The Fire Baby

34

‘I’d like you to come with me, OK?’

Humph studied the Capri’s rear-view mirror.

‘I’ve never asked before. I won’t again. Once.’

‘Last time,’ said Humph, fingering the retied ends of his beloved fluffy dice.

‘Jesus,’ said Dryden. ‘He slashed the seats. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. This is important. I need your help.’

Dryden got out of the car, slammed the door and took the steps two at a time into the reception area of the hospital. Humph followed carefully, picking his way up each individual step, and when he got to the top he surveyed the plush carpet-muffled interior of The Tower. ‘Is there a lift?’

They rode up to the third floor in a silence punctuated by the bronchial whistles of Humph’s pulmonary system coping with the shock of physical effort.

Humph had never actually seen Laura. His partnership with Dryden had begun in the desolate weeks after her accident when the reporter needed ferrying from the hospital to his mother’s house on Burnt Fen. Wordless journeys of unshared grief which had somehow forged between them a bond of mutual alienation. Humph was dissolving in a toxic combination of anger and grief after his wife had walked out with the kids. Dryden was coming out of shock after the accident and wishing he wasn’t. They were made for each other.

Humph felt guilty seeing the figure in the bed for the first time, as if he was peeping into a private nightmare. Dryden’s rare excursions into memory had given an impression of his wife characterized by an exuberance of warmth: Latin temperament, Italian colouring, and ample curves. Humph had seen a picture reluctantly withdrawn from the zipped pocket of the wallet: a broad face blessed with perfect skin, brown eyes with a slight cast, and a jumble of auburn hair. The cabbie was not surprised to find the real Laura dramatically different. Her skin was ice-white and lifeless. The eyes open, brown, but blank; the arms laid straight at the sides, and the lips pale and parted by a centimetre. The teeth behind were perfect, linen white, and dry.

‘She’s beautiful,’ said Humph, lying.

Dryden nodded, pleased at the lie, and oddly moved. ‘Tear it off,’ he said, pointing at the tickertape from the COMPASS machine.

‘Why?’ said Humph, tearing off the sheet and sitting down on two bedside chairs.

‘Tell me what it says. It’s beginning to freak me out. She told me to watch Freeman White. I’m pretty sure he’s responsible for the threats, the attempt to sink my boat. How the hell does she know?’

Humph shrugged and studied the tape. There were a few lines of jumbled letters.

SGARTFN FH F F DGFDHFYRND LOPQJFCYOID

SGSH SI I H SHSJOSD SDHFUTKG SHFDGFYTO

GHLL

‘Nothing,’ said Humph.

‘There’s gotta be,’ said Dryden, snatching the paper back.

There was a long silence in which Dryden tried to force meaning from the jumble of letters.

Then the tickertape machine bashed out a single letter: T.

They both jumped, Humph’s return to earth producing a perceptible after-tremor.

The COMPASS machine ticked and printed a second letter: H. They jumped again and Humph began to edge back from the COMPASS machine. Dryden held his ground, holding the paper. ‘Tell me, Laura,’ he said, looking into her vacant brown eyes.

THE. Then she stopped. A minute passed in which they could hear a B-52 overhead droning in towards Mildenhall while the string of letters slowly lengthened.

THE WHISSLES

Dryden tore off the sheet and studied the letters again. ‘Wait in the car,’ he told Humph.

Dryden sat beside Laura’s bed. ‘I need help,’ he said. ‘Not this.’

He waited by the COMPASS machine for an hour in complete silence.

She knew the moment when she’d made the decision: the unilateral decision that she loved him. She’d always loved the idea of him, ever since she’d understood what America was. But that day at the track, she’d gone to get hot dogs and Cokes while he strolled round the cars before the first race. Running his fingers sensuously along the beaten metal, the way he’d run his fingers over her.

