TW for racist language (untranslated, used by Grigori).

Feel it's probably obvious, but just in case, Ilya's internal monologue is in Russian, so no language difficulties there.

‘I hated it,’ said Yuna Hollander, and laughed.

‘I said, I want to go home. I said, Okaasan, why are we in this terrible place?’

Ilya was helpless not to like her. He was helpless against most mothers really, but especially Shane’s.

‘And then, hockey.’

Hockey! Hockey, like a miracle from heaven descending, a gleaming light illuminating the darkness. Her dad turned on the tv and they all sat in a row on the couch, Yuna and her littlest brother on the floor in front, and the announcer said Hockey Night In Canada Brought To You By Imperial Oil And Esso Dealers, Agents and Distributers and her whole world lit up, she found the steady beat of the universe and the singular point of life.

That was how she made it sound. No wonder Shane was Shane. Probably she had eaten hockey pucks while pregnant with him.

Ilya was sitting shoeless and cross-legged on his chair, listening as intently as possible to everything Yuna said. She was sat on the couch, and the gestures she made as she spoke were graceful and precise, a counterpoint to her words which were always articulate but sometimes lapsed into startling vulgarity. Her whole face was wonderful when she smiled.

Ilya liked her so much. He had never expected that; when he had seen her face as he walked in after Shane, her complete befuddlement and distaste at the sight of him, he had thought Oh fuck, and not, I am going to like this woman as much as I like Svetlana.

He should have known better. Shane was so good himself. Ilya should have known that his mother must be good too, to have raised Shane. Look at her, her son was not even there, was even now driving over from Montreal, and she still welcomed his boyfriend in, still fed him and talked to him and smiled at him.

It was the bye-week before All-Star. Shane and Ilya would be driving down to the cottage in the morning, but Ilya knew Shane would want to see his parents at least briefly. They’d already had to negotiate Christmas, not because Ilya cared, but because time was short and flight times difficult.

Ilya hadn’t minded hugely. For the first time, the three days mandated off for Western Christmas felt like more than a welcome pause in the season. Actual Christmas felt incredibly irrelevant, regardless of calendar. Ilya’s mother had been the religious one. New Year’s had been mildly important to Ilya’s father as an excuse for heavy drinking and the annual totting up of Ilya and Alexei’s many defects, but not much more.

Usually, Ilya spent the three days off in bed, with or without company, or, in earlier years, with Kohen before he’d been traded. They’d eaten Chinese food and bitched about the rest of their team’s Christmas obsession.

But now it had meant he could see Shane, and so he had got out of practice on the 23^rd and flown out to Ottawa at Shane’s invitation. Or rather his parents’ invitation. He left again on the 26^th, but even this small gap of time had been too desirable to miss. Christmas was still meaningless, but seeing Shane was not.

It had been fascinating to see him with his parents. The holiday was by nature a trap for sentimentality and nostalgia, for family memories and the kind of North American gush Ilya would always find baffling. Sickly sweet and earnest. 

The Hollanders were not like that. How they loved one another, those three. How they enjoyed one another too, genuinely liked to be in one another’s company. It had been, in the bitchy phrase of Marleau’s Isabel (a fellow non-American), anthropologically interesting.

Having run that gauntlet, it hadn’t felt like so much to agree to spend a night in Ottawa again. It had meant he would be alone with Shane’s parents until Shane arrived, but that no longer frightened Ilya as much as it had done in the summer. Both Yuna and David texted him and there had been two actual video calls when Ilya had been with Shane post-Raiders vs. Metros.

Hockey, Shane, immigration: that was enough to be going on. Ilya had even less to speak about with Shane’s father, and they got on all right, largely by, well, not speaking. That was okay. The not-speaking wasn’t the bad kind, and Ilya had a lot of familiarity with that. It was nice, to sit on the couch and watch stupid films with Shane’s dad. Nobody was shouting, nobody was crying, nobody had thrown a glass at the wall, not cleaned it up, and called you a faggot for yelping when you put your socked foot straight into the shards. Nobody was disappointed. David had thanked him very genuinely for the wine he had brought with him, had seemed actually pleased.

But it was Yuna he could relax around, Yuna who openly told him she hated the brand of chocolates he’d brought last time and flowers instead were fine if he had to bring a gift (Ilya, Russian to his core no matter what, had blinked confusedly at this assertion), Yuna who sent him recipes she thought he would like and showed him how to cook them, Yuna who said he didn’t need to sit up straight like a soldier when they were chatting together on the couch after supper, Yuna who wiped at a smudge on his cheek with no more hesitation than she would use with Shane, Yuna who produced the name of an immigration lawyer and expressed her outrage at his agent’s management of his sponsorship, Yuna who didn’t mind if he stood too close during conversations and who patted his shoulder comfortably, Yuna who got out the photo albums and told him everything, everything he could possibly want to know about Shane’s childhood.

At first it had felt weird and uncomfortable – why would he care about Shane’s passionate love of frogs when he was five? – but now he couldn’t get enough. He still didn’t understand the point, exactly, but it felt so cosy and familial. Anything was better than small talk, anyway, an American and Canadian institution Ilya would never acclimatise to.

Even better was getting Yuna to talk about herself.

She too knew what it was to be a stranger in a strange land. It was different of course, Ilya had been an adult or nearly, a desirable talent, a desirable immigrant, white, male, a prize bullock brought in as new stock for the failing farm that had been the Raiders when he arrived, and the 1970s were a world away from the 2000s, but the culture shock, the language problem, that they had in common.

It helped that he could ask her good questions, that he could display genuine interest in her experience. Ilya had been nervous, and unsure, and it had taken Yuna a few visits to warm up to him but now she liked him, he was almost sure.

And Ilya liked her hugely, but he’d known that since that last summer night with Shane, dinner with his parents and a divine revelation: You Like Your Boyfriend’s Mother. It was such a relief. Shane loved his parents. If Ilya couldn’t like them it would be a real problem.

Occasionally he could see Yuna remembered that this was Evil Ilya Rozanov sitting in her house, Evil Ilya Rozanov who took first in the draft over her darling baby boy and also regularly shoved her aforesaid darling baby boy into the boards while visibly enjoying it, but she got over it pretty quickly.

Besides, this was increasingly balanced by the fact that Evil Ilya Rozanov was revoltingly besotted with Yuna’s only son, and (possibly more importantly, not that Yuna would admit this) played really, really good hockey, even if it was for Boston and it was against Shane. Yuna was nothing if not fair-minded, and Yuna loved nothing more than good hockey. She was like Shane that way. Fuck personalities, fuck morals, so long as you played well, Yuna would always acknowledge it.

‘I learnt my best English from hockey games,’ Yuna confided.

‘Me also,’ Ilya said. From watching tapes of his potential rivals in Worlds and later the draft, but whatever.

‘Did they teach you English in school? Here it’s always French and English. I thought about putting Shane in Japanese classes, but, well…’

‘Yes, but I was not a good student,’ Ilya told her. ‘I hated learning English.’

‘The alphabet,’ Yuna said sympathetically. ‘And no articles, right?’

‘No articles,’ Ilya confirmed, though that had been the least of his troubles.

‘For hockey you don’t need them anyway,’ Yuna teased.

What was it like to have that epiphany, that this was the thing you loved, this was the thing the world was about? Shane must have had the same thing, or perhaps, born into those waters, swimming in a sea of hockey, he hadn’t known how to breath any different.

Ilya was different. Hockey was not the foundation of his life. It was not the meaning. He had not had any divine revelation about it. As a small child he had liked to skate. Then he had liked to play hockey. Then he had liked the praise he received, the adults whispering behind their hands, the boy’s a natural, the way he had outstripped his peers, the way it made his father look at him.

After that, the grinding hard work demanded of him, the growing pressure, it stripped hockey of every pleasure except the pleasure of winning, the pleasure of getting his opponents to react, the pleasure of making them admit he topped them all.

When he lost it, it would trouble him, because he loved to excel and loved (like every single other athlete ever) to win, but he would not need to find a replacement source of oxygen. That was not its purpose in his life.

Fun, attention. And then, finally, it had meant escape. Freedom. Transplanted from your own terrain to a new world, cutting loose

Only even when he had got out on its back, no longer tied down, tetherless, he found that the soil you grew in never let you go entirely. You thought it was long gone, that you were safely uprooted, and then you found, sweeping your hands down casually, that there were crumbs of earth in your pockets, roots curling around your feet.

*

The alphabet wasn’t as hard as all that. Ilya simply hadn’t applied himself until he had to, because he hated learning grammar in any language. Boston had been trial-by-fire, immersion course on steroids, but as English-first-language hockey players tended to have a fairly limited vocabulary in the locker room anyway, it hadn’t been as much of a problem as Ilya had been afraid of.

 But fuck, the interviewers, the press, the sponsors, management, they never seemed to consider that Ilya might not have understood what they had said, and if they realised they treated him like an idiot. Like because his English was bad, he must just be a muscle-bound moron, a thug who didn’t have enough brain to think.

There had been some bad moments, to the point Ilya briefly considered looking for a tutor, but then Sara, wife of the player Ilya was billeted with to begin with, started making him talk to her while she cooked supper, and Marleau took to dragging him out clubbing (surprisingly useful crash course actually) or to watch a movie, or began pointless, complicated conversations while they worked out together in the gym.

The incentive of being able to flirt more effectively over text had ultimately been more of an inducement, to be honest.

‘You’re always on your fucking phone, man,’ Marleau had said last week. Ilya had laughed it off but lately it was true. Always texting Shane or looking for Shane to have texted.

The phone was all they had at the moment, during the season. It was only a year, Ilya kept telling himself, and they did play each other, so they would see each other occasionally, just like always. They might be able to steal a day or two as well, if everything lined up.

Texting was fine and hearing Shane’s voice was better, but it was tiring too, these long conversations in a different language when he was already physically exhausted. Ilya had never had a serious relationship before, had never had more than casual sex since his teen years, excluding Svetlana, and so had never had to come home and still speak English even if he wasn’t going out with the team.

Sometimes he saved his good English for Shane. Sometimes, more and more often these days, he didn’t. It was more important to sound fluent, intelligent around his team, the managers, the press. Shane knew he spoke English. Shane wouldn’t think he was stupid if he dropped articles, mixed tenses, put prepositions in the wrong place.

But neither option ever felt right. It was frustrating when Ilya had to get his point across and didn’t. It was frustrating playing his own words back, listening to how he had sounded when it all sounded wrong.

Fuck he hated English. Fuck he wished Shane knew Russian, except not, because then he would have understood what Ilya had been saying when he rang in Moscow.

He teased Shane for being mono-not-quite-bilingual sometimes.

‘Uh, I mean, you don’t speak French.’

‘And you don’t speak Russian,’ Ilya shot back, kindly not pointing out that while Shane’s French was good, his accent was stilted and caused Saint-Simon (French mother, American father) to full-body flinch when he heard it.

‘I’m learning!’

He was. It was slow going which was not a surprise. Shane was trying, but Russian was hard and he was incredibly busy anyway. And Ilya was weirdly reluctant to help. He wanted not to have to speak English always. But Shane knowing that side of him felt dimly threatening.

When Ilya muttered and cursed to himself in Russian because he had dropped his mug while on the phone to Shane, he could not match Shane’s excitement at having understood what Ilya had said. It was scalding. It was red-hot needles run down the tender inner flesh of his arm.

There weren’t words in Russian for what he wanted to say anyway. Or rather. There weren’t words he was willing to use.

*

David was opening the front door, Ilya could hear him. He shot up in his chair, ears straining. It might be a neighbour, it might be a deliveryman, it might be an unexpected guest and Ilya would have to hide upstairs – but no, there was Shane’s low, levelled voice, Hi, Dad.

When he turned back to Yuna, she was looking at him with raised eyebrows and a smile.

‘Go on,’ she said indulgently.

Ilya bounced to his feet, said in one breathless rush ‘Please tell me more about you and hockey later,’ (because he actually did want to hear) and shot through to the entrance where David had just finished hugging Shane.

Ilya suddenly couldn’t move. He stood in the doorway, sure his every thought was written across his face and unable to care or conceal, and Shane looked over and saw him. He smiled, put down the bag he was holding, and then Ilya was enveloped in his arms, Shane holding him close and reaching out to bring him closer and kiss him, not caring that David was right there.

If Shane didn’t care, Ilya didn’t care. He kissed back enthusiastically and then broke off so he cup Shane’s face in his hands and look at him properly.

Shane looked tired, damp from the rain and a little worn, a coffee-stain on his hoodie (Ilya was amazed he hadn’t stripped it off the moment he got in the house, he hated to wear dirty clothes of any kind), but his eyes were alight. He kissed Ilya again, brought a firm hand to the back of his neck and squeezed.

‘I’m just gonna –’ A voice said from behind them, and then David squeezed past them with his head down in case he saw something he didn’t want to.

‘Sorry, Dad!’ Shane called after him, but he was grinning.

‘Sorry, David!’ Ilya echoed, and he was grinning too.

‘Your father is much more tactful than you are,’ he told Shane.

‘Yeah, well, if you’d rather go talk about the New Yorker with him –’ Shane couldn’t even complete the joke, shook his head and touched his hand to Ilya’s face.

‘I’m so fucking glad you’re here. Thank you for –’

‘We have made your bird food for you,’ Ilya interrupted before Shane could do something stupid like apologising to Ilya for having to exist near his parents. ‘And your mother showed me how to cook the edamame beans you like. It’s in the fridge.’

‘Help me take my bags upstairs first,’ Shane said, looking up under his eyelashes like some 1920s black-and-white movie vamp. Where had he even learnt to do that?

Ilya said severely, ‘Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep.’ Then he spoilt it by laughing, because Shane was absolutely not going to suggest a quickie while his parents waited downstairs. Don’t write a cheque you can’t cash, David had said over on a business call earlier.

They could – how had David put it, watching that film at Christmas? – ‘neck’ for while instead, maybe, if Shane didn’t get anxious about his parents knowing what they were doing or being rude or something.

Ilya didn’t care. Shane was here. The ceaseless milling thoughts that pursued Ilya these days when he was without him could stop. He only wanted to be close to Shane, as close as he could get, covered by and intwined with him, until the outside world was no more than a faint dream against this happiness.

*

Ottawa was going to be lonely, and Boston would be too, once people found out he was going to be traded. To stave off those thoughts, Ilya wrapped himself up in Shane as best as he could. As much as Shane would allow. Ilya wasn’t stupid. He knew Shane didn’t always like Ilya to be on top of him, metaphorically speaking. He tried not to smother him. If he could he would crawl inside of Shane and live there, very quietly, so quietly Shane could not possibly be bothered by him and that would just about be close enough, but as it was, he couldn’t, and he had to give Shane space before Shane got fed up with him.

They had said I love you. They had said it over and over again. Shane meant it and Ilya knew that, did not doubt that. But Ilya had also said I don’t ever want the problem to ever go away and though in the lead-up he had been teasing and by the end he thought Shane was made happy by it, Shane had not reciprocated.

Don’t marry Svetlana – that was Shane’s equivalent. That was what Shane was able to say to him, the only way he could say it. The desperate assurances Ilya wanted to demand, something even stronger than I love you so much, something like I will never, ever leave you, you are mine forever and we won’t part, he could not possibly ask of Shane. Neediness was unattractive and unfair.

There was nothing wrong with not stating things directly, or there hadn’t been. Now, it made Ilya uneasier than he cared to admit.

Ilya prided himself on his reading of others, learnt off living with a man with a mercurial temper at the best of times and whose slightest facial twitch represented some infinitesimal shift in mood, but Shane was tricky. It was hard sometimes to know what Shane was thinking or feeling when mostly Shane didn’t seem to know either. And when Ilya did know, Shane didn’t always, and he didn’t want to have to tell Shane what he felt. They were less often on different pages than they had been before, at least.

It was not impossible that Ilya could fall out of love with Shane or get fed up with him. Nothing under the sun was impossible, as Ilya had learnt when he was twelve. He did not think it was even slightly likely he would do either of those things, and more to the point he had no desire to do so, but you never knew.

You couldn’t predict the future. In the old exhausted cliché that was a cliché for a reason, he could get hit by a car tomorrow. Maybe he would get brain damage from a concussion and have a full personality change. Maybe he would get dementia.

Ilya wanted a future with Shane, had started tentatively planning for the long-term but that didn’t mean he would rely on it even as he planned and performed that plan. His actions had to remain separate from his rational thoughts.

At the same time as he admitted the possibility, examined it and dismissed it as implausible and certainly irrelevant for now, he had to admit it was much, much likelier that Shane would get fed up with him, that Shane would fall out of love with him.

Ilya was a lot. He kept it in check, but he was loud and energetic, and he took up a lot of space physically. Shane’s parents had been utterly bewildered by their son’s choice. Shane was building towards telling Hayden fucking Pike, and Ilya could already tell that that was going to be Pike’s reaction too: Why him? You can do so much better.

That was true, of course. Anybody with eyes could see that Ilya was a bad bet. A poor choice of investment. But if Shane was nice enough to overlook that (for now, anyway) then Ilya didn’t see why other people should go around saying it.

A lot of work, the sadness and the laziness and the high sex drive and the neediness. The last especially disgusted Ilya. It revolted him but he could not turn it off, not completely, not when Shane was far away and they saw each other only briefly and he had, he had to soak up as much of Shane as he could before one of them left again.

Otherwise he was working on damping it down apart from his libido because they were pretty well matched on that at least.

Shane was a lot of work too sometimes. He never did seem to know what he was feeling. Ilya often didn’t share what he was feeling or actively tried to change it, but he knew his own emotions.

It was why he had treated Shane casually for as long as he had, avoided emotional intimacy, panicked and ghosted and pretended. The line they were walking was a dangerous one, and Ilya had tried for a long not to tip over the wrong side. Not to fall in love. Once it was too late, once it had happened, he did not pretend to himself it had not, but he tried his best to keep it contained.

At the time, all those years ago, Shane had thought he wanted to know about Ilya and Russia, but he hadn’t. Not then. Ilya had known that if he sought to return Shane’s occasional overtures to serious conversation, Shane would freak.

And Shane had. Had run away from – not even a conversation. Two simple words. Ilya. Shane. That had been enough. Pre-Rose Landry, if Ilya had tried to explain any of what he was feeling, never mind the house, Shane would have fled the fucking country.

