by Maynard Sims
Three bunks, three lives; three men sharing a space no more than twelve feet square. Jacob’s letters from home that he kept pinned to the wall above his bed were yellowing, and with no new ones to replace them, they shouted out the man’s desperate loneliness. Grabowski’s Freddie Mercury shrine was looking tired and dog-eared, a testament to the fact that Grabowski had long ago given up on life.
Czerwinski’s own bunk was curiously anonymous. He had deliberately made it so. He didn’t want to give the guards or the other inmates the slightest clue about what went on in his mind.
He had spent the four years of his sentence isolated inside his own head, and not once, not even for the briefest second, even when things had been so bleak he had contemplated suicide, did he feel the urge to open up and bare himself to somebody else. It was safer that way.
At eleven thirty he would gather his parcel of personal effects, say good-bye to the governor, get himself signed out by the releasing officer, and then make the short walk across the courtyard to the main gates. In the years he had been here, he had seen them open many times, but this time it would be special because they were opening for him.
He wondered if there would be anyone there to meet him, but he doubted it. Within two months of him going down, Helena, his wife, had moved in with Wiktor Polanski, the solicitor who had handled his case, and two years later she asked for a divorce. He granted her request with some relief as the marriage had never been sound, but now he was wondering how he was going to face life outside completely on his own.
That would be an entirely new experience for him. Helena and he had been childhood sweethearts and were married a few days shy of his eighteenth birthday. The marriage had lasted nearly twenty years, good and bad. Mostly bad.
He shook his head to shoo the memory away. This was his new beginning, his fresh start, and he didn’t want sour memories spoiling it. He closed the door to the cell for the last time and turned to the warder who stood at his shoulder. “Right,” he said to the guard. “Time to go, I think.”
The prison gate shut with a whisper behind him, and he took his first lungful of free air in four years. Across the street a car was standing, its engine idling. As the gates closed behind him, the car door opened and his daughter, Julia, stepped out. She said nothing but raised her hand in a semblance of a wave.
He was surprised to see her there. She had not visited him once while he was in prison. He met her halfway across the street and they embraced, stopping the trickle of traffic and eliciting several angry horn blasts, but they were oblivious to the noise.
“You’ve had your hair cut since I last saw you.”
She ran her hand through her auburn crop self-consciously.
“It suits you short.”
“That’s more than Mother thinks. She hates it.”
He shook his head. Four years on and his daughter was still playing the rebellious teenager. If prison had taught him one thing, it was tolerance. “No, really, I mean it. It looks good. Brings out your eyes. How is she, your mother?”
“Still with the asshole Wiktor.”
He settled in the passenger seat of her Volvo. “Nice car,” he said. “Who does it belong to?”
“A friend. He lets me use it sometimes.”
“Has he a name, this friend of yours?”
“His name’s Wladyslaw.”
“And does Wladyslaw have a job?”
“Dad, don’t start. Don’t spoil it.”
“Point taken. Did you bring my keys with you?”
She reached into the glove compartment and dropped the bunch of keys into his hand. He stared down at them and selected two of them. “Can you take me straight to the workshop?”
Julia started the engine and stared straight ahead. “I thought you’d want to go home first. There’s…” She hesitated.
“There’s what? Go on—spit it out.”
“Well, I invited a few people over to your place, just to welcome you back.”
He sagged in his seat. “Oh God, Julia, why? A coming-out party’s the last thing I need. I don’t want to see anyone…not just yet. I’m not ready.”
“It’s not a party,” Julia said indignantly. “It’s just a few friends. It’s no big deal.”
He slammed his hand on the dashboard so hard it made her jump, and her foot slipped from the clutch. The car lurched and stalled. “Dad! For God’s sake. It’s not as if you’ve got to make a speech or anything. It’s just the people who’ve missed you since you went inside. People from the club. Jacek, of course. I thought it would be nice.”
“If they’d missed me that much, they would have taken the trouble to come and visit me, wouldn’t they? And did they? Did they, hell!”
Julia shook her head. “I didn’t realize you’d grown so bitter.”
“Will she be there?”
“Mum? Do I look stupid? Of course she won’t be there.”
He was staring back at the prison, taking one last long look. The wall rippled as a shockwave passed through it, and then the bricks began to bulge outward as if made of rubber. The brickwork stretched, ballooning, splitting, and a black shape pushed out from the wall, forming on the pavement outside the prison into an uneven cloud of shadow. It took the human form of a man but was ill defined around the edges, as if incomplete.
Czerwinski gasped and spun round in his seat. “Drive!” he said to his daughter.
Julia turned to him, confused by the panic in his voice. She followed his gaze but saw nothing except the prison wall, solid, iron-gray brickwork, intimidating and unbreachable.
Her father sat in the passenger seat, his face bleached white, a film of perspiration covering his skin, a look of terror in his eyes. “Dad!”
He rounded on her. “I said, drive!” He reached across her and twisted the key in the ignition.
She batted his hand away. “Calm down! I can do it.”
The car started and she pulled away from the curb, glancing at her father, who had turned again in his seat and was staring back at the prison.
