Somehow I blame myself, after all it was my stupid idea to walk to the North Pole, so when the Russian nurse nods that it is ok for me to enter the room I am more than somewhat nervous.

I take a seat by the side of the white bed, hesitating for a moment over whether I should take Joe’s hand or not. I decide not. I am already in enough trouble.

Joe’s eyes flicker, perhaps disturbed by my presence, and then open.

“Where am I?” he says dozily.

“We,” I say, “are on Axel Heiberg Island. A group of Russian meteorologists found us and brought us back to their base. Joe, do you remember?”

There are two tubes going into Joe’s arms and a machine looms over his left shoulder. Every so often it makes a loud beeping sound.

“Joe,” I say, “Mandy is coming out.”

“What for?” says Joe and then for the first time I see that he notices the bulge of the cage at the bottom of the bed.

“It was touch and go for a while,” I say. “We didn’t know if we were going to lose you all together. I’m sorry, they had to take your feet.”

I am stopped in the corridor outside Joe’s room by the doctor. He is a dwarf-like man with a walrus moustache. He leads me into a tiny office and takes a seat behind a plastic table you would normally expect to find on board a commuter train. Everything here exudes transience.

“Your friend is awake, yes?” he says.

I nod my head.

“Good, good.” The doctor nods in return and lifts something up onto the table and pushes it towards me. It is an oblong box.

I must look puzzled because the doctor leans towards me and speaks in a low whisper. “It is the feet. At some point you will need to reintroduce Joe to his feet.”

“Can they be reattached?” I ask.

“Oh no, but….”

The doctor lets the ‘but’ hang in the air as if it has some meaning. It probably does but I am not sure what.

“You would like to leave this job for the wife?” says the doctor. His tone has an undercurrent of challenge to it, as if somehow he can perceive our history.

I scoop the box up. “Maybe,” I say. Then I add, “I’ll hang onto them for now.”

The meteorological base is a large dome-like construction in the middle of a plain of ice. There are five male meteorologists stationed here, the doctor and his nurse. The nurse and the doctor each have there own bedrooms, the meteorologists all share a third. I am in with them.

At night the meteorologists drink bottle after bottle of vodka and smoke strong Russian cigarettes which fill the air with a fog of smoke. Later, they sleep naked, the covers slipping off them as they twist and turn.

Each of them has a taut muscular body covered in complex interlinking tattoos and a massive penis that fluctuates wildly throughout the night; tenting the sheets or hungrily probing the air.

I admit that I lie and surreptitiously watch them, imagining myself as one, or all of their, coup de foudre, but deep down Joe remains the one I love.

Each morning on waking I go to Joe’s room. The nurse has made it quite clear that she has other fish to fry and that if anyone is to look after Joe, then it will be me.

My first job of the day is to clean out the bedpan and wash Joe’s body. He sweats a lot in the night, there is some kind of fever running through him, and I always find him sticky. This trick is to get the sponge at just the right moisture level; too much and the bed is sopping, too little and the ministrations are ineffectual. It is a task I almost enjoy.

Once this is done I have taken to reading to him. I have found one English book. It is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Joe doesn’t talk much and I wonder if he is thinking about the story or what has happened to his feet. I haven’t told him that I have them yet and I am just waiting for the right moment. After all, these feet have history.

On the forth day of this routine I am stopped by the nurse in the corridor and am told there is a telegram from Joe’s wife.

“We don’t get a lot of telegrams here,” she says. “You could say we are almost completely cut off from the real world.”

I want to ask her what she means but she has already gone off to do what it is she does all day. I go into the sick-room and ask Joe if he wants me to read the telegram out to him. He nods his head silently.

“Dear Joe,” I read. “Sorry to hear about feet. Stuck in hotel in Anchorage. Weather atrocious. Be with you soon as. Best. Mandy.”

“Do you think she will still love me without my feet?” says Joe as I finish.

“Doctors can do a lot of things these days,” I say. “They’ll sort you out.”

“They still hurt sometimes,” says Joe. “In the toe area. That’s the funny thing.”

When I go back to my bedroom I find it empty. I sit on my bed and, double checking that there really is no-one around, I slide the oblong box the doctor gave me out from where I have stored it under the bed and place it on my lap.

The feet I thought might be ugly, jagged and bloody from where they were cut, but they are not. They are beautiful and white and perfectly formed. Like Joe himself.

I take one out, the left one, and turn it around in my hands. I bend the toes one by one and mesh my fingers between them and grip tightly. I bring the foot up to my nose and inhale deeply, drinking in the smell. It is both masculine and intimate. Finding that I am hard I undo my buttons and drop my trousers and underpants.