It was possible to know somebody too well. Ilya had known both his father and brother in this way. Sometimes he thought his mother had known his father and his brother and Ilya in this way, and that was why.

He was still worried Shane might bolt once he saw the sheer rottenness at the heart of Ilya’s soul, the wood-wormed riddle framework of his emptiness. I love you was not the all-powerful token others seemed to treat it as, the final word, the signature on the dotted line. They were so light with it in America and Canada. They tossed it around until it lost all meaning.

Besides. Saying it and meaning it, using it sparingly or not at all but allowing the fact of your love to shine through – that meant nothing. People loved you and they left you anyway.

It secured you the moment but nothing beyond that. All Ilya could do was stave that off for as long as possible. Try to bind Shane as tightly to himself as possible, until it was as unthinkable for Shane to leave him as it was for Ilya to leave him.

*

Now, bags stowed upstairs, Ilya hiding the marks on his neck with a turtleneck, Shane finished with his disgusting dinner, they were all watching a film in the living room.

Ilya had sort of expected the Hollanders’ Ottawa house to be more lived in than either of the cottages, but no. It was not quite like a showroom, cold and unlived in, but it was very smart, sophisticated, full of clean lines and dark wood. The dusty curtains at home, the heavy and elaborate furnishings, the endless trinkets and curios, photographs and mementos cluttering every surface, the ornate decorations, the old-fashioned taste Ilya had grown up with, all of those had no place in the modern Hollanders’ modern house in modern Canada.

Yuna and Ilya sat on the sofa, Shane and David in armchairs. Ilya clutched a cushion to him. He’d been careful not to sit right at the end, standoffishly far, but also not too close, close in a way that felt natural to him, but put North Americans off. During Ilya’s rookie season, Saint-Simon had actually put a hand on his chest and moved him back a foot, saying Kid, I can hear you, you don’t need to stand two inches from my face. Ilya hadn’t even known he was doing it.

Ilya wasn’t very invested in the film, which David said was a Canadian classic and seemed notably sappy, but Yuna and David were both eyes front, fixed on the screen. It wasn’t boring because the comfort of being amidst Shane’s family was never boring. But he did wish he could be alone with Shane.

Shane wasn’t paying attention either. He had his glasses on and was reading again.

The book was Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which Ilya hadn’t heard of until Shane had bought it, and now he wished he hadn’t.

Books weren’t going to get you anywhere. Ilya, who was not exactly a cultural person, was also not going to get you anywhere. He hadn’t even bought Shane Orlov like he’d said he would, because actually when he thought about it, Orlov was incredibly dull.

Give up, Shane.

But Shane kept reading his bad books, and doing his language apps, and making Ilya tell him random words in Russian and write him notes in Cyrillic so he could practice. He was threatening to take an intensive course next summer which seemed like a complete waste of scarce time off to Ilya, but when Shane got that look in his eyes he knew he couldn’t shift him. They’d already had that conversation.

*

They had snatched an evening together after a game (Raiders lost and on home turf too, which Ilya was not overjoyed about, but meant he wasn’t going to be dragged off by his team for celebrations when he could be with Shane instead). They fucked, and then they made supper out of the horse fodder Shane considered a healthy diet, and then they showered together (fucking again to save time) and got into bed. It was the first time since the tuna melt incident that Shane had been to Ilya’s house and something purred inside his chest with the satisfaction of it. He hadn’t made much effort with the place, hadn’t tried to stamp his personality on it or whatever you were supposed to do, just had it kitted out by someone Svetlana recommended, insisted on a huge tv, huger sofa, thrown a few pieces of art up he mildly liked and called it a day. Shane in his bed improved its appearance beyond belief.

Ilya scrolled through his phone, occasionally pausing to send Svetlana a particularly ugly cat photo with Ты as the caption, while to his untold happiness Shane put on his reading glasses and settled down with a paperback.

It was only after Ilya grew bored with doomscrolling and the lure of Shane’s glasses proved too much that he looked over, preparatory to pouncing, to see that Shane was reading the translated works of a certain murdered journalist.

Ilya winced. That was the Russia he knew. Not the only Russia, but a larger part of it than he necessarily liked to remember.

If Shane was going to waste his time on this, why not fiction? That was the bright, clean side, even the most fatalistic, pessimistic classic was surely more enjoyable. But no to Pushkin or Lermontov (Ilya’s secret favourite), no Shushkin, Ulitskaya or Platanov. Shane liked hard facts. Ilya had forgotten that. This whole insane project was after all based off Shane’s desire for hard, cold empirical data – about Ilya. Ultimately.

If Ilya had been born in Warsaw or Shanghai or Freetown or Adelaide, Shane would never have picked up a book on Russia in his life. That largely felt flattering, but also vaguely alarming.

Ilya had liked history in school, the cleaned-up version, all those colourful stories. That was what he had liked. Non-fiction held few attractions. Real life was bad enough, why bore yourself into a coma reading more of it?

And personal histories were the most tedious of them all. The story you told others, the story others told about you, they were so futile. The hunger for factual knowledge – Ilya didn’t care. Past, present, future, were only what you chose to remember and not what happened. None of it was real or true or controllable. You tangled with it at your peril.

Sveta texted him back a picture of a stupendously hideous macaque. Ilya automatically searched уродливая лысая мышь and sent her the resulting image.

They could keep this up for hours.

Shane turned a page in his book. Svetlana texted to say she would never again help him get a new obscenely expensive car. Added, I went to the cemetery like you asked. Katya brought Sonyechka. The following photo showed flowers on his mother’s grave, and then Svetlana standing with Katya and Sonyechka outside the gates.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Svetlana with my niece and sister-in-law.’

Ilya was trying to be better at talking about these things with Shane. If he opened the door enough for a chink of light to shine through, Shane might stop asking about the other things, the things Ilya did not and sometimes could not discuss.

Shane leant over. ‘She’s cute,’ he said. ‘She looks like her mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Sonyechka. Sofia, but she is always Sonya. After our aunt.’

‘Pretty name.’

‘Alexei wanted to call her Irina,’ Ilya said without thinking. ‘Katya thought it was too sad. And Papa might not have liked it.’

And there it was, he was thinking about those things again. Since the photos came, since the summer, they had been moving through his mind with ever-greater force.

It wasn’t so bad, to think about his mother. His mother, who couldn’t play the piano or dance but loved to skate and read obsessively until the last few years of her life. She would have loved Shane, Ilya was sure of it. He was her kind of person. She admired passion and excellence, dedication to anything so long as it was intense, liked to see people devote themselves to their craft and hone it into the superlative.

Would she have been upset, at her son loving another man? Ilya couldn’t know, but he believed because he had to believe that she would have accepted it eventually. She had been compassionate. She had been charitable. Heart overflowing. Soft, Papa called it. Our little saint, Ilya’s aunts sneered. Crying over a dead squirrel, loving to clutch the cats at the dacha close to her breast, going over twice a week to help their elderly neighbour wash her hair, petting Ilya too much when he was small, helping Svetlana draw a card for Sergei Mikhailovich’s birthday, sighing over the caged birds Papa’s sister kept, kissing Alexei’s knee where he’d scraped it, in floods at a sad news story on the television, begging Papa to kill the mice in their traps because she couldn’t bear to do it herself.

Not a saint at all despite all that. A connoisseur of ridiculousness, her sense of humour had been sharp, her enjoyment of other people’s foibles pronounced and merciless. Her postmortem of a dinner party had even been able to make Papa laugh. But a good person. Fundamentally kind, even as she laughed.

Such persons were not made for the real world.

‘How long have you known Svetlana?’ This was Shane’s version of practicing tact, to ask that instead of about Ilya’s niece or brother.

Ever since they been plunked at either end of Svetlana’s playroom and ordered to play nicely together. The adults cooed at the charming sight they made, the little fair-haired boy, the little dark-haired girl, settling down side-by-side to build a tower of blocks. From behind, the adults could not see the highly suspicious sizing up that was going on between them. Svetlana, only child, was affronted by the invasion of her territory; Ilya, younger brother to the ever-mercurial Alexei, recognised the expression and braced himself for battle.

Within five minutes Svetlana had hit him on the head with a wooden block and Ilya had bitten her in retaliation. Screaming and crying, they were forcibly separated, placed in separate corners and told to think about what they had done. Svetlana’s nanny left the room for perhaps two minutes, and came back to find mutiny in progress, the nursery curtains torn down, a vase smashed and Ilya and Svetlana desperately attempting to move the chest-of-drawers across the doorway.

His father had been furious. Sergei Mikhailovich is a gold medallist and a hero of our country, how dare you behave so badly towards his only daughter?

His mother had told him off too. Hitting and biting, that’s appalling! You should never, ever hit girls, Ilyusha, it’s a wicked thing to do. You could have hurt her.

But Svetlana, lectured in much the same fashion (Grigori Sergeevich is an important man and an old friend of your uncle’s, how dare you treat his son your guest like that? if Ilya had to guess) had laid out a flat demand for Ilya’s immediate return, and what Svetlana wanted, she mostly got. Ilya was duly reintroduced to her nursery the following week, presented to her by Sergei Mikhailovich himself as if he were a birthday gift.

Under the gimlet eye of Svetlana’s nanny (now firmly on her guard after the reaming Sergei Mikhailovich had given her), they decorously built a castle out of blocks, Ilya obediently acceding to Svetlana’s every command. At some point Sveta worked out Ilya was easy to boss around, eager to please, was always prepared to follow her into mischief and quite good at coming up with it himself, and after that they were inseparable.

Ilya’s father couldn’t decide if he was happy about it or not. On the one hand, Vetrov was a useful person to keep close. On the other, there was something suspicious about his son spending all his time with a girl. Mama said mildly, ‘They’re only four, Grisha’, not that that cut any ice.

Most of this was not memory. It was the memory of a memory, of being told about it by the adults later. Mama especially found it funny, but Sergei Mikhailovich also liked to reminisce about Svetlana’s imperiousness, her power over Ilya, and laugh about the whirlwind tangle of fists and teeth that had concluded in a lifelong friendship.

She was indeed her father’s only daughter, the apple of his eye. His women came and mostly went, and if they were sensible they endeavoured to get on with Sveta because they were all entirely disposable parts when compared to Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova.

(Stepmother No.4, who was going on for a record six years and whom Sveta called ‘Зайка Грозная’, had sensibly devoted her energies to amassing Persian cats instead of antagonising her stepdaughter. Sergei Mikhailovich was not particularly interested in his sons by her but then, neither was their mother. Svetlana certainly wasn’t. ‘She’s stupid,’ Svetlana said dismissively. ‘The boys too.’)

‘Forever. Almost always. We were small.’

‘That’s nice,’ Shane said. He put his book down on the bedside table and burrowed his way into Ilya’s side. ‘I’m glad you have her,’ was his stifled addition.

‘She’s great.’ Shane was so warm against his side. Ilya caressed his hair, rubbed his neck in gentle circles. ‘Oldest friend. We went to school together also.’

They had called Svetlana names at school. Abominable names. They had used words that in America, in Boston would get you beaten to a pulp (it had got you beaten to a pulp at Svetlana’s school also, but because of Ilya). Svetlana’s beautiful, stylish mother, they called her an ape, a monkey. Ilya’s father had once said shortly ‘чёрная’. Then he added, ‘But the child is beautiful, at least.’

It got bad enough that Svetlana’s father shipped her off to boarding school in Switzerland. Sveta threw a massive tantrum and spent all summer sulking. After that Ilya saw less of her, though even before that they had been on separate paths between training and school. But she was his fallback. She was the single part of his past that he wanted to keep. The single part that wanted to keep him.

‘I’d like to meet her,’ Shane said into Ilya’s side.

‘Mm. She will bully you terribly, you will hate her.’ Shane’s idea of a female friend was Rose fucking Landry, Hollywood golden girl and revoltingly, saccharinely nice in that American way. Svetlana in her worst cat mood would eat Shane alive. More importantly, she would eat Rose alive. Hmm, perhaps Ilya should see if he could facilitate that meeting…

‘No, I won’t.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Ilya admitted. Cat mood didn’t last forever with Svetlana. ‘She will bully you to make sure you are tough and will stick with me, and then she will realise you are perfect, and you two will bully me together instead.’ She will love you because I love you.

‘She can tell me all your most embarrassing secrets.’ Shane’s breath was hot against Ilya’s bare leg.

‘You already know them. I am in love with boring, ginger ale obsessed, evil bird-speaking Canadian man, so gone in love it is totally humiliating, it is utterly pathetic and Svetlana laughs at me. I am, what does Marly say, ‘whipped’.’

Shane laughed and nuzzled in closer. It was good, but –

The book cover shone slightly under the bedside lamp. The murdered journalist’s face was on the front cover, smiling, spectacled, serious, dead.

‘Why are you reading this?’ Ilya asked, though he had told himself he wouldn’t. ‘Depressing, no?’

Shane sighed and removed his face from Ilya’s thigh.

‘Because it’s interesting,’ he said. ‘We talked about this, Ilya.’

Well. Sort of. Shane was bad at explaining himself but Ilya understand him anyway.

‘Okay,’ Ilya said, because he didn’t actually want to pick a fight. He just wished Shane would give up on this. It bothered him and he didn’t know why. Or he knew why and didn’t know how to explain it to Shane. Or he knew how to explain it to Shane and didn’t want to, because it would hurt Shane to hear it.

I don’t want you to hurt yourself to make me happy.

Ilya didn’t want Shane to hurt himself to make him happy either. And it would, eventually. What was pleasant about reading about murders, corruption and cover-ups, the ugly, ugly side of Ilya’s country that was not even an underside because everybody knew and nobody dared talk about it? The side that was increasingly more and more of it.

And the more Shane knew of it, the more he would know Ilya. Ilya believed what he had told Shane, that last night at the cottage, that they knew and understood each other inherently. The gaps were there, maybe, but they weren’t relevant. They weren’t necessary. They were dangerous to Shane’s view of Ilya. Maybe to his love too.

‘It’s kind of nice to study again,’ Shane was saying. ‘I didn’t like school, but the reading was good, I guess.’

‘You are studying me or studying Russia?’ Ilya asked lightly.

‘Both,’ Shane said firmly, and buried his face back against Ilya’s thigh. Then he nipped Ilya, right in the fleshy part.

‘Oh, so that’s what you do now?’ Ilya said once he’d finished swearing.

‘You like it.’

Unfortunately, he did. Shane was smirking, pointedly not looking at Ilya’s groin.

‘You are such a fucking tease,’ Ilya told him.

‘I’m a tease? Me? Look in the mirror, Rozanov,’ and then Ilya was rolling him over and off his legs so he could cover him with his body and stop the words entirely.

As he did, he thought with a little wriggle of unworthy pleasure, that Shane loved him at least as much as hockey right now. That Shane was studying him as he had studied hockey. Maybe Mr Highest Hockey IQ In The League was aiming to also be Mr Doctorate In Ilya Rozanov Studies too.

*

Obsessed. Like a bug under a magnifying glass. Ilya didn’t know how to say any of that in English without freaking Shane out. He liked it. He loved it. Now he had lured the bird to his hand and slipped the hood over its head, didn’t have to worry that Shane might bolt, slip free of him, he was 100% down for Shane’s weird obsessiveness. He quite literally couldn’t get enough of it. He wanted Shane to be even more obsessed with him if possible (it seemed unlikely).

The Russia/childhood thing he could maybe do without, okay, but what it represented was indescribably satisfying, secure-making. There was nothing like having Shane’s complete attention, the way that under the correct circumstances he fixated on what he was doing and let everything else drop by the wayside.

That first time Shane had sucked his cock, Jesus fucking Christ. Like having a lamprey attached to your dick. A leech. Ilya had been worried he might have to pry him off with a crowbar.

That was fine. Ilya couldn’t get enough of Shane’s kisses. His embraces. His words and his looks and his touches and yes, okay, his dick. Of Shane’s love. Ilya’s was a greedy mouth, forever open, forever empty, forever screeching out Fill me up, больше, больше, as bad as the rest of his family. Like a screaming child throwing a tantrum, impossible to ever pacify.

Ilya had heard an alarming amount about his inner child from those yoga videos Shane made him do with him sometimes. He didn’t like it. Wasn’t the whole point of being an adult that you didn’t have to have an inner child anymore? You were grown up and powerful and in control, and you didn’t have to do those things you didn’t want to. You might find yourself doing them anyway, but they couldn’t make you, you had to make yourself.

Ilya hadn’t liked being a child. Describing to Shane himself at eight, he had left several parts out, not because he wanted to lie to Shane but because they just didn’t seem relevant, they would distort the picture, maybe trick Shane into feeling sorry for him. He was by nature upbeat or at least energetic about life which was often close enough to be mistaken for the real thing, but he had not liked childhood very much.

*

The film was over. David had gone through to the kitchen to take a call from his sister. Shane was still reading that fucking book, but Ilya was distracted now because Yuna was telling him about meeting David at college, how immediately taken with each other they were. She smiled, remembering how serious David had been, how earnest a young man. It had charmed her, that straightforwardness.

‘But he made me laugh, as well,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t marry a man without a sense of humour.’

Shane had an excellent sense of humour, though hardly anybody seemed to notice. Had Grigori Rozanov made Irina Belova laugh when they met?

‘And the hockey didn’t hurt,’ she added.

‘Oh, I know,’ Ilya said, vamping to make her laugh. Then she reached out and tousled Ilya’s hair, for no reason.

Ilya loved that about her. She wasn’t touchy-feely, particularly, not a purveyor of the casual friendly touches Ilya was used to from his fellow Russians, but she was given to gestures of spontaneous physical affection when she was moved, if only to those whom she – well, she probably didn’t love Ilya, but people she liked, people she felt – close to, maybe? And she gave very, very good hugs. Every time Ilya arrived. Every time Ilya left.

Why that had made her come over all maternal, Ilya had no idea. Why he made her come over all maternal in general, Ilya had no idea either, but he certainly wasn’t going to turn it away. Nobody had mothered him since his mother died. It didn’t take Einstein to parse that equation.

‘I was distracted in class. I’d never been distracted in class. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was sick, I thought I had the flu or a brain tumour.’ 

You are so like Shane, Ilya thought. He’s like David in a lot of ways, that’s what I first noticed when we met, but at the core he’s your son.

