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

by Will Dean

  I hear the front door.

  ‘Cheese sandwich,’ says Lenn from the main room. ‘Mug of tea, no squash.’

  I drop the brush into the paint tin and grip the dry part of the wall and climb awkwardly down the small step ladder, taking my time over each narrow rung.

  ‘Been sprayin’, wind’s pickin’ up down big barley field, muckin’ it up.’

  I wash my hands with scalding hot water and then I make his lunch and I make mine.

  ‘Been thinking about names,’ he says as he chews his Mighty White cheese sandwich.

  Nothing to do with you, Lenn.

  ‘Been thinking about Jeff or Gordon.’ He takes a swig of lukewarm beige-sweet tea. ‘Jeff was me granddad and Gordon was me mother’s sister’s husband, good lad was Gordon, strong as a bull.’

  It’s not your child, Lenn. Not any more. Nothing whatsoever to do with you.

  ‘I reckon Jeff,’ he says.

  I finish painting the bathroom ceiling and then, after chicken broth made from yesterday’s discount Spar shop bird, we watch Match of the Day. He insists I still sit on the floor even though he needs to help me up. The wooden boards are cold and the draught from the half-cellar below is stale and sour.

  ‘Best time of day, ain’t it?’ he says. ‘Nothin’ wrong with bit of telly together after hard day’s work. Not a bad life here, is it, Jane?’

  I blank him out. I’m stroking the head of my child millimetres beneath my own skin and I’m dreaming up childhoods for it. Plural. Different potential futures, with step-dads, with me and my parents, with Kim-Ly in Manchester.

  Before the birth I’ll prepare the small back bedroom as best I can. I’ll have to use pillows on the bed to create a makeshift cot for when I need to do my chores and the baby’s sleeping. Lenn’s told me I’ll be getting two days off like his mother had with him, and then full resumption of normal service, no lying about. He says it’s not healthy for a woman.

  ‘Tottenham Hotspur, your favourite,’ he says.

  And then the baby kicks me, but it feels different.

  My attention, every joule of energy I have is focussed on my womb. Inside my womb. My baby. It’s moving and it doesn’t feel right.

  ‘Lenn,’ I say. ‘The baby.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right. It’s too early, too small.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He stands up and looks down at me.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I think it’s back to normal. I think. But, Lenn. You said you know of a woman. Who could come here. Who wouldn’t say a word.’

  ‘I told you before, there ain’t no woman.’

  ‘But if there’s a problem. Because of the pills or something.’

  ‘If it ain’t meant to live it’ll end up in dyke just like me brother did.’

  The blood inside my veins freezes to ice. I stiffen at his words.

  ‘No.’

  I wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Your brother?’

  I reach up to the sofa armrest to pull myself up and Lenn helps me to sit on it.

  ‘Passed on when I were seven and he was size of a cookin’ apple. Not enough time in oven me mother said. Poor little beggar.’

  ‘You know I could die, Lenn. During childbirth. So could the baby.’

  ‘We’ll see. Have watched the video film on computer. I know what I’m doin’, I ain’t thick.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’

  ‘Happens out ’ere. Just happens, you got to get on with it.’

  I stay seated on the sofa and Lenn adds a couple of logs to the Rayburn, we don’t need as much this time of year, and sits back down.

  Outside the evening light is warm and the shadow of the house is as long as a field. From the kitchen window I can see the pig barn in the distance, its breeze-block walls and corrugated-iron roof glowing like a gemstone.

  ‘That weren’t a goal, that were offside, did you see that, Jane?’

  I need the bathroom. It stinks of chemical stain-blocker paint and I sit there with the door wide open and the TV flickering from the main room. Kim-Ly’s last letter is still fresh in my head and I can read her writing line-by-line in my mind again now I’ve cut back to half a horse pill a day. Her handwriting is more fluid than my own, more alive. Her grades were always better than mine. Especially mathematics and science. She told me in the letter how her job was raided by the border control people two weeks before and she’d had to run out of the fire exit and hide down a side street until it was safe. Hide between a brick wall and a skip. She couldn’t even go back to her flat because they raided that too. But she keeps her ID card and passport in the roof space and they didn’t think to look there. She’s OK. Kim-Ly works six days per week and has four repeat customers that she really likes. They ask her things. Like her actual name. They’re interested in what she has to say, they really listen to her answers. But then there are the other customers, the women who come in before a night out, stressed, in a hurry, looking at their phones. She wrote that she doesn’t mind these women if they’re not regulars but some of them see her every week and treat her like a vending machine or a parking meter.

