Dog Boy (34 page)

She pulled out a bundle of rags which she began to cradle in exaggerated movements, lifting her gaze from it to nod and smile widely at them both as she approached. She seemed a figure in a pantomime, playing with a prop. A thin birdlike piping came from the bundle and Natalya caught Dmitry’s eye with an angry look. It really was a baby. The woman stepped nimbly to head them off as Dmitry shifted his weight. She wasn’t going to let them past. She stopped rocking the baby, looked up and leaned towards them in awful intimacy, as if they shared something. Dmitry realised she wasn’t old. Her face was young, thin and horrifically disfigured by the scar of a deep knife or axe wound that had cut through her brow above one eye, through her nose, and down through her lips and her chin. It had healed without stitches to give her an unnaturally sinister expression, with the cut somehow dividing her face into uneven halves. Her small deformed nose had been severed too, he realised, and was half gone. Saliva pooled behind the two flaps of her bottom lip and she sucked, hissing now and then, to control it.

She grabbed the baby by the rags at the back of its neck and thrust the whole bundle towards Natalya. The baby was only weeks old, its malnourished face almost like that of a baby chimpanzee: small, wizened, with bulging vacant blue eyes and blue lips. Its mouth was dry and crusted. It reeked of petrol.

The woman caught Dmitry’s eye and held out her other hand in an unmistakeable request. She winked, pushing the dying baby into Natalya’s face, fending off any move from either of them. He was about to give her something for her pitiful child, and for her terrible disfigurement, when she suddenly broke the shuffling silence between them.

‘You’re late, doctor,’ she said, hissing softly, but with a startling voice. ‘But a deal is a deal, isn’t it? 5,000 roubles? That’s what the Roof said. Clean, too; no drug baby, this one.’ That voice. Melodious, nuanced. Deep and lovely. His scalp crawled: it scared him. She was raising her arm high to make her coat drop. She grabbed her sleeve in her teeth and held her exposed arm towards Dmitry. It was thin and smooth, without needle scars. Dmitry looked at it numbly, as if the arm could help him, then shook his head and held up both hands to the sky.

‘You…ah…y-you have made a mistake,’ he stuttered. She shook the bundled baby sharply to halt Natalya, who was trying to edge by.

Natalya shuddered and pushed past. Dmitry followed. As he passed, he reached for the young woman’s hand to press some money into it, but Natalya swung round and stared at him so fiercely that he retracted it, feeling all the more ridiculous for having tried at all. He looked back as they stumbled down the cracked pavement and away. The young mother was smiling again. That was how her face fell out in repose, he realised. It was no smile at all. Her face couldn’t say what she wanted it to. She stared after him, then shook her head at him, the appalling smile unwavering, before she turned away.

They didn’t talk. Dmitry concentrated hard on the map, although he knew already which of these little orange trails they were now stepping out. He felt completely jangled, as if he were an instrument and someone had banged his strings all at once with an unloving hand. He couldn’t get that voice out of his head. That monstrous face, that smile. Natalya stomped on in angry silence.

They had all but given up when their newly sharpened hearing picked up a faint yabbering. High-pitched, forlorn. Natalya smiled in relief and triumph. In front of them was a ruined church. The single cupola was burnt and had fallen in, leaving wooden framing like a gaunt half-closed hand and the odd beauty of ornamental brickwork casements silhouetted against the sky. Long grass grew along the tops of walls, even along the top of the brickwork of the cupola. It had never been a prepossessing building. Even new it would have been modest, bordering on plain. A small village church once, perhaps, long before the city crept up; then abandoned as all communal life drained from centres of worship. The countryside around greater Moscow was dotted with these ruins: Natalya had seen a few but this was the only one she could recall seeing in the city itself. Mostly such useless buildings had given way long ago to housing developments, or had been restored and made useful again.

