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

by Will Dean

  ‘None of that,’ he says. ‘This is England and she’ll speak proper English like me and rest of us. I’ll have none of that other stuff, none of them foreign words, you’ll mess with her head.’

  I nod but my eyes are steel and my focus bores into his forehead and out through the other side. I will speak to my child how I see fit and you will have no say in it.

  ‘Get fish on then,’ he says.

  I stoke the Rayburn and push in willow sticks and put away the food shopping. I pleaded with him to buy some things for the baby but he has not bought them. He buys things he thinks we need: sliced ham and toilet paper and crisps and Rich Tea biscuits. But he won’t buy disposable nappies or wet wipes or nappy creams. He says the Spar shop doesn’t stock those things. He says we don’t need them.

  When the fire’s hot enough I boil his boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce. We eat it at the table once he’s reviewed the tapes. We eat in silence with frozen Birds Eye peas and boiled potatoes. I’m ravenous. Last night I consumed half a pack of Rich Tea biscuits and a whole jug of water when I was feeding my child. The hunger was immense. There is a heat radiating from me and from her, an energy, a force, a cycle of milk and food, and I need to keep feeding the fire.

  He’s bought Arctic Roll for dessert. It’s some kind of sweet cake wrapped around a column of ice cream. He buys it sometimes. He likes it. We eat and my back tooth starts to hurt like someone’s stabbing it with a needle.

  The baby’s backside is red. I bathe her in the tub, my hand under her whole body. I want to make use of the hot water because we let the Rayburn die down after dinner these hot days, otherwise we can’t sleep. I check the water because it comes out of the tap scalding hot, and then I give my first child her first bath. She screams and I smile and soothe her. Then I wrap her in a towel and take her upstairs, one slow step at a time, my hand gripping the banister to save both our lives, and get her to the small back bedroom. I blow on her skin and fold a fresh cloth to form a nappy and wrap her and use a safety pin, one of his mother’s, to keep it secure.

  She’s warm and calm.

  I hear him unlock the TV cabinet downstairs and then lock away the key in the key box bolted to the wall by the front door.

  ‘Telly’s on,’ he says.

  I sit with my baby and almost fall asleep holding her. This is a whole new level of weary. I start to feed her and he says, ‘I said, telly’s on, come downstairs, come on.’

  ‘We’re going to sleep,’ I call down.

  ‘The heck you are. Come downstairs, bit of telly do you some good.’

  I wriggle to the end of the bed and look at my foot. The fluid around the joint is cold to the touch. The bones are snapped and the muscles are torn and the foot may as well be someone else’s. If I get out of here I expect some kind doctor will amputate it and that will be the best thing all round.

  ‘Jane.’

  My name isn’t Jane.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  I shuffle downstairs holding her tightly to me.

  ‘Sit down right here,’ he pats the side of the armchair.

  ‘Lenn, I can’t, not with her. I’ll sit on the sofa.’

  ‘Best part of day, bit of telly and all of us together. You’ll sit down here where I tell you to.’

  I get to his chair and try to lower myself but my legs are too weak and I collapse and fall awkwardly on my right foot and I wail with the pain and then the baby starts crying, her tears wet against my chest.

  ‘Mary’s hungry,’ he says.

  I bite down on the inside of my cheeks until I taste blood. I latch her on and she feeds and makes cooing noises and my foot feels like I’ve broken some malformed bone, some fusion of tissue, some approximation of an ankle joint. I bite and he pats my head and I can feel his eyes on my breast, his eyes above my head looking down at me feeding my child sitting on his bare floorboards.

  ‘It’s nice, ain’t it, three of us sitting here of an evening? Not a bad life, is it?’ He pats my head again, stroking my unwashed hair. ‘We’ll see rest of snooker, then I’ll be off to feed pigs.’

