Page 84 of The Half Life of Valery K

Valery knocked him gently and felt bad for objecting.

There was a strange scratching sound on their left. Valery frowned through the gloom to try and find it. He was still caught in the dregs of the nightmare, and the idea of having a rat in the compartment with them loomed sharper and nastier than it would have if he’d been properly awake. It was hard to shrug off that fogginess in the morning, and getting harder each day. He wasn’t bothered exactly about being hungry and thirsty, but he was starting to feel weak with it, and starting to notice that his mind was turning sticky.

Someone was pulling at the splinters around the knothole in the compartment divider. The air was better on the women’s side – they had more cracks in the walls, and a loose plank.

‘Hey, can you not?’ a woman’s voice said on the other side. ‘We’ve got little girls in here.’

‘Uh, put up with it,’ the man said tiredly. ‘We’ve got old men in here.’

‘Hey,’ Shukov whispered to the man by the compartment divider. Over the last couple of days, he had been getting a glassiness to his expression. Valery was worried he had a fever. ‘Can you see them now?’

The man glanced at the slightly enlarged hole. ‘Uh … yeah.’

Shukov grabbed Valery’s shoulder and scrambled over five protesting people to see. ‘Hello,’ he said happily, his eye to the gap.

Valery winced and pulled his arm. ‘Don’t, Shukov. Come on, mate, leave them alone.’

‘Hi,’ a woman on the other side said, very gently. Even to her, he must have looked feverish. ‘Everything okay in there?’

‘Oh, you’re pretty.’

‘Nope,’ a woman decided, and hung something – a scarf, maybe – on a nail or a splinter above the hole.

‘Hey!’ This from Shukov and the man who had scratched the hole open a little more. They both sounded like little boys.

With a spike of little-boy anger, the scratching man yanked the scarf to pull it in through. He only succeeded in jamming it, and the angle was too awkward to wrench it all the way.

Valery took a breath, asked the eternal question of what would Svetlana do, and banged the man’s head against the wall. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Now. Look at what you’re doing. She said there were little girls in there. Don’t scare them.’

‘Oh, fuck you, you queer,’ the man snapped, but he stopped.

Some of them knocked tentatively and tried to play hangman later, but the women wouldn’t answer.

‘Stuck-up bitches,’ Shukov mumbled. His eyes hazed with tears.

Valery squeezed his arm. He wanted to say that obviously nobody wanted to play after the little performance this morning, but that wouldn’t have done any good. He wasn’t sure Shukov remembered. ‘It’s okay. They’ll get bored in another couple of days.’

‘I don’t feel very well,’ Shukov whispered.

‘I know.’ Valery pulled him close despite the heat so that he wasn’t propped so awkwardly on the hard floor.

He let his eyes drift around the compartment. Usually, by the afternoon, there was a ripple of conversation, but everything had turned stagnant. Even the younger men, who were normally animated enough to play knucklebones with old nails they’d dug out of the walls, were still and silent. Every so often, people glanced over at the dividing wall, almost as unhappy as Shukov. Valery swallowed. If he was honest, he had been living mostly for hangman too, and those quiet higher voices on the other side of the wall that sounded like home and church windows.

Someone else was scratching at the hole now, trying to free the scarf.

‘Stop it,’ someone said sharply on the other side.

The man stopped. Valery looked away. If he had been able to string words together properly, he would have tapped on the wall and tried to explain that everyone was miserable, and would it be all right if they could be forgiven now, if everyone agreed they were sorry about before, but even trying to think those things in a logical line gave him a feeling like vertigo. The silence went on.

‘I think this bloke’s dead,’ someone said quietly from the other side of the carriage. ‘Is anyone a doctor?’

A brief discussion was enough to elect Valery in the absence of a real doctor. The old man at the back was indeed dead. When the train stopped, it was a relief to get rid of the body.

Wanting to get a look at him in the sun, Valery took Shukov for a tiny walk when it was their turn out. They were on a silent stretch of railway track in the middle of a forest. Valery couldn’t have said which forest. The trees were pines, and the heat reflecting from the steel railway tracks was fierce. Shukov had turned still and terse.

‘I think it will be me next,’ he whispered.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Valery said, but Shukov looked terrible.