Sapphire Skies Read online

  ‘Come on,’ she said, reaching down and rubbing Pushkin’s chin.

  The geriatric cat stretched his rickety legs and jumped onto the floor to join the two kittens, Max and Georgy, who were staring at Lily with their guileless eyes. One of the good things about street cats, thought Lily, swinging her feet to the floor and feeling around for her slippers, is that they’re patient. She remembered her family’s cat, Honey, who wouldn’t have tolerated waiting for her breakfast.

  The cats followed Lily to the kitchen, their untrimmed claws clicking on the parquet floor. Lily filled the kettle with bottled water and plugged it into the wall socket before opening a can of cat food and spooning the contents onto a plate. She placed the plate on the floor and leaned against the refrigerator, watching her feline guests lap the food.

  ‘Before you go to sleep,’ the counsellor back in Sydney had advised her, ‘think of something you like and examine it from every angle. A cat, for instance: imagine the rumble of a cat purring; the caramel smell of its fur; the warmth that transfers to your hand when you scratch its belly. Cats are therapeutic.’

  Lily shut off the memory of those sessions with the counsellor. If she started thinking about them again she’d have trouble getting through the day and she had an important meeting with the advertising agency. ‘Moscow in winter isn’t a place you go to cure depression,’ Lily’s mother had told her before she departed from Sydney airport seven months earlier. But Lily had found Moscow cocooned in snow strangely comforting. It was summer now and the trees on Tatarskaya Street, where she lived, were in full leaf. Yet Lily felt the same sense of despair she’d had when she’d arrived. She was thirty-two years of age and she had lost all direction.

  She made herself a cup of smoky-tasting Russian tea with lemon and carried it to the living room. She sank down onto the floral sofa, and stared at the imposing mahogany wall unit where she’d placed her television and CD collection. How had they got that thing up to the fourth floor, she wondered each time she sat in this spot. She’d decided that it must have been carted up piece by piece. All the furniture in the apartment was too big for the space and added to the cramped feeling inside. It was the antithesis of the breezy beachside cottage she’d shared with Adam in Sydney’s north.

  She sipped her tea and, despite her intentions, began thinking about the day she and her fiancé had thrown a barbecue for their friends to mark the completion of the renovations to their cottage and the bombshell that had fallen on them.

  ‘Hey mate, you better get that spot checked out,’ Adam’s best friend, a nurse at Royal North Shore Hospital, had told him that afternoon. Bradley had pointed to a pink bubble on Adam’s shoulder, so tiny that Lily, who thought she knew every inch of Adam’s skin, hadn’t noticed it before.

  ‘I’ll make an appointment for you,’ she told Adam. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing, but best to get it looked at.’

  Lily had been felled when the specialist’s face turned grave as he examined the spot under a magnifying lens. ‘We’ll have to do a biopsy and then a test to see where the cells might have spread to,’ he told them.

  They had walked back to their car in a daze. Weren’t melanomas meant to be big black ugly things that let you know they were dangerous, like funnel-web spiders?

  They postponed their wedding to focus on Adam’s treatment. While the surgeons cut a chunk out of his shoulder, Lily researched alternative therapies. She read books on juicing, and about how cancer survivors had defied stage-four diagnoses by drinking bicarbonate of soda mixed with molasses. She took Adam to his reiki and reflexology appointments. Together they posted positive affirmations on their fridge and on their bathroom mirror: I am healthy, healed and whole; I now claim perfect health.

  At first, the surgeon was confident everything had been taken out. But a few months later lumps appeared on Adam’s neck, which were lymph nodes that needed to be removed.

  Adam fought his worsening prognosis with everything he had, and Lily fought alongside him. To the amazement of the medical profession, Adam’s scans and blood tests started to come back normal. At his follow-up appointments over the next year, he passed every one with flying colours.

  After all they’d been through, Lily would have been happy with a simple service on the beach. But Adam insisted that she have her dream wedding, with a string quartet, lavender and vintage pink rose bouquets, a pale lavender cake, flower girls, and a dress that swished around her ankles when she walked.

