Andrea Bennett: Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story

Mitya was thorough. He took pride in being thorough. Thorough and careful would have been his middle names, he thought, if his middle name hadn’t been Boris. He frowned and paused with the boot brush poised in his hand. The thought of his middle name spoilt his mood as a bark spoils silence, and he shuddered briefly in the shadow of his thoughts about Mother. There were things he held against his mother, and his middle name was one of them. A drunkard’s name, a name with no imagination: a typical Russian name. His left eye twitched slightly as he aimed the boot brush at a mental image of his mother hovering near the door, and slowly and deliberately pulled the trigger. Her green-grey brains spread out across the orange wall as Dave Gahan hit a rousing chorus and Mitya felt a tremble shoot from his stomach to his groin. Life was sweet. He had his order, he had his job, and in this room on the East Side, he was in control of his own affairs. He was Lord of all he surveyed.

There was a muffled click in the hallway, and Mitya froze, sensing trouble. He was not mistaken: a thumping beat suddenly vibrated his orange walls, snuffing out his tape like a candle in a snow storm. He lowered the boot brush and bit his lip. His neighbour, Andrei the Svoloch , was hosting a party, again. Soon there would be girls with too much make-up, girls with too much perfume, girls with skirts impossibly short and tights with ladders reaching up with clawing fingers towards their unmentionable parts. Girls: his neighbour was a success with them, it seemed. The younger, the better, according to Andrei, although Mitya always tried not to listen whenever his neighbour opened his ugly, tooth-speckled mouth. Mitya violently disapproved of Andrei, and his girls. He frowned at them from around his door, and when they laughed, he closed the door and frowned at them through the keyhole. They came out of Andrei the Svoloch ’s room to go down the hall to the stinking shared toilet, and then he sometimes frowned at them through the keyhole of the toilet too, just to make his point, although this always made him feel bad afterwards. He didn’t know why he did it. It wasn’t like he found them interesting. It wasn’t like he wanted to see them at all. They were just hairy girls, after all.

Mitya’s view was that girls, and women in general – females, to use the technical and correct term – were a distraction. Men should keep their eyes on the prize and their wits about them. Girls were for when the fight was over. Or nearly over, as Mitya’s fight would never be over, fully. He knew that if he ever got in the position of being in physical contact with a girl, he would make sure that she knew where she was in his order of priorities before any actual physical contact ensued: somewhere near the bottom, way down the line after work, eating, sleeping, beer, going to the toilet, Depeche Mode and ice hockey. Oh yes, he’d show her. She’d realize how lucky she was, to be in physical contact with Mitya. One day. When he had the time. When he met the right one.

Mitya’s boot brush was still poised in his hand, one plastic-leather boot shiny, the other slightly dull. He collected his thoughts, pushed the girls firmly to the back of his mind, in fact out of it completely, and polished the dull boot with a frenetic stroke that turned his hand to a blur and made his neatly combed hair vibrate like a warm blancmange on a washing machine. When he had finished, the boot gleamed and small beads of sweat stood out on Mitya’s forehead. He folded a piece of tissue twice and blotted away the small drops. His arm ached slightly, and his heart was beating faster.

With satisfactory boots in place, he collected his wallet, keys and comb, and indulged in a last look around the room. Everything was in its place under the glare of the bright single bulb. He was out of here, and it was going to be a long night. He felt big, and enjoyed the noise his confident footsteps made stomping on the floor. He was a man on a mission, a man with a plan. He was important. The only cloud on the horizon, so to speak, was his bladder, which was now painfully full.

In the hall, Andrei the Svoloch with his hateful dyed hair and cheap cologne was leaning against his doorway, smoking a cigarette with one hand and rubbing the thigh of what appeared to be a schoolgirl with the other.

‘Hey Mitya, off for another night on duty? You’re so fucking dull, mate! Why don’t you join us for a drink? Come on – have a look at what we’ve got on the table? Maybe you want some?’ Andrei slid his hand right between the schoolgirl’s legs and she squeaked.

Mitya winced, but despite himself, he glanced into his neighbour’s blood-red room. It was a scene of hell. There were women everywhere: draped over the divan, curling over the TV, straddling the gerbil cage.

‘I’m going to work, just as soon as I’ve had a piss,’ he muttered, and stomped down the corridor. Turning on a sudden impulse at the toilet door, he bit out the words, ‘You need to clean this toilet, Andrei. It’s your turn. I did it the last four times. I’m not doing it again!’

Andrei the Svoloch laughed, displaying two rows of stumpy yellow teeth, and pushed the schoolgirl back inside the red room, closing the door behind him with a hollow thud. Mitya pushed hard on the toilet door, and his nose connected with the back of his hand. It was locked, again.

‘Son of a bitch.’

His swollen bladder would not be denied. The strain of keeping the pee in was bringing a film of sweat to his smooth upper lip. He had been periodically waiting to use the filthy toilet for over half an hour but every time he gave up and went back to his room, the cursed toilet occupant would come lurching out and be replaced by another incontinent before Mitya could get back down the corridor. So now he had to wait, and risked leaning on the wall next to the violent alcoholic’s door, his slim legs tightly bound together, hands clenching and unclenching. He hammered on the door again.

‘Come out of there you stinking old tramp! I’m going to call the skoraya – you’ll go to the dry tank!’ Mitya really, badly, needed to pee.

The door opened slightly, and in the festering half-light a peachy soft face looked out at him, hesitantly. After a moment the door opened wider on its squealing hinges and out stepped, not the stinking old alcoholic with vomit down his chin, but an angel come to earth. Mitya gasped and felt a small pool of saliva collect in the corner of his mouth and then trickle gently on to his chin. He had never seen a girl so beautiful and so perfect. Blonde hair framed a delicate face with apple cheeks, a small freckled nose and eyes that seemed to stroke a place deep within his stomach. And here she was, in the stinking bog, with a twist of yellow toilet paper stuck to her perfect, peach-coloured plastic slipper.

‘I’m sorry,’ she lisped, looking up at him through gluey black lashes.

‘No! Ah…’ Mitya wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’m sorry, er, small female. Let me!’ and he held the wobbling door open for her as she slid through the gap between it and his underarm. ‘I didn’t know… I thought you were the old man – from up the corridor. He spends… hours in the… smallest room.’

‘Jesus, I’m surprised he’s still alive,’ joked the perfect angel with a wink.

Mitya felt something twang deep within him, like a ligament in his very soul stretching and snapping, never to be repaired. She turned slowly and swayed, tiny and ethereal, up the hallway towards the end room, and then hesitated, looking back at him from the doorway.

‘Who are you, beautiful?’ Mitya blurted, without meaning to make a sound, without knowing his mouth had opened, without giving his tongue permission to form any words at all.