The Fire Baby

Her hand fluttered, searching out the bedside table where the tape recorder stood. ‘I’ve said it here. But I must tell them too. Promise me.’

He’d always remember the white arthritic knuckles and the parchment skin clutching his fingers. He stood, angry at the suggestion he needed a public oath to make him keep his word, and angrier still that she’d penetrated his emotional defences.

‘I promise.’

She cried. The first time he’d seen her buckle after all the months of pain.

‘I promise,’ he said again, and by some peculiar transference of emotion he felt vividly that he’d made the promise to his mother, to her memory, to the gravestone on Burnt Fen. Even now the thought produced a fresh surge of sweat on his forehead. He was doing all he could. The police appeals, ads in the papers along the coast where Estelle and the American had gone touring. Why didn’t she ring? Why didn’t she answer her mobile phone?

He walked back to his wife and touched her shoulder through the white linen sheet. ‘Laura?’

Her eyes were open. Seemingly sightless, but open. He imagined she slept – why not? So she needed waking like anyone else. And he liked using her name, now that he knew for certain that on some level, however deep and however distant, she could hear him.

The caretaker walked by in the corridor outside, dragging laundry bags and whistling the ‘Ode To Joy’, each note perfectly pitched.

Maggie Beck turned in her bed and struggled, as she always did, not to cry out.

Humph beeped from the cab. They had a job. Dryden had to go, back out into the world where people talked. But Dryden knew there was no real hurry. The Crow, the paper for which he was chief reporter, had a final deadline of 3.00pm.The handful of stories he had yet to file would take him an hour to knock out, probably less.

‘Loads of time,’ he said, sitting on the bed and taking Laura’s hand.

They’d made the breakthrough three months ago. Dryden, unable to sleep, had spent the night on the deck of his boat at Barham’s Dock. The sunrise had driven him to walk and a fox had dogged his tracks into town, scavenging across fields of sunburnt crops. The Tower had slept, the night nurse looking up from her studies to wave him through. He’d tried the routine a thousand times: taking her hand and beginning the endless repetition of the letters. Waiting for the tiny movement which would signal intelligent life, like a radio blip across the galaxy.

That first time, she’d done it perfectly. L-A-U-R-A. No mistakes. He’d sat on her bed and wept for her. Wept for joy that she was somewhere. But wept most for himself, doomed perhaps to spend his life beside a hospital bed, waiting for messages from another world.

Humph beeped again. Dryden placed the smallest finger of Laura’s right hand in his palm so that it barely touched his skin. The neurologist had shown him how. They had a machine too, the COMPASS, but Dryden liked doing it this way – the way they’d first done it. The communication was intensely personal, as though he were a lightning rod, channelling her energy to earth.

‘OK. Let’s concentrate.’ The specialist, the one with the dead-fish eyes, had told him to give her a warning.

Humph beeped again and Dryden suppressed a surge of petty anger.

‘Loads of time.’

He counted to sixty and then coughed self-consciously: ‘OK. We’re starting. A, B, C, D, E, F…’ and on, a full two seconds for each. He felt the familiar tingle of excitement as he got nearer: ‘J, K, L’ – and there it was, the tiny double movement.

It didn’t always happen. One out of five, six perhaps. They’d always got the next bit wrong until Dryden had hit upon the idea of beginning at M and running through the alphabet rather than starting at A. He moved on, with the two-second gaps, but she missed it. Two tiny movements – but on the B.

He felt irritation, then guilt. The neurologist had explained how difficult it must be. ‘It’s about as easy as playing chess in your head. She’s learnt to combine certain muscle movements, small tremors in the tissue, to produce this timed response. We have no way of knowing how much time she needs for each letter. How long she has to concentrate.’

He did the rest to spite Humph. L-B-U-S-A. Three letters right, two just a place away in the alphabet.

He felt fierce pride and love burn, briefly, at her achievement. The specialist, an expert from one of the big London teaching hospitals who had treated his wife like a specimen preserved in a Victorian museum jar, had told him to be patient – a word which always prompted in Dryden an internal scream. Laura’s messages were halting, disjointed, sometimes surreal. He must wait to see if she would ever emerge from the confused penumbra of coma.

‘Patience,’ he said out loud. A virtue, if it was one, of which he had no trace.

2

Humph parked up in a lay-by three miles east of Ely. It was a lay-by like all lay-bys, distinguished by nothing. The A14 east–west trunk road linking the coastal port of Felixstowe with the industrial cities of the Midlands was punctuated by them. At this hour – lunchtime – it was a canyon of HGVs ticking over and spewing carbon monoxide into hot air already laced with cheap grease from the Ritz T- Bar.

‘Coffee. Four sugars,’ said the cabbie, unfolding a five-day-old copy of the Financial Times with casual familiarity. He played the stock market in the way that many people play the horses. He lost a lot; but when he ran out of things to read the FT made a snug, pink blanket.

Humph was Dryden’s chauffeur. There was no other way to describe it. They had shared a life of aimless motion for nearly four years since Laura’s accident. Humph had a few regular customers who paid well – early morning school runs, and late night pick-ups for club bouncers in Newmarket and Cambridge. The rest of the time he was on call for Dryden. The Crow, Dryden’s newspaper, was happy to pick up the modest bills as it made up for the fact that they appeared to have forgotten to pay their chief reporter a salary.