White Gardenia by Belinda Alexandra Page B

teacup and understood. ‘My mother isn’t a redhead,’ I said.
    The woman held the necklace above me. I didn’t attempt to grab at it. I knew it was lost. I heard the door open and a man’s voice call out. Then nothing. Only blackness.
    Men’s voices brought me back to consciousness. They were arguing. My ears rang with their shouting. A light burned into my eyes and my chest ached. Something was lying across my stomach. I squinted at it and saw that it was my hand. The skin was scratched and bruised and the nails were broken and rimmed with dirt. My fingers were numb, and when I tried to move them I couldn’t. Something hard was poking into my leg. I attempted to sit up but my head throbbed and I lay back down again.
    ‘I don’t know who she is,’ one of the men was saying in broken English. ‘She wandered into my café like that. I know she is from a good family because she is usually well dressed.’
    ‘So you have seen her before?’ the other man asked. The inflection was Indian.
    ‘She has been to my café twice. Never said her name. Always asking about Russia.’
    ‘She’s very pretty. Perhaps you found her attractive?’
    ‘No!’
    After another attempt I managed to sit up and swing my feet to the floor. The blood rushed to my head and made me nauseous. When the blindness passed, the bars came into focus and I saw that I was in a prison cell. The door was open and I was sitting on a bench attached to the wall. A basin and a bucket were in one corner. The cement walls were covered with graffiti in every language imaginable. I glanced down at my bare feet. Like my hands, they were dirty and covered in scratches. A shiver passed through me and I realised that I was in my petticoat. I felt under the material, my underwear was missing too. I remembered the man in the hall. His vacant eyes, the scars on his hands. He must have been her accomplice. I started to cry, opening my knees and feeling between my legs for signs of injury. But there were none. Then I remembered the necklace and broke down weeping.
    The policeman rushed into the cell. He was young, his skin as smooth and brown as honey. His uniform was neat with elaborate braids on his shoulders and he wore his hair in a turban. He straightened his jacket before kneeling down to talk to me. ‘Do you have someone you can call?’ he asked. ‘I’m afraid that you have been robbed.’
    Sergei and Dmitri arrived at the police station soon after. Sergei was so pale I could see the veins beneath his skin. Dmitri had to steady him with his arm.
    Sergei handed me a dress and pair of shoes he had brought from the house. ‘I hope these are all right, Anya,’ he said, his voice tense with worry. ‘Mei Lin fetched them for me.’
    I washed myself in the basin with the rough cake of soap. ‘Mother’s necklace,’ I wept, my airwayschoked with grief. I wanted to die. To climb into the sink and swirl away with the water. To never be seen again.
    It was two in the morning when I led the policeman, Dmitri and Sergei back to the crumbling apartment building. It looked sinister in the moonlight, its cracked walls jutting into the night sky. Prostitutes and opium dealers were waiting in the courtyard but disappeared like cockroaches into shadows and crevices when they saw the policeman.
    ‘Oh God! Forgive me, Anya,’ Sergei said, putting his arm around my shoulders, ‘for not letting you talk about your mother.’
    I was disorientated in the dim hallway, hesitating in front of one door and then another, unsure which was the right one. I shut my eyes and tried to recall what the hall had looked like in the afternoon sunlight. I turned to a door behind me. It was the only one with a grille. The policeman and Sergei glanced at each other. ‘This one?’ the policeman asked.
    We could hear someone moving about inside the apartment. I looked at Dmitri, but his eyes were turned away from me, his jaw set. A few months earlier I would have been excited to see him, but