The Last Thing to Burn: Gripping and unforgettable, one of the most highly anticipated releases of 2021
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But Huong will never meet her grandfather.
He died the year before our escape. Heart failure. Part of me wonders whether the loss of his daughters for all those years ruined his heart. The other part of me knows that it did.
I give Huong a chunk of cucumber. With her beautiful new teeth she can devour a length of cucumber like a beaver might devour a log.
I still get chills.
They might be panic attacks or PTSD. They might just be my bones remembering. But when I walk through this small town sometimes I get chills. We’re about an hour from Lenn’s farm, but the accents are almost the same. If I hear a man say ‘don’t be daft,’ or ‘what are you talking about, Karen,’ I stop dead. My blood coagulates in my veins and I have to force myself to breathe deeply and to carry on living. One time I almost passed out with fear when I found cod in parsley sauce in the freezer of the corner shop. I held it cold and stiff in my hands and it sent me right back there. To that little cottage. That upstairs back bedroom. The locked halfway gate and the eel in the nettle patch. The lumpy damp floor of the lean-to bathroom.
We were saved by a farmer.
A kind bearded man in a pick-up truck driving back from some meeting about sugar beet processing. Cynth was the one who flagged him down. Her arms spread wide, her body upright in the middle of the unlit road. I had Huong close to my chest. She was so cold that night. So tiny. Kim-Ly still dragged a length of her broken ankle chain behind her. I can remember the sound of it scraping along the asphalt. Cynth pleaded with the farmer in the truck. He looked horrified. The whites of his eyes that night. He helped us all into his pick-up and he turned the heat up high. That farmer gave us his Mars bar and his bottle of Coca-Cola. He drove us to the nearest police station. He even waited outside to check we were OK.
We were not OK. But in time we would be.
What saves me is people. Strangers. Old women. Shopkeepers. Young lovers, and milkmen doing their rounds and window-cleaners with ladders fixed on top of their vans. Individuals oblivious to one another and yet, in a way, together, they act like insurance. An invisible web. Nothing too bad will happen on the street of a small town like this because people are everywhere. If something heinous occurs then it’s likely to be short-lived. Terrible acts are more difficult to conceal in a place like this. Someone will eventually step in or call the police. Horrors can still take place, but people look after people even though they might never think of it that way.
Huong takes the TV remote and turns over the channel. We all get a say in what we watch. Kim-Ly is obsessed with competitive cooking programmes and I don’t tell her I’m hooked too, but I am. The simple act of choosing a channel. Making that decision. All of us enjoying the selection. That simple of act of togetherness.
I prefer documentaries and news programmes. Never the snooker or Match of the Day. I avoid them both. Something visceral about the theme tunes. Even with my sister and my daughter in the room, the front door locked, not a living enemy in the free world, those theme tunes can send me right back to sitting at his feet, his Rayburn fire door open, his hands in my hair.
The door opens.
‘Snake!’ says Huong.
Kim-Ly looks at me and smiles and then puts down her handbag and her keys and falls to the floor with her niece, hissing and tugging at the line of taped possessions.
‘Half an hour,’ I say. ‘How was work?’
‘Not bad,’ she says. ‘There might be an assistant manager job opening up next year.’
‘Can you still do that with all your studies?’
‘Of course I can,’ she says.
There is still a scar on her ankle. A groove. There is no twisted knot of bone and gristle but she bears the marks of her trauma just like I do.
Huong turns the volume up on the TV and Kim-Ly turns it back down again. I dress Huong in her party dress with her black patent leather shoes and her golden Sherriff badge. Kim-Ly showers and puts on a jumper I bought her for Christmas, and a skirt she found in the charity shop on the high street. Her short, beautiful hair is wet at the tips. Pop music plays low in the background and the flat is full of easy happiness.
Huong takes a card from the coffee table. It’s a photograph of Cynth riding her horse and it has a big purple heart on the other side.
We take out the food and the drinks and Kim-Ly drops a glass. We clear it up.
I check on the Phở broth.
The door opens.
Huong runs squealing and Kim-Ly unlocks the door.
Red hair. Freckles. Jodhpur trousers. A squeal as she picks up Huong off the floor and holds her up to look at.
The familiar dial tone of a Skype call bleeps from my phone and Huong squeals again.
My world in this flat.
My family.
I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I’ve lost the option of dying. The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I had to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek.
Kim Thúy, Ru
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If you suspect someone is in need of support as a result of human trafficking, exploitation, or their immigration status, then the following organisations may be able to assist:
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants
www.jcwi.org.uk
info@jcwi.org.uk
020 7251 8708
Turn2Us
www.Turn2us.org.uk
Consonant
www.consonant.org.uk
hello@consonant.org.uk
020 7354 9631
World Relief
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Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks:
To my mother.
To my friends and family.
To my agent, Kate Burke, and everyone at Blake Friedmann.
To my screen agent, James Carroll, and everyone at Northbank.
To my UK editor, Jo Dickinson, and the whole Hodder team.
To my US editor, Emily Bestler, and the whole Emily Bestler/Atria/Simon & Schuster team.
To Hayley Webster, Bethany Rutter and Liz Barnsley for reading early drafts.
To all the librarians, booksellers, international publishers, bloggers, reviewers, event organisers, and translators.
To Thanhmai Bui-Van. For your wise, generous words.
To Maxine Mei-Fung Chung. For your kind, encouraging words.
To my wife and son. I love you.
Stay in touch...
© Will Dean
@willrdean
/willrdean
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