4th Prize – L. E. Robson with:

Svetlana Chausova

Svetlana Chausova twisted her ankle as she emerged from the bathroom window grasped for the edge of the adjacent balcony, missed and started the seven-storey descent to the trash bins below.

Her ankles were delicate, divine, but wasted on the men at the club for whom her attraction was not her smile, which was sweet, nor her eyes which were brown with specks of amber like her father’s, but rather her blonde hair and the fact that they could purchase her with their new, sly money.

At first she gasped in laughter at her clumsiness. Then she released a scream, a long, hollow sound which raced around the well of high-rise buildings and arrived back at her as she dropped. The underside of the balcony which she could now regard, she noticed, was laced with cracks. A flash of colour snagged her eyes, the reds and pinks and violets of the garden cloaking the next balcony down. It dripped out between the railings innocent and hopeful and well-meaning but its optimism couldn’t do anything to save her.

‘Wear red, red lipstick, red shoes and a red dress,’ Dina had told her. That is the colour of sex, she had said.

She watched each afternoon in the apartment which she was locked into at night with nine others from Russia and Moldova, as Dina applied a mask of make-up that, in the ordinary light of the living room, made her look like Medea. She strapped on four-inch plastic scarlet stilettos made in China. Dina knew before she came what she was in for, was Svetlana’s view.

But Svetlana had not.

Suddenly she rotated violently to face the ground then the sky again and the trails of fuchsia flowers looked like someone regretfully waving goodbye.

As she passed the next balcony a cat looked back at her blankly with smudged little eyes. He was meowing, long and plaintively. His head, which was poking through the rungs of the balcony, was like a large, shapely apple and his coat was thick and dark brown tabby like Mouse’s.

Mouse had been the one she had kept from the litter of sickly kittens she had nursed when she was eleven. She had found them, abandoned by their mother and secreted them back to the house where she lived with her father, making a nest for them at the bottom of her closet. They had grown fat, and their eyes opened and she found homes for them amongst her school friends. Her father had, of course, known all along and pretended to mind when she presented him with the dark brown kitten, Mouse. But he was privately pleased that his daughter was so warm-hearted in spite of the absence of a mother.


Thirteen years ago, Svetlana thought as the cat’s impassive staring face receded while she fell staring up at it.

The underside of that balcony was also a network of cracks.

Imperiously, the cat followed her with its gaze through the banisters then sharply looked up at a bird which had alighted on the balcony railing.

The sound of her scream pursued her as she twisted so that her right side now faced the ground which appeared to be speeding at her from five floors below.

“You can clean the bar first,” her boss had told her in thick English on her first afternoon of work and she had, even polishing all of the bottles one by one. After that she did his office then he told her to go upstairs and put ‘something nice on’ for the night’s work.

‘Never mind. Tomorrow you can borrow a mini-skirt from one of the other girls,’ he had said, scrutinising her, when she came back wearing a pair of trousers.

She had borrowed a too-tight mini-skirt from skinny Dina the next night and put on more lipstick than she felt comfortable with (also borrowed from Dina).

Pedrag or Markus or whatever his ugly name had been had told her back in Russia that even the cleaners had to be beautiful in Cyprus.

‘They like the best and you are the best,’ he had said from his ultra-white-toothed mouth.

She had gone behind the bar, secretly wiping some of the lipstick off, and started polishing the glasses. The club was dank and smelled of sadness. Saggy old men lined the bar and looked at her in a way that managed to be at once surreptitious and bold. There were too many mirrors
everywhere, she thought fed up of seeing her tarty face flashing back at her from every angle.

Then the boss had barked at her to go upstairs where Kyrios Konstantinos was expecting her and
she had looked up at him puzzled.

‘For what?’ she had asked at once understanding ‘what’. Her stomach had curled up.

In the four weeks and three days she had worked at the club, she had refused to have sex with any of the men. She shouted at her boss about it, her English harsh and vulgar. He had hit her. And one night, when he had drunk too much and forgotten to lock them in the flat, she had fled to the humid, velvety dark streets with their uneven pavements and magical palm trees.

At the police station, she felt grateful that a woman was at the desk. But her eyes rejected Svetlana. She was overly made up, with yellow hair tightly pulled back, powdery cheeks and a mouth outlined in pencil.

“Where is your passport?” she had asked through her sticky, perfect lips after Svetlana chipped out fragments of her story through tears.

But the maestro had her passport and she hadn’t known how to reply.

She was a passport-less person.

A phone call had connected the police woman and the maestro and two waiters from the club came and the police woman let them take Svetlana.

