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

by Will Dean

  I stagger to her as fast as I can and hold her and bring her to me and sit back against the wall and she sobs and finds me and latches on and we sit there listening to his quad race off towards the distant pig shed.

  Chapter 14

  Huong is three weeks old.

  I have a craving to know what she weighs, how long she is. That’s normal in Vietnam, you get to know these things on the day of the birth. Data. Hard statistics. Officially recorded in the system. Things I can hang on to. Numbers to remember and share with curious grandmothers and uncles who in turn compare them to other family members. But I have no idea. She seems healthy enough although I do worry that her thirst is too intense. I worry that she’s dependent on the horse pills and that she needs my milk to get her dose like I need my three-quarters of a pill each day just to be able to function.

  It’s mid-afternoon and the sun is beaming through the front window. He hasn’t asked me to stay in his front bedroom since that night. I feel more vulnerable than ever with my ankle pain and my toothache and my possessions now burnt down to one. My sister’s letters. If I lose them I’ll lose the last contact I may ever have with Kim-Ly and I will lose the last possession, the last piece of myself, that exists in this damp featureless world.

  I mop the floor and glance at her. Huong’s awake, snuffling on the sofa, her hands opening and closing. I slop the mop in the bucket of soapy water and wipe the floors clean and she’s listening to the noise the water makes on the floorboards. The squeak and also the drips as the water finds its way between the boards and into the dark half-cellar below. She can grip my finger now. She’s strong, I think, a concentrated bundle of power and potential. I just have to help her reach it.

  The sunlight disappears and the room darkens. He’s there at the front window. Then the light floods back in and the front door opens.

  ‘I’ll be done baling in about an hour and a bit, then I’ll get in. I’ll fix your mouth tonight, I said I would and I will.’

  ‘Let’s wait one more day,’ I say.

  ‘Your rotten teeth ain’t doing that youngen no good. I’ll whip them out before they get you both sick. I did it for me mother and she were fine, didn’t make a squeak. I’ll have them out after me tea.’

  Maybe it’s for the best. I think they’re wisdom teeth, bottom row, right at the back one on each side. The last time I saw a dentist I was with my mother and my brother nine years ago. The dentist also taught at the local medical university. She was kind, strict but kind, and she had a way of making me relax. I’ve only ever had fillings and routine check-ups. Never an extraction.

  I let the floors dry. My fear is that I’ll put too much weight on my bad foot one of these days and it’ll snap even more. Or twist further around. I pad flat-footed to Huong and pick her up and inch up the stairs. To my letters. I sit on the bed with my back to the cool wall and pull a letter from under the pillow. I unfold it and stuff the pillow under my arm and let her latch on. I need to memorise her words like I did with Of Mice and Men. I need to read them and read them so I can recite to Huong when she’s older, I have a responsibility to her, so she knows her aunt, so she understands some of our heritage, so she knows the country beyond these endless flatlands.

  My mouth hurts and my foot aches but I am content. The warmth of her on my body, the two of us reconnected, the smell of her scalp, the sound of her sucking, the beat of her tiny pigeon heart against mine. And the words. Kim-Ly was a good writer. This letter tells of the city park she drives through on the way from the nail bar to the flat. She has to pay for the transit each week, it’s deducted automatically from her wages just like accommodation and heating. It’s not optional. She tells me about the colours of the trees and the wet greyness of the walls and the memorial statues. She writes of the squealing children on the roundabout and the kind old man who feeds the pigeons every single day. Perhaps I should have suspected that these were two years’ worth of letters instead of seven, but I never did. Perhaps I should have seen the truth in the seasons, in the slow progress. But, as in this letter, much of what she writes is reminiscence because I think she wanted to comfort me. She wrote about Dad’s jokes and Mum lecturing us about homework and the way our brother used to ride his bike straight through the house as a young boy.

  I slide my finger into Huong’s tiny palm and she grips me.

  ‘Don’t ever let go,’ I whisper to her.

  I take her downstairs and let her sleep on the sofa. It’ll just be twenty or thirty minutes but it’s enough time for me to prepare dinner.

