An outline and the first 3 chapters of NICOLAI'S PLANET, my Young Adult science-fiction adventure novel, are below.
Thank you for visiting.
Best wishes,
Andrew Hawcroft
NICOLAI’S
PLANET
by Andrew Hawcroft
Outline
At a secret location, deep within the freezing
forestland of Eastern Siberia, Valentin and Mischa Valenko, two of Russia’s
most brilliant scientists in the field of electro-magnetism, prepare to
demonstrate their life’s work before a gathering of the Russian government’s
most high-ranking officials.
The Q-Drive will entirely replace the internal
combustion engine, that clunky, filthy relic of the twentieth century. Today, deep inside their highly-classified research
centre, this loving couple will attempt to finally change the face of the
planet for the better, with the pressing of a single button.
Instead, a jealous colleague, ousted from their team
weeks earlier, decides to sabotage the demonstration. It all goes to hell in a hand basket, as the prototype
Q-Drive detonates, and the attending dignitaries, along with Valentin and his
pregnant wife, barely escape with their lives.
The base, flooded with electro-magnetic radiation, is closed forever.
Barely escaping jail, Valentin and Mischa are
blacklisted by the Russian scientific community, and banned for applying for a
patent for the Q-Drive under threat of imprisonment. With no choice, the Valenkos decide to head
to the West, settling in London, England
Thirteen years later, and life is very different. Living in a leaky house in a low-end suburban
neighbourhood, Valentin works in a huge
toy store, selling over-priced toys to spoilt brats, and Mischa works long
hours in a fruit factory. Their only joy
is each other and their beloved son, Nicolai.
Mischa’s pregnancy was not unaffected by the accident,
it seems. Nicolai Valenko was born only
with only his left eye intact, the other is simply missing. It never developed. To keep staring to a minimum, he wears an
eye-patch to school, where he excels at softball and Art. Remarkably sanguine and at ease with himself
considering his disfigurement, Nicolai has become a popular and cheery young fellow. Despite his parents’ difficult lifestyle,
their love for each other carries the family through.
And then one day, his mother collapses.
The doctor’s face is grim when he announces it is a
form of accumulative radiation poisoning, her body finally succumbing to the
effect of millions of electro-magnetic particles embedded in it after the
explosion. She has only weeks to live.
What makes this tragedy somehow worse is that there is
a cure. Colobium, the infamous ‘anti-metal’,
and the most precious substance on earth. (Only seven pounds of it exist on the
planet, shared amongst various governments’ scientific bodies and held under
the tightest security.) Its strange
polarity would absorb and eliminate the radiation in her body.
But a disgraced former Russian scientist in exile
holds no sway, and no amount of pleading to various governing bodies will see
him provided with the barest milligrams he needs to save the life of his
beloved wife.
With no hope, the devastated family try to make their
peace with Mischa’s forthcoming demise.
Except....
Except that one day, a friend in the Russian
equivalent of NASA, informs Valentin that a small planetoid is drifting close
to the Earth within the coming month.
This planetoid, jokingly labelled Eden’s Folly, has aroused great
interest in the scientific community due to the strange and fascinating
information their sensors and telescopes are providing them with. There is evidence of vegetation, bodies of unidentified
liquid, of mountain ranges containing unrecognised chemical elements, strange
weather patterns, strange thermal sources and unidentified radiations....and in
one localised area, large traces of Colobium.
Valentin, a man who loves his wife more than his own
life, embarks on an insane plan. He will somehow cobble together the components
and materials to build a spaceship, complete with a Q-Drive, in their front
room, blast off to Eden’s Folly, collect samples of Colobium, return to Earth,
and treat his wife before the radiation poisoning takes her from him.
Maxing out every credit card, selling every
conceivable item that anyone would buy, Valentin and Nicolai quit their jobs
and school, and embark on building the Ship in their front room, (cutting
through the ceiling for additional height) trying to avoid the sneering,
peering gaze of their troublesome neighbour, cobbling together a spacesuit out
of a customised wetsuit and aqualung.
With a desperately short time window, all obstacles
are overcome, and Valentin races home to blast off at the optimal launch-time.....only
to be arrested seconds from reaching his home.
With his disabled son being only too aware that the
Ship is about to be discovered, and that the launch window is fast
disappearing, he does the only thing a loyal and courageous son would do. Nicolai shrugs on the far-too-big
‘spacesuit’, closes the hatch, and blasts off.....
Seeing the Ship smash through the roof of their
suburban home, Valentin knows immediately (and to his horror) what has
happened. The Police agree to let him
speak to his son through the radio transmitter that Nicolai was supposed to man
back on Earth, doing his best to keep his son alive, and guide him to the best
possible landing site on Eden’s Folly.
With wretched technical problems even on its brief
fiery flight, Nicolai manages to somehow crash-land on Eden’s Folly, but far
from the mountain range where the Colobium lies. To get there, he must trek on foot, over nine
miles of the surface of this strange and terrifying place.
For Eden’s Folly is a deadly treasure-trove of dangers
that Nicolai’s child-mind gives names to; Starfish, Thornballs, Blue Mist and
Porridge Pits to name but a few.
Young Nicolai Valenko, twelve years-old, running out
of air in a hastily-built, homemade spacesuit, is weary, frightened, and a long
way from his damaged spaceship.
Still, he continues to survive terror after terror, to
finally arrive at the dark, hulking, metallic blue mountain range, only to make
the most shocking discovery of all....
Another Ship.
NICOLAI’S PLANET
by
Andrew Hawcroft
For Lily and Len
Chapter One
The Beginning Of The End Part I
Here in the 21st-century, the most valuable
commodity on Planet Earth is not oil or diamonds. It is not gold, water, or some rapidly
disappearing mineral, or species of animal or plant-life.
The most valuable thing at this time in the history of
the human race is silence.
Silence has become one of the hardest things to find
in the daily life of most human beings, and it is fast becoming one of the most
prized, for it is only in silence, when all distractions and all busy, hurried
Doing Of Things is eliminated, that people can finally feel who they really
are.
The planet builds more means of creating noise and
stimulation every day, and these things are embraced, for many people on the
planet...although they don’t realise it.... are uncomfortable with who they
really are inside, and do not wish to be reminded. So they drink ,and watch endless TV, and use
phones and computers to stay busy Doing Things.
Any Thing, really.
But if you don’t know who you are, it is difficult to
feel at peace with yourself. To feel safe and secure in yourself. People suffer from this in their millions on
a daily basis, and a lot of problems come from this. Anger, fear, buying things you don’t need,
eating too much, drinking too much...
Not understanding who you are can be a quiet but terrible burden, and
you can only distract yourself for so many hours a day. It takes a lot of work to hide from who you
are. As such, silence is becoming valued
by more and more people every day, and yet becoming harder to find.
But there are places on this planet, no matter how
rapidly humans keep building, that remain blissfully silent. Some of these
places are inhabited by people, and they are grateful. Probably they are very happy people, for they
grown up in that environment, they have had years to feel who they really are
in that silence, and have ultimately found peace inside.
Some of these places remain uninhabited by people.
Often for good reason.
In the most remote corner of Eastern Siberia in Russia,
there lies the wild forest region of Krasnoyarsk Kray. It is huge, barren and well-endowed with ways
to die. Nobody lives within three hundred miles. Life in any animal form above insect-life is
rare, and the temperatures frequently dip below minus fifty degrees Centigrade during
the winter.
