Riding Icarus (2 page)

“They don’t have snakes in England either,” Gena said. “They have these things called slow-worms.”

“So what?” said Masha. “All worms are slow.”

When she came home she was exhausted. They had skated some more, they’d played at being Cossacks fighting the Turks, and practised some dancing. The haze had thickened into dense clouds, but it had got hotter and hotter. Now thunder was growling somewhere in the distance, like a gigantic grumpy tiger complaining all the way away in Kamchatka.

Granny was sharp and fretful. She hustled the goats into their pen, swept the trolleybus floor and tied a couple of curious knots in the corners of the curtains.

“What are those for?” Masha asked. She got no answer, which showed that Granny really was unsettled. “It’s only a thunderstorm.”

“There’s no such thing as only a thunderstorm.”

When she thought about it, Masha agreed. Thunderstorms were too huge and amazing to take for granted. They raced across the flat fields of Ukraine every summer like the invading hordes of Mongol Tatars, shining and rumbling and terrible in strength.

Masha settled down on her bed to read the animal encyclopaedia. Outside the windows, the hollyhocks fluttered petals like bright rags and the willow trees tossed and heaved, flashing the silver undersides of their leaves. On the page the striped orange tiger glowed.
The Siberian tiger is the largest member of the cat family in the world
, Masha read.
Specimens have been found measuring over three and a half metres in length
.

Overhead, the trolleybus wires bounced and quivered. The whole bus swayed lightly. How long am I? wondered Masha. I mean, how tall. One metre five, ten? She was tall for her age, taller than round, fair Gena. But three and a half metres was unimaginably big. Bigger than Uncle Igor. Bigger even than Papa, she thought, with a sudden memory of sitting high, high up on her father’s shoulders, looking down haughtily on her kingdom. A tiger that took up the whole world.

She tried to read further but it was suddenly too dark. It was utterly still and close and silent. She fell into a moment of emptiness that stretched on … and on…

Crack!
went the thunder, right overhead. It was the sound of a vast backbone breaking in half; it made Masha feel sick. The trolleybus wires were thrumming and swinging. Where was the lightning? Where the rain?

“Granny…” she said nervously. As she watched, Babka Praskovia was suddenly illuminated, like an X-ray, and for a moment Masha could have sworn she saw the delicate shadows of her grandmother’s bones, and other dim shapes swimming mysteriously in the whiteness. Then it went dark again.

“Granny…” She opened her mouth to say it, but a huge roar came out: it was the thunder; it was the pain of broken bones; it went on for ever. She could see her grandmother shouting at her, but she could hear nothing. Masha shook her head, shouting back, and Granny seized her arm and began pulling her towards the doorway.

Masha pulled the other way. Granny must be mad, taking her outside! She’d be blinded, she’d be deafened, trampled by the huge paws of the storm. They struggled in the open doorway, yelling at each other and hearing nothing, while the world went once more dazzlingly white.

Then Icarus moved. A sudden, violent lurch forward. Granny tumbled off the step outside, and Masha fell inside. And Icarus, antennae suddenly straining onto an invisible humming wire, drove away into the storm.

M
asha found herself squashed into the small space between the gas cylinder and the bookcase. The floor vibrated beneath her knees and all around was the familiar whining hum of a moving trolleybus. Icarus lurched and staggered as he drove along. Branches whipped the sides with violent cracks and scratches, and a deluge of rain rapped sharp knuckles on the roof.

In the sickening seconds of illumination Masha saw leaves and twigs rushing past the windows, and other things too: what looked like shrieking faces and burning flames. In between the deafening bursts of thunder, the trolleybus hummed like a huge, angry swarm of bees. She covered her ears with her hands and wondered whether she was screaming. She could not hear. The trolleybus racketed and bucketed along, taking her somewhere, all alone into the darkness, away from Granny. She kept remembering Granny’s look of utter surprise as she fell into the shaking hollyhocks, and began to cry.

The world jumped horribly from white to black to white to black. A book fell out of the bookcase and hit her on the head, and her tears stopped at once as if a tap had been turned off. What was the point of crying? No one was going to hear her. Not the storm, not Granny, not Icarus. Of course not Icarus; he was a machine, and machines ran on electricity and had drivers. And brakes.

The trolleybus tipped wildly, throwing Masha sprawling across the floor almost to the driver’s cabin. In the lightning’s flash, she could see clearly that it was empty. She crawled towards it, through a storm of books tumbling from the bookcase. The floor was wet where the rain streamed in through the open windows; her knees were cold and they hurt. She reached up for the handle, the door swung inwards and she fell into the cabin.

She’d been in there before, of course, playing at driving the trolleybus to exciting destinations. It made a good spaceship control room too. It was such a cosy little place, with its high leather seat, its rows of buttons and lights. Now lots of the lights were on, twinkling and flashing madly red and green and yellow. Rain flooded down the windscreen, and as she watched from behind the driver’s seat, leaves flattened themselves against the glass and then vanished with a hideous screech.

The humming was louder in here. Brakes! thought Masha. Brakes, brakes, brakes. Where were they? She tried to remember her father driving their old battered car, years ago.

The bouncy seat squeaked as if a fat driver were shifting his bottom in it. Masha thought she saw a boneless white hand glue itself to the outside of the windscreen. It stuck there like a bloodless, rubbery strand of seaweed, long enough for her to see the curling, knife-sharp painted nails. Then it slowly peeled off and disappeared.

