Mourning Ruby (8 page)

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to swim anyway.’

‘Of course you wanted to swim. What else do you come to the seaside for?’ asked my adoptive father.

The sound of the plane flared in our ears. We all
looked up, rows of families on the broad beach, as the plane swooped low trailing its banner with blue writing on it.
Come to Damiano’s Dreamworld
, it said. I picked the words out aloud.

‘Wherever the hell that may be,’ said my adoptive father. I believed he was big enough to pull the aeroplane out of the sky and crush the glad message in one fist.

I hear him now.
Wherever the hell that may be
. Those were his exact words, and they had an elegance of phrasing I don’t associate with him.

He’s here with his stewed tea and his daughter with her head bowed and the hair sliding across her face. With her right hand, the one he can’t see, she’s secretly burying her egg sandwich.

He wanted a bouncy girl, a daddy’s girl, a girl who’d race to the door at the scratch of his key and drag him in, hanging on his hand. A rosy, noisy, curly haired caution who would pour out nonsense to make him grin.

‘
What did you do at school today, Rebecca?
’

‘
Nothing
.’

The plane flies back along the beach. The banner swirls then straightens and I read it aloud for the second time, proud of the way I manage the difficult name.

Wherever the hell that may be
, he whispers to me, one adult to another now. My adoptive father is forty-four, and I am thirty-six. We are on the level. I don’t need to bury my egg sandwiches any more, I can simply hand them back to him.

‘I don’t like this.’

And he’s free too. He can tell me what he really thought of his hunched wife and child, of the blank beach and the aeroplane that went away with its message that
stirred his senses and would never satisfy them.
I don’t like this
, he might say too, and with justification. He wanted something and he didn’t get it. He made himself safe by pretending to want nothing.

Mr Damiano liked to fly with the pilot. He liked to hear the snap of the banner as the plane turned, and the noise it made as it flowed behind them like a sail. Maybe he once saw my face among all those upturned faces.

He restored scarlet and gold horses for the merry-go-rounds. They were the size of beast a full-grown man could ride on. Their nostrils flared as the music began and they rose and fell, faster and faster, their silver stirrups glinting in the fairground lights. Each of them had a name, like a horse of flesh.

They came from far places. Mr Damiano got word of them and they arrived after long journeys by strange, circuitous routes. A neat brown pair from Hungary, a single plumed horse from Vienna, a ruined nag from a German fair that needed paint and leather and metal and a new mane and tail of real horse-hair. Mr Damiano took the flotsam of a dozen carousels and prepared them to face the music again. Their saddles creaked, their bridles clinked, slowly they began to rise and fall against the dark-blue fairground night. They were made to take the weight of a full-grown man, and a woman too, the pair of them crushed together, gripping the pole, joined at breast and hip and thigh. When the ride was over and the couple stepped off they would stagger, and catch hold of each other again before they wandered, dazed, into the crowd.

He hired jugglers and fire-eaters by the season. The clairvoyant had predicted the death of Kennedy, and in
the supper-tent roast pigs were sliced and served up with crackling on plates of bread.

There were tumblers and a dance-band, tight-rope walkers, barrel-organs. There were clowns and conjurors and a man who could free himself when bound with chains at the bottom of a dull-green glass tank. There was a girl who had trained a poodle to pick out words from an alphabet board, at her direction. There were men in rags who magicked them into tail-coats, and a woman who could hang by her teeth from a rope suspended thirty feet above the crowd. Behind the hall of mirrors a mind-reader practised, and one year a real mermaid told fortunes.

‘A dugong,’ said Mr Damiano.

‘What made you go into hotels?’ I asked Mr Damiano when he interviewed me. He was telling me about the bears that still dance in Russia, and I didn’t say that I had seen them. He was looking at me too closely. I thought he would see the cracks in my smooth face.

‘How old are you?’ he asked back.

‘Thirty-three.’

‘Have you children?’

‘No.’

‘A husband?’

‘No.’

Mr Damiano looked at me. His back was to the window and his face was hard to read. His big shoulders rested peacefully inside the most beautiful suit I had ever seen. The room was pale and still, lit only by a jar of tulips. In the outer offices there were telephones and computers. In here, nothing.

