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

by Will Dean

  ‘Lenn, look at her.’

  He walks out and then walks back in with an armful of coppiced willow and drops it into the basket by the stove.

  ‘Give her cold bath after tea, that’ll fix it.’

  Maybe he’s right? How do I know? This is what grandmothers and neighbours are for, and doctors, nurses, wise local women who have seen these things a hundred times before.

  She settles a little and we eat. There’s scratching from immediately beneath me and I talk louder than usual to cover the sound of it. And then when my volume is too suspicious I pinch Huong on the fat part of her leg so she starts crying to cover up the scratching because no good can come of him getting more agitated than he already is. If I need a doctor or some medicine for her, he’ll need to be kept happy.

  ‘Why don’t you run nice hot bath and I’ll take youngen.’

  ‘She’s not well, Lenn.’

  ‘Just needs her father more than likely, you run hot bath and I’ll tend to her.’

  I bathe as quickly as I can, my ears attuned to any noise in the main room. When I get out, a towel around my head, she’s asleep in his arms.

  He winks at me and I take her from him.

  ‘Nothin’ on box tonight,’ he says. ‘Best turn in, night like this. I’ll feed pigs in morning.’

  We go upstairs, him helping me up each step, me cradling Huong from every lurch so she can get some sleep to fight whatever sickness she has. Whatever infection or virus. She’s sweating. Red. As hot as a roast chicken in my arms.

  ‘Put her down in there, she’ll be all right.’

  I place her down on the single bed in the back bedroom and she’s wheezing in her sleep. Restless. Her tiny heart is racing. I surround her with pillows and he passes me the folded sheet and the small towel and says he’ll be back up in a minute.

  From space right now, looking down, you’d see a small rooftop with a smoky chimney sitting at the centre of a huge flat series of fields interconnected with tracks and low hedges and dykes. There might be a thin crust of ice atop the still dyke waters. A glass lid. The land is white. From space right now, looking down through the layers of atmosphere, you’d see a roof and then a mother and her child, wheezing, overheating, and then a man washing himself in the bathroom he built, and then another woman barely existing underneath it all in the cold and the dark.

  I pull off my nightie, his mother’s nightie. I place the folded towel on the other side of his bed and lie down and I half cover myself with the sheet.

  This is the worst.

  I will him to speed up and to never, ever, ever try to give me pleasure. I implore him. It will never happen, I will not allow it, not at all. Idiot. Imposter. Base creature. He is over me, his face clear through the fine cotton sheet. She wakes up. I lurch upright, my weakened stomach muscles tightening, my spine responding to her gasps, and he pushes me back down softly.

  She coughs but it’s barking really, some sick little dog. She’s fighting for breath and she coughs and my eyes are tears, wet on the sheet. He’s still being slow. I will a heart attack on him, some vein collapsing, some arterial blockage swooping to his brain, a stroke, a catastrophic haemorrhage. But he keeps on. She sobs in the other room, twenty feet from me, alone. He moves away and I get up and throw the sheet on the floor, him behind me curled up with that towel in the foetal position, and I pick her up and hold her to my mouth and look at her and stroke her neck. She’s breathing, but she sounds like she’s full of mucus, something wrong with her tubes. I rub her back and her eyes roll in their sockets. Oh, no. No, please, Huong, no. I walk around the small back bedroom and I want to slam the door shut so it’s just her and me in here but that’s against his rules. I cannot do a single thing that might set him off.

  I take her into the bed. I cover us both with sheets and blankets because the air up here is cold and it is heavy. I take the bottle I prepared earlier. It’s lukewarm now, the temperature of the blood inside my body. I offer her the formula and she shuns it. I take her to my breast for warmth and then I give her the bottle and she drinks a little, coughing and spluttering against my skin.

  He’s there in the doorway.

  ‘You get cleaned up downstairs and I’ll have a good look at youngen, case she needs doctor from down village.’

  OK. That’s progress. I will do as he says if there’s hope. I hand her to him, me shrouded in the sheet from the small bedroom, her shrouded in a moth-eaten blanket. I go down and wash and pray to the horizon that he might take her to a qualified doctor or buy her some baby medicine at a pharmacy in the large town past the bridge, or from the Tesco where he bought the two bottles and baby formula.

