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

by Will Dean

  I lie with her and curl my body around hers. She makes noises. Safe noises. Contented noises. My stomach is still huge, like I haven’t given birth at all, but it’s soft now. My mother tore when she had me, she told me she did, and she tore with my sister, and I always expected the same. But I seem to be OK. Tender and numb, the pills doing what they’re designed to do, but I’m OK.

  ‘Finished drillin’,’ he shouts as he enters the house. ‘Birds never left me alone for one minute, summat wrong with ’em I reckon.’

  I tighten my curl around her, my back a wall between her and him.

  ‘You making me a pie or what?’

  I don’t say anything, I just watch her sleep, her chest moving up and down, her cupid’s bow lips parted slightly, the air pocket sucked in and out as small as a sparrow’s cough. He steps upstairs to our small back bedroom. The treads creak and then they stop creaking. He’s behind me, watching. Watching us now, not just me, she is now living under his roof, his things, his rules.

  ‘You makin’ pie?’

  I close my eyes and feel her cool feet on my belly and her cheek close to the tip of my nose and I pretend to be fast asleep. He watches us. He stays but he does not attempt to wake us, he just observes. And then he walks back downstairs.

  I could lie here with her for a hundred lifetimes. She is nothing of him and everything of goodness and I know this with all my soul and she’s only been here half a day. I know it.

  She wrinkles her nose and I think she might sneeze, but she sniffs and opens her mouth as if for my breast and then she settles down again and rests. Her eyes move beneath her lids. Dreaming. I’ve never seen harmony like this in his house. She is a gift and he is not worthy of even knowing what she looks like.

  I left the cord downstairs. He offered me a freezer clip and then a pair of scissors that he sterilised in a pan of water on the Rayburn hotplate, we weren’t sure if that was necessary but it seemed sensible. I’ve covered her belly button with veterinary gauze and secured the gauze with electrical tape. It’s the best I could do.

  I have never been so tired or so relieved. A month early, maybe more, but she seems to be perfect. Well, she looks perfect, and she feeds and she sleeps. All the fingers and toes. Some hair on her head, some on her shoulders. A birthmark on the back of her neck. Eyelashes, my sister’s eyelashes, and the most exquisite nostrils I have ever seen.

  I want to study her like a postgraduate student might study a narrow niche of a subject. Deep and singular. The kind of focus that’s difficult to comprehend. I want to know her.

  It was three pills in the end, three whole horse pills counting the dose I had that morning. I’m as strong as a bloody elephant, so it turns out. I have the anatomy of some long-forgotten mammoth, some killer whale of the cold arctic deep, I am as formidable as a river in full flood. Maybe he sees that now. But I need to be careful. I look at her and I think clearly and that needs to be the way it is from now on, for her sake and for mine. I need to be watchful and alert. Half a pill for the next few days, then a third. Maybe down to a quarter in time but probably a third.

  The tarp’s still down there unless he’s tidied it away. He’ll leave it to me I expect. Blood and other things, a discarded umbilical cord lying like a dead copper snake, sweat, lime squash, placenta, dead leaves.

  ‘Sandwich?’ I hear from down the stairs. ‘Ham and cheese?’

  He’s offering me a sandwich.

  Offering me.

  It’s not my stomach’s spontaneous grumble that surprises me, it’s this role reversal, this change. The awful night of my ankle six years ago he wanted sausage and mash and he waited until I tried to make it, until I passed out again from the pain in front of his Rayburn.

  I uncurl myself from her and sit up on the end of the bed.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Coming up.’

  I hear the metal clank as he opens the bread bin. I hear the cellophane wrapping come off the thick-cut Mighty White. It rustles. I hear him open the fridge and pull out the pre-sliced cheese and the pre-sliced ham and the marge. He doesn’t ever do these things and I’m sitting on the single bed in the small back bedroom next to my sleeping daughter listening to him make me dinner.

