by Will Dean
When we go downstairs it’s getting dark outside and there’s a chill in the floor.
‘Broth’s good and hot,’ he says. ‘Have set table myself, you sit down, take weight off that foot.’
I sit down, Huong awake and quiet.
We eat the broth, steaming from the heat of the Rayburn, and we mop it up with slices of Mighty White and marge. When we’re done I start feeding Huong and he brings out two tins. I look up at him. What’s this?
‘Pineapple chunks,’ he says, smiling, placing a teaspoon next to each opened tin. ‘Good for the youngen, gets vitamins and that from your milk.’
I eat. It is fantastic, my first pineapple for years, my first new food type since arriving here on Fen Farm. The juice doesn’t sting my gum wounds, they’re OK. Healing. My tongue tingles from the acid and it is good.
Is Cynth still down there? Is she alive? There is no noise, no sobbing.
I bathe Huong in shallow tepid water and now that her belly button has healed, the crispy umbilical remnant falling away, she looks complete. I dab at her wounds, at her old rash. The Vaseline is already helping.
Lenn’s moved the dishes to the sink when I get back into the main room. It’s the first time he’s ever done this. I dry Huong and apply a fresh coat of Vaseline, thank God for this cream, this miracle, and put her in a new nappy and dress her in his old baby clothes and lie her on the plastic-wrapped sofa while I wash up.
‘I’ll put telly on,’ he says.
I hear him unlock the box on the wall of the entrance hall and unlock the TV cabinet in the corner and then lock the key back in the key box.
We sit. It’s getting damp outside and damp inside so he opens the Rayburn fire door for the first time this season and lets the flames flutter and spit, the light from within licking up the walls and finding the ceiling. We watch the ITV evening news and I’m sitting on the floor with him patting my head and smoothing my hair, my daughter feeding from me, the pineapple still alive on my taste buds.
And then the phone rings.
The box that encases it muffles the noise but I can feel the vibrations through the floorboards.
‘Help me!’ Cynth screams from under us, her voice more animal than human. ‘Please!’
The phone rings and rings and we three just sit up here like there’s nothing strange happening at all. His hand is still on my head. Rigid. And then the phone stops and she screams something unintelligible.
Lenn stamps on the floor with his socked foot so hard it makes me jump. It makes Huong jump a little too, and then she reconnects and suckles like before.
‘This is nice,’ says Lenn, smoothing my hair. ‘Not a bad life, is it? We’re doing all right.’
Chapter 16
He’s almost done with the harvest now. I’ve been watching from the front door as grains and brassicas are trucked away, him standing at the locked halfway gate in his overalls, positioned between me and the haulage trucks, between us and the haulage truck drivers.
I’m keeping the Rayburn fire going around the clock. Huong gets cold in the night if she drifts from me and, I’m sorry to say, the pills I’m still taking make me sleep so deeply that sometimes I’m not as physically close to her as I’d like to be when I wake up. My nipples are cracked and the left one’s bleeding. But it’s my ankle. That’s why I can’t come off the pills yet. Can’t even reduce the dosage. The damp, the October fenland damp creeps into the joints, what’s left of them, and makes them swell and stiffen and throb. But it’s also her. Downstairs. That ongoing horror. Me not doing anything about it, not being able to think up an ingenious plan to help her, to help Cynth. I end up focussing more on Huong, on her needs from minute to minute so I can avoid thinking what it must be like down there in the stinking half-cellar.
Cynth.
Cynthia.
I must think of her name. Repeat it over and over in my head. If I forget her name then I won’t be able to forgive myself. I must offer her that shred of dignity. She still has identity down there in the dark hole beneath this forgotten place. She’s still alive. She is not the woman locked in the half-cellar. She is Cynth.
I’ve never been down there in my seven years on Fen Farm. It’s a rule. But I’ve looked down. When the sun’s low by the front door, at the end of a long summer’s day, it lights up the dark spaces. I’ve only peeked down there twice, in the early days, the lucid days, when I had two working ankles, when the bolts were loose, and it was always dark and shockingly cool down in that half-cellar, and it smelt of spores and decay and wet cardboard and rot.