It is composed of snow upon ice upon granite, black
earth and wood. During winter, (as it is now) there is no green at all, only
nearly-black trees whose spindly branches claw quite horribly in despair at the
grey-white sky, like the hands of witches caught up in violent regret.
There are roads (of a rough, uncared for kind) which
were built a long time ago by people who no longer live here for reasons we
won’t think about. Some wolves survive
here (somehow), as the lack of human population means they have not been hunted
for decades. They patrol the dark and
filthy undergrowth of Krasnoyarsk Kray like white-eyed soldiers, hunting, ever
hunting. To rest is to die of starvation
here.
Upon one of these rare roads, a painfully-thin wolf
now trudged along, sniffing the ancient gravel surface. Its belly was sunken in, its ribs
showing. The wolf had not eaten in days,
and it whimpered a little.
Suddenly, glories of glories, it spied an equally-hungry
and wet-furred rabbit, poking out of its burrow about a hundred yards ahead.
Immediately the wolf lowered itself against the road,
almost sliding forward on its belly, trying to get to the long, sodden and
wind-broken weeds nearby for cover.
The rabbit stuck its little nose in the air and
sniffed. No, all seemed safe to it. (The
wolf was downwind.) Primitive instinct
kept it cautious though. It crept
forward only a few inches, reluctant to leave the safety of the burrow.
The wolf reached the weeds unseen, now only eighty yards
away. It crept forward, belly scraping that blackened earth.
The rabbit took another hoppity-jump forward, still
sniffing the air.
The rabbit and its burrow were now faintly reflected
in the dirty-white eyes of the wolf. Its
belly rumbled. It licked its lips to keep
them moist in this grim climate, and risked another yard, creeping forward,
trying not to disturb the weeds too much.
Then the wolf stopped.
Its ears pricked up of its own accord.
It turned its head to the right.
Rumbling.
He turned back to the rabbit but it was gone, back in
its burrow.
The wolf turned around and faced in the direction of
the rumbling, lowering itself even more into those snow-choked weeds.
Black limousines, long, with bulletproof glass for
windows and snow-chains on their tyres, rumbled along the barely-passable
road. Ten of them in all, looking
entirely out of place in this awful and untamed location.
They passed by, and the rumbling of their engines
disappeared slowly as they were lost from sight upon entering a deep valley amongst
the highest mountains that bordered the edge of Krasnoyarsk Kray.
The wolf snarled at them and then loped off in search of
food, for there was surely none to be found around here now.
The limousines snaked through the valley road. The wind occasionally rocked them from side
to side and the unseen drivers, all-too aware of the importance of their
passengers, fought hard to keep the cars in the centre of this broken trail
track that had been made when the horse and cart was king of transportation.
If we were to rush ahead of them (for they had a good
distance to go yet) we would follow the road further and further through this
particular mountain range. We would rush
past frozen lakes, alongside blood-chilling drop-offs that would send a
careless driver plummeting hundreds of feet to his death. We would push on and on to places where even
wolves and rabbits had given up trying to survive. We would drive on further
still, turning back into the forest onto a track could barely accommodate even
that horse and cart of old. We would
drive deeper and deeper into this part of the forest until the trees above got
so dense, the sunlight itself (such as it was) would be defeated, and a false
night would fall over us. We would push on through a land that normally wore a
vast garment of utter, utter silence, the kind of which 21st Century
man could not tolerate for long.
And eventually, if we went on long enough, we would
come to The Building.
The Building was all wrong. It should not be here in this lost and
primeval place. It was all too glaringly Man-Made. It was long and low and made of concrete and
steel, with no windows and no lights to be seen.
As the first limousines eventually arrived, they were
guided to a place along the front of the building where they came to a stop.
Suddenly, a small concrete door clunked and swung open
in the surface as if by magic, and four soldiers in heavily-padded,
grey-and-black camouflage uniforms, with faces seemingly also made of snow-covered
granite, appeared and approached the first limousine. They cuddled snub-nosed machine-guns to
their sides as they asked for, and were presented with, identification.
Apparently satisfied, one of the soldiers said
something into a walkie-talkie, and soon after, an eight-foot section of the
featureless front of this strange building lifted smoothly upwards, revealing a
vehicle access ramp that was edged with blue lights. Beyond its base was an underground car park,
and here at last, was proper light, if only of the hard, fluorescent kind.
The limousines eased down the ramp until all were
gone. The eight-foot section slid back
into place, not even revealing cracks to indicate it had ever been.
The four soldiers re-entered the still-open door and
were gone from sight. Then this door
also swung back into place. The cracks
along its sides slowly disappeared with a faint hiss, and absolute silence
returned to this place of shadow and ice.
This building was the Russian Government’s Primary Siberian
Scientific Research Facility.
Inside, a very special man (though he would not call
himself so) stood in The Testing Chamber, thinking of the future with all
manner of emotions fighting for supremacy.
The Testing Chamber was an octagonal room, about forty
feet high and one hundred feet in diameter.
It was very brightly lit, and along one side was a Viewing Window made
of special glass so tough that a tank shell could not penetrate it.
In the centre of this octagonal room stood Valentin Valenko. For the moment though, what’s more important
is what stood before him.
The Q-Drive was a white cylinder about six feet high
and eighteen inches across. It had vents
and accoutrements all over its surface, along with yellow and black warning signs
that could not be overlooked by a star-struck viewer. It stood alone, unencumbered by cables.
Perfect.
Valentin Valenko was thirty-three, with dark brown
hair. He was broom-handle thin but had the translucent blue eyes of an artist.
He was dressed in a white lab coat that hung loosely on his lanky frame. He
looked at his creation and felt a highly-justified flutter go through his body.
This was it!
He had been paged that the dignitaries had arrived and
were being briefed in the Briefing Room on the floor above. In a short time, they would be led down here
and take their seats in the Observation Room behind the Viewing Window over
there. And then ...
....And then ten years of his life, ten years of blood,
sweat and tears, would finally be acknowledged, and he and his wife Mischa
would enter the history books as two people who changed the face of the planet
with their efforts.
Change it for the better,
Valentin reminded himself. Oppenheimer,
the man who had worked so hard all those years ago in America on the so-called
Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb, had believed much the same;
that he was doing right, that his efforts were ultimately for a just cause.
The atomic bomb had changed the world. Oppenheimer had gone into the History books,
though not in any way that Valentin wished to emulate. He shivered slightly, and wished for the
millionth time that he could stop thinking of Oppenheimer. Then, before he
could stop himself, the memory of that infamous crackly recording of
Oppenheimer, quoting Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, floated treacherously back
into his mind.
“Now I have become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.”
The flutter went through him again.
No, thought Valentin, carefully, I’m not that. I am not such a man.
The Q-Drive was not a weapon! It was to replace the
internal combustion engine. It would revolutionise transport, and end Mankind’s
dependency on the fossil fuels that, even now were steadily running out, while
polluting the planet on a gargantuan scale.
The Q-Drive would take care of all of that. It was a creation as important as the light bulb......antibiotics....the
wheel!
Clean, quiet, perfect in every way, this humble white
cylinder contained no moving parts, required no dirty fuel to power it. It took the concept of electro-magnetism,
and developed it to a degree inconceivable to most Western scientists.
