The Last Thing to Burn: Gripping and unforgettable, one of the most highly anticipated releases of 2021

by Will Dean

  But this hot bath also marks the beginning of a long night and the beginning of the next three weeks in his front bedroom.

  I dry off and pull on my nightie, his mother’s nightie, and keep a small towel wrapped around my hair. I pull myself upstairs and sit on the end of his bed.

  The TV goes quiet.

  Footsteps.

  Chapter 5

  I dry off my hair, rubbing at it with his mother’s towel.

  He’s washing himself downstairs in the bathroom. I can hear the water draining away into the fields and into the dykes and into the sea. I open his mother’s linen closet and take out a fresh white sheet and this one is older than the rest, it’s almost see-through like muslin cheesecloth. I throw it into the air to unfold and let it settle gently on the bed.

  He’ll need his special towel. I lay it on the right-hand side of the bed. He’s brushing his teeth down there. Spitting. Gargling. I hear the toilet flush and then the bottom stair creak.

  ‘Good bath, was it?’

  He says bath with as short an ‘a’ as you could possibly imagine. Other people say ‘baaath’ and some say ‘baath’, I do, and he says bath. If the letter ‘a’ could be any narrower, any more compressed, then that’s the letter ‘a’ that he pronounces.

  I nod and pull my nightie, his mother’s nightie, up over my head.

  He looks.

  I stare straight ahead.

  I lie on the bed and pull the thin cotton sheet over myself. I adjust it so the sheet’s covering me from the navel and higher. This is, in some ways, the worst of it. The waiting. Because it drives the truth home like a hammer would drive a nail through a plank of rotten wood. I have no say in this. None. I fought the first dozen times. The first hundred. I fought and pleaded and struck him. I scratched at his thick hide and I bit him so hard one time he jumped in the air. He’s not a violent man, not usually, but he’ll always take what he wants in his own horrifically gentle way.

  I wait under the sheet. The single lightbulb over the bed is on, it’s always on for nights like this, and I look through the cotton and see him looking back down at me. He undresses, folding his jeans and his socks and his shirt and placing them by the linen cabinet. Still watching.

  My head turns to the right under the sheet. It’s an automatic response now, a learnt coping mechanism. My entire existence is a learnt coping mechanism.

  Does he plan this? Does he think about me? I never want to be inside his thoughts. I want pain to strike him if he ever thinks of me.

  The skin on my legs is chill.

  He steps closer to me and I can feel his thighs against my feet and the bed creaks and the mattress moves slightly.

  I am as still as a marble statue of myself and just as dead. Just as cold.

  I close my eyes and initiate what I think of as a mental epidural.

  It’s all I have.

  I claim my body from the navel and higher. This is me. The rest is not me. From the navel and higher I can think what I want and be who I want to be. Anything covered by this sheet, his mother’s sheet, is me.

  It’s now I try to go back home. To the weekend feasts my mother and father would prepare for us. My brother and my sister and I would sit around the food. Neighbours would drop in, my mother’s colleagues might come, we’d have uncles and aunts invite themselves. The spread was unimaginable. A mosaic of colours and sauces and herbs. Every taste catered for. I try to recall the scents and the spices and the noodle broths and the fruit, but my taste buds have been worn down as if they’re oak nubs and they’ve been sanded each night.

  He climbs onto the bed.

  I sink as his weight bears down into the mattress.

  When I think of Kim-Ly now, she’s in Manchester, out with friends, maybe even on a date. They’ll get Phở if it’s available, and salad rolls and they’ll drink ice-cold beers straight from the bottle. They might see a film. They’ll laugh and she’ll be able to say whatever she wants. Do whatever she wants. She’ll be wearing her own clothes and walking without pain and she’ll be making plans for her future.

  His face is close to my shoulder and I can smell his soap through the cotton sheet but the epidural is holding. I will not let this happen to me. I can’t do anything about the rest but navel up is mine and I am somewhere else right now. He’ll pay the price for his deeds in this life or the next.

