The journey south involves a lot of listening. Anastasia has traveled on many long journeys and has listened to lots of talking men. The driver speaks about the roads and the state of the haulage industry. Anastasia is in fact deeply interested in all aspects of business and industry. She is fascinated by the making of things and the ways in which those things get from one place to another and are then transformed from one thing to another thing. That said, she doesn’t let the lorry driver know that she finds his conversation interesting. She knows from experience that it can be dangerous to bolster a strange man’s sense of self-worth. Almost as dangerous as undercutting it.
Also, he keeps forgetting her name. “Anna, is it?”
“Anastasia,” she corrects him.
Anastasia isn’t her real name. She adopted it when she came to London. Nobody could pronounce her real name, but “Anastasia” was the kind of name these people thought she should have so she gave them what they wanted. Her old name was ugly when pronounced by the English; she did everything she could to forget it.
The journey back to London goes more quickly. Perhaps it’s because Anastasia is agitated. She passes the same pylons, the same motorway bridges, the same road signs, albeit reversed. They drive through a thick cloud of fog that has descended since the morning. The fog gets stickier as the city gets closer, as if attracted by its mass.
Anastasia would do anything for her daughter. It is an inescapable, uncomfortable fact. She supposes it is a connection that was established at birth, only Anastasia can barely remember her daughter’s birth. She reads about birthing choices that women make these days, in glossy magazines. When she was pregnant she had never heard of birthing choices. She had never realized there were any choices she could make. She was seventeen years old, in a foreign country, under the protection of a man who was old enough to be her grandfather. When she felt the contractions, she was rushed to the nearest hospital. The rest of the process must have been vivid at the time, but it is now a series of facts; not a story but an itemized list. The labor lasted eight hours. Eventually the doctors performed an emergency C-section. Agatha weighed 5lbs 9oz.
Anastasia was left with neither sensory nor visual memories of the events, and they exist for her now as if they happened to someone else. When she thinks about it, it is like looking at the scene through a steamed-up window, slowly wiping away lines with an index finger.
Anastasia presses her index finger against the steamed-up window of the lorry. As she looks out, she begins to form a plan. Who from the old crowd does she still know in London? Which of the men she came over with from Russia still lives there? She thinks about Vlad. When she first met him he was fresh from the KGB, only not the section that dealt with intelligence and espionage, the section that dealt with enforcement. He’d seen the inside of soundproofed torture facilities and knew how to use the equipment there. And there is Mikhail, his heavy. Both are now respectable businessmen and live in Belgravia. They deal in imports and exports and stocks and shares. They are unlikely to want anything to do with this, for the same reason that her daughter wants nothing to do with this.
She had met other hard men through Donski. He came from a criminal background and had always kept a foot on that side of the fence, even after he’d become old and bought property. As the driver speaks, she makes a list in her head of some of the old crowd, judging who she is most likely to be able to find and who will be willing to do the job that needs to be done.
It doesn’t take her long to make a decision about whom to approach.
Anastasia is dropped off on the busy Euston Road and walks through Bloomsbury to Soho.
It is nearly Christmas, and the city is full. There are only a few days until the high street closes, so shopping has become frenzied. There is no time for browsing, only purchasing, and the pace of pedestrians has quickened. The lights have been up for weeks and flash with festive messages that only make sense when it’s dark. In the dark, they shine brightly and cover the street in beads of color. During the day, they look awkward, out of place, the tangle of wires resembling bare hedgerows against a cold white sky.
In London, Robert Kerr lies back on his sofa with a can of beer listening to BBC Radio 3. It is incredible how his tastes have changed over the decades. He can’t think of any reason for it. When he was a lad he listened to rock and roll. When he joined the gangs he listened to punk. Now he listens to Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Thomas Tallis, Ralph Vaughan Williams.
This is what people always said would happen but he hadn’t believed them. This is what adults tell teenagers.
“Just give it a few years,” they say. “You won’t be able to stand that rubbish.”
That part isn’t true. He still enjoys all the music he used to enjoy, just not as much as he did.
A couple of years ago he watched a BBC Four documentary about sound. It talked about hearing. Teenagers’ ears are much more sensitive, it said. That’s why those high-pitched hummy things outside
