Glancing up and down the murky river, I spot the big wheel of a fairground on the other side and realise that it must belong to the famous Gorky Park, and the Scorpions’ song ‘Winds of Change’ immediately starts playing inside my head, lifting my mood. I’m not a fan of fairgrounds in general, but I’ve had just enough vodka to think that it might be fun. I’m bored on my own, after the initial buzz of the shoplifting and the running, and I definitely don’t want to go back to my hotel alone right now. I have a quick look around me, hoping that there might be somewhere I can change into my new clothes – a public toilet with wash facilities would be preferable, but in the absence of that, anywhere nearby. I settle for the shade of a tree. I’m not exactly concealed, but I don’t really care.
I pull off my sweaty, grubby clothes and ball them up, then I step into the dress, sliding it up over my hips, twisting my arm behind my back to do up the zip. I smooth the material over my thighs, swish the material back and forth. It’s a perfect fit. I take off my filthy sandals and pull on the ankle boots, without socks. I need a mirror to sort out my hair and face, but I look better than I did before. I head off along the riverbank, tossing the old clothes into the water without looking back.
Carrie is hardly going to miss that top now.
I cross the river at Krymsky Bridge and enter the gates of the fairground. It’s one of those places where you don’t pay to get in, and just buy tokens for the rides. I listen to the rattle of the ancient rollercoaster and the shrieks from the people riding it, and decide to give it a miss. There is something very out of control about rollercoasters, and I’ll never understand why people go on them. I’d rather be in charge of my own adrenaline surges, with much more thrilling activities. What happened in Irkutsk has awakened something in me that I’d thought was safely buried away. I’m like a vampire – lain dormant for years until the smell of blood has me wanting more. Of course I like to try and convince myself that all the things that have happened to me over the years have been accidents, but in an occasional moment of honesty, I recognise what they really are. What I really am. I take a swig of the vodka and realise that I’ve nearly finished the whole bottle, and I can’t help but laugh. What must I look like, to others? Bedraggled hair from the run, out-of-place clothing, swaying slightly from the alcohol – laughing to myself in a park.
Mothers with children swerve to avoid me, throwing me filthy looks. A couple of men leer at me in that way I’ve noticed here many times now – they don’t care if I’m drunk, if I stink of booze and sweat. If I’m vulnerable. They’ll fuck me if I ask them to. What they don’t realise is that I don’t actually care about fucking them, or talking to them, or anything else. What they don’t realise is that I am looking for something that none of them can give me.
A traitorous tear slides down my cheek, and I wipe it angrily away, then I toss the vodka bottle into a bin and ignore the staring children and the snotty mums, and head over to a row of colourful stalls on the other side of the park.
By the time I get there, I’ve pushed the tears and the regrets back into their box, and I’m feeling a bit brighter. I stop to look at the items that have been arranged neatly in rows, according to height. Babushka dolls – some out on display as the full set of seven, the rest of them with their interlocking babies safely stored inside. They are painted in every colour under the sun, with different faces, different styles of dress. There are even ‘novelty’ ones, with faces of celebrities and politicians.
When they see me looking, the stallholders start to demonstrate with their dolls, twisting them apart, taking out each nested doll from within, setting them out in a row like ducklings following their mother. It’s mesmerising, and joyful, and I feel another wave of deeply hidden emotions threatening to push themselves up and out of me. A wave of panic and dizziness hits me, and for a moment, all of the dolls seem to be un-nesting themselves, coming towards me, circling me, and I take a step back and try to breathe, but it’s too hard to catch my breath – my throat starts to close up and the light around me begins to shrink until there’s nothing but a pinprick.
There is chattering in Russian, and shrieks of children and the clatter of the old rollercoaster as it whizzes around above my head, and I feel myself falling, blackness taking over and I want it to end … and then … arms, grabbing my arms, someone talking in my ear. I feel weightless, and then I feel nothing.
I come to on a bench, my head between my legs, staring down at cracked concrete. Someone is rubbing my back.
‘Hey, you’re back. You kinda scared me a bit then.’
I don’t know who this is. I turn my head slowly in the direction of the voice – American, I think, or it could be Canadian. I can’t really tell the difference.
‘Hey yourself,’ I manage. My mouth feels like sandpaper. Tastes like shit.
I sit up slowly, and wriggle away slightly, so he stops rubbing my back.
‘Do you need to be sick? Here, I got you some water.’
He hands me a plastic bottle, the cap already off, and in other times I would query this as being very unsafe, but right now I need water, and if he’s decided to drug me then good on him, because I’m not too scared of oblivion. I’ve often thought that date-rape drugs are the best way to go, because if you can’t remember what happened, then did it really happen at all? More rational people would question this logic, but I am long past any form of rationale. I gulp the water down and sit up.
‘Who’re you, then? My guardian angel?’
He laughs. ‘I’m Brad. I saw you pass out and I thought you might need a friend.’
He’s being nice and I should thank him, but part of me remains deeply cynical about people who like to ‘help’. What’s in it for him? I give him a proper once-over, and decide that a lot could be in it for him, as it happens, and maybe for me. He’s late thirties, fresh faced, well dressed – in that preppy kind of way that I wouldn’t normally go for, but that screams money, and that is really the prevailing thought in my head right now.
‘Look,’ he continues, ‘this might sound really creepy, so feel free to tell me where to go, but my hotel is just there…’ He pauses and points through the trees at a towering concrete block next to the river. ‘And maybe you could do with some place to get cleaned up? Have a lie down?’
Cleaned up? I’d like to be offended, but I can actually smell myself through the clean clothes, and it’s not particularly fragrant. I should tell him where to go, just for his assumptions. I was clean before I came out, wasn’t I? This is obviously a combination of the sprinting, the adrenaline come-down and the vodka leaching out of my pores. I should tell him where to go, and I should head back to my own hotel and sleep, but instead I say, ‘That’s very kind of you. I’m staying in a crappy hostel and it would be nice to go somewhere nicer for a while.’
He squeezes my shoulder. ‘See? That’s exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking: This girl is backpacking – this girl would just love to come and see the massive tub in my en suite … Am I right?’
He grins, displaying his perfect white veneers, and I think: I know your type, Brad. But I can handle it.
Then he stands up and holds out a hand for me to take, and I take it, like some grateful little college girl so pleased to be with this handsome man, and I think how much I am going to enjoy the rest of the afternoon – and not for any reason he thinks.