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

‘Olya will be angry.’

The taxi driver hunched forward in his seat, and took a prolonged and emphatic chew on his stubby yellow fingernails. The rough edges hurt the end of his tongue, but it was as nothing compared to the turmoil in his psyche. It had seemed like a good job at the time: in the dead of night, a group of past-it out-of-towners needing a lift home. But now he wished he hadn’t started.

He looked at his watch again, and muttered to himself: it was almost six in the morning. The three elderly revellers in the back had been asleep for some time, sprawled, as best they could, across the shiny black plastic of the seat. Their mouths were endlessly puckering and twitching, and in the rear-view mirror, to the driver’s tired and distracted eyes, they had looked like a row of ghastly, wizened babies, sucking up the last sleepy milk from the swollen teats of the night, while the lights of Moscow had twirled by, hour after hour, mile after mile. Occasionally they had made slight mewling and burping noises. The driver had felt a certain affection for them at first, but it had soon disappeared: now he just wanted to be rid of them. He had driven, and enquired about direction, and received no clear instructions one way or the other. The younger man with the scar who had got in with them had been more forthright: he had known exactly where he was heading to next, and had alighted quickly outside a smart block in the diplomatic area. But then, then it had got difficult. The old man had occasionally roared something very insistently, but completely unintelligibly. And the two old women seemed to have no idea who they were, let alone where they were.

He’d been paid to take the old ones home, so he hadn’t wanted to be fierce with them, but they had steadfastly refused to tell him where home was. Now they had made him late, and made him run out of petrol, and it was miles to the nearest garage. Olya was going to be so very, very cross. The taxi was beached, washed up on the edge of the grand weed-riven pavement, its fuel gauge stark, staring dead. It had coughed its last just as it was making its way, slowly and for the third time, around the great edifice of the Moscow State University. Up, up towards the sky the spikey towers of the university stretched, and down, down the needle on the gauge had fallen, unnoticed by the driver, who was too much in a quandary what to do with his sleeping passengers to see how his night was going to end.

The three on the back seat continued to snore.

‘Olya will be so angry! You… lazy old bastards!’ With shaking hands, the driver picked up his water bottle and, with a fierce squeak of trouser on plastic, turned and gave the three passengers a good, hard squirt.

‘Everybody out! Out, I say! I have to go for petrol, you’ve made me late, and you’re a lot of stinky old lazy bastards. Olga’s going to kill me, and it’s all your fault!’

The three on the back seat squirmed slightly as the water drizzled them, and a floppy hand was raised, vaguely, to fight off the drops.

‘Ha! Yes, that wasn’t nice, was it? And there’ll be more of that, too, if you don’t get out of my car! Go on! Shoo! It smells like a brewery. She can’t stand booze – especially in the morning! She’ll be so cross! And I’m late!’ The driver turned in his seat again and started flailing at the sleepy OAPs with his gnarled hands, tugging at their togas and pushing at their swollen, pinky-purple knees.

Galia batted away the water, and her hand came into contact with Zoya’s nose with a hard slap. Zoya squawked, and thrashed her head away from the blow, head-butting Grigory Mikhailovich, who stirred like a long-dormant volcano on a tropical island. A trickle of blood escaped the end of his bulbous nose, and the driver crossed himself.

Grigory Mikhailovich emitted a vodka-soaked roar and, in slow motion, raised both massive fists before his face, as if about to tear off Zoya’s head.

‘Oh Saints preserve us! Now there’ll be trouble. Get out of my car!’

The driver shrieked, and Grigory Mikhailovich opened his eyes, one and then the other, and fell silent, fists still raised, but looking about slowly as if the movement of his lead crystal eyes caused him great pain. Galia also finally prised open her eyes, which had up to now been glued shut with an earthy cocktail of Zoya’s mascara, Moscow air and her own sleepy dust. She tutted, blinked rapidly, and tried to recall where she was, and how she had got there. Grigory Mikhailovich let out a loud, hacking cough, and opened the car door to spit plentifully. Zoya slept on between the two wakeful monoliths.