  My sister and I thought we’d be working in a shop, that was the deal my parents negotiated. With an agent who’d check up on us once a month. What a joke. They said there’d be substantial travel costs to cover, we knew that, and living costs afterwards, but we were guaranteed retail work and we were guaranteed we’d be able to stay together.

  And then they took us in a van from the container to the first farm.

  We worked for twelve hours a day six days a week. We had to live there in a wooden shed. But we had a shower and toilet block and we had decent food and they paid us. Not much after the accommodation costs and the interest and the random extra charges, but we received an envelope each Friday. We had a day off to rest. And most importantly, we had each other. We wrote to our parents and they wrote back to us. It was a start. And then the day came when they took Kim-Ly away, and they sold me to Lenn.

  He rolls off me to the side and then the bed begins to shake. He can’t finish with me. He can’t do it. He has to roll off and finish himself. He uses the towel. I count this as a minor victory, a hollow one, the most pyrrhic victory of them all.

  And then it’s over. I let the epidural wear off and reclaim my lower half. I wriggle to the end of the bed, him still next to me in the foetal position, and I pull on my nightie, and walk out and grip the banister and hobble down to the bathroom.

  I feel sick. Always. Sick to my very core.

  I keep the bathroom door open because that’s the rule. But he’ll stay up there for a while now, he always does. At least I have that. A window of relative privacy. I clean myself. Perhaps I need to move up to three-quarters of a horse tablet, pig tablet, cow tablet, whatever they are. It’s too much for me to be this aware every day. I need more escape. More numbness. I’ll ask him tomorrow.

  The toilet seat is ice cold and the floor, the linoleum floor, is soft and lumpy. The door is open but he won’t come down. This is a relatively safe time. He’ll stay up there rolled into a ball on the bed with that small towel. I look down at my feet. My right ankle is swollen and my toes are pointing to the bathtub instead of straight ahead. The house is silent. No electric boiler here like we had back home. No air-conditioning unit. The place is deathly quiet. Lost and alone in the flatlands.

  I almost re-smashed my ankle a few years ago, I don’t remember when exactly. I’d had enough. My plan was to reset the bone, to allow it to fuse with the foot in the correct forward position, to recuperate, and then to flee. I almost went through with it. Desperate and stupid as it would have been. I was sitting on the small back bedroom floor with his claw hammer by my side. I lifted it and placed it back down. Felt the weight of the head. The smooth, oiled wood of the handle. I was ready to hit my swollen ankle, to undo and redo some of the damage. I was ready to twist my torso and lift the heavy head and swing and smash it into my own body. But I couldn’t go through with it.

  Before my ankle injury life was god-awful, but it was better than this.

  Before my ankle injury I could walk and I could jump and I could pivot and I could simply step into a bathtub.

  Before my ankle injury there was always hope. Always a chance I could run away.

  He’s probably asleep up there now, so I won’t rush. If I wait a while I’ll be able to sneak in and maybe I can sleep without him getting anywhere near me, with my head facing away from him, with my eyes to the wall, with his breath nowhere near mine.

  I stare up at the mould spores on the bathroom ceiling.

  My first escape attempt, all those years ago, was almost my last.

  I took thirteen possessions, all I had left at that time. I still owned my own trainers and no
rmal clothes and I had my purse and I had my card with telephone numbers written down on it.

  The preparations were thorough. I knew exactly what I’d say to the first person I met. How to ask for help. To take me to a police officer. I thought through how I’d struggle and fight if I met one of his friends. If I bumped into Frank Trussock from the farm up by the bridge. I was optimistic. It was my time to leave.

  I was maybe 400 metres from the road when he spotted me.

  There were cars and trucks, not many but some, driving from left to right and from right to left on the horizon. I could hear their engines. The sounds as they changed gear. There was a sign to this very farm, his farm, on the side of the road. It’s too far away and too small for me to see from here. There was a green bus approaching in the far distance and I was running, I used to be a good runner. I was sprinting. But he got to me.