  I go upstairs.

  He’s in the main bedroom with her, sitting on the edge of the bed, her cradled in his arms. She looks content there.

  He looks up at me.

  ‘Don’t reckon she looks like a Mary, this youngen, wrong face for a Mary, what do you reckon?’ He touches the tip of her nose. ‘Ain’t no Mary like I’ve seen in me life, this one. Reckon we got her name wrong with this youngen.’

  Huong wheezes and coughs and looks over at me, her eyes half closed.

  ‘Reckon we’ll call her Janey from now on, what do you say, eh? Looks like a little Janey this one, reckon she’s a Janey through and through.’

  Chapter 23

  I wake every hour or so through the night. Each time Huong moves or coughs or cries out I’m awake in two blinks; alert and ready for her. Despite the horse pills. I’m drugged, but I think I’m alert. At least I hope I am. And now the light is returning to the fields, about an hour from proper sunrise I’d say, and I am utterly exhausted.

  She’s not hot. In the night she went from fever to chills, shivering, her shoulders shaking. If she’d had teeth they would have chattered. But now the fever seems to have passed, or reduced. I wish we had a thermometer in the house, some means by which I could judge her health. I don’t know her weight or her height or her blood type. I feel it all, I know it inside myself, but the numbers would be reassuring. Like a passport or birth certificate. And I yearn for her to be seen by my parents. For my mother to rock her in her arms and my father to place his finger in her tiny palm. It’d make it all more permanent, safer.

  He’s up early to feed the pigs and by the time he gets back we’re downstairs and she’s asleep in double blankets on the sofa, still wheezing. Has the damp from this place caught in her chest? Is this tuberculosis? Some virus that other babies are now vaccinated against?

  ‘Ain’t a whole bowlful left in packet,’ he says, shaking the box of corn flakes.

  I shrug. Tired. Defeated.

  ‘Don’t reckon there is. Most of it’s dust. I’ll take it down.’

  He unbolts the door to the half-cellar. No voices, no scratches. A chill sour wind rises up and sweeps around the walls, and Huong coughs on the plastic-wrapped sofa and a line of saliva joins her lips to the plastic. The stove chimney roars in the wall. He comes straight back up and bolts the door. Must have left the cornflakes box on the ladder down.

  ‘I’m used to the name Mary,’ I say. ‘I’ve been calling her Mary for months now, she’s our Mary.’

  Please. Please never call her the other name again. That is not her. Do not continue this hideous purgatory. It ends with me.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘She’s Janey now, best get used to it. She looks like a Jane to me, like. She’s a Janey, that youngen, just have to look at her to know it.’

  I grip the steel rail of the Rayburn stove to keep my composure. I squeeze it in my palms until my knuckles feel tight in their sockets. She is no such thing.

  ‘Maybe go down village later, maybe Spar or even biggun up past bridge. Need to be careful out and about, Frank reckons. Janey got much food left, has she?’

  ‘One tub left.’

  ‘All right then.’

  He leaves and I take Huong down to the floor. She’s so unspeakably pale. More pale than I have ever seen her. Chalk white. I unpin
her nappy. Something’s stuck so I fiddle with the blunt safety pin, his mother’s, and then the nappy stains red and it’s her blood on my fingers. I turn her gently and I see the pinprick. I did this? I pinned her own nappy through her skin? How? When? Last night? She didn’t scream when I pinned her? I dab the blood with the old nappy cloth. Must have been just before sunrise. Her last change. Or the waking before that, pitch black, the dead of night. How alert am I in the darkness? With these pills in my system? How many times did I change her last night? I wounded my own sick child and she didn’t have the energy to cry out.

  I bring her to my face and touch my cheek to hers and she is cold. I scoot on my backside to the Rayburn and I can’t lean against it, it’s too hot, but I sit close to it, my back against the rear of his armchair. She didn’t cry out? With a pin stuck through her?

  Scratching noises.

  I move my bad leg, my mangled ankle, and slip down until I’m lying on the floorboards. I turn my face to the heat.

