The Fire Baby (11 page)

The last torch had faded three hours ago and Emmanuel had wanted to cry then. Others did. He heard them when the lorry stopped and killed its engines. But the fear had shut them up.

No one talked now. The blackness was total. But that wasn’t why they were afraid. They were afraid because of the heat, and the way it seemed to be stealing away the oxygen they craved. Emmanuel’s chest hurt as he breathed, and he had to suck the air just to stop the screaming pain in his lungs. He pressed his forehead against the coolness of the metal walls and he tried to do what his father always said: ‘Emmy. Act your age.’

Sixteen. He was proud of that. A man at last in the village. Just in time to leave.

He felt the self-pity well up so he thought about home: his touchstone. Almost thirty-one days now, counted out and marked up in his diary. He’d written down what he’d missed most; the way the dogs barked at night and the cool, overwhelming presence of the great river. He’d spent his childhood feeling it slip by, never ending, perpetual. Their lives depended on the river because his grandfather’s boat meant they could all eat. He ferried the foreigners to the mine and back, and Emmy could hear, even now, the high intoxicating whine of the outboard motor. But it hadn’t been enough. First his father had left and sent money. Now he too must send money home.

He reached out a hand and touched an arm. It jerked away. None of them were friends now. He felt the indignation swell into tears. They were supposed to look after him. There was Kunte, Josh and Abraham from the village. His guardians, his grandfather had said, in front of everyone. The village would never forget what had happened to Emmy
,
but then he thought they might never know. Could that really happen? Could he die and no one would know?

The fear had started at sea. The panic swept over them with the first big swell, which piled them in a thrashing heap against the food boxes. When the lantern failed Emmy felt better: he couldn’t see the faces of the others. He had been a lucky child to live so long and never see betrayal in another’s eyes. But he saw it then.

He’d seen England for the first time that day sometime just before dawn in a lay-by on a busy road. At least it was busy to Emmy. In the village they’d come out to watch the oil tankers go by, and the cars driven by the well-fed Americans. Here the cars were perpetual like the river, not cool and comforting, but alien – harsh.

In the lay-by the driver’s torch beam blinded them. They hadn’t been let out. Something was wrong.

‘There’s no choice,’ the driver said.

They let them have the air for a moment and then crashed the tailgate back down. A fight started as the bolts shot into place. Emmy touched his fingers to his forehead later where someone’s nails had clawed and he felt the stickiness and smelt the hint of iron on his fingertips.

They’d driven on and then Emmy had heard the sound of gates opening. Then silence. How many hours now? The driver got out and a car started up. Then nothing.

The night had gone, Emmanuel knew that. Now the sun was rising. Just beyond the thin aluminium curtain which kept him from the air.

He wasn’t the fisrst to panic. Even in the dark he knew it was Abraham; he’d known him all his life. He heard his fists hit the walls. Then everyone moved. Blindly in the dark. And Emmanuel felt the pain across his chest, and as he panicked too he knew, with the true insight of the living nightmare, that this was just the beginning of the end.

Nine Days Later Monday, 16 June

14

Aboard
PK 129
Philip Dryden had not slept. That was the lie he always lived with: the truth was that he had slept, but could not face the nightmares which proved he had. Who said you cannot dream in colour? The blood was red and Laura always bobbed to its surface. She floated past his outstretched hand, each time a little nearer, but each time he could not reach, and each time he shouted out her name until he woke himself free from the torment of repeated failure. This time his anxiety had been doubled by the presence of Maggie Beck in his dream, still curled in her deathbed like an aged foetus, but floating on the sticky surface of the blood.

As always, with the dawn, the darkness lifted like the lid on his chest of guilty secrets.

He went up on deck with a mug of coffee to watch the sunrise from his deckchair. When he’d bought
PK 129
shortly after Laura’s accident it was chiefly for the unspeakable romance of the small teak plaque in the wheelhouse which read ‘Dunkirk: 1940’. The deckchair was less romantic. Tired of repeated efforts to put the thing up he had nailed the wooden stays in position and fixed the legs to the deck with steel brackets.

The sun wobbled free of the horizon and Dryden felt some joy seeping back into his heart. He liked his floating home: it combined permanence with mobility and a pleasing sense of the temporary. And if he ever got bored with the view he could just pay for a new mooring. She was a steel-built
inshore naval patrol boat for which Dryden had extracted £16,000 from the joint savings account he’d held with Laura. He would have paid twice that for the plaque, but money management was not one of his strong suits. He had few determinations, but one was to make sure his life wasn’t pinched by a lack of pennies.

He made a fresh batch of coffee in the galley. Two cups, tin. Through the porthole he spotted Humph’s Ford Capri parked up at Barham’s Farm. He laughed out loud at Humph’s biggest joke: the only cabbie in Britain with a two-door taxi: a triumph of indifference over reality.

An automatic irrigator sent a plume of water back and forth across the intervening fields. The first rainbow of the day formed and appeared to end in Humph’s cab. Dryden doubted it ended in a pot of gold, recalling instead the murky glass specimen bottle the cabbie had collected to make sure the occasional call of nature did not result in him having to leave the car.

Dryden looked up and checked his watch: 8.10am. He’d arranged to get to Black Bank early. The call had been difficult: they were busy, said Estelle Beck, arranging for the next day’s funeral. He sensed animosity in her voice, even fear. Getting up early suited him. It was press day for the
Express
and he wanted to run Maggie Beck’s deathbed confession and the plea for Matty’s father to come forward. He was happy to follow Maggie’s stipulation that his story should run after the funeral – but he still needed an interview, and a family picture, to make sure it got the space it deserved.

‘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.