  I peel potatoes at the sink. My eyes are heavy and it’s getting misty out there in the end fields, the ones out towards the pig barn. The mists are straight lines, razor thin. They hang over the fields and block the long-distance view. They connect the land to the sky and I can feel autumn in the air.

  The Rayburn’s glowing. I throw in another batch of willow and close the vents to settle it down. The chicken’s in and the potatoes are in. The water’s boiling on the top ready for the peas, and the Oxo gravy’s good and hot.

  Pain flares in my jawbone. It’s not like my ankle pain, this is someone pushing a dirty blade straight into my flesh and probing a nerve. The sharpness jolts into my head. I hold my chin in my hands and dig my fingernails into my temples and then Huong starts to cry.

  Her nappy’s full.

  I take her to the floor and pull out a fresh towelling nappy from the stash I keep underneath the plastic-wrapped sofa along with a bowl of water and a roll of paper. I unpin the cloth. I am very, very tired. It’s not black tar any more, it’s green. Her rashes are horrendous. Weeping sores. I mop her up and dab the skin, but she is red raw and I blow on her wounds, on her bumps and lesions, but she is screaming so hard her tongue is sticking out of her mouth like a stiff beak.

  I squint with pain as my own teeth burn, the nerves exposed.

  I blow on Huong’s skin and tell her she’ll be OK and she’ll be better now, but when I pick her up there’s blood on the new nappy. Blood from the rash.

  ‘I’ve had it for today,’ says Lenn, hanging up his jacket, pulling off his boots. ‘Combine will need some oil before tomorrow.’

  ‘She needs cream,’ I say.

  ‘Cream? You what?’

  ‘Mary. She needs cream for her nappy rash, she’s bleeding.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Best have it natural, that’s what me mother always did, none of them fancy potions and lotions. You keeping her clean enough, are you?’

  ‘She needs cream,’ I say, my jaw set. ‘From the Spar shop in the village. Please, Lenn. I’ll do anything you ask, just buy her some baby cream.’ I hold my chin. ‘Please, Lenn.’

  He looks at me and then over at the Rayburn.

  ‘That bird cooked?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I say.

  We eat, her feeding from me at the table. He watches. He doesn’t try to hide his gaze. I force myself to swallow peas and gravy and a little chicken but I can’t really chew, just bite with my front teeth. I know I need food for her, for my milk, for her bones to grow and for her mind to develop so I eat what I can.

  ‘Wasn’t bad,’ he says. ‘Now then. You get this cleaned up and then I’ll fix your teeth.’

  I’m resigned to this. What else can I do? What options do I have?

  She’s asleep on the sofa when he brings in the newspapers and spreads them under the pine chair I just sat on to eat my dinner. I try not to think of her rash, her sores, the weeping wounds that show I am failing her.

  ‘Half more pill,’ he says, placing half a tablet on the table with a glass of water.

  I take it.

  He takes a pair of pliers from his trouser pocket.

  ‘You need to sterilise them first,’ I say, my eyes wide open. ‘They need to be sterile, Lenn.’

  He takes them to the Rayburn and slides the kettle onto the hotplate, waits for it to boil. He pours water over the serrated ends of his pliers in the sink. They’re rusted and the rubber handles are split.


  ‘Open your mouth as wide as it’ll go,’ he says.

  I tip my head back and hook my good foot around the chair leg.

  ‘More wider,’ he says.

  I open my mouth to the point where the hinges of my lips hurt. He looks inside my mouth. I want to bite him.

  ‘Back two, you reckon?’ he says. ‘Any more, is it?’

  I shake my head.

  He places his left hand over my face, his fingers pushing down into my eye socket and my cheekbone and temple.

  ‘Brace yourself, then,’ he says.

  I feel the metal of the pliers on my tooth, the loose one, the bleeding one. The pliers feel hot and they feel enormous, like someone rubbing a rough hammer against my molars. He opens his tool and grips my tooth and pushes down harder onto my face with his left hand.

  The tooth comes out.

  I taste blood in my mouth and swallow and he takes his left hand off my face and my tongue moves back to probe the hole.

  ‘Nothing to it,’ he says, holding the tooth up for inspection with its absurd depth, its long unhuman roots attached.

