by Will Dean
Chapter 19
When I wake up, the horse pills thick in my head, she feels cold.
I pull her to my chest and wrap sheets and blankets around us. I rub her back, the thin skin covering her spine, the bumps of each vertebra; the butterfly wings of her shoulder blades which feel like they’re sharpening hour by hour. I breathe on her face. I give her all the warmth I have, but still she is cool. Cool and pale and slow in her eyes.
I ease myself downstairs on my backside and put more willow on the fire. I load it full and then squeeze in a twisted knotty log and fasten the fire door. Then I run her a bath, a little deeper than usual, a little warmer than usual. The water is fine but the room is cold and wet, spores along the ceiling, creeping webs of mould climbing up the walls, the floor spongy under my feet. I lower her into the bath. She doesn’t flinch or scream, she doesn’t look straight at me like she normally does, her lips are more purple than red. I run more hot water, using my hand to shield her from any scalding drops.
‘Huong,’ I whisper. ‘He’s going today. He’ll get you new food today, proper baby food.’ I splash the water on her body, more hot from the tap, more warmth. ‘You’ll be OK my darling. You must stay strong. There will be baby milk for dinner, proper milk just for you.’
She stares up with blank eyes.
She doesn’t react to the drops of water that fall near her face. She doesn’t even blink.
I take her out to the Rayburn and dry her in one of his mother’s threadbare towels. I’ve opened the fire door. She seems to look at the flames, the orange and the yellow licking her pupils as I gaze at her with worry and love and terror and hope.
She’s warm now.
But she is not screaming, and that’s the worst thing of all. She is silent. Hungry. And so is Cynth.
Lenn comes in as I’m preparing the cow’s milk. I loathe it and I never want to see it ever again. The bottle, the piglet feeding bottle, is drying on the warm area near the stove.
‘Might be tomorrow, me getting off to that big shop in town over yonder past bridge, ain’t sure one way or the other yet.’
‘No,’ I say, my hands shaking with rage. With fear. ‘Lenn, look at her, she won’t make it.’
‘I’m looking,’ he says. ‘And she looks right as rain. Don’t go nagging me, Jane, I’ll do it when I can do it.’
‘Your daughter,’ I say this, but she is not his daughter, she will never be his daughter, no relation whatsoever, ‘will die in the night,’ I say, with the certainty of a priest or a politician.
He looks at her again and sniffs.
My heart is throbbing with anger. With terror.
‘I’ll maybe get off after me sandwich, ain’t making no promises, mind.’
I word thank you without saying it because I want his words to be the last ones spoken as if that lends them permanence and weight, as if that will make them come true.
Lenn takes down the medicine bottle from the top of the cabinet and unscrews the big metal lid and takes out three fragments and puts them down on the pine table.
I nod to him and bow my head.
While he eats his sandwich I feed Huong from the big plastic piglet bottle. She doesn’t suck. I move the teat around, the blue one, and try to squeeze the bottle a little, but she won’t take it and she won’t look me in the eye and I could give up right now. She has turned her face away from me. If she dies now it will be with one infant thought, one clear and untainted opinion: that her own mother failed her. I had one job. I try to move her to the other side, a cushion under my arm, tempting her with the synthetic teat, but she won’t latch on.
‘Please, darling. Drink,’ I say, my voice catching in my mouth. ‘Please, just a little. Take a sip.’
She opens her mouth and I gently push in the teat and I think she tries to suckle, some reflex coming back to life, but then the milk just pours out of her mouth and she coughs and I pat her back and she feels loose in my arms.
I turn to face Lenn and he sees the haunting in my eyes and he leaves immediately.
I watch his Land Rover drive away, faster than he normally drives, water spraying up from the puddles on the track. I hold her to me. He unlocks the locked halfway gate and drives through and relocks it and drives away. Lenn put up a new sign after he saw the news bulletin about Cynth. I watched him screw it to the halfway gate but I don’t know what it says.
He’s gone and I want him back in minutes. For the first time in my life I want him to come home.
