Beautiful Bad

by Annie Ward

  “Yeah. And he had to work! Hillbilly Buck told me Ian let her spend the night with him.”

  “At the ambassador’s residence?” My voice actually squeaked. Trouble.

  “I know,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, Ian’s boss would be none too pleased.”

  I whistled. I myself was also none too pleased. I even felt sick.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I wanted you to know. Even though nothing happened. I think it’s best for us to take a breather from the British bodyguards for a while.”

  I stared at the shoe-scuffed muck below my feet. “Yeah,” I managed, focusing on the filthy floor. “Maybe we should call it a night.”

  She put her arm through mine. “Read my thoughts.”

  That’s when the cavernous club began to shake. One of the bathroom-stall hook-locks started making a rat-a-tat noise. A ferocious metallic whirr could be heard above us and we all looked up at the water-stained ceiling. A sagging remnant of drywall came loose, danced and fell. Like sheep, the drunk and high girls emerged from the bathroom stalls, rearranging clothes and stumbling in their platforms. Jo and I grabbed hands and followed the others out to the patio, where a crowd had already gathered.

  They were all looking west. A few miles away the woods of Mount Vodno were on fire. Military helicopters were stampeding over our heads like immense dark buffalo, massive and blotting out the stars.

  The mountain was only a slightly darker shade of black than the world behind it, and it loomed like a pyramid over the city center, a frightening but almost identical twin to Sofia’s Mount Vitosha. There were many small fires and one large one, and it looked as if they were all growing. The glassy-eyed clientele of Lipstick stood in awe, staring at the throbbing sky and the burning forest. Rockets from the lower part of the mountain were visible arcing up and into the area below the summit.

  “The military is shelling the rebels,” said Jo with an unmistakable note of terror as she fumbled for her phone. “They better stay the fuck away from the camps.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up. Ian had approached behind us and, without taking his eyes off the sky, started to steer us away. One hand around Jo, the other around me. “Let’s go, girls,” he said softly, pulling us back. “Let’s go home.”

  As Jo and I allowed ourselves to be backed away from the others still staring into the sky and up at the mountain, I looked back and forth—at her, at him and back at her. Neither one could tear their eyes away from the destruction. Suddenly, Jo brushed Ian’s hand away from her shoulder with a sound of utter disgust. She pulled me away from him and whispered in my ear, “I just want him to leave us both alone.”

  MADDIE

  2001

  I was at my apartment in Bulgaria working on the travel guide, and I had no plans to visit Joanna again anytime soon. I told myself that I was being responsible and focusing on my career, but the truth was, now that we had decided to “take a breather from the British bodyguards,” the thought of running around the squalid streets of Skopje had lost some of its allure. I pictured being in that city, walking down sidewalks, entering restaurants and sitting in the park, constantly on the lookout for a glimpse of his face. It seemed excruciating.

  Eventually, however, I had no more excuses. The reality of returning to America was again on my mind. My time was dwindling, and I’d been in denial. Joanna missed me. She’d been telling me that she was lonely and her work made her depressed. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she said. “I don’t even want to be here anymore.”

  Finally I went.

  * * *

  The buses in Eastern Europe never arrived on time. Sometimes they were detained at the border. Sometimes the driver stopped at a restaurant for a sandwich and several beers. They broke down. They ran out of gas. Anything could happen, but somehow Jo was always waiting for me. I didn’t mind taking taxis from the bus station during the day, but at night we both thought it best for her to pick me up. This time I arrived long after dark.

  This time she wasn’t there.

  I paid an illegal taxi driver far too much to take me up to Joanna’s bungalow on the hill. I rang the doorbell three or four times before she finally answered, looking colorless and shocked.

  “I’m sorry, Maddie!” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me in for a hug. “I’m so sorry. I set my alarm, but I must not have heard it.”

  “You were asleep?” She usually burned the midnight oil.

  “I’ve been sick,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m fine now. The worst was a few days ago. Let me make you some tea.”

  She was feeling better the next day.

  It turned out that while I’d been working on the travel guide not much had changed in Skopje, except the men in Jo’s life. She’d ditched the company of the British bodyguards for “the horseshit heavy-metal band.” Her new friends were four Macedonian guys in their early twenties who played in a band called Vengeant, which they insisted (inaccurately) was an actual word in English. The thing I liked best about these disgruntled musicians was the way they treated Joanna’s adopted street cat, Panda. They doted on her and brought her little tins of smelly fish. It didn’t matter how mangy she was, they scratched and stroked her matted black-and-white fur like she was a fluffy Persian princess.

  They would gather often, the unemployed quartet, on Jo’s patio to smoke and drink when it was time for her to get home from work. This would infallibly incense the tiny, vile, ancient neighbor lady who they called “the old witch.” She would give us the evil eye over the rock wall while she grilled peppers or beat rugs or simply stewed in outrage, all the while working on something in her mouth with that powerful, old, spotted-hyena jaw.

  “What’s she so angry about?” I asked the boys of Vengeant.

  One of them shrugged and said, “Life. War. Cats.”

