‘Gooden,’ he says. ‘We’ll watch it while bird cookin’.’
I continue to prep the food. I didn’t and don’t feel any pain whatsoever from the cut to my finger. The pills are that good. I haven’t run it under a cold tap and I haven’t held it above my head the way my father taught me and I haven’t wrapped it in kitchen roll. I’m just letting it bleed into his Christmas food.
‘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.