‘They are similar businesses,’ Mr Damiano answered me. ‘A man who succeeds in the fairground business will do well in hotels if he puts his mind to it. People do not visit my hotels to sleep and to be fed. They visit them to discover that I have already found out what will give them the greatest pleasure. If you want the job, it is as simple as that. That’s all we are trying to do.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want it.’

He looked at me closely to check that it was true, and then he nodded.

11

Moscow

Adam and I first took Ruby to Moscow when she was two years old. By then Joe had a Russian girlfriend called Olya. There’d be no problem with the baby, he said when we phoned to arrange the details. Olya knew where to buy all the things babies need. She had a sister who would babysit for Ruby while the four of us went out. Joe hadn’t seen Ruby for nine months. He kept a baby in his mind who no longer existed.

‘She’s out of nappies,’ I said. ‘She sleeps in a proper bed now.’

I was always moving Ruby on. To me, a red, hot lump in Ruby’s mouth was already a tooth. She could nearly crawl, nearly stand alone, nearly walk. It took me a long time to understand that it was only the day itself that mattered, not what the sum of Ruby’s days might one day bring.

‘She’ll be fine in Moscow,’ said Joe. He thought I was hesitating because of Ruby. ‘Russians love babies. Make sure you bring enough warm clothes for her, or the babushkas will stop you in the street and tell you to dress her properly.’

It surprised me when Joe said
Russians love babies
. It wasn’t like him to make a generalization. He’d told me a thousand things about Russia, but all of them were specific and they all sounded real, except for this.

Russians love babies
. What did that mean? I looked at where Ruby was playing. She held a book of nursery rhymes and she was singing songs from memory, turning the pages randomly in the middle of a line. Her face was bland and pearly and I knew that there was another game going on inside the singing game. She was pretending to be someone else: me, perhaps. Noticing me, she glanced up with a faint, warning frown. She did not want to be interrupted. A kiss now would affront her.

‘We’re going to Russia, Rubes,’ I said. My voice sounded oddly in the kitchen silence. Outside, the sky was white. There was so much time in these long days with Ruby that sometimes I would see the big hand quiver as it came to rest at the end of another minute. That was the way I used to watch the clock at school. I learned to tell the time early and other children would ask me in whispers,
How long till play time? How long till dinner time? How long till home time?
I had time in a bag on my lap, a substance that I owned and gave out when I chose.

Adam wanted me to go out more. Ruby could play with other children at groups in church halls. I could take picnics and share them with other mothers and babies in parks.

Three nights a week, I worked in a bar in town. The hourly wage barely covered Ruby’s babysitter, but the tips were good. We wore black dresses and I pulled my hair back tight and put on lipstick. It wasn’t a place people drank to get drunk, though there were drunks sometimes. It was a warm, dark, secretive bar with a regular clientele. I liked working there. I liked the bloom on people’s faces when they felt well looked after, and
the things they would say to me that I felt sure they wouldn’t say to anyone else. (But I knew that if any of the other girls went to the table it would be the same warm look in the eyes, the same tips, the identical bloom and confidences, or at most only a little different. Maybe that was what I liked.) If customers were out of order it was easy to let them know it. It wasn’t the kind of bar where you could behave as you liked. If you wanted that there was the whole Strip to go to. We were different.

The money I earned, I kept for Ruby. We didn’t need it, although often I wished we had needed it, and that it was because of my tips that Ruby would have new shoes and holidays. Adam’s money came so thick and fast that our joint bank account brimmed. We had direct debits and never had to worry when the bills came in. Adam had even begun to overpay our mortgage so that we would be free of it sooner. But I was wary of that joint account. It still seemed to me like stealing when I wrote a cheque on it, unless it was for gas or electricity.

I thought that maybe one day Ruby would like to travel, or buy herself a piano, and then I’d say to her out of the blue that she had her own account with thousands in it, saved up for her so that she wouldn’t have to ask anyone for money, not even me.