I take the big toe in my mouth, swirling my tongue around it, caressing the curve of the nail and when the toe is dripping with saliva I bring the foot around behind me and insert the slippery toe inside myself.

When I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen I shared a bedsit with Joe. We had one chair, one bed, one television. This was our world.

During the evenings we would drink wine, Joe sitting on the chair, me on the floor in front of him. It started off as a game and gradually became something else, Joe probing me with his toes, undressing me with his feet. It wasn’t something I dreamt of. It was just one of those things.

Then Mandy came along, the whole America whirlwind bundle of her. With her blond hair and extravagant hoop earrings; how could I compete?

Afterwards I pull up my pants and clean off the toe and then suddenly, like a theatre filling after an interval, the room is filled with Russian meteorologists. One of them comes up to me, Sergei I think, and speaks.

“Tomorrow we need your help. You come with us, yes?”

I am more than aware that I am here at their discretion so I feel that I am not able to say no. I nod and Sergei, pleased with himself, goes back to the others and grabs for a bottle of vodka. I watch as he drinks it down. I know that later he will sleep naked.

In the morning I get up extra early. I clean Joe and tell him I will be gone for the day.

“Any news of Mandy?” he says.

“Not yet. The weather must still be bad. Don’t worry. She’ll be here.”

“How can you be sure?” says Joe.

“She’s Mandy,” I say. I have no answer but this.

The Russians are waiting for me in the airlock. Sergei passes me a thick heavy coat with a fur hood.

“Today you will be teamed up with me. We are going to retrieve a weather balloon.”

“What about the others?”

“They go different direction,” says Sergei. “I take care of you.”

It is the first time I have been outside since the accident and the smack of the cold is like a reminder of reality. I thought that day we would die. Instead Joe only lost his feet.

“You ok?” says Sergei peering closely at me from inside his hood.

“Just the cold,” I say and we set off.

Sergei is talkative away from the others, out in this wide expanse of empty land that stretches further than the eye can see. It turns out that he is not from Russia, as I assumed, but from Gdansk in Poland.

“My father he part of the solidarity movement, you know this?”

I nod my head. “Lec Walesa.”

Sergei bellows and makes a fist in the freezing air. “That right’s. We all stick together. Yes?”

Sergei tells me his father was a ship builder and his mother a cleaner in a hospital. They had to fight for him to go to university, making do without new clothes, a car, sometimes even food.

“And look I am here,” says Sergei and he raises his arms. All around is ice, flat white ice as far as the eye can see.

I want to ask Sergei what he means by ‘here’, if he is being ironical or if this really is the culmination of a young Polish boy’s dreams until I notice something else. It is a polar bear.

The bear is standing stock still sniffing at the air. He is a massive beast, hair shaggy but with a graceful poise. There is something poignant about him, as if he is here only by an absurd accident. Perhaps like Sergei and me ourselves.

“Come,” says Sergei, “we chase him.”

“Is that a good idea?” I say but Sergei is already off, making loud whooping noises and waving his hands above his head like a child who has spotted danger and is running towards it.

He twists around while still running and shouts back at me.

“Come!” he says. “Come!”

That sounds like a poor plan but I run after him anyway, caught up in what appears to be a genuine desire, and we chase the polar bear across the ice, slipping and sliding until we both collapse laughing.

We don’t reach the weather balloon that day and we are to stay out on the ice overnight. Sergei puts up the tent and we share a dinner of fish out of a pair of cans.

After, Sergei opens a bottle of vodka and we pass it between us a number of times and just as the warm glow of alcohol is finally reaching my frozen toes Sergei leans back on the sleeping quilt and says something which surprises me.

“You fuck men, yes?”

“I…”

“I have seen you looking,” says Sergei. “I know this look. Come.”

I watch as Sergei unbuckles his belt and pushes down his trousers and underpants. His penis is already hard.

The truth of the matter is, apart from Joe, I have never had sex with a man. And with Joe it was always only his feet.

“Well?” says Sergei and raises his eyebrows.

“Quite well,” I say and sensing that Sergei has not got my joke I move down towards his penis.

I hold it experimentally in my hand for a while, bobbing it up and down against Sergei’s stomach and then I pull back the foreskin and take it in my mouth.

In the morning I wake half upside-down under the sleeping quilt with my face next to Sergie’s bum. I lay admiring it for a time and remember many things. Then it is time to get up.

We pack up the tent together and set off across the ice.

The weather balloon is easy to spot even from a distance. It hangs like a huge red orb on the cusp of the horizon. Today is different from the day before as I feel that now we are heading towards something.