I’m feeding Huong upstairs and she’s starting to bite. She has no teeth but I think I can feel something deep within her gum, some hardening. I pledge to look after her teeth when they come and if ever she needs any professional dental care I will somehow get that for her.
Cynth’s down in the half-cellar. If she’s sobbing I can’t hear it from up here and that’s why I’m not in the main room much these days aside from making Lenn his lunch and his tea and keeping the Rayburn fire in. Lenn’s eased up on my chores and it’s helping my leg a little, even with this damp air.
Cynth is tall.
That’s what I keep thinking about: her height. I’m tall myself but she’s taller and that half-cellar is as high as an armpit, that’s what Lenn told me, you have to bow or crouch or kneel down there, there’s nowhere to stand up straight, not even close. She’s been there for so long and she hasn’t once been able to stand erect.
I’ve used up a whole tub of Vaseline and he’s bought me two more. The nappy rash is all but gone. Huong’s more content now, but she’s feeding like a wild animal might after a drought, sucking and knocking her head against my breast for more milk, to will it out of me. Because it’s food? Or because she needs her trace of horse pills just like I do?
I hear the front door creak open.
‘Tea,’ he shouts.
‘I’ll come down,’ I say.
‘Don’t be daft. Do you want some tea, Jane? I’ll bring it up to you.’
This never happens.
‘Thank you.’
Huong suckles and I hear him place the kettle on the Rayburn hotplate and I hear Cynth cry out from her darkness. He stamps his foot. Then the noise stops and the kettle starts to whistle, and he walks upstairs.
‘Youngen drinking up good, is she?’
I nod and he places my mug of tea, freebie from the fertiliser company, down by my bed. His mother’s bed.
‘Thanks, Lenn.’
‘Drink it all up, youngen,’ he says, staring at her. ‘Big and strong.’
‘Lenn,’ I say. ‘Can I take her down some food?’
‘You what?’
I nod towards the floor.
His jaw stiffens.
‘Off down shop later, nothing you fancy? More Vaseline cream for Mary, is it?’
‘No, I’m fine.’
He walks to the back bedroom store cupboard and opens the door and turns to the right, to the slatted wooden shelves holding his mother’s things.
‘Got clothes here, all me old stuff, moths been at them but they’ll do. Fix them up with some thread maybe. You want me get you some new wool from shop?’
I imagine what I can make for Huong. Things with colour. Soft, new clothes made by me for her, not by his mother for him. New possessions we can both hang on to. And maybe I can customise the old things, adapt shirts and trousers for when she grows. ‘Yes, please, Lenn.’
He turns around to face me and he has Kim-Ly’s letters in his hand. All seventy-two of them. The baling twine holding them together hangs down between his fingers like the hair of a doll crushed inside his palms.
‘You still want these letters, do you? You not done with them yet, are you?’
I tense up.
‘I want them.’
‘Well then don’t be pushing your nose in where it ain’t wanted. Nowt to do with you what’s down cellar. Keep looking after youngen and keep house clean and keep making me tea, and that’s th
at.’
I nod.
‘Your last thing, ain’t it?’
I nod again. My last possession on this planet.
‘Best look after them then, ain’t you?’
I look down at Huong. She’s still drinking, her cheeks bright red, her hair slick with sweat from the extraordinary heat of us both, from the exertion.
He walks downstairs and drives off in his Land Rover. I lay Huong down surrounded by pillows, a blanket on top, and make my way down each step on my backside. Cynth’s quiet underneath the house. I walk to the front door and double-check he’s out and then I look at the black iron bolt at the top of the half-cellar door and its twin down near the bottom. There’s a noise. Wood creaking. The door moves in its frame.
‘Jane? Jane, is that you? Jane? Help me, is that you?’
