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

by Will Dean

  ‘Smellin’ all right, that is,’ he says, sniffing the air. ‘I’ll scrub up.’

  He goes into the bathroom.

  Not the tapes, do not look at the tapes. Do not. Please do anything but that.

  ‘I’ll just look at them tapes.’

  He sits down and switches on the computer. It whirs and beeps. The screen flashes. So, this is it? How will he do it? Do us? In what order?

  I take Huong into my arms from the plastic-wrapped sofa and she looks scared, as if she knows exactly what’s about to happen. Her lips are pursed. She’s hot and red and her eyes are twitching, not focussing on my face, looking around the room.

  Poker? Knife? I’ve thought these thoughts a hundred times before. A thousand. I cannot fight him; he’s too strong, too heavy. It’s as pointless as fighting a tidal wave or a cliff. The computer screen fills with me. And Huong. On the toilet, in the bed, making his tea in his pesticide mug. I step over to the kitchen sink. ‘There’s a wasp,’ I say. There is no wasp. I push on the window but leave the lower latch locked, I push and then ball a fist and I thump through the lower left pane of glass as if it were his forehead.

  The sound of glass breaking startles Huong.

  ‘What in the hell?’ he says, standing up. There are glass shards all over my hand, blood trickling into the white enamel sink, the sink I have scrubbed white every day for the past seven years. ‘What you doing, you daft woman?’

  Huong has tiny shards of glass on her face. Triangles. Some equilateral, others isosceles, I remember the shapes from school. I look at her perfect skin and her eyes and I can remember the internal angles. The tapes are playing on the computer and as he stands out in the garden knocking out the remaining glass, the fragments clinging to the putty surrounding the pane, I watch on the screen as Cynth and Huong and I leave this house. Lenn taps out the glass pieces with his sleeve covering his hand. He says, ‘I’d better get me tools from shed, board it up right, you can get on with cleaning up that mess on floor and don’t go spoilin’ me pie neither.’

  A stay of execution.

  He walks away and I stand in between him and the computer. When he’s gone I turn and watch the empty main room and hear him open up his shed. I look at the screen and see myself push Cynth down into the half-cellar and see him come back. I let it run on. The pie smells like it’s almost ready in the stove.

  After dinner we sit watching TV with the Rayburn door open, a square piece of plywood screwed over the window hole. The room lost a few degrees of heat in the time it took Lenn to board over the missing pane and it’s struggling to regain them.

  ‘Did you cancel your shopping trip?’ I ask, his hand on my head. He is at his most calm during this farce performance, this charade of a happy family evening, me on the floor, him in his chair, the remote balancing on his armrest.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  I sit and rock Huong to settle her and I say nothing. I know he was testing me with that quick return, that aborted shopping trip, keeping me on my toes, no privacy and no certainty, nothing of my own.

  ‘I’ll likely go tomorrow,’ he says, his fingers sliding through my hair, over my scalp like five dry snakes slithering through long grass. ‘I’ll get young Janey some pills, some more food powder, don’t fret, woman.’

  His fingers move sideways and my hairs pull in their follicles, my scalp stretching up to meet his hands. It’s uncomfortable. I say nothing, just sit there trying to keep my daughter quiet with this man, this stranger to me, twisting his fingertips into my hair.

  He feeds the pigs. Huong and I go to bed in the small back bedroom and I worry about Cynth plunged back into freezing blackness down there, bent double once again, the sweetness grasped away from her after she’d only just reached out for it.

  Huong coughs and wheezes. She has a bad night. I feed her and rock her and soothe her and tell her that one day she’ll be in a circle, a circle of family members and friends and neighbours, and she will not be coughing. She will not be cold or scared or hungry and she will not need to look out for her mother because I will be fine.

  The next morning he takes his tools to coppice more willow.