  I fought him, I was stronger back then. With my head bent towards the bus I yelled for help, but my voice was carried on the winds back out to his farm and out to sea. I wriggled and scratched and bent my body this way and that to evade him. I kicked like a mule and I screamed, but his rough hands smothered me and he loaded me into his Land Rover as if I were a child mid-tantrum. He took me back to the house and he was angry although he didn’t show it. He didn’t say a word in the Land Rover. But he was bleeding from his neck and I could see his hands were tense on the steering wheel. I’d almost escaped. He took me into the tool shed next to the house and my leg twitches just thinking about it. He took me into the shed and sat me down on the tool bench and he took a pair of steel bolt cutters off the wall. There was no glee in his expression. No fury. He was calm, like this all made sense. I remember begging him. I didn’t fight, he was too strong for me, and I was too exhausted, and we were too far away for any mortal soul to hear. I begged him for my life. He told me about his rules and about how much I’d cost him. He told me this was for my own good. That things would be better and more simple from then on. No more messing about. And then he swung his bolt cutters around like a golf club and he smashed them into the ball of my ankle.

  The bathroom is cold.

  The floor is soft underfoot and the mould is growing where the ceiling meets the walls. A web of mould like a fine mesh of lace. I flush the toilet. When I wash my hands the water is still boiling hot from the Rayburn. I look to the dark main room and the locked TV cabinet. Would I leave now if I could? Would I jeopardise my sister’s happiness, her future, her life? For what? What kind of life could I have now with this foot? At what moment did I reach that point of no return? These past years are stained indelibly onto my soul, engraved into my bones.

  I sit on the lowest step of the staircase. There’s a camera in here too, one of seven. That day with the bolt cutters, that was my watershed. The voyage to the UK could have been a watershed and the job at the first farm with my sister could have been a watershed. But they weren’t. What he did to me in his tool shed was my before and after. After he’d swung those bolt cutters I don’t remember things very clearly. I think I passed in and out of consciousness, black to grey and back again. But I do remember him retelling me his rules while he twisted and manhandled my foot to ninety degrees. He retold me his rules as he pushed his weight down onto my foot and left me like this for ever.

  At school I ran the 400 metres. I wasn’t the fastest, but I was a close second. That was a good distance for me. I wasn’t explosive enough for the short sprints, nor stoic enough for long-distance. The 400 metres was my race.

  I reach up for the banister and pull myself up the stairs and go to bed.

  Chapter 6

  On Christmas morning I don’t wake until eleven. It’s the one day a year Lenn takes off so it is the worst day of the whole year. He’s here in his house all day long, apart from a brief break to feed his pigs. All internal doors open, no opportunity to discreetly read a page of my book or one of Kim-Ly’s letters. No distance from him at all.

  My head is foggy. It’s been numb the past six weeks since he agreed to increase my dose to three-quarters of a horse pill per day. Vague. If you ask me what’s happened in the past weeks I would tell you that nothing whatsoever has happened. Time has just moved on. The weather has been wet, and still and nothing at all has happened.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Jane,’ he says as I stop, panting, sweating, on the rough bottom step of the staircase. ‘I’ll have me mug of tea and one of them mince pies in next five minutes, please.’

  I go into the bathroom, door wide open, to wash. One of my back teeth is aching. My expression is that of a recently slaughtered animal. I have sleep crust in the corners of my eyes, and they’re filmed with pink sludge. I pull my nightie over my head and don’t look if he’s there behind me watching or if he isn’t. Chills run down my spine. An addict trapped inside a cage. I need a new pill but I’m sufficiently drowsy still, sufficiently embalmed, to not care about much. And yet, today, this seventh Christmas day here in his house, is the day I have chosen to tell him.

  The water from the tap is lukewarm. I finish and dress and try to think of how I’ll word it and what he’ll say in response. What he’ll do in response. My mouth tastes like I haven’t brushed my teeth in weeks, and my right ankle is loose, the bones more fudgy than normal, more liable to snap away.

  ‘There’s your tea,’ I say to him, placing down his pesticide mug beside his armchair.

  ‘Horse racin’,’ he says.

