The Fire Baby (12 page)

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-white 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 shot 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.

Then they heard it, the unmistakable sound of a highly polished limousine creeping sedately over gravel. Estelle grabbed at her throat. ‘It’s the undertakers. They just want to run through the details.’ She looked towards the rear of the house with something which again looked closer to fear than anxiety.

Dryden made for the back door. ‘I can tell Lyndon,’ he said.

Relief flooded over her. ‘Thanks. We should both see them. She’s his mother too.’

15

The dead crows, strung like beads on a line over the kitchen garden, were the only signs of life in the farmyard. It was one of the landscape’s ironies that the only sign of life was death. Black Bank, like most Fen farms, had no livestock. The soil was too precious for fodder. The peatfields stretched east to the limit of the eye, but nothing moved, nothing breathed.

A dead landscape, and silent but for the rhythmic pounding of a basketball. Lyndon, sporting black wraparound pilot’s glasses, didn’t acknowledge Dryden’s arrival. The reflective black lenses mirrored the panorama of Black Bank Fen, an image as lifeless as the landscape itself. Then Lyndon stooped, tilted his chin and sent the ball in a loop high against the sky, from where it dropped into the hoop without touching the sides.

Lyndon loped across the farmyard, his brilliant white Nike trainers kicking up knee-high clouds of red dust, collected the ball and thrust it with surprising force at Dryden’s midriff. He pushed the glasses up into his hair and looked around. ‘It’s like home.’

Dryden nodded stupidly.

‘There,’ said Lyndon, pointing to the far eastern horizon where a turning red-black miniature twister teetered like a child’s top. Common that summer in the Saharan heat they did little harm, touching down on the earth for a few short seconds to suck up the weightless dust. Dryden always felt uneasy at the sight, which recalled a nightmare vision of a
length of disembodied gut twisting in pain. This one was corkscrewing harmlessly over a field and visibly fading as it lost touch with the hot earth.

‘At home they could take the roof of your farm. Here they can’t get the tops off the carrots,’ said Lyndon, leaning against the barn wall with the easy grace of the natural athlete, his chest muscles filling out the all-American sweatshirt. His height, which must have been at least two inches greater than Dryden’s six feet two, didn’t make him look skinny. He flashed a smile that was a testament to the efficiency of Texan dentistry and an affluent US childhood.

‘This must have been a difficult time,’ said Dryden, proud of himself for finding the right opening question.

‘Difficult? Hell, no. I’ve just found out that the life I had was someone else’s, and that my life never got lived. I’m buried out there at that clapped-out church. I’ve visited my own graveside. Confused? Cheated? Pissed angry? You said it.’

He grabbed the ball, ran back to the edge of the yard and shot directly at the hoop, twanging the metal and sending the ball on a zig-zag bagatelle course around the farmyard until it rolled into one of the sheds.

‘What sort of life was it – Lyndon’s?’ asked Dryden.

The US ace pilot walked towards him with the hint of a military swagger and slipped the glasses down again, cloaking his eyes. ‘Great. Texas. The big country, makes this look like Central Park. San Antonio. You know it?’

Dryden shook his head. He and Laura had made New York and New England for a week in the Fall before the accident but hadn’t fancied the South: they lynched people and drank out of beer cans so cold they stuck to your lips.

‘The big country,’ said Lyndon again. ‘I’m always near folks here. Kinda gets ya. It looks like a wilderness but it
ain’t.’ He lifted the sweatshirt from his chest to let some air circulate.