Charlie Johnson in the Flames Page 7

  He could tell that Rae and Barbara knew they had walked into bad marital weather, but they were the good kind of people who just ploughed their earnest conversational furrow, believing feigned obliviousness would help a couple through a bad patch. He stayed silent and watched them talk. He had time to look over at Elizabeth, to look at her as if he was just a guest and could get up at the end of the night and never see her again. He reflected that it was good that she knew who she was and that she had never based her life on assumptions that weren’t true. For example, after coming to London to study, she had known she would never make an orchestra, and had gone into teaching, and having done that, she realised she was a better administrator and had become deputy head, an American no less, with an even stronger mid-Atlantic accent than his now, of the school where Rae and Barbara were teaching. Rae taught maths and Barbara chemistry, and Elizabeth was their boss. She liked her job, and they liked her, and Charlie looked on and took it all in, as if he was just passing through.

  Christ, they were great people, really, but they took the Lord’s time to go. Afterwards Charlie and Elizabeth did the dishes, because the dishwasher was acting up, and she handed him plastic gloves to protect his hands, and he was able to pat the big pots and plates with the towel and put them away on the shelves. They didn’t exchange a word, and it ought to have been a com panionable silence. But it was not. When he put down the dishtowel and walked through the sitting room and out into the hall, he saw his bag still lying there on the floor. He picked it up and walked to the door. She followed him out into the hall.

  ‘Where the hell are you going?’ she demanded. She grabbed him and turned him around. She was shaking him. Then she punched him hard in the chest and knocked him back against the wall.

  ‘What are you doing? Talk to me. You have to.’

  But he couldn’t, and he couldn’t explain why. He shook himself loose and just said Sorry. She shouted his name, but it made no difference. He opened the door and stepped out into the night.

  Charlie spent his first of many nights in the railway station hotel. He could afford better, but his view was that he didn’t deserve better. He lay in the dark and went to sleep to the sound of someone taking hoarse, fierce pleasure in the room next door.

  SEVEN

  He woke at first light, still in his clothes, listening to the waking roar of the city through dirty curtains. The bag he had packed in Magda and Jacek’s house lay unopened on the floor. He sat up and felt around for his shoes. He had woken up before in a strange hotel room, thinking he had done the irrevocable, only to discover, in time, that he hadn’t. But this felt different: as if this was the moment, the pivot on which his life turned.

  He imagined Elizabeth standing in the kitchen in the half-light, unable to sleep and Annie, at the Duggans, wrapped in her sleeping-bag on the floor of some kid’s room. His own recklessness frightened him. ‘Live in truth,’ he heard a voice inside him say. What the hell did that mean?

  He shaved though he didn’t want to, because he thought he ought not start out by letting himself go. He changed his clothes, straightened himself up, and then stood there, ready for the day, looking at himself in the mirror. ‘Live in truth’: what was the truth of this face? He could see his mother and his father, old Mika and Frank, the tender nemesis of all his attempts to be different from them, but the traces of their features were all that was familiar in the visage in the yellow light of the plastic bathroom suite. It felt crazy to look at your self and think: I’m a middle-aged guy in a hotel bathroom, Mika and Frank’s kid, and I’ve left my family, and I don’t have any idea about what happens next.

  ‘Live in truth.’

  He had a longing to be right with the world, to be at home in his skin, or whatever the phrase was. He had once thought he knew what it felt like, but he didn’t know now and he hadn’t known since the woman had died and Etta had left him. He came down the stairs in the hotel, imagining Etta intently, like a voyeur concealed behind a half-open door, watching as she opened her dressing gown and enfolded him in. He watched the scene, like a lonely outsider, but at the same time he could feel his burning palms resting on her shoulders, the moist smell and the warmth of her body. He felt less homeless to think that she was out there in the same city, but to tell the truth, he did not know where she was.

  In the hotel lobby, he stopped and stood reliving their last moment together, in front of the church. He could now see how he must have looked, waving his bandaged hands about, pretending he knew what he was doing, when he was actually sick and completely out of control. He almost laughed. It took a weird kind of talent for self-destruction to shoot yourself in the foot like that.

  The first thing to do was to fix what had gone wrong. He was a believer in the new day. It was an expression of his father’s. According to Frank, when you got lost in life, you had to retrace your steps and start over. You had to keep believing you could find a life that made sense. It was about the only advice Frank had ever given him, in the shy, indirect way he had, standing at the work-bench in the garage, in between the noise from his drills, and so low Charlie wasn’t sure he’d heard it. ‘Find the new day.’ Charlie had to find it now.

  He phoned Etta’s extension from the pay phone in the hotel lobby. He heard the answerphone reply, in a cool voice, that she would be out of the office for three weeks. Next he tried her cellphone. As unit manager, she gave it out to all the crews on the road. It was standard procedure, only now, when it answered, her voice instructed callers to reach Megan instead.