  I stand up to flush and there’s blood in the water.

  My breathing quickens and I wrap my hands around my bump and slow my breathing so I can hear it, feel it, check on it.

  He shouts ‘lime squash’ from the main room.

  The blood is new, fresh, light in colour, pinkish. I talk to the baby silently without using my lips, I ask it are you OK?

  And then there’s something warm on my leg.

  My waters have broken.

  Chapter 10

  I don’t say a word.

  This is a moment for myself. A moment I own. A moment to register what is happening. This sliver of time is for me and my child.

  I look at my gloss legs, at the puddle by the base of the toilet.

  ‘Starting, is it?’ he says, right behind me, in the doorway, looking at the floor, looking at me, uninvited.

  I nod.

  ‘Early, is it?’ he says.

  ‘Too early,’ I say. ‘Lenn, it’s too small. I need some help.’

  ‘Be back in a bit,’ he says, turning and leaving.

  I clean up the clear fluid and flush the toilet and sit on the plastic dust sheet of the sofa. The air is warm. I’m cramping but I’ve had no contractions, at least I don’t think I have. I need the toilet again.

  By the time Lenn gets back my contractions are ten minutes apart and I know exactly what they feel like.

  ‘Get off settee, Jane,’ he says. ‘I’ll set you up down next to table.’

  He unfolds a tarpaulin sheet, something you’d use to cover a hole in a roof, and flattens it down on the floor opposite the Rayburn. It’s covered in leaves and dry dirt.

  I look at it and look at him.

  ‘I’ll brush muck off.’

  ‘I need the bathroom.’

  ‘It’s all right long as you keep door open.’

  ‘No, I mean I need help walking there.’

  He swallows and I see his Adam’s apple roll down beneath his collar and up again. He helps me up and then supports me to the bathroom. The pain is intensifying and I wonder at what point, if at all, this will overtake my ankle pains. Will the two run concurrently or will one eclipse the other?

  ‘Don’t go making a carry-on about all this, not a mother on planet who ain’t been through all this, don’t go making a big fuss about it.’

  I want to gouge his eyes out with a pencil.

  He helps me to the tarpaulin and I rest with my back against the wall. In front of me is the stove, to the left of me is the kitchen, to the right of me is the locked TV cabinet and the camera and the window.

  ‘Get the pills down off the shelf,’ I say.

  ‘You’ve had your half, had it with your corn flakes, I watched it.’

  I clench my teeth through a contraction. When it’s passed I say, ‘Get the pills down now.’ />
  He stretches for the jar and unscrews the lid.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two,’ I say. ‘Break them up into pieces.’

  He does it.

  I’m not in full labour yet and the contractions are small. I need the pill fragments lined up now because I can’t be negotiating with him later on, I don’t want to have to speak with him at all later on. That time’s for me and my child. It’ll need me and I’ll need it, we live as one today or we die as one.

  ‘Like having a lamb, me mother used to say, same difference.’

  Shut. Your. Mouth.

  ‘Me granddad had lambs for a time, beast too. Up inland he was, small farm, rocky land and no good drainage. Went up there as a lad.’ My contraction kicks in and my back stiffens and the pain is like a solid object. ‘Saw lambing as a lad, nothing to it really, slipped out they did, some had three youngens and most of them survived good into summer.’

  I take a fragment of pill, maybe a fifth, and swallow it dry.

  ‘Water,’ I say.

  He huffs and pours me a glass of water and leaves it by my hand.

  ‘Want telly on?’ he says.