  I watch the screen with tears in my eyes. An empty feeling inside me. Tiredness. From the routines but also from the hopelessness. She sucks and I unclench my teeth and taste the blood on my tongue and feel the rear tooth loose in its socket and I think about killing him. Before, when he threatened that my sister would get sent home, he’d said that his mate Frank Trussock would know something’s wrong because they speak every day and so if Lenn didn’t check in then Kim-Ly would get reported. But now Lenn can’t use that against me so he’s threatened my child instead. That means I can’t try to escape; the stakes are too high. I can’t make it out of here. Before my baby I always had the option to kill myself, maybe in the dyke, but then he’d have sent my sister back. Now I can’t kill myself because my daughter would have to endure a life so unimaginably cruel and she’d have to endure it alone. But I could end him. The risk is that we’d be stuck here with no food, that the supplies would dry up and the food would run out and I’d have to wait for some chance visitor. Or his mate, Frank Trussock. Maybe I’d have to fight Frank. Protect us both. Lenn pats my head and makes comments about one of the snooker players and I sit here feeding my daughter and planning his death.

  Chapter 13

  My daughter is growing stronger and she needs a name. She deserves one.

  I try to picture my childhood. The colours, and the shape of the roof on our house and the scent of lotus flowers in the summertime and the way my father would chase us around the garden, hiding behind bamboo clusters and pretending he couldn’t find us and then sprinting out and roaring and laughing and running away again like any other neighbourhood boy. My daughter’s name will come to me.

  We had lean years when I was young. After my little brother was born we had little money for shoes or new clothes. But we never went hungry. Later on my father told me how he was often anxious for the family. But I never noticed. My parents either shielded us from their worries or else their partnership was so strong that they leant on each other. A couple who found each other after a party at a riverside restaurant in 1989.

  He’s left a pill out for me by the kitchen sink. I take it and go upstairs with her for a midday nap. Her eyes are everywhere. I shift up the stairs one at a time, hot pain in my foot, hot pain in my mouth, and she’s looking up at me, directly into my eyes, at my face, taking me in.

  We lie down together and I feed her. The pill’s working. It’s a big dusty square pill now, the supplier’s changed. Lenn assures me it’s the same medicine inside but I think these ones are stronger.

  When I wake up my mouth is dry. My lips are stuck together and they’re attached to the pillow of the single bed in the small back bedroom. It takes me a moment to remember where I am. Who I am. I’m in that fuzzy state you feel when you’re almost asleep, perhaps you’re entering sleep, and then a noise wakes you and you’re awash with vagueness and warmth and you long to preserve that quiet buzz.

  Where’s my baby?

  What has he done with her?

  I turn and feel her beneath my chest, under me. My weight is bearing down on her. I prop up on one elbow, panic in my chest. What have I done to her? I scoop her out and she’s still.

  Quiet.

  No.

  What have I done?

  Her eyes are closed. I bring her to my lips, her mouth to mine to feel her breath but there is no breath. She’s warm, but it’s my warmth.

  ‘No, no,’ I say but the words fall flat from my mouth.

  The room spins.

  I hold her in front of my eyes and squeeze her and then her tiny nose wrinkles and she snorts and her mouth parts.

  I lift her eyelid. She snaps it back shut. I take her to my breast and she opens her mouth and suckles but she doesn’t really drink. She is alive. Waves of relief: each one stronger than the one before. But I am suddenly sober and clear-headed and my God, Thanh Dao, you almost killed your own daughter.

  My
blood is solid in my veins with what could have been. These new pills. What’s in them? He’s never even told me what species of beast they were manufactured for. The lack of information makes me livid. A man controlling me in a dozen different ways. Ten dozen.

  I have to wean myself off the drugs or I’ll accidentally kill my own child. My sleep is too deep, too unreal.

  She disconnects from my breast and there’s a drip of milk hanging from her lip and another on her chin.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper to her. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I’ll do better.’

  She opens her eyes and looks at me as if to say you are already perfect and I am the safest and luckiest child that has ever lived.

  ‘Get yourself down here.’

  I wipe my eyes and check her again and she’s fine so we get down the stairs together on my backside.

  ‘Tapes say you done nothin’ this whole afternoon.’

  ‘I’m not well,’ I say. ‘My leg. I was resting with Mary upstairs, Lenn. I had to.’

