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

by Will Dean

  ‘We’re leaving that place,’ I say to her. ‘We’re leaving, my love, and I will take care of us both.’

  Cynth pokes a dead piece of wheat into the water to test the depth but it’s too flaccid and just floats on the top. She peers down.

  ‘Not deep,’ she says, sweeping her filthy hair from her face, her fingers leaving marks in the grime by her ears. She turns to me. ‘Not too deep, I don’t think.’

  I look along the dyke. It is as straight as the magnetic strip on the back of a credit card. And as shiny. It ends at the bridge, which is now our horizon, but I know it ends many, many miles away from here, towards the sea.

  ‘If I fall . . .’ I say.

  ‘You won’t fall,’ says Cynth.

  I dip my hand into the water and wash it around and the reflected sky distorts and twists and sinks to the bottom.

  The water is ice cold. It’s so still it looks like liquid metal rather than water. There are no insects buzzing around its surface like there are in summertime. No living things at all.

  We step in.

  Arm in arm, hesitantly, we nudge into the freezing water.

  The bottom is close but it is soft. It tricks us. I take a step and lose my size eleven sandal and turn and fall into the water, my arms up over my head, Huong squirming with me underneath her.

  ‘Take her,’ I say, gasping, thrashing around, spitting dirty water from my mouth.

  Cynth pulls me up and takes Huong and she screams even louder.

  ‘I can’t find it, it’s gone,’ I say.

  ‘Your sandal?’

  ‘It’s gone,’ I say, gasping for air, my teeth chattering.

  Cynth gives Huong back to me and I stand there with my bad foot resting on the silt, the weight on it excruciating, my molars grinding into each other.

  She feels around for it with her feet, shivering like some abominable bog creature.

  She shakes her head.

  We wade together, her helping my weight, Huong tight in my arm, and we move across the low, stinking dyke, the water almost up to our hips.

  It’s so unspeakably cold.

  ‘Just keep going,’ says Cynth. ‘We’re doing well.’

  I look at her and focus on not losing my footing. She’s still shivering. Her red hair is greasy and the strands have moved to reveal more bald patches. Poor Cynth. My sock is full of mud. I’m in up to my waist now, damp to my chest. Ice cold. Huong is shivering but I pull her tight to me and I breathe on the back of her neck to warm her. We splash out the other side, me with one sandal, Cynth with weeds around her ankles, and sit on the bank.

  ‘Eels,’ says Cynth, panting for breath, shuddering, wringing out her trousers. ‘Did you feel them?’

  I shake my head. What godforsaken pit is this flatland place? Why was it ever reclaimed from the seas?

  She helps me up the slope and I help her. It’s steeper this side, higher. And then we peek back towards the cottage like a soldier might have once peeked out of a trench or a hole. Nothing. The smoke is rising from the chimney and the Land Rover is not at the locked halfway gate. Lenn’s still out.

  ‘Half an hour more,’ says Cynth. ‘Then we’re at the barn, somewhere to stop, you can feed her maybe, quickly, then we’re off to the road. We’re getting there.’ She crosses herself.

  We set off, but I cannot stop shivering. I’m getting forgetful. Tired. The wind freezes my wet pinny to my legs and Huong is as heavy as a six-year-old. Cynth is driven by some invisible power, some force, pushing her, pulling her, helping her. Or maybe it’s just the things she has seen in that half-cellar, the pitiful kindnesses she heard afforded to me that she never received.

  This field is stony. I feel every step on the underside of my unclad foot, like some animal forced to walk on rough ground. Each flint shard, each hardened lump of earth digs into me, into my one good foot, the one leg I rely on to carry me and my daughter away from this fenland existence.

  But we are making progress. The barn is growing on the horizon and now I can see the lorries on the small road Cynth talked about, the white lorries at least, and the tractors. I haven’t seen a bus yet, but I’d take help from a bicycle on this day, from a pedestrian.

  Huong shivers.

  She shivers against my chest and her face is turning blue. Did she get wet from the dyke? Or is it her heavy cloth nappy, the fluid against her perfect skin freezing her minute by minute? I breathe onto her. I urge the heat out of myself and into her skin, into her blood. I want that transfer to be fast. My heat to her. When we cross the next stile I reach down for her bottle, her formula, and it is cold to the touch. How can I save her from this wind?