  I close my eyes tight shut. If my sister were here, what would she do? She’d have me in bed, not on some dirty tarpaulin sheet. She’d have fresh towels and baby clothes at the ready, pain medication and hot water and pressed linen. She’d have a bowl of fruit: some candied, some fresh.

  The next contraction comes at me like a wave I never saw. My God. It’s like my womb is pulling itself apart, the pressure deep down, way down, spreading my skeleton, moving the bones that took a lifetime to form. I scream out and pant like an animal.

  He comes to me. He looks down disapprovingly and removes his belt. I recoil. What is this? What is he doing?

  He bends it, looping it over on itself, the cracked brown leather splitting at each traverse.

  ‘Bite down on it if you need to, Jane.’

  What century am I trapped in?

  He hands it to me and I place it down by my bad foot.

  The hour hand drags itself around the clock face and the baby does not come out of me. Hours of pain. The contractions are closer, they’re harder. I’ve had one and a third horse pills on top of my usual half, and my head is awash with dream-like images and thick fog. There’s blood on the tarp. It moved around for a while by my legs and my ankles and he didn’t clean it up. It’s dried now, stuck to some oak leaves and wheat husks, dried into some unheard-of fertility emblem from a different place and a different time. I can’t focus. The things I see at the edges of my eyes are hazy and when the pains come, as spaced-out and regular as the heartbeat of a blue whale deep underwater, my eyes fog completely and I throw back my head and I sob.

  My ankle is nothing.

  The pains aren’t eclipsing, they aren’t concurrent, they are different. Separate, but together. The pills help, but I’m weak now. Exhausted. How do women do this with no pain relief? Why do they do it?

  ‘I need food,’ I say to him.

  He looks over from the armchair, the blue clock of Countdown on the TV, and says, ‘Cheese and ham?’

  I nod.

  I feel sick, I can’t eat, but I can’t afford to pass out either.

  He makes sandwiches for both of us.

  I wail as the next contraction strikes me. It’s a period cramp amplified to the point where I’m breaking apart. Cracking open. I feel down for the baby’s head between my legs but there’s nothing. How long can I do this?

  ‘Have your sandwich then,’ he says. ‘Made them for you so eat them up, do you some good.’

  I eat one because I really need the fuel, and then, during the lull between the pains, I throw it back up.

  ‘That’s why I brought ground sheet in, you see that now, don’t you?’ He throws me a kitchen roll. ‘For your mess, that is.’

  ‘I need the bathroom.’

  ‘Again,’ he says.

  ‘Help me up.’

  I try to go but I can’t. Nothing. But the sitting down on the toilet is more comfortable for now. It’s better than the floor.

  ‘Can you help me up to bed,’ I say.

  ‘Nobody’s having no youngens upstairs. Got you all set up down here, don’t go making no fuss, it’s what you women been doing hundreds of years. Me mother had me down here, right in this spot, it’s best place for it.’

  He helps me back to the sheet and I squat for a while and take the belt between my teeth and bite down so hard during a contraction that my teeth move in my gum sockets. The leather tastes of him and it tastes of cow.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say to the baby, whisper to it, ‘you’re doing well.’

  Lenn shakes his head. ‘Daft.’

  There are more contractions and more pill fragments. Lenn throws a pile of newspapers down on the floor. I have no idea what they’re for.

  ‘Need to get sprayin’ before too long, wind gonna pick up or so wireless said.’

  I want him to leave me here but it’s the wrong thing to want. I may need him. I want this to be me and the baby, nothing connected with him whatsoever, but what if there’s a problem, what if we need to drive to hospital, what if the umbilical cord is wrapped around its neck, if I haemorrhage?

  There’s more pressure now, more pain. I feel faint so I grip the table leg with one arm and slide down the wall and glance at Lenn and he has fear in his eyes now, pure fear.

  ‘Squash!’ I scream at him. ‘Squash!’

  He runs to the sink and makes strong lime squash and helps me to sip it. I reach down and touch the top of my own baby’s head and it is the most perfect thing I have ever touched in my life. A smooth, dry head; perfectly formed. I’ve touched my child and that makes all the difference somehow and the agony is still there but it’s worth something now.