  They’d booked the reception venue in Bowral for the second time when Lily woke up one night to hear Adam retching in the bathroom.

  ‘Was it the green curry?’ she’d asked him. ‘Do you have food poisoning?’

  One look from Adam and Lily had understood that this wasn’t the first time the vomiting had occurred.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Adam’s doctor told them. ‘It appears you have tumours in your stomach and bowel.’

  That night, Lily’s dream of falling into an abyss began. Eight months later, Adam was gone.

  Max jumped onto the wall unit, sending CDs clattering to the floor and jolting Lily from her painful memories. She picked the kitten up and placed him on the windowsill, then glanced at the clock. She’d have to get a move on if she didn’t want to be late for work.

  The bathroom was squeezed between her bedroom and the narrow entrance hall. She picked up a towel from the cupboard, heard a snarl and jumped back just in time to avoid the paw that swiped at her from under the telephone table. She’d forgotten about Mamochka, Max and Georgy’s mother. The tortoiseshell was the latest addition to Lily’s cat sanctuary, courtesy of Oksana, her landlady, who charged her a reduced rent for taking in the overflow of stray felines that she herself rescued. Lily had four in her apartment. Oksana, whose apartment was only bigger by two rooms, had thirty.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lily, making as much space as she could between the cat and herself. Unlike the other strays, Mamochka was wild. She only came out to eat after Lily had gone to bed, and anyone who approached was repelled with a growl and a stomp of her paw.

  ‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ Oksana had assured Lily. ‘With love and affection Mamochka will come around. They all do.’

  Lily turned on the shower and stood under the spray. For two weeks of the year during summer, Moscow’s city council turned the hot water off so the pipes could be maintained. Lily had grown accustomed to the ice-cold water on her skin; it was bracing and numbed her thoughts like an icepack numbed a bruise. After her shower, she dressed instinctively in what her friends called ‘Lily’s Park Avenue Princess look’: a Ralph Lauren shirt dress, tan court shoes, pink-brown lipstick and a touch of mascara around her amber eyes.

  ‘Lily, you dress up for everything,’ Adam used to say with a fond smile. ‘Even the beach!’

  Adam, who’d been a freelance web-page designer and a volunteer surf lifesaver, thought ‘dressing up’ meant discarding thongs for a closed shoe. Lily’s mother had been a fashion and beauty writer for a newspaper and Lily had picked up the habit of dressing well from her. Now her smart clothes and fashionably blow-dried long brown hair had become a way of coping: making the outer shell presentable while inside she was in pieces.

  Before leaving the apartment, she put out fresh water for the cats. Pushkin rubbed against her legs and she bent down to pat him. ‘Okay, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I’m off to work.’

  It was only when she’d closed the door and turned the three deadlocks that she realised she’d spoken to Pushkin the way she used to speak to Adam. Her heart sank and she sensed another difficult day ahead.

  With many Muscovites away at their dachas for the summer, the city had taken on a more relaxed atmosphere. The traffic had eased and Lily felt for the first time that she was breathing oxygen instead of the acrid fumes of diesel.

  A trail of commuters were making their way to the Paveletskaya metro station and Lily joined them. She descended the long wooden escalator to the platform and managed to squeeze herself onto the next train. The fi
rst stop was Novokuznetskaya. A group of tourists stared in confusion at the Cyrillic signs; there wasn’t a single notice in English. ‘Why do the Russians give things such bloody long names!’ she heard one of the tourists lament.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union had seen an influx of foreign investment and international companies, as well as tourists pouring into Russia. It was the reason why Lily, with her marketing experience and bilingual skills, had found a job in the city so quickly. She glanced at the metro station guide: Bagrationovskaya; Shchyolkovskaya; Krasnogvardeyskaya. Even if you could read Cyrillic, you needed to be able to read it quickly or you’d miss your stop.

