Pravda (47 page)

"Whereas you—you are all heart, right, Gabs?" Her throat was reddening but she was leaning forward to meet him now, the space between them narrowing. "You think and feel on their behalf, on everyone's behalf ... and then—and
then
—you go right ahead and do it anyway. Straight to the torture: fuck with everybody around you, but it's all okay, because you're doing all the feeling and thinking on their behalf." She jeered at him. "Very kind. Thank you on behalf of all the women you are so graciously caring for."

His voice was flat and cold. "All your life you have just come in and taken my friends and used them, transparently, when you thought they could help you, and then ignored them the minute you thought they could not. You even bullshit one lot of my friends about how close you are to another lot if you think the second lot can get you something. But you never understood that the reason they're my friends in the first place is because I give back, I put in, I keep the fucking friendships going. I don't just turn up and ask, 'What can you do for me? I'm waiting.' I write the letters. I make the visits. I listen to their stories. I try to help them in return."

"I don't want your help."

"But you've always taken it anyway."

"Because ... because you know what? Your help—which is a joke anyway—your help comes with way too much baggage. Your help comes with too much moralizing and too many conditions. And you know the sickest part? The sickest part is that you're not even sure what your fucking morals are. Or you're too much of a coward to act on them. So in the end your help just comes with one big fat stamp on the side that says
control.
Isn't that right, Gabs? And you know who that reminds me of? Speaking of cowards and controlling bastards. No, no, of course you don't want to hear it."

He recoiled. "Fuck you."

"Why don't you come out and face it?" She was sneering. "Deal with it. Deal with the fact that you lie to yourself. Get past—"

"Oh, fuck
off
with your therapy bullshit."

"Sorry—that's your area, isn't it? What are you afraid of, Gabriel? You're—"

"I am not afraid of anything."

"What are you afraid of?"

They faced each other.

His scornful features mirrored hers exactly. "We'd all love to quit our jobs, Isabella, and sit around crying or screaming or smashing our heads against the wall. Or however the fuck it is you like to spend your time. But you're going to have to grow up now, Is. Life is about ignoring the fact that life isn't about anything. That's it. Get used to it. And stop looking for excuses."

"You are afraid of being yourself. You are afraid of facing up to what and who you are. Now you sit here trying to control
me.
You do, you do, you remind me of—"

"You never faced one single thing."

"I face the fact that my father is my father."

"I have lived every day—every day since I left college—in the real world. Facing it. Doing it. Doing it despite.
Despite
the fact that I know it's senseless."

"Well, then you
are
an idiot."

There was raw rage in their voices now, bloodiness in their eyes.

He pointed his finger. "You're the one who can't face anything. Can't do it. Keeps on avoiding, hiding. Cowering away from real life. You know why? You know why you don't have the nerve to try anything for long enough? Because you're afraid that after all, you might not be very good at anything. You might just be a talentless piece of shit. The same as the people you think you are so much better than."

"Whereas you seem delighted with your mediocrity."

"You ... you sit here bullshitting
me.
Lying to
me.
When I know ... And I've known it ever since you came back. I
know
that you are in touch with Dad. Why lie to me? Why lie, Little Miss Facing Up? When it's so fucking obvious that you've been calling, writing, probably planning a cute little family Christmas get-together. So obvious. And yet you haven't got the guts to tell me to my face. Who's the coward? Who's controlling you now, Is? Today? Right now? Doesn't feel like you're in control to me. You contact Dad behind my back and expect me not to realize. Then you bullshit me, hide it. Feels like Dad is in control to me. Feels like Dad is stopping you from having some kind of a conversation with your brother. Feels likes he's totally in control."

"I can't believe how fucked up you really are. It's actually a surprise."

"Is he giving you money as well? Is that how come you're so relaxed about not finding work that you can tell Becky her life is a bag
of shit? Fine, take his money. Enjoy it." He got up. "This is crap. Use some of his money to pay the bill. I don't want to talk to you anymore. I'm going to work."