‘I nearly failed that class. Too busy looking at the back of David’s head. Too busy worrying I needed a brain scan. I thought, If he doesn’t ask me out, I’ll die. So silly, so melodramatic.’

‘You were young,’ Ilya offered.

‘I was twenty! But I’d never had that teenage phase, I skipped all of that in high school.’ She regarded him humorously. ‘I bet you were a heartbreaker in school. I bet you distracted all the girls.’

‘I liked school,’ Ilya said, both because he had and because he wanted Yuna (who valued academic success) to think well of him. ‘They sent me to all-boys academy when I was thirteen. To focus on hockey. What did you do, about David?’

‘Oh, I thought he hadn’t noticed me at all. I thought if I didn’t do anything about it, nothing would ever happen. And then I’d die! So after Finals, I marched up to him as we got out of the exam room, and I said ‘Will you go out with me some time?’ He was so surprised, he stuttered and turned red and couldn’t look me in the eye, and he said something that sounded like ‘Okay’, and then he ran away.’ Yuna paused, shaking her head at herself. Shane, who had clearly heard this story a hundred times, turned another page in that fucking book.

‘I thought he didn’t know who I was, that he was creeped out, but later he found me walking out of the library, and he told me he was taking me out to that night to this restaurant he’d found, meet him at six sharp. Later he said he’d noticed me from the first day of class. He said he was too shy to talk to me and nearly had a heart attack when I came up to him. He couldn’t believe his luck and I couldn’t believe my luck, so that was good, right?’

‘Very good,’ Ilya said. It was sweet. Wholesome. A nice way to meet.

Yuna had clearly been warned by Shane to tread carefully around the topic of Ilya’s mother and father, but she had equally clearly not been warned in sufficient detail (so like to Shane, to consider that he should keep Ilya’s confidences even when it would help him to explain properly and Ilya need never know) because now she turned to Ilya and asked ‘You shouldn’t let me talk you to death. How did your parents meet, Ilya, do you know?’

Across the room, Shane’s head came up out of his book.

Ilya smiled back at her. He wasn’t so tender that such a question wounded him, and he wished Shane wouldn’t act as though his parents sinned in asking Ilya ordinary questions.

‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘She was younger than my father, I think it embarrassed him to talk about it.’

Shane’s head was still raised. Alert, like a pointer-dog.

Yuna made a noise of understanding then said ‘Well, we know how you two met, at least! Smoking in the no-smoking zone,’ pretending to be disapproving, and she touched Ilya’s arm, so naturally, so lovingly, like it was a wonderful thing to be able to mention, that she knew how they had met before she even knew Ilya, and there was a strong pressure in his chest, good or bad he couldn’t say.

*

Going home was dreadful before his mother died and dreadful afterwards. The whole house sunk in dread. When the teachers dismissed them, Ilya’s schoolmates rushed out to the gates, desperate to get home, while Ilya lingered, pretending to have lost such-and-such-a-thing, to have questions about class, to be reorganising his school bag, until Anna Ivanovna lost patience and sent him packing.

Hockey had been fun and then not fun. He failed his father again and again. Everybody pawed over him, talked about his potential and how he was failing to live up to it, and the other boys at the rink hated him for being held up to them as an example, Ilya Grigorievich is two years younger than you but he does not whine like a girl when the puck hits him, so why do you?, while at school he was always being told how lazy he was, how well he could do if only he exerted himself. Once they called his father in and after that he hated school a thousand times more.

When he got home he would throw his head on his mother’s lap and cry out his woes to her. He would demand her demonstrations of love, not the words (which he could hardly remember her ever saying), but the embraces, the caresses, the little signs and signals that he was the centre of her world. He’s too much, our Ilyushka, his aunts would say tsking. Such a loud little boy. So needy.

Ilya had always been like that. All his life. Even before his mother died. He could never have enough of her kisses, her hugs, her declarations of affection, he hung round her neck as much as she would let him and gloated with every private demonstration that she loved him more than Alexei, more than their father, more than anybody. He was the centre of her world, her most important person, and he had revelled in it. When she defended him to his grandfather, when she told Alexei off for bullying him, consoled him for the coldness with which his rare overtures to his father were met, insisted his uncle not discipline him for breaking a plate, his whole soul filled with a wicked delight.

But even that was not enough. With all of his mother’s love and attention, there was still that bottomless hunger.

Who knew why he was like that? Ilya had been born, not made. Not like Shane and hockey. Nothing wrecked him for a normal life. Nobody fucked him up. He came pre-fucked.

It wasn’t that Ilya doubted the security of Shane’s love, now. It was just he couldn’t quite believe in it all the time either. Shane’s analysis was reassuring because it showed Shane’s one-track mind was fixed on him, but it was also frightening because what would Shane discover? What would Shane realise about Ilya, that he might not have realised before? Where was the line drawn, past which Shane would be unable to take it anymore?

Ilya had been afraid once he took the stopper out, uncorked the bottle, the screaming hunger would never end. Before the cottage, he had been afraid to tell Shane he loved him for many, many reasons, including the impossibility of the situation and the likelihood it would scare Shane into bolting away forever into the metaphorical bushes, but also because of that raging appetite he knew lived in his own chest. And he’d been right. If Shane left him now, he would starve to death.

*

‘We could get a dog when we retire,’ Ilya mumbled that night in bed, lying his head on Shane’s stomach where Shane could get at his hair.

Shane’s bedroom was the bedroom of an adult, but there were remnants littered here and there of the boy he had been. Yuna kept Shane’s first pair of skates on her dressing table, but a stuffed elephant watched proceedings judgementally from her perch on the desk, the shelves held a few picture books of particular sentimental value amongst their endless hockey books (‘For when I have kids,’ Shane explained), and though the places where blue-tack marred the walls had been painted over, Shane’s childhood heroes lay stacked neatly in chronological order and near-mint condition in a large cardboard file at the bottom of the wardrobe, their faces grimacing at nobody.

‘We should get a dog once we’re retired,’ Ilya repeated when Shane seemed not to have heard.

The thought had appeared in his head out of nowhere, and since he was trying to be better about sharing his thoughts with Shane, he said it.

Okay, not nowhere, maybe. Yesterday on his way to the airport, he’d seen a mother and daughter waiting for the bus, a huge furry beast next to them with a red ribbon around its neck, like something out of a picture book. The little girl had her arms wrapped around it, her face buried in its long fur. The dog’s long-suffering expression had stayed with Ilya the whole way through security.

And he loved to plan for their future, the further away the better. Tomorrow was not reliable, but to talk of it as thought it was, to pretend it was reliable, assured, that Shane would be with him in ten years, twenty, to make Shane say it back to him, was obscurely satisfying.

‘Why would I get a dog when I already have you?’ Shane teased, burrowing his hands into Ilya’s curls. Ilya reached up into the caress, which didn’t really disprove Shane’s point.

‘A big dog,’ Ilya continued relentlessly. ‘Malamute. Or what do you call them…Чёрный терьер – big black dog.’

‘I have no idea,’ Shane said.

‘Or the sled dog.’

‘What?’

‘The one they use to pull sleds! You should know, very Russian, very Canadian.’

‘Do you mean a husky?’ Shane asked, unable to keep the laughter out of his voice.

‘Yes!’

‘I also had no idea you were so obsessed with dogs.’

‘Not obsessed,’ said Ilya indignantly. ‘It would be nice, that is all. A good guard dog is very useful.’

‘We have a security system.’

‘A dog is better. It can bite.’

‘So can you. And you’re the size of a tank. A Russian tank.’

‘Hmm, I think that is a microaggression, no?’

‘How do you know ‘microaggression’ but not ‘husky’?’

‘I knew husky. Same in Russian. I didn’t remember, is all.’

‘Uh-huh. Did you have a dog before?’

‘No,’ Ilya said, rubbing his face against Shane’s stomach, stubble rasping until Shane laughed and pushed his head away. ‘I wanted one though. Svetlana’s mother kept poodles and borzois. These huge elegant dogs, she used to match their collars to her outfit. Sveta hated them. They made her sneeze.’

‘She stopped buying them?’

‘Mm. She and Svetlana’s father separated. She lives in Paris now, in an apartment on the Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Maybe she keeps them there too, I don’t know. Sveta’s stepmother has big fat Persian cat instead. Did you have dogs?’

Shane seized Ilya’s head again, and brought it to lie in the crook of his neck. Ilya closed his eyes and inhaled.

‘I was scared of them when I was little. Mom likes cats but Dad’s allergic. We talked about getting fish but I wasn’t really interested.’

‘Like me. No pets.’

‘No pets.’

‘You’re still scared of them now?’

‘No,’ Shane said, and there was that smile in his voice, the one that made Ilya want to groan with how much he loved him, ‘You’ve acclimated me.’

*

When Ilya was seven and Alexei twelve, their youngest aunt had become engaged and there was endless talk about she had met her fiancé. Curious, they had both wondered what had happened with their own parents, speculating in whispers at the top of the stairs as the adults celebrated below.

The next day, all of the adults had hangovers and even less patience for the children than normal. Ilya crept around cautiously, bored and looking for something to amuse himself with. Alexei, always the brave one, had taken his hand and dragged him off to find their parents.

Alexei had asked their mother. Then he asked their father.

Mama brushed off, eyes sliding sideways with her smile and murmuring distantly about it being such a long time ago.

It was a toss-up, a knife’s edge, whether their father would also brush it off or would simply explode in rage at Alexei’s temerity in asking him such a question.

Unbelievably, Papa softened. Then he said, ‘Your mother’s elder brother worked under me. Every day, his beautiful sister came to meet him from her job as a technician in the laboratories at the research university. One day, he was ordered to work late. His beautiful sister stood all alone waiting for him outside the doors. He was worried about her unaccompanied, nobody to protect her, so I offered to walk her home. By the time we reached her front door, I knew I would marry her.’

How romantic. Like a fairytale. What a lucky girl, Irina.

It's my (non-American) understanding that Ilya is perhaps being too optimistic about racism in Boston, but there we are, he doesn't know better.

TW for racist language (untranslated, used by Grigori).

Yuna gave him a huge hug when they left in the morning. The cold air bit at their faces and David shook his hand, but Yuna, Yuna wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. She was tall for a woman. Her hair skimmed his neck as she embraced him.

Ilya hugged back as hard as he dared. Shane looked somewhere between pleased and weirded out.

‘I put some treats in the freezer bag,’ Yuna said to Shane once she’d released her stranglehold. ‘Try to relax a little, okay, honey?’

‘Mom, it’s mid-season. All-Star is literally next week.’    

‘The treats are for Ilya,’ Yuna told him with mock-dignity, hugging herself against the chill. Shane waited until she looked away, then mouthed Woof at Ilya and grinned.

‘Always so disciplined,’ David said, despairing and fond.

That was true. Shane and his rigid rituals, his obsession with details, his devotion to the perfect balance of diet, exercise and sleep. Ilya was lazy, disordered, ate enough but didn’t care about macros, only did physio if he absolutely had to, went through periods where he smoked and drank like a fiend, regularly rolled into bed at an hour better known to medieval monks just getting up for dawn prayers, or didn’t get up at all.

Shane was, as he had openly stated, attempting to civilise him, but it was slow going. They weren’t together enough.

‘Enjoy yourselves, boys!’ Yuna ordered them, patting Shane’s shoulder one last time.

‘Oh, we will,’ Ilya said and then had to brazen it out even as he wished the ground below him would open and swallow him up. He hadn’t meant that how it sounded, the tone of it, more like something he’d say to Shane, if not in bed then on their way to it. He’d relaxed too much around these people, that was the problem.

‘I’ll discipline you,’ Shane muttered, swatting tenderly at him. ‘Get in the car before you say something worse.’

*

This is for the sake of discipline, his father had said, the worst time. In those days he had been given to speeches. He got terser as he got older. And shorter-tempered.

This is for the sake of your discipline. How will you get anywhere if you are so unruly? What will become of you? You want to be police, like me? Like your brother? They won’t take you like this. Forget hockey, you won’t get a job as a garbageman. You’ll be lucky if I can persuade them to take you in the army. And then, my son, what will happen to you then?

Ilya, notably short of breath and focused only on the in-and-out of oxygen, had not replied. But he had taken his father’s point.

*

Shane insisted on driving the whole way.

‘You’re not on my insurance,’ he said. Cautious little freak. Ilya loved every particular inch of him. He was going to kiss him from head to toe the minute they got in the door. He was going to suck him off until he screamed, and then he was going to fuck him until he begged for it, for Ilya to give it to him, begged for Ilya’s cock, for Ilya, until he couldn’t think of anything, of anybody else.

They hadn’t fucked last night. Shane said he felt weird about having sex in his parents’ house, and Ilya, shameless slut though he was at the best of times, did too, though he pretended not to, booed and gave Shane a thumbs down when he issued his no-fucking-under-the-parental-roof edict.

The car ride was nice because despite the grey overcast and the ice on the roads, it brought back the summer, the nervousness as they drove to the cottage together for the first time, not knowing what would come of it. The way they had been able to admit that nervousness to each other.

And Ilya was tired, secretly relieved that Shane hated to be driven and would probably have insisted on taking the wheel even if Ilya had been on his insurance. Ilya liked to drive himself, drive fast, but Shane hated that and so Ilya had become accustomed to letting Shane take the wheel rather than unnerve him with Ilya’s views on speed limits (optional) and traffic lights (red did not have to mean stop).

Ilya toyed with his phone to let Shane get into driving headspace the way he liked. He was a clean, careful driver and hated to be distracted while he adjusted. A car journey was good to catch up on social media, and then afterwards, good to think, mull things over, dream your way through your thoughts.

Text of Marly’s ugly baby, text of Kohen’s ugly cat, text of Carmichael’s ugly wife with uglier baby. Swipe into Instagram, like post of Louvre from Sasha, subtlety scan Rose Landry’s to see if she looked miserable (sadly no), realise he’d missed one in his mass-clean out of models, wannabe actresses etc., unfollow her and hope Shane hadn’t noticed, open emails, see one from agent titled ‘Don’t ignore this’, close emails immediately. Text from Marly, wanting to know if Ilya thought ugly baby was cute. Consider typing back no, restrain self and instead write back really cute bcs looks like Isabel not you. Feel noble for not hurting Marly’s feelings, then bad for lying because baby suffering from an unfortunate case of Marleau-face.

Text from Svetlana. Not an ugly cat or monkey or dog.

DON’T UNBLOCK YOUR BROTHER’S NUMBER.

Oh Christos, Ilya thought, and switched his phone off entirely. What now?

‘Okay?’ Shane said, eyes trained intently on the road.

‘Yes,’ Ilya said, and sighed.

He’d thought he’d be free of it, when he was younger. When he was drafted. Wrong, of course he hadn’t been free. The tether of the telephone was still there. His father could reach him anywhere. When he didn’t call he walked through Ilya’s dreams instead.

And then his failing memory, his illness, his confusion, his fear, the shift in his character and his bodily weakness, that had been another tether. It had bred up a terrible tenderness. It destroyed Ilya. It ruined him. it was torture and torment that just as he obtained his independence his father lost his and so the chance to leave him behind forever was gone, gone, gone. Only a monster would abandon his ailing father. 

But Alexei – Ilya told himself he wouldn’t notice, that he wouldn’t, couldn’t care if they never spoke again. Alexei was a leech and a prick and if not as monstrous to his women as their father had been, certainly not running for Feminist Father Of The Year. Ilya shouldn’t miss Alexei at all. To live, he had had to shrug him off. Shrug the whole past off.

Lately it was stirred up and present. Ilya found himself dreaming in Russian for the first time since his father’s funeral. Memories swam up that he hadn’t known he had. Everything made him think of his mother, his father, his brother, his fucking country.

Shane had said he would stop asking and he had stopped asking about Ilya, but he had not stopped asking about Russia and Ilya could not see how he could ask him to stop. That would be unreasonable, dictatorial, censorship.

Nor could he lie outright to Shane. He didn’t want to, the thought made him sick. When some innocuous question would naturally cause the responder to give his own experience, Ilya couldn’t make himself cut around it. It would be dishonest.

Conversation was trial-by-ordeal, nerve-wracking twists and turns constantly appearing at Shane’s latest question. Ilya found himself feinting at every conversational gambit, never sure if that was going to lead to his childhood, his country, his culture. If the answer he gave would be the wrong one. If it would cause Shane’s face to fall, his eyes to widen, horror to streak his tone.

Almost as bad: what Shane didn’t ask. What it didn’t occur to him to ask. His expression when he was reading, and afterwards, looking at Ilya from the corner of his eye or lost in thought.

Case in point: ‘I was reading an article about drugs’ was apparently Shane’s idea of good car conversation. If he was trying to distract Ilya, it worked.

Ilya blinked, then said cautiously, ‘In the New Yorker?’

Shane laughed and said ‘No. Not drug-drugs. Just a think-piece about the Olympics and doping. It was interesting. Those gymnasts, I had no fucking clue it was that bad.’

The Olympics, fuck. Third-degree burn that might have healed if somebody didn’t insist on holding the lighter to his skin every time it looked like crusting over.

Article had to have mentioned Russia. Did Shane think it hadn’t extended to the national hockey team?

You are always looking for someone to blame.

He could tell Shane about the drugs. Probably. It was amazing Shane hadn’t worked that one out for himself. If Ilya had made himself think about it before, he would have assumed Shane had done the maths and come to the correct conclusion. But now it was evident he hadn’t. Ilya mostly loved Shane’s ability to miss the trees for the woods (thank you, Yuna, for that expression). It was endearing. Just sometimes –

Shane would take it badly, he would think infinitely less of Ilya, but probably he would eventually forgive him and forget about it. Tell himself it was Ilya’s horrible country and horrible family and the pressure he was under that had forced him to accede it. All of which was true but still felt like cheating somehow.

It was one of the more shameful periods of his life. The drugs, the loss, his father, how he had behaved towards Shane, all of it. So fucking ugly.

You are always looking for someone to blame.

That was true. It wasn’t Ilya’s fault he was fucked up. His mother killed herself, that was why. It wasn’t his fault the vase broke. Alexei tripped him. It wasn’t his fault he lost to Latvia. His team let him down.

It wasn’t his fault Shane and he had made such a mess of things. It was Shane’s fault, for not knowing what he wanted.

Whining, excuses, never living up to his potential, never fulfilling his obligations, never accepting responsibility, Ilya Grigorievich Rozanov.

