Good practice for phoning Helen.
‘I hope I did not disturb you. But I have some sad news.’ Callous, downright cowardly to break the news by telephone, but much to my surprise I want my foot in her door. Then perhaps the inexplicable will pattern into sense.
She doesn’t interrupt or ask questions or even seem upset, just lets me bumble through.
‘Today’s curriculum day so no school, like to come over? I’ll show you around the hills if the weather holds.’ Her voice is composed but thick with sleep. Or grief.
‘Thank you, that will be nice. I need no entertainment, I am hardly in the mood.’
‘Good, that makes two of us. See you around twelve?’
Anna has torn both yesterday’s and today’s grocery list off the message pad. I rip a fresh sheet and scrawclass="underline"
Anyushka, Home at 6. Hope the doctor’s appointment and shopping go well. Don’t break the bank. OOXX.
Anna’s initial adjustment was perplexingly frenetic. Within two days she was vacuuming cupboards, shampooing cushions, flogging grime from the rubber doormat, polishing the Punt Road window until the glass squeaked. In an unsettling display of independence she arranged a doctor’s appointment, insisting half-plausibly that she could describe female symptoms without my assistance.
Above all I miss her rich inner life. Our Melbourne location is incidental. She would be the same in Canada, Scotland, Moldova, Antarctica. We haven’t made love since the day she arrived, after which she complained of soreness. I am barred from today’s follow-up appointment too, on the pretext she is shopping for my birthday dinner. It leaves me unmoored, my solo efforts somehow disparaged.
Camberwell… Chatham… Canterbury… The train rattles through at alliterative speed. Melbourne up close and fleeting suits me best, stops me thinking too much. Bitumen streets, nary a pothole, thread around gabled cottages, turreted bungalows with slate roofs and liquid ambers behind sculpted hedges, bedraggled eucalypts, fading wattle, jacarandas out of season. European restraint and native abundance wrestle each other to a draw. Past Box Hill where the train waits in darkness beneath a cavernous shopping complex, the same casual devouring of space but the houses are newer and redder, carved into hillsides. White sky streaked grey, a charcoal sketch interrupted. Nearer the hills, brickyards and timber stacks. A sandstone monastery beds down into lawn.
Lilydale is my exit station and the terminus. I stand on the platform and consult my flurry of arrows and asterisks. Bus 680 to Montrose. Third stop get out, second street on left. It isn’t due to leave for another twenty minutes so I ponder a gift. For all of ten seconds. Haven’t we Kurguzikovs given this woman enough? Besides, this is Melbourne’s fringe or another region altogether, perhaps with its own cultural nuances, so bearing gifts to new acquaintances, or one’s father’s lover for that matter, may be a city thing. Or a Melbourne thing. Hell for all I know these hill dwellers speak their own dialect.
680 rolls into the parking area. The driver steps off for a smoke as I and two other passengers clamber aboard. Underway, we dawdle several minutes at each stop whether or not people get on or off. Even public transport here is a kind of personalised luxury. In twenty-odd Moscow commuting years, not once have I ever stepped into a near-empty bus or carriage.
Turning into Dawson Street – my destination – two teenage boys kick an oval football back and forth, leaping to catch it with arms outstretched. Number seventeen which we overshoot by a hundred metres or so, has a green Gemini parked on a concrete driveway fanning into the kerb. A lemon tree, branches festooned with ripe fruit, shades the front lawn. Smoothing the lapels of my jacket I walk up the driveway to an entrance alcove. A young rubber plant sprouts from its tub beside a fluted, amber-tinted window. I buzz the intercom twice. A fluid shape slides behind the glass, darkening the doorway.
‘Come in,’ she says, stepping back to let me through. Shorter and squarer than her telephone persona evoked, Helen wears denim shorts and a salmon-pink T-shirt. One sleeve is covered in spider-web. Close-cut grey hair, once blonde, gelled fringe coaxed sideways. Hard folds of skin pouch her eyes and either side of her mouth. The hallway opens into a teenage lair. Newspapers draped over stools, curlicues of Nintendo packaging, upended polystyrene boxes. A long-haired tabby perches on one, front paws folded beneath its pudgy chin. Cellotape barely covers a grapefruit-sized dent in the wall from a hurled object.
‘You’d never know it was housecleaning day, would you?’
She gestures to the one tidy armchair, sits opposite on a divan with burst springs leaking foam. ‘Cup of tea? Slice of lemon, Russian-style?’
She gets up to boil the kettle, pours tea into matching blue cups.
‘Cigarette? No? Good on you. Don’t mind if I do?’ She curls one leg under the other. They are longer than they first appeared. The smoke whistling out the side of her mouth harks back to her student days.
‘I think I have chosen a bad time to come.’
‘It chose you. Anyway no such thing as a good time, just varying degrees of impossible. That’s a single parent’s lot. This past month Peter’s been disruptive in class or not turning up at all. Barricades himself in his room at mealtimes, sneaks out after dark. The trouble with fourteen-year-olds is that there’s no measuring stick. How to tell a severe bout of adolescence from something more sinister? I get too tired to stop myself imagining the worst. But enough about me. How is your wife settling in?’
Good question. The honest, safe, misleading reply is neither well nor badly. Diffidence is a curse. I sense her sympathies are forthcoming, but will be as easily withdrawn.
‘Ah, well, I should say slowly. And with difficulty.’
‘I guess it can’t be easy for her.’ A brusque hint of female solidarity?
‘We did not expect a piece of cake.’
‘Of course not. How about a toast to the departed? Just one, mind.’
She fetches two shot glasses from a tallboy, a bottle of Kristall vodka, a sliced lemon and a honey jar. Mixing lemon drops into each glass, she dips a swizzlestick into the honey and swirls some into mine. ‘Your Dad got me onto this stuff. Knicker-loosener he used to call it. Mixing vodka is like watering beer, isn’t it, only worse. A cultural crime. Mind you, Sergey liked to toss away the rule book in matters drinking. And other things.’
‘To Dad.’
‘To Sergey. Bottoms up.’ Hers goes down smoothly. As usual I fight back the impulse to gag.
‘I’m not a tosspot, promise.’
Tosspot? To my blank look she flicks the side of her neck, the Russian gesture for drunkenness.
‘See, straight to my head and it’s only my second for the day. Sorry, I tell a lie, third. Not an ordinary day, is it? You’re obviously no tosspot either. Sergey Vladimirovich would disown that effort. Mind you, that’s to your credit, not his. Not being flippant or disrespectful I hope. I’m not big on eulogy, or ceremony, let’s just make it up as we go. A scaled-down wake. Russians don’t really do wakes, do they? Is there even a word for it? More of an Irish thing. Showing my roots. Okay, let’s honour your Dad. Respect and truth-telling. If it comes down to a choice I’ll be telling the truth. I’ll try to do both but I won’t be holding back. Between us we knew his good, bad and in between. All sides deserve an airing, don’t you think? Otherwise we do him an injustice.’
I can only nod.
She stirs her cigarette butt in the ashtray. ‘Did you know about the ring? He said in his letter that it was an inheritance. If I didn’t know him better, I’d suspect he stole it.’