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

by Will Dean

  They last for half an hour. Huong sleeps through it, her backside smooth and Vaselined, her stomach full.

  ‘Get up to bed,’ says Lenn. ‘Nothin’ good on box tonight anyway.’

  I take her up.

  When she’s asleep on me and I’m reading my sister’s fifth letter, the paper crumpled and grubby at the edges from all the time I’ve taken with it over the years, Lenn comes upstairs and looks in on us both and then he smiles and takes the thin cotton sheet and the towel and heads down to the half-cellar.

  I try not to think of it, what good can come of that?

  There is no noise.

  I reread Kim-Ly’s letter, her words of hope, of survival. She tells me about her friendly new boss at the nail bar, and I’m absurdly hopeful even though I know full well the boss turns out to be a vicious thief and even though I know this boss gets deported some time between letter twenty-eight and twenty-nine and even though I know Kim-Ly is back in Vietnam with her debt still to pay off. I try to focus on what she tells me she sees from her shared bedroom window. A fox. More grey than orange. It comes back night after night, and she thinks it lives under a neighbour’s garden shed. I try to flood myself with Kim-Ly’s words to exorcise the thoughts I have of what’s happening right now in the hell that is one and a half floors beneath me.

  Huong sleeps with her clammy palm on my breast. Her wrists are slowly coming back. I think they’re turning from adult wrists back to baby wrists again. The safety buffer is returning under her skin.

  There’s a slam downstairs. Bolts being secured. Footsteps. The stairs. I bring Huong closer to me, folding my arms around her, building a wall in front of her with my body.

  ‘What the hell do you call this?’

  He’s holding out his big open palm in the door frame to the small bedroom. I can see a collection, maybe three, maybe five, grimy fragments of horse pill.

  ‘Lenn, I . . .’

  ‘Get up off your backside.’

  She’s been saving them? For what? Why didn’t she help herself?

  ‘Downstairs.’

  He points down.

  I shuffle to the top of the stairs and look at him and sit down on the top step and start to move down one at a time.

  Cynth was saving them up. Cynth was going to kill herself down there with the grimy fragments. I would have tried the same thing years ago if it wasn’t for Lenn watching me swallow them each morning. Cynth would need three whole pills I think, nine fragments. I’d need at least four. She almost did it. She almost escaped all this.

  He points to the half-cellar door and I walk, Huong cradled in my arms, a blanket over her.

  ‘Working together, now, are you?’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll put you and Mary down with her for a few weeks, down cellar, no bottles or nothing, would that make things clearer to you?’

  He starts unbolting the top bolt.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Just until searches are done. People out there lookin’ this place and that. Maybe it’s for best you two out the way. Better safe than sorry, Jane.’

  ‘Lenn, no, Mary can’t do it. Not down there.’

  ‘Just you then, is it? Leave youngen with me up here and you go down with your mate for a bit, shall we?’

  ‘Please, Lenn,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I thought she was in pain, that’s all.’

  ‘Bring me them letters and you’re lucky I won’t stick you and youngen both down there with her.’

  I look at him. My eyes say: have some mercy. My eyes say: the letters are all I have left, they are my one remaining possession, they are my family and my roots and my anchor. My mouth says, ‘OK.’

  Chapter 21

  I haul myself up the stairs, my ankle – limp, swollen, mangled – dragging behind me.

  The back bedroom store cupboard smells of his mother. Even though I never met the woman I know exactly, with the precision of a master perfumer, what her smells were. Are. They still live on here. And with every possession of mine that he burns in the Rayburn the smell of her intensifies and the smell of me fades. Her things remain whereas mine end up as ash on the pile outside by the septic tank. On the right side of the cupboard are neat stacks of her things. Neat because I wash them and press them and stack them. Petticoats I don’t wear and cloths I use for Huong and will probably have to start to use myself again soon. Towels as thin and as rough as old rugs. Pinnies. Jumpers with moth holes and skirts made from thick cloth and stockings I’ve never tried on and a hat and a pair of gloves I sometimes use in the wintertime. It all smells overwhelmingly of Jane, his mother. On the left side of the cupboard are six identical wooden shelves. On the third shelf, on the right-hand side, is a string-bound stack of letters. Handwritten. Undated. Two years’ worth of Kim-Ly’s thoughts and dreams and musings and observations; memories of our mother and our schooldays. These are mine. Panic surges in my chest. My one last thing. He will surely burn them today but when they are cinders flying up through the kinked chimney breast up to the sky, when they are reduced to ashes in the garden, they will still be mine.

