Page 60 of The Half Life of Valery K

Shenkov watched him for a second. ‘You really can’t talk about it.’

‘No,’ Valery said, on the edge of snapping again, but then understood. ‘Shenkov. I don’t think you’re brainwashed.’

‘That’s funny, hearing you say that as if it’s a ridiculous idea.’

‘It is a ridiculous idea.’ Valery had to pause at the doorway, because his heart was still going as if he had heard machine-gun fire rattle over his head, and it was making him dizzy. ‘One second,’ he said, exhausted with himself and trying hard to avoid imagining how this must seem to Shenkov.

Shenkov didn’t say anything, but he did put his arm around him. Valery thought he was just going to chivvy him inside, but he guided him forwards, against his own chest. Valery stiffened. It was bad enough to be little and calcium-deficient, but to be pathetic enough to have to treat like a child was heinous.

‘Don’t—’

‘No,’ Shenkov said. ‘It’s medicine, you need pressure across your sternum.’

That made no sense. ‘What?’

Shenkov shrugged a little. ‘Western voodoo.’

Valery stood still, thinking, and trying to feel why that might work; and, after only a few seconds, aware that it did work. The hammering in his ribcage was slowing. Shenkov had both arms clamped across his back, tight but not painful. The constriction was, far from unnerving, reassuring in a deep primal way. The panic lost its fangs. Valery had to let his head drop against Shenkov’s lapel. He could feel the edges of the KGB badge inside his breast pocket.

‘It is shell shock, you know,’ Shenkov said quietly.

Valery shook his head once. ‘I’ve never been blown up. This is just weakness of character.’

‘No, you can get it from other things than bombs. In the Komsomol, I worked on the building of the White Canal. My unit had to move the bodies of zeks who had died. I went blind one morning. No reason. No bombs, no threat, nothing. I was just having a cup of coffee and it all went dark. The medic, she said it was very common. She got my friend to do this, and it went away in … about twenty minutes. She said there are all kinds of bizarre things that can happen to you. It’s all shell shock.’

‘Oh,’ said Valery, feeling strange. Somewhere in a memory archive, he had known that; certainly he had heard of hysterical blindness and paralysis, and all the odd things that happened to soldiers on the front. He had just never applied it to himself. All at once, something heavy lifted away, and he could breathe again. He leaned back a little, almost more disconcerted by that lifting than by the panic itself.

Shenkov let him go. ‘All right?’

‘Yes,’ Valery said gradually. It made him wonder what else humans did in their deep workings that nothing in medical science had so much as brushed on its bumbling way by.

Shenkov sank his hands into his coat pockets as they passed inside and into the long corridor, which smelled of cleaning chemicals and cork from the noticeboards after the sharp clear air outside. ‘Now will you please move back into the apartment with me? I’ve been miserable, you got me used to someone making me coffee at five in the morning, for God’s sake.’

Valery started to laugh, which was painful, because his heart was still going hard. ‘Oh, God … something to confess, then.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got an octopus now, he’s been keeping me company. He’s called Albert.’

It was telling that Shenkov didn’t ask him why or how he’d got hold of an octopus. ‘How … large an octopus are we talking?’

Valery held his hands apart to about the size of a coconut. He had given Albert half a coconut to play with the day before yesterday, and come home to find what looked like a whole coconut but was in fact Albert tucked up in the half coconut, staying very still and watching his teatime crabs amble nearer in what looked to Valery like a wilfully smug undercover operation.

‘Don’t they walk about?’ Shenkov said carefully. ‘Won’t it electrocute itself on the television, or … ?’

‘He uses the remote.’

‘Of course it does.’

Neither of them added that all this was only provided the entire facility didn’t go up like a super-volcano in the next few weeks.

Talking about Albert and shell shock had been, however brief, a way not to talk about what was going to happen next. Anna had stayed behind because she had to talk to the director of the nuclear plant, and get him to come across here so that someone could show him what was going on. For Valery and Shenkov, the next name on the list was Dr Resovskaya. All the students’ work was going to have to stop, at the very least, while the physicists worked out exactly where everything had been dumped, and in the best possible world, everyone was going to have a serious discussion about evacuation. Valery knew already that that would never happen, even before the director of the plant, Anna, and the senior engineer arrived.

The director was a man Shenkov’s height who had gone to seed, his nose red with veins and his paunch pressing into the front of his jacket. He was one of those people who found ordinary motion such a struggle that the walk across the snow set him sweating, and as he charged into Shenkov’s office, where Valery and Resovskaya waited already, he was loosening his tie. Valery gave him a glass of water. The director took it and thanked him politely, and then seemed to press a switch that spun his character.

‘What’s all this bollocks about a safety breach?’ he demanded of Shenkov. He had a strong Leningrad accent that was subtly wrong. The man wasn’t actually from there; he was putting it on to seem like more of a proper, salt-of-the-earth proletarian. Valery watched him with some interest, listening hard now and hoping that it would turn out he was the ashamed grandson of an aristocrat. ‘Safety regulations have been followed here to the letter since fifty-seven! What qualifies you to say otherwise, Shenkov? Got multiple degrees in physics, have you?’

‘Sit down, Borya,’ Resovskaya said, dry as radioactive dust. ‘Hello, Anna, how are you?’