At around midday we reach the balloon. Sergei pulls it down by its rope and asks me to hold it while he makes some adjustments to the instrument hanging beneath. After a minute he tells me to let go.

“Is that it?”

“Sure,” says Sergei. He smiles. “In one month I am posted to California, San Francisco. Would you like to come with me?”

I laugh at this and let go of the balloon suddenly and it shoots up into the sky. “You have only just met me.”

Sergei shrugs. “Sometimes you know when something is right. In Poland we waited too long when we could see what was right. I don’t want to make that mistake again.”

I think about those years in the flat with Joe. Did that seem right? I look up at the balloon, out across the ice.

“Ok,” I say, “San Francisco. Will be cool.”

When I get back to the station the Russian nurse is waiting for me. For a moment I think that something terrible has happened to Joe, that maybe he has died, but she holds up a piece of paper.

“There is a telegram,” she says, “from his wife. He wants you to read it to him.”

I find Joe as I left him, lying on the bed. I wonder momentarily if what I have promised is true, that he will indeed walk again one day. He looks so hopeless.

I sit down by the side of the bed and read out the telegram.

“Dear Joe,” it starts. “The weather here is still bad. We have had snow for six days solid but that is not why I am writing. I am afraid I have some bad news. There is no easy way to say this, so I won’t beat around the bush. Joe, I have fallen in love.

“It happened suddenly and it is not something I planned. His name is Mack and he is a motorcar salesman. He is another guest at the hotel. I met him on the first day here and I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight but there was a spark there I cannot lie to you. I tried to fight it. You know me and if you believe anything then you must believe this. But the fates were against us.

“That first night in the hotel there was a power outage. One moment the lights were on and the next they were off. I thought it might only be a temporary thing but then the bellboy was knocking on my door and telling me the power was going to be off all night. He said if I knew what was good for me I would double up with another guest to share bodily warmth. It would be dangerous not to he said and at this point Mack stepped right in.

“Joe you know that things haven’t been so good between us recently. I wonder sometimes if you ever really loved me. Joe, please don’t be angry, but I have to ask you, are you a homosexual?

“Some time ago Janey leant me this magazine and in it was this article about this woman who had married this man. They had had two kids, the lot, and then one day this man, he upped and told her that really he preferred men and that he had only married her because he wanted a normal life and to be looked on kindly by society.

“You may think this whole question has come out of the blue but I have never told you I have always had my suspicions. One day when we were first courting I came to your bedsit secretly to surprise you and I found you with your toe up the ass of your so-called best friend. I am sure that he is a homosexual.

“Joe, I don’t want to get to forty or fifty and find that suddenly that everything I believed in was a lie. Besides, all this is academic now because I have met Mack who I am sure is as straight as they come.

“The conclusion of this whole matter is that I won’t be coming out to visit you and I will be filing for a divorce as soon as is possible. I am sorry to do this now, especially as it is a difficult time for you, what with you losing your feet and all. Take care and I mean this. Mandy.”

“That’s it,” I say. I don’t know what to say. This is a surprise for me and I am sure it must be more of a surprise for Joe.

I stay sitting by the bed for a while and Joe doesn’t say anything. Eventually I ask him if he would like to be alone. He nods his head. I stand up and am just about to leave the room when I hear some words behind me. I turn back and ask Joe what he said for I didn’t hear properly.

“I said,” says Joe, “that I am not a fucking homosexual. Ok?”

“Ok,” I say and I go out of the room.

The bedroom is empty. I go and sit on the bed and I take out the box from under it and open it up. I see the feet differently now.

After what has happened I no longer think I want them. I would also feel awkward about giving them back to Joe. It is because of the feet that Mandy thinks he is a homosexual. It seems to me that the feet are tarnished for all of us now.

I am still trying to decide what to do with them when Sergei comes into the room along with all the other meteorologists. I quickly close the box and slip it back under the bed out of the way.

“My friend,” says Sergei seeing me. He comes over to where I am sitting, hauls me up and puts an arm around me. “Tonight this man will be sleeping with me,” says Sergei to the other meteorologists. “Come, let us play cards. Let us drink vodka. Let us smoke strong cigarettes. We will have a good time. Yes.”

Yes. It is not a question. It is more a statement of intent.

Perhaps, I think, some things are best left hidden under the bed. Not because they are bad in themselves, only because of people’s perceptions of them.

I move my hand down Sergei’s back and slip my fingers inside the waistband of his jeans. Later, I know, that hand can go where it wants. Everywhere. It is just a question of movement.

 

© 2004 Drew Gummerson - Contributor's Bio