by Will Dean
I scrape the plates, a piece of sausage skin stuck between my front teeth, and pile them on top of the old cast-iron skillet, his mother’s skillet, and wash up. He won’t buy me gloves because his mother never used gloves and that’s why my hands look like this.
‘I’m going off up to feed pigs, what we got?’
His damn pigs live better than I do. I look out of the kitchen window, the small one above the sink, and I can see the pig barn in the far distance. Breeze-block walls and a corrugated roof. Far enough away that I can eclipse it with the tip of my thumb.
Off towards the sea, past the dyke, there’s nothing else except his pigs and the marshes. I take some scraps from the bin, some potato peelings, sausage gristle I couldn’t chew through, some out-of-date pre-sliced Spar shop ham from the fridge. I load it all into the scraps bucket and hand it over to him.
‘Make up fire for when I get back in, it’s raw out and the clouds lookin’ mardy.’
I wash up and listen for the front door.
That’s it.
The noise of the bolt.
Blessed relief. I breathe out and wait, scouring pad in hand, and then he’s there at the back field on his quad, a monster riding away on four wheels, riding off towards the pigs, his brethren. I wish upon him a heart attack and a bad fall, perhaps into the dyke, drowning, the quad on top, and a lightning strike. But nothing ever happens to him, no consequence. He’s as solid and as basic as a concrete wall. The times I’ve begged to all the gods, to the horizon, to the four spires I can see to the north on a clear day and the three to the south, to the wind turbines, for some retribution to be brought, some penalty, and yet he thrives on.
The tapes are rolling. They’re always rolling. If I move they start recording, that’s how he installed them. Leonard’s quite handy with electrics and plumbing. And he may come back. He says he’s off to feed the pigs, those royal animals luxuriating on their throne of filth, unaware of their relative freedom, but he could just as well race back in five minutes. To surprise me. To check up on me. To control his small world and keep things exactly as he likes them.
My three things are still in my pinny, his mother’s pinny. With my back to the camera I remove Of Mice and Men and prop it on the windowsill and read as I pretend to wash up. Comforting words. Hope. My eyes flick over the pages. I know all the text off by heart. I glance up to the window and back, always checking. I think about George and Lennie’s alfalfa patch, their rabbits, their dream, their escape, and I think of my sister, Kim-Ly. All of my potential futures are now invested in her one actual future. I will escape this place through her spirit and live on through her.
We arrived here together.
Nine years ago, and back then it was the rosiest thing that we could ever have imagined. It was sold to us well, the idea that we would travel to the United Kingdom to work good jobs – ten times Vietnamese wages – and be able to send money back to our family. The two of us could work and it would be hard but we’d always have each other, wouldn’t we? The two men who came to our house were professionals. They had business cards and one had a leather briefcase. The boss smiled at my mother and shook my father’s hand. They drank our tea. Those men sat and cast their spell and fed us their despicable lies. They sold us an impossible dream and they sold it very well, that alfalfa rabbit patch, that chance to look after the parents whose images will be burnt on the Rayburn stove in this place later tonight.
His Rayburn stove.
If it’s in this house or on this land and it’s not his then it’s hers, his mother’s, and that’s almost worse because she gave birth to him, she reared him, she created him.
I take the book back into my threadbare pinny, the grey light from the window dwindling, the autumn mists rolling in off the salt marshes that are beyond my vision but that he tells me are out there after the pig barn and the copse wood. I smell the salt on the air some nights. I taste it. Something from far away. From beyond his influence. I turn my back on his pigs and on him and look at this pitiful downstairs room. Rayburn to my left, the heater of us and our food and our water, our oven and our hob, our light and our comfort, the heart of this rotten home. And then the small pine table with two pine chairs and the armchair next to the Rayburn, the shape of him preserved in the cushion for all eternity. And then the locked TV cupboard, and then the sofa with the plastic dust cover. Aside from the entrance hall and the stairs up and the lean-to bathroom out the back, that’s it, that’s all there is down here.