I open my mouth as if to speak and then look to my right at the camera in the corner of the main room above the locked-away TV. Its red light blinks at me. I close my mouth and lick my lips and squint my eyes and walk back to the kitchen. She says nothing after that. I wash up and dry the pots and feed the fire and rub breast milk into my nipples to try to alleviate the soreness. Years ago, after my ankle but before he burnt my trainers, I asked him for a new bra and he told me his mother’s would do me, and I asked again recently, partly because of my back, for one that would fit me, and he said his mother’s would still do me, it did for her, didn’t it?
He comes back an hour later with two Spar carrier bags and as I put away the shopping, he reviews the tapes.
‘Did good,’ he says, looking at the computer screen, it flickering and lighting his face in a grey glow. His whiskers picked out by the glare. ‘There’ll be no bother if you keep your head screwed on right.’
I open the final bag. Everything until now has been what he buys us every week: one chicken, cling-filmed pack of root veg, frozen Birds Eye peas, pork sausages, Oxo stock cubes, pre-sliced ham, pre-sliced cheese, UHT orange juice, Rich Tea biscuits, Swan Vesta matches, Mighty White thick-sliced bread, Walkers ready salted multipack, PG Tips teabags, golden granulated sugar, full-fat milk, margarine, Birds Eye cod in parsley sauce boil-in-the-bag, potatoes, and frozen pastry. In the final bag, under the peas, there’s a bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s sensitive skin shampoo. Body and hair. I hold up the pink bottle, hungry to read the ingredients, hungry for new words, to find out what this liquid can do for my child.
‘Saw Mary got some dry skin on legs, under backside, behind her ears. That stuff will fix it.’
He’s right. She does have scaly skin, dry patches, some kind of condition on her scalp. I flip the cap and it smells new, soothing, a fresh scent in this same-old-same-old farm cottage.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘Don’t let bathroom ceiling get too mouldy, Jane. Bad for the youngen. You got plenty of paint in shed so if it gets sporey again, get up there and fix it, don’t wait for me to tell you.’
‘OK.’
I start preparing dinner. I use the leftover chicken from last night, stripping the carcass, to make a pie. As I pull the delicate oysters from beneath the carcass I imagine gouging his eyes. As I pull apart the flesh from the wings and thighs I fantasise about him not being able to fight back. His mother made her pies with sliced carrots and the peas inside the pastry, not on the plate, never on the plate, and she liked to include chopped potato and leftover gravy. He ran through how his mother did things in my early days here. Over and over again. How she folded his shirts. What shade of beige she made his tea and the method she used to bleach the sink. I shred the rest of the meat off the carcass. He took most of yesterday’s veg for the pigs so I’ll use some of the new stuff. I chop and season and fill and spoon and lay the pastry over the top.
There’s a loud bang at the front of the house.
Lenn and I walk to the front door and she’s smashing the half-cellar door with something, her shoulder, or something he keeps down there, and there’s dust settling in the air, floating on the draught from the front door.
I look at him and he runs his fingers over the black bolts.
‘Best get pie in stove now, Jane.’
I retreat to the kitchen and he unlocks the bolts and she screams with some deep guttural voice the tone of which I have never heard. An underground screech. Something Dante might have imagined down in that extra level of hell he never dared to tell us about. The last exhalation of a person in agony. Lenn doesn’t say a thing. I can hear her fighting with him, beating down on him, but I know, I know only too well, he is resistant to this. He is hardened to it somehow. From his childhood or from now. A man made from stone. The noises stop and they’re down there together. I hear her scream, ‘No!’ and then he walks back up the ladder and bolts the door locked and comes back to the kitchen and sits down at the table.
‘When tea ready, Jane?’
‘Half an hour,’ I say.
He has beads of sweat in his hairline and there are red scratch marks on his neck and on his hands.
‘I’ll have me bath before tea then. Be a good lass and run it for me, would you?’
I run him a hot bath and Huong wakes up. I can feel her wake upstairs in the back bedroom even before I hear her yelps. My milk is hard in my chest. I have a blocked duct, I think.
‘I’ll go and bring her down and feed her by the Rayburn,’ I say.
