Charlie Johnson in the Flames

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Michael Ignatieff. Charlie Johnson in the Flames

Charlie Johnson in the Flames

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Charlie Johnson in the Flames

Fiction

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‘Charlie.’ It was the way Jacek used to say it, just to shut him up. It worked this time. Someone had to help him stop these futile gusts of helpless self-recrimination. He came back to himself. He thought: she is all right. Isn’t investing too much in being here, isn’t holding her breath, doesn’t want anything from me.

Would he have flown from London to listen to this? Not without something in return. Like sloshing around in the bath together, like spilling the minibar over each other and licking it off. But there hadn’t been anything like that. In fact, there had been nothing at all. She took a shower. He took a shower. She re-bandaged his hands with the dressings the Navy had given him. She unpacked a small bag and hung a dress in the closet. She tossed his clothes into a hotel laundry bag, rang for service and told them to dispose of them and to send for new ones, same size, in the city. He watched all this with approval. She took charge. He liked that. The weather lifted inside him and he knew all he had to do was lie there with her and talk it out, talk it through until it was no longer weighing upon his chest.

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