KYLIE PATRICIA MURPHY
JOHN MURPHY, JNR.
IN MEMORIAM, it said simply, followed by the date. Dryden fished in his pocket and found a round beach stone he’d picked up the last time he and Humph had run out to the coast. He put it on the top of the memorial and walked on.
Ahead of him he heard the engines first, and looking up from the dust saw the B-52 rise, heaving itself out of the distant haze like a swimmer breasting the pool. Its four turbines screamed and the pregnant black belly seemed to rear straight out of the fields: a nightmare crop. Dryden looked directly up as it went overhead, and saw the undercarriage enfold itself into the fuselage with a satisfying mechanical thud. It was so close he could see winking safety lights inside the undercarriage bay as they switched from red to green before the doors closed.
And then it was gone. A stream of grey fumes uncurling in the warm morning air.
He stood in the sudden silence before the front door of Black Bank Farm, which was green, varnished, and massive. Dryden looked at it from the gate of the kitchen garden and thought
In the full litany of Dryden’s fears dogs were not in the same class as water, enclosed spaces, heights, authority, or emotional attachment. But they moved faster than all of these, and the bone-white teeth and chopped-meat gums had always held a potent power to terrify. Dogs stood, growling, in a long queue of terrifying dangers which pursued him with tenacity. But nothing he was afraid of was as frightening as looking like a coward, even to himself. This fear ruled all others and produced occasional acts of misunderstood courage which had earned him an unwarranted reputation for valour. So he pushed the gate open and walked up the path. Which is when he actually got to hear the dogs. Their claws skittered on quarry tiles on the far side of the door. Dryden knew what they were thinking. They were thinking they could smell fear, and they were right.
He knocked, praying it wouldn’t open.
But it did. Estelle Beck leant against the door jamb in US combat fatigues which Dryden guessed had cost her half a week’s salary. Her T-shirt carried a single Stars & Stripes across her bust.
She held a large Alsatian, the size of a small horse, by the collar while eating a tomato.
‘He won’t hurt you,’ she said, with a smile that never touched the lichen-green eyes. She looked like she hadn’t slept for a week and her carefully cut bob of blonde hair was completely lifeless, like straw. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the dog’s collar. Dryden noticed that the leather was decorated with tiny studs in red and blue with white stars at their centre.
‘Then I won’t hurt him,’ said Dryden, failing to move any of his limbs. ‘What’s he called?’
‘Texas,’ she said, a laugh dying in her throat.
She nodded. He looked beyond her to the dark interior of the house and saw a foot poised on the staircase. A trainer, Nike, new and still shop-white below a pair of jogging pants.
‘It’s what she would have wanted,’ he said. Experience told him that if he had to say anything more she wouldn’t let him in.
Estelle dropped the dog’s collar and it padded nonchalantly past, pausing only briefly to smell Dryden’s testicles. In the darkness beyond her Dryden saw a lighter flare, then snap out.
‘Come in. It’s a mess.’
He met Lyndon in the hall. He was putting a large bottle of mineral water into a rucksack. He didn’t have to explain why he was there. He was home, but he didn’t look like he was staying. Dryden looked from brother to sister and searched for the tell-tale signs of their mother.
Lyndon was in a less self-conscious outfit than his pilot’s uniform but it was equally American: grey sweatshirt with US Air Force crest, running trousers in white, and the new Nikes. He twisted a basketball in his slender hands. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Dryden, and fled into the shadows of the house.
Estelle turned right into the front room. It was stuffy and about as homely as the Victoria and Albert Museum. An upright piano supported a clutch of family photos, a mockery of the truth they now knew. The newest showed Maggie in bed at The Tower with Lyndon on one side and Estelle on the other. It had ‘last picture’ written all over it.
Dryden picked it up. Best to ask first, get it over with. ‘Could I borrow this? We’ll need a picture. I can give you some copies too – bigger size.’
Estelle shrugged. Dryden thudded down into a moth-eaten armchair beneath a stuffed fox’s head. He took out a notebook and tapped it with a ballpoint. ‘I’ll keep it short.’ It was a phrase he loved, and like most of the phrases he loved, it meant nothing.
Estelle sat at the dining-room table sorting through some papers. A will? Dryden hadn’t even thought of that. A will: the sudden possibilities multiplied as he considered Maggie’s hastily re-drawn family tree.
‘So. Where to start?’ said Dryden. Clearly she didn’t know. There was a long silence while somewhere music played. Folk. An American voice just audible: Bob Dylan perhaps.
‘You were born after the crash?’
‘In 1978. Two years,’ she said. Dryden sensed she wanted to go on but was diverted by a greater truth.
‘And your father…?’ He knew much of the story himself, largely retold by his mother. But Fen gossip had clouded the detail.
‘Donald. Donald McGuire. Mum went back to the Beck family name after Dad died. They married in ’76. A few months after the crash. She never said why. He was older, much older. I think she loved him in a way, he certainly loved me. It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t really believe I remember him at all, but I can remember that he loved me.’
She shuffled some of the papers on the table. ‘Why do you think she married?’ asked Dryden.
‘Yes. She talks about that on the tapes – we’ve been listening together. It’s such a help, hearing her voice.