He’d never go to the Olympics again. Sergei Mikhailovich, patting his back the night after that catastrophic humiliation against Latvia, Next time. I know you can do it. Fuck.

Shane was chattering on about the article. Ilya listened attentively, made noises in the right places, waited for the subject to turn, inevitably, to whether Ilya had been traumatised for life by being alone with Shane’s parents for a whole afternoon before Shane arrived.

Shane worried too much about these things. He worried about Ilya’s comfort. Tactless, blundering in on topics without considering that they might be delicate, never entirely sure of what he was feeling – and he worried about Ilya’s comfort regardless. Did his best with it.

No matter how many times Ilya reassured him that he liked his parents, wanted to spend time with them, Shane was always concerned that secretly Ilya resented having to be around them. There didn’t seem to be a way to convince him this was not so. Time would do it probably.

‘I can’t believe you let my father make you help him with his computer virus,’ Shane said absently. The conversation dropped off as the road got rougher. 

‘My father,’ Ilya began suddenly, and broke off. Shane was concentrating now on a tricky bend. Ilya waited until his jaw relaxed slightly, then reached over and put his hand over Shane’s fist, clenched on the gear stick. Rubbed at his fingers. The car was a small private world where Ilya could do such things and not be afraid and not make Shane afraid.

*

Old and frail his father had lost the terror he had held for Ilya.

That last summer, the final time Ilya had seen his father. He had been so ill. He had been so weak. When Ilya wiped his face with a damp cloth or gave him an apple cut into chunks, when he cajoled him into swallowing pills and putting his socks in, Ilya had felt – he didn’t know what. A sharp pain in his chest, the sorrow of his father’s failing health, the tenderness occasioned by his father’s frailty, the longing for approval Ilya had never quite managed to stamp out, the powerless anger smothered beneath that this was how it was to end, with no reconciliation, no reckoning, no resolution, no recompense for being Grigori Sergeevich Rozanov’s son.

He had loved him so helplessly then.

Papa had not remembered his own name. He called Ilya by his name, but sometimes he was talking not to Ilya but to his brother, the younger brother whom Ilya had been named for.

Ilyushka, Ilyushka – his father never called him that in his life. Ilya. Ilyukha, when he was in a good mood. Most terrible of all: Ilya Grigorievich, how dare you do as you have done?

Papa said strange things. Things that might have been real and in the past or a false illusion, the ravings of a sick and dying man. Who knew. Things Ilya had never known before about him. There were times when he no longer knew how to speak, when he would sit staring at the wall, and there were times when he seemed almost himself, recognising his visitors, recognising his sons. But mostly, he existed in his own reality.

His father talked to both his wives. He talked to his long-dead parents. He spoke to Alexei’s daughter as though she were a child of his own, a daughter who had never after all been born or even conceived.

Svetlana came to visit on Sergei Mikhailovich’s behalf, and his father asked кто такая негритянка?

Ilya wanted to kill him. Ilya want to weep. He could remember, once, Svetlana sitting on his father’s lap, at her mother’s birthday party. His father had liked her mother, in so far as he liked women at all, American women, foreign women. How could he say such things?

Svetlana left, but she texted Ilya to say it was all right, she understood, he could not help it.

She came again a few days later, and this time his father said, And how’s our Svetochka, in far friendlier fashion than Ilya had ever heard from him. He smiled at Svetlana and told her she was as beautiful as her mother, as clever as her father, a credit to her country.

That visit was almost as bad as the first one.

*

‘Sorry, did you say something?’ Shane’s hands had relaxed on the wheel and the road had smoothed out.

‘No.’ Then, because he knew Shane would find it funny, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

‘We’re not even halfway there yet, you fucking child,’ Shane laughed. ‘I should have made you go running with me this morning, burned some energy off.’

‘Mm. I think not. I am on holiday, Hollander.’

‘You are not on holiday,’ Shane scolded. ‘We’ve got All-Star next week.’

‘Pike is in fucking Florida, Marly is in Maldives, Scott fucking Hunter posts photo from Hawaii and he is playing next week. He should be careful, he will break hip climbing out of the pool.’

‘Yeah, yeah, you won’t be saying that when you lose.’

‘I am not such a sore loser,’ Ilya informed him. ‘I have always been a very good loser.’

‘You’re worse, you’re a sore winner. You and Mom during charades at Christmas. Jesus, you two were un-fucking-bearable.’

Ilya smirked. Yuna was the most competitive person he had ever met. She had organised their charades with military precision.  It was a shame she had never been an athlete herself, she would have had six gold medals. Secretly Ilya thought she was wasted on managing Shane’s career. It was wonderful that she did it, much better for Shane that it should be somebody he could trust without reservation, but all the same, she should have been running countries. Heading armies. Or at least in charge of a moderately sized city.

A city run by Yuna Hollander – Ilya would live there under her benevolent tyranny quite happily. He would miss his sports cars though. It would be very, very well-organised, with hockey front and centre of the budget, and it would definitely suit Shane, who had the same taste in most things even before the hockey of it all.

‘When I was a kid she was always telling me about the necessity of good sportsmanship,’ Shane lamented. ‘What happened?’

‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ Ilya suggested. Marleau’s girlfriend said that to Marly all the time.

‘I should have guessed, after the Parents’ Egg and Spoon Race in kindergarten. She nearly got banned from the school grounds,’ Shane said mournfully.

‘That is the one your father has photo of on the wall in the hall?’ Yuna, a look of burning ambition on hers, clutching the aforementioned egg and spoon, and small Shane standing on the sidelines with both hands shielding his face from the horror and humiliation.

‘Yep. Immortalised in all its shame forever. Dad said it was to remind Mom to keep things in perspective. And also he thought it was funny.’

‘I do not think it worked. With the perspective.’

‘It really, really did not.’

*

Yuna and David had many, many photos of Shane at the cottage, fewer at their Ottawa house, but still. A lot of photos of Shane up, Shane at all ages and all activities. He really was an only child. Anything he did, one parent or other was there, a camera in hand to record it for posterity.

There were even more in those intimidating photo albums, all in maroon leather, organised with an index, which had begun this whole fucking problem in the first place.

‘Collaborative parental effort,’ Shane had said gloomily when Yuna had first hauled them out. Ilya was impressed and also intimidated, which he supposed had probably been Yuna’s intention in showing them to him. With every page, Ilya understood what he had already known though not in such detail: Shane was an adored only child. Look at our son, our only son, and understand exactly how well-loved he is, and then consider what the intense and regimented minds behind these albums could do, if you were to break that well-loved heart…

Yuna hadn’t been so sure of him then. It was understandable, to want to impress upon him certain facts.

That had been helpful, actually, to fill in the gaps of Shane, understand the environmental factors (David Attenborough, actually) in his development. And Yuna was, if far from an impartial observer, at least provided a different and more distant perspective.

There was a cardboard box in the boot of the car, filled with all those other photos. The ones Alexei had sent from Moscow. It was such an uncomfortably literal way of carrying your past with you.

Shane had begun to go through them and label them. Ilya was not much help. He could identify most of the people in them, but his memory for dates was bad. He was forever saying, ‘That was before I was born, that was after my aunt’s cat died, that was before Svetlana cut all her hair off and her mother didn’t talk to her for a month and a half, that was after I was made captain for my junior team’, on and on, locating the pictures in his personal chronology. But he frequently couldn’t refine that further into ‘That was in 1995, that was in 2008, that was in 1983’.

And that was where he remembered at all. Certain portions of the past were glassed over, nothing beneath them. You could walk over that glass, it was sturdy, but you could not stop too long to try and fill it in. It could not bear your weight for too long.

It offended Shane’s sense of orderliness to be unable to date the photographs correctly, to have to leave names and places blank, but he had let it go, mostly. Contented himself with writing names on the back where he could, carefully specific for some hypothetical future audience.

 Ilya Rozanov and Svetlana Vetrova in front of the Bronze Horseman in Saint Petersburg. Ilya and Alexei Rozanov and their mother Irina in ?Novgorod. Ilya Rozanov and his father Grigori at Grigori’s sister Tatiana’s wedding to Maksim ? Radzinsky. Irina Rozanova with her son Ilya as an infant. Ilya and Alexei Rozanov with Oleg Doronin, a friend of their father’s, on holiday in Sochi (?). And on and on.

The box was labelled now too, ‘Rozanov family photographs’, ‘photographies de famille Rozanov’, ‘семейные фотографии Розановых’, as if some future possessor might throw them out if they weren’t correctly identified in every possible language that possessor might speak.

Sometimes Ilya considered burning or burying them. He hadn’t thought it through before he asked Alexei for them. Hadn’t thought what it would be like to have them hanging round his neck, a palpable piece of the past for Shane to see.

It hadn’t even made Shane happy to see them, the way Ilya had hoped it would. What Shane had wanted when he first asked about them, Ilya still didn’t entirely understand, and whatever he asked or said, he got no closer. Every answer he gave Shane about Russia, about his childhood, just seemed to cause Shane pain, to cause those dark eyes to take on a dazed and wounded expression.

Ilya was inclined to think he would shove the box under the bed and forget about it. Maybe take one or two of his mother out and put them up like Shane had said. And maybe not under the bed. It seemed that a box so impregnated with his family’s history would surely breed bad dreams.

*

Shane was stealing glances at him, which he never did when driving.

‘You’re brooding,’ he said when Ilya caught his gaze and bugged his eyes out slightly in pointed confusion.

That smarted slightly, but Ilya made himself say ‘Maybe. Sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Shane said quickly. ‘Is everything, uh, okay? You still want to spend the week here? It’s not too boring?’ Clearly whipping himself up into a panic, preparing to spiral into thoughts of how he was forcing Ilya into coming all this way to spend time in Shane’s home, no consideration for what Ilya might want to do, etc. etc., Ilya could guess the contents and wished Shane wouldn’t feel so predictably anxious.

Ilya said soothingly, ‘Shane. No. I love your cottage. I want to be here. I want to be with you. It is boring, yes, because it is you, and that is very sadly what I like. Soon I will be as boring as you, you have infected me.’

The cottage was as close to home as Ilya had had since leaving Russia. The flat he had grown up in had ceased to be home long before that.

Peaceful, private, filled at every corner with happy memories. The worst thing that had happened to Ilya at the cottage was David walking in on them, and that hadn’t been that bad. There wasn’t another place on earth Ilya could walk through without running into some sort of ambivalence, some sort of mixed emotion.

Shane smiled a little, a flash of tooth, but he was shaking his head slightly too, not yet convinced.

‘Svetlana texted me. I think my brother is causing trouble. That is why the brooding.’

‘Oh. Uh, what kind of trouble?’ Shane was worrying his lower lip between his teeth, looking conscientiously closely at the road ahead.

‘I don’t know. Svetlana just says, don’t unblock him, which means something is going on. I’m not going to unblock him. I don’t want to know.’

‘Okay. Okay, good. I mean, not good, but good you’re not letting yourself get mixed up. I guess. Sorry, I just –’

‘I know,’ said Ilya fondly, because he did.

‘Did the photos set him off?’ Shane blurted.

Ilya shrugged.

‘Moscow can be expensive, his job doesn’t pay as well as he would like, he has his daughter and his drugs. There would have been trouble eventually once the money ran out.’

He could see Shane holding back his questions, trying so hard to respect the – fucking therapy-speak – boundaries they had agreed on together.

It felt cruel in a way because Shane’s curiosity was natural to him. Presumably.

Ilya didn’t believe in unearthing the past if you didn’t need to. Thinking of your own past was one thing, as long as you didn’t become too self-indulgent with it. The desire to paw over somebody else’s past, Ilya didn’t understand that.

He resented, a little, the questions, even when Shane didn’t ask them. Shane was not a quiet thinker once you knew him well enough to read him. You could practically see the cogs whirring.

‘It will be all right,’ Ilya said gently. ‘Please don’t worry. I won’t unblock him.’

There were books in the boot too. Shane kept saying he was going to get a kindle and not doing it. Ilya hoped he would. Then he wouldn’t always know what Shane was reading.

*

Ilya had lied a little, when he said he didn’t read much. He read as much as he could get away with, entirely randomly and according to his mood. He wasn’t an intellectual. He’d left school to focus on his career at sixteen and been at a specialist hockey academy for four years before that, but the Russian education system was a great believer in shoving as much of its national literature down the throats of its hapless victims as possible before it spat them out of its own maw and into the real world.

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Ilya loathed, partly from doing them in school, partly out of principle because they were the only two authors Westerners ever seemed to know, partly because he disliked Tolstoy’s more sanctimonious moments, and partly because his mother had had a passionate distaste for them. Lermontov over Pushkin, Pasternak over Akhmatova and Mandelstam over them both – she was not without her clichés, her classics.

Ilya wished Shane liked fiction. He would have enjoyed sharing that with Shane. Novels would have produced a class of questions Ilya felt equipped to answer.

Instead Stalingrad by some Englishman had sparked off a series of questions from Shane about Ilya’s grandparents, most of which he couldn’t answer. Papa’s mother had died when Ilya was very young, Mama’s mother was the least approachable woman ever born, and both of Ilya’s grandfathers had died when he was small. It had led on to a more general interrogation: do you have aunts? Uncles? Cousins? To which the answers were yes, yes and yes. And also, no, we have never been that close.

Ilya’s maternal grandfather had been a war hero. Mama had kept some of his medals in a drawer because her brother hadn’t wanted them Alexei probably had them now. He had been very, very old when Ilya was born so Ilya did not remember him that well. Alexei had been his favourite. His little namesake.

 Ilya hadn’t been named after anyone he thought, until one time, just after his coach had pulled his parents aside for a very intense conversation, he had said something to this effect in his father’s presence. His father had got that still look on his face and Ilya braced himself, though he didn’t know what he had done wrong.

Instead his father said very slowly, ‘No, Ilya, you are named for my brother. My younger brother, who died before you were born. It is a good name. A strong name. I hope you will live up to it. I hope you will do it honour.’

*

‘So,’ Shane began, glancing over to where Ilya had been doing his best to doze off against the window, ‘I hope you’re prepared for the snow.’

‘Hollander,’ Ilya said very patiently. ‘Where was I born again?’

Shane rolled his eyes.

‘And how long is it since you were in Moscow for the winter, again?’

‘The body never forgets,’ Ilya told him loftily. ‘I am bred for snow.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Like a malamute,’ Ilya continued, warming to his theme. ‘Impervious to lower temperatures. Specially designed to withstand the cold.’

‘Yeah, with that wonderful double layered fur coat you both have. So far you’ve told me you were bred to skate, cut onions without crying, drive over the speed limit and drink vodka. You’re contributing to your own stereotype again.’

‘Hundreds of years of ice-cold blood…’

‘Like a fucking husky. That’s why you want one.’

‘We share a kinship. You would not understand, the bond between man and beast.’

‘Says the man afraid of loons.’

‘It is a very reasonable fear. Anybody alone in the woods hears that noise, they will agree with me. Man two thousand years ago, he agrees with me too and that is why my ancestors were not eaten by bears.’

‘Definitely contributing to your own stereotype.’ Suddenly Shane’s face was serious. ‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Mind?’

‘I mean, I know we’re just joking, but when people say shit to you – I mean everyone assumes all this stupid stuff, like Cold War stuff,  xenophobic, exoticising –’

‘Big words. From your reading?’

‘Ilya.’

‘Ah, yes, very concerning, the oppressed minority of ethnic Russians,’ Ilya said dryly. ‘No, I don’t like it, but that’s how people are. Stupid. Don’t like foreigners. You should hear what they say back home about Canadians.’

‘What do they say?’

‘Nothing,’ Ilya said gleefully at how easily Shane had walked into that one. ‘Nobody even knows you exist.’

*

Russia, allegedly: domed churches, Faberge eggs, the glories of the Hermitage, sleighs racing through the snow with wolves slavering after them, the low sound of plainsong across the inner courtyard, St Petersburg rising up out of the mud on the bones of serfs, long haired and bearded monks, head-scarfed women lighting candles to Byzantine-eyed icons, Tolstoy’s Levin toiling in the fields with his peasants, the black earth and black bread.

Alternately, Russia: that one club in Moscow where Ilya had first sucked cock, the prim fronts of the buildings on Noble Row, the place near Tverskaya Street where he and Sasha had thrown up after smoking their first cigarettes, dodging protests on his way to school with Alexei back in 2004, Svetlana’s 5000009 ₽ fur coat thrown over the back of her chair at Varvary though the maître d’ had wanted to take it, lines of coke in the bathroom on a hot summer’s evening, yet another fucking Pelevin out, nihilistic pleasure as they danced the night away and the fog rolled in.

Formerly Russia: the Red Square, drifts of snow, grim-faced men in greatcoats or uniform, hammer-and-sickle flying high, Glorious October! on bright-coloured posters, a stoical, cynical national character, blood on those drifts of snow, bathtubs without plugs in, the wide open skies of the Siberian tundra, the zeks frozen as they worked, fearful silence from city to city, samizdat, Mandlestam’s words passed wordlessly from hand-to-hand, endless killing and toil and fear, the untold numbers of the dead, the people drowning themselves in vodka to make life bearable.

And Russia: the small apartment on Frunzenskaya, his mother’s cheap paperbacks spilling over the bookshelves, polishing his father’s medals on Sundays (then the greatest thrill of his short life), spring budding to life on the tree outside his bedroom window, Alexei showing him how to do a header with their old football, the worn-down comfort of chafing sleeve of the blue duffel coat he’d had when he was six between his fingers, big black Begemot the cat of his grandmother slinking past with a rat in his jaws, the shingled beach at Sochi where they had holidayed as children, the sun bearing down on his face as he lay on his back on the lawn with his mother and Alexei.

Also Russia: tanks and helicopters, wars dragging out, bearded Chechens on the news, killers-for-hire, Afgantsy, journalists poisoned on the street, conscripts rotting to death for lack of medical care, refusing to read the newspaper because it was either depressing or all lies, governmental cover-ups, accusations of fixed elections, Svetlana spat at on the metro, a covert war of information, gas and oil as bargaining tools, Americans saying to him sympathetically You must be so glad you don’t live there anymore and baffled at his offence.

