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Dryden searched in his jacket pocket for the chocolate bar he had bought earlier that day.
Humph squirmed in his seat. ‘A baby?’
‘Maggie said she swapped the kids on the night of the Black Bank air crash. The one that survived – the Yank pilot – is her son.’
‘Jesus!’ said Humph, actually turning in his seat. ‘How does Laura know?’
Dryden considered this: ‘I guess she heard Maggie using the tape recorder. If that’s the baby Laura means.’
The last torch had faded three hours ago and Emmanuel had wanted to cry then. Others did. He heard them when the lorry stopped and killed its engines. But the fear had shut them up.
No one talked now. The blackness was total. But that wasn’t why they were afraid. They were afraid because of the heat, and the way it seemed to be stealing away the oxygen they craved. Emmanuel’s chest hurt as he breathed, and he had to suck the air just to stop the screaming pain in his lungs. He pressed his forehead against the coolness of the metal walls and he tried to do what his father always said: ‘Emmy. Act your age.’
Sixteen. He was proud of that. A man at last in the village. Just in time to leave.
He felt the self-pity well up so he thought about home: his touchstone. Almost thirty-one days now, counted out and marked up in his diary. He’d written down what he’d missed most; the way the dogs barked at night and the cool, overwhelming presence of the great river. He’d spent his childhood feeling it slip by, never ending, perpetual. Their lives depended on the river because his grandfather’s boat meant they could all eat. He ferried the foreigners to the mine and back, and Emmy could hear, even now, the high intoxicating whine of the outboard motor. But it hadn’t been enough. First his father had left and sent money. Now he too must send money home.
He reached out a hand and touched an arm. It jerked away. None of them were friends now. He felt the indignation swell into tears. They were supposed to look after him. There was Kunte, Josh and Abraham from the village. His guardians, his grandfather had said, in front of everyone. The village would never forget what had happened to Emmy, but then he thought they might never know. Could that really happen? Could he die and no one would know?
The fear had started at sea. The panic swept over them with the first big swell, which piled them in a thrashing heap against the food boxes. When the lantern failed Emmy felt better: he couldn’t see the faces of the others. He had been a lucky child to live so long and never see betrayal in another’s eyes. But he saw it then.
He’d seen England for the first time that day sometime just before dawn in a lay-by on a busy road. At least it was busy to Emmy. In the village they’d come out to watch the oil tankers go by, and the cars driven by the well-fed Americans. Here the cars were perpetual like the river, not cool and comforting, but alien – harsh.
In the lay-by the driver’s torch beam blinded them. They hadn’t been let out. Something was wrong.
‘There’s no choice,’ the driver said.
They let them have the air for a moment and then crashed the tailgate back down. A fight started as the bolts shot into place. Emmy touched his fingers to his forehead later where someone’s nails had clawed and he felt the stickiness and smelt the hint of iron on his fingertips.
They’d driven on and then Emmy had heard the sound of gates opening. Then silence. How many hours now? The driver got out and a car started up. Then nothing.
The night had gone, Emmanuel knew that. Now the sun was rising. Just beyond the thin aluminium curtain which kept him from the air.
He wasn’t the fisrst to panic. Even in the dark he knew it was Abraham; he’d known him all his life. He heard his fists hit the walls. Then everyone moved. Blindly in the dark. And Emmanuel felt the pain across his chest, and as he panicked too he knew, with the true insight of the living nightmare, that this was just the beginning of the end.
Nine Days Later Monday, 16 June
14
Aboard PK 129 Philip Dryden had not slept. That was the lie he always lived with: the truth was that he had slept, but could not face the nightmares which proved he had. Who said you cannot dream in colour? The blood was red and Laura always bobbed to its surface. She floated past his outstretched hand, each time a little nearer, but each time he could not reach, and each time he shouted out her name until he woke himself free from the torment of repeated failure. This time his anxiety had been doubled by the presence of Maggie Beck in his dream, still curled in her deathbed like an aged foetus, but floating on the sticky surface of the blood.
As always, with the dawn, the darkness lifted like the lid on his chest of guilty secrets.
He went up on deck with a mug of coffee to watch the sunrise from his deckchair. When he’d bought PK 129 shortly after Laura’s accident it was chiefly for the unspeakable romance of the small teak plaque in the wheelhouse which read ‘Dunkirk: 1940’. The deckchair was less romantic. Tired of repeated efforts to put the thing up he had nailed the wooden stays in position and fixed the legs to the deck with steel brackets.
The sun wobbled free of the horizon and Dryden felt some joy seeping back into his heart. He liked his floating home: it combined permanence with mobility and a pleasing sense of the temporary. And if he ever got bored with the view he could just pay for a new mooring. She was a steel-built inshore naval patrol boat for which Dryden had extracted £16,000 from the joint savings account he’d held with Laura. He would have paid twice that for the plaque, but money management was not one of his strong suits. He had few determinations, but one was to make sure his life wasn’t pinched by a lack of pennies.
He made a fresh batch of coffee in the galley. Two cups, tin. Through the porthole he spotted Humph’s Ford Capri parked up at Barham’s Farm. He laughed out loud at Humph’s biggest joke: the only cabbie in Britain with a two-door taxi: a triumph of indifference over reality.
An automatic irrigator sent a plume of water back and forth across the intervening fields. The first rainbow of the day formed and appeared to end in Humph’s cab. Dryden doubted it ended in a pot of gold, recalling instead the murky glass specimen bottle the cabbie had collected to make sure the occasional call of nature did not result in him having to leave the car.
Dryden looked up and checked his watch: 8.10am. He’d arranged to get to Black Bank early. The call had been difficult: they were busy, said Estelle Beck, arranging for the next day’s funeral. He sensed animosity in her voice, even fear. Getting up early suited him. It was press day for the Express and he wanted to run Maggie Beck’s deathbed confession and the plea for Matty’s father to come forward. He was happy to follow Maggie’s stipulation that his story should run after the funeral – but he still needed an interview, and a family picture, to make sure it got the space it deserved.
‘Have you listened to the tapes?’ he’d asked Estelle.
‘At nine then,’ she said by way of reply. ‘At Black Bank.’