Natalya pushed cautiously through the crumbling gate and stepped into the tiny courtyard. Dmitry followed. Five dead apple trees were festooned in coloured plastic bags, clearly the work of some human hand. These insane flags fluttered and snapped over drifts of rubbish blown off the mountain. Inside the building itself there was nothing except rubbish and rank weeds under an open sky. Its desolation made it seem emptier than bare concrete. The path to the corner was clear. They picked their way through until they reached a jagged hole in the floor. They lowered themselves gingerly through the cracked floorboards and scrambled down the rubble tunnel into the dark den.

It was a large cellar, much larger than they had expected: almost as long as the building itself. Natalya looked around in the gloom, overwhelmed now by what they had taken on. This awful hole had probably been his home, their home. Any clinging faith she had in Mamochka vanished. She now imagined Romochka and Marko’s mother as a female Bluebeard, a Fagin, someone like the grotesque Madonna mother they had just encountered.

The floor underfoot was sticky. The smell was disgusting, overpowering: the air was thick with the rankest dog smell she had ever experienced, and more. Death and decay. She switched on her torch and breathed in sharply as its yellow light played over the mess around her. There was a huge pile of rags in a corner, covered in dog hair. Plastic bags everywhere. She noticed bones lying here and there at her feet, then the torch picked out the splayed and dismembered carcasses of some large animals—a glimpse of ragged skull holes and an intimate dirty grimace. These bones were brown, not white. She counted three skulls and several shredded lengths of desiccated skin and hair. A rib cage with a battered plastic sword was threaded through it.

She shuddered. They looked like big dog skulls. Did they eat each other? That idea pulled another out of the tumbling darkness in her chest. She tried not to look further into the shadows, suddenly fearful that there might be human bones here too.

She was both shaken and affronted that a human child had lived here among these ghastly things, and had most probably taken it as normal, invisible. Nothing could have said more starkly that they lived here on the very brink of death. Against the far wall she picked out the supine form of Lenin, staring upward in blank-eyed serenity, and shuddered. It all seemed to have some deranged meaning. Worst of all, wherever she looked there were children’s toys. A broken pedal car was upturned against Lenin’s shoulder. Large red, yellow and blue building blocks lay scattered around, all half chewed.

She looked down. She was standing on two battered peacock feathers. There were more of them, lying all about. She stared at them stupefied for a moment, then remembered when Khan had escaped from the Moscow Zoo. So this is where that prized jewel had ended up. There was something terrible about that. Frightening. Nothing lost was ever really lost. A peacock was once here, had lived and died rigidly a peacock. It died purely from being a fraction out of line, a fraction outside the boundary of where a peacock in Moscow should be. A boy was here—two boys—lost but not-lost, with nothing so firm about their weird jelly selves.

And, of course, at last, there were puppies, cowering and silent now in the mound of rags that she had seen first. She inched her way over to Dmitry, who was squatting near them. Three living; one, out to the edge of their putrid corner, dead. All grey-gold with paler masks. They were very young, eyes just open, very weak. It had been two days now since Romochka was caught.

She touched the edge of this bed, feeling that with every breath, every touch, she was being contaminated by something far worse than a dog-den church cellar. What had they been thinking, that they could rehabilitate an eight-year-old boy who had slept in this for three or four years? They were the experts, for God’s sake. They knew full well that he was past the plastic stage, incapable of any kind of grafting into life. She avoided Dmitry’s eye, dreading the moment he would scent her rising fear and begin to crumble.

She felt a touch at her waist, and Dmitry put his arm around her. He was no longer holding his nose. He looked at her in the gloom and breathed in deeply, as if savouring it. ‘What a boy, eh Natalochka? What an amazing kid—he was king here.’ He grinned. ‘He’ll have to learn how to be a pauper, now.’

She knew Dmitry didn’t for a moment really mean this. He was nothing if not a realist. She laughed, shakily.

