Off towards the sea, past the dyke, there’s nothing else except his pigs and the marshes. I take some scraps from the bin, some potato peelings, sausage gristle I couldn’t chew through, some out-of-date pre-sliced Spar shop ham from the fridge. I load it all into the scraps bucket and hand it over to him.
‘Make up fire for when I get back in, it’s raw out and the clouds lookin’ mardy.’
I wash up and listen for the front door.
That’s it.
The noise of the bolt.
Blessed relief. I breathe out and wait, scouring pad in hand, and then he’s there at the back field on his quad, a monster riding away on four wheels, riding off towards the pigs, his brethren. I wish upon him a heart attack and a bad fall, perhaps into the dyke, drowning, the quad on top, and a lightning strike. But nothing ever happens to him, no consequence. He’s as solid and as basic as a concrete wall. The times I’ve begged to all the gods, to the horizon, to the four spires I can see to the north on a clear day and the three to the south, to the wind turbines, for some retribution to be brought, some penalty, and yet he thrives on.
The tapes are rolling. They’re always rolling. If I move they start recording, that’s how he installed them. Leonard’s quite handy with electrics and plumbing. And he may come back. He says he’s off to feed the pigs, those royal animals luxuriating on their throne of filth, unaware of their relative freedom, but he could just as well race back in five minutes. To surprise me. To check up on me. To control his small world and keep things exactly as he likes them.
My three things are still in my pinny, his mother’s pinny. With my back to the camera I remove Of Mice and Men and prop it on the windowsill and read as I pretend to wash up. Comforting words. Hope. My eyes flick over the pages. I know all the text off by heart. I glance up to the window and back, always checking. I think about George and Lennie’s alfalfa patch, their rabbits, their dream, their escape, and I think of my sister, Kim-Ly. All of my potential futures are now invested in her one actual future. I will escape this place through her spirit and live on through her.
We arrived here together.
Nine years ago, and back then it was the rosiest thing that we could ever have imagined. It was sold to us well, the idea that we would travel to the United Kingdom to work good jobs – ten times Vietnamese wages – and be able to send money back to our family. The two of us could work and it would be hard but we’d always have each other, wouldn’t we? The two men who came to our house were professionals. They had business cards and one had a leather briefcase. The boss smiled at my mother and shook my father’s hand. They drank our tea. Those men sat and cast their spell and fed us their despicable lies. They sold us an impossible dream and they sold it very well, that alfalfa rabbit patch, that chance to look after the parents whose images will be burnt on the Rayburn stove in this place later tonight.
His Rayburn stove.
If it’s in this house or on this land and it’s not his then it’s hers, his mother’s, and that’s almost worse because she gave birth to him, she reared him, she created him.
I take the book back into my threadbare pinny, the grey light from the window dwindling, the autumn mists rolling in off the salt marshes that are beyond my vision but that he tells me are out there after the pig barn and the copse wood. I smell the salt on the air some nights. I taste it. Something from far away. From beyond his influence. I turn my back on his pigs and on him and look at this pitiful downstairs room. Rayburn to my left, the heater of us and our food and our water, our oven and our hob, our light and our comfort, the heart of this rotten home. And then the small pine table with two pine chairs and the armchair next to the Rayburn, the shape of him preserved in the cushion for all eternity. And then the locked TV cupboard, and then the sofa with the plastic dust cover. Aside from the entrance hall and the stairs up and the lean-to bathroom out the back, that’s it, that’s all there is down here.
I drag myself through the door and step down into the bathroom. It’s damp back here, always. And cold. The floor has a chill alien to the land outside; it’s frost-cold for six months of the year and wet to the touch. He built the room himself in his forties, eight years ago, after his first wife died. I don’t close the door because that’s a rule.
At least tomorrow I get a hot bath. Scalding hot, water heated from the back boiler behind the Rayburn stove, red hot, kettle hot. I take it just as close to boiling as I can stand. Burn me, numb my brain stem, help me take away these feelings. The downside is what will happen afterwards.
The cold of this room, the damp of it. My sister and I arrived in Liverpool in a shipping container nine years ago. It was the coldest time of my life. From the heat of Saigon to that icy metal box. Seventeen of us hiding behind packages and crates. Crammed together behind a fake partition. Blankets and water bottles. Buckets. Me clinging to my sister and to the backpack I had with me. The photos of my parents. Sixteen of us made it to Liverpool and I sometimes wish, I often wish, that I had been the seventeenth.
I pull myself upstairs, heaving my weight with my arms, clinging to the banister like I’m fighting in a tug-of-war, creeping up one bare step at a time. I need the second half of that pill, my ankle’s screaming out for it. I’ve only passed out once in my life from pain and that was the day this happened to my ankle.
There are two bedrooms in this place, his place. His room, which he calls our room, faces the front, towards the track I failed to walk out from today, and the locked halfway gate and the silos and barns and yards and old ploughs. There’s a storage heater and a wardrobe and a double bed. The other, smaller bedroom, the back bedroom, is my room one week out of every four.
For those six days, more or less, I get to sleep on my own. He will not tolerate me in his front bedroom. These are the days I live for, the nights I get to sleep in my own space and dream my own dreams. These are the days when I can almost exist.
But I have to keep the back bedroom door open at all times. That’s another rule.
Always open. And he’s pushed the single bed up against the wall so he can watch me from the landing or from his front bedroom. He wanders in whenever he feels like it. I have no security of space, no boundaries of my own whatsoever. Nothing to protect or hide behind. I have no privacy, not even anything resembling it. I am filmed and observed and caught out and recorded and spied upon. I live in an open prison surrounded by wall-less fields and fence-less fens. It’s the vastness of these flatlands that keeps me prisoner here. I am contained; incarcerated in the most open landscape of them all.
I can hear his quad. I rush into the store cupboard in the small back bedroom. The left side’s for me. It was full when I arrived here from the other farm, confused and terrified. Unsure of what had been agreed. I had seventeen possessions. Now I’m down to just three. The opposite shelves, on the right side, store his mother’s old things. He’s never bought me anything. I have to make do with his mother’s woollens and her underwear and her blankets. I can’t wear her shoes, I can’t really wear any shoes at all, so I wear his open sandals, his old ones, with one leather part snipped open to allow for my disfigured knot of a foot.
I put my ID card and my book and my sister’s letters down on the slatted shelves. This side of the cupboard looks sad. Almost empty now. An egg timer running out of sand. Then I pick up the letters, seventy-two of them, and hold them to my upper lip, to the soft skin beneath my nose, and I breathe her in.