I take Huong over to the Rayburn to keep warm and I take my wash cloths and a bucket and some soap. I fold down onto the floor by the sink and open the cupboard. The bucket is steady. I move it aside and hiss like she does and I have Huong in the crook of my arm, she’s asleep now, and I poke my finger down into the hole.
Nothing.
I hiss and hiss and poke my finger in and out of that hole in the floorboard and finally something touches my fingertip and pushes it back up. I watch her nail, long and filthy, erect through the floor in the under-sink cupboard.
‘I need help,’ I say.
‘I need help,’ she says.
‘My baby is sick. She won’t take the cow’s milk.’
‘Is she conscious?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Feed her a little at a time, a drip from your finger. Or dab it on your nipple. Add some sugar to the milk. Make sure it’s warm. Just drops will keep her with you until he gets back with the formula. Give her a drop of water. Keep her warm.’
I push a one-third fragment of horse pill down through the hole.
‘What is it?’ she whispers.
‘A tablet for the pain,’ I say.
She says nothing.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘You have helped me.’
‘Save your child,’ she says. ‘And then save me.’
Her finger sticks up through the hole again and I take it between my thumb and forefinger and I shake it and then I bend to get my head inside the cupboard and I kiss it.
Lenn comes back within the hour.
He drives like a maniac up the track and I have the fire stoked and the piglet bottle washed and ready for Huong’s powdered milk. Her medicine.
I open the front door and he runs from the Land Rover carrying Tesco bags.
‘She all right?’ he says.
‘Give it to me,’ I say.
He upends both bags onto the plastic-wrapped sofa and I could hug him.
He hands me a large cylindrical tub of baby formula and I open it and there’s a plastic scoop in there and I read the instructions as quickly as I can, and he hands me a new bottle, fresh, not for piglets but for human babies, and I dunk it into the water boiling on the stove and shake it to dry it off. She’s slipping, I can feel it. She looks the same but she is giving up.
I make up the bottle and shake it and squeeze it onto my wrist and it’s too hot. But I can’t wait any longer. I cradle her in my arm and she weighs less than a pillowcase. I push the teat, a proper purpose-built baby teat of the correct size, to her mouth.
She won’t take it.
‘Please,’ I say.
‘Give her a minute,’ says Lenn.
I let a drip fall onto her lips. She won’t suckle. I spoon a little into her mouth and she vomits it back out.
‘Lenn, we need a doctor now. It’s been too long. We need help.’
‘Rubbish. She’ll be all right, will Mary. Besides, there’s people out there looking, I know there is.’ He glances down to the floorboards. ‘Posters up in shop windows. Ain’t safe. Just keep on at it and Mary will take it if she knows what’s good for her.’
I am desperate. Exhausted. I want Cynth up here and the midwife I never had and the mother I’ve not seen for nine years and my sister and an experienced paediatrician. All I have is him.
With the back of my hand I stroke her and she looks at me. Her eyes, her lashes, my sister’s lashes. She opens her mouth and takes the teat. She doesn’t suckle much, just a few seconds, but she takes
in some of the milk, and it stays down. I look at Lenn and he looks away and sighs and rubs his head.
She sleeps after her feed. I place her down and she’s still as pale as bone but she seems content. He bought us two bottles, each with a teat, and about three months’ supply of powdered baby formula. And a rabbit. He bought Huong a soft rabbit, pale blue, called Tommy. He didn’t have to do that but he did.
I heat his boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce in a pan. I boil his potatoes and his frozen peas. I take real care over every detail because of that rabbit. I want him to eat well tonight, to enjoy his dinner, because he saved my daughter’s life and he bought her a toy.
He goes off on his quad to feed his pigs.
Huong’s asleep on the sofa.
I step outside.
The air is thick with woodsmoke and frost and the birds are hanging in the still air like flies trapped in some otherworldly cobweb. I hobble around to the rear of the house, to his homemade bathroom extension, and stretch up to the place where the wall meets the roof and there’s a gap just beneath, perhaps a frost crack in between the breeze blocks from before they were laid, and I pull out an orange boiled sweet. Lenn calls them ‘car sweets’. I’ve never eaten one in a car. It’s chipped and dusty and there’s something dead stuck underneath it, a tiny red spider, but it is still edible.
