by Will Dean
‘I’ll feed pigs after,’ he says. ‘Make sure them eggs are sloppy, and no hard crust under neither.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He sits down at the computer in the main room and switches it on.
No wrong moves, not a single one.
I hobble to the bottom stair, my body yearning for Huong. Why is she not with me? My soul feels depleted. Hollow. Then I say, ‘There’s a dead pheasant outside by the hawthorn hedge.’
He looks at me. ‘Dead, dead?’
I nod.
He sniffs and gets up and walks outside. He puts the dead things in the nettle patch by the septic tank; he doesn’t like dead things in his garden.
I ease myself upstairs, my ankle a third bigger than usual. The cuts on the other sole have clotted in the chill of the bathwater. I get to the top of the stairs, to the small back bedroom. There’s a ghostly light up here. A stillness. I’ve already said goodbye to this rotten place and I should not be back here. I pull the pillows into a kind of square in the single bed, and ruck the sheets underneath. I get to the store cupboard, left side empty, right side his mother’s things. I take a few cloths. His mother’s cloths. Used by me and used by Huong, but they are and always will be his mother’s cloths. I roll them into a baby shape and stuff them under the sheets in the centre of the pillows.
By the time he gets back inside, the Rayburn fire is burning hot and the room is warming. But it is still damp. And Cynth is underneath me. Silent. Waiting. What is she thinking down there? We didn’t have time to talk about this possibility. Well, we did, but we never managed it. I’ve already decided we leave here tonight after he’s fallen asleep. That’s the new plan. Cynth will know what I’m thinking. We’ll both arrive at that plan because that’s all we can do. As long as he believes Huong is upstairs fast asleep in that back bedroom, then it might work. It just might.
I place his chips into his mother’s baking tray and slide them into the top Rayburn oven and start to fry his ham and his eggs. With every movement, every routine action tried and tested hundreds of times to make it perfect for him, I’m being sucked back here to this place. My child is over there in the pig barn by the horizon. With my sister. And I am back here in this fenceless prison, this fenland pig pen of his own design.
‘Bird’s dealt with,’ says Lenn, walking back in. ‘Cock pheasant, looked frit to death, it did. Summat frit it.’
The egg white bubbles and I pop them one by one and feed the fire with more willow.
‘Young Janey still sleeping?’
‘She’s still getting over the infection. I want her to rest.’
‘In back bedroom, is she?’
I nod, but my body wants to flee. I am braced against the stainless steel rail of this Rayburn, his mother’s old stove, and I want to take off and flee.
He walks to the banister and looks up.
Time slows.
He goes upstairs.
Don’t panic. Keep a clear head.
I have a carving knife on the worktop and the poker resting beside the stove and I know both are useless against him. My ankle throbs. I listen. The floorboards upstairs creak as he moves around. He’s on the landing. Now he’s in his front bedroom. He’s coming downstairs.
‘What happened to Rich Teas? You ain’t finished them all, have you? Full packet?’
I turn to face him.
My ankle is burning against the fire box and I am sweating at the back of my neck, beads rolling down between my shoulder blades.
‘Dropped them in the sink,’ I say. ‘They turned to mush. I’m sorry, Lenn.’
He looks at me like he’s deciding what to do about it or maybe he’s deciding if I’m lying.
‘You reckon we should give young Janey pill from town now or later?’ he says.
‘The paracetamol?’ I say. ‘Later. Let her sleep.’
He looks at the pan.
‘Don’t ruin them eggs or we’ll have nowt to eat in house.’
I take the skillet pan off the hotplate and make up his plate and make up mine. I am so hungry I could eat both, but I have to look normal, like I haven’t half escaped, like I don’t know my sister is right here, alive, hidden, chained up; like I don’t know the horrors he might have inflicted upon his first wife.
‘S’all right,’ he says, pushing his knife into the yolk of an egg like a scientist conducting an experiment. The surface gives. I watch the skin of the yolk indent under the strain and then it bursts and the rich yellow runs over his ham and his chips. ‘S’all right.’