  I pick them up and hold them to my nose.

  At the bottom of the stairs I hand them over to him. I haven’t looked at them and I haven’t sneaked one out because he will know. I can’t make any mistakes from now on. No micro rebellions. I have no bargaining chips left, nothing to lose except her, nothing to cling on to. Zero physical possessions of my own. I have nothing.

  Last week I had a nightmare. His eggs were cooked for too long, the yolks had turned hard. I woke from that terror at the moment before he pushed Huong into the Rayburn fire box. The sensation of terror in my bones has never felt more intense. It was so powerful it changed me.

  He takes the letters and flicks through them like a bank robber in a film might flick through a stack of dollar bills. He looks at me and then he opens the Rayburn fire door. It’s quiet in there, just embers.

  ‘Have to behave yourself now, won’t you?’

  I make my eyes as empty as I can and then I nod.

  ‘Mind you do, then,’ he says.

  Lenn jabs the stack of letters, flexing in his hand, at Huong. He points at my daughter with her own aunt’s letters. Then he flings them into the embers.

  They sit there for a few moments. Curling. Blackening. I could reach in and take them if I were stronger, braver, more stupid. Take them and then beat him with the poker. But I watch. He watches, too. The whole stack take at the same time, a flame springing up from beneath them, from some incendiary point, some random heat spot, and it takes them and holds them. The brightness fills the room. Seventy-two handwritten letters from my own baby sister. Tens of thousands of her beautiful words. Huong moves her arm so it rests against the skin of my clavicle and she comforts me. It is I who should look after her, but at this moment, in this farm, his farm, with the flames licking the outer door of the Rayburn, it is she who sustains me. Her touch. The potential in her tiny body, the possibilities contained inside of her. She comforts me and I take it.

  ‘That’s that then,’ says Lenn, walking to the bathroom and closing the door behind him, something I’ve not been allowed to do for seven years, closing that door and making it a room.

  The flames die away and turn amber-red. To my left and to my right, through the windows, I can see sparks and cascades in the huge fenland skies. Hazy fireworks in my peripheral vision. The booms are subdued but the lights are everywhere tonight. I pray to the horizon to keep Kim-Ly and Huong and Cynth safe, to keep them themselves.

  The next day I wake and feel empty.

  What can I rely on now the last scrap of my identity has been destroyed? Huong? It’s too heavy a burden for her to carry. Too unwieldy. For her to be the only reference point of life, my only hint of goodness, it seems unfair. And yet she looks up at me after her morning feed and smiles and she looks like new light.

  Each time I look out of the window these days I yearn to see a police ca
r. A search team with torches and rifles. Sniffer dogs. A group of Cynth’s friends going door-to-door.

  Downstairs, he’s under the kitchen sink.

  ‘Mouse holes,’ he says, looking up at me. ‘Oldens. Little rats used to scurry up and down. Hole here under bucket but expect you know full well all about it, don’t you?’

  He screws up tin foil into a ball. He compresses it inside his massive fist and adds another sheet and compresses it and then he sticks it down into the hole. He places a piece of pine over the top and screws it down onto the floorboards with eight screws.

  ‘That’ll do her.’

  He spends the day on the winter wheat and on cleaning out the old combine. By the time I see him driving back to the locked halfway gate, there are mists all over the land. They’re layered like stripes, like white animal hairs floating horizontally in front of the distance, each one almost see-through, each one straight and whisper thin.