I drag myself through the door and step down into the bathroom. It’s damp back here, always. And cold. The floor has a chill alien to the land outside; it’s frost-cold for six months of the year and wet to the touch. He built the room himself in his forties, eight years ago, after his first wife died. I don’t close the door because that’s a rule.
At least tomorrow I get a hot bath. Scalding hot, water heated from the back boiler behind the Rayburn stove, red hot, kettle hot. I take it just as close to boiling as I can stand. Burn me, numb my brain stem, help me take away these feelings. The downside is what will happen afterwards.
The cold of this room, the damp of it. My sister and I arrived in Liverpool in a shipping container nine years ago. It was the coldest time of my life. From the heat of Saigon to that icy metal box. Seventeen of us hiding behind packages and crates. Crammed together behind a fake partition. Blankets and water bottles. Buckets. Me clinging to my sister and to the backpack I had with me. The photos of my parents. Sixteen of us made it to Liverpool and I sometimes wish, I often wish, that I had been the seventeenth.
I pull myself upstairs, heaving my weight with my arms, clinging to the banister like I’m fighting in a tug-of-war, creeping up one bare step at a time. I need the second half of that pill, my ankle’s screaming out for it. I’ve only passed out once in my life from pain and that was the day this happened to my ankle.
There are two bedrooms in this place, his place. His room, which he calls our room, faces the front, towards the track I failed to walk out from today, and the locked halfway gate and the silos and barns and yards and old ploughs. There’s a storage heater and a wardrobe and a double bed. The other, smaller bedroom, the back bedroom, is my room one week out of every four.
For those six days, more or less, I get to sleep on my own. He will not tolerate me in his front bedroom. These are the days I live for, the nights I get to sleep in my own space and dream my own dreams. These are the days when I can almost exist.
But I have to keep the back bedroom door open at all times. That’s another rule.
Always open. And he’s pushed the single bed up against the wall so he can watch me from the landing or from his front bedroom. He wanders in whenever he feels like it. I have no security of space, no boundaries of my own whatsoever. Nothing to protect or hide behind. I have no privacy, not even anything resembling it. I am filmed and observed and caught out and recorded and spied upon. I live in an open prison surrounded by wall-less fields and fence-less fens. It’s the vastness of these flatlands that keeps me prisoner here. I am contained; incarcerated in the most open landscape of them all.
I can hear his quad. I rush into the store cupboard in the small back bedroom. The left side’s for me. It was full when I arrived here from the other farm, confused and terrified. Unsure of what had been agreed. I had seventeen possessions. Now I’m down to just three. The opposite shelves, on the right side, store his mother’s old things. He’s never bought me anything. I have to make do with his mother’s woollens and her underwear and her blankets. I can’t wear her shoes, I can’t really wear any shoes at all, so I wear his open sandals, his old ones, with one leather part snipped open to allow for my disfigured knot of a foot.
I put my ID card and my book and my sister’s letters down on the slatted shelves. This side of the cupboard looks sad. Almost empty now. An egg timer running out of sand. Then I pick up the letters, seventy-two of them, and hold them to my upper lip, to the soft skin beneath my nose, and I breathe her in.
‘Where are you?’ he shouts from the front door.
‘Coming.’
I arrive in the living room as he’s pulling off his boots in the entrance hall and unlocking the lock box with his neck key. He deposits the quad key in the box and yes of course I’ve tried to hotwire it, I had no idea what I was doing, four years ago, maybe five, failed totally and that’s when I lost my pencil, already shaved to a nub, that’s when he took it and burnt it in front of my eyes. I haven’t written a word since.
‘Get kettle on, it’s blowing summat awful out there.’
I put the kettle on the Rayburn hotplate.
‘Right, let’s get this done then.’ He pulls the photo of my parents out from his overalls. The tips of his fingers are red and his cuticles are bleeding. ‘Get stove open.’
I pull the door to reveal glowing embers.
He holds up the photograph but it’s gone to me already; I’ve made my peace. He licks his lips. ‘Don’t do it again, Jane.’
My name is not Jane.
‘Do it again and you’ll have nothin’ left to burn on stove, will you?’