But Russia: fifteen red roses in the blue Merino glass vase for his mother’s birthday, writing line after line of cursive until the teacher was satisfied, reciting The Bronze Horseman in a silly voice to make his mother laugh, punching Alexei in the stomach over something stupid, the tragical tweeting of his aunt’s caged budgerigar as he fed it seed through the bars, Babulya cropping his hair military short to keep it neat and his mother crying over his baby curls, Papa red-faced with pleasure amidst his cronies and smashing his glass to the floor in a toast, the unspeakable pride of being named captain for the Olympic team.

Supposedly Russia: birch trees, rabbit hutches and duck ponds, chickens scratching in the yard, samovar and tiled stove, babushkas presiding over the hearth, a pot of soup on the fire, the Little Father safely on his throne, his worshipful people at his feet, stories of Baba Yaga and Father Frost and the Golden Horde coming in off the steppe, a storybook country with about as much substance.

And Russia: the chemical-cool scent of the ice rink, his father telling his mother in a voice as cold and smooth as the snow outside exactly how stupid she was, skating on the duck pond round and round in pleasurable circles until he was dizzy, the friend of a friend of a friend of Svetlana’s found beaten to death on the street in Krasnodar and nobody ever arrested, insisting he had to stay in Moscow for the summer to train, fear clutching at his ribs when he realised Sasha had told his sister about them, Sergei Mikhailovich pounding the table in drunken bonhomie and shouting I’m telling you, the boy is good!, choking down boiling hot tea when he fell into a snow drift and his aunts were convinced he had hypothermia, the incredible startlement of his coach patting him on the shoulder and saying gruffly Not bad.

On and on. All of them were true, one way or another, or had been, or had been in part, or in somebody’s mind, on somebody’s printed page. All of them were false. The dark fairytale the West liked nauseated Ilya the most. Tsars and dictators, glittering opulence and oppression hand-in-hand. What did they know about any of it?

What he could not seem to get through to Shane: Russia was only a place like any other place. It was different from other places in the way other places were different from each other. France and Spain were different from each other, had more in common maybe than with Germany than with Poland than with Belarus, going on and on spreading out, ripples in a pond, but always the same pond. People were the same everywhere. Their surface behaviour, their manners and mannerisms, their social mores, were nothing to the basic impulses beating away beneath.

It was only a place. To be foreign in another place was very hard, and to be a Russian in America was these days even harder. But in the end it did not mean so much. Unable to visit his mother’s grave, he told himself that too was only a place. Maybe the only one he missed with something more than a babyish nostalgia for the golden childhood he hadn’t had, but still, a place.

People were more important.

He had kissed the soil of his mother’s grave the last time he was there. Put himself full length alongside it, up on his hands as if he were prostrating before an icon, and lowered himself to touch his lips. It was the sort of dramatic, sentimental gesture his teammates had let him know was far too Russian for them to cope with. God knew what Shane would have made of it.

*

When Ilya wasn’t driving himself he considered the car an ideal spot to sleep. This drove his teammates mad on the rare occasions they shared a car, and was dangerous near Svetlana who had been known to take the opportunity to draw on his face or take pictures of him drooling and post them on Instagram. Shane didn’t mind. He liked some conversation in the car, but he also liked the opportunity to focus.

Ilya could murmur a few replies to him, and Shane would realise he was falling asleep and leave him be, no offence on either side. A person you could sit in silence with was far more valuable than a teenaged Ilya had realised. Sveta came close but she had a low tolerance for his moods, his sulking or brooding or lows. If the silence was gloomy, she tended to take measures to snap him out of it.

Drifting, dreaming his way through the journey, along the icy roads, the patches of melted snow that Shane said would not be melting for long, according to the weather forecast. Watching the countryside didn’t interest him, and though watching Shane did, it made Shane uncomfortable to be examined so closely when he was trying to concentrate.

Sometimes Ilya woke to feel a phantom kiss on his forehead, a ghostly hand brushing his hair back, as if Shane could no more resist him sleeping than Ilya could resist Shane. As if it rendered him as powerless, as hopelessly in love as it did Ilya.

Ilya’s mother had been the last person to kiss him while he was sleeping. To love him enough to not want to wake him, to love him enough to be unable to resist.

Lately, he dreamt in Russian. And he dreamt of her too.

*

A child who finds his mother dead, will never recover.

That was what his aunt whispered, sitting in the kitchen with the other women after the funeral.

Papa heard her. He whirled on her and shouted, There is nothing wrong with my son! Ilya will be fine, he is strong. Keep your nonsense to yourself, Sonya!

Ilya, standing outside in the hallway in order to eavesdrop without having to speak to anybody, was relieved to hear his father say this. He did not feel fine. He did not feel he would ever be fine again. To hear his father say this, his father Grigori Sergeeivich Rozanov, who never said what he couldn’t make true, who bent the universe to his will and would accept nothing but the best from his sons, meant that at some point, he would indeed be fine.

She had been so cold. Stiff, her flesh the colour and consistency of wax. That one trailing hand. Her dark hair askew over her face and her eyes wide open, staring sightlessly.

 Ilya had never seen a dead person before. He knew what it looked like, from the rabbits and ducks his grandmother kept, but he did not know that it was the same in a person. Filmy eyes, the slight smell of urine, and the skin cold and rigid because Ilya had been late up this morning, hadn’t woken his mother at the time he usually did. Lately she had been up before him, suddenly filled with cheer, with energy, almost back to her old self. He hadn’t heard her crying alone at night for several months. How could she be lying there like that now?

That last thought had made him hysterical. He had grabbed at her like he was a little boy again, saying Mama, Mama over and over again as though it might not be true, as though she would wake up. He had cried at once, tried to stifle his tears as he hugged her, because if his father heard – 

But his father had heard him and had come through, already dressed for work and irritated by the disruption. Alexei was eating breakfast, Ilya could hear him in the kitchen asking ‘What’s happening?’ His father had been in the middle of a returning roar but when his eyes landed on the bed, its occupant, and Ilya with it, he froze, let his voice die.

Alexei called out again and Ilya sobbed and let go of his mother.

His father had shouted out, ‘Irina, oh my God, Irina,’ and shook her. He had moaned over her body as if he were in dreadful pain.

Ilya had screamed when he had realised she was actually dead, forever dead, that this was not some dreadful dream. His father had grabbed him and held him face first to his chest as Ilya screamed into his shirt until his voice gave out.

Both his father’s arms were around him, rocking him a little, and the dreadful moaning continued, Irina, oh my God, Irina, and interspersed what might pass for comfort, hush, Ilya, hush, holding him until the screams quieted, those strong and startling hands more hitting than patting his back, his shoulders, his hair.

 It was the last time he could remember Papa touching him without any sort of attendant reprimand.

*

Shane had switched the radio on low and was humming along as he drove. It was some song Ilya didn’t know, something about blue windows and yellow moons, flying birds.

He leant his head against the window and slept.

*

That smothering embrace in front of his mother’s body was the closest Ilya could remember ever being to his father. There were photographs of him holding Ilya as a baby, of Ilya on his shoulders, on his lap, but he couldn’t remember that. Neither of them looked particularly happy about the situation in the photograph anyway.

After that terrifying outburst Papa had been like ice.

Before the funeral he had slapped first Alexei and then Ilya for crying too much. Alexei had taken the lesson and stopped his tears, but Ilya could not stop his. He cried at the burial, and at the meal afterwards, and on and off for the entire week following until his father came home from work on Friday and slapped him again for it. Then he took Ilya’s head in his hands, made him meet his eyes.

Be a man, Ilyukha, his father said harshly. She is gone. It was an accident. That is sad, but you are twelve not two. Now get over it.

But Mama.

It was an accident. Do you hear me? She took too many pills without realising. It was an accident!

The fingers tightening on his face until he nodded.

Good. Go do your homework.

Ilya didn’t have any homework, though he was not stupid enough to tell his father this. Aunt Sonya had kept him home though Alexei had gone to school. She had brought him tea and clucked and tutted and stroked his hair back as if he had a fever.

Aunt Sonya was going to live with them for a while, to look after everything.

‘Grisha, you need a woman in the house,’ she had said firmly and Ilya’s father had said ‘You expect me to marry over her coffin?’ and Sonya said ‘It was you who mentioned marrying, not I.’

In the event of it, it was only a year before his father summoned his two sons to his study and announced he would be remarrying.

Alexei, eighteen and terrible with it, had exchanged glances with Ilya, and then said politely ‘Congratulations, Papa.’

Ilya had only echoed him when Alexei’s elbow landed in his ribs.

Polina Stepanovna was twenty years old, blonde and blue-eyed and nothing, nothing like Mama. She did not read. She liked the ballet, though, and it was at the Bolshoi she was introduced to her new stepsons, giggling with champagne and hanging off their father’s arm in a way that ought to have made him tell her to stop playing the fool.

But he didn’t. He patted her fondly and laughed at her antics. All through Giselle, she sat entranced, her head resting on their father’s shoulder, safe in the circle of his arm. Alexei and Ilya couldn’t believe their eyes. They had avoided looking at each other for fear they would break out into laughter, and who knew what their father would do to them for such an outrageous failure of manners?

After Papa had seen her safely into a taxi, he turned and eyed his sons.

Alexei, taking up his role as the elder, said ‘She seems nice, Father.’ Daringly he added ‘Very beautiful.’

Their father’s face tightened and relaxed. ‘Yes. It is good to see you have eyes in your head, Alexei.’ The dry tone could presage an outburst awaiting only the opportunity, or it could be approval, man-to-man, for Alexei boldly acknowledging the obvious.

Ilya said nothing. If he’d said that, Papa would have slapped him for commenting on his future stepmother’s physical appearance. Alexei was always bolder with their father, which was sometimes punished and sometimes rewarded.

‘Ilya? What do you think?’

The bear-trap beckoned. The audacity to think your opinion is worth hearing, perhaps, or In my youth, such impertinence was not permitted.

‘She’s very cultured,’ Ilya said as dispassionately as he could. ‘She knew all of the poses, the positions, and whether they were being performed well.’

Papa examined this sentence for hidden meanings, then set it aside.

‘She wanted to be a ballerina but did not have the build for it,’ he said dismissively. Warningly: ‘I expect you both to be courteous to Polina Stepanovna,’

‘Yes, Father,’ they chorused obediently.

They weren’t, of course. Alexei was only a year younger than her and could not take her seriously. Ilya was polite to her face and awful, awful behind her back for the first year.

He couldn’t stand to see her taking up space in the apartment, standing where his mother had stood, scattering her make-up over the kitchen table, leaving her hairbrush on the dressing table that still stood in Papa’s bedroom (which had stopped being Mama’s bedroom some years before she died), littering her Western magazines across the sofa in the sitting room.

Sometimes he hid or broke her possessions. He brought Svetlana home, and together they sneered covertly at Polina. When Polina told him to do something, he would agree politely to do it, and then leave the house instead.

When his father caught on, for only the second time in Ilya’s life he beat him with a belt. Not as hard as he might, because he had a match the next week, but hard enough that Ilya lost it.

After that Ilya avoided his stepmother as much as humanly possible. He was leaving school next year to focus on his career anyway. His father travelled with him when necessary, provided him with the best equipment, urged him on and obtained a superior coach, all of that, all of that.

 It was unbearable. Plans were being made for his career in the KHL and all Ilya could think was that he had to get out. If he played in the KHL he would have to live with his father. He couldn’t see Papa letting his son have his own apartment at the tender age of eighteen.

If he got into the MLH, it would be different. He would be free.

If Ilya stayed, it increasingly looked as though he would be on his own with his father. Alexei had moved out, was crashing his way through the police, talking about getting married. The house was like a museum, a grim record of the Rozanov family between 1979 (when Papa had inherited the flat) and 2002 (the last time anything had been substantially updated décor-wise). Papa had not let Polina change very much. They didn’t share a bedroom anymore and Polina was clearly on the verge of extricating herself.

 Ilya did not like her or dislike now he was old enough to understand his anger and resentment had very little to with her, but all the same he hated to see his father with her. Papa was his usual self, but he never spoke to her the way he had to Mama. Maybe because Mama had been the mother of his children. Maybe for other reasons.

His father, who was shorter and shorter-tempered, who frowned every time Ilya opened his mouth. Who did not raise his hand to Ilya anymore, now that he was too big for physical discipline, who did not raise his voice often either, but reduced Ilya to a pile of dust and ashes with a handful of cold, carefully chosen words.

Hard to imagine that this was the man who had fallen in love with a pretty girl waiting outside the police station, who had romanced her into marriage, who had cried out so unbearably at the sight of her body as though he had not put her there.

Irina. Oh my god, Irina.

*

Shane drove on. Ilya slept, head crooked awkwardly against the window-pane. He didn’t dream. But he woke as disorientated to their arrival as if he had, the crunch of gravel under the wheels, Shane’s gentle monotonous voice calling his name, the car lurching to a stop and echoing in his head his father’s voice, just out of reach.

More introspection than plot, but things will gear up again next chapter which will be up in a week or two. These first two chapters were originally one giant chapter, which is why they've been posted so close together.

The cottage in winter was a different world. It had only snowed lightly so far, but everything was frozen over, the frost creeping to the edges of the lake.  

Shane laid a fire (because he was the kind of person to have a fire in the face of his central heating) while Ilya fiddled with the heating and complained about the labyrinthine controls.

Somebody came once a week or so to check the house, arrange fresh sheets and groceries. The taps weren’t frozen over and the fridge was full which meant whoever Shane had hired was doing their job. but the house was as cold as if nobody had been there at all.

Thank God everything was wood. Ilya could remember the flagstones of his grandmother’s kitchen against his bare feet, chilling to the bone.

Now the fire was lit and their bags unpacked and supper was in the oven and Ilya was draped over Shane on the sofa. It was dark so early at this time of year. No wonder Shane had all those windows despite the heat loss they represented. The stars were so bright against the black sky, the white snow.

Shane stretched out, moved Ilya over a little so that they were facing each other properly.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ Ilya said, and bit him gently on the shoulder because he wanted to.

‘I should get your teeth filed,’ Shane said, catching him by the neck and running a fond finger over Ilya’s canines. Ilya bit that too, and then dropped down on top of him to kiss at the base of his throat.

‘The chicken will burn,’ but Shane’s arms were round his neck, he was pulling Ilya closer and closer, wrapping his legs across Ilya’s thighs. One hand unlooped itself from the stranglehold on Ilya, and reached between them.

At which point, the smoke alarm went off, Ilya startled violently, and they both fell off the sofa.

Once they’d disentangled themselves, cursing and laughing, supper proved to be beyond rescue. Ilya made scrambled eggs instead, feeling like a Moscow housewife as he did, and then they returned to the sofa, at that stage of exhaustion where the idea of a shower felt overwhelming.

‘Svetlana wants me to call her,’ Ilya said as Shane swiped furiously on his phone.

‘Okay.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Mom. Wants to know we got here safely, that we’re fed. You know, usual parent things. I should text her back, she’ll be going nuts by now. Convinced we’re in a ditch by the side of the road.’

Knowing someone well enough to predict how they were feeling, Ilya was familiar with that. But the casual concern, Yuna, coming the mother at them both, that was the relic of a lost world. Shane, he did not say, we are both so fucking lucky.

Instead of saying any of that, Ilya said ‘I should call Svetlana. She wants to tell me how shitty last match I played was. And so she can lecture me on tactics for next week’s All-Stars.’

Ilya facetimed Svetlana from a strategic position on the sofa, where all she would be able to see was his face and not the room in general. Shane insisted on shutting himself in the bedroom while Ilya did so, despite Ilya’s protests that Svetlana was trustworthy, half-knew already, and would like Shane.

The last was a bit of an exaggeration. Ilya had never had a long-term relationship outside of Shane, but he had hated every single one of Svetlana’s boyfriends and knew she was just as possessive of him as he was of her. Shane was perfect, so Svetlana would definitely, definitely come round, but initially?

More to the point, Shane might not like Svetlana. He had not liked at all Ilya’s casual suggestion he might marry her for citizenship.

That comment had started casually, but Shane’s jealousy was so unprecedented, so delicious that Ilya, who sometimes suspected his veins ran with seething envy instead of blood, had been unable to resist and had continued prodding.

And maybe he had been a little bit hoping that Shane might say, ‘Marry me instead.’ Pipe dream (a phrase Coach was inordinately fond of), pleasant pastel daydream. Even if Shane had said it, they couldn’t have done it. But he would have liked to have heard it.

Maybe Ilya should hector Shane into a meeting after all. He would love to see him jealous again. Love to make clear, later, exactly how secure in Ilya’s love Shane should be.

‘I’ll do my yoga,’ Shane said, shutting the door firmly against Ilya’s expression of overwhelming lust at the words. ‘Later,’ was his muffled addition.

Collapsed on the sofa, Ilya considered an assault on the bedroom door, but Sveta would be pissed at him if he ignored her too long. He slid further down the back of the couch and rang her number.

There she was, dressed for bed in a gold and black silk robe. Ilya knew that robe intimately, its sensation across his bare chest, his face.

‘Where the fuck are you?’ was her greeting. ‘Never mind, I don’t want to know. What was that goal against Pittsburgh? You are perhaps blind in one eye now?’

It was such a relief, to speak Russian again. Back in Boston there was Kovalev and Parshukov, and Bulgarian Mitkov who could understand enough to have a mutually intelligible conversation, but it wasn’t the same. Kovalev had been so long in the States his instinct was to speak English while Parshukov and Ilya had nothing in common anyway.

They talked about nothing. Ilya’s last match, Svetlana’s business expansion. Gossiped about old friends and acquaintances. Lyuda got engaged and fired on the same day (it was a great job and a really ugly man); Anoushka was marrying a man so rich she would never work again (she would be bored in three months and climbing the walls); Alyosha (the one from school, not Ilya’s asshole brother) was working in the Ministry of Culture (‘even though he is illiterate and reads even less than you, Ilyusha’); Sasha fucked his boss’s boyfriend (‘he must have been high, the man is not good-looking’); Misha was divorcing Ala because she was cheating on him even though he was cheating on her right back (‘thank god, now I never have to sit through a dinner party with them at each other’s throats again’); Vanya finally got Musia to sleep with him (‘she told me it was a ‘disappointing experience’’). No minefields.

And then, suddenly, Sveta’s face was emptied out. She had less practice at that then him, more often she smiled, even if only with her eyes.

‘Alexei rang me. He wants to speak to you, very badly.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do not do it. You blocked his number, yes? Don’t speak to him.’

‘I won’t.’

Svetlana narrowed her eyes. His agreement had been too easy.