I check Lenn’s still out at the pig barn and then I go back inside and check on Huong and then I open the cupboard under the sink. I move the bucket and hiss and hiss and hiss. Huong wakes up and yells. Such beautiful sounds. Loud. More vibrant than in days. The blackened finger pokes up and I place the orange boiled sweet in the hole and then I push it down and it can hardly squeeze through. I twist it and push and it drops down to her.
‘God bless you,’ she says.
Chapter 20
We’ve had a few good days.
It took time for Huong to take the bottle, to drink down the formula and keep it down. I had to start with excruciatingly small feeds. The volume she could ingest, the minuteness of it, pained me. Huong’s stomach must have been shrunken to the size of an almond. But her heat came back soon enough, and her colour. She’s eager for the new bottle, a real bottle, the teat of which was designed for her perfect mouth and not the mouth of an infant swine.
He’s left us to it pretty much. I keep up with my chores and make sure his eggs are fried right, flipped, not too brown underneath, never broken, ever, always runny. Not easy on a wood-burning Rayburn. It’s getting the fire right, at the correct time, planning it all, placing the skillet in the correct place on the hotplate, judging the zones of the pan, that’s the trick.
I’m lying here with my good foot off the bed and my bad foot resting at some awful angle. I’m starting to lose sensation in it. This is a godsend as the pain is migrating away from me along with the feeling, but I remember when this happened to my uncle. He lost the sensation in one leg. Pins and needles. It was dying. The doctors had to cut it off. He was in a good hospital but he still died soon after. Sepsis.
She’s asleep on my arm.
Her hair, her dark, perfect hair, is starting to curl a little like his does. I run my fingertips through it as she purrs her deep baby sleep, nestled in the crook of my arm, her stomach full. The diarrhoea has stopped and the blood has stopped. She still vomits if I feed her too much in one sitting, but I’m eager to build her up so that one day she can flee this place and then I’ll have done something good with my life. My sister may have been sent back, but Huong will have a full life in this country, I’ll give her everything she needs, all the lessons, all the self-confidence and strength, and then I’ll set her free. Maybe she’ll get word to someone in time to save me or maybe that won’t be possible. It has no relevance. She’ll be away from this cottage one day. Nine, ten years from now. Running down the road with a message and that five-pound note I keep behind the storage heater in the back bedroom. I smile at the idea. Her leaving. That’s my rabbits and my alfalfa right there.
I sleep and she wakes me and I take her down for a bottle.
She smiles.
This is a new thing, the most miraculous new thing, miraculous for any baby, but especially for Huong. She’s happy. She looks at me and even though she lives here she smiles right into my eyes. My daughter is healthy and calm.
‘Going down to feed pigs early tonight before them bangers start setting off.’
I frown at Lenn as he removes his jacket and hangs it next to the locked key box.
‘Fireworks night, ain’t it? Gunpowder, treason and plot. Idiots spending money they don’t have more like it. Pigs don’t like it, makes them frit.’
Makes them frit? What if I’m frit? What if my daughter is frit? What if, I look down to my feet, what if she’s frit down there? He’s worried his pigs are frit?
‘Ain’t checking tapes tonight,’ he says. ‘Have me tea on table when I get in.’
I don’t believe him.
He will check the tapes.
But I need to get a fragment, the fragment I skipped, I need to get it down to her. I haven’t contacted her these past three days partly because it’ll look suspicious me cleaning out the cupboard under the sink every day, and partly because I needed the full three-quarter dose. Every fourth day he gives me the fragments and I give her one of them. I’m not sure if it helps her but at least it’s something. I’ve managed to get some cold chips through the hole to her, a rolled-up slice of ham, some mild cheddar, more crusts. She’s alive down there but she’s stopped making any noises. No sobbing, no pleading, no crying. She doesn’t even hiss any more, just taps the bucket. I can’t imagine it. Crouched or lying, no bath, no toilet, just a bucket, one with scraps he takes down and one with her waste he brings up. She doesn’t deserve this. No light. No change of clothes. How will she ever see again? How will she die down there with no light?