  He didn’t know where else to look. He had been to Etta’s apartment once, about five years ago, to pick up some tickets on the way to the airport, but he’d never find it now, and she might have moved in between. She hadn’t let him in the door, just smiled and handed him the tickets. He could hear some classical piano music playing in the background. She had looked young, her hair braided back at the nape of her neck, wearing a blue dress, her feet bare with red toenails and she looked perfectly happy and self-sufficient on her own. No closer, Charlie, had been her message then, and he had taken it in good grace, giving her a little wave as he stepped back into the taxi.

  He walked out into the square in front of the railway station and seemed to have eyes only for everything that was vile: the spit on the sidewalk and the vomited food in a starburst by the subway entrance and the bloody gash on a drunken beggar’s forehead. Life’s redeeming features must still be around here somewhere, he thought, but he couldn’t see them, and as he was swept into the people funnelling down into the subway, he felt he was on his way down into hell.

  The subway car was packed, and they got stuck between stations, and he was hemmed in, with his eyes shut. Then he remembered a story Etta had told him that night in the Esplanade about Jimmy something, the singer who was a star in her country. She said he looked like that Australian, with the same ringlet hair style, and he sang songs about love, in a four-octave range, and the people thought he was the greatest thing there was. They even crowned him the King on one of their TV shows, and when he put the crown on his head, Etta said, he looked as if he really was the King. She began to laugh, and so had he, as they lay on the bed together while she described the sequinned suits he wore, and the sweat pouring down his face as the girls clawed at him from the front row of the stalls. The great part of her story was how Jimmy had woken early one morning, disturbed by a cock crowing in his neigh bour’s field. He grabbed the gun he kept on the bedside table. He began firing it – and this was the point – from inside the bedroom, shattering the windows, while his wife sat up in bed begging him to stop. He just went higher and higher, waving the gun around his head shouting that nobody had the right to disturb King Jimmy. Then the gun went off again, and Jimmy slipped down with a stunned look and when his wife got to him on the floor, he was staring up at her with a neat small hole in the side of his head.

  Charlie remembered how Etta laughed, with her hand to her mouth and a look just short of tears when she described Jimm
y’s fate. She had sympathy for Jimmy, who had seemed to understand, but just a little too late, that life could get completely out of control. Charlie was thinking about Etta so hard he was surprised when the train lurched into his station and he was bundled out on to the platform.

  She wasn’t in her office, of course, but he lingered by the glass door observing the neatness of her cubicle, so unlike the others, the desk swept clean, and the files with their tabs in order in the tray and her handwriting on each of them. He hadn’t noticed before how the chaos of the newsroom, all those piles of newspaper, discarded scripts, dusty monitors, Post-Its, half-empty cups of coffee, seemed to stop at her doorway and give way to her serene space. Looking at her monitor and its mouse, the filing cabinet sealed shut, the way she kept the disorder at bay, he wished he had paid attention to it all before this moment. She had left a pair of black high heels by the coat-rack. He wanted to pick them up, run his hands along the inside of the leather, feel for the indentation of her toes in the sole, but when he tried the door, it was locked.

  There was no one in yet, except the cleaners, and he sat in his coat in front of his desk, looking at the mess as if it belonged to someone else. He poked around in the newspapers now weeks old and that script idea he had and then he swept it all into the bin and held it out for the cleaner in the sari, with a blood spot in the middle of her forehead, who took it without a word and dumped it into a black plastic bag attached to her cart.

  He had been a journalist from his early twenties, he thought, in a pompous kind of way like someone about to make a speech or a confession. And at the age of twenty-four, when he was a buck private, he managed to parlay his high school sports writing into a berth on the Stars and Stripes at Danang. He never did see combat, like his dad, but he saw what combat had done to the people brought to the base hospital. All he remembered was going down the wards, talking to guys who had left parts of themselves up there on Route 9 or Khe Sanh, and how, when he was by their bedsides, writing up their story in his notebook, he would look up into their eyes and see something there that made him feel ashamed of himself without knowing why, though he knew now. He filed some stories, lies all of them, about how brave everyone was, and came back determined that he would be a little more truthful. After Danang, there had been nearly thirty years of it, from linotype and typewriters to ENG and satellite feeds, from home town papers to the metropolis and from the metropolis to the London bureau. What he had to show for it was an office of his own, where he could shut the door, as well as half a secretary, three awards on his wall, and more experience than he knew what to do with. Not understanding it, he had reduced it all to a set of stories told whenever he was drunk or there was a woman he wanted to impress. The point of these stories was: look at me, how I have lived. But it seemed obvious to him now that he had been left almost completely untouched by his life. Tired of it, perhaps, but untouched, as if it had all been just a very long action movie and no curtain.

  Except, of course, the woman on fire. He looked at his hands, lifted off the bandages. They were better now. He pulled the bandages off entirely and threw them in the bin. The new skin was pink and tender. But they were fine. If people didn’t shake his hands, he would be OK.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  It was Megan, large, cheerful, English, the first in and the last out every night and nobody really knew how she lived. With a dog. With a cat. Who knew? Who cared?