  Another pointed to Panda, who sat there, fat and pleased with herself. “She’s going to have kittens. More damn dirty animals all over the place.”

  “She’s pregnant?” I asked happily and knelt down and stroked her until she purred. For some reason this made them laugh.

  Sometimes I would politely offer the four of them tea, pausing by their outdoor naked-torso jam sessions, and they would say, “Yes, please, thank you. Cool.” I could see why Joanna might find it helpful to have such young disaffected nationalists as friends, since they were usually the sort of people who protested the refugee camps and made her job hard.

  * * *

  On the Friday after my arrival, she came home from work and said, “There’s a party tonight. Locals. Students, rock climbers, musicians—locals instead of just ex-pats for a change.” She smiled. “Okay?”

  I was genuinely surprised by the feeling of disappointment that washed over me. I realized that I’d been hoping, in the worst way, to head down to the Irish Pub for a chance encounter with Ian. What I said was, “Of course.”

  Jo and I drank vodka tonics until Bogdan, the drummer for Vengeant, and Dragan, the bassist, finally picked us up in a Russian Lada that was missing so many parts we were doubtful it would make it up the street, much less to the party. Dragan drove and Jo sat on Bogdan’s lap. The good news was that the Russian Lada did, in fact, transport us to the parking lot of a graffiti-covered high-rise block on the west side of the city.

  The entire block appeared to be inhabited by students having parties, and most of the doors were swung wide. We took the stairs to the ninth floor because the lift was broken, lugging up with us several bags of some sort of pirated rakia, which I had no plans to go near, and a few massive glass bottles of brown beer.

  Jo entered the party with a sideways whisper, “I might leave and go back to Bogdan’s place, but you can grab a cab at the corner and you know where the key is.”

  “Okay,” I said indifferently, though I was annoyed.

  She immediat
ely joined the sweaty drummer of Vengeant, who was lounging on the dirty sofa, bare-chested again. He was playing the guitar and leading a Macedonian heavy-metal ballad sing-along with a handful of people strewn about the couches.

  I pushed my way through a group of rowdy, young, handsome and dirty men with impressive dreadlocks who I guessed were the rock climbers. I opened the door to the balcony and stepped outside into yet another braying group of drunks. I had just achieved the respite of the railing when I felt a tug on my ponytail.

  I whirled around, furious, and there was Ian; wobbly, happy, grinning from ear to ear.

  Butterflies went wild in my stomach, and it was all I could do not to jump up and down clapping my hands.

  “My God, woman,” he said, looking astonished and elated. “It is you! I said it once and I’ll say it again. You are full of fucking surprises. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Joanna knows the band guys!” I yelled over the clamor. “The guys from Vengeant.”

  “Oh? Of course she does. Follow me,” he said. “I know where it’s quieter.”

  He beckoned me to come with him as he made his way to the back of the balcony, where a metal fire escape ladder led the way up to the balcony above. He started climbing. “Come on.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I know the girl who lives in this one,” he said, pointing.

  “But I don’t know her.”

  “It’s fine. She’s dating Jason. She’s nice. She’s a veterinarian who runs an animal shelter. Come on.”

  I followed him up the ladder, and from the balcony I could see into this other apartment, much homier than the one below. Jason, the bodyguard, whom I had come to think of as “the quiet one,” and a handful of people sat around a kitchen table talking. Ian said, “Wait here a sec, would you?”

  I stood out there eavesdropping on the wild scene down below, and a minute later Ian showed up with a glass of wine. He handed it to me and proposed a toast. “Here’s to random encounters,” he said, smiling. “And American girls who don’t have the slightest idea what’s good for them.”

  “I don’t think I’ll toast to that.”

  “What is it?” he said, leaning in and peering at me. “Did you do something you shouldn’t have done? Or is it a family thing? Some horrible skeleton in your closet? Maybe you didn’t do anything. Maybe something bad happened to you.”

  “I told you, Joanna knows the guys from Vengeant—”

  “No! What are you doing here? Here! In this country that is on the brink of civil war? Do you have any idea how—” he searched for a word “—unreasonable it seems to me that I keep running into you here? A few hours away from a recent genocide? I see you and I’m so happy. But then I’m angry because you shouldn’t be here. Happy. Angry. Happy. Angry. You’ve got me all worked up, young lady.”

  A part of me wanted to say, I’m here because you’re here. I held back. “It’s nothing dark or crazy or scandalous. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I got a Fulbright scholarship to write a book about life under Communism, and then I got hired to write a travel guide to Bulgaria.”

  “Oh my God, you’re the tortured artist with a death wish.”

  “No. I’m the journalist and the teacher. I wish I was half as interesting as you imagine.”

  “Okay,” he said finally. “So you’re normal.”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “But you’re not crazy. You’re just a good writer.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You’ve written two bloody books?”

  “They’re not, like, Harry Potter, you know. But when this one is done, yes, I will have written two bloody books.”

  “Are you allowed to do that at your age?”

  “I am not sure what the writing age is in England, but in America I can assure you I am completely legal.”

  “Well, now I am really surprised that you graced us with your presence at this pikey circus.” He looked up and through the window into the apartment, which was now more crowded, as if scanning for Jason or anybody else.

