by Will Dean
‘Come on,’ he says, patting the armrest of his chair.
I put the veg on top of the Rayburn hotplate to boil for hours and hours just the way he likes it, the way his mother did it, and then I sit down on the floor by his armchair.
He pats my hair.
I let my finger bleed into his floorboards.
It’ll be me that cleans it all up later, but I don’t care. I pick at the cut and open it wide so that the blood can’t coagulate and clot.
I focus on a spot between the top of the TV and the camera watching us. And I think of what’s happening back at home right now. The food. The blessed warmth of the soil and the air. The vibrant colours. The flowers blooming in the brightest colours imaginable, brighter than the oilseed rape Lenn will grow next spring. Maybe my siblings have travelled into Saigon to visit a mall, buy small gifts for each other, go out for bánh bèo. They’ll be laughing, chattering, patting each other’s forearms and asking each other to pass the cucumber. They’ll share their food. They’ll smile.
When I stand up I almost fall over.
‘You all right, Jane?’
‘Fine,’ I say, lifting my right leg by the knee, gripping the back of his chair to help me over to the bathroom.
It hurts when I pee. The pills make this happen, they make me need to pee more often and they make it excruciatingly painful. My body is rotting from the inside at the constant fighting. The dependency. Animal medication polluting my human frame. I’ll tell him today, I have to.
We eat at the pine table. He’s placed two Christmas crackers from the Spar shop next to his mother’s plates. He buys a box the week after Christmas and that box lasts us six years. He goes through this same tradition every year. No tree, no decorations, no gifts, no songs, no cards. But always two Spar crackers.
‘Ain’t bad,’ he says, shovelling turkey breast and roast potato and cabbage onto his fork. ‘Maybe more time in oven next year, eh?’
Next year. Will I still be here next year? How can I be?
I nod.
I eat it and it tastes as bland as the Sunday roast chicken I cook for him every weekend. There is literally no difference between that dry bird and this one. With the same carcass I could make him a rich, fragrant Phở broth, layered with noodles and peppercorns and mint and coriander and chillies and green onions. But he will not allow it. In the early days I would plead for him to let me cook it for myself at least, just for lunch. The ingredients are cheap. But he would say You got to eat English now, Jane, you live ’ere in England now.
He pushes the red cracker at me.
I grip it.
He pulls his end while maintaining eye contact. Those dead fish eyes of his. He pulls gently and looks at me and then it separates and goes bang and he smiles and pulls out his hat and his joke and his toy.
‘Mini screwdrivers,’ he says. Then he pulls his hat on. It’s blue. He reads the joke and smiles but doesn’t share it.
I stretch my cracker out to him and we go through the same thing again. I win. The toy is a keyring. The joke is the same joke I had five years ago. I put on the hat. Lime green. He takes the keyring from me. ‘I’ll have that, might come in useful, that might.’
We sit with the Rayburn door open. There’s a small cardboard box of Quality Street chocolates on his knee. He likes them. All except the strawberry ones and the orange ones. He drops those on the floor by my mangled foot.
‘Nothin’ on box, never is,’ he says. ‘Not like old days, Morecambe and Wise. Me mother used to howl at them, she did.’
He says all this every Christmas but never does anything about it.
‘Load of rubbish, really,’ he says. ‘Not worth paying licence fee.’
He switches off the TV and drops another strawberry cream by my sandal, his sandal.
‘Why don’t you run good ’ot bath,’ he says.
The hairs on my arms stand on end and the chill from the windows and the walls and that uneven bathroom floor creeps up my shins. I move away from the armchair and collect up the wrappers that I’d arranged on the blood spatter from my fingertip, and stand, unsteadily, and throw them into the Rayburn fire. The flames prickle and leap as they engulf the red and orange plastic wrappers. I watch them shrivel to nothing. Turn to heat and smoke. The glare hurts my eyes and I step over to the pine table.
‘Lenn, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Summat to tell me?’