It would change the face of the planet. Car travel, air travel, train
travel....space travel. The fuel-powered engine was
about to become a relic, a thing of the past to be sneered at by future
generations who would wonder, ‘how could Mankind have put up with such a noisy,
messy inefficient contraption for so long?
The Q-Drive was the key to a cleaner, faster, quieter, more efficient Planet
Earth.
And Space, of course. Now there was the big question.
The total power of the Q-Drive was almost impossible
to appreciate. The speed it would give
to spacecraft would be like nothing conceivable from the rocket engines of
old. The only problem would be how to
stop astronauts’ bodies being pulverised by the velocity this miracle of
electro-magnetism would provide them.
The big question hung in the air.
The impossible question that was no longer crazy to consider, even if it
was whispered in corridors by awe-struck astrophysicists.
Could the Q-Drive reach the speed of light?
Valentin felt dizzy a moment. Too much. Too much for now. Steady,Valentin. One step at a time.
A shadow by his side, and he jumped.
Mischa Valenko put her arm around her husband’s waist,
and he laughed as they pressed their cheeks against each other.
Mischa herself was a miracle, at least as far as
Valentin and his entirely jealous male colleagues were considered. In Russia, Mischa means ‘Gift of God’. Nobody in this building would have contested
that.
Standing six-foot three, this stunning woman with
shoulder length raven-black hair, eyes of creamy jade and prominent cheekbones,
had been proposed to by eight love-struck men in her life (and it’s worth
noting she was currently only thirty-three.)
Seven of these men had been very rich, very powerful, some very
famous. None had been prepared for her
rejection, and though some had gone on to marry others, none had ever really
gotten over her. Nobody could really get
over Mischa. Every other woman was just sort of.....second place.
Born to a poor family in Eastern Ukraine, she had
shown an aptitude for science from as early as four. Her notable athletic side had also lead to a
high profile career in gymnastics, representing Russian in two separate
Olympics, taking home the silver medal the first time, the glorious gold the
second time. This success and fame,
coupled with her stunning beauty, had
attracted the attention of politicians, actors,
musicians, academics, soldiers... She
had gently rebuffed them all. Retiring
from gymnastics after winning the gold, she returned to complete her scientific
studies in the University of Moscow, where her papers on the untapped potential
of electro-magnetism had attracted the attention of another student on her
course, the shy-to-the-point-of-being-silent, Valentin Valenko. The two of them were thrown together on a
number of projects, and quickly developed a complete ease with one another,
their minds and hearts running along the same lines when it came to science,
politics, the environment... By the end
of their first week of officially being lab partners, they were finishing each
other’s sentences, and it quickly went unspoken that they would have lunch with
each other every day from there on.
Months passed, and one day, one of the other students
in the class noticed that Valentin was holding Mischa’s hand as they sat alone
at a table nearby. He was whispering
something to her while gazing directly into those depthless green eyes. She had a half-smile on her lips. She gave the slightest of nods and that was
that.
A month later they were married.
The news of this union caused tears, rage and
heartbreak to an awful lot of men in Russia, and around the world. Snatched photos of the couple on honeymoon (a
long weekend visiting a Russian radio-telescope array; they were students after
all) raised a thousand eyebrows, followed by roughly the same thought in a
thousand jealous minds;
She chose him?!
In their final year, the couple presented a very large
file of notes to the Head of the Science Department with the same curious smile
on their faces. This man went home and
began reading. Three hours later he was
still reading but with his mouth half-open.
If what those two had come up with could actually work...!
It would change everything. Just....everything!
Suddenly this unassuming couple found themselves in
meetings with some of the most high-powered men in Russian Defence, POCKOCMOC ROSKOMOS (the Russian Federal Space Agency) and finally, the Russian
President himself. These underfunded
students suddenly found themselves very
well funded indeed, with a ten year research grant to perfect something that
would...well....one step at a time.
And it would belong to Russia.
“Nervous?” said Mischa. (In Russian, naturally.)
“I think the situation calls for it,” smiled
Valentin. “It’s rather an important day
wouldn’t you say?”
“They’re on the way down, I just got the word.”
Valentin turned to face his wife properly.
“Whatever happens with the Q-Drive, whatever future it
is given by our Government, by the world itself, we always had the best intentions, didn’t we?”
Mischa frowned.
“Why do you say that?”
Valentin shrugged.
“It’s so big, what it could do to the world. That kind of change.... I feel like an infant playing with a cannon
sometimes.”
Mischa took her husband firmly by the shoulders. “But it’s not
like that. It’s not. How could we not
build it? That’s what you need to
remember. What if we had kept it to
ourselves? The world would chug along,
polluting itself, before coming to a grinding halt when the last barrel of oil
had been sucked from the last deposit.
This isn’t about fame or glory or money for us. It’s about making a positive difference in
the world. That’s what we’re doing it for. And that’s what we’ll achieve.”
Valentin smiled and kissed her full on the lips. “Thank you.”
A moment passed.
“A shame we had to lose Yuri before reaching this
stage,” he said
“Yuri was a self-serving egotist. His behaviour left us no choice. He got himself thrown off our team by his own
actions.”
Valentin looked away.
It took no effort at all to record the moment Valentin had told that man
to pack his things and leave the Research Facility. The man the Valenkos had hired as an
assistant had been burning with ambition from the start, and quickly had begun
to believe (or at least to imply to other staff at the Facility) that he had actually
helped design the Q-Drive itself, rather than merely assist in its physical
construction. That hawk-faced man with
crew-cut hair so blonde it was almost white, the contrasting reddened face,
veins in his neck standing out as he screamed in outrage at Valentin.... No, Yuri had been all wrong for this
project, no matter how good his credentials had been. He had had to go.
“I suppose so. Threatening
to contact the West about it. He was lucky not to get charged with treason.”
“Firing him from the team was better than he deserved.
A stretch in prison would only improve
that man. I hope he gets sent to teach
Chemistry in an American high school.”
“No man deserves that fate,” said Valentin.
Mischa frowned again. “Don’t you dare waste a second
of sympathy over Yuri Filatov. He was
obsessed with money. Obsessed with recognition. He thought the Q-Drive could give it to
him. And his technical contribution was
negligible to say the least.”
A moment passed.
Then Valentin said “I hope the world our child enters will be worthy of
him.”
He smiled widely now and looked down to his wife’s
stomach. The bump was not yet visible,
for she was barely one month pregnant.
They had kept the news secret until today was over with.
“Do you wish for a boy or a girl?” said Mischa.
“Whatever it is, it will be perfect. Because it came
from you.”
A tear filling Mischa’s eye?
“It is my
child, yes?” said Valentin, dryly.
Mischa wacked him lightly on the back of his head.
“Careful, you will damage my genius.”
The couple stared at the Q-Drive for a moment
longer. Then Mischa turned her head. Not
the slightest shift in her ethereal face, but she calmly said;
“They’re here.”
Valentin turned and his stomach flipped. Three dozen men and women, all in formal
suits or a military officers’ uniform (highest-ranking
military uniform) were filing into the Observation Room behind the Viewing Window. The highest representatives of the Russian
Government; the deputy prime ministers, the federal prime ministers...
Then the Russian President walked in, surrounded by a
wall of minders.
