Page 64 of The Half Life of Valery K

Happiness gave Shenkov a glow even beyond his ordinary elegance, so Valery was not surprised when a woman bought him a drink and saluted from down the bar. Shenkov held up his wedding ring. She shrugged and held up hers. It made him laugh, but he shook his head.

Then Anna was there at the table with them, even though she wasn’t. Valery looked down at a paper coaster. He would never come first for anybody, that was silly, but he would have given anything for second. In a desperate rush, he missed Shenkov even though he was sitting right there.

‘Smile!’ Shenkov chided him. ‘It worked, for God’s sake, get drunk. You can’t be a machine tonight.’

‘I’m not purposefully a machine,’ Valery protested, and downed the vodka to try and prove it.

He watched Shenkov decide it was because he was shy. ‘I’ll buy you something expensive if you speak to an actual human woman.’

‘I’m not playing. I came here to sit with you, not torture some random stranger.’

Shenkov studied him quietly, without laughing. ‘I worry about you, though. You don’t have anyone. You need to get into the habit of talking to people.’

Valery nodded. It was Married Person code again: please stop asking for more than precisely one eighth of my available social time. I have too many people already.

He looked along the bar, found a woman about his age with a military haircut like Svetlana’s, went over, explained he was being hounded and would she mind talking to him for five minutes. This damselling brought out her chivalrous side, they bought each other a drink and talked about the show she’d just seen at the ballet, toasted each other’s pushy friends – she assured him she had an exact Shenkov replica – and parted again.

He made an effort not to look back at Shenkov’s table. The man deserved the night to himself and his own thoughts; Valery wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t understand that other human beings sometimes wanted to sit with their own thoughts. After a minute or so, he pulled a newspaper along the bar to read, and turned it over to find the crossword. The Truth crossword was much more impressive than the tiny countryside ones. He borrowed a pen from the bartender, ordering himself to feel fortunate. It was, after all, an excellent crossword, with cryptic clues and everything. He could only do some of them. Before long the bartender was also involved. She, it turned out, was a literature graduate, and bar work was what you got for not going into the sciences. A waitress with a history doctorate knew a couple as well.

It was good to sunbathe in their friendliness, though they weren’t doing it for the sake of it. They were using Valery to get rid of the pair of unpleasant predatory types lurking at the far edge of the bar. He was a perfect shield. He was wearing a waistcoat and glasses, and his hair was getting its old curl back, so he looked like the boy next door again; but he was also clearly a recent zek, with Vor tattoos showing on his arms where he had turned back his sleeves. Even unpleasant predatory types did not go near that.

It made Valery jump when someone pressed one hand against his back, but it was only Shenkov.

‘You’re sitting here with a crossword.’

Valery put the pen down. ‘You told me to go away. Make up your mind.’

‘I didn’t! I just thought you might be better if you had an evening with someone who didn’t break your arm.’

‘Yes, well, and now you’re responsible for these poor people having to work out what the hell the newspaper bastards meant about stately function, badgers foxes,’ Valery said, motioning at his victims.

‘You know what, it could be a typo,’ the bartender said.

‘I think they do it on purpose sometimes so they don’t have to give anyone the prize,’ put in the history doctor.

‘The prize is … a cassette player made by a company claiming to be called Robotnik,’ Valery reported.

They all laughed. If a machine had to tell people on the box that it was a Worker then something was amiss.

Shenkov ordered some expensive vodka, resting his knee and his shoulder to Valery’s because the seats were crammed together. The bartender did a complicated trick that ended with the drinks on fire and sugar caramelising on the surface. It tasted glorious. Valery had to pause after the second round, already more drunk than tipsy, and far too aware of Shenkov next to him – how warm he was, and the way his whole body tightened when he laughed.

‘I might go back to the hotel,’ he tried.

‘You’re not going anywhere, I want to know what you’re like when you’re drunk,’ Shenkov said. ‘Is … that English?’ he added, puzzled.

Everyone else had stopped to listen too. There was an odd stillness all through the whole flashing room. Even the bartender had paused. The music was only on quietly, but Shenkov was right – the lyrics were English, over a light drum and a guitar.

‘No one report me,’ the DJ murmured into the microphone. ‘Might have got this special for you.’

She turned it right up just as it hit a climbing scale and swung into a proper melody. Teenagers and students were laughing, disbelieving, but they were jumping up to dance. It was infectious, full of a naive joy like only American music could be, the kind you had to smile to, or smash against a wall; usually you could tell which it would be by whether or not you liked children. It was packed with California sun and the feeling of the beach, and burnt sugar. Shenkov laughed, for all he would probably have lost his job if he’d been found in a bar playing smuggled American radio.

‘What’s it mean, do you know?’

Valery listened. ‘They’re saying – do you want to dance.’

He expected Shenkov to say that enough was enough, and they had better go. But Shenkov only asked him to write the lyrics in the margin of the newspaper, which was difficult given that Valery was already struggling to think, and that Shenkov made him drink another shot every time something went wrong. By midnight the bartender and the history doctor had joined in, everyone was helpless laughing, and Valery was trying hard not to enjoy it too much, because, like an echo, he could hear the silence that waited in City 40, and feel how bitter all this would seem when he was back in it, and Shenkov went home to his family.

The hotel room was unexpectedly excellent. It was a double suite, with two bedrooms linked by a living room. They were right opposite the MinMac building, but on the seventeenth floor, so the view looked straight over the top of it. Very much enjoying the ability to finally unfasten his own shirt without serious ado, Valery stood by the window while he did, watching Moscow glimmer. He had never seen it from so high up. Below them, Bolshaya Ordynka Street was a brilliant line that stretched right the way to the glow of Red Square in the north, where floodlights showed up the candy colours of St Basil’s meringue-shaped domes. Headlights and tail lights crept along in great chains, and further off, smoother and quicker, like spirits, the front lamps of Metro trains on the circle line.