‘I won’t! I don’t – Svetka, I swear to God, I don’t want to speak to him.’

‘Good.’

Unable to resist, Ilya asked ‘Why did he call? What does he want?’

Svetlana shook her head, curls bouncing.

‘He didn’t say. Just, I need to speak to Ilya. I told him to go through your agent if it’s that urgent.’

‘He won’t,’ Ilya said, relieved. ‘If he did, Mike would tell him to fuck off. He hates that stuff. Strictly business.’

Svetlana gave him her cat-look. Then something in his face spoke to her, and she relaxed, nodded, said ‘Okay,’ and changed the subject. Ilya cursed himself. If he hadn’t got Alexei to send the fucking photographs –

‘My father’s coming to Boston next month,’ Svetlana threw out, deceptively casual. ‘We’ll come and watch you. That match against Toronto, hmm?’

Okay.

*

Svetlana’s father had always been nice to Ilya. He had no son of his own back when they were children, and while Svetlana was mad for hockey, lived and breathed it, she did not want to play any sport.

Hockey was off the cards anyway. There was a women’s team, obviously, but nobody paid much attention, and Sergei Mikhailovich, heart swelling at the sight of his tiny infant daughter, had thought Absolutely the fuck not. Or words to that effect.

 Svetlana had been in skating lessons and then in ballet, and then in piano, and refused all of them and her father hadn’t minded. If Ilya had refused to play hockey anymore, his father would have tossed him out the nearest window.

Once or twice Sergei Mikhailovich came to watch Ilya’s matches. It was the first time Ilya actively realised that he was considered to have real potential, that his father wasn’t just driving him onwards out of some sadistic urge or some attempt to make Ilya less lazy. That hockey was his future, not just something he had to do after school.

Sergei Mikhailovich spoke familiarly to Ilya’s coach afterwards, signed autographs for the more awestruck amongst the team, and collared Ilya’s father on the way out of the rink.

‘Your son, Grisha,’ he’d said jubilantly, ‘Is going to win us gold medal again.’ He looked at Ilya and ruffled his hair. ‘2010, 2014, you’ll be old enough, eh, Ilyusha?’

‘Don’t swell the boy’s head,’ Ilya’s father said, but Ilya could see he was pleased. Sergei Mikhailovich had been a goalie, couldn’t give advice on everything, but still. Sergei Mikhailovich Vetrov, the great sporting hero, the Olympian.

And an earlier memory too. On the ice with Svetlana and her father, when they were still small enough to pick up. Sergei Mikhailovich doing just that, Sveta in one arm, Ilya in the other, pretending to drop them. Standing behind Ilya and guiding his hands to make a better shot.

Why had they been there? Why had Sergei Mikhailovich had charge of them? Was Ilya’s mother hovering somewhere in the background, perhaps in the stands chatting with Svetlana’s mama? Was Ilya’s father drinking tea at the café next door to the rink? Where was Alexei? Where was Svetlana’s nanny?

Was it maybe Svetlana’s birthday? But no, she always had huge, elaborate parties, arranged by her mother. Maybe it was a treat for her – Svetusha, this weekend, I will take you to do anything you like. Me, your father.

I want to go skating with Ilya.

‘Svetochka, watch! Tell me what he should be doing instead,’ and Svetlana had fired orders at her father and Ilya both, put his hands lower on the stick, adjust his grasp! Sergei Mikhailovich had hands as big as Ilya’s father, but he used them much more slowly, more gently. When Svetlana got fed up with being a bystander, her father skated them both in circles until they were dizzy, laughing and falling over.

A lesson in analysis for Svetlana, a lesson in something else for Ilya.

*

They got out of bed at dawn because Shane was trying to kill Ilya. Sex hadn’t worked, so now it was ‘watching the winter sunrise across the snow’, presumably as cover for murdering Ilya via the insane temperature.

Ilya moaned and bitched out of principle as they put on coat and boots but it was a nice idea. Ilya liked sunrises more than sunsets. And it was a very romantic thing for Shane to do, Shane who usually wouldn’t notice romance if it hit him in the face.

Ilya loved that about him, actually. He cheerfully expected to never, ever receive a single Valentine’s card from Shane. What were they, boarding school girls with a crush on each other?

Where had this sunrise idea come from? His yoga instructor? But no. Ilya harboured strong suspicion that a quick look at Shane’s search history would include ‘romantic things to do for partner in winter’. Or possibly ‘how to keep large antsy hockey player occupied while snowed in and while pushing the refractory period any more will result in both our hearts exploding’.

They stood watching the sunrise from the dock, the same as all those months ago. It was far too cold to sit down, but Ilya wrapped his arms around Shane. Shane shifted uncomfortably, so Ilya loosened his grip until he settled. Too tight. Too much. Ilya needed to be more careful.

Ilya was learning. He was paying better attention. Yuna, too, she had given him her perspective. While Shane researched Russia, Ilya was researching Shane directly. He kept a list in his head. He wasn’t going to take notes. He didn’t need to. He would remember it all because he loved Shane.

Shane doesn’t like surprises. Shane doesn’t like being crowded. Shane doesn’t like split-second decisions. Shane doesn’t like deviating from plans. Shane doesn’t like having things sprung on him (well, that’s covered under surprises, isn’t it). Shane doesn’t like it when things don’t go as he expected them to. Shane doesn’t like to admit what he wants. Shane doesn’t always know what he wants.

Therefore:

Don’t arrive earlier than you said you would. Don’t get up in his space as much as you want to (unless you’re having sex). Don’t force him to make sudden choices (unless it’s about sex). Don’t suggest spontaneous activities (apart from sex). Don’t casually tell him things that he didn’t know about you. Don’t act differently from how he thinks of you. Don’t make him admit it. Don’t make him know it. Just work it out, and give it to him.

That was okay. Ilya could do all that for him. All he wanted was to stay at his side like a dog.

The dog at his feet. An attack dog. A mangy, beaten up old stray that bit. He knew what was going to happen when Shane got round to telling Hayden Pike, the way he was threatening to.  

When the last of the red clouds had faded and the dawn light had brightened, they went inside. Ilya prodded Shane in the ribs.

'Are you going to go do your yoga again?’

Shane swatted at him.

‘After breakfast. So I have energy when you interrupt me.’

Last night, after getting off the phone with Svetlana, he’d walked into the bedroom to find Shane in the middle of a vinyasa, which objectively should not have been sexy. Ilya still had splinters in his elbow, he was pretty sure.

‘So boring, Hollander.’

‘Yeah, me with my boring hip mobility and improved injury recovery times –’

‘I like your hip mobility,’ Ilya said, wiggling his eyebrows. ‘It makes it so much easier to –’

Shane clapped his hand over Ilya’s mouth, and then shrieked when Ilya licked it. Amateur. Only child. Anybody had grown up with siblings – anybody who had grown up with Svetlana – would have known what to expect/

‘Normally you don’t mind my tongue,’ Ilya pointed out as Shane wiped his palm against Ilya’s t-shirt. ‘You’ve had my tongue in many worse places than your hand.’

‘Jesus, stop!’ Shane scolded, shoving Ilya through, down into the sunken living room and onto the sofa. Ilya collapsed back against the cushions with a groan. It was too fucking early. Shane needed to get that sadistic streak looked at by a doctor.

‘How was Svetlana?’ Shane asked pointedly, settling at the other end. He’d certainly been too distracted to ask last night.

‘Good. Selling her luxury cars. Her father is coming to see her, they will come to my home game next month.’

‘That’s nice.’ Shane drew his feet up against his chest. ‘Is he nice?’

‘Her dad? He’s okay. Spoils her. You know he played?’

‘Goalie, right? And Minister for the Interior, right?’

Ilya shifted uncomfortably.

‘Mm.’

*

After he was made Minister, Sergei Mikhailovich had a big party, filled with important people. Ilya’s father went, and took Ilya with him. The whole evening, champagne in hand, he’d been clamped to Papa’s side, shaking hands and making polite conversation. His father jabbed him in the small of the back to make him stand up straight. Sergei Mikhailovich got very drunk and came over with his pretty new wife and a bevy of his ministry cronies.. He introduced Ilya and his father with playful bombast – ‘Grigori Sergeevich, my boyhood hero! The friend of my poor late brother, we thought you were a god’ – and praised the game Ilya had played last week.

‘Our little sporting hero,’ he said, ruffling Ilya’s hair. Turning to his wife, he said ‘Masha, this is the boy who will win us back our Olympic glory.’ The ministry men made exclamatory noises, and eyed Ilya up and down, to check that the Minister was not losing his mind and that this boy was in fact a promising athletic prospect.

Ilya had never wanted Svetlana more in his life, but she was at school in Switzerland. She had complete disdain for her new stepmother and did not bother to conceal it. If Ilya talked to or about Polina the way Svetlana talked about Marya Andreevna, his father would have taken his belt to him. Sergei Mikhailovich just laughed and pretended not to hear.

Marya antagonised Svetlana right back. She thought she was untouchable. She did not yet realise that the centre of Sergei Mikhailovich’s world was Svetlana, that everything rose and fell on her breath, her word, her lightest look of disapproval. My angel, my darling, my soul, an endless litany of endearments from both her parents. She was spoilt rotten whenever Sergei Mikhailovich was home. Probably to make up for the fact that he had done this thing to her, brought her into a world where she was a toy, an ornament, treated so carelessly, so lightly. Where she received a litany of slurs, despite her beauty, her wealth, her intelligence, her father’s power. That would take a lot of making up for.

Svetlana had laid this out to Ilya on two occasions, once when they were fourteen and didn’t have the language for it, and again when they were seventeen and Svetlana was in the middle of her long campaign to be rid of Marya Andreevna. He couldn’t lie; it wasn’t the sort of thing he would have noticed by himself.

*

They made breakfast together. Ilya made Shane show him the precise steps to produce his evil green smoothie, chirping the whole way, but committing them to memory secretly. Ilya fried a full English breakfast (why was it called that anyway, weird) which he’d picked up a taste for via hotel life.

As close as possible. Shane sat down one side of the table and Ilya sat down next to him, as close as possible. Shane rolled his eyes.

‘Sit on my lap, why don’t you,’ he said and was evidently not expecting Ilya to say ‘Okay,’ and move his chair back so he could shift over and on top of Shane.

‘Ilya, I can’t eat like this!’ But he wrapped his arms round Ilya anyway. Briefly stroked his hand down Ilya’s cheek, touched the mole there. ‘It’s like living with a dusky leaf monkey.’

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘I googled ‘clingiest monkey breeds’ and after scrolling past your picture at the top – ’

‘Very funny,’ Ilya said. It was just teasing, he knew that, and while Shane might frequently be oblivious to undercurrents or reach the world’s weirdest conclusions off seemingly straightforward evidence, obviously he had noticed Ilya preferred to be within Shane-grabbing distance at all possible times.

Shane managed to pry Ilya off long enough to eat breakfast, though Ilya had smoothie stains down his front now. He stripped it off (ignoring Shane’s disapproving mutters about the temperature) and put it in the laundry basket (like a civilised adult in a relationship, not a teenage bridge troll like Svetlana called him).

Shane liked the dishwasher done a certain way. Ilya made Shane show him how, and then shoved him out of the kitchen and tidied up himself (still shirtless, he had plans).

Ilya’s own place was either organised with military precision or a complete dump, no in between. Mostly it was the former, because that was the way he had been raised, but sometimes it was the latter, because he was a ‘black dog of a mood’ as Marleau’s girlfriend called it, or more rarely because he was in a ‘fuck you what are you going to do about it’ mood, when he was spitefully aware that nobody was there to shout or slap until he cleaned up.

Post-tuna melt debacle, the house had looked like a cross between battlefield carnage and a rubbish dump, one of those huge floating ones that had collected in the Indian Ocean and killed everything around it. Svetlana had stuck her head in once during this period and promptly turned around and left.

It got bad enough that Ilya took to crashing on Marleau’s sofa, but as Marleau had both a baby and a girlfriend, he overstayed his welcome pretty quickly. Eventually, Marleau’s girlfriend wordlessly gave him the number of a cleaning service and patted him on the shoulder while he dialled it.

That wouldn’t fly with Shane. He had his own way of doing things and this was his house. This was his life. It was for Ilya (who had very little to speak of, lifewise, nowadays) to fit himself into the space Shane left for him. To adjust to Shane’s needs and requirements.

Rinsing the dishes before they went in the dishwasher (front row for the blue ones, back row for the big white ones), Ilya had never been as content. Happy, yes, deliriously up, up, up and sometimes even without the accompanying fall, but content to do this. Anything for Shane, anything with Shane, Ilya was so in love any observer would be disgusted. It was obscene, to be sorting out dirty dishes and still be perfectly satisfied. Nobody should have the right to such a feeling.

This particular kitchen was fine, built to Shane’s exacting specifications, a little small in Ilya’s view. Flitting through his head, the dozens of different kitchens he had been in with women he had slept with. Not with other men because he wasn’t insane. His own current kitchen, open-plan, the much shittier kitchen in the first apartment he had owned. If he thought of that he could see Svetlana walking naked across the floor, her body lit up like gold against the sunset. She was the most beautiful woman in the world to Ilya and always would be. But he had never been in love with her.

*

‘What colour were her eyes?’ Shane had asked the morning after their fight all that time ago. The photographs were spread across the table in front of him, and he was peering assiduously, already documenting their details.

Shane had been holding the one with Ilya’s mother with Ilya as a baby. Her dark hair, her porcelain oval face, her fine-boned features. Shane had said that was his favourite. It wasn’t Ilya’s favourite (he liked the one of his mother alone at the dacha, holding a large grey rabbit), but he liked it too.

‘карие глаза. Fuck, I don’t know what you call it.’

Shane was already reaching for his phone, typing it into Google Translate. At his demand Ilya had spelt it for him patiently.

‘Brown eyes.’

Ilya had pursed his lips. He couldn’t remember the colour precisely, couldn’t bring his mother’s face into focus in his head, but brown didn’t seem quite right.

‘Maybe. They changed. In most lights, greenish. Others, brown.’

‘Oh. That’s, uh, hazel, I think, in English.’

‘Huh. Not a separate word in Russian. You also have карие глаза.’

‘Say it again,’ Shane had demanded, and mouthed the words silently as Ilya repeated himself.

*

Dishes done, Ilya tripped over something coming down the stairs to the sitting room, living room, whatever the fuck Shane called it. He cursed, caught himself and looked down to see what it was.

That fucking box.

Ilya sat down on the sofa again, opened the box and considered its contents. Shane had ordered picture frames. The kind you put on the wall and the kind that stood up by themselves. Had said, You don’t need to decide now.

Now here was Shane again, peering over his shoulder as Ilya leafed through the bundles, dug out that one of his mother with the rabbit.

‘Do you want to put that one up?’

Ilya nodded. Shane knelt behind him, draped his arms around him, leant against his back, the way Ilya liked to do to him when he was cooking.

‘I thought we could have a photo of us too,’ Shane said quietly. ‘In the bedroom. Nobody else is allowed in there, I clean it myself and lock it when I leave.’

Ilya couldn’t speak. He managed to nod.

‘I can see why your dad called her an icon,’ Shane commented.

‘She hated that so fucking much,’ Ilya said. ‘She was so beautiful, but she never thought she was.’

‘I looked up Rublev.’ Shane’s arms pulling Ilya in tighter. ‘I guess I can see it. Her chin. Like that Madonna.’ He rubbed his face against the back of Ilya’s neck, once, twice, then came over his shoulder to look at the photo again.

Ilya focused on breathing. So funny, his Shane. Looking up Russian art history, when the only reason Ilya remembered Rublev’s name was because his father’s words were scored on his memory. His smile, his hand coming up to cup Mama’s face, her wide and trembling eyes, turning her head away, her stern Grisha, stop it!

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Fuck off,’ Shane said, and then remembered he was supposed to be being sensitive. ‘Don’t answer if you don’t want. Is your brother like you? Like her?’

‘No. Alexei looks like our grandfather.’ Ilya rifled through the photographs until he found the one he wanted, Alexei with Papa at Sonyechka’s christening. He’d been high, Ilya was pretty sure, and Katya had enlisted Ilya and her own brothers to corral him. Easier said than done. Papa had held the baby once, examined her with a displeased look, and then handed her off to Katya. He had wanted a grandson. ‘Here. Lighter than her, darker than me. Getting stocky. I look like Papa, little bit, like his side of the family more.’

‘You have the same mouth as your mom,’ and Shane’s hands came round, tracing Ilya’s upper lip. ‘The shape of your eyes. Your hands. The curls.’

‘Mm,’ Ilya said, and let his head fall back against Shane.

‘What do you want to do with them?’

‘Burn them,’ Ilya said honestly, and regretted it instantly. Shane was rigid against his back. ‘I should not have asked Alexei for them. Big mistake.’

‘Because they make you sad.’

‘No,’ Ilya said, twisting round to see Shane’s face. Because they make you sad. That expression, what was it? He’d thought he knew all of Shane’s expressions. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t know what to do with them.’

‘Put some up, if you want, and shove the rest away. They’ll keep.’

Ilya picked through them. One of Mama with the rabbit, one of Mama holding him as a baby Shane liked so much, one of Mama in the kitchen frowning over her book, her tea cold beside her, one of Sonyechka only three years old and clutching the teddy bear Ilya had sent from Boston, one of Ilya and Svetlana in the hay loft (where they were adamantly not supposed to be), heads poking up out of the straw, one of Mama, young, young, young, long before she had the misfortune to meet Grigori Sergeevich Rozanov, arms wrapped around the waists of her schoolfriends, hair falling out of a schoolgirl’s plait, laughing with her head tipped back.

‘She looks so serene,’ Shane said, finger gently tracing over small Ilya’s face where Mama’s hands cupped it.

‘She was a good mother. She tried. She was so fucking sad. All those pills, to make her less sad.’ He stopped. Mama’s silent tears, the hours she spent in bed or sitting by the window, talk more quietly, Ilyusha, my head hurts, Papa screaming at her, How could you forget to pick him up from school?, how by the end she was hardly a person at all, so thin, so quiet, a shucked out oyster shell. But if he came in after school quietly, if he took his shoes and coat off and tiptoed to where she lay on the sofa, if he curled up on the floor next to her, sometimes she still had the energy to reach out and stroke his hair.