Joe met us at Sheremetyevo airport. He got a taxi with a driver who thought he spoke English and who drove very fast, with a strange loose acceleration as if the car wasn’t in gear or properly touching the road. He kept turning fully round to talk to us. His eyes were beautiful, pale blue, washed out. Drunkard’s eyes, and there were bottles of beer in the passenger glove compartment.
I pressed Adam’s arm and showed him where the bottles were.

‘Tell him to slow down,’ Adam said to Joe. ‘Ruby isn’t secured.’ The car braked sharply and I let out my breath and made myself believe it was all right to have brought Ruby here.

‘I told him you wanted to look at the sights,’ said Joe.

Outside the window the flat, soiled snow stretched away, the same colour as the sky. In the distance there were tower blocks, pylons, and black, prickling stands of trees which looked as small as weeds against the bulk of the blocks. The way the land was used reminded me of New Jersey. Russians and Americans could afford to waste their countryside. They could have as much ugliness as they chose. They knew they had thousands of miles of prairie, mountain ranges, forests, and lakes as wide as inland seas. It was hard to understand, if you came from a small country.

The taxi hit a pothole and made Ruby bounce on the fake leather seat. She liked the feeling and she made herself bounce again. Her eyes flashed at us, bad and bold, and Adam and I smiled at each other. A thousand times a day, we saw things in her which no one else would ever see.

‘It’s minus seven,’ said Joe. ‘It was down to minus fifteen last week. Seven’s not bad, as long as there’s no wind.’

But all the same Ruby’s breath squeaked as I lifted her out of the car and she turned her face into my shoulder to hide it from the cold.

Olya had thick black hair. It sprang strongly from her hairline, which was like the point of a valentine heart.

Olya wasn’t beautiful. She was tall, shapely and forceful, and when I first saw her she had her back to me. Her hips were wide, her legs braced, her feet planted. She was at the stove in the small apartment kitchen, frying little meat patties. As we crowded in she turned, and pushed back her hair. Broad face, matte, thick skin, dark eyes. Maybe she was plain, but she was the kind of woman I liked to look at. Her smile was spacious and kind and she went on frying the patties without haste, as if it was as important as anything else a person might do.

It was three in the afternoon. We ate the meat patties with beetroot, pickled cucumbers and potatoes. Olya had made dill sauce and there was cranberry relish. Afterwards we had a jar of preserved pears, and ice cream. The pears were whole, with their stalks still on, and their cheeks had been stained red with cochineal. Olya had preserved them herself, she told us, when a friend had given her six kilos of pears last September.

‘They’re excellent,’ said Adam. ‘You must give us the recipe.’

‘No, you must take the jar home!’ said Olya. ‘I wrap it up in newspaper, and it won’t break when you fly.’

‘On the flight,’ said Joe.

‘Was there vanilla in them?’ I asked.

‘You noticed it! It’s so nice cooking for people who notice what they are eating. Now Joe could eat the newspaper instead of the pears and if I ask him he says, “Very nice, Olya.”’

I stared at her. Was she talking about Joe, who’d taught me most of what I knew about food?

‘Luckily Olya does all the cooking,’ said Joe. He looked at me, deadpan.

‘Yes, that’s lucky,’ I said.

Olya would not let us touch the duty-free whiskey. We began with pepper vodka, continued with champagne, then returned to vodka. Since I’d had Ruby, I was out of the habit of drinking. I put my hand over my glass when the bottle came round to me.

‘Do you know what vodka means, Rebecca?’ asked Olya. ‘Voda is water. Vodka is little water. You take a little water for your health. It’s good for your blood movement.’

‘Circulation,’ said Joe.

Olya gestured at the window. ‘You see what winter is like here,’ she said.

Outside, the same pallor of sky, thickening now. Heaps of dirty snow, packed ice on the pavements. We were on the fourth floor. The wind was rising and people walked with their heads down. There was a desultory, numb look to the street life, as if it had no money to make it stir.

‘Did you see the man lying on the ground, by the airport access road?’ I asked.

‘Drunk,’ said Joe.

‘Won’t he freeze?’

‘He’ll get picked up by the airport police.’

‘Some freeze, every winter,’ Olya corrected him. ‘They are too drunk to know how cold they are, and so they die. If they are lucky they can sleep on a ventilation shaft where there is warm air, but often the police pull them off.’