  ‘Now, the other one.’

  I swallow again, my own blood lining my throat. Some of the pain has disappeared.

  ‘Open,’ he says.

  His hand’s there on my face again, pushing my head down into my neck. The metallic teeth of the pliers scrape along my own teeth and then they open. Pain surges through me from my tooth, my non-loose tooth. He grips it and pushes down onto my face and pulls.

  My God, the pain.

  My spine, compressed beneath this man’s palm.

  I weep.

  He readjusts his grip on my face and on the pliers and yanks the tooth upwards and twists it and my vision turns fuzzy at the edges. I want this to stop.

  Huong’s crying now. There’s more blood in my mouth and he opens the pliers and grabs the tooth and pulls it back and forth and I close my mouth around it because the pain is too much to bear. He retracts the pliers and prises my jaw open.

  ‘Don’t mess round, we’re almost done here. Swallow this.’

  Something on my tongue. I swallow hard and the pill fragment scratches my gullet on the way down. I swallow again and there’s more blood in my mouth. Warm, metallic. He grips the tooth and I look into his eyes, his watery blue-grey eyes, and he pulls and keeps pulling and I can hear Huong screaming and then my vision goes dark. He pauses. I hold the chair beneath me and he yanks the tooth again and says something I can’t hear. There’s a knocking noise. He strains with the pliers. And then everything goes black.

  Chapter 15

  My eyelids open.

  I blink and clear my eyes.

  I wiggle my jaw and the pain is gone and now my face just aches and my gums are raw. The deep pain, the bone-nerve-jaw pain, is over.

  I sit up.

  Where is she?

  I look around the small bedroom. How did I get up here? I scoot to the end of the bed and stand up, my balance a little unsteady.

  ‘Lenn,’ I say, peering into his bedroom. Nothing.

  I hold the banister and ease myself down the stairs, my right foot hanging in mid-air as I hop down.

  Huong’s crying now, she can sense me. I move into the kitchen and she’s lying on the sofa surrounded by cushions, just like before. She screams at me and I can feel warm milk dribbling down my stomach, my shirt wet. I get to her and kiss her forehead and hold her to my chest. She is frantic for milk, screaming, probing with her lips pursed. She latches on and sucks.

  But the screaming continues.

  ‘Help me!’

  I stand bolt upright with Huong still suckling.

  ‘What?’ I say. Is this the pills? ‘Who said that?’

  The front door opens and Lenn walks inside and brings through two bags of Spar shopping and places them down on the pine table. My two teeth are sitting there next to the bags atop a bloodstained tissue.

  ‘Shhh,’ I say. ‘Listen.’

  But the voice is gone.

  It could be the drugs, but I think I heard something. A voice. A ‘help me’.

  ‘You what?’ he says, rummaging inside the Spar bag. ‘Sit down,’ he says.

  I sit back down on the sofa and I can hear someone sobbing, someone weeping.

  ‘Ain’t doing this regular so don’t get yourself used to it, but here.’

  He sits down hard in his armchair. The sobbing’s still there in the background like a TV on in another room. But the TV’s in this room and it’s locked in the cabinet in the corner. He reaches up and passes me something encased in his rough hand.

  A small tub of Vaseline.

  ‘For youngen.’

  Tears form in my eyes. It is the best thing I have ever seen in my life.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  I try to detach her from my breast to apply some to her backside but she won’t let me. She’s famished hungry.

  ‘How long was I asleep for?’ I ask.

  ‘Dunno, about twelve hours or summat, you went right under. Didn’t expect you awake yet.’

  Twelve hours?

  ‘But, Mary?’

  He smiles and taps his head. ‘Bringed her up to you, didn’t I? Bringed her up to you and put her on your chest for a drink, every few hours or so, you never woke up, never stirred. She were all right, we made a pretty good team, Mary and me.’

  I look down. Huong’s eyes are closed and her eyelashes are meshed together, the tips almost touching my skin. I can see her pulse in her perfect neck. All that time you were with him? I wasn’t awake for you? All that time?

  ‘The pill must have made me black out,’ I say.