  We climb over the stile and Cynth pulls away and I pull her back.

  ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘She’s too cold.’

  Cynth looks at me and then down to Huong and I see the alarm in her reddened eyes. She comes to me and opens her fleece and pushes herself to me and we shelter Huong from the flatland winds like two sides of an oyster shell protecting a pearl. She blows on Huong’s face and I blow on her neck and I rub her back and then Cynth slides her hands together very fast and then rubs Huong’s legs inside her blanket. I can feel new warmth. From nothing more than two women willing it to happen: two women, strangers, friends, forcing their own warmth together to make a family of sorts out here.

  Huong is contented. She is calmer and Cynth looks less concerned, so we set off towards the pig barn, glancing over our shoulders every few strides towards the cottage and the track. The chimney smoke is faint now. Almost invisible. He’s not back. But he will be.

  My good foot gets stuck in mud and my bad foot feels like nothing.

  We skirt the edge of an oilseed rape field. It was boldest yellow in the months before Huong was born. Cynth is weakening now. It’s as if the heat she gifted my daughter was her last. She offered it up without thinking and now it is Huong’s, and Cynth is too cold to go on.

  But we do go on. There are rock fragments in the earth and my good foot can’t take much more so I pause and decide to take the sandal from my bad foot and move it over. Cynth helps me. She unbuckles the sandal and I bite down into my hand. I bite deep. She pulls off the sandal and I scratch my forehead with my nails and the feeling is back at that ankle, it is unwelcome and it is back. She tries to put my good foot, a ball of dark mud and unrealised wheat seeds, into the leather straps, but it does not work. All for nothing. She puts it back onto my misshapen foot and gently tightens the buckle and the pain is such that I lose my sight for a moment.

  The barn is right there. Breeze-block walls, a corrugated-iron roof, some loose feed sacks and rubbish strewn about the place. It’s smaller than I expected. This will be the first new building I’ll touch for seven years. The first Huong will ever touch. I look back at the cottage, at the stove where each of my possessions was burnt one by one.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ says Cynth. ‘You feed her quickly out of the wind and I’ll keep watch. We don’t have long. Then we make for the road with the barn in between us and the house, we’ll try to use the barn as our cover.’

  I nod. We keep on walking. These fields are too vast, too unhuman, they are unending tests for the three of us, hellish forevers through which we must keep on wading.

  We walk over discarded pig feed sacks and get to the wall of the barn, the solid breeze-block wall facing the cottage. We disconnect and I use the solid structure for support. There is no door this side, no way in. I hold Huong and whisper to her, ‘Soon, my love. I’ll have food for you, soon.’ I think of warming the bottle in my armpit or rubbing it with my hands to get some heat into the fluid but I’ll probably just feed her as it is. She’s hungry, she needs the comfort, the quiet ritual away from the weather, a roof over us both, me looking down at her sucking and sucking, her hand on my wrist.

  There’s a rusting pig pen railing on the side of the barn, some kind of outdoor area. We walk past it and the barn smells strongly of animal. We get to the edge of the wall and look inside and there a
re no pigs here.

  There are none.

  Chapter 27

  Cynth rests against a stack of pallets, her boots encased in dirt, and rivulets of sweat have carved paths through the grime on her face so that she looks almost engraved that way.

  I check the cottage.

  He’s not home yet.

  I go inside the barn, Huong’s bottle under my armpit. She’s agitated, tied to my body with a blanket, another shrouded around her, all inside my coat, his mother’s coat.

  It stinks of pigs in here; faeces and blood.

  The first half of the building is empty pig stalls, metal fencing separating each pen. Straw on the ground. Stainless steel feeding troughs empty of all but black and white bird droppings, piglet feeders complete with teats pointing downwards with no piglets to find them.

  The bottle’s getting warmer now. It’s not at body temperature, but it’s not chilled any more. Cynth walks around the breeze-block partition wall and I check the cottage again.

  He is not home. Yet.

  ‘Jane,’ she says.

  I feel even less like Jane out here, away from the cottage, away from the small back bedroom and the Rayburn and the locked TV cabinet and his mother’s cloths.

  I walk around to join her and the wind whistles through the gaps where the block walls meet the corrugated-iron roof.