“Well, I suppose this is as good a day as any to
change the world,” said Valentin.
“I didn’t marry you for your athletic build,” said
Mischa.
Valentin smiled back but now his face was noticeably
paler.
Five minutes later, Valentin and Mischa Valenko were
also in the Observation Room, standing by a microphone and a control panel. To
one side of them sat that stony-faced audience of only the most powerful men
and women in Russia.
Along the wall to his right was the Valenko’s team;
the trusted assistants who had toiled alongside the couple for the last ten
years, doing their bidding, working endless late hours, and each as utterly
dedicated as the Valenkos to changing the Earth for the better through their
efforts. Hands clasped before them, nervously smiling, fidgeting, or just
looking pale, were Andrei Fradkov, Anatoly Leonov, Vadim Barinov and Vladmir
Fursenko. Anatoly (red hair, shaped like a pear) risked a weak smile at
Valentin, who nodded back, and then swallowed hard enough to be heard.
The control panel before him had a keyboard and large
plasma screen monitor above it. Just to
his right was the large Viewing Window, and Valentin spared a final glance at
the white cylindrical object standing in splendid isolation in the centre of
the room, now safely behind that reassuring three inches of armoured glass.
He cleared his throat, was about to speak when Mischa reached
gently out and actually switched on the microphone. An electronic crackle and he began. A breath in, and the speech that had floated
around his mind for ten years finally came out of his mouth.
“Mr President, honoured ladies and gentleman of our
Defence, Transport and Scientific bodies, my wife Mischa and I, along with our
tireless team (a gesture to them) stand before you today with what we hope will
be the answer to at least a large percentage of Mankind’s problems. We present to you the Quasar-Construct Format
Magnotronicasising Propulsion Unit, or Q-Drive for short. It is our replacement for the common internal
combustion engine, the turbo jet engine, the liquid-fuel rocket system....the clean
and safe replacement for all
fossil-fuel based means of propulsion.
Mischa?”
Mischa stepped forward, looking far more at ease than
her perspiring husband, and even wearing a white lab coat, her beauty made the
men at least, lean forward and pay just that little more attention. Not for the
first time, Valentin glowed with pride so brightly he felt could have been seen
from space. Her voice rang clear and firm. God bless her!
“The Q-Drive employs a unique...and obviously
highly-classified design of electro-magnetic propulsion, operating primarily,
though not exclusively, on the ‘black-body’ EM radiation frequency. The
intricate core constructs result in powerful fields being arranged to conflict
with each other in such a way as to create a single reactive point of ionic propulsive
force. Our advanced alternator design
means that for minimum electrical input, we can get a terahertz output to the
power of one hundred. This results in unheard of heights in terms of ratio of energy per photon, calculated, of
course, using the Planck-Einstein equation...”
The Russian president shifted uncomfortably in his
seat.
Keep it simple for God’s sake, thought Valentin. His turn now.
“The test you are about to witness involves a Q-Drive
that is being powered by nothing more than a couple of these.” He nervously pulled an AA battery from his
lab coat pocket. “A standard AA
battery. The kind that children use to power their CD Walkman...or... whatever
gadget is polluting the air with what children are calling music these days.
Ha!”
Dead (and deadly)
silence. He coughed.
“ Thus one of greatest advantages of the Q-Drive is
its minimal energy requirements to do things I am sure you will consider...impressive.
By that, I mean changing the face of the planet through the field of totally
clean, ultra-efficient transport. Nothing less than the total obsolescence of
the fossil fuel-based combustion engine.
And perhaps, the first realistic chance
to explore...and leave....the Solar System via space travel.”
The Russian President turned to look at his advisor.
No words were spoken, but the Valenkos got the distinct impression he was going
to be hard to convert to a believer. Who
could blame him? Valentin had built and
tested the damn thing, and yet his own words felt like childish fancy to him.
Valentin stepped forward.
“Four special assistants, who will wear radiation
shielding uniforms purely as a precautionary measure, will now step into the
Testing Chamber and attach four 40 kilogram weights to its side. “
From a rubber-lined door at the side of the Test
Chamber that hissed open on hydraulics, four figures dressed in all-concealing
bright-red radiation suits entered. All
four assistants (hand-selected military personnel who had signed release
waivers should anything go wrong) wore helmets with visors of darkened glass.
They entered the room carrying circular weights marked
brightly with ’40 KILO’ One man in
addition, carried a collapsible frame
over one shoulder.
This man arranged the steel-tube frame over the
Q-Drive, allowing the men to attach the four weight-plates on four sides of the
Q-Drive.
Valentin’s eyes narrowed. Had one of the men briefly moved
his hand to one of the vents in the side of the Q-Drive? Why? Had he really? He shrugged off his tension. Calm
down. All four men had been
interviewed and chosen by himself, and all had emanated military courage, duty
and precision.
The four men backed off and lined up against the wall
of the room, gloved hands clasped before them, waiting patiently. Yet....was
one of them a little more slow to take his place? A little more uncertain of where to
stand? No. Paranoia.
Breathe, man!
Valentin turned to the assembled throng.
“A total weight of 160 kilos has been attached, one hundredth
of what this small prototype could carry, but sufficient enough for our
demonstration. And now, for the
magic...!”
The joke, if that’s what it was, died in the air. Valentin moved to the control panel and
pressed some buttons. His hand rested on a joystick control on the right hand
side.
“And away....we go.”
In the centre of the Test Chamber, the Q-Drive rose
easily and silently ten feet into the air as though it weighed a feather.
The assembled group shifted in their seats and leaned
further forward.
“And let us go on a trip around the room,” said
Valentin.
Suddenly the Q-Drive moved easily around the Test
Chamber in a wide circle.
Mischa smiled.
Valentin allowed himself a slight smile too. “A shame our Test Chamber is not higher or we
could really demonstrate what heights it could reach...literally. I’m sure the follow-up demonstration...”
At that moment, a slight movement to his right caught
his eye. As he spoke he looked to see
that one of the radiation-suited assistants was turning to look at him instead
of following the path of the Q-Drive like the others.
Something truly animalistic went off inside Valentin,
and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
A strange trick of the light from the fluorescent
lights in the ceiling, hitting that man’s visor at just the right angle,
allowed Valentin to see a trace of the man’s face behind it. Wait...........yes! There was no mistaking, even through that
darkened visor, the hawk-faced features of a recently-fired man of
over-ambitious nature.
“Valentin?”
Mischa whispered urgently.
With something like dread, Valentin watched Yuri Filatov
raise (almost imperceptibly) a small object in his gloved hand. A remote control! A remote control with a
single red button.
Terror flooded Valentin’s system like a rushing river
coming off an ice-bound mountain.
“Ladies and gentlemen! I fear we may have...”
BANG!
One of the vented areas of the Q-Drive blew off in a
cloud of smoke, and suddenly the Q-Drive went mad, zipping awkwardly about the
room...before smashing, at three times blinking speed, into the toughened
glass, creating a nine-foot crack.
Red strobe lights began to flash, and the mother of
all sirens went off.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please stay calm! I will disarm
the system if....”
“Valentin!” Mischa’s voice, hissed over her husband’s
words. “Valentin, look!”
