The Fire Baby

18

Dryden needed two things: a bag of ice and a copy of The Crow. Humph realigned the rear-view mirror so that he could see the black eye burgeon. ‘Corker,’ he said, swinging the cab out on to the main road and heading for The Crow’s offices.

‘Thanks for the bodyguard service,’ said Dryden unkindly.

‘If I’d known you were going to wink at a seventeen-stone HGV driver I’d have been keeping my eye out,’ said Humph, letting the smile take root.

‘I think his reaction points to more unsavoury motives than effrontery, don’t you? I’d guess he had a cab full of hard porn, or even a container full of it. That’s why he was looking for our mutual friend Johnnie Roe.’

In The Crow’s front office there was a pile of Expresses for sale, the ink still wet. Dryden took one and jumped back into the cab. His story on Maggie Beck had made the splash – complete with the picture from Black Bank of Estelle and Lyndon with their mother. There was a chemist next door who advised him that he needed a cold compress for his eye.

‘Brilliant,’ he said, rudely walking off.

Dryden knew exactly where he could get one. ‘Five Miles From Anywhere, quick as you can,’ he told Humph, getting back in the Capri. Humph tooled the cab down Market Street expelling a cloud of exhaust which would have looked extravagant trailing behind the Zeebrugge ferry.

Five Miles From Anywhere was a pub at the confluence of the Ouse and the Cam. It stood on a lonely promontory accessible only via a dispiriting three-mile drove road. Most of the clientele were families from the pleasure boats which used the moorings beside the pub or the marina which had been dug out of the bank in the sixties. Most days there was dust in the bouncy castle and a small pyramid of empty Calor gas bottles in the car park. It was a place haunted by the ghost of holidays past. Dryden loved the ambiance of gentle disappointment and the spectacular view: directly north along the wide conjoined rivers Ely Cathedral patrolled the horizon like a bishop’s battleship.

They parked up on the tarmac forecourt with a satisfying screech of bald tyres. Humph killed the engine. ‘G&T please, and a packet of cashew nuts.’ He began to fumble with the language tapes.

Dryden fingered the black eye in the vanity mirror and for once his infinite patience fled. ‘No,’ he said.

Humph froze. Dryden pressed on. ‘No. I’m not getting your fucking drink and nuts. You’re coming with me. We’re gonna sit outside and have a drink and… and a chat.’

‘Chat?’ said Humph, horrified.

Dryden wasn’t going to argue. He got out, but leant back through the open passenger window. ‘I’ll see you at one of the picnic tables. No hurry.’

The bar was empty so Dryden rang a bell. He waited for a bleary-eyed barman to organize his trousers before ordering drinks, nuts, and a bar-towel packed with ice. He considered Humph’s lumbering progress from the Capri towards the picnic tables, as viewed through the bar window. Already he was regretting baiting his friend. Did he really want to talk? No: what he wanted was to sit on his own with a pint of beer and contemplate both the river with its immutable beauty and his bad luck in being thumped in the face by a thug in a lay-by. Now he’d have to talk to Humph instead. He cursed himself, and friendship, and upped the order to two pints for himself.

‘Medicinal,’ he told the barman, touching the eye. Humph, astonishingly, had reached the picnic table by the time he walked out with the drinks.

‘I hope you’re bloody satisfied,’ said Humph, wiping a curtain of sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.

Dryden sat back and held the ice to his eye, sipping from a pint at the same time. The silence between them deepened like a grudge until Dryden set the ice aside. He considered the normal rules of friendship, a pertinent subject as Humph appeared ignorant of the basics. ‘So,’ he said, heavily, ‘how are you? Who’s cleaning the house these days?’

Dryden had initiated several conversations that summer about the problems of finding someone to clean clothes and homes – a not too gentle hint which Humph had finally taken. The cabbie fumbled with the nuts. ‘The woman who does,’ he said.

‘Does she indeed?’ said Dryden, smirking.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Humph emphatically.

‘And the kids?’

