brandies. He brought Humph up to speed on the investigation by reading out the copy he had filed. The cabbie listened, whistled once, and settled down to sleep.
Dryden decided it was visiting time. Laura’s breath whistled like a cat’s. Dryden, and the nursing staff, had long since agreed that her sleeping time should be respected, and despite her open eyes the room was darkened, and the COMPASS machine turned off, between 10.00pm and 7.00am.
Dryden sat quietly for a minute, studying her face in the blazing moonlight. He stood and went to the window. Below, the caretaker was sweeping the forecourt. Clearly an insomniac, he whistled happily. Beethoven again, perhaps ‘The Emperor’, thought Dryden. In the cab Humph read his language primer by the courtesy light.
He turned back to the room. It had changed since his visit the evening before. Estelle and Lyndon must have been in to ferry out Maggie’s stuff, large amounts of which had accumulated in her final weeks. A bookcase had been filled with gifts from family, neighbours and friends and a wardrobe had held clothes for when she was judged well enough to walk in the grounds of The Tower. The cardboard box in which Dryden had stored Maggie’s tapes had been emptied shortly after her death, the box left under the bed. Her life, in her own words, was back at Black Bank. The cupboard stood open and empty. The only thing left of Maggie’s in the room was the tape recorder on the window ledge.
Dryden sat down by Laura’s bed and examined her hands, which lay lifeless on the single sheet. The image he was trying to suppress seemed to be etched on his retinas – the outstretched hand of the corpse in the pillbox and those undulating, angry, skin grafts. Who had killed Johnnie Roe? Had Bob Sutton’s inquiries disrupted the trade in pornography? Had the crooks behind the business come looking for Johnnie? Or had Sutton got there first?
Quietly he stood and walked to the COMPASS machine. For once his curiosity seemed dimmed. He stuffed the tickertape in his pocket unread, and went back to the cab.
SHFYTJF SHDURIT DHEOFJO DJDO
GHGEIKOW WATCHWHITE KRUBBYO
ASAIUDSJ HD UCANSEETIERIVERGHHUJI
Over the months he’d learned the telltale signs. The tiny sounds which said the light was coming.
First there was the outer gate. A rusted hinge grated. Not like the others he could hear at dawn and dusk. The hundreds of iron doors opening and closing in the prison of Al Rasheid.
This one had a note. He’d played cornet at high school. Was it a G? Perhaps. Middle register. Pleasing.
He had only a few seconds then to prepare. He had to close his eyes, he must, because the pain would be sweeping, a burning poker of agony thrust into his eye sockets and down into his brain. That first time the nerve ends had sizzled, like tiny caterpillars shrivelled on a hotplate.
But he had to open his eyes to savour the light, to relieve the human inkwell of darkness which was his life. An absence of light so total he sometimes forgot what sight was. So to ready his eyes he pressed his fingers into the sockets, producing the dancing colours which helped prepare for the light, even though they danced now with a half-hearted flickering voltage.
After the rusted hinge came the dog biscuit. He knew the dog, Atta, lived at the end of his corridor. Many people kicked him; some, surreptitiously, patted and fussed him. But only the jailer gave him the biscuit. He imagined the dog tossing the biscuit and crunching it further each time it was caught. A joyless meal which made the jailer laugh each time.
Then came the keyhole. There must have been a disc of metal covering the keyhole on the outside. The jailer flipped it up to insert the key and for a second a magical key-shaped beam crossed the cell and fell on the wall.
So he’d moved Freeman there, to catch the light. Freeman, who’d survived like he had, drifting down inert to the desert. Lyndon blamed himself for the injury. He’d panicked, hitting the button for the ejector seats before his co-pilot was ready. So he’d caught the canopy with his head, breaking the skin and the skull, and blackening his eyes. He held Freeman’s head in his hands sometimes, tenderly, feeling for the fractures beneath the skin, and the sickening click of the cranial plates which had been dislodged by the cockpit canopy.
But when the keyhole light fell on Freeman’s face his eyes never opened. For eighteen days they’d been in this solitary silence. And Freeman hadn’t moved; even though Lyndon gave him most of his food and cleaned the head wound with the water he craved so much to drink. But Freeman White lay still, stiller with each passing day. One day soon, Lyndon knew, the keyhole light would find his eyes forever open.
The jailer knew his business and the key turned in the lock and the door flew open with military swiftness. The light engulfed them. Direct sunlight. Lyndon’s eyes hurt so much he always cried out, while he scrabbled to his knees beside Freeman’s body.
And then the jailer showed his pity, smoking a single cigarette in the doorway as Lyndon tried to see out on the world. Once he saw the leaves of a cedar tree over the far wall flickering from lime green to silver grey in a breeze. And once the flag. Three green stars on a horizontal white band, a red band above, black below.
And he always made the same plea for Freeman: ‘Take him away, not me. Take him away. He needs a doctor. Look!’ And Lyndon would draw back the bandage on the forehead to reveal the purple wound, with its iridescent greenish tinge. He’d take some of the water then, and bathe away the pus and the flies.
But the jailer smoked; not cruelly, but with his back turned. There was never ever any warning of the end of the light. Just the sudden diminution of the sunburst and the rocking percussion of the iron door crashing against the jamb. And then the darkness again, and the terror of the small space he knew so well.
