The Fire Baby

Dryden thought Mum? but asked: ‘And you’ve no idea where he is?’

‘He took the Land Rover and went. Said he’d find somewhere to think. Rent, I guess. He didn’t have any friends outside the base. He just wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t here, somewhere that wasn’t the air force. He wanted space. He said he knew a place… out there.’ She looked out over Black Bank Fen as another lightning bolt zig-zagged down into a stand of trees.

Dryden counted the seconds before the thunder struck, 1–2–3–4, and then the rumble which made his joints vibrate. She was still looking out. ‘He said you’d told him of a place he could go.’

‘Me?’

‘To be on his own. That’s what he said… a place you loved. Somewhere like Texas – somewhere he could be free.’

Dryden saw it then as he’d seen it last; the black peat of Adventurer’s Fen stretching out to the reed beds by the river. ‘Does he have a mobile?’ he said.

‘Yes. But he never answers. Just listens to the messages.’

‘Ring him. Ring him quickly. Tell him about the last tape. And tell him we’re coming.’

The jailer cried, that last time, when Johnnie asked him what he’d done to deserve the torture of the pillbox.

‘Just tell me,’ said Johnnie, as though the answer marked the only difference between the real world and the hellish distortions of his hexagonal cell.

‘I’m being punished. I know that. I’m going to die here. Tell me why.’

Lyndon took the decision then. He’d planned to stay silent, but the appeal was so direct, and he had such an overwhelming answer, he knelt before his victim and took his face in his hands.

‘What do you see?’ he said, feeling his nails puncture Johnnie’s bristled flesh.

Johnnie felt his life hinged here: in an airless pillbox where he’d once made love to Maggie Beck. His jailer’s voice, he noticed, was American. It surprised him, where the educated cadences did not.

‘I can’t see the glass,’ he said. Lyndon’s head obscured the diamondlike beauty of the water on the shelf.

Lyndon dug his thumbs into the sallow dehydrated flesh. ‘What do you see?’ he said again, knowing now he would have to give his father the answer. And he knew why he’d avoided speaking until now, for he felt an urge to be tender, to cradle the head of the man who had run into the flames of Black Bank to save his son.

He fought it back, and thought instead of his mother, tortured too by the knowledge that to save her son she must give his life away. ‘Think of a mirror,’ said Lyndon.

Johnnie tried to think. His mind screamed for water, for the glass beyond the jailer’s eyes. His head swam and those eyes filled his world.

‘My eyes?’ he said, knowing instantly he was right, feeling his heart contract with dread.

‘I’m your son,’ said Lyndon, and let him, brutally, fall to the ground.

Johnnie fainted then, the thirst beginning to destroy his brain, as it had ravaged his flesh.