  He walks upstairs with two plates and gives one to me, all the time watching her.

  He stands in the doorway resting his immense shoulder against the frame and we both look at her and we both chew and swallow and it is very quiet in the house. The June light is warm in the window and it casts a glow on one side of her face and the shadow cast by her is small.

  ‘Youngen all right, is she?’ he whispers.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll go down town tomorrow, get the weekly shop done early, we’re getting low on squash.’

  I just smile at my baby. I need the bathroom and I want to take her with me, to never have her more than an arm’s length from me. But she’s fast asleep and I think she needs the rest.

  ‘Can you watch her for me,’ I say. ‘I need the bathroom.’

  ‘Of course I can.’

  I hobble to the door and he stands aside and I hop to the banister and pull myself down, looking back at each step, seeing her there, alone, unprotected, fragile. My right foot’s in bad shape. Worse than usual. If I put any weight on it then it feels like it’ll snap right off. I grip the wall to get to the toilet and then I sit down, one foot facing forward, the other to the bath, my toes blue, the blood supply worse with each year that passes.

  I’m leaking fluids. Not as much as I expected, but still. I clean myself up and splash cold water on my face and my neck and a force pulls me up towards the stairs. It’s been long enough, too long. I need to see her breaths, her chest moving, her eyelids, her nostrils. I need to give her my warmth.

  He’s still in the doorway watching her. I hobble up and pass him and she’s still asleep, still shielded by a ring of pillows.

  I check her breathing and it is shallow and fast but she seems well. I would give a kidney and a lung for her to be checked by a doctor right now, a full check-up, some kind of report or certificate telling me she’s healthy, that she’s not in any pain, that she’ll live, thrive, and that she’ll never be anything like him. I’d even settle for the red-haired woman to come back. To check on my baby. To reassure me the child is strong.

  He finishes his sandwich and I finish mine. I’m tired. She’ll be awake soon for a feed and I need rest, I need to recharge.

  ‘I need to sleep now,’ I say.

  ‘Get another blanket. Clear night, colder than it looks out there.’ He points to the window.

  I go to the store cupboard. On the right side are his mother’s things, on the left side are my stack of letters from Kim-Ly bound with baling twine, and my battered copy of Of Mice and Men. I take a blanket from his mother’s side and hold the door frame and turn around and he is holding my child.

  ‘What,’ I breathe, a broken whisper. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Holding me daughter,’ he says, looking down at her with a smile, her whole body supported by his two big hands, his gnarled cuticles curled up around her head and her thighs.

  I step to him. ‘Let me take her, she needs a feed.’

  ‘She’s a strong youngen,’ he says, lifting his chin to look at me. ‘And if you ever try to leave this cottage with her,’ he moves one of his hands so his flat fingers curl around my baby’s neck, the rough tips meeting over her tiny throat. ‘I’ll sink her in dyke.’

  I rush to him and take her and he releases her with no struggle and I turn my back on him and pull her tight into my chest, into my belly.

  ‘You understand?’

  I nod, my back to him.

  ‘I said, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Right then,’ he says. ‘Now that’s out the way, I can tell you summat I been meaning to get out for a while now.’

  I turn my head, my back still to him, my spine a guard rail, my daughter starting to nuzzle for my breast in her
sleep.

  ‘You seem quite pleased with yourself, Jane. Quite happy with all this.’

  I frown at him.

  ‘And now I know you ain’t leaving, you’ll never leave now, not after what I just said to you.’

  She finds my nipple and latches on and starts to suckle.

  ‘It’s your sister, you see,’ he says. ‘Well, she ain’t in Manchester.’

  What?

  ‘She got sent back, didn’t she, got herself deported about five year ago, she’s not here in England no more.’

  ‘What?’ I say, turning to face him, my shawl falling open. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘She’s gone back where you both come from, back to the jungle, not here, just you and me here, and now little Mary and all.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I have her letters.’

