrow stairs to the second floor and stood framed on the threshold for a moment. He stepped within and moved slightly to one side so that the dim light of the corridor behind could better illuminate the small dormitory room. There were four bunks—two on either side, with the narrowest of aisles between them. The one above his was empty. But he saw that those opposite were now taken. The window beyond was open. Hence the noise. Two tattered backpacks were propped up beneath the sill, a towel draped over one, a baseball cap on the other.

He checked under the bed. His greatcoat was still there. And his pack had not been touched. He was angry with himself. He would take no further risks.

He took off his sweater and his shirt and unbuckled his money belt. There were no covers, no blankets, not even a second sheet. Pat’s Place provided beds, and beds only. And he had not brought anything to sleep under. He stood for a moment, considering. People were shouting in the street below. He pulled off the sheet, and the streetlight shone dully on the surface of the rubber pad beneath. At least here in London they tried to save the mattresses from the worst of the alcoholics. He put down the money belt where his head would lie and drew the sheet back over it. Then he turned to the window and fastened it shut.

He listened for a moment before stepping carefully out of his jeans and rolling them up. He removed a plastic bag of clean laundry from his pack, took out a T-shirt and pulled it on, then flattened the rest of the bag out to fashion a pillow. He laid his jeans across the top and the shirt he had been wearing over them. The room was too close. He needed cold air to sleep. He opened the window again, fastened the latch against the wrench of the wind. Then he placed his pack against the wall, picked up his greatcoat from under the bed, and laid himself down beneath it.

Yes, the sooner this bullshit was over, the better. All he had to do was survive two weeks. He wondered what he would do back in Petersburg. The thought of playing in the bars made him so angry that saliva poured into his mouth and he wanted to spit. Work for Leary. Make a fortune. That stupid bitch. He closed his eyes and turned to face the wall.

But he neither slept nor rested. Long after the other two returned (talking at normal volume in Moldavian accents before belatedly whispering when they became aware of him), and long after they had fallen asleep, he lay uneasily alert, watching the lights and the shadows on the wall sweeping, merging, steadying—swelling circles, diagonal lines, penumbras and silhouettes—the headlamps of the cars as they turned, the streetlights, the glow from the shop opposite, the fizz and flicker of the neon sign that advertised cosmetics. Apart from anything else, he wished that he were here as himself. There would be some comfort in that.

Mice moved in the wall. The elder of the two Moldavians began to snore on the lower bunk, less than four feet away. He set himself to listen to the city instead. But all the usual sounds—car doors closing, breaking glass, motorbikes, cans being kicked, drunken shouts, the muffled thump of angry music, the hiss and squeal of bus brakes, unnatural birdsong, a dog barking crazily somewhere on the edge of his hearing—all the city sounds seemed now to threaten and loom, alien and strange, as if each were just another moment in a gathering drama, the aural narrative of developing violence that would soon involve him and that would surely culminate in a vicious raid—gangs or, worse, the police bursting through the door. The blaze and stab of flashlights. Guns, snarled orders. The Moldavians panicking.

All the while the wind was growing stronger, banging and slapping, rattling at the window. He turned and turned again back to the wall. He told himself that London was nothing compared to Moscow or Petersburg. In the long years he had waited for his place at the conservatory, though only on the fringes, he had seen more death than those of his fellow orphans who had joined the army. But the difference was that in Russia, he knew the face and weight of every danger; in Russia, he knew what they wanted, why, and how they planned to take it. Here, now, he had no idea. He was blind.

A woman screamed.

She sounded as though she were directly beneath the window. A car pulled away, engine straining. Doors slammed. He lay rigid. Voices. Men. Swearing.

He had heard the stories and believed them well enough—London, the European capital of organized crime: the Albanians, the Turks, the Croats and the Serbs, the Jamaicans, the triads, the Irish, the Islamic cells, other Russians, the Nigerians, the Colombians, the plain old-fashioned mafia; people smugglers, drug smugglers, weapon smugglers; prostitutes, heroin, explosives. The whole world liked to squat right down and do its nastiest possible shit in London. He was not afraid for his well-being or even his life (if only they would take it quickly, get the fucking thing out of the way), but he feared the police, he feared robbery, and most of all he feared violence.

Blue lights came swirling across the ceiling, sweeping from one side of the room to the other, then stopping directly above him, as if spotlighting him for some provincial nightclub’s amateur dance competition. The Moldavians were awake now. They would all be arrested as part of the raid or fight or whatever it was that was happening out there. He would be sent back. Before he had his chance. All three floors of the hostel, he knew, were heaving with people that even a blind Gypsy cocksucker would recognize as illegal—construction workers, cooks, waitresses, cleaners. He could not understand why the police did not raid it every night.