The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,1

wings.

She took a limping step towards the coolness of the night. These ashes weren’t cold like the ones in the grate at Black Bank. These were white with heat, an ivory crust beneath which breathed the cherry embers. She smelt flesh burn and knew, with the clarity of shock, that it was hers.

And then she saw him. A hundred yards from the house, shielding his face from the heat with an out-turned palm.

He’d been waiting to join the celebration. Her father had been confident Maggie would change her mind that night ‘Come at eleven. She’ll come round for Matty’s sake. It’s the baby. She’ll come round.’

And with the intuition of a lover Maggie knew where he’d been, knew where he’d been waiting in the night. The old pillbox. Their pillbox; the concrete hexagonal space that she had once dreamed of in the damp and guilty night, the place where they’d made Matty come to life.

She heard a siren then. The first. From the base. They’d be at Black Bank soon, but not soon enough to save him. Not soon enough to save him from the life she planned for him in those few seconds. It was the best decision of her life. And the quickest. Taken in the time it takes to light a match.

And then they were together. So she smiled as she trembled. The yellow-blue light of the kerosene was in his eyes and briefly she remembered why she’d loved him once. But she saw that he looked only down, at the baby. His finger turned back the fold in the blanket. He saw the face for the first time, the tiny red wandering tongue. And the fool smiled too.

‘Our boy,’ he said, wishing it was so. ‘He’s safe. Our boy.’

She let him believe it for another second.

‘Dead,’ she said, and pulled the blanket back to let him see the stencilled blue capital letters on the soft linen: USAF: AIR CONVOY.

He looked at the ruined farmhouse then: ‘Dead? You can’t be sure.’

He looked at the blanket again. ‘I’ll get him,’ he said. ‘stay here.’ She watched him run into the flames, until they closed behind him, like the hushed velvet curtains of a crematorium.

Saturday, 14 June 2003 – 27 years later

The single glass of water stood like an exhibit on the pillbox shelf. When the sun reached the western horizon it shone directly into the hexagonal room through the gunslit and caught the liquid, sending a shifting rainbow of incredible beauty across the drab concrete walls.

It haunted him now. He could see it with his eyes closed. Its cool limpid form was held for ever in his memory: but then he knew that for ever, for him, was not a long time. As the heat rose towards midday he could see the level of water drop, and he sucked in air to catch the memory of the moisture.

It was his life now, trying to reach the glass. But he knew, even as he stretched and felt the handcuffs cut into his wrist, that he would never touch it. He’d marked the full extent of his passion on the floor. On the first day he’d stretched out and left a line in the sand, three feet short of the far wall. By the third day he’d stretched until he heard his joints crack, a sickening pop of cartilage disengaged.

The next day he won six inches in a single panic-stricken lunge, the pain of which had made him swoon. When he came to, the blood had dried and the cut at his wrist showed the glint of bone, like a gash of knuckle glimpsed on the butcher’s counter. That night the fox came for the first time, circling, sniffing death.

His jailer noted his efforts to reach the glass with obvious satisfaction, smoothed clean the sand and re-filled the glass with bright water from the sparkling plastic bottle. Then he took the carved knife from its place, sticking out of the door jamb, and held it to his victim’s throat. A minute, maybe two, then he returned it, unblooded.

There was something familiar about the jailer. Something in the way he leant against the concrete wall by the glass and smoked. Something in the downcast eyes.

He yearned to hear his voice, but the jailer hadn’t spoken.

The routine was silently the same. He’d hear first his footsteps on the tinder-dry twigs beneath the pines. The iron door pushed open, the glass re-filled. Then he’d stand and smoke. A packet sometimes. How long does