  It’s a bright day: chemtrails clear in the blue sky like God’s own noughts and crosses. I feed Huong and I feed myself. She’s still hot. Still less responsive than usual. With the camera watching me from the corner I heat sugar in his mother’s saucepan with some water and then I pour it into a clean bottle and I walk over to Huong on the sofa. With my back to the camera I tap the floor and pick up my child. There’s scratching underneath me. Weak scratching. I find the gap between the floorboards, a split as wide as a piece of paper, maybe a sheet of cardboard, and pretend to feed Huong and then the teat falls off the bottle and the warm sugar water pours down onto the floorboards. Some drains through the gap. Most of it pools on the wood and I have to help it down with my hand.

  ‘Silly me,’ I say, as if to Huong. ‘Clumsy me.’

  It’s getting down to her, I think. A bottle full of sugar-water. Might make her sick. Might not get to her at all. There’s no noise from down there, nothing. No slurping or smacking of lips, no scratching. The sweet liquid’s all gone. It’s all down there.

  ‘God bless you,’ she says. ‘I’m ready now.’

  ‘Wait,’ I say.

  When Lenn returns I give him his pre-sliced ham and pre-sliced cheese sandwich and his packet of ready salted crisps.

  ‘I’m off to shop in a bit, but if traffic busy and snarled up near bridge I’ll come straight back here and do it tomorrow.’

  He looks at me.

  ‘OK,’ I say. Must not urge him, must not.

  I have two full bottles ready, hot ones. The blankets are tucked under the sofa. I have the remnants of my sandwiches, not so much that he’d notice, not so little so it wouldn’t help Cynth. These are sugared too. She’ll need a boost to her energy if we’re to get all the way to the road and this is the best way I can think how.

  He puts on his coat.

  He pulls on one of his boots. Then the other. Tightens the laces.

  ‘What’s that pill you talked about, the one for little Jane. For her hotness?’

  ‘Paracetamol,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he says, and then he unlocks the key box and takes his Land Rover key and locks up the key box and glances at me and walks out the door.

  My heart is pounding and so is Huong’s. It’s as if she knows. Or else it’s her sickness intensifying. We stand at the Rayburn. Her body is too limp. She’s cold now and I want her as warm as possible before we do this, as full as possible. Lenn gets to the locked halfway gate. My ears are ringing at the thought of what we will do. I see him start the engine, grey smoke pumping out of the back of it and freezing into low puffs of fog near the ground. He puts his lights on. He drives off up the track.

  I hobble through to the half-cellar door as fast as I can and unbolt it and she’s right there waiting this time, her eyes glowing in the murk.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, as she climbs out.

  ‘Hold her for a second,’ I say, passing Huong to her. It feels wrong giving her away. Huong screams and scratches out with her hands. I reach under the sofa and take the blankets, and stick both bottles down into my pinny.

  Cynth has more red on her cheeks now and she’s wiped herself with something, some water or spittle; she looks cleaner this time. She takes Huong to the Rayburn and speaks to her and strikes a match against the Swan Vestas box – it’s almost empty now – and tries to calm her with the bright flame, but my daughter will not be calmed.

  I take Huong and we step outside into the cold November air.

  ‘No,’ says Cynth, pointing up the track towards the locked halfway gate. ‘This won’t work.’

  Chapter 25

  I tug Cynth’s sleeve.

  ‘We have to go,’ I say. ‘I don’t know how long he’ll be, we have to leave now.’

  She shakes me off and walks with her back bent over, around the corner of th
e house. Filthy. She scans the horizon while I follow her, rocking Huong in my arms.

  ‘We have to go . . .’

  ‘There’s a B road that way,’ she says, interrupting me, pointing in the opposite direction to the track and the locked halfway gate. ‘Less traffic but we’ll have a better chance.’

  I hobble to her. I look into the nothingness which is that direction. The vastness. The uninterrupted distance. Hope is the other way: food and the Spar shop and the village and every car I’ve ever seen here comes from the other way. I’ve dreamt of escaping in the other direction. That’s the way out.

  ‘It’s too far,’ I say. ‘Cynth, the road that way is too far, the lorries are smaller than on the main road, I can’t make it.’

  She looks back to the locked halfway gate and the yard. She looks at my ankle.