  ‘All old, they are,’ he says. ‘I’ve been rationing out cos there’s no dates on them. I burnt the ones with news, stuff that would give game away, burnt a page here and a whole letter there. She wrote you a lot, daft woman. Kept you goin’ all these years though, I’ll give her that.’ He looks at my baby. ‘But now I’ve run out. I had a couple letters left but I just burnt them now on Rayburn. She ain’t living in England no more, Jane. Got deported years back. Sent home to where you both come from. Sent back. Not legal, see. You ain’t got nobody here no more except for me and youngen. You just got us two and you ain’t leaving unless you want young Mary sunk in bottom of dyke.’

  Chapter 12

  It is the dead of night and the light from the window of the small bedroom is dim and quiet.

  Lenn’s snoring in the other room.

  I asked for half a pill before he went to bed and he gave it to me and now I’m propped up against the wall on this single bed, feeding, thinking, hurting. Numb but not numb enough.

  My sister was sent back years ago? How? My reality was a lie, my aspirations, projected onto her, lived through her slow journey towards freedom, was a trick of the light. She didn’t even get close to being free of her debt. Now she’ll be burdened with it for life. All of the debt and none of the opportunities. I asked him how she was deported, on an aeroplane or via some more dangerous method. Officially or unofficially. He didn’t know. I pray she was put on a plane with her things and sent home to Vietnam. But in my head she was put inside a shipping container like the one we arrived in. Shipped by greedy men from harbour to harbour, sick, freezing cold, told to keep silent, threatened with no water and no food.

  My baby’s feeding well. Her strength is growing. I can feel the power in her lips, the vigour of her tiny mouth as she suckles from me. I enjoyed one day of happiness with her. Lenn gave me that one day. I have lost a sister and gained a daughter. He had a hand in both.

  She unlatches and is asleep at my breast. Her mouth is open and her cheeks are hot and red and full, her body warm against mine, her fine hairs sweaty in the crook of my arm. She smells of milk. Sweetness. I can hear her tiny vole breaths and his grumbling snores and nothing else.

  I sleep when she sleeps and the pills help with the layers of pain inside my body and my head and my stomach. I am broken inside and out. My poor sister.

  My baby’s nappies are a practical trial I didn’t expect. The feeds go well and the sleeping seems to be fine, and she hardly screams or cries, as if she already understands that he won’t like it and she’s trying to make my life as easy as possible as I digest the abject horror of what he’s told me. Each nappy is black. The black tar on her backside is so thick and sticky I can hardly remove it. When I rub I leave red marks and I worry she’ll cry out, but she doesn’t. I wipe with paper and water, and when that doesn’t work I try with a flannel, one of Lenn’s. That works a little but it leaves her raw. Is this black liquid normal? I want a wise old nurse to tell me this is normal and the baby will be fine and that she will grow to be a happy woman someday, a woman with her own life.

  The next day he goes out early to start the barley harvest. This month has been hot and the yield looks decent, so he says. I sit on the single bed reading Of Mice and Men to her at a whisper. The part where George and Lennie tell Candy all about the rabbits. About the plans. The dream. She feeds and makes contented noises and I read on. Kim-Ly has been sent home and I feel like Lenn did it even though he’s just the one telling me about it. He withheld the news. He used my hope for my sister against me. Kim-Ly was deported and now I’m George at the end of the book when he shoots Lennie and is left alone with his alfalfa hopes and I always thought I would be Lennie and she would be George. I will read this book to my daughter over and over again. I will not let him take it from me. She needs it. I’ll teach her about life from this one book if I have to. I will reread it so I know it by heart and so will she.

  ‘I’ll have me sandwich early,’ he shouts up the stairs. ‘Make it a double.’

  I bring her down with me, patting her narrow back, urging her to burp, a towel draped over my right shoulder. I’ve mastered this now. I inch down the stairs on my behind like a child, gripping her, ignoring the banister. It’s tough on my ankle but I won’t fall this way, I won’t crush her.