We eat.
Cynth is underneath me right now, exhausted, skeletal, in the dark. We owe each other everything. George and Lennie.
‘You been in shed today?’ he asks.
I cough, the fatty skin of a chip catching in my throat.
‘Have some squash, Jane.’
I drink the lime squash and my eyes are watering.
‘Needed to check,’ my voice is strange from the chip skin.
‘Wrong hole,’ says Lenn. ‘Chip gone down wrong hole is all. Drink your squash.’
‘Needed to check on the paint,’ I say. ‘Want to do the bathroom ceiling again.’
He nods and looks at me and moves pink ham into his mouth and chews and keeps on looking at me.
‘And?’ he says.
‘And what, Lenn?’
‘Do I need me to buy tin of paint or not? Ain’t cheap, you know, that sealing paint. Bit a rot on wall never hurt nobody. Janey’s as strong as her father, she’ll have lungs like a boar pig.’
‘We’re fine,’ I say. ‘There’s some paint left in the tin.’
My God, Huong. Are you OK? I know you’re safe with Kim-Ly, but what are you feeling right now, what are you thinking? I have not left you. I have not betrayed you. I am still your family and your neighbours and your teachers and your friends. I always will be.
‘People out searching again in big town. Posters up with her picture.’
I stay quiet. I don’t want to set him off.
‘Ain’t good, Jane.’
He glances down at the floorboards and I glance out of the window in the direction of my daughter and my sister.
‘You think you know summat,’ he says. ‘But sometimes you don’t, do you?’
I look at the stove. At the poker.
‘You think things are all right, cos they always have been, like, but you never really know what’s happening, do you?’
I look down at my empty plate, my pulse beating faster, the yolk stains dry on his mother’s plate.
‘Especially when summat’s perfect, really working well, never a problem, and then stuff gets changed, do you understand?’
A scratch from the half-cellar below.
I look at him. His face is as expressionless as a wall.
‘Stopped selling Arctic Roll in shop. Not just in big shop after bridge, neither, in Spar shop down village and all. Tried three shops in end. Spar shop said can’t get it, big shop after bridge reckons coming in next week, butcher place in village inland reckons factory went bust. Been havin’ that for me pudding last thirty-odd year on and off, and then it all just stops, you know?’
I clear his plate and my plate.
‘Sure Janey’s all right?’ he says. ‘Ain’t heard a peep from her.’
‘She’s tired, but I think her fever’s passed,’ I say. ‘I’ll go and check up on her.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I’ll get off and feed pigs.’
He puts the leftovers, his plate only, ham fat and rind, into the scraps bucket, and then he goes into the bathroom and closes the door. I pull myself up the banister and peer into the empty back bedroom, at the fake child sleeping in the single bed, and then I go back down to the Rayburn.
I can’t let him go to the pig barn.
I pick up the poker and stoke the fire until the end glows red but then I set it back down again.
The toilet flushes.
He comes out wiping his hands on his overalls, looking at me.
&
nbsp; ‘Well?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Janey doing all right now or not?’
‘Oh, she’s fine. She’ll be awake soon.’
‘House is cold today, ain’t it? When I got back from shops up town, it were colder inside than out.’
I look at the Rayburn. I pick up some willow sticks, my hands shaking, and feed the fire and open the vents.
‘You think I’m daft?’ he says.
I shake my head. ‘No, no, of course I don’t.’
‘That fire ain’t been lit for hours, Jane. Me house had frost in it.’
‘I’ll keep it in, I promise, I’ll not let it go out again.’
‘Nothin’ left of yours to burn on it, is there?’
I am so tired of this. Tired in my bones and in my head.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’
‘That why?’
‘Is that why I let the fire go out?’
‘That why you didn’t do your jobs today?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I slept with Huong upstairs because she was sick. I’m sorry, Lenn.’
He nods and picks up the scraps bucket. Then he places it back down and swallows and says, ‘That why you opened door down to cellar?’