"That's a lie too," she said to his back. "You haven't been in all week."

But he was gone.

All through the city, her brother's words stalked her. Sinister clowns or blithe assassins—she could not tell. A few steps behind, peeping after her around the corners she had just turned, pretending other business if ever she swung around to confront their whispering.

By eleven a vicious staccato wind that came in from the east had begun to whip at the last of the morning's mist. By noon it was utterly impossible to imagine such a silent foggy stillness as had delivered the day, and by two she was being lashed by the belts of freezing sleet that the easterly carried in its chattering train. From Hackney to Acton and from Finchley to Balham and at all the bitter points between, the weather nagged and thrashed at the city, and nowhere was there enough shelter or relief. The doorways were all too shallow, the roofs of the buildings never quite overhung the pavements, the shops had insufficient frontages, the streets were all too wide. There was nowhere to get out of it, no Renaissance-built arcades, no Mall of America, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape. On days such as these, she realized, the people of London felt it hard in their bones that their city was fashioned for neither one thing nor the other: not for sun or shade, rain or snow.

All day long she struggled through this weather, looking at one flat after another: a crepuscular Vauxhall basement ("excellent access"), a converted half-floor on the Maida Vale border ("vibrant community"), a "reclaimed" council flat in Bethnal Green ("superb views—up to your ears in real London here, love"), an attic in Bal-ham ("good new bars"). Had she actually been seriously looking for
somewhere to live, she might have said something. But she wasn't. Or not anymore. Indeed, she did not know what she was doing. All she was sure of was that she was grateful for two things: that the day was full of appointments to mark out the hours so she was continually moving, and that the moving itself was done on the blessed tube—dry, sheltered, out of it. If anything, she wished that she had been even more haphazard in selecting possible flats—the more time traveling, the better.

It was four now and she was back on the Northern Line, on her way to see a cluster of places near Susan's in Kentish Town, the last of the day. The rest of the passengers looked nervous, overvigilant, tensed and ready, their heads jerking involuntarily to the maddened old tune of the centenarian track, but the racket and clatter were to her a lifelong balm. When she and her brother were young, they used to joke that happiness was a sign that read
HIGH BARNET I MIN.
The Northern Line was theirs. And the High Barnet branch was as good as home.

She wasn't upset, or unduly depressed, or indeed angry about what had happened that morning—or not near the surface. Rather she felt as if she were on some kind of clumsy emotional painkiller, the sort of thing they handed out to people who could not take too much reality; she felt vaguely irritated, but she also felt cosseted from the rampage of what she knew must be the truth of her feelings. Yes, they stalked her. And she knew they would catch up with her. But not here and not yet. Not yet.

This weird fuzzy numbness had begun almost immediately after her brother had left the café. She had not been that worried. Instead she simply assumed—her spirit simply assumed, regardless of her mind—that somehow—and she had absolutely no idea how—they would find a way back. She really could not imagine what this way would be. For they had said far too much, they had said the unsayable, and she knew that she and her brother were fearsomely (and disastrously) equal in the ferocity with which neither would now yield an emotional millimeter without evidence first of a capitulation on the part of the other. Of all the people she had ever met, with the sole exception of her mother, only her brother had a focused will that equaled her own.

Everything was fucked, of course. That much was obvious. She couldn't go on staying with Susan, though Susan had made it very clear that she was to remain as long as she liked. On the other hand, she was now no longer sure she wanted to remain in London at all.
Hence the half-assed way in which she had been seeing the flats. She realized that she'd been banking on staying with Gabriel and Lina until ... until she'd sorted herself out. But that too was out of the question.

At Warren Street, she experienced her first real pang for Sasha, for New York, for the East Village, for her life before. At least the old mess was properly understood: Mum—Russia; Dad—who cares?; Gabs—London; Sasha—annoying but good-hearted and actually a nice guy to hang out with. Oh God. She forced herself back into the present.