  ‘If we leave up that track he’ll intercept us,’ she says. ‘Or he’ll find us on the side of the road when he drives back. We should walk back there, to that pig barn. That’s about halfway, that’s our resting stop. If he comes back from the shops and we’ve made it out that far then we’ve still got a chance. He won’t know we’re there, he won’t expect it. He’ll go up the track as normal, looking for us.’

  She’s shivering as she tells me this. Her cheeks are curved inwards and her red hair, her matted red hair, is shiny with grease in the clear winter light.

  ‘If we make it that far, to the pig barn, and he comes home,’ she says, ‘then maybe you and the baby can hide and I can run for it, run to that side road and get help, flag down a car. Call the police. He’ll think we went the other way. This is our best chance.’

  I look towards hope, towards the road I arrived on, and then I look at the endless flatlands she’s gazing at. She sees hope there. I see endless fields he’s planted, he’s tended, sloping down towards the sea, nothing good in that direction, the only thing that comes from that way is weather.

  ‘You’re sure?’ I say.

  She nods and puts her arm around me for support and I take the weight off my bent ankle.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says.

  We walk along the gravel and try to avoid making footprints. We pass the dead eel, rotting, its skeleton like some prehistoric fossil, and we pass the ash pile, the resting place of my belongings, and then we skirt the edge of the closest field. It’s stubble now, tiny remnants of wheat, and they crunch under my size eleven sandals. We’ve been walking for ten minutes and my feet are already frozen, but it helps with the pain, it numbs me. Each footfall feels like stepping on upturned drinking straws, the ones we used for soft drinks back home. Cynth’s shoulder pokes into my armpit and we stagger and try to keep rhythm, try to keep going. Huong’s not making a noise. She either understands what we’re doing or else she’s even more sick that I feared.

  At the end of the first field we cross a small ditch and step over a stile and the next field is larger. Ploughed. The ridges are frozen and sparkling, each piece of dirt fixed in time and space, the surface so uneven we almost fall every few paces. We stay to the edge of the field but he’s ploughed close to the ditch.

  Her wrists are covered in scratches or cuts.

  I look back at the farm cottage. I’ve never seen it from this distance, from this direction. The bathroom extension looks like my ankle: sub-standard, the wrong angle, affixed crudely onto one side.

  ‘Keep going,’ says Cynth. ‘Keep it up. You’re doing really well.’

  But it is she who is doing well. She is a buckled skeleton haunting these November fields, her eyes red from the light, her bent frame so slight beside mine.

  I give her a sweet from my pocket, one of the three I removed from the walls this morning. She grabs it from me and I hear it rattle around her yellow teeth and we seem to walk faster for a while.

  A pair of pheasants, a cock and a hen, a couple, fly out of a low hedge and land halfway up the field. Towards the cottage, towards the pencil line of willow smoke rising from the Rayburn stove. They’re going the wrong way.

  Huong moves about inside my coat, his mother’s coat. And then she screams. I stop and Cynth stops and I try to comfort her, rock her, speak to her. I tell her we’re doing OK, and tell her to stay strong. But she wails and then she starts to bark again. Wheezing. I pull the bottle from my pocket, lukewarm now, and give her a one-minute feed, Cynth looking anxious in my peripheral vision, scanning the horizon, keeping watch, staring at the track and the locked halfway gate. I withdraw the teat and Huong grasps for it and I tell her, ‘Later, more later,’ and she screams all the more loudly. I push her into my chest and shush her and we set off again.

  ‘Is it too far?’ I say, more to myself than to Cynth.

  ‘No, we’re almost halfway to the pig barn,’ she says. ‘The worst part is over. Let’s keep up this rhythm.’

  My breath is making clouds in the air. We pass through into another field, grain sprinkled on the earth. Weeds lie withered in the tractor tyre grooves that tessellate each field with shallow tracks. There’s a patch of wet land we try to skirt, but my sandals get muddy and suddenly each step is a trial. I scrape my sandal on the ground but the mud is glue and my good foot weighs almost as much as my bad one.

  George and Lennie and a mouse. Thanh and Cynth and a perfect angel.