‘I think—’
‘You don’t tell me nothing less I ask you to. Now, get in bathroom and run ’ot bath.’
‘Lenn.’
He looks up at me, a toffee penny visible on the flat of his tongue.
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘You what?’
We look at each other. He takes the toffee penny out of his mouth and I hold onto the table for support.
‘How?’
I shrug.
‘I don’t do nothin’ inside you. Nothin’.’
I know.
‘I used me towel.’
I know.
‘Did you plan this, did you?’
What?
He stands up and storms out of the room, grabbing his jacket as he leaves through the front door. He stumbles putting on his boots. The TV cabinet’s unlocked, it’s the first time he’s left it unlocked. I watch him out of the window as he stamps off towards his quad, his blue cracker hat still on his head. He’s going to feed his pigs.
I know I should be thinking about this baby, but really it’s too small to think about. Too ridiculous. I can’t even feel it. My breasts are sore, they’re fuller, and my skin feels different, but I can’t think of this thing as a baby. And anyway, it’s his. What monster will this child grow into? What demon? I can’t be responsible for the continuation of the bloodline. That would be a crime. For the past weeks, since I missed my period, since I figured out what must have happened, I’ve worried about this child growing into an adult. Looking like him. Being like him.
But it’s me I need to think of now. For nine months I will have to sleep with him in his front bedroom, in his bed. No six days off a month in the small back bedroom. No escape from him asking me to take a bath. I will have nine months with no distance from this.
I’ve thought about killing it but I have no idea how. Maybe if I didn’t take one of the pills, if I coughed it up, did that several times. Could I take an overdose of these farm tablets, these veterinary drugs? It’d kill the baby, surely. Or maybe it would just hurt us both. Make us sick.
I will the baby gone. If I don’t want it, if I tell myself it’s just him, a smaller version of him, a vile copy, my body might expel it. It might. I have no connection to this child, no attachment, no love. I want it gone.
What now?
How do I manage all this? With my ankle?
I sit down on the plastic-wrapped sofa and reach into his box of Quality Street and take a green triangle, praline, his favourite, and unwrap it, and let it melt on my tongue.
Chapter 7
I missed Valentine’s Day.
In years gone by I would glance at the Massey Ferguson flip calendar on the wall, the one next to the kitchen-sink window, the one I hang up on the same brass drawing pin each January. If I removed that calendar right now I’d find seven holes. They’d look like bullet holes on some minuscule firing range, all close together, a cluster marking how long I’ve been here, how long I’ve been attaching his farming calendars to his wall. But now I chart time differently. It’s nothing to do with him, nothing he’s part of. My diary, my calendar, my watch: it’s all inside my body.
I’m starting to show.
I’m not having any particular issues with my back or my clothes, her clothes. But I can feel it. Him, her, it. I don’t trust it, but I do love it. How did that happen? From hatred and fear to love. Already. I think of this tiny thing often, all the time, every waking hour. I hated it for a while and then, all of a sudden, I accepted it.
This baby will be mine, not his.
; ‘Get kettle on. I’m freezin’ me hands off out there.’
I take the cast-iron kettle from the Rayburn and fill it from the tap and open the lid to the hotplate and place it down. The drips on the bottom hiss and roll around the hot surface and then they’re gone.
Lenn’s covered in paint. He’s wearing his new overalls, got them from the farm supplies catalogue, the one I still read when I can get access to it away from a camera, hungry for new information, new language, new images. The Argos catalogue served me well for years. It taught me so much. I found comfort in its pages, its index, its photographs, in the subtle differences between the thousands of products. But that was before.
‘Old plough’s about had it,’ he says, staring out of the window towards the track and the locked halfway gate and the road beyond. ‘Maybe get another year out of it if we’re lucky.’
I give him his pesticide mug of sweet beige tea.
‘You want me to tidy your tool shed?’ I ask. ‘I’m done in here.’
He looks at me and looks down at my belly. ‘Don’t hide nothin’ in there or play daft games, don’t move nothin’.’
