The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [118]
‘What are you talking about?’ Anya whispered.
She turned to Anya as if seeing her for the first time. ‘You would rather live as a prisoner? A prostitute? At the mercy of terrible men? I would rather die. But now we don’t even have the freedom to choose that. Our lives are no longer our own.’
‘Shut up, Ludmilla. Don’t say these things.’ The girl in the yellow jacket spoke, looking pointedly at Anya. ‘While we are alive there is hope.’ Then she said, ‘My name is Dasha. This is Ludmilla. We are from Belarus.’ She did not smile but she had a kind face.
The girls wore makeup and heels and Anya thought they looked quite grown up. But why had Ludmilla mentioned prostitutes? They didn’t look like prostitutes. They would have been about nineteen.
‘My name is Anya Kozkov and I am from Moscow.’
The door rattled, a key in the lock. All three girls shrank back from it as if from fire. An old woman appeared with a tray, behind her the shadow of a large man in boots. She put the tray down on the floor and the door was quickly closed, locked again.
There were three cups of tea, some slices of black bread curling dry at the edges, a jar of pickles, and something that might have been cheese. The girls drank the tea while it was still warm and began to tell their story.
Ludmilla and Dasha were school friends. They had answered an ad on a flyer taped to a lamp post: A Better Future Is Waiting! Needed: girls to work in Turkey as nannies for wealthy families.
Dasha and Ludmilla answered the ad. They were ambitious for a better life and longing to travel far from the muddy streets of their one-taxi town. They were young, pretty and invincible and the world was at their feet.
That feeling hadn’t lasted long. At the Ukrainian border, they had handed their passports over to the men supposedly escorting them to Turkey. They had soon realised that they were not getting the passports back; they had also realised that the way to a better future had turned into a dark path through a nightmare.
No one had touched Dasha or Ludmilla yet—apart from a few hard slaps to the face when they had demanded their passports back. Dasha’s lip had split and Ludmilla saw stars but they knew it was nothing compared to what could happen to them. They had heard the horror stories of girls being trafficked into dirty brothels all over the world and now expected the worst. And, they said, there had been others—four other girls in the van with them. Perhaps they were in the house, they didn’t know. So far they were staying quiet to stay alive, hoping a window would present itself to escape, hoping they would not be separated.
‘We started this together and we will finish it together.’ Dasha took Ludmilla’s hand. Anya wished she would take hers, too, but Dasha didn’t.
Instead, Dasha opened her tiny backpack and pulled out two bottles of nail polish, one pink, the other purple.
‘I’m training to be a beautician.’ She shrugged. ‘It might help us think of something else for a moment.’
Dasha took Anya’s hand and painted the nail on her index finger pink, the one on her thumb purple.
‘They’re cheerful colours together, don’t you think?’
Anya nodded.
‘You can do mine when I finish,’ added Dasha. ‘I’ll show you how.’
And so, in a garret on the outskirts of Bucharest, two terrified girls began painting each other’s nails pink and purple.
Ludmilla watched them for a moment then closed her eyes and began to pray.
The Hammer-Belles were sleeping late before helicoptering back to London. Stevie was in turmoil, having not slept at all the previous night.
Henning was still not answering his phone, which only made things worse: Stevie was beginning to worry about him in earnest.
She did some callisthenics, hoping to calm herself. It was not successful. The helicopter was arriving that afternoon and she could see no way out of her bind. She needed to clear her head with mountain air and exercise, and she needed some sensible advice. Fortunately, she knew exactly where she could find some.
Stevie pulled on her canary yellow ski suit, grabbed her skis from