  There’s an elevation in this field, maybe three feet above the general flatland level, perhaps six feet above sea level. When we crest it and cross a hedge, we see the dyke. Cynth says nothing and I say nothing and we just keep walking. But we’re both looking up and down its length, looking for a crossing point, a bridge or a narrowing. And there are none. None to help us anyway. The two I can see are miles away, maybe four miles away in either direction.

  ‘How are we . . .’

  ‘We just will,’ she says.

  ‘Can you swim?’ I say.

  ‘Can you?’ she says. ‘It won’t be deep. We’ll wade through.’

  I look back and the cottage is tiny now, a pale line of grey smoke rising up from the chimney, rising vertically for a while and then diagonally, up to the clouds and the huge open skies. It’s too far to go back. We have reached that point, my sandals caked with heavy mud, Huong furious at my chest, where we are stranded in between two hells.

  ‘Can we stop for five minutes?’ I ask. ‘She needs a feed. I have a sandwich for you.’

  Cynth is panting. I have no idea how she goes on, how she finds the reserves to do this after her months bent double underground. Her elbows are sharp as razors and I can see bare patches of scalp where her red hair has either fallen out or else been pulled out in clumps.

  ‘We’ll stop at the barn,’ she says. ‘If we stop now we won’t make it, we’ll stop when we get to the pig barn. Give me the sandwich. You try to feed her as we walk.’

  I hand her the pre-sliced cheese and pre-sliced ham sandwich and I take a sweet for myself and I try to feed Huong. It’s a struggle. With every hobble we take, a farce of a pathetic three-legged race with no other competitors, completed on the surface of some hostile planet, the bottle slips from her mouth or I almost fall. Her nose is running constantly and her breaths are turning shallow. My bad ankle is muddied and the bones inside are scraping together. I have no more horse pills. None.

  I’m preparing myself for the water. The ice? How do you cross a dyke with a baby and a twisted, mangled ankle, in November, in men’s size eleven sandals? How?

  But Huong manages the whole bottle and then she falls asleep, the rocking of our endless footsteps and missteps sending her off into a peaceful doze, a sleep of freedom and hope and family and joy. Dreams. But it could be too deep a sleep. It could be. I have an urge to wake her. To check her. Cynth has finished her sandwich and we’re walking faster now, getting closer to the barn, the width of the dyke seeming to grow with every footstep. A hare bursts from the low hedgerow and sprints across this rough set-aside field like it could go three times as fast if it chose to. What does this look like? The three of us dragging ourselves, each other, through the mud, sk
irting the edges of these vast featureless fields, his fields, and that hare just deciding to leave and then leaving. How does that look?

  Cynth stumbles on a ridge of stiff earth and brings me down with her. I see the barn twist as I fall. Our legs get tangled and I fall on my right ankle and nothing cracks, but the joint bends under me like chilled pork jelly. When I straighten up, the shards of bone in the joint, if you can even call it that, scrape each other, and pain flares up and I throw my head back. Squinting, gurning, I feel Huong wake up. The agony. I cannot go on. I am broken.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Cynth. ‘It’s my fault, I’m so sorry.’

  I can’t talk right now. I focus everything on not blacking out, on gritting myself to keep conscious. My teeth are clenched, my nostrils flared, I have no tears to offer this fresh agony.

  A plane passes overhead. I look up and watch it pass silently through a small cloud and out the other side. Calm and steady. Full of people going about their normal lives. I must remember that: there are people up there in that plane going from one place to another, hundreds of people most likely, and I could be one of them one day.

  We trudge on.

  The barn is still miles away in the distance; the landscape’s tricking us, the flatness of the fields a curse, an illusion, a cruel game. But we’re coming up to the dyke. The waters are still. It’s medium-sized I’d say, fifteen feet across, maybe twelve.

  I see the clouds reflected in the unmoving dyke water and look down at my wet, mud-encrusted sandals, and I pray to the horizon to get us safely across this thing.

  Chapter 26

  Cynth helps me down the bank.

  The grass on either side of the silver-black water is dead. Bile yellow. We scramble down to the water’s edge, me on my backside for the final few feet. I’m gripping Huong so tight she yells and I bring her up to my face, the water just inches from my muddy sandals, and kiss her.