by Will Dean
‘Piglet bottle,’ he says, showing me the thing in his hand, the thing with straw stuck to its base with grey mud. ‘Feeds them all right, do youngen all right and all. Got two sizes of teat: bigguns and littluns.’ He takes two rubber teats from his pocket, one blue and one white. The blue one is coated with something sticky. ‘See what’ll fit her, she’s about size of a little piglet, is Mary.’
I look at the bottle. At the dirt. When we had an Argos catalogue in the house years ago I knew most of the pages off by heart. If you’d asked for a kettle or an ironing board or a three-man-tent or a camera, I’d have found the page on the second or third attempt. They had bottles for sale, with sterilising machines. They were new. Clean. Perfect. They were what babies should have. Not this thing. Huong isn’t a piglet for God’s sake.
‘I need proper formula,’ I say. ‘She needs real baby formula, she’s not even two months old, Lenn.’
He scratches his head.
‘Ain’t nothing can be done about that. Ain’t like I can go waltzing down Spar shop and ask for baby formula now, is it? I mean, come on. Sue or Larry would say, now then Leonard, what on God’s green earth will you be wanting with baby formula? I ain’t asking for it, Jane. Nothin’ for it. Youngen will have good old cow’s milk from bottle just like rest of us and then she’ll be fine, grow up strong as her mother.’
‘Give me those,’ I say, taking the bottle, the enormous, agricultural, filthy, awful bottle, and the two dirty rubber teats. I run the hot water tap in the kitchen sink and scrub the bottle inside and out and scrub the teats and rinse the detergent off and rinse them again and then dry them with clean towels. Then I wash them all over again to make sure. I take the milk from the fridge and warm it in his mother’s saucepan until it’s at about body temperature. I fill the bottle one eighth full and screw on the big rubber teat.
‘Don’t give the baby that!’
I look down at my feet, at the voice, at the floorboards.
‘Why not?’ I say back, my first words to her. ‘Why not?’
Lenn stamps on the floor and the room shakes.
‘Why not?’ I yell.
He runs to the door of the half-cellar and unbolts it and she’s screaming to me something about the baby not drinking cow’s milk, how it can be dangerous, but he’s reached her and she’s crying and then the door’s bolted shut again and Lenn’s in front of me, his grey hair loose across his bulging eyes.
‘Get youngen and bring her down here. Get letters and all.’
I shake my head. ‘Lenn, please.’
‘I said go and get ’em.’
I drag myself up the stairs, my heart pounding in my chest. Huong’s asleep where I left her. I pick her up and she wakes and moves her head close to my breast and latches on and I let her, the little good it will do her. She bangs her head against my chest in frustration as I shuffle downstairs.
‘Give her a feed then no more bother.’
I take the bottle, as big as a family-sized milk carton from a supermarket. I sit on the sofa and my eyes flood with tears and the tears fall onto her perfect face as I try to guide the rubber teat of the piglet bottle into her perfect mouth. She won’t take it. She wants me, wants my milk, my touch, my warmth; she doesn’t want this thing he’s brought me. I try to feed her from myself but there is nothing. I cover my chest and try again with the bottle and the white teat and she yells until her tears mix with mine, hers full of salt, mine empty and hopeless and stale.
‘Mary will take it,’ says Lenn, watching from the Rayburn. ‘She’ll get hungry enough and then she’ll take it, mark my words.’
She doesn’t. She just shrieks and yells and cries and looks at me, right at me.
Lenn wants his tea now so I put her down on the sofa, and the noise from her lungs is deafening. My ears, my foot, my back, my skin, all hurt, and my heart is as bruised as it has ever been. I fry his eggs and his ham in his mother’s cast-iron skillet the way she used to do it.
‘Frost in the air,’ says Lenn, finishing the last on his plate. ‘Be red sky in morning, mark my words.’
I clear the table and try Huong with the bottle once more. I even suck from it myself to show her. She refuses. She works herself up into a state where she’s blotchy and then she throws up what little milk is in her stomach and she gasps and cries. Her body is losing its softness. Her head’s starting to look too big on her body. I give her my breast to settle her, and it does, but she is so hungry it makes me livid.
