The Fire Baby

Was Emmy inside? Jimmy waited as the square man went in and he listened, hoping with such a violent intensity to hear his son’s voice that he conjured it up. He heard ‘Papa’. He heard ‘Help’; an hallucination more powerful than any sound he’d ever really heard. So he called out Emmy’s name – but it was the square man who came out. And he had blood on his hands. He wouldn’t have killed him if the muscled man hadn’t been so strong. He hit him with the jack from the car, across the chest. But the fool ducked and took the blow across the forehead and just grunted, standing there, stupidly. Even in the moonlight Jimmy saw the shock in his eyes. So Jimmy hit him again and recognized the sound; the sticky soft crunch of the cranium folding into the brain. That’s how his father had killed the cow a lifetime ago, a single blow, destroying the head and turning the eyes white.

So he left him in the grass and ran inside but Emmy wasn’t there. Only the man from the Ritz. The man with the cigarette hair, strung out across the floor, reaching for the empty glass. Pathetically he thought Jimmy had come to save him. So he begged for the glass. Begged for the water. There was blood around the man’s mouth which trickled as he spoke. Jimmy guessed the square man had hit him. A bruise, oddly green in the moonlight, was rising quickly over the man’s cheek and eye, distorting his face.

The contents of the Tesco bag had been dumped on the straw floor. Jimmy looked down at them stupidly and the man from the Ritz saw his chance.

‘I told him. I don’t know – don’t know whose they are. I missed the lorry. Tuesday. I missed it. Perhaps it was for them? I don’t know.’ Then his eyes turned again to the glass on the shelf and he almost whispered it this time. ‘A drink?’

So Jimmy asked him where Emmy had gone. Where they’d all gone. What was the plan if the drop was missed? Was there a plan? But he wouldn’t say, or he didn’t know. And then when Jimmy didn’t give him the water he made something up, babbling rubbish to win himself the water. Jimmy had felt anger then, and humiliation. He felt a fool, manipulated always by the white men who ran his life, the men who had lost his son. A simple bargain they had failed to keep. They’d taken the money and his son. The anger made him swoon.

So he left the glass on the ledge. And then he ran, hearing the man’s screams diminish slowly, until he could only imagine them in the silence of the fields.