They reached the outskirts of town. For the past thirty miles they had driven in virtual silence. Julia tried hard to make conversation, but her father was reticent and closemouthed, confining his answers to monosyllables.
“I’m not sure I can take much more of this,” she said, crunching the gears into second as she pulled away from traffic lights.
“Much more of what?” Czerwinski said, although he knew exactly what she was talking about. Since leaving the prison, he had closed in on himself again. It was a trick he developed first when he was on remand awaiting his trial. He found it a calming exercise, and at that moment he badly needed calming.
He knew he had seen the black shape emerging from the gray brick wall of the prison. Things couldn’t pass through solid matter, and the walls were solid matter, impenetrable. Equally logical, he couldn’t have seen the shadows because they only existed inside the prison. And he really thought, hoped, he had seen the last of them.
“Look, I’m sorry I invited them, okay? We’ll get you home and I’ll get rid of them.”
Czerwinski sighed, forcing the darkness from his mind. “I just need some time to adjust, that’s all. I’ve been surrounded by people twenty-four hours a day for the past four years. The last thing I need is to get out of that place and be surrounded by more. Understand?”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said sullenly. He could almost feel her resentment.
He leaned back in his seat with a sigh. This was going poorly. She was trying hard. Their relationship had never been easy, but today she was trying hard and he was throwing it all back in her face. Perhaps she was maturing, after all, becoming the daughter he never thought he’d have.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being unreasonable. Best behavior from now on. I promise.”
It was a promise he soon found impossible to keep.
It was a problem meeting his old friends, and when they sang “Sto Lat,” he started to feel nauseous. The s
ong was usually sung at birthdays or name days, wishing the recipient good health, good wishes, and a hundred-year-long life. He wasn’t worthy of the sentiment. He was a man who had committed a crime, who had been caught and punished. He was a man so neglectful of his wife that she ran off with the first man to pay her serious attention. He was a man who had let himself down. He didn’t deserve, or want, their goodwill.
An hour in to the gathering, he sought refuge in the garden. He stood underneath the rose arch, smoking a cigarette, trying to think of a way to escape and laughing at the absurdity of it. Here he was at his old house, freshly cleaned and tidied for the first time in four years, surrounded by his own furniture and belongings, and he found it as confining as the prison he had just left.
“It’s good to see you again, Tomas. Got a light?” Lucja Wallenski came up behind him.
He and Lucja had been friends for years, since before she married his best friend, Pawel. She had been single then, and he had nurtured a major crush on her, but at the time he was committed to Helena. “You shouldn’t smoke, Lucja. It’s bad for your health.”
“I’ll see you in your box first,” she said.
He chuckled. “Yes, you probably will. Have you got your car handy?”
“Why, fancy a drive? Or looking to escape?”
“What do you think?”
“Would you like me to smuggle you out?”
“Think you can?”
“Of course.”
Five minutes later they were driving out onto the street. “Where to?” Lucja said with a smile.
Czerwinski took a long final pull on his cigarette and flicked the butt through the window. “Do you remember the workshop?”
“Of course I do. You took me there after the pub one night…before Pawel and I got together.”
“That’s right, I did. God, you’ve got a good memory.”
“I remember you proposed to me.”
“Did I?”
“You certainly did. Mind you, you were drunk as a skunk.”
“And married to Helena.”
“Just as well I didn’t accept.”
“Lucky for you.”
“Maybe,” she said.
They drove in silence for a few minutes, both wrapped up in the memories of that night.
Life could have been so very different for both of them had they followed their hearts and not their heads.
“Here we are,” Lucja said, breaking out from the reverie and turning the car into a narrow lane that ran parallel to the railway line. The workshop was in one of the arches underneath the bridge. He noticed as they drove along the dingy street that most of the other businesses had gone in the time he had been inside. There had once been a secondhand record shop that specialized in ‘50s rock and roll, a wood turner who made fruit bowls and table lamps, and an old man whose shop was called Iskier-Sparks and who claimed to be able to repair anything electrical. They were all gone now.
They stopped outside his workshop. There were metal shutters secured by heavy padlocks over the entire frontage. Graffiti artists had exercised their creativity. There wasn’t an inch of metal that hadn’t been covered with spray paint.
He climbed from the car, pressing his hands into the small of his back to relieve the stiffness. He was very aware he was getting older. One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, he would be too old to make use of the workshop. But that was a few years off yet.
“Would you like me to wait?” Lucja asked.
“No, it’s okay.”
“Call me later in the week.”
He bent down and kissed her cheek. “I will. Promise. And thanks for getting me out of there.”
“A friend in need…”
“…is a pain in the…Yes, I know. See you soon.” He blew her another kiss and watched as she U-turned in the road. She winked at him as she drove away. One in a million, he thought, and fished in his pocket for the keys to the padlocks.
The shutters rose smoothly and quietly. The front of the shop was painted a dark green and still looked quite smart. The sign that ran above the shop was in scrolled gold lettering and proclaimed Tomas Czerwinski Upholsterer, no more than that, but anything else was unnecessary. He had enjoyed a reputation as one of the best upholsterers in the area, and several interior design shops had him on their books as their first choice. Under their aegis he had done work for some of the richest and well-known people, and he found it a privilege to work on their fine antique furniture, bringing it back to its former glory.
