The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,4
crash at Black Bank which had killed her parents and her infant son. They shouldered their grief together, farmers’ wives who didn’t want to subside under the weight of their misfortunes, at least not without a fight. They’d travelled together – day trips and weekends which took them far from the memory of their lives. He’d met her many times at Burnt Fen in his mother’s kitchen, a big woman with farmyard bones as familiar and comforting as the Aga, with that corkscrew burn like a tattoo on her face.
Maggie knew she had cancer. The radiotherapy would last six weeks, the convalescence longer still. Dryden had gone out to Black Bank to see her and knew instantly that she expected to die. The specialists had suggested that it might be good therapy for Laura if she shared her room. Maggie said yes without a pause and raided her savings to afford The Tower’s substantial fees. She would spend her last months in comfort, for she had a task to complete before the cancer took her life. She wanted to tell her story. Dryden gave her a tape recorder so that each day she could spill out her tale to a silent audience. The story she wanted to tell, the one she wanted Laura to witness. And Laura, if she could hear, had a story to listen to.
Dryden had visited in those first weeks and found in her a desperate insecurity. She’d hold his hand and tell him that her life had been a failure, that she’d failed Estelle, that she’d failed Black Bank. But she still hid the heart of this failure, a secret Dryden sensed was burning her from within. And then she’d turned to him one night just a week ago, as he sat with her enjoying the breeze that came through the open windows. They’d heard the cathedral clock chime midnight and she’d taken his hand and held it with the intensity of a bullclip: ‘Promise me they’ll come,’ she’d said.
She’d been in The Tower a month and each day Estelle had visited – until now. Each day she had come to sit with her mother. But the best days for Maggie were when she brought the American. Dryden had met him twice, by Laura’s bedside. ‘Friend of the family,’ said Maggie. A pilot, tall and slightly wasted, with the drawn features of a victim. Every day they came – until this last weekend. The doctors assured them that the end was months away, if not years. Maggie had agreed to a break, to let her daughter go. Let them both go.
The moment they left, Maggie’s health had rapidly collapsed. The cancer cells had begun to multiply in her blood and she had felt the change within her, the subtle beginning of the process of death. She had to get Estelle back, she had something to tell her. About the secrets that had consumed her life.
‘Promise me you’ll find them in time,’ she said. Dryden noted the plural.
He didn’t like telling lies. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘The police are trying; what more can I do?’
Her eyes pleaded with him, with a look which seemed, prematurely, to cross the divide between the living and the dead. ‘Then promise,’ she said. ‘And promise you’ll forgive me too.’
‘Forgive you for what?’
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,