Humph had two daughters: Grace, six, and Naomi, three. They lived in a nearby village with their mother and the postman of doubtful parentage. Humph got to see them every other weekend for outings arranged, down to the smallest detail, by his ex-wife.

‘Next Saturday. Pantomime apparently, in Cambridge.’

‘A pantomime in June?’

Humph shrugged. ‘It’s avant garde.’

‘Oh no it isn’t,’ said Dryden.

‘Yes it…’ Humph stopped himself just in time, grunted and reached for the G&T. All the liquid disappeared as if inhaled. So Humph got to his feet and said words never previously uttered in Dryden’s presence. ‘Same again?’

He tottered off like a hot-air balloon trailing its basket along the ground. He returned with what looked suspiciously like a double G&T, a pint, and an astonishing array of bar snacks from pork scratchings to cheesy whatsits.

‘Snack,’ he said, pulling open a packet of crisps with the kind of ease a polar bear exhibits when gutting a mackerel.

Humph took a big breath. ‘So, Laura, how is she then?’

Retaliation, Dryden realized, brilliantly executed. Suddenly his insistence on communication seemed ill-judged. ‘What can I say?’ Dryden’s emotions on the issue were complex. He wanted Laura to be returned to him as she had been a few minutes before the crash at Harrimere Drain. He didn’t want to be tied to an invalid unable to speak for the rest of her life, or, more to the point, for the rest of his life. He wanted to take her back in time to the woman she had been. He didn’t want to be a ‘carer’ – a word he hated. If she was going to exist in some world beyond his reach then he’d rather it was completely beyond his reach. At the moment they existed neither in nor out of the real world, but in separate universes which shared only a diaphanous boundary across which they might fleetingly touch. So her present condition was not the point. The point was, where it was all leading, and how long it would take. And since the answers to these questions were almost certainly not what he wanted to hear, he had avoided asking them even of himself.

But then he’d insisted on having a conversation in the first place. ‘I…’ he said, and then he spotted the motorcyclist. The one who appeared to be trailing the cab, and had been parked opposite the Ritz. The motorcyclist with the monochrome oxblood leathers. He was just getting out of Humph’s cab. Even from a distance of 200 yards Dryden could see that he was taking a hammer out of his pocket. Then he pulled it back and crashed it through the passenger side window. Dryden saw the fractured glass suddenly catch the light and the sound reached them a second later, like the call of some exotic bird off the marshes.

Dryden’s jaw dropped and he pointed stupidly. ‘Oi,’ he said, so softly even Humph didn’t hear him.

But Humph turned to see what the reporter was pointing at and an emotion close to murderous anger crossed his childlike features. Fate had taken many things away from Humph: his wife, his two daughters. They had all gone without a fight. His cab was a little peripatetic island of security, and now someone was defiling that sanctuary. So Humph was mad, and when he shouted ‘Oi!’ everyone on the Great West Fen heard – including the motorcyclist.

Dryden would recall afterwards the lack of panic in the rider’s movements. He folded something and put it in a zip-up pocket. Then he put on the helmet with the black visor and the single chrome line along the cranium and ambled to his motorbike. The engine was already purring, drizzling a stream of hot hair out of the double exhaust pipes: and then he was gone, visible only as the invisible centre of a dwindling red dust storm.

Humph got to the cab first. The seats had been slashed with a knife and his beloved fluffy dice snipped off. The contents of the glove-compartment bar had been swept to the floor, with a few breakages, and the picture of Humph’s daughters torn into pieces. A single knife scratch crossed the bonnet in an ugly zig-zag.

Dryden, who had stopped to finish his pint, came in second. He looked inside the Capri and decided to try for a laugh. ‘It’s the mark of Zorro,’ he said.

Did Humph have tears in his eyes? He looked at Dryden now. ‘You made me get out,’ he said, by way of accusation.

The newspaper cutting was taped to the windscreen with a single piece of masking tape. It was Dryden’s story about Maggie Beck.