Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

I choose a small room at the back of the house. The window, half hidden by a threadbare orange curtain, looks back up the slope towards other, grander properties, including the brown-and-white building, which used to be the miners’ canteen. Scattered about on the floor are a number of random objects — among them a bone-handled knife, a single mattress, and a crumpled Pepsi can. On the windowsill are five stubbed-out cigarette butts. Four have brown filters. The other one is white. I imagine a tryst where the man was nervous and smoked more than the woman. The gap between the white filter and the brown ones suggests the couple didn’t quite connect — it seems unlikely they made love on that soiled mattress — and the man left the house frustrated and alone. I draw the cigarette butts, then I draw the knife. This takes a good couple of hours, and I keep myself going with biscuits, chocolate, and bottled water. When I have finished I climb back out of the open window, hoping no one sees me until I’m back on the gray wooden steps.

/

The day before Axelsen is due, I enter the building that houses the museum. On the second floor is a library. When I walk in, a young woman is sitting at a desk, sorting through slips of paper. Her dark hair is cut straight across, stopping just short of her eyebrows, and a close-fitting black sweater shows off her slender arms. Her movements are slow, as if she’s sedated.

“Can I help you?” The woman speaks English in a low, slurred voice I feel I could have predicted.

“I thought the doctor was the only person who spoke English,” I say.

“You know the doctor?”

“He eats breakfast in the hotel.”

She nods, then gathers up the paper slips and puts them in a drawer.

“You have a great voice,” I tell her. “Do you sing?”

“Only when I drink too much.”

I smile. “How did you know I was English?”

“Somebody tell me an English girl arrive. Everything is news here. Small town.”

“Do people read a lot?”

“Not so much. But we have one or two people, they like books. The winter is very long.”

Later, when I have walked round the library, which seems to specialize in technical literature — books on geology and engineering predominate — I ask the woman about herself. Her name is Zhenya. She came to Ugolgrad with her husband on a two-year contract. Her husband works for the mining company. She sighs, then adds, Like everybody else. They left their six-year-old son in Donetsk with his grandparents. It was a difficult decision, and there’s hardly a moment when she doesn’t think of him, but it isn’t for much longer. They plan to return to Ukraine in the summer, and it will have been worth it. You make good money here, she says. More than back home, at least.

“And there’s nothing to spend it on,” I say.

“Phone calls,” she says, “and vodka.”

I’m smiling again.

“You’re curious about our town?” she asks. “You are — how to say it? — a voyeur?”

“Not at all. No. A voyeur is a person who is on the outside, looking in. I want to become part of the place. I want to live here.”

“You want to live here?”

“Yes.”

Zhenya’s deep-set eyes and the dry way in which she expresses herself give her a haughty condescending air, and yet she seems happy to talk. It’s possible she is grateful for the company. I imagine her days must pass in silence — unless one of the few people who reads books happens to appear. An idea occurs to me, and I decide to try it out on her.

“Perhaps I could work here,” I say, “in the library.”

“I don’t think so.” Zhenya looks past me, towards the curtained doorway, with that distant gaze of hers. “There is not enough even for me to do.”

“Not as a librarian. I could clean. With books, there’s always dust.”

She looks straight at me, and her eyes are focused suddenly, and clear. “Strange you say that.”

She tells me that Mrs. Kovalenka, the cleaner, has recently been taken ill. The poor woman had a stroke, and was airlifted to the mainland.

A scene from The Passenger comes back to me. Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider are having drinks on the terrace of a hotel that appears to be in the south of Spain — the décor is flamboyant, Moorish — and they’re both smoking, their glasses of rosé offset by the pale green of the tablecloth. He’s curious to know whether she believes in coincidence. She says, I never asked myself . Then she smiles, but only with her eyes, which are mischievous and smudged. I never used to notice it , he says in his slightly nasal drawl. Now I see it all around .

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “But I could fill in for her, perhaps — until she returns.”

“She’s old,” Zhenya tells me. “I don’t think she will return.”

My heart speeding up, I wait to see what she says next.

“We don’t pay so much — not what you are used to.” She smiles faintly. “This is not England.”

“I only need enough to live,” I tell her.

“I will talk to the authorities.”

“Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.”

“No” — and she glances at the papers on her desk, her eyebrows raised. “I do not know.”

/

At three o’clock the following afternoon I pull on my parka, my fur hat, and my gloves and I leave the hotel. It’s light outside, but only just. A gray sky blankets the town, and flakes of snow stick to my clothing as I hurry down to the dock. The temperature is dropping every day. Though I haven’t seen a thermometer I can tell it’s below freezing, and October isn’t even over yet.

I descend the two hundred-odd steps, passing the viewing platform and the house whose interior I have begun to document. The ship from Longyearbyen has already docked, its black hull flush against the quay. I shield my eyes and peer through the rapidly darkening air. Axelsen is in the cabin on the bridge, his head and body framed in the side window, the light a murky aquarium green.

Once the tourists have disembarked — there’s only a small group, all wrapped in waterproofs — I say hello to Torgrim, then I climb on board and pass through the door that leads to the bridge. The smell is the same as before. Oil, metal. Brine.

When Axelsen sees me, he adjusts the peak of his baseball cap, then folds his arms and leans against the wall, partially obscuring a chart showing various species of whales. Next to him are three pairs of binoculars in upright brackets.

“No suitcase,” he says.

“No.”

“So I was wrong.”

I go to the window. The floodlights are on, and snowflakes whirl and jostle in the brittle sodium glare. Beyond, there is nothing but grayness, impenetrable, chaotic, all-enveloping. “I’m going to stay for a while. It suits me here.”

When he doesn’t say anything I face him again. I sense him repeating the words to himself, testing them for authenticity.

“I found a job,” I tell him.

That morning the humorless woman from the bar handed me a note from Zhenya asking if she could see me. After breakfast, when I called in at the library, she told me I had been hired as a cleaner. We went through the paperwork together. Later, she walked me round to the mining company’s main office, where there were more forms to fill in. While in the office, I learned that Mrs. Kovalenka’s family have contacted the company to say there are medical complications, and that she won’t be coming back. Zhenya has suggested I move into Mrs. Kovalenka’s apartment. It will cost much less than the hotel.

“You will work as a cleaner?” Axelsen’s voice lifts in disbelief.

“Yes. Why not?”

“You don’t look like a cleaner.”