I am being forced to play Russian roulette on this fen. Maybe that’s a poor example; it’s like the universe is saying ‘I’ll shoot your mother or your father. If you don’t choose one then I will shoot them both. Now, make your choice.’
Except this is worse because in a way the decision has been made for me. If I help her too much I risk my child. If I focus on Huong too much and don’t take any risks, Cynth will surely die. Or worse, she’ll just suffer on and on indefinitely. I understand how microscopic kindnesses – warm words and rolled up slices of ham – can buy a soul a few more weeks. His rare kindnesses, even though they’re shrouded in something unspeakably cruel, keep me moving forward.
I hear a bang.
Through the window I can see a light in the sky, some reds and yellows over by the wind turbines. They’re early. Just kids. Back home we’d have mesmeric fireworks, dazzling colours, whizzes and bangs and crackles, and we’d be together to watch them and we’d smile and hold hands and smell the gunpowder in the warm evening air.
I stick a log in the fire box of the Rayburn and slide the pan of broth onto the hotplate. Translucent globules of fat move around on the surface. When will Huong be able to take a sip? Or a nibble of a mushed carrot? Next spring? I have nobody to tell me the answers, no parenting books, certainly not Lenn. I must feel my way through this on my own.
I pick up Huong from the plastic-wrapped sofa and she blinks at me. We stand at the sink. The bucket rattles, I can just about hear it. I pretend to drop Huong’s feeding cloth and then we crouch down, her in my arms, and I open the cupboard door. He will watch the tapes, I know he will, I must be quick. I move the bucket. Her finger. Like a blackened root sticking up through the soil from underground. The world corrupted. Nature reversed. I touch the finger quickly and take the fragment of horse pill from the pocket in his mother’s pinny and stick it down the hole to her. She puts her grimy fingertip back up through. What else does she need? What else can I give her? She needs more. And then Huong moves her foot. I lift my child towards the probing finger. I position her cheek, now recovering some of its chubbiness, over the hole and lower her gently and Cynt
h, the woman under this blackened finger, she strokes my daughter’s plump cheek. I hear sobs down there. In my head she is smiling, her trembling fingertip caressing fresh skin, pure and clean and fat, new, an ally, a friend, a child, an innocent. She sobs and then she whispers.
‘God bless you, child. And you, Jane.’
I pull Huong back out and touch the fingertip with my own and then I move the bucket back, but she won’t withdraw her finger. He’ll be back soon. I nudge the finger with the bucket a few times and she pulls it down reluctantly, slowly, the digit half bent with resignation, and I put the bucket back in its place and close the door and pray to the horizon that my daughter’s cheek has bought Cynth some more time.
Lenn comes back and we eat the broth. Back home I’d add a dozen herbs and spices, coriander and mint, handfuls of each, basil and chillies and ginger and cloves and star anise and noodles and limes and it would be a thing of beautiful sustenance. But this is OK. It’s still stock, the basic foundation, and I add plenty of cracked black pepper to mine.
He slurps from his spoon. A strand of carrot lies across his lip. He’s been jittery ever since he found out the police are searching for Cynth. He’s not used to that. There was never anybody out there searching for me like they are for her.
I give Huong a feed, she can take a little more now, and then I stoke up the Rayburn until the thermometer gauge is close to the maximum.
‘Let’s have a look at them rockets,’ says Lenn.
So instead of unlocking the TV cabinet, he opens the front door. And instead of watching snooker or the news, or the football, we look out at the land, his land. We stand on the doorstep together like a real couple with heat at our backs and cold on our faces. Huong’s asleep, satisfied. Cynth’s had her horse pill fragment and I hope that affords her some relief, some short-lived escape.
The colours intensify, lighting the undersides of clouds and giving a golden fringe to the trees and steeples in the distance. I watch lights roar into the sky and then there’s a pause, a sweet expectation, and the thing explodes into a thousand sparks and then the noise arrives here at this miserable flatland farm.