Charlie Johnson in the Flames (6 page)

He did eighteen months for the trick with the garbage can and when Charlie next saw him it was nine years later at a Solidarity meeting in Gdansk shipyard. Jacek was leaning against the back wall of a union hall, ignoring the talk, which never interested him much, and snapping the factory women in smocks who brought the vodka into the meeting without the big guys ever noticing that they were there. He was a good snapper, but it didn't take much for Charlie to persuade him to, as he put it, go into motion pictures. From then on, they were inseparable: Slovenia, summer 1991; Novska and Pakrac, October 1991; Sarajevo, Christmas 1992; Mostar, summer 1993; and on and on: Mogadishu, Luanda and Huambo, Kabul, all the assign ments lined up in his mind like so many rows of tape. They were holidays from hell every one of them, and Jacek seemed to survive them by keeping everything contained within the black frame of his viewfinder. It was often all Jacek would say about a bad situation: ‘Look,' he would say, having framed up, and then he would gesture at the machine, and Charlie would look through into the digital world and think: Yes, it looks like something when Jacek frames it up. I can deal with this. They'd seen the world together, though they'd seen it too close to know what it really meant. Some times they both felt like spectators at a terrible and violent play. Sure, they wanted to go on stage and stop it. But these plays couldn't be stopped.

The worst thing was that their experience got blurred, lost definition, one bad play shading into the next. Everybody said they had interesting lives, which was true, and it seemed pretty stupid to complain, but after a while it just became a series of assignments, a set of stories you told when you got home but which left you with a feeling that their reality had escaped you. ‘We suffer from too much experience,' Jacek said once. ‘We have more than we know what to do with.' Which was why Jacek began turning down assignments and would disappear to the farm and his pigs, and nobody could reach him. He managed his exposure a lot better than Charlie, and, altogether, he was saner.

Charlie was thinking all this as they hit the four-lane and the windshield wipers came on, and Jacek said nothing and the big German rigs kept passing and slewing rain on to the car with a thump which made the Lada shake. He had no idea where they were going other than it was bound to be the farm but almost anything seemed fine, and Charlie fell asleep in his coat.

It was too dark to see much when they arrived, bucking and weaving along a dirt track, the Lada's head lights playing over the tops of dark wet furrows. It was all new to him, and he realised that never having met Magda before, he had simply presumed that they would both have to take him in. He was asking people to make a lot of allowances, Etta and now these two, and he didn't like what it said about his state of mind, his eerie helplessness. Charlie was going to say all this, but it was too late, for the lights picked out the barn and the white house and now they rolled up to the gravel in front of the door and there in the open doorway, leading back into the kitchen, stood Jacek's wife.

Her hair was up, and she was wearing jeans and what looked like one of Jacek's checked shirts and a pair of white socks on her feet. She had glasses on the end of her nose and she had been cooking. Early forties, he thought. All Jacek ever said about her was that she trans lated books for a living, ran the farm and was, as he put it once, with fine philosophical precision, ‘the principle of my existence'. The minute he saw her Charlie felt bad, for she looked at him with the same appraising look as Etta, only Etta was probably back in London by now and wouldn't want to see him again. Charlie stood there in the kitchen, mute with longing.

Magda poured them vodka and they drank by the pots simmering on the stove, under a red light, and Jacek said something to her in Polish. Magda looked at Charlie – gaunt, unshaven, a shirt-tail sticking out, and a stain of vomit on his trouser leg – and said, ‘We have a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.' She pronounced the syllables with ironic distinctness, as if to distance herself most of the way, but not entirely, from these American notions. Charlie smiled.

‘I don't see it like that,' he said. ‘I just didn't want to go home.'

‘Why not?' she asked.

‘Because I'm not ready,' he replied.

‘So we will get you ready,' she said. On that basis, he could see, she could have him here without betraying his wife. Charlie thought he deserved praise for such intuition about the way women's ethical principles worked.