Valentin turned to see his wife pointing at the
computer readout on the plasma screen. On it, there flashed Russian words that
would be etched across Valentin’s mind and soul for the rest of his life.
ELECTRO-MAGNETIC
FIELD REACHING CRITICAL LEVEL.
DETONATION IMMINENT.
“Please clear
the room! Please clear the room!”cried Valentin.
The assembled audience were leaping to their feet a
second later. The President was hurried out first, and then frankly, it was
every man or woman for themselves. They fought and jostled to get through the
too-narrow entrance door.
Valentin turned to see the horrified face of his
wife. He noticed a second later that
only three of the assistants had left the Test Chamber. One of them...that one... stood looking openly at him. The gloved hands moved up and pulled off the
helmet.
Yes, the perspiring face of Yuri Filatov stared back
at him with the bitterest of smiles. He
walked over to wear the Q-Drive stood and embraced it like a father greeting a
long-lost son.
“VALENTIN! WE
HAVE TO RUN!” screamed Mischa.
Valentin snapped out of his shell-shocked reverie and
grabbed his wife’s hand, pulling her toward the door to the Observation Room as
the last of the assembled dignitaries left.
As he took his first step, Valentin Valenko felt,
rather than heard, the enormous energies inside the Q-Drive reach un-restrainable
levels...
A flash of light and the shattering of safety
glass. For a second Valentin thought he
saw the skeleton of Mischa (whom he had pushed ahead of him) with perfect
clarity through her skin, as well as the bones of his own hand that pushed her.
Then he was punched in the back of the head by the
fist of an angry god, perhaps irked at mortals playing with the laws of his
domain. Valentin tipped forward and fell
onto a carpet of shimmering fragments and all went black....
Seven miles away, the same wolf as before suddenly
dropped the body of the rabbit it had finally caught and looked to its
left.
Above one of the mountains, a rising tower of black
smoke began to invade the pale featureless sky.
However this sight did nothing to feed his aching belly, and so he
picked up his bloody prize and ambled off somewhere to find a safer place to
eat it...
Chapter Two
Welcome to the West
FOURTEEN HARD AND DIFFICULT YEARS LATER
“Mummy? I don’t liiiike
him. MUMMY!?”
Valentin gripped the edge of the counter with fingers
that turned white at the knuckles. He must not lose his temper. He must not lose his job! Not again!
The mother of the offended ten year-old angel called Lionel,
tore herself away from her mobile phone conversation with someone called
Jackie, and looked with a white-lipped face towards the man who had caused a
ripple in the pond of her morning.
“What’s wrong now!?”
she hissed at Valentin, as though it were his fourth blunder of the encounter.
Valentin swallowed and looked down at the plastic case
bearing the title BOMB DISPOSAL HERO 3.
“This computer game is meant for children of fifteen years or older.”
“Lionel is fifteen!” snapped the mother. There was enough of a lilt to her voice to
suggest this was a lie. Then there was
the general pint-sized nature of the kid himself.
“I’m afraid I will need to see some ID.”
“You saying I’m a liar?”
“No madam, but I do need to see some ID for the child.”
“So you are
saying I’m a liar!” She put the phone to
her mouth. “You won’t believe this Jackie!
I’m at Toys 4 All and this
dude behind the desk is calling me a liar to my face. To my face!”
Lionel started crying in long, low-pitched notes, and
snatching at the hem of his mother’s neon green T-Shirt.
“SED A CUD HAVIIIIIITTTTTT! AHAAA-HAAAAAA! AHAAAA-HAAAAA! AHAAA-HAAAA....”
Lionel then screamed....not cried...screamed into his mother’s skinny jeans
that she was ten years too old to be wearing, and beat a ten year-old fist
weakly against her hips.
“For Christ’ sake
Lionel, stop that! Hold on Jackie, as if
I don’t have enough to deal with. I’ll
call you back....Yeah....Yeah he is....Ha!
Alright...talk soon!”
The mother snapped the mobile phone shut in a way that
felt like she had punched one fist into another and was ready for a street fight. She leaned over the glass counter and the
muscles of her neck strained into sight.
The permed curls on her head trembled with anger.
“Now you look here....Valerie! (She had just glanced
at his name tag that said “HI, MY NAME IS VALERIE AND I’M HAPPY TO HELP.) You’re going to goddamn take my word that my
boy is fifteen and if you don’t...so help me....I’m going to cause you so much
grief, pal, you’ll wish you hadn’t been born.
Now give....me.....that.....god...damn...GAME!”
Valentin’s lip curled.
He leaned forward and perhaps the glass of the counter squeaked under
his grip.
“No.”
The mother met his gaze for three seconds, then she
snatched her now-snuffling and whimpering Lionel away with a violent jerk that
started him screaming afresh.
“Right.
RIGHT! Where’s the manager’s
office? Somebody! ANYBODY!? Where’s the
manager’s office? I’m going to be back, Valerie!
Oh yeah! You’re going to hear from me again. You! (She had locked onto another yellow
T-shirted Toys 4 All employee) Where’s the Manager’s Office? And don’t mess
me about. Christ!”
The employee led her mercifully away, taking her
steady stream of shuddering, vocal bile, trying to calm her and failing,
judging by the continuing colourful metaphors that drifted back . Annoyed parents turned to look. One mother put her hands over her daughters
ears.
Valentin let out a long breath and lowered his head.
It’s this or
Welfare, he
reminded himself. It’s this or Welfare.
He lifted his head and looked around him and wondered
for the millionth time how life had really come to this.
Toys 4 All was a cavernous, entirely
un-heated warehouse-scale toy store, with shelves reaching twenty feet off the
ground, the tops reachable by only ‘fun’ coloured ladders. The actual floor needed sweeping quite
badly, with litter comprising of dropped chocolate bar wrappers, the odd empty
Coke can, even the odd cigarette butt visible in most of the aisles. The company was apparently not doing well in
the current economy, and some recently-hired part-time staff had been
dramatically let go after only a month’s employment due to cutbacks. Valentin decided he would sweep the aisles
himself after his shift. Even in this
plastic and beeping Hades, he would take some pride in his workplace.
The other remaining staff were all twenty-three or
below. He was the undisputed ‘old-guy’,
and with his reasonable English nevertheless carrying a heavy Russian accent,
he might as well have erected a concrete wall between him and the others. They didn’t talk to him other than an
uncomfortable ‘Hi’ in the morning. In
the staff room, they stridently read gossip magazines or tabloid newspapers
when sharing the same break period as him, rather than talk. The girls in particular seemed to read
nothing that didn’t involve fashion or publications that told about the
marriage problems of just-married ‘celebrities’ he had never heard of. After the first month, he stopped trying to
break the ice and spent his whole half-hour lunch reading ageing scientific
manuals that had floated around the country for a couple of decades before
arriving at his local library.
Valentin had more grey in his hair now, and had lines
around his eyes that were due to more than the mere passing of fourteen years
since the catastrophe in Siberia.
Even now, Valentin closed his eyes, and images of that
period in his life came back unbidden.
That he and his wife should survive the detonation of
the Q-Drive, that they should even be alive was certainly something to be
grateful for. The safety glass had taken
the brunt of the actual explosion before shattering. The removal of ninety-two tiny fragments of
toughened glass from his back , legs and neck seemed a small price to pay for
survival. Mischa had been partly shielded by his own body, and thus, apart from
severe concussion and blood loss, which had seen them spend thirteen days in
hospital, they were lucky to be alive.
