The Fire Baby Read online

  ‘Have you listened to the tapes?’ he’d asked Estelle.

  ‘At nine then,’ she said by way of reply. ‘At Black Bank.’

  Dryden knocked on the cab’s bonnet and held up a cup of coffee. Peace offering. Normally Humph’s working hours began at 9.00am.

  Humph was chatting to Nicos again about the village olive festival. Reluctantly he sipped the coffee: ‘No egg?’

  ‘No egg,’ said Dryden. ‘Full English at the Bridge after the interview.’ The Bridge was a greasy spoon in town which specialized in fried everything on fried bread. For Humph they did a drive-in service complete with an improvised in-cab food tray.

  Humph wiggled in his seat by way of indicating mounting excitement at the prospect of such a feast. They pulled out into the busy A10, already nose-to-tail with sleepy drivers heading for the academic sweatshops of Cambridge seventeen miles to the south. ‘College sweater shops,’ said Dryden, and laughed at his own joke.

  Humph remained in a silent, brooding world. Dryden imagined the cabbie’s sunrises were fried-tomato red.

  Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror on the passenger side and looked himself in the face. His jet-black hair had been sandwiched in a strange cone towards the left, the result of sleeping heavily and avoiding early morning brushes and mirrors. He was fingering the sallow skin beneath his eyes when he saw a motorbike in the rear-view mirror. The bike was black, with cow-horn handlebars, and the early morning light touched the chromework in a series of minor sunbursts. The rider was in oxblood-red leathers with a matching helmet and a black tinted visor. A silver line of chrome crossed the helmet along the ridge of the cranium. A flag flew from the aerial which Dryden failed to recognize: a white star on a blue background took up one third, the others were red and white.

  ‘Easy Rider’s a bit close,’ said Dryden.

  Humph made a point of never consulting his rear-view mirror. It was angled to provide a squint view of his own face. He felt too much information was confusing and a curse of modern life.

  The motorbike trailed them at varying distances along the A10. Dryden guessed from the size of the air ducts to the front of the engine cowling that it was a 2,000cc at least. ‘Why the hell doesn’t he just breeze past?’ he asked.

  ‘I said…’ Dryden glanced back at the vanity mirror but shut up when he saw the bike had gone. ‘Where…?’

  But then Humph swung the cab off the main road and on to a drove. Originally cattle tracks, the network of drove roads provided the Fens with a latticework of shortcuts and dead-ends the map to which did not exist. Dryden skewed round in his seat but couldn’t see the biker. Then he made a nearly fatal mistake. He told himself that only paranoid people think they’re being followed.

  ‘Only paranoid people think they’re being followed,’ he told Humph.

  Humph considered this. ‘Who’d bother?’ he said – an eloquent insult.

  The road to Black Bank was the loneliest Dryden knew in a landscape disfigured by solitude. It ran for seven straight miles through the fen. The drought had killed the midsummer crops and the soil had been left to the sun. Even a light breeze raised clouds of red dust. As Humph’s cab bumped along the drove it left in its wake a series of miniature crimson whirlwinds. Dryden wound the passenger window down as far as it would go and put his elbow on the already hot metal of the bodywork.

  The sun was low into Humph’s face as he drove east, a disc of murky orange already weaving and rippling with the heat from the land. He flipped down the sun-shade and hummed tunelessly. Devoid of curiosity he never asked questions. He was happy going nowhere, as long as he knew the route.

  A mile into the fen Dryden saw the tail-fins of the transatlantic fuel tankers parked on the apron of the main runway at Mildenhall US air base. It must have been six miles away but the tall, battleship-grey tail fins stood up like a glimpse of whales breaching the surface of a calm ocean. Then came the fields of landing lights. The inward flightpath was marked by formations of steel posts with green, white and red lamps. For the pilots of the Starblazer fuel tankers that had flown non-stop across the Atlantic this would be their first sight of Europe from under 30,000 feet, save for the illuminated Octagon Tower of Ely Cathedral.

  Airport flotsam littered the landscape. Nissen huts from the war held hay and sugar beet and just short of Black Bank they saw their first Stars-&-Stripes, flying from a Dallas-style bungalow complete with a triple-doored garage which could have held the fleet cars of a platoon of travelling salesmen. And the Mildenhall Stadium. A dog track boasting US fast-food outlets, a bar with draught Schlitz, and popcorn stalls. Six days a week it was deserted, but its car park was big enough to take an incoming B-52 bomber.