  The TV is never on in the daytime, but this is Christmas. He’s watching horse racing like a schoolboy, his socked feet pointing at the screen. I use his poker to spread the embers in the Rayburn, my hand gripping its iron handle, my arm less than a metre from his cranium, my head and my heart at odds, again. If I slay this man my sister will have worked here for years and years in vain. If I do it I’ll ruin her life for a single moment of ecstasy. Have to be stronger than that. I shove two knotty logs into the Rayburn and close the fire door shut.

  ‘Pie,’ he says. ‘Mince pie.’

  I warm three mince pies, his mother’s recipe, in the warming oven of the stove, and present them on his plate, and then I stand at the kitchen sink, my hands gripping the porcelain lip like a climber might cling to a granite ledge. The day is sodden. We’ve had cold Christmases, even snow one year, but this is wet November weather cheating us on Christmas Day. I’ve missed the hour where the sun sits just above the horizon, beneath the clouds, above the earth, in the narrow strip we subsist in. I was comatose at that hour. Medicated with a horse pill. Outside, the drizzle is so fine it can’t be seen, only felt.

  I’ll tell him later. It’s the one day he’s almost happy, the one day he has something other than the normal. An interruption of the usual food routine. Today we should be having ham, egg, and chips. But we won’t. This is the day I have selected to impart my private news. Something I’ve been in control of these past weeks. If he kills me then, according to his rules, Kim-Ly will be OK. There’s that. If I kill myself she’ll be deported. If I kill him, she’ll be deported, his mate Frank Trussock in the farm past the bridge will see to that. If I escape, she’ll be deported. And she’s so close. Eighteen months from now she’ll be all paid-up. Undocumented, of course, but paid-up and free of the men who brought us here. She’ll be living life. Her future will be in her hands and her hands only. And she’ll be sending money, plenty of money back to Mum and Dad. By then they’ll be desperate for it, if they’re not already. I once thought of whether they were still alive and then I made a pact with myself never to think that again. Of course they are still alive. And on Fridays they drink beer together and eat peanuts. They still share that joy. If I start to imagine the alternative I clench my teeth and dig my fingernails into my palms and that forces the remainder of the thought to stay away.

  ‘I’ll get your pill, Jane.’

  He reaches up for the glass jar. These pills are pale blue and have a groove halfway across. He buys them from an agricultural dealer and there’s never a label or a name or a logo or a list of
possible side-effects.

  ‘Have that.’

  I swallow down the three-quarters of a pill. It’s so large I can hardly do it because the edges of the tablet skirt my gullet and I can feel it work its way down into my stomach. By that point it’s already starting to work and I’m light and I’ve pulled in tight within myself. My skin is ten times thicker than before and I’m hiding inside my own skeleton.

  ‘Better get on with that bird if we’re to eat before Boxin’ Day.’

  He disappears into the bathroom and closes the door and locks it. I start peeling his potatoes. The turkey is a crown from the Spar shop. It’s in its own little throwaway baking tray so I just slide it into the Rayburn top oven and let it dry out nicely in there. Considering he’s a farmer we eat like inner-city people. If we had a vegetable patch and a brood of chickens we’d live much better. Richer. I used to suggest it to him. I used to strive to enrich my miserable existence. To make the best of a very bad job. Not any more. I’ll eat the food from the Spar shop and I’ll get through each day and I’ve stopped looking for better.

  ‘Raiders of Lost Ark in a bit,’ he says, rubbing his hands on his overalls as he emerges from the bathroom. ‘You seen it?’

  I peel another potato, my hands dream-like under the water, and I let the point of his mother’s paring knife slip into my index finger. ‘No,’ I tell him, as a fine thread of blood swims and spirals and fans from just beneath my nail.

  ‘Gooden,’ he says. ‘We’ll watch it while bird cookin’.’

  I continue to prep the food. I didn’t and don’t feel any pain whatsoever from the cut to my finger. The pills are that good. I haven’t run it under a cold tap and I haven’t held it above my head the way my father taught me and I haven’t wrapped it in kitchen roll. I’m just letting it bleed into his Christmas food.