  We eat ham, egg and chips. He says it’s all right. All I can think about is if Cynth is getting enough air down there now the undersink hole is completely sealed over. She’ll be relying on whatever oxygen slips through under and around the bolted door so I must keep the front door open during the day regardless of the chill, must keep the air flowing in. I dreamt I passed her down a pair of knitting needles and a ball of wool, pushing the yarn down, her pulling one end and balling it up down there in the dark. She could have made herself a sweater. It’s very cold now and I’m not sure how she’s still alive down there in the dark, not being able to stand upright, him going down to her whenever he feels like it.

  Dessert is bananas and custard. A treat. He does this from time-to-time, brings in another dish, like the pineapple, or once it was a sponge pudding. I heat the ready-made custard on the hotplate and it looks like egg yolks mixed with bright yellow paint. I slice two bananas into the gloop and serve it up in two of his mother’s bowls.

  ‘It’s not bad, is it?’

  It’s delicious. I eat it and I dip my little finger into the tepid custard when I’m almost done and I let Huong lick the sweetness from me. She likes it. She smiles and wrinkles her nose like this is the best day of her life so far. Like she’s lucky to be alive.

  ‘Youngen be learning from you soon, I expect,’ he says. ‘How to peel carrots and tates and how to scrub sink and scrub floors and that.’

  No.

  Huong will be a pilot or an engineer or a teacher or a nurse or a factory worker or a professor or an artist or a plumber. She will not become me. I will not allow it.

  We watch Match of the Day. Lenn sits heavy in his armchair with his hand on my head and I sit on the floor wondering how Cynth is managing directly beneath me. I want to pass her something, a message, a piece of bread.

  ‘Not bad, is it, really?’ says Lenn. ‘You and me and youngen, sat here, good hot fire, football on telly, roof over heads, it’s all right, ain’t it?’

  I look down at Huong. She’s asleep in my arms, her eyelashes fluttering through a dream. Keep dreaming, my darling. Anything but here. Dream of the savannah and of family walks through a forest, dream of playing Lego with your future friends in Saigon and of swimming in the sea and of driving a car. You stay there on my lap and you dream and I will live this flatland reality for the both of us.

  He locks up the TV cabinet and secures the key in the key box by the front door and locks that box with the key around his neck. He checks out of the window, he’s started to do that these past days. Looking up towards the locked halfway gate and the road beyond. Checking. Scanning the horizon.

  I used to think he might die.

  A heart attack, cancer. Anything. A quiet death upstairs in that front bedroom; me finding him motionless and cool. Or something more dramatic. An aneurism in his combine or a heart attack while dragging coppiced wood onto the trailer behind the quad. I was sure he’d die one day. And I used to imagine heaving his dead weight up with a pulley and a rope, some kind of lift system, so I could get that neck key up to the lock box to open it and reach the Land Rover key, to get away from this place. He’d be too heavy, I know that. I’d use the bolt cutters he used on me. I’d snip off the thick chain from his neck and I wouldn’t beat his body with the bolt cutters, I’d stop myself from going that far.

  Lenn says goodnight and then he goes down to the half-cellar with a bucket full of overripe banana and two bowls with dried-up custard in the bottom, I left as much as I could without him noticing anything, and he’s taking bacon fat and one raw egg, out-of-date.

  I change Huong. I still keep the spare cloths and pins and Vaseline and a bowl of clean water and some paper under the sofa. I can sense him down there. With her. She is still alive but they say nothing to each other. The gaps between the floorboards are big enough for me to tell. Not big enough for me to pass her anything through, not wide enough for her finger to pass between, even if I could risk that kind of thing any more. Which I can’t. I have nothing whatsoever left to be burnt.

  He comes up, bolts the door, looks at me.

  ‘Jane,’ he says, looking me up and down. ‘You still leaking from having youngen?’

  Chapter 22

  Last night we had a sharp frost. When I look out of the kitchen window this morning the dank featureless plateau all around us is silver-white with ice crystals blasted onto every blade of grass and every stiff wave of mud. The world is still.