I look at the embers.
He places the photo in, but before he even releases it the edges curl and distort from the heat and then there’s a contained white flash, an uneventful flaring from the burning willow, and then they’re gone, transformed into heat to warm his bleeding hands and to make his beige-sweet tea. They are gone.
I feel nothing.
I pour hot water into two mugs as he unlocks the TV cabinet in the corner of the room. I say cabinet, it’s a full-size door bolted to the walls in the corner on a diagonal. It creaks as he opens it.
He locks the TV key securely in the key box and sits down on his armchair with his remote control to watch his TV.
He says, ‘Thanks, duck,’ as I place his pesticide company freebie mug down by his chair.
‘Match of Day,’ he says. ‘One of your favourites, ain’t it?’
I look back at the pills, the horse pills, cow pills, whatever they are, on the cabinet. Tranquilisers not tested on or for human beings. Generic medication for swine and bovine.
‘Can I have the other half, please, Lenn?’
He takes a quick look at my right ankle, at the teeming mass of sinew and bone, at the pain contained within, at the bruising, the blood pooling at the base of my foot under the wretched skin, at the foot existing at ninety degrees, my foot, my sideways foot.
‘Get stove door open and heat this room, it’s freezin’ in here.’
He stands up and reaches for the glass jar and unscrews the cap, the muscles in his hairless forearm flexing and bulging, and then he passes me the other half of the horse pill. I take it and open the door to the Rayburn so that, in some feeble distorted way, the room, this one room, his room, is transformed, in his eyes at least, and only his, into a cosy living room.
‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you, Lenn.’
He sits back down on his armchair and I sit the way he likes me to sit, on the floor by his knees. By his feet. He watches Match of the Day with subtitles on, some early gift from him to me so I could improve my English, and he pats my hair.
‘It’s all right, ain’t it, this life?’ He sips his beige tea, and the fire from the stove lights one side of his face. ‘We’re warm, under decent roof, full bellies, together, not all bad, is it?’
I sit, my crushed ankle throbbing, his broad, rough fingers in my hair, patting my head, and I swallow the half-pill.
Chapter 3
I wake up, but not like you would.
There’s a sense that I’m not asleep any more, but I have distance from that sense, I am away from it.
And then the pain hits.
It doesn’t creep up on me like you might expect it to. From deep, sedated horse pill sleep, not sleep really, more like an amateur coma, to screaming pain. I look down. I’m in the back bedroom of his cottage under his mother’s bedsheet and my ankle’s almost twice the size it usually is. My toes are black with blood. I’m lying flat on my back and my left foot is sticking up like yours would and my right foot is lying away from me, attached, somehow, some fused knot of broken bones, glued splinters, into a ball of an ankle, an abomination of a joint.
I need another half-pill.
More numbness. More distance and more fog.
The clock on the wall says it’s half past eleven and I can hear his tractor through the loose timber window frames and I can feel the draught off his fields.
I drink a sip of water and try to stand. My ankle has the colour and ripeness of some long-forgotten soft fruit. It feels less cohesive than usual after my walk yesterday, my failed not even halfway walk. It feels like it might crumble and fall apart if I put any weight on it.
I hop, but that’s worse. My right foot dangles and bobs and the strain is too much and I sit back down on the end of the bed, sweat beading on my forehead and at the back of my neck; my face twisted.
The tractor’s close by, maybe the ten-acre field to the east, maybe the winter wheat field edged by the long dyke.
I straighten myself and pull my body down the stairs one step at a time, one agony at a time. The fragments inside my ankle joint scrape and when I reach the bottom I hear a dull crack.
The day is vague.
Overcast.
I’m standing by the front door, the damp breeze cooling my pain, my eyes on his tractor ploughing his fields, the outline of his head visible in the tractor cab, and I can still make out my one-day-old footprints in the dirt, each one a victory and a defeat.
He stops the tractor and climbs down.
Growing ever larger as he walks towards me.
‘What time you call this?’
‘I need a pill,’ I say, my teeth gritted.