  ‘You got all night to rest together in that back room. Day’s for working.’ He points to the Rayburn stove. ‘And you let that go out, didn’t you? Don’t care about me tea, not bothered I’ve been toiling out there in fields on a day like this with that weather coming down off salt marshes, not bothered, are you? Well if I don’t eat then none of us eat, don’t forget that.’

  I look at the clock and it says ten past five.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lenn.’

  ‘Get tea on, I’m famished.’

  I take a long match from the half-empty box of Swan Vestas, and light the Rayburn. My baby’s asleep on the plastic-wrapped sofa, cushions all around her. I fry his ham and his eggs in his mother’s old cast-iron skillet and I roast his frozen chips in the top oven even though the fire’s not burning hot enough to do a proper job of it. He’s upstairs banging around. I will the stove hotter, but it’s coming from too cold a starting place and his eggs aren’t the way he likes them and the clock’s ticking on the wall and she’ll need her next feed soon.

  He comes downstairs.

  ‘Ain’t hot enough, is it?’

  ‘It’s getting there,’ I say. ‘I’ve put more wood on.’

  He takes Of Mice and Men out from his back pocket.

  ‘Reckon this’ll help it along.’

  Tears form in the corners of my eyes, tears I wouldn’t have known a month ago, but they come easier now for some reason, they’re closer to the surface now, either because of her or because of what happened to my sister or probably both.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I say.

  ‘Book or sister’s letters, one or other, you can pick, up to you. If you’d done your chores we wouldn’t have nowt to talk of, ain’t my doing.’

  I point to the sofa. To the perfect, cooing baby framed by threadbare cushions.

  ‘I want her to read it one day.’

  He smiles.

  ‘She’ll be too busy for your book reading, she’ll be working for a livin’ like her father has to. She won’t be idle, I’ll be making sure of that, you mark my words. Now, open hatch.’

  I open the fire door of the Rayburn. At this point years ago I still had hope that he’d relent, find some mercy. I remember when he burnt the photo of my family, seventeen members all together – cousins and uncles and grandparents – when he burnt it for me trying to break into the phone he’d boxed inside a metal case and bolted to the floor joists. I went at it ferociously with tools from his shed and I didn’t even get close to being able to pull out the receiver.

  He steps to the stove and looks at the book and turns it over and looks at the back cover, at the curled edges, the typeface, the photo of Steinbeck, and then he looks at me and tosses it into the fire. The flames flare and I watch the book blacken, each page crisping and shrinking and turning amber and grey all at once.

  His chips are too pale.

  ‘What’s up with them, then?’ he says. ‘What do you call them?’

  I say nothing. I eat my chips, my eggs, my ham. I need it, I need it for her. I glance at him and he’s looking at my right hand. I look down and I’m gripping my dinner knife so tight my knuckles are white and the knife’s trembling on the table. He stands up.

  ‘Same thing as before, you know that, don’t you? Anything happens to me, say a nasty accident or summat when I’m fast asleep, and I don’t check in with old Frank Trussock, he’ll do to Mary what I talked about, he’ll make sure of it.’ He looks over at the sofa. ‘We’re a happy family here, Jane, so don’t go having no daft ideas, do you understand me?’

  I nod.

  ‘Right, make sure you do. And another thing, it’s about time you had a good hot bath. Get one run now the stove’s goin’ and get yourself clean, woman. I’ll take care of youngen. Go on.’

  I’m still holding the knife. I don’t move, don’t say anything.

  ‘You want them letters burnin’ and all, do you, cos that’s how it’s goin’.’

  I stand up and clear the plates and run a bath. I need her letters. I came here with seventeen possessions and I have one left. One possession and one daughter and that’s what I’ll be leaving with one day once I figure out how. And if Frank ever turns up here I’ll kill him and I’ll kill Lenn right where they stand. I’ll bury them both out by the ash pile and I’ll not think twice about it.

  I lie in the bath and my ribs shimmer beneath the surface. The hot water, heated by my only book, my precious incinerated book, helps with my ankle; it helps maybe twenty per cent. I lie here with the door wide open, a draught around my neck, but I’m warm and I feel like I might sleep. My eyelids are heavy. She’s in the main room with him but there’s nothing I can do about that, nothing at all. I wash myself. Rain beats down on the corrugated-iron roof above and I top up the hot water, steaming as it comes out of the tap.