  ‘That and fact you’ve got teeth like a horse. Never seen teeth like it, double as long as me mother’s, yours was. Almost put me back out getting that last one loose I did.’

  The sobbing’s there again.

  From the bathroom? Upstairs?

  ‘Can you hear that, Lenn?’

  ‘You hungry?’ he asks.

  I nod. I am hungry.

  I notice the red scratch on his neck.

  ‘I’ll fix you cheese and ham sandwich and then we’ll talk about it.’

  I finish feeding her and lie her down on the sofa and unpin her nappy. It’s long overdue. I drag out the paper and the bowl of water I keep under the sofa and I clean her and put the dirty paper in a Spar plastic bag. The oldest stuff is dried on. I have to moisten it and scrape it off but as gentle as I am with her she screams and yells. Raw skin. Blood.

  ‘I know, little one,’ I say. ‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s almost over. We have the cream now, you’ll be better soon I promise.’

  I moisten the paper. I can’t hear sobbing now, just Huong’s screaming. Her face is red. She’s crying and the tears are spraying and the ones that settle on her cheeks just sit there and quiver.

  My instinct is to smother her backside in Vaseline, to be generous, to bathe her in it. I read the label but it doesn’t tell me much. I take my index finger and scoop up some of the thick, smooth gel and apply it to my daughter’s wounds. I’m careful. I don’t want to rub it in too hard or cause her any more pain, I’ve done quite enough of that already. I cover the worst of the rash, the dried blood, the blistered flesh, and I wrap her in a new nappy. I hold her and she falls asleep instantly in my arms. Her relief is palpable. I sit with her and the sobbing is still there, close by.

  When Huong is deep in sleep, and her eyelids are fluttering, I stand and walk over to the sink and wash my hands.

  ‘Help me, please!’ says a voice. ‘Jane, help me!’

  My heart races.

  Lenn jumps up from his armchair and runs over to the front door. I watch from the Rayburn as he unbolts the half-cellar door and slams it shut behind him. I listen. No words from him and none from her. Is it Cynth? The red-haired woman with the horse? Must be, no one else knows my name, my false name, the name he imposed upon me.

  There’s a bang down there. Sniffling.

  Then I hear steps up, his boot
s climbing the steep wooden ladder back up to the half-cellar door, then it opening, then him bolting it shut again.

  ‘Sit down,’ he says, pointing to the table and the two pine chairs.

  I sit.

  ‘Mary likes that cream, doesn’t she, sleeping all right now with that on her, ain’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, my eyes darting between his face and the floorboards.

  ‘Who is it?’ I whisper.

  He shakes his head. ‘None of your concern, that, Jane. I’ll tell you what. Now you’re with youngen I reckon you might need odd extra bit and thing, like that cream I got for you down Spar shop. You keep on doing your job, looking after house and young Mary, and I’ll keep up my end, all right? We’ll call it a bargain. About time you had a new thing or two. I’ll let you stay in that back bedroom, let you focus yourself on youngen. And we’ll speak no more on it, do you understand?’

  There’s no noise from the cellar now.

  Nothing.

  This is where I refuse. Where I stand up and fight. Where I scream to the woman beneath my feet that I will not abandon her, that I will help her.

  But, Huong. I have no idea how premature she was when she was born. How vulnerable she still is. If she’s to get through these perilous early weeks, if I’m to live, to feed her, nourish her, strengthen her, then I have to be selfish. For her sake. At least until she’s a little older. I can’t risk her health. I look down at her sleeping face, the roundness of her cheek, her hair, her soft chin.

  ‘I need a thermometer,’ I say. ‘If she gets a fever I need to know how bad it is. And I need paracetamol. It’s what my mother used when we had infections. It’s important.’

  He nods.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. You two get up to back bedroom and I’ll make us tea tonight. Broth and bread. You two get up for some rest and I’ll fix it. No more yabbering. We’re done down here.’

  We do as he says. We go upstairs.

  After my blackout and Cynth’s screams from the stinking half-cellar, we leave all that behind. How bad a person am I that I can just go to bed after all that? I bend like a waning moon around Huong and she snores and we sleep.