‘Jane,’ he says, standing, beckoning me over, placing his hand on my arm, the scratch marks pocked with dried blood. ‘Been thinking. Me mother knew man in next village over but one, inland, he were a doctor. When Mary’s bit bigger we could take her to be checked over. You’d have to stay here cos you’re not English, you ain’t legal, but I could take her and say she’s a youngen of a worker. Doctor’s retired now but he’s a local man. He’d look at her.’
‘I want to come with her,’ I say. ‘She needs me to be with her.’
He chews the inside of his mouth and looks down at the floorboards and back up to me.
‘I’ll have a think on that,’ he says. ‘Maybe you can stay in Landy when I go in, roped up in back seat, maybe that’d work all right. But if we’re to see doctor in next village but one, inland, then you’ll need to be no bother between now and then, do you understand me?’
I nod.
‘No bother at all, no stepping out of line. I got enough on me plate. And then I’ll see what I can do. Maybe we can get out for a little trip, three of us.’
Chapter 17
The skies are changing.
From the window in the small back bedroom I watch the sun rise out of the salty waters that I cannot quite see no matter how hard I look, and then during the day when I’m scrubbing and feeding and washing, it tracks around the sky, low, not overhead, and then dips back down, melting into the spires on the horizon as I stand at the front door, back to the half-cellar, watching another day slip away.
There’s less washing now. I still have her cloths, her nappies, so many each day, so loose. But I’ve stopped needing the cloths for myself. I’m not sure if he knows or not but he hasn’t asked me to take a bath since that night. He hasn’t invited me into his front bedroom.
My milk fluctuates. It was plentiful and she was content before, but now, with Huong growing and hungrier than ever, the milk comes and goes. It makes her angry. And then I wonder if she has my anger, a galvanising, thinking type of anger, or if she has his. I pray to the horizon that she has mine. Or her own.
‘Shhh,’ I say to her. ‘Settle down.’
I want to say ‘settle down, Huong’ and I want to say it in my own language but I must be mindful of the camera in the corner of the room. If he hears me speak Vietnamese to her, if he hears her real name, I could lose the letters. Or the Vaseline, or him being more kind, or the trip inland to the retired doctor, or one day I could lose her altogether. I remember his terrible threat every time I see the long dyke. I look at that unending line of still water and my heart collapses in on itself. It’s unimaginable. Monstrous. I pull my daughter close and she b
eats her forehead on my chest. I move her over to the other breast but it is too sore and there’s no milk there either. She cries and cries and I rock her and soothe her and kiss her head and I tell her there’ll be more milk soon.
When he comes in from drilling winter wheat, I show her to him.
‘My milk’s dried up,’ I say. ‘I have no more milk, very little.’
‘Me mother fed me till I was four from the teat, it’ll be back. And anyway . . .’
‘No,’ I interrupt him, my voice firmer. ‘She needs much more than I have, Lenn. She needs some formula, special baby powder we can make into milk. She needs a bottle now, I can’t feed her. I haven’t got what she needs.’
‘You bother me with this right when I’m back in off fields, on a day like this? Where’s me tea?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Better be.’
He washes himself and then he shields the keyboard from my vision and he enters his password and he watches the tapes. Most of it in fast-forward mode as always. Tapes of me washing the windows this morning, me making his bed, bleaching the sink, me feeding Huong in the small bedroom and reading Kim-Ly’s letters, me rushing to the toilet between desperate, failing feeds, my child screaming at me because I’m failing her; me making his tea, me asking for baby formula to keep my child alive. I tried to get into the computer my first week here. Failed password attempt after failed password attempt. I tried Jane and Fen Farm and Gordon and Morecombe And Wise and Lenn and his date of birth. Then the screen locked me out. He took my pendant necklace for that. And when it didn’t burn he took it to the barns in the distance and he fed it to his pigs.
Lenn unbolts the half-cellar door and goes down the ladder. I hear nothing. She’s been quiet for days, resigned or dead or gagged or injured. Helpless.
He climbs back up and locks the door. He drives off to the main yard by the locked halfway gate and then he drives back and walks in with a plastic can.