‘Here, have this, settle yourself down.’ He passes me a fragment of horse pill, one quarter. I’ve started taking this sometimes, a top-up before bed to soothe me to sleep. Otherwise I can’t cope. And I must cope, I do not have a choice, it’s this or nothing.
He unlocks the corner cabinet and turns on the television. Local news. I see the fear in his eyes as the newsreader mentions a missing woman, Cynthia Townsend. He steps over towards the corner of the room, closer to the TV, and shields the screen with his bulk. The story runs for thirty seconds, maybe less, but he is affected. Lenn walks back to his armchair and sits down heavily. He glances down at the floorboards and then he beckons me over.
Could this be my way out? The police finding us all here? Helping us?
We watch a Grand Prix race. The same lap over and over and over again like every day of my life. The race is taking place in Malaysia and even though it doesn’t look like home, and the people dress differently and the light isn’t the same, the vegetation looks familiar. I stare at the trees. Huong takes the bottle in the end even though I can tell that she hates it and she would tell me if she could, she would kick the back of my knees in protest if she could. I sit there feeding her from this unwieldy bottle with him behind me, his bloodied cuticles tangling in my hair, his dry palm on my scalp, and Cynth right underneath me. She’s silent but I can sense her down there, bent double, wasting away. All hope receding. He took the leftovers down along with a bucket of water like he does every night. And he brings a bucket back up and empties it on the other side of the shed, or sometimes straight into the septic tank he built himself as a young man. She’s down there listening to us right now. She’s giving up, she must be.
When the race is over he helps me to my feet and I make my way upstairs. He says, ‘Night then, sleep tight you and the youngen,’ and then he takes a thin white sheet and a small towel from his mother’s linen cupboard, and he folds them under his arm, and he heads downstairs.
Chapter 18
Little Huong’s getting worse.
It started with her crying at night, with Lenn telling me to shut her up, and now she has fallen quiet but she’s vomiting the cow’s milk up as soon as I give it to her.
She’s pale and gaunt. Babies shouldn’t look gaunt. Her skin is greying. I watch the pulse in her neck.
I can’t give her bread or Rich Tea biscuits, he keeps telling me to try it, to soften them first in my mouth like a bird in a nest up in a tree, but she is too young for it. The crumbs of the one Rich Tea I did give her, she vomited them back up at me with a look in her eyes like Mother why are you doing this to me, why can’t you help me?
Is she allergic to cow’s milk or just too young for it? I would give a kidney right now, a kidney and one of my eyes and one of my hands for just ten minutes with a proper doctor. I would give more. Just to check her over and listen to her heart and her lungs, to run tests, take blood, to tell me what to do, to say ‘your daughter will survive’.
I get his lunch ready, peeling each pre-sliced square of mild cheddar from its neighbour, sitting it on the margarine slurry on the thick-cut Mighty White bread, closing it up. Back home we had Bánh mì baguettes sliced and filled with grilled pork, the fat caramelised and crisp, with bright green coriander and peppers. They were delicious and this is as far as it is possible to be from that. Huong’s asleep on the sofa and her cheeks are not red like they used to be.
‘Landy needs new tyres, two new ones I reckon, back end, bald as eggs, ain’t gonna make it past MOT up to
wn with tyres like them backens.’
‘Lenn.’
He looks at me, his sandwich small in his oil-greased hand.
‘She still won’t eat.’
He takes a bite of his Mighty White sandwich and looks around at her lying on the plastic-wrapped sofa, her neck to one side, her pulse clearly visible below her jawline.
‘Mary’ll get hang of it, just give it time.’
‘There’s been blood in her nappies, Lenn. More blood. She’s vomiting the cow milk back up. Can’t keep it down.’
He looks back to me.
‘Blood?’
I nod.
‘From rash?’
I shake my head.
He sniffs and wipes his nose with his sleeve.
‘I can’t just waltz into Spar shop up village and say two tins of formula for youngen, now, can I? You see what I mean, I can’t just go in and say it, can I?’
