Moskva by Jack Grimwood Read Free Book Online Page B

not your girlfriend then?’
    Davie Wong looked so shocked Tom smiled.
    ‘Didn’t think so. How did you meet?’
    ‘At the swimming pool.’
    ‘The big one opposite the Pushkin?’
    The boy nodded. ‘She was smart and funny and suggested we get a coffee after we got changed. So that’s what we did. We met a few times. Nothing happened.’
    ‘Not your type.’
    Davie Wong glanced at him sharply.
    ‘My uncle was a stoker on destroyers,’ Tom said. ‘These days he lives in Portsmouth with a P&O steward he met in Singapore in the sixties. They’re just friends, obviously. Two bachelors sharing a small mews house outside the dockyard because it’s easier than living alone.’
    The boy grinned.
    ‘So, if you weren’t going out with Alex, who was? I mean, she’s smart and pretty and about to turn sixteen. There has to be some boy on the horizon. Unless her tastes don’t run in that direction.’
    ‘They do,’ Davie said.
    Seeing Tom’s look, he added. ‘We used to ogle Russian boys at the pool and in the cafe afterwards. She likes brooding and dark or blond and angular. I’m a bit less
dramatic
. It’s difficult here though. I mean, it’s not just illegal, it’s an illness. Did you know they put you in a mental hospital?’
    Yeah, Tom did know that.
    The wrong politics. The wrong public pronouncements. The wrong kinds of religion. The wrong sexual orientation. They put you in a mental hospital for a lot of things in the Soviet Union, although these days it was getting better.
    ‘There was a Russian boy at the pool,’ Davie said suddenly. ‘Thin, good-looking, very intense. He came over and introduced himself. I thought …’ Davie hesitated. ‘I thought he was interested in me. We went out as a group for a coffee and he took us to Patriarch’s Ponds to sit on the bench from
The Master and Margarita
. I didn’t see him again. Alex might have done.’
    ‘Might have done?’
    Davie blushed. ‘She cancelled me the next week. She was nice about it but we both knew why. She was going swimming with K.’
    ‘What does the K stand for?’
    ‘Kotik. But that’s just Russian for …’
    Little cat. Yeah, Tom knew.
    ‘Did Alex mention a New Year’s Eve party?’
    Tom watched the boy wrestle with his conscience and the good angel win. Looking round the ruins of his room, the boy found a paperback of Cocteau sketches that had escaped destruction and flipped towards the back, extracting an address not that far from Tom’s flat.
    ‘It was going to be great, Alex said. She said I should go. Her new friends were cool, they’d like me.’ Davie shrugged, looking briefly puzzled. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Alex didn’t
do
friends, not really. She hated school. Things were horrid at home. Her mother drank. Her stepfather hated her. I’d never met anyone so lonely.’
    Tom wondered if Davie realized that he kept referring to Alex in the past.
    The student room Tom wanted was right at the end.
    ‘Who is it?’
    He knocked again.
    ‘I said, who is it?’
    A third knock produced swearing, more swearing and the clatter of someone stamping to the door. It was thrown open and filled with the bulk of the sneering jock who’d been persecuting Davie for being different.
    Tom’s punch was low, fast and dirty.
    The boy was twenty, maybe twenty-one. Not used to being on the wrong side of the equation. Not used to being the one on the floor. Once the Texan had his breath back, Tom hooked two fingers into his nose, yanked back his head and gripped his throat. The list of nasty things he promised to do if the boy trashed Davie Wong’s room again, or indeed went anywhere near him, was long and very detailed.
    The boy believed every word.
    Tom left him curled on the floor and found his own way out of the overblown concrete cake, Stalin’s idea of how a skyscraper should look. Outside, an old woman sat in the shelter of its steps being ignored by students, a black scarf tied tightly round her head to protect her from