  More scratching, directly beneath me.

  ‘Cynth?’ I whisper.

  She’s starts to cry down there.

  ‘You know my name,’ she says.

  I start to cry as well, my tears falling to the dry wood I scrubbed yesterday.

  ‘I can’t pass you things, he’s closed the hole.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I want nothing. Just waiting. Not long, now.’

  ‘No,’ I say, Huong warming up in my arms, wheezing, her heart racing. ‘You must stay with me.’

  ‘I’m not with you,’ she says. ‘I am not with anyone. I am underneath you all.’

  ‘He met Frank Trussock at the halfway gate,’ I say. He didn’t, but I did dream it, a warning from Frank that the police are about to raid the house and take us somewhere safe. ‘People are coming. You just have to wait a little longer.’

  ‘No one’s coming, Jane.’

  And then my eyes widen and I look up to the light of the window. The tone of her voice has changed. She sounds calm. It’s as if her spirit is dying right at this moment.

  ‘Cynth,’ I say. ‘You there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I swallow.

  ‘Let’s leave, the three of us. Let’s make it out.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t do it. I’m too weak.’

  ‘My baby,’ I say, my head turned to her, the floorboards in between our lips, my tears falling to the wood fibres and dust, ‘She’s getting sick. And he has plans for her. He’s getting desperate, I can feel it. He knows they’re out there searching for you. He’s like a rat backed up in a corner. We can’t wait. Cynth, I cannot let you stay down there any longer. There is no option.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘You go. I am too weak. You don’t know.’

  I turn my face and Huong is looking at me with great intensity, her eyes large and clear now. And there are birds at the window, birds lined up on the telegraph wire outside, a dozen or more crows. One flies away. They all fly away.

  ‘Next time he goes to town,’ I say. ‘The three of us. You and I can support each other and we’ll need to move fast. I know the way. We can get out together.’

  ‘Leave me here,’ she says.

  ‘You do not understand,’ I say. ‘I can’t leave without you, I cannot walk. And my baby cannot leave without me. If you stay we all stay.’

  There’s a spit in the fire box and the chimney roars up by the roof.

  Huong and I both look down at the floor, waiting.

  ‘I’ll try,’ she says.

  Lenn gets back for his sandwich. Get out of this godforsaken cottage, you demon. Leave us.

  ‘Dead eel up side of dyke up by pigs, saw it coming back here, stiff as a pipe.’

  Leave us.

  ‘Gonna stick it in nettle patch. Ain’t a snake, just a fat eel. Leave it be. And anyone comes ’round here you get yourself upstairs and don’t make a whisper. I got Frank Trussock keeping an eye out, I ain’t daft. Any bother and I’ll put you out with pigs for a night or two, see how you like it out there by marshes.’

  I nod.

  ‘How’s Janey feeling? You lookin’ after her proper?’

  ‘She’s sick,’ I say, my back rigid. ‘Please buy medicine. Infant paracetamol. To reduce the fever.’

  He sticks out his bottom lip and looks at her and takes his coat and takes the keys to his Land Rover from the locked key box by the front door.

  ‘Have me pie ready at five,’ he says.

  Go.

  I watch his Land Rover drive away, the red lights at the back shrinking, morphing into the pinpricks of blood I left on Huong’s hip earlier today.

  The bolts.

  I look at the top bolt and then look back through the front door. I touch it and then pull back. What if he forgot something? What if he comes back? I touch the bolt again and Huong is asleep in my arms, pale, clammy. I pull on the end of the bolt. I swallow and then I push it hard. The door loosens in its frame. I look back and he is not there. The two bottles are full and hot, ready to go. I’ve had an extra half horse pill to help with the pain. He’s not coming back, the track is clear. I move the lower bolt. It’s stuck firm. I look back. Nothing. It’s safe. The coast is clear. Huong wheezes in my arms and I move my foot and my size eleven sandal strap, his sandal strap, catches on the door frame to the main room and pulls my bad foot the wrong way and my face twists and contorts with pain.

