Chapter 7
I missed Valentine’s Day.
In years gone by I would glance at the Massey Ferguson flip calendar on the wall, the one next to the kitchen-sink window, the one I hang up on the same brass drawing pin each January. If I removed that calendar right now I’d find seven holes. They’d look like bullet holes on some minuscule firing range, all close together, a cluster marking how long I’ve been here, how long I’ve been attaching his farming calendars to his wall. But now I chart time differently. It’s nothing to do with him, nothing he’s part of. My diary, my calendar, my watch: it’s all inside my body.
I’m starting to show.
I’m not having any particular issues with my back or my clothes, her clothes. But I can feel it. Him, her, it. I don’t trust it, but I do love it. How did that happen? From hatred and fear to love. Already. I think of this tiny thing often, all the time, every waking hour. I hated it for a while and then, all of a sudden, I accepted it.
This baby will be mine, not his.
‘Get kettle on. I’m freezin’ me hands off out there.’
I take the cast-iron kettle from the Rayburn and fill it from the tap and open the lid to the hotplate and place it down. The drips on the bottom hiss and roll around the hot surface and then they’re gone.
Lenn’s covered in paint. He’s wearing his new overalls, got them from the farm supplies catalogue, the one I still read when I can get access to it away from a camera, hungry for new information, new language, new images. The Argos catalogue served me well for years. It taught me so much. I found comfort in its pages, its index, its photographs, in the subtle differences between the thousands of products. But that was before.
‘Old plough’s about had it,’ he says, staring out of the window towards the track and the locked halfway gate and the road beyond. ‘Maybe get another year out of it if we’re lucky.’
I give him his pesticide mug of sweet beige tea.
‘You want me to tidy your tool shed?’ I ask. ‘I’m done in here.’
He looks at me and looks down at my belly. ‘Don’t hide nothin’ in there or play daft games, don’t move nothin’.’
I nod and he hands me his empty mug, blue paint bordering his nails and his bloodied cuticles.
Since Christmas I’ve thought about the woman who visited, the one who wanted a field for her horse. I try to remember her name but I just can’t. My brain is addled. Soft. Imprecise. She had red hair and she smiled with all of her features, I remember that.
Last night Lenn told me about his caravan holidays, the ones he had as a child with his mother. He tells me about them more often since he found out about the baby. Not in any great detail, no sentimentality, just where they went and for how long. Logistics rather than emotion. Crabbing. Candyfloss. Rock made from sugar with words running through it. I still can’t picture it but I try. Piers with arcades. Kites. I can tell they’re his favourite memories. He clings to them. Perhaps they were the days when he got away, when his mother, Jane, let him escape this bleakest of all fenland farms.
I rest my foot. It throbs and stabs me in the eyes with its pain, but I need to rest it and the pills are starting to fail me. I want more. Full pills, the whole thing, no ends chipped off. My body craves them, but I think the baby does as well. We need more. It’ll mess up my system in other ways, I know that, but I want more medication. And, also, I don’t. Because the more I take the more I need him and the more he can do whatever he wants to me and the greater risk there will be to the baby and, most terrifying of all, the more I’ll resist ever trying to leave. Or rather, the less energy I’ll devote to fixing something smart, a plan where my sister is safe and I get to leave this place once and for all. But I can hardly sew a button or set the washing machine these days, my brain’s so muddy. I went a whole week last month without thinking one proper complete thought.
I get up and go outside.
It’s the only respite I get from his cameras. There is no back bedroom time any more, only him on one side of that damn sheet and me underneath it. Night after night.
The day is clear and the sky is as blue as glacial meltwater. He’s painting the sprayer now up by the locked halfway gate. I hobble around the outside of the house, my hand on the wall to keep my weight off my ankle. The ground’s hard now. Dead grass and no insects. The spires are there like upturned nails on the edge of the world, each one a signal, a symbol, a finger pointing out and saying ‘I’m here, come to safety’, and I see them every day and I can’t reach them. One would be infuriating, but being able to see seven separate parish churches is some kind of mean-spirited joke.
I reach out and let my fingertip follow the curved smooth edge of a yellow hard-boiled sweet. It might crack in the cold nights, but so far it’s all right. I’ve been hiding more since Christmas, since I told Lenn about the baby. I might need them. The sugar might come in useful for the gruelling days to come.
His shed is already tidy, old wooden tools hanging from their hooks, a bucket of oily sand ready and waiting in the corner for rinsed spades and forks to be dipped into, the jagged crystals cleaning them back to pure steel, the oil coating them until the next use. Lenn takes care of his tools.
The bolt cutters are here. Always here. Reminding me. They lie horizontally at the end wall resting on two six-inch nails. They taunt me. There is no handcuff keeping me here, there is no manacle locked around my ankle. And yet I am imprisoned.
I sweep the floor with his brush, pushing wood shavings out into the cold, dry air. The fringe of grass poking in from outside is yellow. I pull out my book from my pinny, his mother’s pinny, and read. It’s the section where Lennie hides a mouse in his pocket. A dead mouse. It’s the part where George discovers it and takes it from him. I reach down and place a hand on my bump. It’s hard. The baby doesn’t move. Maybe that will come later. But I worry the baby doesn’t move because of the drugs, and living here, the wretched food he buys from the Spar shop in the village, the lack of nutrition, the lack of joy in my life.
Right now it’s Tết, the Vietnamese lunar New Year. My seventh here, my ninth in this country. More important for us than Christmas. A time of heat and humidity and red dragons and feasting and coming together for a few days. The Tết celebrations I experienced on the first farm were grim, but they were everything compared to this. Kim-Ly and I saved from the cash pay packet envelopes we received every Friday. We’d get what ingredients we could from a Tesco nearby on the edge of town. The second year we found mung bean purée next to the lentils and the boil-in-the-bag rice and we both cried with laughter. Delight. Relief. We cooked the dishes, less than half of what we’d have prepared back home, and shared Bánh chưng sticky rice parcels with our Polish and Romanian housemates. They enjoyed them, they really did. At the time they tasted strange and they were not good enough, but looking back from this flat fen I think of those meals as state banquets. Nine of us living in a house built for two, mattresses arranged on the floor, people sitting cross-legged, steaming bowls of food between us, cans of Coke and bottles of beer. The Poles and the Romanians were kind to us. They were fair. I haven’t had a proper drink since the day I left that first farm. Lenn’s mother didn’t drink, so neither does Lenn.