Then he thanked God, shouted his name, and pulling the door towards him, fell out, back into the world which wasn’t on fire, his arms flailing in a fiery semaphore.
43
When he came to, Estelle was kneeling, holding him, with his back to the dust storm. Ahead the house still burned, a single column now of cherry-red flame fifty feet high. The pain along his spine was distant, but he knew that it was shock which had dulled it, and that it was blossoming slowly, but relentlessly. The dust storm blew, and somewhere in the hiss of the cloud in which they existed he could hear Humph, up close, on a mobile. ‘Yup. Quickly. It’s serious,’ he said, and Dryden wondered how the cabbie had hurt himself. Dryden was unmoved by the fact that he was still alive. He glugged air, choked on the carbon monoxide, but glugged some more. Estelle’s eyes were locked on the burning house, while she held her sweatshirt to her mouth to block the fumes.
Dryden’s chest heaved. ‘You knew,’ he said. He took what air he could. ‘Lyndon died thinking he’d killed Johnnie Roe. Thinking he died of thirst. But that’s not right, is it?’
She didn’t try to deny it. ‘No.’
Dryden closed his eyes but could still see the brilliant outline of the house on his retinas. ‘You’d been there – to the pillbox. At Maggie’s funeral you said Johnnie had been tortured like Tantalus. It was too perfect a description. None of the reports had the details. But you knew…’
She watched the fire with the same intensity Lyndon had reserved for the Zippo lighter.
Humph’s voice floated into their world. ‘They’re coming,’ he said, and was gone.
She coughed back the fumes. ‘He disappeared – after the night Mum died. He knew about Johnnie then, from the tapes. He came past a couple of times and we met at the hospital – to clear away her things. Freeman came too. But I knew Lyndon was struggling, struggling, with all of it. We had to talk. He just wanted to go back home – as if nothing had happened. It was crazy. He was crazy. It wasn’t something you could just forget. Then I saw the lights one night – out at Mons Wood. And the Land Rover, in the trees.’
‘You found Johnnie?’
‘Yes. In Mum’s pillbox, she’d talked about it on the tapes. Where she’d met Johnnie. And I knew then that Lyndon had taken him there. I’d thought of revenge too. But what could I do? Then, suddenly, he was there. And I had that power, of life and death, given to me without asking. So I went back the next night with some of the chemicals they use for the fields. Weedkiller. Dad… Don, Don always said they were lethal, and to keep them away from kids because they were tasteless. Like water. And colourless. We kept supplies locked up at Black Bank. I thought if Johnnie Roe was that desperate, he could drink that. So I filled the glass with the poison and I gave it to him.’
Dryden said nothing, trying not to see Johnnie’s body twisted on the pillbox floor.
‘He started screaming. Saying it burnt him inside. So I left.’ She turned to Dryden and he sensed she’d taken a decision. She smiled. ‘I don’t regret it. I never have. I just wish I’d told Lyndon. Why didn’t we talk? I wouldn’t go back with him. We couldn’t get past that. So we hid in silence and then he left.’
They watched the house burn. ‘Now Lyndon’s gone too,’ said Dryden, shaking badly as the shock subsided. The pain was making it difficult for him to think: a pulsing electric pain, branching out from his spinal cord.
‘I had something to tell him,’ said Estelle, and she let her hands drop to her stomach, where they cradled the flesh. Dryden’s head swam, but he knew she was rocking, rocking gently to the sound of the fire.
He knew then why Laura had told him there was another baby.
‘A child,’ he said, and she turned to him again.
‘I wanted to tell him that I didn’t go.’
‘Go where?’
‘The hospital. The last time we spoke we decided. I wouldn’t go with him so he said that it would be best if the child wasn’t born. I wanted to hurt him then, for being brutal. So I said OK. I said I would get rid of the child. He must have died thinking I had. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Terrible that he died not knowing there’s still a baby.’
Humph appeared before them and the green tinge of sickness on his face told Dryden everything he didn’t want to know. ‘Your back,’ he said. ‘There’s some burns. They’ll be here soon, so sit.’
Dryden nodded and leant on Estelle. The dust storm had vanished as quickly as it had descended on Adventurer’s Fen. In the silence the house crackled like kindling.
‘Lyndon. How did he die?’ she said, standing and taking a step towards the fire.
‘The lighter. Petrol, I think. It was over very quickly.’
She twisted her head back in despair: ‘Oh Jesus! We never escaped, did we? Any of us. From that fire. From this.’
And she started to walk towards the flames. Dryden stood, felt the fen sweep around him in a dizzy vision, and lunged after her. He clutched at Estelle’s arm and then his knees buckled and he brought her down into the dust with him. The front of the house was charcoal black, but where the door had been a sheet of ruby-red flame still burnt like a shimmering curtain of beads.
‘The child can escape,’ he said, and blacked out.
Postscript