  He swivelled around and realised how pleased he was by the sight of her, pink cheeks, hair askew, perennially dishevelled in those capacious print dresses that thankfully concealed her moving parts.

  ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ she said.

  ‘You haven’t,’ Charlie said, smiling. ‘Jacek phoned. So you knew.’

  ‘I mean we did, but you did bloody well disappear.’

  ‘Needed a break, Meg, a bit of peace and quiet.’

  ‘Your wife didn’t bloody know.’

  ‘She’s very cross with me, I quite agree.’ Even though Megan had never cast eyes on Elizabeth, she took the woman’s part. It was her trade union.

  ‘You all right?’ She had a great south London accent. Awwright? She gave him her quizzical look, the one that registered that he belonged to another tribe, men in trouble with women.

  ‘Just fine, Meg.’

  There were footsteps and voices in the corridor. The early shift was coming in for the one o’clock. Dannie. Martin, the Luscious Maria. Foster and Imran.

  Hey, they said.

  Hey, Charlie said, waving a little wanly.

  They weren’t really curious about where he’d been. They didn’t want to know. They were satisfied with the minimum: that there had been an accident, something about his hands.

  ‘Charles, it was a good story,’ Luscious Maria said and turned her molten brown eyes upon him from the doorway. She was the only person on earth who called him Charles. She was a comic figure, Luscious Maria, a serious and melancholy Christian Palestinian whose curves and skin and dark eyes attracted men with outsize wrist-watches, chest hair and big money in import-export, when what she wanted, as she once confessed to Charlie on their solo late night drink together, was a man with sensitivity. To which Charlie had replied that there was no such thing, not really, as a man with sensitivity.

  ‘Thanks, Maria,’ he said. But he wasn’t thinking about her.

  ‘Meg, could I have the tape? All the output.’

  He hadn’t seen the pictures and now there was nothing else that mattered. Meg came back in a minute with two cassettes, one the finished story, the other Jacek’s output tape. She said that Shandler wanted to see him at ten, but although Charlie took this in and registered that it meant trouble, he was already putting the tape in the deck. Meg wanted to watch too, but he shooed her out and sat there alone, blinds down, seeing it all over again.

  The version was cut to the standard 90 seconds and had run, so he could see from the tab, on the 1 and the 6 a month or so before. They had kept his stand-up in the dug-out, though it was terrible, since he looked as jarred and scared as the three camouflaged village boys just behind him in the shot. The rest of the voice-over was by the seedy Stedman, whose voice blessed every event – from earthquakes to celebrity weddings – with the same empty portentousness. ‘Militia units seen here, in the uniforms of… .’ It was all the long lens stuff Jacek had shot of the blue armoured vehicle, the commander coming out to the house, the flames rising from the door. And then Jacek’s shot went in closer, as the woman came out of the house. You could see the trick with the lighter. The flames on her clothes. Charlie got close to the monitor, moving the dials forward and back, re-running it over and over. Then he pulled out the output tape and scrolled through Jacek’s shots, all the drops and edits. There was one shot; – unusable because too fast, too shaky – there goes another award, Charlie thought – of the woman running towards him. If you slowed it right down, until she was jerking frame by frame, you could begin to see in the smoke and the aureole of flame around her the widening hole of her mouth. Opening and closing. Opening and closing.

  Charlie played with the dials, back and forward, but he could never get her face to come into resolution, could never freeze it in such a way that he could print it and have something to hold on to. She slipped away into the flames, and all he could feel was the thud of her body against his and the smell of burning and the groaning from her lips near his ear.

  But if you slowed down the militia unit footage, to the moment when the commander got out and came down the path to the house, you could see his face clearly in a frame or two. After she caught and began to flare like a torch, yes, you could see his face. Charlie slowed it down, froze the frame, pressed print and then waited, with a feeling of being satiated and certain of at least one thing, while the single image came off the printer.

  He had it in his hand when he came into Shandler’s office and he was studying it when Shandler gave him the lecture. It wasn’t easy of course, because the footage
had run everywhere and the network had recouped every dime. But the thing about Shandler was that he liked to make you think the money didn’t matter. There was also the principle, though Charlie never could anticipate what ‘the principle’ would turn out to be. Charlie got the whole pompous lecture, the one about not being professional, about not telling them, leaving crew behind, taking leave without permission, not seeking appropriate medical help, the whole boring administrative stick. Charlie even had time, so little did Shandler’s words imprint themselves upon him, to observe that their whole relationship was a cliché: Johnson the field man confronts Shandler the desk man. The desk man always wins.

  ‘So what’s it going to be?’ Charlie said.

  ‘I had considered dismissal,’ Shandler said.

  ‘So why don’t you?’

  ‘The footage was too good.’

  ‘And it would look ridiculous to fire the man who burned his hands getting it.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So I’m grounded.’

  ‘Desk assignments for a while. Glad to oblige.’ Shandler looked at him over the top of his rimless half-glasses.