Masha screamed. She heard herself this time. Another lurch threw her forward, and lightning illuminated a row of pedals on the floor.

“Brakes, brakes, oh,
please
let them be brakes,” Masha sobbed. She grabbed the nearest pedal and pushed it downwards as hard as she could.

Icarus groaned and shuddered. The lightning vanished, and as the humming died away, the trolleybus faltered unhappily – and ground to a halt.

It was so quiet! The rain had stopped; the trolleybus had stopped; the thunder and lightning had ceased as though they had never been. Outside something went
drip … drip … drip
extremely slowly, as if there were all the time in the world for a drop of water to loiter down to the ground.

Masha stayed crouched beneath the driver’s seat like a tiny little mouse. She still leant all her weight on the pedal that had stopped the madness. She did not want to let go. She did not want to move. She couldn’t stop seeing the hand stuck to the windscreen. Now that she had halted the trolleybus’s headlong rush she wanted to carry on, further and further away from whatever lurked outside.

It was thinking of Granny that made her move. Granny tumbling into the hollyhocks, not knowing where Masha and her home had driven off to. Maybe she’d hurt herself when she fell. She was very old, after all; no one knew exactly how old. She wasn’t even Masha’s grandmother really but her great-grandmother. Maybe she was still lying there on the cold ground.

Slowly, carefully, Masha let go of the pedal. It eased itself upwards with an indulgent sigh, but Icarus remained motionless. The lights on the dashboard were slowly fading. It was not quite dark outside, and the view through the rain-blurred windscreen was reassuringly ordinary: bushes, grass, a scrap of fence. Masha tried to feel brave. She didn’t quite succeed, but she did manage to open the cabin door and pass through to the main door, still jammed open. She pulled aside the curtain and jumped out quickly before she had time to get too scared.

The light was gentle and dim. She was standing in a meadow bordered by tall willow trees, through which water glimmered. To one side there seemed to be allotment fences made of the usual leafy willow wands interwoven with all sorts of odds and ends. She didn’t know exactly where she was but it looked familiar, as if it was a corner she’d often walked through but never really noticed before. When she looked up, the sky was already clearing to a blue so muted it was almost colourless. She thought she could even pick out a couple of the first evening stars. And Icarus was there behind her, fat and cream and red striped and looking as innocent and comforting as if the terrifying ride had never happened.

No rubbery hands or screaming white faces. Nothing scary. Only she really couldn’t work out where she was.

As she tried to decide which way to go, a big lump of tears and fright jammed itself in her chest. It was like a jigsaw put together out of order; she recognized all the pieces but she couldn’t quite make sense of them. Trying to swallow the lump down to somewhere more comfortable, she sternly counted off in her mind: river, allotments, meadow, trees. If the river is there and the allotments are here, that means I should go … which way? If the trees are between me and the river, that means…

She was distracted by a noise. A curious slapping sound, like someone beating a carpet perhaps, or jumping up and down doing aerobics. People often came to the riverbank to do their exercises. Young men practising kung fu kicks; fat ladies trying to touch their toes. She knew some of the more regular exercisers quite well. People brought their carpets here too, so they could wash and beat the dust from them. The noise she could hear wasn’t frightening; it was as eerily familiar as the woods and the water. She went to find out what it was.

Like everything else that evening, she recognized it immediately. It was just in the wrong place. It was a Cossack, and he was dancing.

O
f course Masha knew who he was. Didn’t she have books full of pictures of Cossacks? Hadn’t her mother taken her to the theatre to see thunderous Cossack choirs? Couldn’t she Cossack dance herself?

That was where Cossacks belonged. On stage, in picture books, in dancing classes. Somewhere way back in the past, when there were feasts and heroes and battles with Tatars and Turks.

This Cossack stamped on the ground with heavy feet in worn boots. He had a moustache as fat as two droopy sausages stuck to his face, and the long topknot sprouting from the crown of his bald head spun round like the blades of a helicopter, so fast was he whirling and twirling, crouching and leaping. His wide scarlet trousers ballooned out with each rotation; his white shirt was a moony blur in the dimness.

Such dancing! It was fast; it was furious; it was glorious. Masha could almost hear the squealing fiddles, the raging drums, the handclaps pattering faster and faster as round, round, round he went, filling the night with speed and heat and sparks. Still faster, still higher—

And then it all fell apart. Somehow he missed a step, something went wrong, the fiddles broke their strings, the drum exploded, the Cossack stumbled and fell over as the end of his topknot swung round and hit him smack in the eye.

“Damn and blast you! May your eyeballs drop out and be eaten by cockroaches, you stinking pile of horse manure!” roared the Cossack in a voice as huge as half an orchestra.

Masha trembled. Was he shouting at her? But the Cossack did not look in her direction. He sat with his elbows on his knees, wiping the sweat from his face with a hand like a beef steak.

“Cursed ground,” he grumbled. “Can’t you let an honest Cossack dance in peace?” He shook his fist in the air, and that was when he caught sight of Masha.

“What monstrous object are you?” he rumbled in his enormous voice, heaving himself to his feet and advancing upon her threateningly.

“I’m not a monstrous object; I’m a person,” she quavered. His clenched fists looked as large as her head. “I liked your dancing. Why did you stop?” she added in a desperate attempt to make him more friendly.