‘What?’ I push myself back into the Rayburn.
‘Bolts been open, they’ve been moved.’
The fire scorches the backs of my legs.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t.’
He looks down into the scraps bucket and then back up at me and then up to the ceiling.
‘Quiet up there, ain’t it?’
I smell something. The Rayburn.
‘Saw you both when I come home. Two of you in me headlights, coming out of shed.’
No. I shake my head but my knees are loose, they’re not keeping me upright. My daughter. My sister. My friend.
‘No, Lenn,’ I say, and then I lower my voice. ‘She’s still down there.’ I point to the floor and frown. There’s smoke rising up through the paper-thin gaps in the floorboards, grey wisps rising and being pushed by the draught from the door.
He drops the bucket and runs to the half-cellar door.
Chapter 32
He unbolts the top bolt. Says nothing.
I’m right behind him.
There is grey smoke rising from under the door.
He unbolts the bottom bolt and the door swings open.
Thick smoke.
He coughs and moves forward and I see something red down by my feet. Cynth’s hair. She’s curled up in a ball at the top of the ladder, down by his boots, with her scarf wrapped around her mouth.
Lenn moves his arm around to clear the smoke.
I lean back.
I surge forward and push into his solid wall of a back and he stumbles into the slate grey smoke and Cynth rises and bucks and we push him down there and we scream.
He’s gone.
Down the ladder.
Disappeared into the smoke. He’s down there and we’re up here.
I pull Cynth closer and slam the door to the half-cellar shut and reach to lock the upper bolt as Cynth does the same down near the floor. But she’s too slow. She’s wheezing for air and she’s too slow. She coughs something up. The door bulges down below, straining on its hinges. The frame flexes in the wall, the timbers creaking. He bangs his fist. We both lean, pushing into the bottom half of the door with all our weight, my one good foot straining against the wall for purchase. He heaves and we push back. Black smoke curls up from under the door. He bangs at it again with his fist and Cynth screams as she tenses her arm and heaves the bolt shut.
It’s quiet.
He isn’t saying a word.
The door bangs again, a new attempt to barge through the big black iron bolts, but he cannot do it. Not from that angle. Not without a run-up. Not from the ladder. He is down there and we are up here.
‘Burnt my fleece,’ says Cynth. ‘With your matches.’ She shows me the box of Swan Vestas.
‘Your fleece?’
She nods.
The smoke is still rising up into the main room, through the gaps in the floorboards, under the computer table, snaking around the legs of the two pine chairs and the pine table, billowing from under his armchair, from under the plastic-wrapped sofa.
The floor bulges and shakes as he thrashes around to break through, to break up into this ground-floor room.
I crouch down and drag out the bolt cutters from under the sofa.
Dust and smoke mix together in the air.
‘Help me to get upstairs,’ I say. ‘Help me up.’
Cynth shakes her head. ‘We have to go,’ she says. ‘Your baby, your sister.’
‘Help me upstairs.’
She helps me.
The house is getting hot, getting hotter than I’ve ever felt it even in the middle of August when the dyke runs dry and the grass bleaches white-yellow.
More bangs from under the house. His shoulder smashing into door and floorboards. His body a battering ram.
I open the linen cabinet in his bedroom and take out the thin cotton sheet and his small towel. We get down the stairs and the cast-iron Rayburn is glowing red. I open the fire box door and the flames flare out into the room and I throw in the thin sheet and the towel and I close the fire door. The stove, his mother’s stove, devours them.
His possessions burn.
I take two things with me: the bolt cutters and a tub of formula, a tub he bought for Huong this afternoon from the town past the bridge.
‘It’s just the fleece burning down there?’ I ask, the smoke rising through the floorboards like Cynth’s pleas and whispers once did.
‘Nothing much else down there,’ she says.
But her face tells a different story. Her face says she has finished him.
We step outside into the cold, clear night.
