The Fire Baby

his memory: but then he knew that for ever, for him, was not a long time. As the heat rose towards midday he could see the level of water drop, and he sucked in air to catch the memory of the moisture.

It was his life now, trying to reach the glass. But he knew, even as he stretched and felt the handcuffs cut into his wrist, that he would never touch it. He’d marked the full extent of his passion on the floor. On the first day he’d stretched out and left a line in the sand, three feet short of the far wall. By the third day he’d stretched until he heard his joints crack, a sickening pop of cartilage disengaged.

The next day he won six inches in a single panic-stricken lunge, the pain of which had made him swoon. When he came to, the blood had dried and the cut at his wrist showed the glint of bone, like a gash of knuckle glimpsed on the butcher’s counter. That night the fox came for the first time, circling, sniffing death.

His jailer noted his efforts to reach the glass with obvious satisfaction, smoothed clean the sand and re-filled the glass with bright water from the sparkling plastic bottle. Then he took the carved knife from its place, sticking out of the door jamb, and held it to his victim’s throat. A minute, maybe two, then he returned it, unblooded.

There was something familiar about the jailer. Something in the way he leant against the concrete wall by the glass and smoked. Something in the downcast eyes.

He yearned to hear his voice, but the jailer hadn’t spoken.

The routine was silently the same. He’d hear first his footsteps on the tinder-dry twigs beneath the pines. The iron door pushed open, the glass re-filled. Then he’d stand and smoke. A packet sometimes. How long does that take? An hour? Two?

Sometimes he came twice a day, the sound of his car suddenly loud as it parked beyond the trees he could see through the guns lit. But he’d always go without answering the questions. And then once at night. He was afraid then, for the first time, that the jailer would kill him before the thirst did. His tormentor was drunk, and the storm lantern put tiny red flashes in his eyes, but still he said nothing.

He’d speak before the end came. He felt sure of that. But he wanted to know now. Know now for which of his crimes he was being punished.

Nine Days Earlier Thursday, 5 June

1

Philip Dryden looked down on the taxi cab parked on the neat shingle forecourt of The Tower Hospital. In the front seat was a large sleeping figure encircled by an Ipswich Town sweatshirt. The driver’s delicate hands were clasped neatly over an ample tummy. The slumbering cabbie’s tiny mouth formed a perfect O.

‘How can he stand it?’ Dryden asked, turning to the figure laid out under a single white linen sheet on the hospital bed. ‘It’s eighty-four degrees. He’s parked in the full sunlight. Fast asleep. All that meat. Cooking.’

The figure on the bed didn’t move. Its immobility was a constant in his life, like the heat of that summer, and equally oppressive. He turned back to the large Victorian half-circle window and put his forehead to the glass.

Heat. Inescapable heat, like a giant duvet over the Fens. He felt a rivulet of sweat set out from his jet-black hair and begin a zig-zag journey across his face. His features were architectural. Precisely, Early Norman. The head of a knight, perhaps, from a cathedral nave, or illuminated on a medieval parchment. Illuminated but impassive; a dramatic irony which nicely summed him up.

He tipped his head back and turned his face to the ceiling. He had a powerful imagination and he focused it now, as he had done a thousand times that suffocating summer, on conjuring up a snow storm. The ice-cold flakes fell on his upturned eyelids. He listened to them falling in the silence, punctuated only by the tick of the bedside clock.

When he opened them it was 11.57 precisely. Three minutes.

He closed his eyes again and tried to wish the heat away. The Tower was on Ely’s only hill. A precious hundred feet above the limitless expanse of the Black Fens which stretched in a parched panorama to the distant wavy line of the horizon. A tractor, wobbling in a mirage, trundled across a field slightly smaller than Belgium.

He looked down at Laura. His wife had been in The Tower nearly four years since the accident at Harrimere Drain. Dryden had met the other driver on a lonely fen road head on, swerved over the verge, and the two-door Corsa had plunged into twenty feet of water in the roadside dyke. Harrimere Drain. Whenever Dryden saw the sign he could feel the seatbelt cutting across his chest and the dull, distant, double click of his collar bones breaking.

He’d been dragged to safety, but Laura, unseen on the back seat, had been left behind. He tried never to imagine what she must have thought when she regained consciousness. Alone, in the dark, in pain, and gasping for breath in a remorselessly diminishing pocket of damp air.

Three hours later the emergency services got her out. She was in the coma then. Locked In Syndrome: LIS. Locked away from the horror of those 180 minutes of total isolation, locked away from the knowledge that she’d been abandoned, locked away from him.

The clock flipped over a number: 11.58. Dryden pulled at the frayed linen collar of his white shirt and fingered the gold chain around his neck. He pulled on it until the single brass Chubb-lock key came out into his hand. The car crash had been two days before his thirty-third birthday and he hadn’t got back to their flat in London until a month later. That’s when he found his present where she knew he’d stumble on it, in the top drawer of their desk. A single white envelope, a card showing a black and white landscape shot of the Fens near Ely, and a newly cut key. The inscription on the card read ‘Love, Laura’; nothing else.

He’d tried the locks in the flat first, then her parents’ cafe and flat, but nothing. He tried the local locksmiths in the North London suburb where they lived but none could recall a visit from the Italian girl with the copper hair. He’d tried the two cottages out on Adventurer’s Fen they’d inspected during their long debates about moving out, starting a family. But the doors were rotten and the keyholes rusted. Ivy obscured the sign engraved in the bricks: Flightpath Cottages.

How many other locks had he tried since Laura’s accident? A thousand? Two? But nothing. Only Laura knew which door the key opened, and she hadn’t spoken since the night of the crash. It was a mystery which tormented him subtly because it seemed the perfect symbol of his life since the accident. That he should have the key, but not the door. An answer without a question.