Shane had kept asking questions, though he took Ilya’s ‘no’ as he had promised. But God, question after question, stirring the bottom of the pool up, so that the previously clear water was clouded, rippling with all the soil and filth from the bottom.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t talk about this with Shane. He didn’t want to talk about this with Shane. All it did was hurt them both.

*

Ilya’s memories of his mother were variable, a little patchy these days because of all the time he had spent not thinking of her. The sharpest ones were conversely the oldest. Sitting on her lap and looking out the train station. Watching Ну, погоди next to her on the sofa. Helping her pick out her jewellery for an evening at the opera. Eating an apple, biting round and round until he got to the core while she read her book.

Always reading another book. Papa culled any he found inappropriate. Once, he burnt three hardbacks and Mama said Like a Nazi, and their aunt had hustled Alexei and Ilya out of the room before he could see what happened next.

They’d hidden under Alexei’s bed until the noise stopped.

Ilya preferred to hide under his mother’s bed, but it came with the risk of being caught by his father because at that time it was his bed also. That was very vivid in his mind still also. The long trailing ends of the lace bedspread made a tent of it, the way the mattress sagged in the middle. Those brass bedknobs on the bedstead. The little beds Alexei and Ilya slept in at the family dacha, those had them too. So satisfying to put your hand around, cold at first, the coppery taste when you put your tongue to it.

*

Shane was watching the news, wrapped up in a huge blanket. Here they were, on vacation, completely alone together, and Shane had dragged Ilya out of bed at the crack of dawn for his scheduled spontaneous romantic gesture, bullied him about smoking, made him go on a run in the afternoon and now he was watching horrible things happen on the tv.

Ilya had never understood the impulse. Life was depressing enough without adding other people’s problems to the mix. And Shane was not political. He watched the news because he thought he ought to. Because Yuna and David did, and expected him to be able to keep his end of the conversation up when it turned to politics.

The story changed. Now the journalist was talking about developments in HIV medication. She was speaking to ‘members of the gay community’, young and old men who explained the impact the stigma had had on their lives.

Shane turned it off.

Ilya came into the room and sat down now that it was safe. He crawled across the sofa and into Shane’s side. Shane absently lifted his arm and opened the blanket and Ilya collapsed against him with a happy sigh.

‘Why you watch that, I don’t know,’ he said after a while, though he did know really.

‘You should know what’s going on in the world,’ Shane said, frowning. Ilya couldn’t see his face from where he’d planted his head, but he could just tell that Shane was frowning. So judgemental, always, his Shane. So interested in what people should do.

‘Everything is terrible. People are killing each other. Anyone who is different is evil. Poverty is everywhere, sickness and war, and nobody is doing anything about it. There, see, I am caught up.’

Shane exhaled and his hands went to Ilya’s hair. Since that had been Ilya’s objective since he came into the room, he didn’t complain.

‘Your hair’s so soft,’ Shane mumbled.

‘So’s yours.’

It might have turned into one of those silly lovesick conversations – your hair is soft, your skin is soft, you are so beautiful, I love your eyes, kiss me, I love everything about you, let’s have sex – but instead Shane asked ‘What’s it like, in Russia? For gay people.’

‘Hasn’t all that fucking reading told you yet,’ Ilya mumbled and heaved another sigh.

‘It’s given me facts. I want your, um, experience. Since it’s illegal.’

‘It’s not illegal technically,’ Ilya said and sat up. Shane’s hands felt wonderful against his scalp. As a counterpoint to yet another uncomfortable conversation however, not so much. It distracted and weakened him.

He didn’t need to be on guard against Shane. He knew that.

‘If you’re quiet. If you don’t flaunt. You can live your life. If you keep it absolutely private, so that if you make an enemy they can’t say, Look, he has posted a photo of him with another man, he is spreading propaganda, arrest him.’

‘That’s not a way to live,’ Shane said.

‘Yes. But it is the way it is. Some parts, Caucasuses, they will murder you. Not on the street, not just because they see you are gay. I mean, your own family will kill you.’

Shane was quiet for a long, long time.

Eventually he said, ‘I’m sorry you grew up like that.’

‘Was better for a little while… Then the law, not better, but they weren’t using the laws. If you have money, influence, could get away with it. Now they are.’

‘Would you live there if that wasn’t true?’

‘No. Maybe. I don’t know.’ He cupped Shane’s face with his hands. ‘Place is just a place. I don’t care where I am, so long as it’s with you.’

Shane’s eyes were shining, his whole face were softened. He leant forward and kissed Ilya – so gently! – on the mouth. Then he lay back down, pulling Ilya with him. Put his hands back in Ilya’s hair.

‘Tell me something nice. About Russia. About you. About that fucking nature documentary you pretend not to watch, I don’t know, just something nice.’

To take the taste out of his mouth, he meant.

‘You read lately. It makes me think of my mother. Happy thoughts,’ Ilya emphasised as Shane clenched his fist where it lay against Ilya’s shoulder. ‘The whole house was full of books. So many books in the house. Books and old records. Papa loved marching music. And Shostakovich.’

Even now, play Tchernetsky and Ilya was back in the kitchen, Mama cooking at the stove, Papa through in the sitting room, reclining with his head back on the sofa and conducting with his fingers. His mother laughed; his father grumbled, Woman, don’t you know good music when you hear it? but he wasn’t angry, it was affectionate, almost. In those days he had moments of gentleness.

Mama’s lips, her deep cupid’s bow, like Ilya’s, Papa would put his finger there in the dip, slide it down to close her mouth. Sh-shshshsh, Irisha.

‘Wasn’t he a bit rebellious for your dad?’

Ilya shook his head, ‘My father was more complicated than that.’ What a bizarre thing to say. Shostakovich, rebellious? What, were the chords in revolt? Were his notes dissident? Ilya knew nothing about music anyway. And his father, who had no more opinions on communism than he did on capitalism. No point in trying to explain the complexities represented by his father’s tastes.

*

They played music for his father when he was sick. Put on his ancient records, used the old CDs, tuned in to some old polka on the radio. Sometimes his father responded, sometimes not.

His anger then was fleeting, as easily swatted aside as a fly, more like the tantrum of a child than the volcanic rage that had ruled so much of Ilya’s life. When he flung his soup bowl at Ilya’s head it fell short and all Ilya felt was pity, that this was what his father had been reduced to.

Pity was unforgiveable. Papa would sooner have died or seen Ilya dead, than be pitied by his son. Ilya wanted to tell him to hit him, beat him, revile him, anything, if it would only make his father be himself again. Anything if would make his father less afraid, the animal fear of a fox in a snare beating away in his eyes, something that knows itself to be dying and howls out in defiance against it.

As the illness took a firmer grip, the frailties of the body became more frightening, more embarrassing and that bred pity too, for the humiliation Papa would have experienced, if there were enough of him left to know the tasks his sons had to perform for him. His naked body in the bath, the vomit on his shirt, and towards the end, the piss and shit, they revolted Ilya, but he did what he had to. It was his duty. It was not his father’s fault. The revulsion made him feel guilty, and then it brought back the pity. Poor old man.

No son should feel such condescending tenderness for his father. It was the nature of things, that the son was weaker than the father. Maybe not. The wheel turned, and an infant had much in common with an old man. But it felt wrong. Unnatural.

Once Papa woke crying in the night, not knowing where he was. Ilya had gone through and sat with him, held his hand, and Papa had said, stuttering around his cracked lips, You are good to me. Ilya had felt his heart crack clean in two.

But then into his mind came the image of his mother trembling. Her whole body shook, shuddered with uncontrollable terror. This sick old creature, this withered man, he had done that, and what was his fear compared to that which he had instilled in her?

*

By the time Ilya got out of the bathroom that night, Shane was sitting up against the headboard, scrolling on his phone. Ilya watched him from the doorway for a while, until he was sure Shane knew he was there but was ignoring him.

Finally, Shane put his phone down and smiled at Ilya.

‘Come here.’

‘You come here.’

‘No, you,’ Shane said, patting the bed firmly. And picking up his phone again.

Ilya gave in. He sat down on the bed and cuddled up to Shane. Leant over his shoulder to see what he was doing.

Duolingo. Again.

‘You are never going to learn Russian this way,’ Ilya said.

‘You don’t need to sound so happy about it.’

‘If you can speak Russian, and you meet Svetlana, I am finished. Never another moment’s peace,’ Ilya said dramatically.

‘You learned that from my mom.’

‘She has very good phrases,’ Ilya said, considering what would happen if he put his hands down Shane’s shirt now. Might be good, might be a swat and a get-off-Ilya-we’re-not-having-sex-while-talking-about-my-mother.

Shane exited the app with that terrifying image of an owl on fire, and opened his messages.

‘Who are you texting?’

‘Rose.’

Ilya pulled a face behind his back.

‘I saw that,’ Shane said, even though he hadn’t turned around. ‘Anyway, Duolingo’s fine. It’s a start. You should try it. It probably would have been useful when you were learning English.’

In Ilya’s considered opinion, his English was not bad. Svetlana had said it enough times that he actually believed her. He’d had more sex in English, so to speak, than in Russian (despite his quite impressive body count pre-draft) and that helped. He was primed to dirty talk in English, and wasn’t that more important than being able to discuss the news?

Before the summer, he hadn’t been primed to talk endearments in any language. Svetlana did not expect them from him, knew better, and knew better to apply diminutives to him, when the last person to call him Ilyusha and not mean it mockingly was Mama.

*

His mother’s stark terror before his father, how everything she was fell away into pure animal abasement. How she desperately tried to pacify him at times, at others stood mute and proud, closing her eyes and refusing to bend. The latter happened less and less often as Ilya got older.

He had cloudy baby memories of her actually shouting back, standing up for herself – no, standing up for him, for Alexei, telling their father not to be so harsh, ‘Ilyusha is a baby still, you cannot expect a baby to behave perfectly!’

That first of the two times his father actually beat him, not spanked or slapped, Ilya’s mother had been out. She had come back to the house near the end of the beating, and she had utterly, utterly lost her mind at the sight of her husband stood over her son with a belt.

One moment Ilya was anticipating the next stroke, the next he was pulled up and away and his mother was in between him and his father, screaming in Papa’s face. She ripped the belt from his hands and Papa was too surprised at the suddenness of her appearance to resist.

‘Go to your room, Ilyusha!’ she ordered, and to Ilya’s everlasting shame, he did.

The sound of his father shouting was an everyday sound. The sound of his mother shouting was normally only a faint memory from babyhood. The sound of his parents arguing, that was entirely new.

Eventually, the sound of something hitting the wall. Eventually, the sound of his mother crying. Crying out in fear.

Ilya put his hands over his ears, buried his head beneath his pillow. His back was throbbing.

Mama appeared later, tear-streaked. She cleaned the marks with stinging antiseptic, coaxed Ilya into his pyjamas and tucked him into bed though it was still early. She stayed, stroking his hair and humming, like she had done when he was little.

Papa got worse as he got older, as Ilya was forever telling himself. He hadn’t always been that bad.

Mama, she got worse as she got older too. The sadness ate away at her, left her soul moth-eaten. What would she have been today, living so long with the sadness?

*

Shane woke him up, a turn of events so unusual Ilya initially thought he was still dreaming. Usually Shane was up before him, but he then went to do yoga or make breakfast while Ilya kept sleeping, until he rolled over and discovered the empty space beside him. Then he was up too, hunting out Shane wherever he was, getting in his space, twining himself around him, Shane laughing and batting at him, What’s your problem? and Ilya still half-asleep, whining, You left me alone.

His night had been uneasy, slipping back and forth between waking and sleeping. Shane kissing him, touching him, that made a nice change from the strange elusive dreams he’d been having, where nothing bad happened but sickened him regardless.

But no, that was Shane’s actual mouth on Ilya’s actual neck, breathing hot heavy air, his actual fingers slipping down to pinch at Ilya’s actual nipple.

Ilya groaned and rolled over on top of him.

‘Shane, fuck.’

‘Yeah, that’s the idea,’ Shane said encouragingly.

‘That is my line,’ Ilya whispered in his ear as he shifted on top of him. ‘You sound exactly me. I have got to you.’

‘That’s what Scott Hunter said.’

Ilya groaned and fell back.

‘Why would you mention that fucking dinosaur in bed, Shane? There is nothing sexy about that, you have killed my boner, look, see, it is dead, dead, dead –’

‘Doesn’t feel dead to me,’ Shane said grabbing a sly handful.

They rubbed up against each other, Shane gripping onto Ilya’s thighs to yank him closer, encouraging him to thrust. Ilya kissed him messily, missed his lips, kissed his nose, his cheeks, his chin and neck. It was so fucking amazing, morning breath and all. They pulled apart long enough to move their boxers out of the way, and then Shane was spreading his legs, pulling Ilya forwards and closing them around him.

No lube, dry, painful friction but Ilya couldn’t be bothered to roll over and reach for the bedside drawer, spat on his hand, reached down, then Shane was squeezing his thighs together as Ilya thrust. A full fuck could wait, because Shane was gasping, coming, sighing into his mouth, and Ilya came, collapsed against Shane’s chest and tried to remember how to breath normally.

‘That was good,’ Ilya muttered after a while. He pulled Shane closer. ‘It’s always good. Let’s do it again.’

‘If you put your hand on my dick right now, it will fall off.’ But Shane was leaning into him, running his hands up and down Ilya’s chest.’

‘No touching, promise. I will leave it absolutely alone until it feels better.’

Which he did, until Shane was yelling at him to touch his cock, and Ilya smirked through the blowjob that followed.

‘When did you first have sex?’ Shane panted, flat on his back in the middle of the bed. Ilya was still kneeling on the floor, hooking his arms over the side of the bed to watch Shane recover.

‘I think you should retrain as therapist. You were never so nosy before.’

‘Not my fault. Hockey, remember?’ Two, three things, Yuna’s voice said in Ilya’s head.

‘Fourteen. Sister of schoolmate. Then Svetlana. Then Sasha. You?’

‘Uh, I had a girlfriend in high school. I was sixteen. It went – badly.’

First times could be bad or weird or rushed. Ilya’s own had left him buzzing under the skin, feeling slightly disgusted with himself. But Shane should never feel like that.

‘And with a guy, well, you already know that. Haven’t with a lot of people, not like you.’ He stopped, as if worried the conclusion of that sentence might offend Ilya.

Ilya slithered onto the bed (you are like creepy oversized reptile, Svetlana said in his head as he crawled towards her on hands and knees) and pulled Shane into his arms.

‘I have fucked many, many people. Always the best with you.’

True. Ilya had fucked a lot of people. Many, many more women than men because for the latter the stars had to align and certain precautions had to be taken. All the bodies he had searched through, trying to out of his head, his body, trying to do what felt good. It was an effort now to pick out individual encounters, to pick out the blonde in Maine, the brunette in Cali. A hazy rush of sound and colour, nauseating and sweaty and indistinguishable. Some good, some bad.

Nothing touched fucking Shane.

‘I know.’ So fucking smug, how could he be madly in love with this smug bastard? A year ago Shane wouldn’t have said it, wouldn’t have thought it, wouldn’t have believed it.

Sex had always been fun, mostly been good. Fucking one girl after another, letting them blur into each other. None of them meant anything apart from Svetlana. He did always make that clear, but maybe sometimes not clear enough.

Svetlana: fucking was just a continued conversation, often. They argued while fucking, by fucking, they had whole conversations with Ilya inside her, or with her hand on his dick, his hand on her clit. They had fucked for so long there were no boundaries. Svetlana saying to him, Ilyusha, I am hot for it, I have no man at the moment, eat me out. Ilya wasn’t stupid enough to ever speak quite so bluntly to Svetlana: Sveta, I am horny, I have no woman at the moment, suck my dick. She would have castrated him. it felt different. A job. Make her happy. But friendship, ultimately, undercut by the single strung wire of electric attraction.

With Shane, sex was more than sex.

‘It’s nice,’ Shane was rambling now. ‘That it’s always, uh, the best for both of us. I like that.’ Now he was turning his head away, embarrassed, the motion the same as Ilya knew he himself used. There was a curious delight fluttering in his chest at the sight. Living with someone, knowing them, you took on quirks of theirs, gestures, tastes, habits. You stamped your mark on them.

‘Team effort,’ Ilya reminded him, gathering him in. The closer the better.

‘Team work makes the dreamwork,’ Shane breathed hotly into his ear, and then they were both laughing too hard to continue.

*

Team work? Not at the rink Ilya trained at. They were all constantly jostling for position, backstabbing, rivalries. Praise of another was insult to you. Anathema. And Ilya, golden boy, was Public Enemy No.1. They fucking hated him. First because he didn’t take it seriously, and then, when he realised what hockey could be for him, because he did. Either way he was much, much better than any of them.

Any kind of training for serious sports, it would be brutal. Maybe a little worse with Ilya’s coaches, who would have laughed in the face of safeguarding and spat at the feet of health and safety (both concepts new to Ilya since they started piecing together the legal side of the foundation). Igor Alexandrovich, Sasha’s father, considered a training session wasted if somebody wasn’t bleeding or crying.

For the best, really. It toughened you up. Survival of the fittest, as with so much in life.

People were brought in to look at him. Not the usual scouts. He knew Sergei Mikhailovich had sway with his old team and they were eyeing him up, so Sergei Mikhailovich had definitely tapped them or they never would have heard of him, but there were others too, two Americans and a Canadian, who eyed him like a prime side of beef and spent a long time closeted with Igor Alexandrovich in his office. That was the whole little game of it: Ilya knew why they were there, and they knew Ilya knew, and Ilya knew they knew he knew, but they didn’t speak to him and Ilya had to act like they weren’t watching him play the entire time.

Shane would have had to actively pursue hockey. Nice Canadian parents, they didn’t plan for their son to sell his body to sport even if they wanted him to play. Maybe they thought he would follow in his father’s footsteps, go to college, play hockey, then settle down and work for the government.

Ilya had it handed to him. His father wanted him to excel. He would have settled for a football star or even a figure skater, but ice hockey, rough, masculine, beloved national sport, sport of his old friend Sergei Mikhailovich, sport where he had some pull, could pull strings, influence and control, that was ideal. That was wonderful. It was the first thing Ilya had ever ever done right in his life in his father’s eyes.