But that was as happy as the ending of their careers
got.
Even as Valentin had lain groaning in a hospital bed,
the curtains around him had parted and grim-faced men in suits had entered and
without sitting, basically told him his life in Russia was over. With Yuri’s body, along with the remote
control he had used to detonate the explosive device he had slipped through the
vents of the Q-Drive apparently blown to individual molecules, there was no
evidence to back up Valentin’s claims of sabotage.
The Russian President had nearly been killed, along
with a room comprised of some of the most important people in Russia. He was lucky not to be charged with
attempted manslaughter. The damage done
to the Research Facility ran into billions of rubles. A charge of ‘gross negligence’ had been
brought against him. His funding would obviously be cut. He was legally forbidden to continue any
work on the Q-Drive, either government-funded or in the private sector. He was not allowed to apply for a patent for
the Q-Drive design. Any attempt to build
another prototype in Russia would see him face a mandatory twenty-year jail
sentence. The sharing of any work
created at the Facility with Western authorities, would also result in his
instant arrest if within the borders of Russia.
He would be blacklisted from applying for employment
at any of Russia’s major scientific development companies. He would be arrested should he attempt to
publish any of his work, or discuss his ideas or what had occurred at the
Facility with the media.
And with that, the men had left.
Even as Valentin had lain there, staring at the cracked
ceiling tiles of the hospital ward, the thought of what all this meant hadn’t
taken long to arrive. The men had known
it too. They just hadn’t said it.
Valentin was to leave Russian and never return.
England had never actually featured on Valentin’s list
of possible countries (of exile, for that’s what it amounted to). He had tried to get basic, ground-floor jobs
with most of the significant scientific research, development or manufacturing
companies of Prague, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Japan, China and Australia. Each time his application was greeted with
enthusiasm...until a single phone call was made and somebody wearing a suit in
Russia on the other end of the telephone line crushed his chances of employment
like a wrestler would crush a paper cup during a bad mood.
A very distant cousin of Mischa’s had married an
Englishman and moved to Deptford, London.
When things eventually grew desperate enough
financially, the Valenkos, with a child due in four months, had thrown
themselves on the mercy of this cousin, travelled to London with a pitifully
small collection of luggage, and moved
into her cousin’s cramped room above the garage. From here, they had job hunted for weeks, no
longer with illusions of getting anything worthy of their intellect.
It seems that outside of the scientific community,
advanced degrees in electro-magnetism do not carry a lot of weight with most
employees. They were essentially
starting from scratch, and fighting with eighteen year-olds for the
lowest-level paid jobs.
Valentin had gotten part-time work as a cleaner at the
massive Toys 4 All store nearby, and
four months later, when a staff vacancy had come up (for the turnover of staff
was impressive) he had been granted an interview with somebody who looked like
they still lived with their parents, where he had been forced to take the most
childish and degrading tests to see if he ‘had what it took to be part of the Toys 4 All team.’
And now here he was.
At least he was relatively
warm here. He grimaced as he thought of
his beautiful wife toiling for eight hours a day in the fruit factory where she
worked boxing apples, pears, oranges and bananas with mind-numbing
repetitiveness. He had visited her there
only once and couldn’t bring himself to do it again. Once had been enough to fix in his memory the
image of grey walls, rusting pipes, and seemingly endless rows of tables manned
by faceless women in the same blue aprons and hair nets. They were dull of eye
and saggy of skin. They gossiped
relentlessly of the mindless and superficial.
These were the ranks among which his astonishing wife toiled, head down,
jaw clenched. The screechy, giggly,
fist-eatingly stupid chatter she was forced to listen to all day was backed by
the inane prattle of the moronic DJ’s on the local radio station, broadcast on
broken speakers to keep the staff ‘entertained’. In that place, Mischa did no better socially
than her husband. Her beauty, poise,
intelligence and grace made her an instant, un-relatable outcast, almost an
alien creature.
Welcome to the West.
He breathed out and made the mistake of glancing at
his watch. Another six and a half hours to go before his shift was done. Six and half hours before he could get out
of this prefabricated palace of over-priced infantile indulgence.
Valentin had struggled hard to adjust to the culture
of England. In fact he was still
struggling. Life was so different here,
as he had expected it to be, in good ways and bad. One thing that still hit him afresh on a
daily basis in a place like this, was the way the British over-indulged their
children. There seemed scant evidence of
any moral or ethical training. Barely
any sign of respect for their elders.
Nothing at all resembling humility and patience. Children in Britain wanted everything now, and when it arrived, it would not
satisfy them for more than a blink of their eye before they wanted something
else. The prices of toys in this place
was unbelievable! Yet parents dished out
money time and again, the same children returning nearly on a weekly basis to
by something new.
Valentin put a stop to his grim thoughts then and
there.
You’re
generalising,
he said. How can you judge the character of nation based on those that roll in
and out of here?
As he consciously calmed himself ( a vital skill he’d
still to master) Valentin understood that it was not the children, nor the
parents he was angry at. They were
just....there, to take the
blame. He was angry at Life. Life that had been so promising, so perfect
back in Russia. He had been a man to be
respected, a man with the hope of a planet in his hands. He had known dignity back then. He has known purpose. His future, and that of his wife, had been assured, and a
better world would have been his legacy.
Now....this.
He glanced at his watch again. Stop!
In times like this, as a last resort, he always did
the same thing and he did it now. He
pulled out his wallet and opened it.
There was precious little money in it, but instead there was something
that could not fail to heal his day.
He pulled out a plastic-coated photograph of Nicolai,
his son.
After looking at it for nearly a minute, Valentin
finally smiled as he always did, and replaced it in his wallet. At least there
was something to be proud of. His son
made him feel like he had done something
right.
Valentin glanced up.
Uh-oh. The mother was returning
on stiff, loud heel-steps, dragging a wet-faced Lionel behind her as he
occasionally fought to pull back, only to be yanked forward. By her side was Jeremy, the twenty-five
year-old, eighteen-stone Manager of Toys
4 All, (and Valentin’s boss) whose face seemed to have undergone plastic
surgery a while back to remove all capability for expression upon it. He glanced at Valentin with eyes that held
no sympathy or solidarity.
Valentin gripped the glass counter edge again and slowly
took a deep, low, private breath....
* * *
At ten minutes to seven, Valentin pulled his eleven
year-old Volkswagen Beetle into the driveway of the house that they had found
the deposit for with the very last of their government- funded savings all
those years ago. It was technically a
bungalow, but the attic space was so large, Valentin had worked weekends for nearly
a year converting it into a bedroom for their growing son.
It was in a nice enough suburban street here in
Deptford. At least they weren’t living in some cramped apartment in a
drug-ridden inner city tower block. Here
at least they had a semblance of a garden (though neither he nor his wife knew
or cared about matters horticultural.)
The Beetle trembled for a moment before the engine
stopped and Valentin eased himself out.
As he did so, he caught sight of the blue-rinsed curls of Ms Keeley, the
seventy-one year-old woman who, as their neighbour, had made them feel as
welcome as an outbreak of the E-Bola virus since they moved in.
It had taken only a moment for the Russian accent to
sink in after Mischa had first introduced herself over the garden fence. Then the dough-set eyes behind those
over-sized plastic framed spectacles had narrowed.