  ‘Feed her in there if it’s open. You’ll get more shelter.’

  We step towards the caravan.

  It is decrepit. Could it be the thing he used to holiday in with his mother? In Skegness? It’s still here? Most of the windows are boarded over or taped, and its base is propped up on loose breeze blocks.

  ‘Get your baby out of the cold,’ says Cynth. ‘Out of the wind. I’ll keep watch.’

  But I’m not sure I want to go inside this caravan. His and his mother’s. I walk to it, the gusts howling now through the corrugated-iron roof, sporadic cars in the far distance, a few hours’ walk further away from the cottage, and this does not feel like a safe place. Speedy 350, it says on the side. And now I can see clearly that it’s locked up. There’s a chain securing it to the concrete barn floor.

  ‘All clear,’ says Cynth. ‘Get in, we’ll set off again in five.’

  ‘Come inside with me,’ I say.

  ‘Someone needs to keep watch,’ she says. ‘I’ll get you settled and then I’ll wait for you out there, all right?’

  ‘I think it’s locked.’

  We move in closer.

  There is a small hole in the bottom right-hand corner of the caravan door, a triangular cut-out. The chain connected to the concrete floor of this pig barn with no pigs passes through the hole.

  We look at each other and I move Huong up to the crook of my neck.

  It’s silent. Still. Nothing here.

  ‘Get her fed,’ says Cynth. ‘As quick as you can. We have to move soon. He’ll be coming back.’

  I reach for the fibreglass door and pull down the handle. It’s unlocked. Warm musty air moves onto my face.

  ‘Hello,’ says Cynth. ‘Anyone in here?’

  Nothing.

  I step up into the doorway and the caravan moves a little on its breeze-block foundations. Inside it’s abandoned. Derelict. To my right is a small kitchen area, cracked plastic sink, window covered in bubble wrap. There’s an Argos catalogue open by the tap. Page two hundred and seventeen. Electric lawn mowers.

  ‘Nobody here,’ says Cynth.

  She switches on the kettle and it lights up and we look at each other.

  I turn it off.

  ‘We have to be quick,’ I say. ‘I’m OK. Keep watch. Five minutes. Three if she drinks fast.’

  The bedroom area is two single beds separated by a narrow aisle, piles of rags and sheets and dirty blankets heaped on top of each one. I open the shower-room door. It’s mouldy but it’s clean. There is toothpaste. An old variety I’ve never seen before.

  ‘Come on, little one,’ I say, sitting down on the single bed. I pull out the bottle from under my arm. I lift it to her mouth and she takes it like she hasn’t been fed for days. She suckles and holds one cold hand to the bottle, the other to my chest, her anchor, her warmth. And then the blankets on the other bed start to move.

  I stand up and back away and Huong loses her suction on the bottle and she yells and I hobble to the door. The chain that threads through the door, the one from outside, is secured to the bed. The moving bed.

  I’ll hide. Run.

  I scoot along towards the area where the caravan is secured to the concrete floor.

  ‘Hello.’

  I stop.

  I turn around and there is a woman standing in the doorway of Lenn’s caravan. I squint, but I already know that voice. I almost drop my own daughter. Am I dreaming? Are the horse pills making me see this? Am I dead?

  ‘You came,’ she says.

  Chapter 28

  I am colder than before, cold to my bones, and Huong is quiet.

  She is standing there, her arms outstretched, the chain secured to her ankle with some kind of horrific manacle, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No. It cannot be. Not you.’

  ‘You came,’ she says. ‘I knew you’d find me.’

  I look back, but Cynth is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘How are you here?’ I say, tapping my head with my fingers. ‘It can’t be.’

  I walk to her. She moves off her step and looks down at my ankle and gasps and covers her mouth with her hands.

  ‘Thanh?’ she says.

  ‘Kim-Ly.’

  She’s wearing layers and layers of rags and blankets, her hair long down to her hips, her body wasted away to just a frame.

  I reach out my hand.

  She takes it and puts it to her hollow cheek and I collapse. My brow is furrowed with a hundred urgent questions. She falls into me, Huong between us. We fuse together into an embrace so fierce that nothing, nothing whatsoever could ever break it. My palm is pushed into her cheek, my nose in her hair, her hand at the back of my head, her face nestled into my neck, close to her baby niece.