  With the sun now up, and the dust kicked airborne, they could have been anywhere west of the Mississippi. Dryden expected to see a wagon train threading its way across country surrounded by twenty thousand head of longhorn.

  Black Bank Farm stood on a wide plain of Fen peat which stretched to the edge of sight. The farm’s façade had survived the air crash which had killed Maggie Beck’s family, but the stone had been burnt a deep carbon black. Foursquare, with a central doorway and Georgian windows, it faced south across a small kitchen garden. To the east end of the old house were the remains of a single pine tree, a pencil-black fossil, distorted into a twisted tapered finger. A new kitchen block stood to the west, an unadorned example of seventies utility, and beyond that a large steel-framed barn. A line of poplars grew in a natural shield at the rear of the house, protecting it against the north winds. The sash windows had perished on the night of the air crash, to be replaced with single-pane double-glazing which managed to unsettle the building’s otherwise classic proportions. Dryden felt it looked like what it was: a house with an ugly past.

  Humph pulled up short of a cattle grid by a sign: ‘Black Bank Farm Ltd: Salad Crops’.

  ‘Bit grim,’ he said, and laughed. He really enjoyed other people’s misfortunes.

  ‘I’ll walk from here,’ said Dryden, throwing open the passenger-side door. Humph didn’t argue.

  Dryden squinted east into the rising sun: 9.04am. The sweat popped on his forehead and he felt a rivulet of salty water begin a long journey down his back. Just inside the gate was a large granite memorial stone which listed the victims of the 1976 crash: the three UK civilians first, then the nine US citizens.

  WILLIAM VINCENT BECK

  CELIA MAUD BECK

  MATTHEW ‘MATTY’ BECK

  CAPT. JACK RIGBY

  MAJOR WILLIAM H. HOROWITZ

  MAJOR JIM KOSKINSKI

  MARLENE MARY-JANE KOSKINSKI

  CAPT. MILO FEUKSWANGER

  LT RENE FEUKSWANGER

  AIRMAN JOHN DWIGHT MURPHY

  KYLIE PATRICIA MURPHY

  JOHN MURPHY, JNR.

  IN MEMORIAM, it said simply, followed by the date. Dryden fished in his pocket and found a round beach stone he’d picked up the last time he and Humph had run out to the coast. He put it on the top of the memorial and walked on.

  Ahead of him he heard the engines first, and looking up from the dust saw the B-52 rise, heaving itself out of the distant haze like a swimmer breasting the pool. Its four turbines screamed and the pregnant black belly seemed to rear straight out of the fields: a nightmare crop. Dryden looked directly up as it went overhead, and saw the undercarriage enfold itself into the fuselage with a satisfying mechanical thud. It was so close he could see winking safety lights inside the undercarriage bay as they switched from red to green before the doors closed.

  And then it was gone. A stream of grey fumes uncurling in the warm morning air.

  He stood in the sudden silence before the front door of Black Bank Farm, which was green, varnished, and massive. Dryden looked at it from the gate of the kitchen garden and thought Dogs.

  In the full litany of Dryden’s fears dogs were not in the same class as water, enclosed spaces, heights, authority, or emotional attachment. But they moved faster than all of these, and the bone-w
hite teeth and chopped-meat gums had always held a potent power to terrify. Dogs stood, growling, in a long queue of terrifying dangers which pursued him with tenacity. But nothing he was afraid of was as frightening as looking like a coward, even to himself. This fear ruled all others and produced occasional acts of misunderstood courage which had earned him an unwarranted reputation for valour. So he pushed the gate open and walked up the path. Which is when he actually got to hear the dogs. Their claws skittered on quarry tiles on the far side of the door. Dryden knew what they were thinking. They were thinking they could smell fear, and they were right.

  He knocked, praying it wouldn’t open.

  But it did. Estelle Beck leant against the door jamb in US combat fatigues which Dryden guessed had cost her half a week’s salary. Her T-shirt carried a single Stars & Stripes across her bust.

  She held a large Alsatian, the size of a small horse, by the collar while eating a tomato.

