Free Riding Icarus by Lily Hyde Page B

into a silly habit of talking to myself. Don’t laugh at me.”
    “I won’t.” Masha patted Mama’s shoulder consolingly, although it felt strange to be doing so, as if her mother was just a little girl too. “Mama, why did you let Uncle Igor send you to Turkey?”
    “Because I was very silly and very … very hopeful,” said her mother sadly. “And now I’m in awful trouble.”
    “Have you done something that’s not allowed? Against the law, I mean?” To Masha’s shock, her mother stared at her for a long moment: a lost, blank, unseeing stare. “You have?”
    “Sort of. No, nothing. At least…” Her mother floundered. “No, Masha, I’ve done nothing wicked. But there are people in Turkey, and here, like Igor, who are doing things against the law, and they’re the ones who are chasing me now.”
    Masha remembered the Cossack in his allotment, clapping his hand to his knife when she mentioned where her mother was. “Nechipor says Ukrainian girls and women are made slaves in Turkey,” she said. At the time, she’d thought he was being ridiculous. “He said his heart was burning to take revenge for it. You weren’t … you weren’t actually made a slave, were you?”
    Her mother looked startled. “I suppose … sort of. But revenge isn’t so easy when it’s your own countrymen. When it’s someone you thought was your friend…”
    Masha felt as if the whole conversation was sliding out of control, into some dark, unreal dream. She held her mother’s shoulder tightly, making sure she was solid, she was really there. “So you’re hiding now? How did you get here anyway? It’s an island.”
    “I know. It was the strangest thing,” said her mother. “In fact, you’ll probably think I’ve gone a bit mad. I walked here.”
    “You can’t have!”
    “But I did.” Mama leant forward to poke at the cooking pot again. The mossy, freshwater smell of boiling fish rose out of it. “It was the night of the storm. Do you remember?”
    Masha shivered excitedly. “Of course I remember.”
    Mama settled herself back more comfortably on the ground, Masha in her lap.
    “I’d just arrived in Kiev that day, at the end of a long, terrible journey all the way from Turkey. I was so tired! I walked right across the city to get here, as the sky got darker and darker, and I’d just reached the sand by the river when –
crash! bang!
– the storm started.”
    “Go on.”
    “I hadn’t decided what to do. I so much wanted to see you, my sweetheart.” A tight squeeze. “But the rain was pouring down, the thunder was crashing and the lightning flashing, and I got completely lost. I walked and walked and walked through the trees and allotments, and then I really think I must have been dreaming, because I thought I saw a trolleybus driving along.”
    “And then what?”
    “I started running after it. I was soaked and frozen and I just wanted some shelter. But it disappeared, and soon the storm eased off. I found a sheltered patch under some trees and I sat down, and I must have fallen asleep. When I woke it was already sunny, so I got up and walked around to find out where I was – and here I was, on the island!”
    “And what about the trolleybus?”
    Her mother laughed. “I think I must have been seeing things, don’t you?”
    “I
know
you weren’t seeing things,” said Masha importantly. “Now I’m going to tell you what happened to
me
on the night of the storm.”
    How on earth am I not going to tell anyone? Masha wondered as she walked back to Gena’s house. She felt so puzzled and excited and above all happy that her mother had come back, it was going to be very hard not to talk about it. But her mother had warned her again and again that she must keep quiet, so she hadn’t even told Nechipor as he rowed her back, although she was longing to ask what he’d meant when he’d talked about slaves and Turkey. Most of all, Masha wanted to stay on the island with Mama, to share the soup she was