Magda drank her vodka and then disappeared into another room, reappearing with some cotton wool, adhesive and disinfectant. ‘For your hands.' He patted his pockets, looking for something, and realised that he had left the Navy pills at the hotel. So here he was, the man he impersonated sometimes but really disliked, the helpless guy. It dawned on him that Etta had been right as usual, he was worse than he thought. But it was too late for Etta now.

F
IVE

                                                                  

M
agda cut the dressings off his hands and examined the wounds carefully in the light over the kitchen table. The pads of the fingers and the base of both palms were the worst. Charlie looked at the suppurating red zones without interest, but she bent over, sniffed them and made a face. She gripped his hands tightly to hold them still and cleaned each sore with a Q-tip dipped into disinfectant. It hurt and he felt like a kid sitting there across from her watching the intent way she worked. She was a fine-looking woman, Charlie thought, especially the nape of her neck, from the collar of her checked shirt up to the wisps of brown hair that hung down from her hair clip. Charlie wanted to lean forward and kiss her, startle her with the force of his lips against hers. This was not a great idea, with his best and truest friend sitting with a drink in his hands, watching them both from across the room. It was a bad sign to be so susceptible. He was just a bundle of longing, he thought, and it was disreputable to be so. She applied some ointment to the burns and then re-wrapped both hands in bandages. She even took his temperature, and when she took the thermometer away from his lips she said that if he was still like that in the morning she would call the doctor.

Charlie said he needed another vodka, and so they sat around the kitchen table, drinking without a word. The silence was all he needed, Charlie thought, as he listened to the wind at the windows and felt the noble Wyborowa lighting him up inside.

They installed him in the upstairs bed of one of their absent sons, away at college, and Jacek undid Charlie's shirt and helped him pull his trousers off. When Charlie was alone, staring up at low clouds scudding across a skylight above his bed, his hands swollen now and hurting, he thought he might stay here a long time.

When he woke it was mid-afternoon, and there was a carpet of snow on the skylight. Snow in April on the flat Baltic plain was unusual, so he stood at the window and felt lucky. What a great place, he thought. He had trouble pulling on his trousers and his shirt, and his hands were as sore as before, but he didn't think he had a fever.

Downstairs, it was quiet. All the objects seemed to stand separately in their own circle of light: Jacek's Timberland boots, muddy and worn, by the front door, and her slippers next to them; on the table in the kitchen, potatoes in a bowl; in the sink, two dishes which had held soup, in the room where the TV was, a T-shirt, hers, across the couch. Charlie touched it and heard through the half-open door of the room opposite Magda say, ‘Charlie?' and caught sight of Jacek's bare foot as it tapped their bedroom door shut.

Charlie went back into the kitchen, got the door of the fridge open with his elbow, and managed to get a pint of milk to his lips. He drank all of it and turned and stood looking out at the snow blanketing the Lada. It was bad to be in the way, Charlie thought, but he didn't know where else to go, so he stood there, leaning against the sink, watching the snow fall.

It was a while before they appeared. Magda was in a blue striped dressing gown, and she smelt good as she brushed by him. She took his hands in hers and turned them palms up, not opening the bandages, just looking at his arms carefully to see if the infection was spreading.

‘Were you ever a nurse?' Charlie asked. She shook her head.

‘Elizabeth called.'

‘That's ingenious of her,' Charlie said, making a face.

‘We said you might be here for a few days.'

‘Thank you,' Charlie said, wanting to put his head on her shoulder. This whole desire to lay his head any where that was soft and female was getting out of control. He smiled and she smiled back.

‘The doctor is coming in half an hour. You need antibiotics.'

‘I need an alibi.' She moved away and filled the kettle at the sink, looking out at the snow, affectionately, like someone who loved exactly this view and the way the snow had softened and then obliterated the world outside.

Why explain? He didn't want to go home, and since Magda didn't know his wife and his child, she didn't have to know why.

