‘And then he just turned up?’
‘He knew Mum was ill. We’d written. I’d even telephoned – we always did at Christmas. But he was out in Iraq and then he got shot down and we didn’t hear until the Koskinskis – the grandparents – sent Mum a letter. About Al Rasheid – the prison. It’s in Baghdad. They’ve always held their political prisoners there, tortured them there. Some US personnel were taken there too – for interrogation. But Lyndon had nothing to tell them. So they let him rot. That was how lucky he was.’
She turned her back on the kitchen table, put her palms down flat on the top, and jumped up to perch on the edge. ‘I’d never seen her cry like that. When she got the letter. She wept for days. I guess he’d died twice for her. It must have turned her inside out – and nobody to tell.’
‘But then he came back,’ said Dryden.
She crossed her legs in a perfect lotus position on the table top. ‘Yes,’ she said, and began to cry. ‘She was in The Tower by then. With Laura…’ She dabbed at the tears. ‘It’s odd. I feel I know Laura. But I never thought of her having a… family. Having you… I mean.’
Dryden wondered why this sounded so depressing. ‘He’s well? Lyndon? He seems withdrawn – I guess that’s hardly surprising. When he came back, had he suffered psychologically? There are scars, surely?’
She picked at the T-shirt at her neck, as if to lessen the heat. ‘Four weeks in confinement in a windowless cell is not something one can feel fine about, is it? I think he emerged remarkably unscathed. But who knows? Who knows what’s going on in someone else’s head? And whatever, it was hardly an ideal preparation for news like this…’
‘He must be disorientated.’
She nodded. ‘We both are. Lost, I think. And wary, very wary, which is understandable. I think it will be a long time before either of us trusts anyone again.’
‘Except each other?’
She smiled with her mouth. ‘Yes. Of course.’
Dryden closed his notebook. They listened again to the dull percussion of the basketball in the farmyard. The kitchen wall was covered in children’s art. Blue cows, green cats with giant whiskers, loads of tractors. Dryden walked over and got a closer look.
‘They’re my kids,’ she said proudly. That was it, thought Dryden – a teacher. Maggie had told him.
Then they heard it, the unmistakable sound of a highly polished limousine creeping sedately over gravel. Estelle grabbed at her throat. ‘It’s the undertakers. They just want to run through the details.’ She looked towards the rear of the house with something which again looked closer to fear than anxiety.
Dryden made for the back door. ‘I can tell Lyndon,’ he said.
Relief flooded over her. ‘Thanks. We should both see them. She’s his mother too.’
15
The dead crows, strung like beads on a line over the kitchen garden, were the only signs of life in the farmyard. It was one of the landscape’s ironies that the only sign of life was death. Black Bank, like most Fen farms, had no livestock. The soil was too precious for fodder. The peatfields stretched east to the limit of the eye, but nothing moved, nothing breathed.
A dead landscape, and silent but for the rhythmic pounding of a basketball. Lyndon, sporting black wraparound pilot’s glasses, didn’t acknowledge Dryden’s arrival. The reflective black lenses mirrored the panorama of Black Bank Fen, an image as lifeless as the landscape itself. Then Lyndon stooped, tilted his chin and sent the ball in a loop high against the sky, from where it dropped into the hoop without touching the sides.
Lyndon loped across the farmyard, his brilliant white Nike trainers kicking up knee-high clouds of red dust, collected the ball and thrust it with surprising force at Dryden’s midriff. He pushed the glasses up into his hair and looked around. ‘It’s like home.’
Dryden nodded stupidly.
‘There,’ said Lyndon, pointing to the far eastern horizon where a turning red-black miniature twister teetered like a child’s top. Common that summer in the Saharan heat they did little harm, touching down on the earth for a few short seconds to suck up the weightless dust. Dryden always felt uneasy at the sight, which recalled a nightmare vision of a length of disembodied gut twisting in pain. This one was corkscrewing harmlessly over a field and visibly fading as it lost touch with the hot earth.
‘At home they could take the roof of your farm. Here they can’t get the tops off the carrots,’ said Lyndon, leaning against the barn wall with the easy grace of the natural athlete, his chest muscles filling out the all-American sweatshirt. His height, which must have been at least two inches greater than Dryden’s six feet two, didn’t make him look skinny. He flashed a smile that was a testament to the efficiency of Texan dentistry and an affluent US childhood.
‘This must have been a difficult time,’ said Dryden, proud of himself for finding the right opening question.
‘Difficult? Hell, no. I’ve just found out that the life I had was someone else’s, and that my life never got lived. I’m buried out there at that clapped-out church. I’ve visited my own graveside. Confused? Cheated? Pissed angry? You said it.’
He grabbed the ball, ran back to the edge of the yard and shot directly at the hoop, twanging the metal and sending the ball on a zig-zag bagatelle course around the farmyard until it rolled into one of the sheds.
‘What sort of life was it – Lyndon’s?’ asked Dryden.
The US ace pilot walked towards him with the hint of a military swagger and slipped the glasses down again, cloaking his eyes. ‘Great. Texas. The big country, makes this look like Central Park. San Antonio. You know it?’
Dryden shook his head. He and Laura had made New York and New England for a week in the Fall before the accident but hadn’t fancied the South: they lynched people and drank out of beer cans so cold they stuck to your lips.
‘The big country,’ said Lyndon again. ‘I’m always near folks here. Kinda gets ya. It looks like a wilderness but it ain’t.’ He lifted the sweatshirt from his chest to let some air circulate.
Dryden shrugged. ‘There are places. Go north. The fen gets deeper. You can lose yourself there. Adventurer’s Fen. That was our place. Is… our place.’
‘Yeah?’ said Lyndon.
Dryden got back to his past. ‘So the life you had. In the States – there was money?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Loads. Grandpa Koskinski was US Navy. Big shot. Pentagon. We had three cars, a pool, tennis court with AstroTurf. A maid, a gardener, and an air-conditioning system big enough to cool an English county. That qualify as wealthy?’
‘Sure.’
‘But not classy, eh? That’s the thing with you British. It’s class, not money.’
‘Happy childhood?’ tried Dryden.
Lyndon took some steps back and squatted down on his haunches in the dust. He took out the Zippo lighter from his pants pocket, flicked it open and lit it once, before holding the cool chrome case to his forehead. Dryden caught a faint whiff of lighter fuel on the hot breeze.
‘You can’t miss what you don’t know – that’s what they say here, yeah? Well, I missed ‘em. I thought they died here,’ he said, running his fingers through the red dust. ‘Mum and Dad. Jim and Marlene. I know their faces better than I know my own. But they’re always the same age. Twenty-seven years ago, right here. But guess what – they’re total strangers. I might as well have your picture in my wallet.’
‘Maggie had kept in touch?’ asked Dryden, sensing a tailspin into depression.
‘Yeah. Christmas, birthdays, pictures of Estelle, that kind of thing. I think my grandparents were grateful and they felt some compassion for her. I guess they’d seen what the crash had done to her life. They went to Matty’s funeral. They felt… implicated in some way.’