He smiled ruefully. Memories, that’s all they were now. Past glories that he would never again enjoy. It was going to be hard getting the business set up again, and he realized it would be starting from the bottom. And this time he wouldn’t enjoy patronage from the interior-design companies. They had very up-market images and wouldn’t recommend an ex-con to their rich and famous clients. He turned the key in the lock and let himself into the workshop.
It was just as he remembered. His hammer and staple gun still lying on the bench where he’d left them the morning the police came to arrest him. Even the material he had been using to reupholster the couch was still there on its roll, leaning against the wall. The couch had gone, though, as had all the chairs and other pieces he had booked in. He hadn’t expected anything else. Helena would have contacted all his customers and told them to collect their furniture. He wondered what excuse she’d used. He couldn’t imagine she would have told them the truth. She couldn’t have stood the indignity. Her one relief when the case came to trial was that there had been a huge fire at a local firework factory and the stories of death and disaster had kept his story out of the local papers.
He walked across to the compressor, stroking the hoses that fed air to his staple gun. He tapped the fuel tank with a screwdriver, but it echoed emptily. He wondered if the machine would ever work again after standing idle for so long. It was very old, and he doubted if they even made spare parts for it anymore.
A small movement attracted his attention. There were black shadows moving among some material in the corner. Vague and indistinct, they weaved in and out of the rolls. He walked across to the corner and crouched down, pulling the material aside. The shadows vanished, but the movement, vague and diaphanous remained, like an echo after a loud noise.
“Bastards!” he hissed under his breath, and suddenly years of containment and frustration boiled up and erupted.
He grabbed a wooden mallet from the bench, and with a cry started pulling the rolls of material away from the wall, chasing the shadows as they scurried for cover.
Finally he lashed out with the mallet. Dancing shadows showed an almost human instinct for escape, trying to find cover under the compressor.
“No, you don’t.” Czerwinski brought the mallet down again and again, and suddenly it wasn’t the shadows he was striking out at. It was Helena. Helena lying there on the grubby floor of the workshop, her skull crushed, her face pulped beyond recognition. And still he kept smashing down with the mallet.
“Did you see them, Tomas?“ voices whispered. “Did you see the breathers?”
“No!” Czerwinski yelled, and hurled the mallet against the wall. Gradually the images and shapes faded and Tomas sank to his knees, fearing the nightmares that had begun in prison were here to haunt him as a free man.
Pawel Wallenski drove slowly through the town, his eyes raking the pavement, looking for any sign of his oldest friend. He was furious with Lucja for spiriting Tomas away from the reunion and made his feelings clear in a blazing, stand-up row with her, the ferocity of which made the other guests squirm with embarrassment. But then there were always issues with Lucja whenever they talked about Tomas Czerwinski.
Wallenski loved Czerwinski like a brother, but didn’t trust either his wife or his best friend when they were alone together, and this simmering resentment always came to the surface during arguments, which were unfortunately increasing in frequency the longer the marriage survived.
His first stop on
his search for his best friend was the workshop, Tomas’s first love, and the reason he had spent the past few years languishing in prison. It was his fight to keep his upholstery business running when faced with the crippling credit card bills Helena had run up on her numerous spending sprees, that led him to seek other, less legitimate, ways of making money. Fraud, forgery, only ever at the expense of those who could afford it but illegal all the same.
When he reached the railway arches, he saw that the shutters were down and padlocked. Of Czerwinski there was no sign.
Czerwinski stood on the bank of the canal.
“What’re you doing, Tomas?” Wallenski chuckled as he came up alongside his old friend. “I thought you were going to throw yourself in.”
“Actually, I was,” Czerwinski said under his breath and turned to him slowly.
Wallenski tried a half smile. “I should get you home. Julia’s very pissed at you.”
“Soon. Fancy a drink?”
Wallenski nodded and began to walk back to the road. Czerwinski stopped suddenly. “I think I’m going mad, Pawel,” he said.
Wallenski hesitated for a moment, then said, “Well, you do seem a little overwrought.”
Czerwinski laughed. “Overwrought! Oh yes, that’s a good one. Overwrought, that’s what I am.” Still laughing, he climbed the steps to the road.
Czerwinski sat at a table and watched while Wallenski ordered the drinks at the bar. The barman was surly and seemed irritated at having his quiet afternoon ruined by the inconvenience of having to serve customers. The table was ringed with the stains of countless forgotten drinks and when Wallenski set two more glasses down, the marks from those joined the anonymity of the others.
Tomas picked up his beer and took a long pull, wiping the froth from his top lip with the back of his hand. The first normal alcohol he had touched for four years, and it soon left him light-headed. The homemade stuff inside was only any good for numbing the brain and most of the senses. His friend sat down opposite and stared at him over the rim of his glass as he greedily drank his beer. “It’s been a long time since we shared a beer, Tomas,” he said.