Jacek, also in a dressing gown, padded in, feet bare, sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his face. When she placed tea in front of him he cupped it with his hands, looking out at the snow. She stood by the win dow at the kitchen sink and Charlie thought that the way they were together, just then, silently watching the snow fall, looking out at their garden, was the closest approximation of happiness he had seen for a long time. He also thought that it had nothing to do with him, and that he shouldn't be here. They would be happier without him.

Etta had called too. She had been talking to the insurance people, Jacek said, and they weren't happy about it but the camera left behind in the valley would be covered. She'd had to make up some story, but they had bought it. Charlie knew that was $35,000 that Jacek didn't have to worry about, although since Jacek had an animate relationship with his cameras, he was probably going to miss it anyway.

‘She is the best there is,' Jacek said, meaning Etta, and Charlie nodded, not saying anything when Jacek added that she had told him she was going to take a few weeks off.

The doctor drove into the yard in a late model four-wheel drive. He had a shiny bald head and brought the cold and the snow into the house with him. He and Jacek and Magda spoke Polish as he unwrapped Charlie's dressings on the kitchen table, like a bloody package of fish. Charlie sat mutely through it all, having his temperature taken, while they spoke about him, and antibiotics were taken out of the briefcase and left on the table. He looked down at his naked, swollen and red hands and listened to the sound of their voices and felt tired and confused. The doctor had a vodka, and Magda and Jacek had one too, and when Charlie's turn came, they gave him a glass of water and three separate pills to take instead. ‘But I want a drink,' Charlie said, to which Magda replied, with the doctor nodding his assent, that if he didn't do exactly what he was told he would be in the burns unit for a month and might lose his hands. Charlie knew this couldn't be true, but it was discouraging nonetheless. Before he could muster any resistance, they had him upstairs in bed, and to Charlie's surprise, the doctor had taken an IV drip out of his case. ‘Is that for me?' ‘Who else?' Jacek said as the doctor bade him bare his arm to introduce the drip line. So he was sick, Charlie thought, sick enough to stay here for ever. It seemed like a dispensation, and as Charlie fell asleep, under the cold canopy of snow over the skylight, he felt that he might never return to his old life again.

He woke the next morning to the bright stab of late morning sun, knowing he had dreamed of the woman on fire. Nothing definite in the way of an image, just the physical sense of her holding on to him, a strange feeling, full of desire, at her pressing her body against his and the flame leaping between them. With the difference that none of it had hurt, and as they fell together, he had felt her breasts against his chest. It was strange to be lying on a bed so far away wanting someone and wishing he could whisper her name.

He could smell coffee downstairs, so he sat up and pulled out his IV line. He tried to put on his trousers, but he couldn't do up his buttons. So he went downstairs with one of Jacek's dressing gowns held closed around himself with his elbows. Magda was working at the kitchen table with a manuscript and a dictionary, and when she saw him she got up and tied the dressing gown cord around his waist and generally straightened him up. He felt unshaven and a mess and tried to turn away when she was close so she wouldn't have to smell his breath. This was getting ridiculous, he thought, but when he went to the coffee on the stove, he couldn't pour or lift or do anything. He turned and looked at her and shrugged and she came and put a cup to his lips and wiped away a drip on his chin, when he had finished. ‘Back to bed,' she said, and he did as he was told. He even put back his IV line, feeling subdued and obedient.

He was like that for a week, and the two of them took turns feeding him and he kept apologising and feeling pathetic and unable to focus. The doctor came, and the medications were changed, and there were new fancy burn dressings with bright shining foil, and he slept and woke and watched the flow of the drip and the sun and clouds crossing the skylight above his head. ‘I should be in hospital,' he said to Jacek. ‘You are. Turn over,' and he swabbed down Charlie's back with a sponge. ‘I can tell,' Jacek added. ‘You cannot stand this much longer.'

‘I keep dreaming about her,' Charlie said.

Jacek was in the bathroom next door, emptying the basin of water and squeezing out the sponge. He said nothing.

‘Maybe we should stop doing this,' Charlie ventured. ‘The road trips.'

‘Magda agrees with you.'

‘And you?'

Jacek came back and sat down on the edge of Charlie's bed.