‘Could you buy it somewhere else, Lenn? Could you drive a little further, to a bigger town where they don’t know who you are? Could you do that and buy a few weeks’ worth, it’d be no bother, nobody would know.’
He looks out of the window as if to think of what towns lie out there and in what direction.
Say yes, you foul man. Grant me this one thing.
‘You mean so you can try and leave here with youngen, is that it? That’s what’s in your head, is it? Me gone for an hour or more up town past bridge and then you go off up track with your busted foot carrying me youngen and then you try and get off out of here, is that it?’
I shake my head.
‘She’ll die, Lenn.’
He looks at her and swallows his mouthful and takes another bite.
‘I’ll think on it this afternoon and tell you tonight. Folk outside keen to poke their noses in. Ain’t gonna be so easy as you reckon, Jane. You got no experience of these things, not in England.’
‘Thank you.’
That’s as good as I can hope for. Better, even. I know when to stop and shut up. I have learnt how to survive with this creature and at what point to back down even though it makes me rage inside to admit it.
He walks to the door and the phone bolted to the floor rings and we both freeze. It rings and Huong wakes up on the sofa and there’s a yell from beneath us, a feral cry, and Lenn stamps his foot and both Huong and Cynth fall silent.
He leaves.
I take Huong and try to feed her from my breast but there is nothing and she just gets agitated. I thought it’d comfort her, me being with her, close to her, the warmth, the familiar scent, but she gets angry and her wrists don’t feel like they did a week ago, they’ve lost the fat ring below the hand, they’ve lost their innocence. They’re miniature adult hands now.
So I take the wretched piglet bottle. And the teat, the blue one, it works the best. And I warm the milk on the Rayburn and pour it in and check the temperature on my tongue, on my hand, on my upper lip. She takes it. She sucks and throws her arms around it like it’s a fresh new mother and she sucks it down. But then she vomits and cries. Her tears don’t spray any more, they just fall. They roll down her cheeks without the energy needed to fly. They’re adult tears now, and sick adult tears at that.
I feel warmth on my arm and drag the towel out from under the sofa and open her nappy. Liquid. She’s had diarrhoea for days. What little milk she keeps down just passes straight through her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘You’ll be OK, little one, we’ll get you some food soon I promise, you’ll be all right. Stay with me, Huong. Stay strong a little longer.’
I clean her up with paper and water and throw the nappy into the washing machine. Thank God for the Vaseline, she needs it every day now.
Staring out of the kitchen window, I see him drive off towards his precious pigs.
There’s a noise.
I crouch down and look at the kitchen cupboards and it sounds like a snake from my grandparents’ garden hissing up at me.
Huong’s gurgling on the sofa. I look over at her and then back down to the floor. Hissing and tapping. Something metallic. I crouch but it’s too much for my ankle, so I get down on the floor and the hiss is there and I open the cupboard under the kitchen sink.
There’s a bucket moving. The bucket I use to mop the floors, it’s rocking by itself. I move it and it’s replaced by the dirtiest fingertip I have ever seen.
I look at it.
And then I reach in and touch it with my own finger and I can hear crying from below me, directly under me, Cynth sobbing and the soft pads of our fingertips – mine clean, hers almost black with grime – touching, connected.
She pulls her finger back down and whispers through the hole.
‘Thank you.’
I almost die from the guilt.
She’s thanking me for what, for meeting her fingertip with my own? After these weeks of me not helping her, not letting her out, not risking my daughter’s life to come to her aid? She’s thanking me for that?
‘I’m coming back,’ I whisper. ‘Wait there.’
I grip the cupboard door and then grab the porcelain lip of the sink and heave myself upright and then I find his plate. He left one edge of one mild cheddar sandwich. I clear the plate into the sink like I always do and then, with my back to the camera in the corner of the room, watching me, listening, I crouch again. I must be quick.
I shred the edge of the sandwich into thin strips and pass down the first strip, mainly crust, into the hole and it’s taken from me like there’s a piranha down there. I feed it all through and then I say, ‘I’ll be back when I can, I’ll do what I can.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispers.
I shake my head with the awful shame of it all and then I take Huong in my arms and wrap her in blankets and take her outside for some air.