They had beaten her in the flat and locked her in the bathroom.

Now her ankle throbbed and her face and arms burned from where she had been hit. She flayed her arms out so that she could feel the rush of air shimmering around the outline of her body like a halo.

The rush of cool air was like skating on the pond at Ozaro. She did it every afternoon in the winter pretending that she was a famous figure skater and that invisible crowds were watching her as she struggled to skate backwards and pirouette on the ice which was grey and blue and white.

Ozaro was ugly when the winter melted into spring and dog shit was revealed from under the melting ice and, occasionally, a drunk was found frozen to death in some snow bank.

The main street was only one mile long and the houses were wooden and of one storey. But when the flowers appeared they transformed Ozaro into another village and sometimes, when she walked to school, she framed the view through a square made by her hands and thought she could be in Paris or Rome or London or St. Petersburg.


On the next balcony a man sat smoking. His mouth opened in surprise around his cigarette as their eyes latched onto one another’s. She could see through the sliding doors behind him a well-lit living room with a medley collection of icons on the wall and the news on a large TV screen.

Her passport hadn’t taken her to Paris or London or Rome but Limassol. The maestro had seized it from her right after he had met her at the airport. It was a new passport, freshly issued especially for the journey to Cyprus.

She had experienced this as theft and hot tears welled up in her eyes even though she wasn’t someone who cried easily.

What was it that the maestro had said to a paper? This had been on the sixth night when Anastasia, who knew four languages, had shown her a report in an English paper.

He was angry, he had said, because he and his colleagues couldn’t get enough visas for ‘foreign girls’ for the clubs. What are we supposed to do, he had proclaimed, get ‘our women’ to work in these places?

‘Our women’.

‘Ours’.

No, the club was no place for Cypriot girls, the holy princesses.

These girls would now be walking around the dusk streets below her in their tight jeans and tottering heels and big hair pretending they didn’t notice the slick-haired men trailing them in their noisy sports cars.

Pedrag or Markus or whatever his ugly name had been, had slid into the seat opposite her in a café in the town where she had got a job as a nanny in another province. Her father had cried inconsolably when she had left Ozaro but her imagination couldn't turn it into Paris or London anymore and she had to get out. He promised to care for Mouse who was now old and rusty with gray flecks in his fur.

Pedrag or Markus had been so charming and handsome and expensively dressed.

That should have alerted her but she was too young she saw now as she passed the next balcony which held a little boy with his back turned to her, negotiating a ball around the legs of a table.

Pedrag had promised her work in Cyprus. They need cleaners and nannies and urgently, he had said, with a dentist-treated smile and lazy eyes which she found dangerous but engaging.

She was used to this. Men sidling up to her trying to make inroads into her space. In response, she had picked up her paper and held it in front of her face, blocking him out.

Why is the pretty girl pretending I am not here, he had asked and she could tell he was smiling.

It was impossible and ridiculous. She couldn’t feign ignorance of his presence. She had put her paper down and looked him directly in the eyes. He had summoned a waiter and ordered more coffee.

What do you make now? he had asked. She hadn’t replied. Well you can make $200 a day there, he had said lighting up a cigarette and looking at her narrowly.

Then he had offered her a cigarette and told her how he had been so drunk the night before that all he remembered was turning the ignition in his car then waking up in bed this morning. She relaxed and laughed and she wasn’t someone who laughed easily.

You’ll be able to buy Versace, he said, lighting her cigarette.

It’s always sunny there. You can go to the beach every day, he added.

If you want to know more about my offer, he had said suddenly toughening, phone me tomorrow.

That night she hadn’t slept. She saw herself operating on a sick dog and saving its life. If she went to Cyprus, in one, maybe two years she would have enough to study to become a vet. Her heart beat rapidly.

The next day she stood by the old brown telephone at the house. Olga, who had leukemia, was having a day when she would not accept her medicine. Anna was refusing to get dressed or have her hair brushed and Pavel trailed her asking in his soft voice if she was happy or sad.

She had taken a deep breath and phoned Pedrag.

The ground flew towards her. The bins were open and full, one with lavender-coloured trash bags. She wondered if they smelled of flowers.

Then, ‘please God’, she whimpered rotating her arms and legs to try to fly, and in the time it took her to say this she passed three more balconies one darkened and sinister and two with drying laundry.

‘Not me’, she felt rather than thought as she slammed into the bins at 135 miles an hour.

It took Svetlana 1.7 seconds to fall from the seventh floor balcony and hit the ground.

A neighbour later told police, it sounded like something breaking.