*

‘Let’s watch a movie,’ Shane said, and Ilya said ‘Okay,’ because it sounded nice, to collapse in a heap on the sofa after breakfast (dishes in regimented order in the dishwasher) and not have to pay much attention to anything but the contentment of it all. And it was so unlike Shane to be lazy, to be willing to avoid routine. Doubtless later he would herd Ilya into the small home gym, drive him out for a run, drag him to the rink. But for now, Ilya could bask in Shane’s relaxation.

Ilya lay back and Shane leant against his chest as he flicked through their options.

‘No Russian,’ Ilya decreed when Shane let the pointer linger too long on some black-and-white classic. It made him think of his father, watching Eisenstein. He was a cliché from head to toe. They had bred him up as a good Soviet, and a good Soviet he had remained, underneath it all. Along with a peculiar harshness that was all his own.

When he was so ill there was not really very much of a person left to him, he had sat in front of the tv and watched Гусарская баллада over and over again. Ilya liked that film too. Dated but funny, light, warm and comforting to watch Shura cavort across the screen and get her way in the end. Sonyechka watched with them sometimes, laughing and clapping her hands until Ilya shushed her.

Russian was a hard language for English speakers to learn. Everybody said that. Nobody ever seemed to say, English is hard for Russian speakers. Nobody told you, No matter what, you will never have the right words in any language again.

Shane vetoed Fast and Furious, Predator, and Terminator. They compromised on Casino Royale, even though neither of them really liked Bond films.

*

You were his favourite, Polina said to Ilya at the funeral, as if that were any kind of comfort. It didn’t sound true. It might have been true. If it were true, that was worse.

The favourite! The permanent disappointment, the let-down, the dutiful son who ran far, far away from home and never quite came back. Never fulfilling his potential. Always lazy, sloppy, selfish.

Winning gold would not have pleased his father. Sveta was right. He would have found something to punish Ilya for. He always did.

If he let up and showed he loved you, Aunt Sonya had said to him once, he is frightened of what will come of it. You would be soft and defenceless and so would he.

She had been drunk, or she never would have spoken like that. They were at Babulya’s funeral. Papa was drinking in the sitting room with the men. Unable to take the rough-and-ready talk that was like a worse, older version of locker-room talk, Ilya had retreated to the kitchen where the women mostly were, although he would undoubtedly hear about it later. At fifteen he had almost reached his full height and was increasingly clumsy with it, constantly misjudging his own strength.

On the ice it was fine. On the ice his body did everything he wanted it to. Nearly. The discipline of an athlete, the reliance on ability, the self-knowledge.

It might be true. It would be nice to think it was true. That his father’s soft love existed underneath it all.

It was a pretty story and Ilya thought probably just that. Aunt Sonya was Papa’s younger sister and prone to fits of sentimentality.

Punishment in those days was a lecture, not a slap, not a beating. Mostly to avoid damaging Ilya when he needed to be on the ice, partly because he was too old for that sort of discipline anyway. The sole time he dared to really mouth off to his father as a teenager, he had been slapped so hard he fell over. But he had deserved it. Who spoke to their father that way, anyway? Who could be so ungrateful, so disrespectful, to the man who gave them life?

Sometimes Ilya worried about Svetlana meeting Shane. Sveta didn’t run her mouth like that, but it didn’t seem to Ilya that Yuna Hollander did either, and she had told him all sorts of things about Shane that Shane might have preferred him not to know.

Now Ilya knew: Shane when he was small couldn’t sleep. After he was no longer a baby he didn’t cry about it or scream, but Yuna would come in at three in the morning and find four-year old Shane wide awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, gazing back at her as silent and solemn as an owl.

Shane was late to speak, but when he did it was in complete sentences, and David thought it was because he hadn’t wanted to do it until he was sure he could get it right.

Shane walked very early, hit all his motor skills and coordination milestones long before his peers.

Shane hated bananas and despite all the entreaties of parents and coaches and nutritionists, could not be made to stomach them.

Shane loved the colour blue very much and always had.

Shane was not interested in playing with most toys but slept with a blue stuffed elephant until he was ten and cried when Yuna tried to get him to get rid of those unused cuddly animals that lived on the shelves and were now in a moth-proof bag in the attic. (‘I feel terrible about that now,’ Yuna had mentioned. ‘But his grandmother kept telling us we babied him. I was worried if he brought a friend home from school…).

Shane had loved the ice since the moment he was first taken out on it.

Shane loved to sit outside at night in the summer, provided there were not too many mosquitos.

Shane loved the taste of spearmint but hated peppermint.

Shane went through the ubiquitous teenage boy phase of wearing so much Axe Yuna used to open the window when he walked in the room.

What could Svetlana tell Shane about Ilya that he didn’t know but she did? Shane knew Ilya liked blue as well. He knew where he had gone to school. He knew he had been an overly-energetic child, a lot of trouble. He knew he liked both spearmint and peppermint.

Svetlana and Shane didn’t know a lot of the same things: the name of Ilya’s maternal grandmother, the place where he had had his first kiss, the teddy bear his father had thrown in the bin when Ilya was too old for it,

But Svetlana knew other things that Shane did not know. Things that were not like the things Yuna had given Ilya.

*

Midway through the poker game, Shane picked up his book and started reading instead. Ilya debated switching over to Alien to see if he would notice but decided against it. He was too tired, too lazy to bait Shane right now. Later. Maybe he’d dump him in a snowbank, maybe he’d fry their entire supper, maybe he’d invent something else about his backhand.

Shane had been doing a very good job of not talking about Ilya’s father since their fight. He passively-aggressively read books at Ilya instead.

Ilya stretched, yawned, leant over casually to see if he could catch a glimpse of what Shane was reading.

Ура, Shane was reading a book on hockey! Some boring biography or something. Was the project over? Was the agony finished at long last? Was Ilya going to be freed from waking at 2am to Shane’s face two inches for his own and questions like ‘Did your family have a samovar? Do you know how to make borscht? Would you like it if we tried to make borscht?’ on his lips? No, they had an electric kettle because this was not 1895, no because he learnt to cook while living in Boston, and absolutely no, because beetroot was the instrument of the devil. Ilya was just lucky that Shane was too obsessive over his horrible diet to inflict his attempts at Russian cooking on them both.

Spoke too soon: to-read pile on the coffee table was Sergei Mikhailovich’s memoir.

Ilya picked it up. Big heavy hardback, but cheap paper, cheap boards, and Sergei Mikhailovich’s airbrushed, out-of-date face grimacing on the cover.

‘Shane,’ he said very seriously, ‘If you actually read this, I will leave you.’

Shane glanced up, startled, then saw the cover and grinned.

‘I mean it,’ Ilya added. ‘Please do not fucking read this. It will tell you nothing about either Russia or Vetrov, but it will tell you many, many ways on how to be more boring.’

‘Fuck off,’ Shane said good-naturedly. ‘It was half-price and I recognised the name.’

‘How can I let you meet Svetlana if you read this? She wouldn’t speak to him for a month after it was published. She said the cover jacket photo looked like he had just got out of Butyrka on bail, and if he dedicated it to her she would enter an Old Believer nunnery in Krasnoyarsk.’

Shane grabbed the book off him and flipped to the dedication page.

‘To my beloved Svetlana, my angelic daughter,’ he read and raised his eyebrows. ‘What did she do?’

‘That is English translation, came later after Sveta calmed down,’ Ilya said. ‘Russian original, is dedicated to Marya Andreevna. Was Svetlana’s stepmother at the time,’ he explained at Shane’s look. ‘Sveta was livid. She went on hunger strike and when that didn’t work she went to her mother’s for Christmas instead. Sergei Mikhailovich cried.’

‘Wow.’

‘But it was too late for the publishers to change it, it had already been printed, so there was nothing he could do. He let Svetlana hold huge party, no adult supervision, when she came back, and he bought her tickets to Stanley Cup Final, and he gave her Graff diamond necklace he had promised Marya Andreevna.’

‘That’s some serious bribery.’

‘Didn’t work. Only made her madder. She went to Paris next holiday as well. She said it was insulting that he thought she could be bought.’

She’d kept the necklace, though. And the Stanley Cup tickets.

*

Svetlana knew the way in which Ilya’s father spoke to Ilya’s mother. Svetlana knew how Ilya’s father spoke to Ilya, especially when he had lost a game. Svetlana knew all the ugly details of Alexei the coke-fiend, of the money drain.

Svetlana knew, but didn’t know every detail. She understood Ilya because they came from the same place, almost the same background, and because they had been almost raised together, had been children together and then teenagers, experimenting with sex and drugs and sex and booze, but mostly sex.

Sentimentally, Ilya liked to think they would have understood each other anyway, because they had a basic, beneath-the-skin affinity, undetectable to the naked eye but beating away steadily. Under no circumstances did Ilya need to say to her: my father was a hard man. She knew that already. She didn’t need certain details anymore than Shane did.

His father had beaten him with a belt once for being disrespectful to his grandmother, appallingly disrespectful, the sort of disrespect that made Ilya disgusted with himself to think of. Another time, for tormenting Polina.

Usually he swatted, slapped or spanked. That last Ilya was avoiding mentioning to Shane also. He knew some Canadians disciplined their children that way but it seemed very much like the sort of thing Shane would take exception to. It was old-fashioned, not Russian.

It had not happened very often. He could see Shane deciding, That is why Ilya is how he is and it made him so fucking angry.

Yes, his father made him who he was, like everybody’s parents, everybody’s guardians, whoever brought you up. Not because he hit him. Hardly ever. The slap recorded in that fucking photograph that had started all of this was an aberration of such magnitude that Ilya could still remember it, beginning to middle to end, whereas the usual slaps and spankings, who knew, who could remember. Sometimes. For real fuck ups. For real bad behaviour.

Even the two beatings, scored on Ilya’s memory because of how unprecedented they had been, those had not come out of nowhere. Ilya had deserved that. He wasn’t so fucked up he didn’t know he hadn’t deserved every single time his father had backhanded him or turned him over his knee as a child for some petty misdemeanour. But the thrashings, the actual, literal whippings, Ilya had earned those. He had been monstrous and he had earned them. God knew, from what he heard, his father had had worse as a child.

*

‘What were you like, when you were eight?’ Ilya asked idly. Shane’s head was against his chest, Ilya’s arm around him. The film was long over. They were meant to get up hours ago to make lunch.

‘Uh,’ Shane said. ‘What brought this on?’

‘You asked me. I didn’t ask you back.’ Ilya strokes his thumb over the top of Shane’s shoulder. ‘What did you tell Rose Landry?’ he added casually.

‘Ilya.’

‘Shane.’

Shane shook his head at Ilya but yielded.

‘Hockey was still fun. Dad got a promotion, we moved to a bigger house. Hated that. School wasn’t great.’

Ilya considered asking what that meant, exactly, but Shane was so easy against him, and besides, he hated it when Shane picked at his own word choices, he wasn’t going to do the same.

‘I remember, Dad got tickets to see the Metros play at home for Mom’s birthday, the three of us went to Montreal. Had lunch at a fancy restaurant, went to a museum for an exhibition Mom was interested in, then went to the game. That was pretty cool.’

Compare and contrast, the presents Ilya’s father had given his mother. Flowers, jewellery, expensive perfume. Never books. Clothing, once or twice, when she was dressing in a way he didn’t approve of.

‘But the promotion meant he was pretty busy… I used to want to stay up for him to get home, and Mom wouldn’t let me because of school. I guess, I guess I missed seeing him as much.’

*

When their father came home, the whole house quaked.

Ilya was often scared of his father but his father was not that interested in him until he began to show promise. Before that, so long as he behaved, was presentable, obedient and quiet, Papa mostly left him alone.

But it was not like that for Mama.

Ilya could remember the shouting but not the contents of the argument. Even when he had been at an age to remember, he could not. His father’s face, flushed with rage, his mouth open, teeth on view, spit flying, but not the words exiting that open mouth.

Scraps, of what his mother had said back. His mother begging. Please. Please don’t. Please, Grigori!

The sheer terror on his mother’s face, that stayed with him. The way she shook when his father came in, sometimes starting before he had even done more than look at her.

What had his father done to her, in the dark night? What had he done where Ilya and Alexei couldn’t see?

She was a proud and dignified person. She watched his father from the other end of the table with grave, grave eyes.

Hazel. Ilya’s eyes were his father’s. His heavy hands, whatever Shane thought. The curls were from her, his mouth too (a wet, effeminate mouth, a girl’s mouth). Nothing else.

She had been great fun, good with small children, effortlessly amusing, never talking down, always full of ideas of things they could do, adventures they could have. Her love was irrepressible, a tangible sensation whenever Ilya was in the room with her, so much so that she didn’t need to say I love you (and hardly ever did). Hers was the kind of beauty that stopped men dead on the street, that caused Helen’s trouble as their pretentious neighbour used to say. Hers was the kind of humour that cut like a knife and which she turned on herself as often as on others. Beautiful, funny clever. So sad, always so fucking sad.

And Ilya’s father reduced to her that, a pleading wreck, fawning on him to reduce the danger. In the greatness of her fear she could hardly contain herself, though she tried. Ilya, go to your room. Alexei, go to your room. Children, go to the kitchen and shut the door and don’t come out until I say.

When Ilya was small and his father had shouted at his mother, she had stood up straight and taken it, had not changed her face, had set her mouth against him and refused to be cowed.

But he wore her down. By the end she was back to giving no reaction but that was exhaustion, submission, not the pride that had kept her straight at the beginning.

*

Pike rang in the afternoon. Bizarre. If Marleau or any of Ilya’s other teammates had rung during this week, he would have assumed catastrophic events, like the whole team being banned from playoffs or Interpol were after Ilya for something his idiot brother had done or Marleau’s girlfriend had dumped him.

But no. Pike appeared to want to chat. There was the sound of children screaming in the background, and Pike kept right on talking over it, like it had nothing to do with him.

Ilya briefly considered sucking Shane off during it again – he made such interesting noises when he was trying to be quiet – but decided not to push his luck.

Inane, boring little man. Four kids, and Hayden Pike. Poor Pike-wife. Ilya hoped she had a nanny.

Eventually Ilya retired to Shane’s lap to wait out the phone call. Shane continued talking to Pike, but he was carding his free hand through Ilya’s hair, so Ilya was going to take that as a win.

‘Okay, man, see you after All-Star, yeah, love you too,’ Shane said and hung up.

Love you too Ilya mouthed and shuddered. I love you after a game, yes, but if Marleau signed off a phone calls to Ilya like that he would have tried to have him institutionalised.

‘Does Pike have nanny for his six billion children?’

‘What? No, Jackie’s a stay-at-home-mom.’

That tracked.

‘I think I’m going to come out to him,’ Shane said. He’d tensed, but now both his hands were in Ilya’s hair, yanking slightly, so Ilya figured either he wasn’t too stressed or the destruction of Ilya’s curl pattern (phrase learnt from girl he had slept with in New York who watched him run a comb through his dry hair and said mournfully Oh, baby, no) would prove a balm to his soul or whatever.

‘Okay.’

What did he want Ilya to say, exactly? Svetlana knew, or knew enough. Ilya liked his teammates but he wasn’t going to push it. Even if it went well (which it wouldn’t because they were hockey players not kindergarten teachers) he did not need to see Marly’s head explode trying to comprehend bisexuality.

‘Not about you,’ Shane added. ‘Just, um, to prepare the ground.’

Ilya squinted. Then he turned over in Shane’s lap to look up at him.

‘Hollander, you do not need my permission. Tell anyone you like.’

Shane exhaled and nodded.

‘But I would like to tell Svetlana.’

Shane’s lips were pressed tightly together.

‘She is my oldest friend. She knew about me and Sasha –’ because she’d walked in on them when they’d grown careless ‘– and she would never tell anybody.’

Because she loved him, and because she was discreet, not a gossip, and because Ilya knew all her secrets too.

‘Sasha?’

Fuck.

‘Coach’s son.’

‘Were you… together?’

‘With Svetlana?’ Ilya asked, startled. Hadn’t he made that clear?

‘Sasha.’

Ilya couldn’t help it. He laughed. Shane’s face dropped and he raised his knees, spilling Ilya out of his lap, and turned away.

‘No, no, Shane, I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you,’ Ilya said, moving to try and put his arms around Shane. Shane pushed him off, scowling.

‘Really. Not laughing at you. It is just, if you knew Sasha, you would know how ridiculous that sounds. He’s not serious about that sort of thing. It was just sex.’

The scowl was still distorting Shane’s beautiful, beautiful face (he had no right to look so cute when he was pulling such an expression) but when Ilya crept back into his lap, he didn’t push him off, let Ilya put his head down against his stomach again.

*

In bed together again in the evening. Halfway through the week, running out of time together – but at least All-Star beckoned, even if it meant a return to secrecy and hotel rooms.

But right now, it was good. The comforting domesticity, just like any other couple settling in for the night, taking their own private world for granted.

Shane was reading. Ilya was staring at the ceiling, envisioning the conversation he could instigate. The argument. They’d already had it. Repeatedly.

Why are you reading that?

How many times are you going to ask me that?

Always one more.

Maybe because he couldn’t take it, that Shane was reading this, could not supress his discomfort. Maybe because he liked the reassurance. Shane was saying without necessarily meaning to, I’m interested in you, you, you.

No, whatever it was, Ilya couldn’t take it. He turned over suddenly and kissed Shane. Half-expected to be shoved off, reprimanded, Shane playing at prim disapproval, but instead Shane kissed him back.

They fucked like that, Ilya pinning him down, holding his hands to the bed, covering him entirely with his body. Shane’s open mouth, the tendons tensed in his neck as he threw his head back and came, it was exactly as it should be.

*

Shane fell asleep straight afterwards. Ilya had thought he’d relaxed, brought himself out of his head, but now he was back to staring at the ceiling. Eventually he reached for his phone, dimmed it so it wouldn’t wake Shane, and started going through all the emails he’d been ignoring.

Notification came through.

Instagram DM – he thought he’d blocked Alexei there –позвони мне мудак!! The most civil message he’d received from his brother in several years.

For a moment Ilya, hesitated, finger hovering over Alexei’s profile. If it was money, Alexei probably would have asked straight out. There might be something wrong with Sonyechka, with Katya… Then he thought of what Svetlana would say, and if there was real trouble, he would have to explain to Shane, bring up his fucking family again.

He deleted the message and blocked Alexei.

What did it matter? The past was always there. Trying to ignore it was like trying to cut off the shadow at your feet.