  I bite down on my tongue, the sharp front teeth bearing down, then there’s blood in my mouth. Something else to feel. I pull the lower bolt and the door swings open and the cold, damp air hits me and it hits Huong. Smells like old garbage down there. Rotten meat.

  ‘Cynth?’ I shout. ‘Are you coming? He’s gone.’

  There is nothing. Nobody.

  ‘Cynth, please. Hurry up, he’s gone to town, we don’t have long.’

  Nothing. Nobody.

  But I cannot climb down this steep wooden ladder into the half-cellar. I’d never make it back up again.

  ‘Cynth!’ I scream.

  Something moves. I see a shadow down on the floor. But, no, it’s not a shadow, it is her. Crawling. She’s blackened and her eyes are red raw.

  ‘Come up,’ I yell, Huong hot in my arms, the sweat from her head soaking into my sleeve. ‘Hurry.’

  She creeps to the lower rung and climbs up. With each step towards ground level she grows more wretched. When she’s at the top I hold Huong and I try to help her get to her feet. She is arched like a hunchback, her head down by her chest. She’s wearing the horse jodhpur trousers, but they are not beige like last time I saw them, they are brown now. Dark brown. Her red hair is black with sludge and it is matted. Her skin is both translucent and filthy at the same time.

  ‘We have to go,’ I say.

  ‘Where is he?’ she says, her voice trembling.

  ‘Gone to town,’ I say.

  She crosses herself.

  ‘But he’ll be back soon. We need to start walking.’

  She steps outside. Her frame is diminished by half. She’s a starving bird, the clothes hanging from her bones. She smells so strongly it makes my eyelids squeeze together. And yet I owe her everything.

  ‘I need food,’ she says.

  ‘Later,’ I say.’

  ‘The milk,’ she says.

  I have two bottles of formula in my pinny pocket. They’re for Huong, nobody else. But reluctantly I offer her one and she unscrews the lid and drinks half of it and then she throws it straight up.

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘Not so fast.’

  She sips from the bottle and screws on the teat and we set off towards the road. There are roads in the distance, to the left of us and to the right, but they’re too far away. We must walk up the track and get past the locked halfway gate.

  She looks at my ankle and pulls my arm around her neck. We hobble together, my twisted right ankle flopping around, Huong wrapped in all the blankets, tight under my arm.

  ‘God bless you both,’ says Cynth. ‘You saved me.’
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br />   I say nothing. We get a decent pace up, me leaning on her, it works quite well. She’s weak, I can feel the sharpness of her shoulder digging into my armpit, but she doesn’t complain.

  The air is cold and crisp.

  ‘My house is twelve miles from here,’ she says, gasping, spitting on the ground. ‘All this time, my house is just over there.’ She looks into the distance. ‘I can almost see it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I say.

  There are lights ahead, tiny white pinpricks.

  ‘It’s a car, it could be help,’ says Cynth. ‘A search party.’

  ‘It’s him,’ I say, turning us around. ‘Quick. We have to go. Run.’

  We hobble faster, no need to conserve energy. We run. We make it back to the cottage and I push her inside and look back and he’s there at the locked halfway gate. Did he see us? From back there could he see her with me?

  I push her towards the half-cellar door.

  ‘No,’ she pleads, her hands fixed on the frame. ‘Let me talk to him.’

  ‘We’ll try again tomorrow,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I can’t go back down there.’

  I look back through the front door window and he’s there, he’s twenty feet away. I push her, but she’s so weak she offers no resistance. I close the door and bolt the top and she sobs on the other side, and then I bolt the bottom and he walks inside.

  Chapter 24

  Can he sense how fast my heart is beating, how hard it’s banging against my ribs? Does he know that we left this place?

  I’m behind schedule for his dinner because I didn’t expect to ever be cooking it. Chicken pie. I make a hash of it, some ugly pie-like thing in his mother’s pie tin, and throw it in the Rayburn and fill the fire box with willow and open the vents and urge the meal to cook.

  He comes back inside and takes off his coat. He hasn’t been down to the half-cellar since we . . . I can’t even say it in my head. It’s too desperate, how close we were, how cruel things have turned out with her back down there and me and Huong still up here and me boiling potatoes for him in his mother’s pan on the hotplate.