  ‘What do I do?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Nothing!’ I scream at him, saliva spraying towards his armchair, sweat flying from my hair as I whip my head around to face him.

  I push hard, there is momentum, the energy in this fenland farm is concentrated on my lower abdomen. There is no power anywhere else to match it, the force of this baby making its way out into the world, opening me, moving lower.

  My screams are distant from myself. Not sure if it’s the pills or what. I hear them before I make them, screams to topple mountains. I yell and retch and push and grit my teeth and bite down into his rancid leather belt.

  ‘His head’s out,’ says Lenn.

  I reach down and touch my baby’s face, its nose, its forehead. My mouth breaks into a smile. The pads of my fingertips probe the softness under the baby’s chin. I pause, looking down, I can see black hair, fine, wet, matted, bloody.

  One more push, two more. Again. My eyelids scrunched tight shut. I screech and his belt falls from my mouth and my baby slips out of me and I see a deer in a forest in my mind as I bend forward to touch the little one; a deer mother birthing a fawn in some quiet protected glen.

  I reach to pick up my baby, but Lenn takes it and holds it up.

  ‘Ain’t breathin’,’ he says.

  I scream and kick out with my good leg and he hands the baby to me like it’s some skinned hare and I take its warm body and turn it around. Turn her around.

  ‘Lass,’ he says.

  I take my finger and scoop fluid from her perfect mouth, from her red lips, and turn her around again, some ancient impulse that I do not question, and I smack her behind and rub her back and she stiffens and wails and I pull her in to me and smile the broadest smile anyone has ever seen and we lie there together, just her and me, together.

  ‘It’s a lass,’ he says.

  I nod and stroke her tiny head and touch her earlobe, a pearl, and latch her to my breast. She doesn’t take straight away so I adjust her and hold her and she searches me with her blood red lips and she finds me.

  ‘I’ll get blanket for her.’

  He goes upstairs and we
are alone. Do not come back, Lenn. Leave us be.

  She is drinking from me. I have never done this before but it feels like I have, she is drinking and suckling from me and together we are warm.

  He comes back downstairs.

  ‘More stuff comin’ out now,’ he says.

  I look down at the eyelids and the nose of my daughter. Eyelids like petals. A nose as perfect as a stone worn smooth by a river. She is the smallest and strongest looking person I have ever seen and in the moment I hold her on this green tarpaulin sheet I pledge to her my body in its entirety. My soul, as well. For ever. I pledge, unthinking and unsaid, that I will be her mother and her father, her siblings and grandparents and neighbours, I will be her teacher and her priest and I will not allow harm to visit her. I will not permit it.

  ‘Name’s Mary,’ says Lenn.

  He is not one of us. He is not alive in our world or any part of it. Your name may be Mary to him but I will think up the right name for you when he is out ploughing his flat fields, when I’ve studied every pore of you and watched you until my eyes dry over.

  I drag the blanket up my midriff and cover her back.

  We are as one.

  Chapter 11

  She’s asleep.

  I’m in the single bed in the small back bedroom, towel wrapped around my waist, blanket over her back, double thickness, and she’s asleep for the first time in her life. I feel her breath on my skin, each exhalation a gift from her perfect lungs. Her heartbeat is fast. Faster than I expected it to be. She is as small as a bird but as complete as anything I have ever seen or imagined. She is miraculous.

  When she wakes I carry her – she weighs less than a kitten – I carry her to the cupboard and bring out a pile of terry nappies, the ones I use as sanitary towels, his mother’s old cloths. I should have had them prepared but she came so early. I stack them by the storage heater and place her down within the pillow nest I built on the bed and fold a cloth the way I’ve done a hundred times over the past seven years, and place it inside my underwear, his mother’s underwear. Then I take another and fold it the way I’ve practised, and place it around her waist, around my daughter’s waist, and she stays asleep and she looks so tiny. So perfect. I cannot stop smiling. My ankle is a dull ache in the middle distance, but my heart is swollen with pride for growing this person and bringing her out into the world all on my own and for feeding her and for her sleeping so peacefully like she’s been born into a normal home, yours for example.