He walks closer and then past me into the kitchen. He gives me half a pill and I take it.
‘You gonna get behind, better get crackin’.’
‘I will.’
He makes coffee: one for me and one for him. He re-uses his pesticide supplier mug and gives me a floral thing his mother used to like. Nescafé and two sugar lumps. The flowers on the porcelain are faded to the point of near extinction. My hands have scrubbed these mugs, and Jane, his mother, scrubbed them, and Jane, his first wife, she scrubbed them as well.
The pill kicks in. I’ll push him to change to three-quarters soon. He can snap off the end and give me the big portion of the pill. He can do that three days running. On the fourth day he can give me the three snapped-off end pieces. It’ll be convenient for him and better for me. I can manage it then. I’ll carry on for Kim-Ly.
I push coppiced willow into the Rayburn stove and stoke it. The water on the top begins to simmer.
The bathroom floor is as cold as a puddle in February. It’s soft, that’s the thing, not just the damp or the chill, but it’s spongy, as if he laid the linoleum straight onto mud. And the smell. Some sort of decay. Rot. The ground under this bathroom is poor ground and the smell is so pungent it makes me retch.
I comb my hair and then he’s there at my back watching me. He’s standing at the base of the stairs, but there’s a rule that I must keep all internal doors open. And he’s watching me comb my hair, watching my back. Tonight he’ll tell me to run a bath. This is why I tried to leave yesterday, the last day of my period, the last chance before it happened all over again. I was going to use my five-pound note, the one I lodged in the storage heater in the small back bedroom, to call someone. Anyone. I took the money almost a year ago. I don’t know who to call. Someone in Manchester? Someone to find her and tell her to hide. To flee. Because if I had escaped then he’d have called his friend, Frank Trussock. They’d have had her sent straight back, and then all her years of toiling, all her work and sacrifice to pay back the men who shipped us here, who tricked us – it’d all be for nothing.
Lenn leaves and closes the front door and drives away.
I make toast on the Rayburn with his Mighty White bread. The p
acket doesn’t say Mighty White, but that’s what he calls it so that’s what I call it. Mighty White. It’s like eating wall insulation, but I’m used to it now. I’m accustomed to it. I’ve grown to enjoy it, even.
The pain is dull and so is my head. This is why my memories are split like a ruined sauce. I can find blobs of this, recall strands of that, but it’s an unruly mess. How I got here, who I am, what he’s done to me. I remember his rules. That’s not an issue, I remember his rules and his meal schedule, what he eats each day of the week, and how he likes his ham, egg and chips. It’s myself that I forget sometimes. Who I really am. From before. But I still have my book and my ID card and my letters.
I load the old washing machine with cloths. They’re his mother’s, too. I begged him in the early days to buy tampons or sanitary towels when he went to the Spar shop in the village each week to buy food. He said, ‘Me mother never needed no fancy rags and you don’t neither.’ It’s an insult, a degradation so personal that it made me ill. I have to use his mother’s towels, the moth-eaten cloths she used for herself and then used as towelling nappies for him. They’ve been on both of them and now I have to wear them. I’m used to it now. It’s the price I pay for five or six quiet nights in the small back bedroom each month alone with my own thoughts and my own beautiful memories.
There was a time when my days were carefree. As a girl playing tag with the little boy next door, as a teenager studying history while falling in love, as a young woman dreaming of what might be.
The main room camera’s on me as I remove the cloths from the washing machine and take them outside. My pinny, his mother’s pinny, flaps in the damp fenland breeze as I walk to the line joining his house to his shed. I peg up the cloths with his mother’s wooden pegs and as I secure each one to the plastic line I study the horizon. If you’ve ever seen a photo taken from the edge of space then you’ll know what I’m looking at. That gentle curvature. Imagined or real. That sense of the edge of the world. There are four spires in this direction and two are obscured by his tool shed from here. Spires, churches, ancient trees, my salvation, places I’ve run towards before my leg, before all this, in the early days. I never made it past his fields. All his. From here they are endless, one after the other, each one vast and featureless, the hedges tall enough to block out everything beyond.