The Fire Baby

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.