  Huong’s sleeping better these days, her stomach has enlarged, that’s what I believe anyway, and she can take more formula from the bottle. I still have the same two proper baby bottles and I treat each as if it were a precious family heirloom, some rare and valuable piece of artwork; I treasure them both the same. She’s getting stronger, and my fear, that stiffness in my skin from wondering how long Huong can live for, what more I can do, how I can help her – it’s fading.

  But he’s watching me. Not to see if I’m doing my chores, he’s loosened up on the tapes, but he’s watching me like he used to when I first arrived. When I take a bath he’s there in the door frame. Staring. Observing. When I go to the toilet, when I undress in the small back bedroom. He hasn’t asked me to his room yet, but I know it is only a matter of time.

  I fill the fire box with coppiced willow and open the vents to help it to take and then I go outside to bring in more wood. He does the heavy lifting, my hips and knees are too skewed now, my ankle too loose, like some overcooked mutton joint.

  When I return I hear something.

  She’s down there scratching at the floorboards. Like a mouse. An emaciated mouse. I can hear her blackened fingernails scraping along the underside of these boards, splinters of wood collecting underneath each nail, her tips rasping against the grain of the wood. There are no words. I have no letters and no ID card and no clothes and no passport and no book. Nothing. So if I step out of line all I have is Huong. And the two baby bottles. And the Vaseline, which is running low. I’m rationing it. If I upset him he will punish me by punishing Huong because she is the one with all things now, not me.

  I slip down to the floor mindful of my crushed ankle, mindful not to damage it more. The skin is changing colour, bruised all the time now. Loose. Numb yet still painful. I get to the floor and bring out the changing things and unpin her nappy. Soon I’ll need to fold the fabric in a different way, soon she’ll be too big for the way I fold it now.

  There’s a voice underneath me.

  ‘Help.’

  I look down but I can’t see through the boards. The camera’s at my back. I remove the soiled cloth and fold it over on itself and clean her.

  ‘Help me.’

  It’s more of a wheeze than anything else. More of a cough than a voice. How cold must she be down there? How damp? How sick? I whisper, ‘I will,’ to the floor, my back to the camera over by the locked TV cabinet. I whisper, ‘Don’t give up, there are people searching for you, stay strong, you have to hang on,’ and then I scramble to the Rayburn and stoke the flames with the poker and will it hotter, and I will the hea
t to travel down instead of up.

  Huong and I take a nap and I have a heavy weight of guilt in the pit of my guts, weighing me down into the mattress, his mother’s mattress. I feed my baby and she drinks. Instead of Steinbeck, I recite passages from Kim-Ly’s early letters. And I tell her of the fruits and vegetables of home. I talk her through the planets of the solar system, and the largest land animals on earth. I explain about the continents and how some of them are moving apart and others are crashing together. Mountain ranges and ocean ridges. Volcanoes. I list rivers from home, each one teeming with fish, as many as I can remember from my schooldays, from geography classes, and then I work through her family, our family, the tree spreading out in my mind, the names comforting to me as I share them with her, this uncle and that late great-grandmother and this cousin and all her second cousins. She is not alone.

  We sleep.

  Her coughing wakes me. Not a baby cough, but some kind of bark, a dry animal croak. I look at her and place my palm against her forehead. She’s hot. I take her downstairs and give her some water and make her up a new bottle. Huong’s crying when he walks in.

  ‘Shut her up, will you. I’m as cold as a dead hare.’

  I take the bottle to her and sit her in my arm, but she writhes around and she’s hotter now, sweating, her hair damp, curling.

  ‘You shut it up or I will.’

  ‘She has a fever.’

  ‘Don’t care what it is, I’ve been workin’ out there all day spraying, and last thing man wants when he walks back indoors is all that yelling and slobbering.’

  ‘I’ll take her back upstairs,’ I say.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Make me mug of tea and shut her up.’

  I boil the packets of cod in parsley sauce on the hotplate. The Rayburn’s about as hot as it’ll go on account of me trying to warm the half-cellar, but it’s making Huong worse. Whatever I do I seem to inflict harm on one of them. I’m failing both. Huong squirms in my arms and coughs and her skin is flushed red.