The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,52

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.

Tuesday, 17 June

22

Dryden held the cup of black coffee to his lips and watched the tiny tremor in his right hand translated into concentric wavelets on the surface of the liquid. He gulped the caffeine with an addict’s concentration, then picked up Humph’s flask and, tilting it, confirmed it was empty.

A surge of panic, less potent than the caffeine, made his muscles tighten. The events of the night before were still a cartoon strip of indelible, technicolour images – from the blue-spotted skin grafts on the victim’s back to the bright yellow fluorescence of the body bag in which they’d taken him away. And finally the cell in which he waited, briefly, for Newman. The cell that smelt like a cat’s tray without the comfort of the litter.

Had he slept? Humph had taken him back to PK 129 but they’d drank little bottles until dawn without speaking. Dryden rubbed his fingers in his eyes and heard the gritty squeak of dust and eyeball grating.

He looked at the ceiling and remembered where he was: church. Precisely, St Matthew’s – The Pickers’ Church on Black Bank Fen. Newman had fended off