The day is bright and clear.
There are clouds sitting in the air like balloons, their lower edges grey and flat, their tops like cushions in a rich man’s house. I show Huong every corner of the compass, the spires to the north and the wind turbines to the south and the flatness sloping down to the salt marshes past the pig barn in the east and the tiny specks of colour passing each other on the flat roads to the west. Some colour comes back to her cheeks but her wrists are still thin.
I squeeze her hands. I feel her feet through the fabric of the blanket. I place my palm to her forehead. Desperate, useless measures to judge her health. Her ill-health.
I think it’s a plane but I know it’s not. And it’s not a bird, I know all the birds that fly these fens and it is not one of them. It’s something in between. Humming across the sky like an overgrown insect, some kind of fan at its back, like a hang-glider with an engine. Not as high as a plane, not as low as a bird, somewhere in between. I want to scream, to burn this house down to the ground to show it where I am, to plead for the pilot to pick us up, me and Huong and Cynth, and take off with us away past the horizon to somewhere safe.
But I just watch it fly on by, humming, buzzing.
I tried to burn the cottage down once before in the early days.
It was after my ankle, maybe six months later, at my lowest point. I took the box of Swan Vestas upstairs and lit some scrunched pages of newspaper in the corner of his front bedroom. I burnt the sheet he made me lie under, the old one. But Lenn saw. He was out on his tractor drilling for that year’s cabbages and he saw the smoke and he came back to the house and put out the fire. A farmer in fenland can see all of his land wherever he is. I lost my passport that time. And I had to repaint the bedroom even though I could hardly stand up. I had to repaint it eleven times to cover the smoke marks.
Tonight is sausage and mash night. I don’t mind it. This time it needs to be good, needs to be absolutely perfect so he’ll agree to buying Huong some baby milk formula tomorrow, she can’t wait much longer. I cannot put a foot wrong. Soon she’ll need a drip, medicine, a doctor, antibiotics, a team of doctors, intensive care.
Huong has to be my priority, but I’m not fai
ling Cynth. I’ll make sure my daughter lives and then I will make sure Cynth lives. I can do both things.
My focus is unwavering. Like a fighter pilot or a watchmaker. The sausages must be just like his mother fried them. They cannot deviate from the exacting standards he has laid down.
I warm the skillet pan on the hotplate.
I fry the sausages the way he likes them as he watches the tapes back. My back is as straight as a fence post, my ears alert to his every huff and puff. Will he see my whispers to Cynth beneath the sink? Will he sense what I was doing?
‘Been thinking on what you said earlier about that shop in big town over yonder, past bridge.’
I look at him. Please. I will do anything you ask, she needs food or she will die. I beg you.
‘Reckon I can do it this coming weekend most likely. Best lay low until then.’
I shake my head, must stay calm, must keep frying his damn sausages the way his mother used to fry them in his mother’s cast-iron pan. I cannot burn them too black or let them split in the wrong way.
‘She won’t make it, Lenn. She’s too weak now. She needs it tomorrow. Please.’
He looks at the sausages hissing and spitting in the pan. He looks at me and then he looks at Huong and she’s curled on the plastic dust sheet on the sofa, asleep.
‘Tomorrow, then.’
I feel like kissing him. I feel like letting go of this pan and this stove and falling at his size eleven feet.
‘Thank you,’ I say, keeping the browning of the sausages as even as I can.
We eat in silence.
‘Them was good bangers,’ he says. ‘I’m going down pigs with scraps bucket.’
I want to say, ‘Why don’t you give them to Cynth for God’s sake? She has done nothing to harm you. Not one thing. Why don’t you give her half?’ but I say nothing. I have to secure the formula first. I have to do nothing, not one thing, to sabotage this plan. I have to tread silently and say nothing and do nothing. Just one more day.
He leaves and moments later I hear a hiss again from beneath my feet. I close my eyes and bite my lips inside my mouth and collect Huong and her piglet milk bottle and take her upstairs. The hissing is still there behind me, along with the tapping under the bucket, the quiet pleading ignored, the woman forgotten, the mother and child away.