  She alighted at Tverskaya Station and took the underpass to reach Pushkin Square. The underpass was like a mini shopping mall, with kiosks built into the walls selling everything from potato piroshki and icons painted on wooden eggs to pirated CDs and counterfeit watches. The air smelt of kvass, the fermented beverage made of rye bread that was popular among the Russians in summer. Lily dreaded this part of her trip to work. Her parents had told her that when they’d come to the Soviet Union in 1969, the government had made sure the drunks and the homeless were hidden from foreign tourists. Now they were out in full view. It turned Lily’s stomach to see men lying comatose with people stepping over them, or kneeling before paper cups and begging for coins. The sight that affected her most was the old women standing near the exit. Some of them sold potatoes and beets to supplement their meagre pensions, but the very elderly or crippled simply held out their withered hands. Lily knew these were the ones who had survived the bitter winter; there were many more who hadn’t.

  The face of the grandmother Lily had loved and had lost when she was nineteen years old flashed before her. That trip Lily’s parents had made in 1969 was to smuggle her grandmother out of the country. If her parents hadn’t taken that risky venture, Alina might have ended up like these old women in the underpass.

  When Lily had first walked through here, she’d been tempted to find some other way to cross six-lane Tverskaya Street so she didn’t have to witness the old women’s suffering. But then she’d found something inside her that hadn’t been depleted during the ordeal of the past four years and had reasoned that even doing something small was better than doing nothing at all. She’d stopped buying takeaway cappuccinos, CDs and lipsticks she didn’t really need and now kept the saved roubles to give to the impoverished women. It was a ritual for each Friday, yet on the other days she still couldn’t bring herself to look the women in the eyes.

  ‘You know that Moscow’s beggars are the highest paid in the world,’ the concierge from the Mayfair Hotel, where Lily worked, had told her one day when he saw her dispensing the money. She was shocked that he could be so heartless. It might have been true of some of the young people kneeling before cups in the underpass, but how could it be true of these frail old women?

  ‘Please! Take it!’ Lily said today, handing her roubles to the oldest of the women. When she had nothing left to give, she ran up the stairs and emerged into Pushkin Square. She closed her eyes and took in gulps of air. When she opened them again she found herself face to face with an old woman clutching a dog.

  The woman pushed a sign in English towards her. It read: Please buy my dog and take good care of her. We have nothing to eat. The woman was aged, but beneath her mottled skin she had high cheekbones and a well-defined chin. The yellow blouse she wore was faded but clean and her white hair was neatly coiled into a French roll. The dog resembled a fox terrier and had a smooth coat and bright eyes. Compared to those in the underpass, this woman didn’t appear destitute, yet her demeanour exuded such hopelessness that Lily felt crushed by it.

  Although she’d distributed her charity budget for the week, she reached into her handbag and took out her purse. She handed over a fifty-rouble note and the woman’s eyes filled with tears. She kissed the dog and whispered something in its ear.

  ‘No! No!’ Lily protested in Russian when she realised the woman intended to give her the dog. ‘I don’t want the dog. Just take the money.’

  The woman looked surprised that Lily spoke Russian. ‘But you must take my dog,’ she said, holding out the little creature.

  Lily stepped back, overwhelmed by the situation. She turned away from the woman and rushed across the square. She was close to tears. The world was a mess and she felt powerless to fix it.

  ‘You stupid foreigner!’ a drunk man sitting at the base of Pushkin’s statue shouted out after her as Lily passed him. ‘It was a trick! She was never going to give you the dog!’

  The Mayfair Hotel was a boutique establishment that occupied a restored eighteenth-century palace and catered to executive business people and affluent travellers. Lily rushed past the floral centrepiece in the marble reception area and waved to the desk manager before making her way to the sales office. She stopped at the staff bathroom along the way to check she hadn’t smeared her mascara.

  ‘Come on, pull yourself together,’ she said to her reflection.

  There was a brass plaque above the sink, placed there by Lily’s boss, the director of sales and marketing: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Scott, an American, never seemed to have a black day, or even a blue one. His Monday morning motivational meetings were renowned. Not only did his staff have to share their work goals for the week, but he assigned them each a personal affirmation which they were to repeat to him the first time they saw him each day of that week. The affirmation Scott had selected for Lily for the current week was My life is a super success story!