At the opposite pole from her fuzziness regarding her brother was her lucidity regarding her father. The dilemma was over. Gabriel knew. Fine. Now the way was open for her to have a clear run at Nicholas. All roads led back to him. She had enough money to see her through Christmas and a little beyond, after which she would absolutely have to work. So she
must
use the time between then and now to deal with the things that had brought her back to London in the first place. She had to talk to her father about her mother. And yet the thought of actually going to see him still repulsed her.

She fished her printed copy of his last e-mail out of her bag as the tube came to a standstill outside Camden.

Insidious. That was the only word for it.

My dear Isabella, I write with a proposal. Why don't you come here for Christmas? You don't have to answer straightaway. But do have a think about it.

His charm, as ever, was so false and so real at the same time ... It crawled under her skin, squirmed, hatched there. And all that stuff about ice creams and when they were all a little family. Yuck. Drawing on her sense of him as a father, of course, niftily leading her back into the role of little one, daughter, dependant. Then all that assumed mutuality—"you know what I mean, I think," "yours whenever"—as if they had been the closest of families through every hour of her childhood and the very best of friends every day since. As if they had spent the past ten years popping around to borrow jam from each other. Next the rant about America, disguised in that faux-humble outside-observer tone ("I'd love to have your impressions") but really yet another covert attack: an attack on her for going there and, by implication, on her judgment, on her taste, on her very personality, her life. The disguise reinstated at the end: "I am going on." And so back to him again. (Nothing new there—
always back to him.) Followed by the offer of payment, the closing terms, the arrangements—ostensibly offering her choices but actually choices that were all alike under his control. Thus, finally, to the blackmail: I'm not going to play your e-mail game; come and see me or you learn nothing.

Part of her felt cruel. Her father had suffered a stroke, and a stranger unaware of his menace would, she knew, have been appalled at her interpretation of the poor man's kindly invitation and evident generosity. And yet that was precisely the point with her father. Both things were simultaneously true: he was a selfish cowardly bullying bastard and a charming intelligent thoughtful man at the same time. The one did not cancel out the other. Besides, there was much new in this e-mail. There was loquacity, there was sentimentality, there was even, lurking back there, fear, panic, and loneliness...

She had forgotten about the weather. When she surfaced at Kentish Town it came at her again, as if she had returned to the deck of some desperate storm-pitched boat in the North Atlantic instead of stepping up onto the high street. The rain was almost evil, bending down in the wind to come up and under umbrellas, hoods. The cell phone she had borrowed from Susan beeped. There was a message. She stepped back inside the station's shelter and huddled with all the other refugees. It was the guy from Petersburg, confirming their arrangement for that evening.

She had forgotten. And of course she hadn't reminded Gabriel.
Shit.
Now her brother would not hear whatever the Russian had to say. She bit her lip hard. Well, fuck him.

She had already spoken to Arkady Artamenkov earlier in the week—this was how she knew Gabriel had not been at work, because the Russian had told her so. Anxious, Arkady had explained that he had been calling Gabriel, leaving messages, increasingly apprehensive as they were ignored, until eventually one of her brother's colleagues had picked up the phone and explained that Gabriel was ill and not expected in before the weekend. Given the fiascos thus far, the Russian was clearly very worried about the reliability of Glovers in general. And so during that call she had reassured him and promised to confirm again on Friday. Yet again, therefore, she had failed to keep her word.

She listened to the Russian's voice a second time. The message was short. She guessed that he was on a pay phone. "Hello, this is
Arkady again. We are meeting tonight at Kentish Town tube station. Please call me on..."He read out the number slowly, and then again. And suddenly she was looking forward to talking with this man more than any other thing in her life that she could remember. What did he know of her mother? Please God he was still going to come.

"Hello, Pat's Place." A hard voice, of Northern Irish extraction.