I nod and he hands me his empty mug, blue paint bordering his nails and his bloodied cuticles.
Since Christmas I’ve thought about the woman who visited, the one who wanted a field for her horse. I try to remember her name but I just can’t. My brain is addled. Soft. Imprecise. She had red hair and she smiled with all of her features, I remember that.
Last night Lenn told me about his caravan holidays, the ones he had as a child with his mother. He tells me about them more often since he found out about the baby. Not in any great detail, no sentimentality, just where they went and for how long. Logistics rather than emotion. Crabbing. Candyfloss. Rock made from sugar with words running through it. I still can’t picture it but I try. Piers with arcades. Kites. I can tell they’re his favourite memories. He clings to them. Perhaps they were the days when he got away, when his mother, Jane, let him escape this bleakest of all fenland farms.
I rest my foot. It throbs and stabs me in the eyes with its pain, but I need to rest it and the pills are starting to fail me. I want more. Full pills, the whole thing, no ends chipped off. My body craves them, but I think the baby does as well. We need more. It’ll mess up my system in other ways, I know that, but I want more medication. And, also, I don’t. Because the more I take the more I need him and the more he can do whatever he wants to me and the greater risk there will be to the baby and, most terrifying of all, the more I’ll resist ever trying to leave. Or rather, the less energy I’ll devote to fixing something smart, a plan where my sister is safe and I get to leave this place once and for all. But I can hardly sew a button or set the washing machine these days, my brain’s so muddy. I went a whole week last month without thinking one proper complete thought.
I get up and go outside.
It’s the only respite I get from his cameras. There is no back bedroom time any more, only him on one side of that damn sheet and me underneath it. Night after night.
The day is clear and the sky is as blue as glacial meltwater. He’s painting the sprayer now up by the locked halfway gate. I hobble around the outside of the house, my hand on the wall to keep my weight off my ankle. The ground’s hard now. Dead grass and no insects. The spires are there like upturned nails on the edge of the world, each one a signal, a symbol, a finger pointing out and saying ‘I’m here, come to safety’, and I see them every day and I can’t reach them. One would be infuriating, but being able to see seven separate parish churches is some kind of mean-spirited joke.
I reach out and let my fingertip follow the curved smooth edge of a yellow hard-boiled sweet. It might crack in the cold nights, but so far it’s all right. I’ve been hiding more since Christmas, since I told Lenn about the baby. I might need them. The sugar might come in useful for the gruelling days to come.
His shed is already tidy, old wooden tools hanging from their hooks, a bucket of oily sand ready and waiting in the corner for rinsed spades and forks to be dipped into, the jagged crystals cleaning them back to pure steel, the oil coating them until the next use. Lenn takes care of his tools.
The bolt cutters are here. Always here. Reminding me. They lie horizontally at the end wall resting on two six-inch nails. They taunt me. There is no handcuff keeping me here, there is no manacle locked around my ankle. And yet I am imprisoned.
I sweep the floor with his brush, pushing wood shavings out into the cold, dry air. The fringe of grass poking in from outside is yellow. I pull out my book from my pinny, his mother’s pinny, and read. It’s the section where Lennie hides a mouse in his pocket. A dead mouse. It’s the part where George discovers it and takes it from him. I reach down and place a hand on my bump. It’s hard. The baby doesn’t move. Maybe that will come later. But I worry the baby doesn’t move because of the drugs, and living here, the wretched food he buys from the Spar shop in the village, the lack of nutrition, the lack of joy in my life.