  ‘He won’t hurt you,’ she said, with a smile that never touched the lichen-green eyes. She looked like she hadn’t slept for a week and her carefully cut bob of blonde hair was completely lifeless, like straw. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the dog’s collar. Dryden noticed that the leather was decorated with tiny studs in red and blue with white stars at their centre.

  ‘Then I won’t hurt him,’ said Dryden, failing to move any of his limbs. ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Texas,’ she said, a laugh dying in her throat.

  Pitch, thought Dryden. The difficult bit. He took a half step backwards: ‘Maggie asked me to be a witness for a reason. She wants me to find Lyndon’s father. I sent you a copy of the letter?’

  She nodded. He looked beyond her to the dark interior of the house and saw a foot poised on the staircase. A trainer, Nike, new and still shop-white below a pair of jogging pants.

  ‘It’s what she would have wanted,’ he said. Experience told him that if he had to say anything more she wouldn’t let him in.

  Estelle dropped the dog’s collar and it padded nonchalantly past, pausing only briefly to smell Dryden’s testicles. In the darkness beyond her Dryden saw a lighter flare, then snap out.

  ‘Come in. It’s a mess.’

  He met Lyndon in the hall. He was putting a large bottle of mineral water into a rucksack. He didn’t have to explain why he was there. He was home, but he didn’t look like he was staying. Dryden looked from brother to sister and searched for the tell-tale signs of their mother.

  Lyndon was in a less self-conscious outfit than his pilot’s uniform but it was equally American: grey sweatshirt with US Air Force crest, running trousers in white, and the new Nikes. He twisted a basketball in his slender hands. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Dryden, and fled into the shadows of the house.

  Estelle turned right into the front room. It was stuffy and about as homely as the Victoria and Albert Museum. An upright piano supported a clutch of family photos, a mockery of the truth they now knew. The newest showed Maggie in bed at The Tower with Lyndon on one side and Estelle on the other. It had ‘last picture’ written all over it.

  Dryden picked it up. Best to ask first, get it over with. ‘Could I borrow this? We’ll need a picture. I can give you some copies too – bigger size.’

  Estelle shrugged. Dryden thudded down into a moth-eaten armchair beneath a stuffed fox’s head. He took out a notebook and tapped it with a ballpoint. ‘I’ll keep it short.’ It was a phrase he loved, and like most of the phrases he loved, it meant nothing.

  Estelle sat at the dining-room table sorting through some papers. A will? Dryden hadn’t even thought of that. A will: the sudden possibilities multiplied as he considered Maggie’s hastily re-drawn family tree.

  ‘So. Where to start?’ said Dryden. Clearly she didn’t know. There was a long silence while somewhere music played. Folk. An American voice just audible: Bob Dylan perhaps.

  ‘You were born after the crash?’

  ‘In 1978. Two years,’ she said. Dryden sensed she wanted to go on but was diverted by a greater truth.

  ‘And your father…?’ He knew much of the story himself, largely retold by his mother. But Fen gossip had clouded the detail.

  ‘Donald. Donald McGuire. Mum went back to the Beck family name after Dad died. They married in ’76. A few months after the crash. She never said why. He was older, much older. I think she loved him in a way, he certainly loved me. It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t really believe I remember him at all, but I can remember that he loved me.’

  She shuffled some of the papers on the table. ‘Why do you think she married?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Yes. She talks about that on the tapes – we’ve been listening together. It’s such a help, hearing her voice. Thank you – it was your idea, wasn’t it? It must have done Mum so much good in those final months, to talk about her life. She felt very guilty about what she did but she had a very noble life in a way. Steadfast. That’s the word that Lyndon uses. We’re still listening. It’s painful – very painful for him.

  ‘We left the tape recorder in Laura’s room. We’ve cleared out the rest of her stuff – but we thought you should have it back.’

  She returned to Dryden’s question. ‘I don’t think she ever regretted marrying Dad. But I got the feeling she did it to get away from here, from the memory. I think she fell in love with the idea of a new life. Away from Black Bank. He had a farm on Thetford Chase, Forest Farm, it’s sold up now and a private house. Mum moved there and that’s where I was born. He died in ’82. Heart. He’s buried out there,’ she said, nodding towards the fen. ‘The church on Fourth Drove.’