  ‘I’ll take Mary,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘She’s hungry. I’ll feed her and make your lunch.’

  He looks like he might say something but then swallows his words. I carry her with her face to my breast inside my shirt, but she’s not feeding, just nuzzling.

  I give him the plate of sandwiches and the packet of ready salted crisps.

  ‘How did she get sent back?’ I ask.

  He chews with his mouth open and frowns at me.

  ‘My sister.’

  ‘How do I know?’ he says. ‘Weren’t legal. This ain’t her country so they sent her packing. Happens all time Frank Trussock reckons.’

  He looks at my baby, her face turned towards my skin, away from his gaze.

  ‘When you bathing again?’

  I close my shirt and turn from him. What is this man? This beast?

  ‘Not for a while,’ I say. ‘It’s like a wound. Has to heal.’

  He says nothing and eats and then leaves his plate on the table and the empty packet on the plate and walks away.

  I stand at the front door with the sun on my face.

  ‘You’ll walk up that track one day, little one,’ I say to her. ‘You’ll walk off into the rest of your life, away from all this. And I’ll be at your side. Until that day we’ll be here together and I’ll be yours, all yours.’

  There’s a lorry in the distance driving from right to left and the crops between me and it are lime green and full-grown and they’ve thickened up so much I can’t see any brown. I step out and look around. A warm breeze. The land, everything from my broken foot up to the horizon, is his. He shapes what I get to live in. I walk a few steps outside and lean against the shed and cover her head with my palm to shade her from the sun. The skies are all mine. He has no say in the skies, no drilling or harvesting. No input whatsoever. The land is his and the skies are mine; hers and mine. The horizon, the fine strip where the two meet, that’s everything else.

  I lie her on the plastic-wrapped sofa and surround her with cushions while I wash the cloths. She’s using eight a day and I’m using three so I have to keep on top of it. The hit from the horse pill is in full flow and it’s like the pain from my crushed ankle is now in another room, the half-cellar maybe, under me, still close by, but there’s something in between it and us. I hang wet cloths on the line with his mother’s wooden pegs, and check on her, and soon I’ll need to give her a real name. The marrow inside my bones is straining to call her Kim-Ly. But this is a selfish thought. A bad thought. I’ve lost my sister now, I admit that, and it’d be cheap comfort to name my baby after her. I must resist the urge. It’s like when you lose a precious pet and then you yearn to buy an infant version to replace it immediately, to give it the same name, and then you stop yourself. I’ll think of some other names tonight during the quiet feeds.

  I haven’t picked up the
letters yet because they will break me. I want to read them forensically, to piece together how I mistook two years of her writing for seven.

  My baby cries out for me and I sit with her on the sofa and feed her. She’s ravenously hungry, her lips finding me immediately. It’s like she’s pushing my body, driving it to produce more milk for her, and when I look at her I see Kim-Ly. It’s only natural. I cared for Kim-Ly like a second mother when I was a child, helping Mum, keen to step up. But here in this forgotten windswept place my baby only has me.

  I’m not cutting back on the pills. I know I said I would, for the sake of the baby, but I can’t collapse now. I can’t crumble. So I’ll stick to three-quarters for the time being. I’ll be OK.

  ‘Best get washing in,’ he says, walking through into the main room carrying shopping bags from the Spar shop in the next village. ‘Mizzling and spitting out there.’

  I walk to the door.

  ‘Leave Mary with me,’ he says, taking her from me. ‘That’s it, Mary, come to your father.’

  You are not her father. You are nothing. I am her family.

  I turn and hobble as quickly as I can out of the door and pull the damp cloths off the line letting the wooden pegs fly off in all directions. I walk back inside, my right ankle dragging in the dirt, and throw the cloths, his mother’s cloths, down on the table, and take her from him and whisper to her in Vietnamese that it’s all OK now.