“Where are you from?”
“Russia.”
“Russia? (Sharp breath. Long tight-lipped pause) Right. I see.”
And that had been that.
Yes, Ms Keeley was actually looking at him through one
of the open knotholes in the wooden planking of their fence. He could see her
eyeball from here.
The Valenkos had never been on friendly enough terms
to find out if there had ever been a Mr
Keeley, but if there had been, he had Valentin’s sympathy.
Feeling like he was being tracked by a military
sniper, Valentin walked into his own home, mentally doing calculations about
how much money remained to be found for this month’s mortgage payment. When he did so, he gulped and put it out of
his mind. Deal with that later. Always later.
Now for the best part of his day.
The kitchen was like a warm sanctuary, the closest
thing to Heaven he was likely to know, he thought. He slumped at the kitchen table and put his
face in his hands, breathing in the spirit-raising smells of freshly baked
Russian-style black bread that hung there almost permanently now. Thank
God, he thought, despite the problems of his life. Thank
God for what we have.
Then things only got better.
The door opened and Mischa entered, still wearing her
blue apron, thought her hairnet was gone.
She carried a carrier bag of fruit (the weekly free allowance for the
staff. Must be a Friday.)
Mischa also had a streak or two of grey in her
otherwise still raven-black hair. Yet no
bland polyester outfit on earth could diminish her ambient beauty, the
glimmering green of her eyes, or the wide, warm welcoming of her smile. The following was naturally all in Russian.
“Evening, husband.”
“Evening, my love.
Coffee?”
“I’ll love you forever if you do.”
“I thought that came with marriage. It’s mandatory.”
“I’ll love you even more then. ”
“Take a seat.
Give me the fruit too.”
Now it was Mischa’s turn to slump at the table, as
Valentin filled the empty fruit bowl and then the kettle with water, flicking
it on. He sat down beside his wife and
they quietly held hands.
“Good day?”
“Fine,” said Mischa.
She yawned though and shrugged her shoulder. She got back pain occasionally now. “You?”
“I still have a job. That’s good enough.”
Mischa frowned a little but didn’t pursue it. He was right. That was all that mattered.
Suddenly Mischa put her hands on her husband’s face
and gently guided it to look at her.
“It’ll be alright Valentin. Things will change. They always do.”
Valentin had actually been putting on a cheery face to
hide his feelings, which apparently hadn’t worked at all.
“I know, my love.
I just hope things change...soon.
I want so much for you and Nicolai.
I don’t care about me, but both of you....you’re my world. You don’t deserve this. You...”
“Enough.”
That was all she had to say, and Valentin bowed his
head.
“You do everything you can, Valentin. So do I.
So does Nicolai. All a person can
do is their best. To do so, and then
demand more of oneself, is nothing but the torture of the self, and no good
comes from that. Life has not stopped changing since it began, and where our
lives changed in Krasnoyarsk Kray, one day they will do so again. But in the meantime, we will be grateful for
what we have, and maintain our dignity, our spirit, our strength as a
family. Then, when life presents us
with an opportunity for change, we will be ready.”
Valentin eased forward and kissed his wife full on the
lips. He no longer said plodding old
statements like; “I don’t know how I ever won you.” He didn’t need to. He’d said it so often it now (in his mind)
the words hung unspoken in the air.
Finally, he smiled and asked.
“Where’s Nicolai?”
Mischa pulled back and looked at her watch. “He should be home from softball practise
anytime now. The Everton family are
giving him a lift tonight, he says.”
As if on cue, a pair of headlights flashed across the
kitchen wall and they heard the distant sound of an engine stopping and
idling. A car door slammed. A Russian-accented “Thank you. Goodbye,” in
English. Then footsteps running on a
gravel driveway.
Mischa looked at Valentin and neither could help
smiling.
“Here comes The Great One.”
The front door banged open, making Mischa wince. More
thudding footsteps in the hall, and finally The Great One ploughed into the
kitchen, coming to a stop.
Valentin turned and grinned. He spoke in English.
“Good evening, Nicolai.”
Chapter Three
“Good Evening, Nicolai”
Nicolai Valenko grinned widely, and immediately a
mini-river of blood rushed over his chin.
“Oh my God!” breathed Mischa, and she leapt to her
feet. Her chair tipped over with a bang as she grabbed a role of kitchen towel
and hurried over to her son.
“Ith alrithe. A goth hith in the theeth ith a
thoftball,” said Nicolai, happily (and also in accented English). “Ith donth theem thoo be thopping, though.”
“Bite on this,” said Mischa sternly, also smoothly
changing to English, folding a length of kitchen towel into a wad and shoving
it into his mouth. “My God, did your
teacher not do anything?”
Nicolai looked guilty but his speech was clearing
now. “He hath gone home. Me and Theven were mething about, waiting for
hith parenths.”
Mischa got a glass of water and a plastic mixing
bowl. She took out the wad of paper and
gave him the glass.
“Drink,” she ordered.
He did so.
“Now spit!”
Nicolai spat the water into the bowl in a red-themed
gush.
Valentin watched all this with amusement. Mischa was a strong woman in every way, but
since becoming a mother, she had become very sensitive to possible injuries and
ailments as far as her son was concerned.
The slightest scratch, bruised knee, etc, brought out in her some
hitherto unseen warzone paramedic.
Valentin looked his son up and down. He’s
slow to grow, he thought.
The truth be told, Nicolai Valenko was undersized for
his age. Both his parents were tall, so
this was a mystery, but perhaps less so in regards to Nicolai himself, for his
very life was a triumph-against-the-odds.
After all that time in that Russian hospital, just getting
on with the business of surviving, it came nearly as a shock to the Mischa that
her pregnancy had survived the explosion.
The certainty of a miscarriage had lain on her mind like a dreadful,
ice-cold anvil. Tears of relief flowed
when the hospital confirmed that the foetus in her womb was alive and
apparently undamaged. And Mischa was not easily moved to tears at all.
Nicolai was a shade under five feet in height. He had his mother’s raven black hair, cut
fairly long, (and today, a little bird-nesty.) His arms were relatively short even for his
body, his fingers slender, as though designed to be pianist. He was wide across the shoulders, with short
squat legs.
If you were to look at him long and hard (which
occasionally of course, some did) you might think there was something not quite
right in his proportions. Nothing
glaringly strange or obvious, just the feeling of something being
ever-so-slightly out of place, off-kilter.
And then there was the eye of course.
Nicolai only had one eye. His right one, to be precise, and that one
was the same depthless creamy jade colour as his mother’s. His left eye...just wasn’t there. Something had gone wrong at some point on a
genetic level, and his left eye simply never developed. Where it should be was merely a smooth
concave of skin under the brow. Nothing
else about his face, head, its proportion or design was odd. Just the lack of a left eye.
To this day Valentin wondered if it had been something
to do with the accident at the Facility.
When the Q-Drive had exploded, apart from the fire and concussive force
itself, another issue to be concerned about was possible high-band
electro-magnetic radiation. Valentin
had fully expected to be diagnosed with cancer within months of the accident,
but no such symptom nor diagnosis came.
It seemed he, his wife and child had dodged a very dangerous
bullet.