  Dryden knew it. A wooden chapel built by the Victorians for the crop-pickers. Dilapidated now, it stood at an angle to the land, tipping its cheap tin belfry to the east. ‘St Matthew’s,’ he said, and made a squiggle in his notebook. ‘But you came back.’

  ‘When Dad died we sold the farm. There’d been a manager here and it had made money, it’s always made money. Black Gold, Mum called it, the peat… you can grow anything ten times a year. Mum wanted to come back.’ She looked out over the kitchen garden. ‘God knows why.’

  ‘You didn’t want to return?’

  ‘The place was haunted. It’s just the identity of the ghost that’s changed.’

  Dryden tried to imagine it, a childhood overshadowed by the death of a baby she thought was her brother.

  From somewhere to the rear of the farmhouse came the rhythmic thudding of a basketball hitting a wall. Dryden heaved a sigh and decided it was time to ask the only question that really mattered: ‘Any idea why she gave her son away?’

  Estelle rose. ‘Drink?’ He followed her into the kitchen. By the door a noticeboard held snapshots covered by a clear plastic sheet. Most were of Lyndon, from the naked baby in the paddling pool with the sunburnt arms to the proud airman by his warplane on a windswept New Mexico airstrip. In several of the shots a grey-haired couple in expensive leisure clothes hovered in the background.

  Estelle offered Dryden black coffee from a filter machine while she got herself a Pepsi from the fridge. She pulled the tab, slipped it back into the can, and studied the pictures.

  ‘Mum always made a point of keeping in touch. She’d not met Lyndon since the crash until this summer. There was a real spark – I guess now we know why,’ she said.

  Dryden sipped the coffee and felt the promise of the caffeine lift his mood: ‘Jealous?’

  She laughed then, forgetting whatever it was that was the backdrop to her life. ‘Of Lyndon! No way. It was dead exciting. An American cousin. And the family – the grandparents – sent presents. Toys and stuff. Clothes for me. It was great. He couldn’t be a threat – he was an ocean away. And it gave me an identity at school – the American kid. Least I wasn’t the Fen kid like the rest. That counts. No, I never resented Lyndon.’

  ‘And then he just turned up?’

  ‘He knew Mum was ill. We’d written. I’d even telephoned – we always did at Christmas. But he was out in Iraq and then he got sh
ot down and we didn’t hear until the Koskinskis – the grandparents – sent Mum a letter. About Al Rasheid – the prison. It’s in Baghdad. They’ve always held their political prisoners there, tortured them there. Some US personnel were taken there too – for interrogation. But Lyndon had nothing to tell them. So they let him rot. That was how lucky he was.’

  She turned her back on the kitchen table, put her palms down flat on the top, and jumped up to perch on the edge. ‘I’d never seen her cry like that. When she got the letter. She wept for days. I guess he’d died twice for her. It must have turned her inside out – and nobody to tell.’

  ‘But then he came back,’ said Dryden.

  She crossed her legs in a perfect lotus position on the table top. ‘Yes,’ she said, and began to cry. ‘She was in The Tower by then. With Laura…’ She dabbed at the tears. ‘It’s odd. I feel I know Laura. But I never thought of her having a… family. Having you… I mean.’

  Dryden wondered why this sounded so depressing. ‘He’s well? Lyndon? He seems withdrawn – I guess that’s hardly surprising. When he came back, had he suffered psychologically? There are scars, surely?’

  She picked at the T-shirt at her neck, as if to lessen the heat. ‘Four weeks in confinement in a windowless cell is not something one can feel fine about, is it? I think he emerged remarkably unscathed. But who knows? Who knows what’s going on in someone else’s head? And whatever, it was hardly an ideal preparation for news like this…’

  ‘He must be disorientated.’

  She nodded. ‘We both are. Lost, I think. And wary, very wary, which is understandable. I think it will be a long time before either of us trusts anyone again.’

  ‘Except each other?’

  She smiled with her mouth. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Dryden closed his notebook. They listened again to the dull percussion of the basketball in the farmyard. The kitchen wall was covered in children’s art. Blue cows, green cats with giant whiskers, loads of tractors. Dryden walked over and got a closer look.

  ‘They’re my kids,’ she said proudly. That was it, thought Dryden – a teacher. Maggie had told him.