  “Why’s that?”

  He continued avoiding my eyes. “Because Fulbright scholars and book authors don’t usually hang out with metal heads, rock climbers and bodyguards.”

  “That’s fucking ridiculous. Of course they do.” I rolled my eyes. “Everybody wants to hang out with those guys.”

  “Well. In England that would never happen. We have the class system.” When he said “the class system” he gave me a mischievous look as if I was naughty for ignoring this important age-old institution.

  The thought of him thinking I was naughty made me blush. I was much happier with that, though, than the night I’d met him and he’d said I seemed like a “nice young lady.”

  I glanced in the window and saw Jo enter the apartment via the front door. She made her way across the room and then joined us on the balcony. “Hello,” she said, handing me a napkin piled with slices of lukanka, a dried sausage that smelled like feet. “How’s your girlfriend, Ian?”

  “She’s fine, thank you. You’re so kind to ask.”

  Jo glared at Ian, and he ignored it.

  “The class system exists, Maddie,” Ian went on. “I left school when I was sixteen. And I barely went even before that. You can’t imagine the shit that went down in that schoolyard, and my mum said, ‘You’re done with that. You’re coming to work with me cleaning the pubs.’”

  Jo looked him over with a raised eyebrow. “What? Really? That’s a shame. You strike me as more of an Artful Dodger than an Oliver Twist, though, Ian. I hope you’re not waiting for Maddie to fall over infatuated with you just because she’s never met anyone from the wrong side of the tracks before.”

  “Wow. And if I concede that while my taste tends more toward X-Men and Star Wars, I have in fact heard of Charles Dickens, then—”

  “Then your sob story about your lack of education is just, how do you put it? ‘A load of bollocks’?”

  “Hmm.” He examined a burn mark on the side of his finger for a moment and then looked up. “You know, Joanna? One of the things I first liked about you? Your sense of humor. It’s a bit like British sarcasm. If only you had any idea when to stop. But...you don’t know when to stop, do you?”

  She held his eye but eventually lost and looked away.

  Stoyan the driver sidled up beside us in his usual costume of black leather and bad-guy trench coat, his eyes as dark as his clothes and unhinged from some dirty Eastern European amphetamine. “We are off to Seksi,” he said, sounding like a dog growling. “Room in the car if you want to join.”

  Ian seemed to be watching for my reaction, and I could tell this irritated Jo. “It’s a strip club, Mad,” she said. “I’ve been there a bunch of times with these guys. It’s no big deal. You don’t want to go.”

  I looked right at Ian. At first he offered a restrained half smile, a curious look in his eyes. There was something boyish in his anticipation to see what my answer would be. Then he winked, as if daring me. There was a curling in my stomach. It was hard to breathe. Something clicked and I wanted him. I wanted to be against him or underneath him, my hands in his hair or on the low-slung back pockets of his jeans, pulling him into me. I hate to think how I must have looked as my eyes traveled over him at that moment, lingering on the dark hollow under his bottom lip, at the corded muscles linking his neck to those broad shoulders. His T-shirt loosely clung to the bottom of his square pectoral muscles, tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves. His big hands rested on his hips in a cavalier fashion. As he waited, his eyes lowered, taking in all of me in return, and then he met my eyes again. This gave me a dizzy feeling; something ugly, desperate and embarrassingly carnal. He was smiling at me like he knew what I was thinking and like he would know exactly what to do with me. My cheeks were aflame for the second time in so many minutes. />
  I said, “I’ll go.”

  Jo was shocked. “Oh?”

  “Sure. I’ll go.”

  “Seriously?” Her mouth was hanging open. “I take it you’re staying somewhere else tonight then?”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. You know what? I don’t care what you do.”

  “Why are you being like this just because I want to go and you don’t? You already made it clear that I was on my own to get home if you got a better offer.”

  “How did you get so drunk, Maddie?”

  “How did you get so transparent, Jo?”

  “Please. What?”

  “Come on! This is about him!”

  Ian shoved his hands in his pockets and stood up straighter.

  Her shock turned quickly to fury, and she glanced at Ian. “About him? Sure. When pigs sprout wings and fly, babe. Whatever. Have fun.” She started to turn away and then looked back with a wicked little smile. “Let me know if you finally get that gang bang you’ve been fantasizing about tonight. Maddie’s a secret crowd-pleaser. Believe me, that’s something I’d like to hear all about.”

  I’d had enough. “Honestly, Jo. Go to hell.”

  * * *

  Ian and I walked in silence down the last few flights of stairs until we reached the gravel parking lot of the block. There was a wooden bench at the bus stop, and Ian motioned for me to have a seat.

  I sat. “Where is everybody?” I asked, fumbling in my bag for my lipstick. “Who’s driving us to the strip club?”

  “Let’s not go,” he said. “I’m not in the mood. Do you mind?”

  “No,” I answered, secretly relieved. It had all been about spending time with him. “Of course not.”

  It was a perfect summer night, but there was a cool breeze. “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, even though I felt a chill running up my back.