Right now it’s Tết, the Vietnamese lunar New Year. My seventh here, my ninth in this country. More important for us than Christmas. A time of heat and humidity and red dragons and feasting and coming together for a few days. The Tết celebrations I experienced on the first farm were grim, but they were everything compared to this. Kim-Ly and I saved from the cash pay packet envelopes we received every Friday. We’d get what ingredients we could from a Tesco nearby on the edge of town. The second year we found mung bean purée next to the lentils and the boil-in-the-bag rice and we both cried with laughter. Delight. Relief. We cooked the dishes, less than half of what we’d have prepared back home, and shared Bánh chưng sticky rice parcels with our Polish and Romanian housemates. They enjoyed them, they really did. At the time they tasted strange and they were not good enough, but looking back from this flat fen I think of those meals as state banquets. Nine of us living in a house built for two, mattresses arranged on the floor, people sitting cross-legged, steaming bowls of food between us, cans of Coke and bottles of beer. The Poles and the Romanians were kind to us. They were fair. I haven’t had a proper drink since the day I left that first farm. Lenn’s mother didn’t drink, so neither does Lenn.
The house is cool when I get back inside so I stoke up the Rayburn with coppiced willow and I take a rest on the bed upstairs. He lets me rest for half an hour in the daytime on account of the ‘youngen’. I lie with my hands on my child, on my stomach, my hard ever-changing lower belly. What will become of this unmoving little person? How will I bring them into this world, this place; how will I care for them? I’ve asked Lenn about seeing a doctor or a midwife and he said ‘ain’t likely’. I asked him about nappies and a crib, about baby clothes, about the things I know or think I know this child will need. He ignores my questions. The pills make my head throb, but they help my ankle. It’s a perilous balancing act. When I have ten minutes left of my rest break I fall into a deep sleep and then I wake up and the clock says ten to five. I scramble, panicking, across to the banister and, holding it tightly in my armpit, inching down as if descending some mountain pass, I make it to the bottom just before he arrives in the entrance hall and takes off his blue-marked overalls and boots and his wool hat.
‘I can’t smell no pie? Summat wrong?’
‘I’ve stoked up the fire, it’ll be ready soon.’
He goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind him.
I take the pie from the fridge. I made it last night with leftovers from the dry roast chicken, and place it as high as possible in the main oven of the Rayburn. I fill the fire box with wood and open the vents and blow to get the fire going.
Lenn walks back in and sits at the computer to review the tapes.
‘You didn’t clean that sink proper,’ he says. ‘Mother used to bleach it every day, scrub it after.’
‘OK,’ I say.
‘Hang on.’
I check the pie in the oven, some impulse telling me the smell of it cooking might appease him.
&nb
sp; ‘How long did you put your feet up for then?’
I look at him.
‘You do that again and I’ll have them letters off you, all right? This ain’t no bleedin’ holiday camp, me mother used to work her fingers to bone out here and then you come, rent-free, not a care in world, waltzed right into this country, into this house, and just lay about.’ He turns and looks straight at me. ‘Won’t have it, Jane.’
My name is not Jane.
‘I’m off to feed pigs, have me pie on table by time I get back in.’
I check on the pie when he’s gone and it’s warming up, the pastry colouring, but the insides are probably still cool. He took my ID card last month. I’d forgotten to place out his towel, the small one he uses after he makes me have a bath. I’d not taken it out of the linen cabinet or placed it on his side of the bed, and when it came time for him to finish, he’d groaned a different groan to normal. Like he was in pain without that towel. And then he took me downstairs and he made me put my three remaining possessions on the plastic-wrapped sofa and he’d made me pick one, and now I’m afraid that if things keep going on like this I’ll forget my real name, my birthday, my place of birth, and I won’t have my ID card to remind me.
There’s a light out front.
I hobble to the window and wipe the condensation with my hand. It’s a truck up by the locked halfway gate. I open the front door and a chill air cools my arms and sends my hairs standing up and my flesh all bumped.
It’s a fire engine.
Men are getting out of the cab at the front.
I step outside.
They’re shouting something but I can’t hear them.
They’re in uniform, official uniforms, hats, reflective jackets, boots.
There are three or four of them. Walking towards me. I hold out my hand and then their voices get drowned out by the screaming engine of Lenn’s quad as he races up to meet them. I watch them talk. They look over at me and one of them shakes Lenn’s hand and then they climb back into their fire truck and turn and drive away.
