The Fire Baby

Then came the real Americans. The state plates, the blonde wives and the kids weighed down with enough dental work to embrace the Golden Gate Bridge.

Dryden sipped Coke and burped for fun. He liked Americans. He liked the brash good humour, the lack of two-faced English subtlety and the simple determination to have plenty of fun as loudly as possible. Dryden slid off the roof, down the windscreen and across the bonnet of the Capri to land lightly on the hot tarmac. It was a good trick, and one the crowd in his head always cheered.

By the turnstiles was The Greyhound ‘Nite Spot’. Neon strip lighting picked out the shape of a racing dog. Class in spades, thought Dryden, as he ordered a pint of imported Bud at the bar and watched two US pilots playing pool on a table with a blue baize top. Two middle-aged guys at the bar played with their cigarette packs and vied, in a half-hearted way, for the attentions of the barmaid.

Dryden had another Bud and left at 7.29 precisely, but was still able to find an empty half-acre of terrace by the time the first race began. The bell rang. The dogs were paraded in their neat waistcoats. Handlers, in mock-lab coats, tried to look disinterested. The dogs were bundled into the starting gate with indecent haste, like murderers into the noose. The hare did a lap and Dryden laughed at its silly teetering progress, but as it lapped the starting gate the dogs exploded out of their traps. Their speed and beauty thrilled him, and they took the first bend in a tight hurtling pack of sporting colours. By the time they crossed the finishing line after three laps he was cheering with the rest. He didn’t know which mutt had won, and he didn’t care. The punters dropped their torn-up betting slips, a tiny snow shower of disappointment. The winners swaggered, but only as far as the bar.

She was beside him suddenly, with a tray of race cards and cigarettes. She was probably under fifty but she’d been given a double helping of wrinkles, and none of them were laughter lines. The hair was once blonde, but now it was grey and cut lifelessly short. She had the slight stoop of the habitual smoker and the nervous searching fingers of someone feeling for a filter-tip.

‘Well?’ she said, and sat down on the concrete terrace. She searched in her pockets for cigarettes, then stopped herself by clasping her hands in her lap.

‘Sally Roe?’ asked Dryden. She nodded, looking at her hands. ‘You were married to Johnnie Roe?’ he asked, trying to think fast and talk slowly at the same time.

‘In 1978.’

‘Thanks for agreeing to meet.’

‘Not a lot of choice once you had the number.’ She smiled in half-apology for the aggressive tone.

Dryden smiled back. ‘The police said you were divorced. Years.’

She nodded, watching the dogs being led towards the starting booths again.

‘Yeah. I got out in’ ninety-three.’

‘Any reason?’

‘Loads. Private now. Best forgotten. But one thing Johnnie never forgot was that kid. When he’d had too much that was what it all came down to. Every argument. Every fight. We never had children. So he grieved for Matt. It brought it all back – what you wrote in the paper.’

Dryden was thinking fast, but he’d just been lapped.

She turned to face him. ‘Johnnie and Maggie were quite an item. We all thought they’d stick together, you know – not like the other teenage flings. He really wanted the kid – that’s why he went back into the fire that night. That’s how he got the burns – you should have seen his back.’

I have, thought Dryden. ‘Johnnie Roe was the father of Maggie Beck’s boy?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Oh yeah. It made Johnnie what he was.’

‘And what was that?’ said Dryden, picturing the pillbox on Black Bank Fen.

Her resolution failed, she found the packet in her breast pocket and lit up in a single fluid movement. Then she took in the nicotine and waited that two or three seconds it takes before the effect floods the bloodstream.

‘A bastard, really. But he could have been something else. If he’d come out of that fire with that kid his life would have been worth something. He said that. Drunk, I know, but he meant it. As it was, he amounted to nothing, so he didn’t see the point in trying to be anything better. He said he was a zero. Mr Zero. Which was nice for me, of course, being Mrs Zero. But by the time I left him zero was an over-estimate.’

‘But at the start?’

She laughed. The bell for the next race was rung and those of the crowd still interested moved down to the rail.

‘The heat was bad then,’ she said, and pressed her hand against her forehead. ‘In 1976. I knew both of them. They broke up after the crash. I got the impression he’d offered to marry her. Anyway, the crash changed everything. We’d known each other before and we drifted back.’ She watched the dogs being manhandled into the stalls. ‘It was good at the beginning.’

The starting pistol cracked and a fresh set of dogs burst out of their traps. Dryden watched the dust the dogs kicked up drift across the floodlit sky.