  ‘You came,’ she says again, sobbing. ‘Oh, thank God you came.’

  I shake my head. ‘I’ve always been here,’ I point to the wall of the barn, in the direction of his cottage. ‘In the cottage over there. Leonard’s cottage.’

  ‘You knew I was here? He chained you up as well?’ she looks down at my injured ankle.

  ‘I never knew, Kim-Ly, I never ever knew. That bastard. He told me you were deported five years ago, deported from Manchester.’

  Her tears flow and flow but mine are dry.

  ‘What has he done to you?’ I say, looking back at the caravan, at the chain. ‘What has he done?’

  ‘He wanted me here,’ she says. ‘He comes in the evenings on his quad bike. He said I was better off here than home in Vietnam. I’d have no rent, flowing clean water, electricity in the caravan. I had a portable TV for three years until it broke down.’ She looks into my eyes and I see my mother in her, our mother. ‘He said you were working on a farm, a chicken farm inland. He said you were making good money, paying off your debt.’ There is spittle flying from her mouth now. ‘You weren’t?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I was here,’ I say. ‘And you were here?’

  She looks down at Huong.

  ‘Is she yours?’

  ‘She is.’

  Kim-Ly smiles. And then her smile sours.

  ‘And his?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘She is mine.’

  She nods and we let our foreheads meet with a bump, we kiss each other’s cheeks, we hold onto each other and let the rest of the world spin around us.

  ‘No sign,’ shouts Cynth, coming around the boundary wall. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, who are you?’

  Kim-Ly’s eyes are wide open, looking at Cynth, looking at me, panicked.

  ‘She’s a friend, Kim-Ly,’ I say. ‘Cynth is a friend. She’s helping me.’

  ‘Do you know eac
h other?’ asks Cynth, walking to us, eyeing up the chain bolted to the ground, the other end tight around Kim-Ly’s ankle.

  ‘This . . .’ I say, and then my tears come. I touch her hair. ‘This is my sister. My baby sister.’

  ‘He did this to you?’ asks Cynth, pointing at the chain.

  Kim-Ly nods.

  ‘We have to go,’ says Cynth. ‘We mustn’t wait any longer. We have to move right now. He’s on his way back.’

  ‘We can’t,’ I say.

  ‘He’ll be back soon,’ says Cynth, her eyes ablaze. ‘You know he will be. Look what he does to people,’ she screams. ‘Look,’ she points to Kim-Ly’s ankle.

  ‘I’ll feed Huong first,’ I say. ‘Then we’ll all go together.’

  My sister looks at me and looks at Cynth and then she holds up the chain attached to her ankle.

  ‘Please,’ she says to both of us, her chain in her hand. ‘Take me with you.’

  Chapter 29

  Cynth takes a loose breeze block and cracks the chain close to where it disappears into the concrete floor. The block chips and Cynth squints as the fragments fly up towards her eyes. The thick metal loops clank and chime with each impact and then the breeze block splits into two pieces.

  ‘I have tried it,’ says Kim-Ly. ‘I’ve tried everything possible.’

  ‘I’ll look for something,’ says Cynth.

  I watch her run out of the barn and look back over the flat fields towards the cottage and the half-cellar below. She looks back at me as if to say, he’s not coming back yet, but soon.

  Kim-Ly and Huong and I climb into the caravan. It smells of bacon fat. My sister looks down at my ankle.

  ‘Him?’

  I nod.

  ‘Evil,’ she says. ‘Devil man.’

  ‘I have to feed her now,’ I say. But Huong does not take the bottle. She is agitated, keen to take in her new surroundings, her bright eyes focussed on her aunt.

  ‘She looks like you,’ says Kim-Ly.

  ‘She looks like you,’ I say.

  My sister offers me two small blankets and I wrap Huong in them until all I can see are her cheeks and her eyes and a little of her hair.

  There is beating outside and through the Perspex window we can see Cynth bashing the chain desperately, swinging a shovel and hitting the heavy metal links over and over again like a coal miner deep below the earth. Her strength is immense. I have no idea where it comes from or how she manages to keep going. There are sparks. But she does not succeed; she throws down the shovel and runs off to find something else.