The Fire Baby

She touched his arm. ‘Lyndon?’ And that was when he knew he’d fallen in love with her, the point when he knew he wanted to come back to the world he’d lost in Al Rasheid. He’d been lonely ever since, avoiding strangers because they could ask questions, and friends because they couldn’t, because they felt that saying nothing was the kindest cure for what he knew they must call many things – his illness, his injuries, his imprisonment, his lifelessness.

In truth he’d always been lonely. His lifelessness was older than hisimprisonment. His childhood had been oddly passionless, an orphan doted on, but never loved, not with the unconditional love of a parent. An orphan placated by money and education. A friendless boy who loved only an heroic image of his father, the Vietnam hero. A figure of intoxicating excitement always just beyond his reach. So he’d been lonely all his life: which is why he’d survived Al Rasheid.

Estelle had ended that loneliness because their shared history made her unique. She’d known him all his life, but he was a stranger. Ever since he could remember they’d sent her presents from Texas, dolls when she was a child, then clothes, CDs, pictures of the desert, and the city where they lived: the pool, the Christmas tree, the people-carrier. And she’d sent pictures back, from the awkward Fen child in farm clothes clutching her American doll, to the blonde teenager with the all-American smile.

‘Pretty kid,’ said his grandfather, sourly. They’d resented the contact, his grandparents, he knew that now. He knew that it was Maggie who had kept them together, persisted, and used their guilt to keep the link alive.

And Estelle had envied him his family as well, with all the cruelty of a child. The lack of parents, the doting grandparents, the freedom. Her father had died when she was four, long before her memory had been born. And her mother had loved her as her second child, precisely that and nothing more. A great love, but always, she sensed, short of its absolute potential. Estelle knew that even before memory began.