  ‘The irony!’ she muttered.

  She noticed cat fur on her dress and quickly brushed it off then rolled her shoulders to loosen their tension. She breathed deeply as she stepped out of the bathroom. Making the transition from her sorrowful personal life to her professional one had become second nature to her, but her veneer of composure nearly crumbled when the first person she laid eyes on in the office was Kate, the perky sales coordinator.

  Kate beamed when she saw her. ‘Good morning, Lily!’

  Lily felt her face sag but tried to smile back. Twenty-five years old, blonde and beautiful, Kate had fallen in love with a fellow Englishman who worked in the hotel’s guest relations department, and was returning with him to Cornwall in September to get married. Everything was being organised by Kate’s mother, aunt and three sisters, who were determined to make Kate’s wedding ‘the most beautiful ever’. Lily could tell by the look on Kate’s face that she had another ‘delicious’ detail to share with her.

  ‘They’ve ordered the cake!’ Kate squealed, rising from her chair and waving a picture in front of Lily’s face.

  The cake was spectacular. The icing was shades of ivory and mocha and decorated with sugar flowers of tea rose and lily of the valley.

  ‘Look!’ said Kate, pointing to the top and bottom tiers. ‘The piped lace design is taken from my wedding dress.’

  Lily felt light-headed. It wasn’t Kate’s fault. Lily hadn’t told her colleagues what had happened back in Sydney, why she’d fled to Russia.

  Fortunately, at that moment Scott got up from his desk and came towards them, giving Lily a chance to escape.

  ‘My life is a super success story!’ she called out as he passed her.

  Kate followed with her own affirmation for the week: ‘My life is an exciting adventure!’

  ‘Good morning, ladies,’ replied Scott, grinning. ‘The demands of life awaken the giant within me!’

  Lily used the interruption to flee to the kitchen and make herself a cup of coffee.

  When she returned to the office, Kate was sharing her wedding cake picture with the sales manager. Mary was in her early fifties and divorced, but was making the same ooh-ing and aah-ing sounds that Lily had a few minutes before.

  Lily sat down at her desk and switched on her computer. ‘Come on!’ she muttered to the screen when she opened her email program. Internet connections in Russia were frustratingly slow. She tried to shut out the v
oices of the two women. Does Kate’s bliss hurt Mary the same way it does me, she wondered. Maybe not. Mary had been through the experience of a marriage and her wedding was probably only a distant memory. Lily’s dream, on the other hand, had been stolen from her.

  The sound of an incoming email brought her back to the present. She pressed her palm against her forehead and willed herself to get on with the day. The message was from her best friend, Betty. Are you crazy? was her opening line. What are you doing with all those stray cats in your apartment? Don’t you know that Russia has rabies? Lily felt a rush of warmth for her friend; Betty’s outspoken personality was legendary. The email was long and Lily saved it to enjoy later.

  Betty was the daughter of Lily’s mother’s best friend, and she and her siblings had become the brothers and sisters that Lily, an only child, never had. Lily shivered. She had no immediate siblings, but before she had come to Russia she’d discovered that in fact she had dead half-sisters — the children of her father and his first wife. They’d been burned alive, along with their mother, by the Japanese during the war in an act of random revenge against the Russian population of Tsingtao. All her life, Lily had believed that the scar on her father’s face had been caused by a work accident. It was only when she’d decided to come to Moscow that her mother had revealed the truth: Ivan had been burned while trying to save his family.

  Lily glanced back at Kate, who had now settled down to work. How different their families were, she thought. Kate’s family had lived in the same village for generations. They even had a family tree in the vicarage that went back three hundred years, so Kate had told her. How unlike Lily’s parents, who had endured revolutions, wars and exile. They were grateful to have ended up in Australia but were haunted still by ghosts, secrets and missing persons. At school, surrounded by friends with aunts, uncles and cousins coming out of their ears, Lily had felt like a freak. All she had wanted with Adam was a settled family life. Now she wondered if she had tragedy in her genes.