When she got back with the food the first race had begun. What she remembered was that he seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t moving. The backdrop was chaotic. The stock cars raising dust even that early in the summer, the metal screeching as two clashed on a bend, then heaved over together as if in a brawl. The crowd, mostly US military from the air bases, had run to the rail to view the wreckage, to cheer the two drivers emerging from the dust

And he’d just stood there, on the grass with his leg up on the running board of the Land Rover, flicking the Zippo. His self-contained stillness made her want to be near him always. It was the antidote to her own life, which had never seemed to have a centre, let alone one which would always hold. Even as she approached with the food and the drinks he didn’t turn.

She touched his arm. ‘Lyndon?’ And that was when he knew he’d fallen in love with her, the point when he knew he wanted to come back to the world he’d lost in Al Rasheid. He’d been lonely ever since, avoiding strangers because they could ask questions, and friends because they couldn’t, because they felt that saying nothing was the kindest cure for what he knew they must call many things – his illness, his injuries, his imprisonment, his lifelessness.

In truth he’d always been lonely. His lifelessness was older than his imprisonment. His childhood had been oddly passionless, an orphan doted on, but never loved, not with the unconditional love of a parent. An orphan placated by money and education. A friendless boy who loved only an heroic image of his father, the Vietnam hero. A figure of intoxicating excitement always just beyond his reach. So he’d been lonely all his life: which is why he’d survived Al Rasheid.

Estelle had ended that loneliness because their shared history made her unique. She’d known him all his life, but he was a stranger. Ever since he could remember they’d sent her presents from Texas, dolls when she was a child, then clothes, CDs, pictures of the desert, and the city where they lived: the pool, the Christmas tree, the people-carrier. And she’d sent pictures back, from the awkward Fen child in farm clothes clutching her American doll, to the blonde teenager with the all-American smile.

‘Pretty kid,’ said his grandfather, sourly. They’d resented the contact, his grandparents, he knew that now. He knew that it was Maggie who had kept them together, persisted, and used their guilt to keep the link alive.

And Estelle had envied him his family as well, with all the cruelty of a child. The lack of parents, the doting grandparents, the freedom. Her father had died when she was four, long before her memory had been born. And her mother had loved her as her second child, precisely that and nothing more. A great love, but always, she sensed, short of its absolute potential. Estelle knew that even before memory began.

And so they’d shared a childhood, an adolescence, despite the 5,000 miles that had always separated them. When he’d been stationed overseas he’d flown out via the Pacific – but they’d told Maggie he was posted in Iraq and that if he came back through the UK he’d visit. He’d dreaded the thought, the reality of the contact after all these years, but his grandparents had insisted it was only right. Only what Maggie deserved. She’d saved his life. But after Al Rasheid he couldn’t face them, despite the calls from home telling him Maggie was ill.

But his depression had deepened, alone in his room at the base. He had to drive, drive anywhere without a map. Perhaps he knew it would happen. He’d seen the sign and felt the past pulling him towards the centre of his life: that moment when the plane had disintegrated in a fireball of burning aviation fuel. He’d never wanted to see it the spot where his parents had died. But just after the sign came the stone, the memorial stone. He’d always carried the picture in his wallet. But now he got out and ran his fingers over the raised names on the stone, back and forth like a prayer said in Braille.

He’d left the car and walked to the house. There was no answer so he walked round to the yard. She had a towel out on the grass by the greenhouses. A bikini, in sky blue he remembered, contrasting with the corn-yellow hair. A CD player belting out country and western. She hadn’t heard him so he stood and considered her, trying to recall what it was like to hold such a body. He couldn’t remember the name of the last woman he’d made love to. It seemed like an episode from a book he’d read, on a forgotten train journey. Or even the last time he’d held anybody, or been held. In the cell, at Al Rasheid, he’d held Freeman, to hold someone, and to keep him alive. But now he wanted to hold this woman.

So he’d said hello. She’d jumped up and removed her sunglasses. And that was the start of it, and now there was an end to it.