‘Where are you?’ he shouts from the front door.
‘Coming.’
I arrive in the living room as he’s pulling off his boots in the entrance hall and unlocking the lock box with his neck key. He deposits the quad key in the box and yes of course I’ve tried to hotwire it, I had no idea what I was doing, four years ago, maybe five, failed totally and that’s when I lost my pencil, already shaved to a nub, that’s when he took it and burnt it in front of my eyes. I haven’t written a word since.
‘Get kettle on, it’s blowing summat awful out there.’
I put the kettle on the Rayburn hotplate.
‘Right, let’s get this done then.’ He pulls the photo of my parents out from his overalls. The tips of his fingers are red and his cuticles are bleeding. ‘Get stove open.’
I pull the door to reveal glowing embers.
He holds up the photograph but it’s gone to me already; I’ve made my peace. He licks his lips. ‘Don’t do it again, Jane.’
My name is not Jane.
‘Do it again and you’ll have nothin’ left to burn on stove, will you?’
I look at the embers.
He places the photo in, but before he even releases it the edges curl and distort from the heat and then there’s a contained white flash, an uneventful flaring from the burning willow, and then they’re gone, transformed into heat to warm his bleeding hands and to make his beige-sweet tea. They are gone.
I feel nothing.
I pour hot water into two mugs as he unlocks the TV cabinet in the corner of the room. I say cabinet, it’s a full-size door bolted to the walls in the corner on a diagonal. It creaks as he opens it.
He locks the TV key securely in the key box and sits down on his armchair with his remote control to watch his TV.
He says, ‘Thanks, duck,’ as I place his pesticide company freebie mug down by his chair.
‘Match of Day,’ he says. ‘One of your favourites, ain’t it?’
I look back at the pills, the horse pills, cow pills, whatever they are, on the cabinet. Tranquilisers not tested on or for human beings. Generic medication for swine and bovine.
‘Can I have the other half, please, Lenn?’
He takes a quick look at my right ankle, at the teeming mass of sinew and bone, at the pain contained within, at the bruising, the blood pooling at the base of my foot under the wretched skin, at the foot existing at ninety degrees, my foot, my sideways foot.
‘Get stove door open and heat this room, it’s freezin’ in here.’
He stands up and reaches for the glass jar and unscrews the cap, the muscles in his hairless forearm flexing and bulging, and then he passes me the other half of the horse pill. I take it and open the door to the Rayburn so that, in some feeble distorted way, the room, this one room, his room, is transformed, in his eyes at least, and only his, into a cosy living room.
‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you, Lenn.’
He sits back down on his armchair and I sit the way he likes me to sit, on the floor by his knees. By his feet. He watches Match of the Day with subtitles on, some early gift from him to me so I could improve my English, and he pats my hair.
‘It’s all right, ain’t it, this life?’ He sips his beige tea, and the fire from the stove lights one side of his face. ‘We’re warm, under decent roof, full bellies, together, not all bad, is it?’
I sit, my crushed ankle throbbing, his broad, rough fingers in my hair, patting my head, and I swallow the half-pill.
Chapter 3
I wake up, but not like you would.
There’s a sense that I’m not asleep any more, but I have distance from that sense, I am away from it.
And then the pain hits.
It doesn’t creep up on me like you might expect it to. From deep, sedated horse pill sleep, not sleep really, more like an amateur coma, to screaming pain. I look down. I’m in the back bedroom of his cottage under his mother’s bedsheet and my ankle’s almost twice the size it usually is. My toes are black with blood. I’m lying flat on my back and my left foot is sticking up like yours would and my right foot is lying away from me, attached, somehow, some fused knot of broken bones, glued splinters, into a ball of an ankle, an abomination of a joint.
I need another half-pill.
More numbness. More distance and more fog.
The clock on the wall says it’s half past eleven and I can hear his tractor through the loose timber window frames and I can feel the draught off his fields.
I drink a sip of water and try to stand. My ankle has the colour and ripeness of some long-forgotten soft fruit. It feels less cohesive than usual after my walk yesterday, my failed not even halfway walk. It feels like it might crumble and fall apart if I put any weight on it.
I hop, but that’s worse. My right foot dangles and bobs and the strain is too much and I sit back down on the end of the bed, sweat beading on my forehead and at the back of my neck; my face twisted.
The tractor’s close by, maybe the ten-acre field to the east, maybe the winter wheat field edged by the long dyke.
I straighten myself and pull my body down the stairs one step at a time, one agony at a time. The fragments inside my ankle joint scrape and when I reach the bottom I hear a dull crack.
The day is vague.
Overcast.
I’m standing by the front door, the damp breeze cooling my pain, my eyes on his tractor ploughing his fields, the outline of his head visible in the tractor cab, and I can still make out my one-day-old footprints in the dirt, each one a victory and a defeat.
He stops the tractor and climbs down.
Growing ever larger as he walks towards me.
‘What time you call this?’
‘I need a pill,’ I say, my teeth gritted.
He walks closer and then past me into the kitchen. He gives me half a pill and I take it.
‘You gonna get behind, better get crackin’.’
‘I will.’
He makes coffee: one for me and one for him. He re-uses his pesticide supplier mug and gives me a floral thing his mother used to like. Nescafé and two sugar lumps. The flowers on the porcelain are faded to the point of near extinction. My hands have scrubbed these mugs, and Jane, his mother, scrubbed them, and Jane, his first wife, she scrubbed them as well.
The pill kicks in. I’ll push him to change to three-quarters soon. He can snap off the end and give me the big portion of the pill. He can do that three days running. On the fourth day he can give me the three snapped-off end pieces. It’ll be convenient for him and better for me. I can manage it then. I’ll carry on for Kim-Ly.
I push coppiced willow into the Rayburn stove and stoke it. The water on the top begins to simmer.
The bathroom floor is as cold as a puddle in February. It’s soft, that’s the thing, not just the damp or the chill, but it’s spongy, as if he laid the linoleum straight onto mud. And the smell. Some sort of decay. Rot. The ground under this bathroom is poor ground and the smell is so pungent it makes me retch.
I comb my hair and then he’s there at my back watching me. He’s standing at the base of the stairs, but there’s a rule that I must keep all internal doors open. And he’s watching me comb my hair, watching my back. Tonight he’ll tell me to run a bath. This is why I tried to leave yesterday, the last day of my period, the last chance before it happened all over again. I was going to use my five-pound note, the one I lodged in the storage heater in the small back bedroom, to call someone. Anyone. I took the money almost a year ago. I don’t know who to call. Someone in Manchester? Someone to find her and tell her to hide. To flee. Because if I had escaped then he’d have called his friend, Frank Trussock. They’d have had her sent straight back, and then all her years of toiling, all her work and sacrifice to pay back the men who shipped us here, who tricked us – it’d all be for nothing.