A sudden jangling crash to her right had made her jump, but the others just laughed and winked at each other.
One of the boys showed her how to hand over her precious ten pence piece to a man with purplish-green tattoos all over his forearms. The man sat up high on a stool in a narrow booth by the door. Neat towers of brown pennies had been lined up along the shelf in front of him, and when Rachel fed her coin under the window he pushed a stack of ten towards her without looking up. The older boy immediately took three of the pennies out of her hand and she followed him towards a long, brightly lit machine with revolving trays of money inside: thousands of pennies she could watch if she pressed her face against the sticky, curving glass.
The boy pushed one of her pennies into a slot. It rolled down a chute and spun on its axis for a second or two before the tray above it moved forward and knocked it flat. Rachel quickly understood that the penny needed to fall in just the right place, at just the right moment, if it was to be shunted onwards with any chance of toppling on to the tray below and perhaps starting a waterfall of pennies like the one she had witnessed when they first entered. All around her, people were scooping up coins from the dark holes underneath and pushing them back in. The jangling sound made her skin tingle and she wanted it to happen for herself. It wasn’t her lucky day, though. One penny in particular seemed to defy the laws of gravity as it hung lop-sidedly over the edge. She longed to see it fall. It wasn’t fair.
When her money was gone she wandered towards the back of the shack, where the smell of mould and vinegar made her want to pinch her nose and the machines only took five pence pieces. A woman in an orange dress leaned over a tall machine in the corner; it lit up her thin face and made her cheekbones stick out. The woman muttered something, then gripped the central rim with her fingers and rammed her hip against the glass. The machine tipped slightly and released its bonanza with a plashing cascade.
Rachel returned to her machine. She tried copying the woman, and when her child’s weight couldn’t shift it, she gave it a kick. The kick hurt her bare toe and still the coins wouldn’t budge, yet the man in the booth had seen her and he started banging on his window and shouting that he’d call the police. As she fled the arcade, Rachel saw him climbing down from his stool. She didn’t stop running until she got back to the house and though the others didn’t tell on her, she spent the next four days in bed, fear pushing her down into the mattress and under the pillow while she cried about a stomach ache and listened for the policeman’s knock at the front door. When no policemen came, she concluded that they hadn’t known where to find her. They were probably still searching, house to house. Those were the consequences. There is no such thing as an empty threat.
Now things are complicated. Elena has pushed Mykola’s black-eyed delivery man into the stairwell and sent him on his way. She strips the old green overalls off Rachel and picks up her bucket before disappearing downstairs herself. Rachel doesn’t know what to make of any of this, but she does know she hasn’t heard the last of it.
Lucas bumps into the machine when he comes home that night. He catches his hip on one corner and Rachel hears him cursing as he fumbles in the darkness by the front door.
‘What the hell is that?’ he asks, as she steps out of the bathroom, still brushing her teeth.
‘It’s a present, I think,’ she mumbles, wiping her mouth. ‘A washing machine. From Mykola, the man I met in the white goods shop. I don’t know how they got it into the lift.’
Lucas is not feeling so open-minded.
‘A present? If you didn’t pay for it, and I hope to God you didn’t as there’s nothing left on the Visa card, then it’s a bribe. Jesus, Rach, it’s a fucking great bribe. He hasn’t even tried to disguise it. Something for the wife – very clever. Well, it’s going right back to wherever it came from. Just as well you didn’t let him bring it in – then we’d be in receipt.’
Rachel lowers her toothbrush.
‘It might not be a bribe,’ she says. ‘It’s only a second. Some Russian make.’ She thinks of Elena spitting at the delivery man, his black eye. And then she remembers how Mykola had looked at her, how he had put his hand on her son’s head.
Lucas knows none of this. Alarm is twitching across his face. No one gives washing machines away for no reason. Not even a damaged one.
‘What exactly did this Mykola guy say to you?’ he asks. ‘He doesn’t expect us to pay him for it, does he? And how did he know where to bring it?’
Behind Rachel, the day’s washing drips from the nylon line above the bath: Lucas’s shirts, Ivan’s yellowing vests and her own knickers and stained nursing bras. She wants the machine. She wants clean laundry, but she doesn’t understand what Mykola wants.
‘We don’t have to keep it,’ she says, following Lucas as far as the living room and flicking the light switch so that the view beyond the windows is obscured by bright reflections. ‘I didn’t pay anything. I didn’t sign anything.’
‘Okay,’ says Lucas, taking out a pack of cigarettes. ‘I’ll get Zoya to call the shop. You’ve got to be careful, Rach. You don’t know how these people operate – starting small, finding your weakness, inveigling their way in and then suddenly I’m expected to reciprocate in some way. What the hell is this?’
Lucas is peering at the balcony door and before Rachel remembers to stop him he grasps the handle and gives it a yank. The frame makes a sticky sound like an Elastoplast being pulled off a knee. He has broken Elena’s freshly made seal.
The lorries start thundering towards Rachel as cold air rushes across the floor. There will be consequences, now, tomorrow, or sometime. She cannot shut out the balcony. The balcony will not be shut out.
Chapter 12
THE WINTER FREEZE deepens throughout January. As an Arctic front sinks down from Siberia dead crows drop out of the sky. On the afternoons when it snows, when the apartment blocks are shrouded and tiny flakes like splinters whip across the road, muffling the shrieks of the trams and swirling in dim halos around the streetlights, Rachel and her son stay indoors. Ivan pulls at her skirt hem and practises his rolling on the bedroom floor. When his erupting gums make him whimper, or his nappy rash flares up and he howls for three hours at a stretch, she rocks him on her hip in front of the mirror by the front door, or distracts him with a mobile made from bottle caps, but she never takes him into the living room. On days when the skies clear and the thermometer won’t nudge over minus ten, Rachel dresses him in five or six layers, with little zip-up bootees she bought near the football stadium and a pom-pommed balaclava on his head. Then she bumps him down the steps in his pushchair with the see-through rain cover pulled around him to keep out the worst of the cold that burns her nostrils and makes her eyes sting, and they walk around the car park or take a trolleybus to the ramshackle BBC office, where Zoya frowns her disapproval and Lucas lets him play with his keys.
The washing machine is still out there on the thirteenth floor landing. At first Lucas tries to get Zoya to have it returned, but she tells him she won’t do his dirty work and besides, everyone knows about Mykola Sirko’s dealings with the new racketeers. His shop is almost certainly used to launder their money.
‘Exactly!’ says Lucas, exasperated. ‘Why do you think I want it out of my hallway?’