‘He’ll be pretty unhappy, I should think.’ Her voice sounded thin. Of course Romochka was unsaveable. Clever, yes, but irredeemable. The same as any experienced bomzh child beyond the age of reclamation. Really, she thought then, they should kill these puppies too, put them out of their misery. Then wash their hands very thoroughly so Romochka didn’t smell it on them. Romochka probably couldn’t get the care he needed except in a specialist institution.

She could hear Dmitry smiling as he spoke.

‘He
is
human. All this is because he is human. There is no turning back, Natalochka, either for him or for us.’ He reached for the snarling mites, shoved them into his overcoat pockets and led her stumbling out of the revolting hole.

Natalya felt better as soon as they reached clean air. She shuddered, laughing, trying to shake out the wild darkness that had clouded her. ‘Phuuu! We stink! What a place. Here, let me carry one; too many might bring on your asthma.’

She had left all but a vestige of her defeat behind in the ogre’s lair. They walked to the nearest metro station, itching furiously and scratching themselves under their clothes and by the time they sighted the welcome red M of the entrance, Natalya had commandeered all three puppies, juggling them between hands and pockets, teasing Dmitry about his imaginary allergies, trying to erase her awful uncertainties with bright and busy talk.

On the landing of their floor, despite padded doors, they could hear Romochka screaming in alien shrieks and growling riffs. There was no time to feed or wash the puppies.

‘Let him do it,’ gasped Natalya, rushing up the stairs, handing two of the puppies back to Dmitry.

They let themselves in quickly and locked the padded outer door. Better not let the neighbours hear much of this shrieking. Outside the door of their spare room they paused, looked at each other, then walked in.

The room stank of fresh faeces. Konstantin Petrovich was standing by the door looking harassed. He had bites and scratches rising in raw welts on his arms, and it was clear that Romochka had thrown shit both wildly and with excellent aim. The sight of the boy was a shock to Dmitry. He barely recognised him. Romochka’s hair was shaved off, leaving an unexpectedly small face, a small child with a red raised scar across his scalp. He was naked and, like Marko, quite hairy. He had been dressed in a white shirt and some sort of white pyjama pants, but these lay at different corners of the room, shit-smeared. Konstantin had cuffed the boy’s hands behind his back.

Romochka looked at Dmitry, disoriented. His rage and feeling of nakedness receded and he was overwhelmed with confusion.
How could this be?
He could smell a cold hint of Mamochka. He could smell home and more.
How? How?
He could sense Dmitry’s excitement and nervousness. He was bewildered, fuzzy headed. Raw sound hurt: his ears were new roaring air tunnels deep into his head. He was terribly exposed without his hair. Dmitry had betrayed him, but what now?
What had he done, where had he been?
The teeming pain of it all welled up and he screamed with fury and grief, squeezing the terrible tears from his eyes and shaking his head to clear them.

Dmitry was horrified. This unrecognisable Romochka snarled and shook himself from side to side. The pale face was twisted, his teeth prominent in an animal grimace, his body held low in an inhuman form. The scarred simian body, the tear-stained cheeks, bared teeth and wild eyes, this posture, all added to a most alienating appearance. His torso, criss-crossed with terrible scars, was awful to see. He seemed wolf-like but at the same time unnatural: truly degraded, worse than any wolf. Dmitry could see the shock and revulsion in Konstantin’s face. He waited until Romochka had stopped screaming and was looking at him with dull black eyes. He signed to Konstantin to release the boy.

‘Romochka, Romochka,’ Dmitry talked while Konstantin reluctantly snipped the plastic cuffs at the boy’s wrists. The boy growled all the while. ‘You know me. I am here to help you. Remember Mar…Schenok.’

Romochka lunged but, before Dmitry could stop her, Natalya had stepped in front of him and was roaring at the boy with a spectacular and savage snarl from all her adult height, at the same time pulling a suddenly mewling puppy from her coat. Dmitry saw her as if in a painting, frozen: a goddess or witch, with a helpless beast in hand, arched over a cowering caliban.