We turn left, as one, to face the wind turbines on the horizon. We walk, as one, past the wall of the cottage, past the Rayburn ash pile which is also the resting place of all seventeen of my lost possessions. Cynth helps me as we skirt past the hawthorn hedge and the eel remains. The bolt cutters feel good in my hand. The formula bulges from my pinny, his mother’s pinny.
There’s woodsmoke in the air.
We turn, my friend and I, heat at our backs, and set off towards the barn, towards my sister and my child.
Epilogue
I’m not celebrating the one year anniversary of his death. I’m celebrating the one year anniversary of my life. Our lives. All four of them.
I bleach the sink and it’s a joy. No cameras watching my every move. No oversight.
The words of Steinbeck mingle with the bleach fumes. An audiobook playing through my phone. My own phone. The contract is in my name. My actual name. I still have the box and all the original packaging. I keep it in a cupboard upstairs. On one side are my things. My treasures. The copy of Of Mice and Men gifted to me by Cynth and her new boyfriend at Christmas. My national insurance card, wrapped in yellow tissue paper. The letter granting me leave to remain. Next to my things are Huong’s things. I guard each precious item like a Rottweiler. Her birth certificate listing me as her mother and showing to the world her real name. Her given name. A radical gift I passed to her back in the cottage.
I rinse the sink and take a moment to look out of the window. No fenland fields here. Just a small town that locals want to escape from but that I will love for ever. Young entangled couples and pubs and laughing children and coffee shops and the kind of parks where people chat as their kids find common ground by the swings. Old people wheel their shopping home at their own pace. Life co-mingling and free to shape itself.
Frank Trussock will remain in prison for over a decade.
The lawyers and police told me I didn’t have to appear in court. They said I could give written testimony, or appear on a screen from another place. But I insisted. I wanted to be there in that courtroom in front of an official judge and in front of Frank Trussock. Facing him. Ey
e-to-eye. I testified as best I could as to what he and Lenn were part of. I answered the lawyer’s questions and I held my composure. Kim-Ly did the same. At the end of that courtroom day I slept for fifteen hours straight.
When they raided Frank Trussock’s farm they found three held against their will. Another six when they raided places his associates controlled. They found a cannabis farm outside King’s Lynn in a boarded-up building that used to be a betting shop. But the workers escaped before the raid. Sometimes I think it’s a shame they ran away. Maybe I could have helped them. Guided them through all the paperwork and interviews. Helped to find them a safe home.
There’s a bang in the next room so I hobble through. One operation done but the three main procedures are still ahead of me. I’ve been given a prescription for pain management. Proper pills for humans.
Huong looks at me with her beautiful brown eyes and she laughs. Trailing behind her is a train of sorts, a line of her toys and clothes all taped together like a snake. The snake knocks the TV remote off the coffee table.
‘Uh oh, Mummy.’
The smile on my face is so broad and deep it stretches my skin.
She smiles back.
Huong can say ‘mummy’ in Vietnamese and in English. Her English accent is already better than mine. She is a wonder.
Standing up, she walks towards me still dragging plastic swords and teddy bears and drinking bottles all taped together.
She stands at my feet, her soft perfect arms raised in the air.
I brace myself and pick her up.
The weight of her is a miracle. A blessing. A godsend. She is healthy despite all the horse pills, and somewhere deep inside myself I feel that she is well past the danger point. The doctors have confirmed this. She is no longer a vulnerable baby. She’s a strong girl now. Resilient. Able to cope with whatever lies ahead. She is a powerful fighter born in the worst place imaginable and yet she thrives.
I pucker my lips and she meets them with her own. Like the gentlest of kisses placed on a mirror.
She has a name and an ID number. She is in the system and she’s been vaccinated and she has a dedicated person at social services who checks up on her. Regularly. I like that. Other mothers in my situation, people I deal with through my job, they resent the State involvement. But to me it is another level of protection for my Huong. She has me. She has the State. And in between she has my sister and her godmother, Cynth, and she has her grandma back in Biên Hòa who has taught herself how to Skype so she can talk to and cry with joy at the vision of her beloved granddaughter.