But when Nicolai’s disfigurement was diagnosed by
sonogram early in the pregnancy, the gut-level fear of afte-effects resurfaced
in Valentin’s mind. A fear that had
never really been subdued, but had been angrily pushed to the back of his mind,
and there caged in a dark crate where it stayed and snarled. There’ll
be a reckoning sooner or later whispered the occasional voice from that
phantom crate.
Yet so far, that lack of an eye, along with the
numerous scars that would never quite heal in Valentin’s body, seemed to be the
only price they would pay for surviving.
Even now, Nicolai wore a black leather eye-patch over
the left side of his brow, covering something that ironically wasn’t even
there. Not so much for school, where
every boy and girl had at some point come up to him and stared with morbid
curiosity at that empty concave of skin.
They had all seen, muttered about it, and eventually gotten used to
it. Old news.
No, he wore the eye-patch for everyone else. To avoid the fifty-plus stares and comments
he might otherwise get on a walk down a single street. Yes the eyepatch drew a little curiosity of
its own, but...
“Did you win?” said Mischa, breaking his
thoughts. She spoke in English. They always did to Nicolai. He had been schooled in Russian by his father
out of pride for his heritage, but it would be of little use to him outside the
home in the foreseeable future. Besides,
it helped Valentin and Mischa to practise their own English.
“Of course we did,” smiled Nicolai. “I got nine full
runs. St George’s team looked really depressed.
The boys hoisted me on their shoulders at the end. It was great.”
Nicolai was popular, that was the thing. Whether it was the one eye, the rather
stumpy, though broad-shouldered physique, his almost unfathomable excellence at
softball (with only one eye, he had no depth perception, so how the hell he
ever hit the ball was a mystery in itself) or his eternally positive
personality, Valentin wasn’t sure.
Miraculously, some of the biggest, roughest, toughest kids in school had
almost adopted him as a little brother, coming to his aid when the inevitable lower-level
knuckle-heads had surfaced. In return,
Nicolai, who was simply A-grade at all academic subjects (all of them!) helped them out with homework, while never actually
taking it home and doing it for them. (For Nicolai understood that would be
wrong.)
His stocky build and wide shoulders actually contained
a very decent physical strength, and coupled with that same mysterious accuracy
for hitting a ball with a bat, he had
quickly risen to be a first-choice candidate during the Deptford Secondary
Modern Softball Team match-ups.
In Russia, Nicolai is spelt Nikolai, but in an odd moment of whimsy, Mischa and Valentin had
christened him with a version spelt with a ‘C’. Hard to clarify why, even now. Was it a name that seemed to represent a
little more the land of his birth? (Nicholas, Nicole, Nicola.) Or was it
perhaps a reluctance to connect him completely
with a country they could never return to?
That had, in fact, cast them out?
They had discussed it, obviously, but when the name was suggested
shortly before his birth, there was something in it that had charmed both
parents, and so Nicolai he had become.
Nicolai yawned very loudly, and then numbly rubbed his
right shoulder.
Can he really
be mine?,
wondered Valentin, who despite his best efforts had never been popular at
school, had no upper body strength to speak of, and had not excelled in any
sport of any kind. At such times he
would look to Nicolai’s black hair and green eyes, and gratefully acknowledge
the overwhelming genetics of his wife.
The kettle boiled and clicked off. Valentin made coffee, and by the time he was
done pouring it, all bleeding had stopped in his son’s mouth.
Nicolai slurped it, took a breath, and said;
“So we won, right? And that means we get to compete
against The Augustine Boys school lot in three weeks, right? And that means if
we win we can get on a bus and travel to Leicestershire to enter the England
Amateur Under Fifteen Junior Softball tournament, right? And after that,
well...”
“Nicolai, breathe!”
said Valentin.
“Sorry, Father”, said Nicolai. “But that would be....cool, wouldn’t it? It would! I think so! Really it would. Winning that?
Great!”
He gulped down coffee so hard that he splashed his
nose.
“Fudgepuddles!” he snorted, and coughed, wiping his
face with his hand.
“Oh for goodness....!
Nicolai, slow down! The coffee will still be warm if you breathe between
words,” said his mother. “Don’t use your
hand. Here, I’ll get a cloth.”
Mischa got up and went to the sink. A moment later she stopped moving and put a
hand to her head. She held the sink edge
with the other.
“Mum?” Nicolai
looked curious.
Valentin turned to look at his wife. Mischa was just standing there.
“Mischa? Are
you alright?”
Mischa took a moment to answer. Then;
“Yes. I just
got dizzy again for a moment.”
“Again?” said Valentin.
“It’s happened three of four times in the last
week. Maybe I’m coming down with
something.”
Valentin looked concerned. “In that factory I wouldn’t be
surprised. Do they ever plan on heating
it?”
Mischa laughed, but it was a weak thing compared to her usual laugh. “Don’t
hold your breath.”
“Sit down for a moment, Mother,” said Nicolai.
“No, no, I’m fine now,” she smiled. “That one was just a bit heavier than the
others. Everything swam for a bit.
Still, all fine now, so no fuss.”
Valentin felt something cold flop over in his stomach,
and that insidious voice inside that locked crate said something about there
being no time limit on a reckoning.
Let it be a
cold,
thought Valentin. He pulled his thoughts
to a halt with a disciplined effort. He
was verging on paranoia as regarding the health of his wife. He knew it.
Every sneeze, every cough. Not
wishing to be an annoyance, he kept a tight lid on these feelings, but they
were there alright.
Mischa sat down and dabbed Nicolai’s chin with a
cloth, looking a little pale and perspiring.
“Mischa, why don’t you go and lie down for a while?
I’ll start dinner and bring in it if you like.
You look like you could use a rest.”
Usually such suggestions during past illnesses were
met with a snort of derision that was the hallmark of his wife’s
character. So it chilled him a little
further when his wife, with uncharacteristic meekness said;
“Perhaps I will. Call me if you need help with
anything. Just ten minutes to close my
eyes. I’ll be fine.”
And with a watery smile, Mischa got up and left the
room.
Nicolai watched her go with that one pale green
eye. When he looked back at this mug of
coffee, his former ebullience was gone.
“Don’t worry, son ,” smiled Valentin. “She’ll be
alright.”
Nicolai nodded, but Valentin’s words clearly hadn’t
changed a thing. Another trait of his
son was to feel things on a very deep level.
The slightest emotion was slightly exaggerated in him. If he was sad, he was really sad. If he was happy, he could rival the sun.
Twenty minutes passed. Valentin was
draining steaming pasta and the pasta sauce was beginning to bubble and burp in
the metal saucepan.
Nicolai was putting away pots he had just dried when
Valentin told him to go and see if his mother wanted to join them here, or
whether she wanted dinner on a tray in bed.
Nicolai slung the tea towel over his shoulder like a
pro and jogged out of the kitchen.
Valentin checked on the sauce and then slung in the
steaming pasta, stirring it well. He
opened a drawer and began placing cutlery on the table. It was only when he was done that he realised
Nicolai hadn’t come back yet. A private
conversation was no doubt taking place.
Then Nicola burst through the door, banging it hard on
the wood.
“FATHER!
Something’s wrong!”
Thunk. The bottom fell out of Valentin’s stomach.
“Come quickly,” gasped Nicolai. “She won’t wake up. Mother won’t wake up!”