‘Get out of my car, or I’ll call the police! Really, this is enough. You’ve had all my petrol. You’ve had your tour. Now get out! I’m an honest man, and I have business to do. I have to get to the market. Olya will be so cross…’

Galia struggled with the door handle on her side, if only to get away from the screeching farmer, or driver, or whoever he was, but her hand did not seem to be part of her own body any more: momentarily, she couldn’t really remember what she needed to do to make it move, or why she wanted it to move. Eventually the door fell open of its own accord and Galia pitched forward, steadying herself by grabbing hold of Zoya’s bony knee, which caused the latter to emit a piercing scream and slap the driver in the face, which he happened to be poking through the gap between the two front seats.

‘Out! Out!’ Blood-pressure mounting, he was working himself into a frenzy, now producing a yellowish froth at the corners of his mouth. Galia could tell it was time to go.

She tugged Zoya out of the car, mostly by the hair, and then stood still, looking down at her feet for a moment. She was missing her left sandal, and had acquired a child’s pink plastic slipper instead. It was not comfortable. She breathed in deeply through her nose, and shut her eyes. Her head was full of helicopters and the angle of the ground beneath her just wasn’t right. Her stomach seemed to be making an attempt to crawl up to her throat, and she felt the wrinkles in her face deepening, forming some sort of relief map of the Himalayas, even as she breathed. She was aware of the sound of Grigory Mikhailovich being levered out of the back of the taxi by the driver, and could hear him coughing and swearing on the other side of the car. She was almost tempted to sit down on the tarmac where she stood, wavering slightly, but then something in the air, not as solid as a smell but something like it, made her stop. The quality of the light touching her still-closed eyelids made her heart miss a beat and she looked up, squinting for a moment.

‘Let’s get away from the car, shall we, Zoya? That driver is rude. There’s no need for rudeness.’

Zoya cawed a vague affirmative, and the two ladies stumbled forward, away from the car and on to the grey expanse of empty pavement.

‘I’m going to crawl,’ whispered Zoya, bending her knees stiffly and stretching her fingers towards the infinite grey slabs.

‘No, you’re not. You’ll be arrested, and then where will we be? Just breathe, and put one foot in front of the other.’

Galia hoisted her back up.

‘You’re a fine one for… perambulatory advice,’ muttered Zoya thickly, as Galia’s plastic slipper flopped about on the ends of her toes like a dead fish, threatening any moment to send her plunging to the ground. ‘That’ll teach you to bet your shoes,’ she added, spitefully. Galia had no recollection of betting anything the previous night, but felt it was wiser, at this stage, to resist further questioning. They staggered across an acre of grey, before coming to a barrier: a parapet.

As Galia’s eyes accustomed to the zesty lemon light, she raised her gaze and, with a little gasp, surveyed the view that spread from her feet to the far horizon. Her fuddled brain gradually focused on the jumble of colours and lights before her. She breathed deeply, and with each breath, her head raised a little higher from her shoulders, her chin lifted slightly from her chest, and she began to feel a little more like a person, and a little less like one of the living dead. Zoya leant against her slightly, whimpering, and she put her arm around her friend’s sharp shoulder. The car had come to a halt on a terrace that marked the edge of a huge green escarpment. The ground in front of them dropped away in green undulations towards the banks of the wide, deep river below. Their vantage point was complete and unspoilt. Laid out at their feet was the entire city of Moscow, bordered by the silver-green Moskva River, and stretching out languidly in all directions into the hazy morning. In the pink distance she could just make out the Ostankino TV tower, famous across the federation: a symbol of progress, homogeny and mediocre state-run TV. She counted the Stalin sky-scrapers, and could see six. Everybody knew there were seven. She tried again, and still only saw six. She couldn’t believe she was wrong. And then some sense made her look back, and up, over her shoulder, and she tutted to herself. Turning to face the opposite direction, she witnessed the majesty of the Moscow State University looming over her. It made her heart flip over, and then thud with a mixture of pride and fear. The seventh of the seven sisters was breathtaking and very close, almost hunching over her. She nodded to it, and then slowly turned back to her private vista. She caught the glint of the Kremlin’s golden roofs, and the vague ice-cream outline of St Basil’s cupolas. A patch of mottled green dotted with bright fairground rides must be Gorky Park. And at their feet, much closer, lay the Luzhniki Olympic stadium, huge and dark and empty. And to set it all off, to their right, slightly surprisingly in the green of summer, a ski-jump lounged.