  My tongue can move my rear tooth. It hurts but the sister tooth on my left side hurts a hundred times more. I need a paediatric nurse to look over my daughter, and I need an orthopaedic surgeon and a dentist for myself.

  I step out of the bath and dry myself on his mother’s old grey towel and the floor feels soft and lumpy underfoot. Something rotten down there. Something bad. Covered over. I pull on my nightie, his mother’s, and wrap my hair in a towel. The beat of the rain on the roof intensifies to a dull roar and the temperature drops in the walls.

  He’s holding her.

  He’s sitting in his armchair with her in his arms and she seems fine with it. He’s smiling down at her but his massive body is motionless. Perfectly still. An innocent child and a monstrous statue gripped in an absurd staring contest.

  ‘Let’s get up them stairs then,’ he says. ‘You want me to carry Mary up or do you want to do it?’

  ‘I’ll take her.’

  He hands her over to me, the muscles in his forearms bulging against her head. I hobble upstairs and he comes up a few minutes later.

  ‘Feed her up good and then you sleep back in your own bed tonight.’

  I don’t look at him.

  She’s hungry and I move her to my other breast, a pillow propped underneath her to save my back and my arm. I feed her and she falls asleep and her mouth gapes open very slowly and she lies there next to my skin with her bright red cheeks, her heat, her plumpness, and I gaze at her every eyelash.

  I put her down. Four pillows encircle her, another on the floor just in case, and then I close my nightie and walk over to the landing.

  He’s standing at the window looking out towards the locked halfway gate and the road beyond. The thin cotton sheet is folded on the bed and his towel is folded next to it.

  ‘Lenn, I’m not ready yet, I’m—’

  ‘You’re all right. I’ll be soft with you, come on.’

  His voice is gentle. He doesn’t want to wake the baby.

  I’m still not used to this and I never will be. Each incidence is a life-changing act. I’m strong for my daughter but I will have vengeance on this man. I will make him pay.

  I pu
ll my nightie up over my head and slide under the sheet, my eyes prickling, the distance too great between me and Huong. My daughter. Huong. That is my daughter’s name. It just came to me. I smile a shallow smile. Huong Dao. She is asleep in the next room and I’m her mother and I’m stuck in here.

  I drag the sheet up my body so only my top half is covered.

  I will protect Huong and I will help her.

  I sense him move closer and I turn my face to the wall like I always do and I can feel his breath on my thigh. I try to imagine myself away. I try with the epidural but it fails because I need to listen out for little Huong, I need to be completely present for my daughter.

  She is quiet.

  Huong makes a noise and I lift my head. She starts crying. Wailing. His hands are on my hips now.

  ‘Ignore it,’ he says, the words breathed onto me.

  I bite my lip and listen to her and I can feel her wanting me. This is excruciating. I can’t be here, ignoring her. She wants me. My body is tearing itself apart to be with her. Huong’s two weeks old, she needs me.

  He brings his hands around and under me.

  My tears come. I want to clamp my legs together so hard I squeeze the last sour breath out of him. Snap him into two. Destroy him. Huong wails now, even louder than before, and I feel it in my chest. I’m leaking, warm milk pouring into the sheet making it translucent, running down my sides, down my stomach. She needs me.

  He backs away.

  ‘What the . . .’

  I turn my head and look at him through the sheet, his outline. What more does he want from me? Huong’s screeching, coughing.

  ‘You’re leaking summat out of you,’ he says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Don’t know what that is,’ he says pulling the sheet down over my lower half, stepping away from me, ‘but it ain’t normal, you got some kind of wound or summat, you’re leaking all over, you need to wash yourself.’

  I wrap the sheet around me and stand up.

  ‘Sort yourself out, woman,’ he says. ‘Keep yourself clean.’ He pulls on his jeans and his shirt and sets off down the stairs. ‘I’m off to feed pigs and then I’ll be back. Make sure you’re in back bedroom.’