Lenn leaves and closes the front door and drives away.
I make toast on the Rayburn with his Mighty White bread. The packet doesn’t say Mighty White, but that’s what he calls it so that’s what I call it. Mighty White. It’s like eating wall insulation, but I’m used to it now. I’m accustomed to it. I’ve grown to enjoy it, even.
The pain is dull and so is my head. This is why my memories are split like a ruined sauce. I can find blobs of this, recall strands of that, but it’s an unruly mess. How I got here, who I am, what he’s done to me. I remember his rules. That’s not an issue, I remember his rules and his meal schedule, what he eats each day of the week, and how he likes his ham, egg and chips. It’s myself that I forget sometimes. Who I really am. From before. But I still have my book and my ID card and my letters.
I load the old washing machine with cloths. They’re his mother’s, too. I begged him in the early days to buy tampons or sanitary towels when he went to the Spar shop in the village each week to buy food. He said, ‘Me mother never needed no fancy rags and you don’t neither.’ It’s an insult, a degradation so personal that it made me ill. I have to use his mother’s towels, the moth-eaten cloths she used for herself and then used as towelling nappies for him. They’ve been on both of them and now I have to wear them. I’m used to it now. It’s the price I pay for five or six quiet nights in the small back bedroom each month alone with my own thoughts and my own beautiful memories.
There was a time when my days were carefree. As a girl playing tag with the little boy next door, as a teenager studying history while falling in love, as a young woman dreaming of what might be.
The main room camera’s on me as I remove the cloths from the washing machine and take them outside. My pinny, his mother’s pinny, flaps in the damp fenland breeze as I walk to the line joining his house to his shed. I peg up the cloths with his mother’s wooden pegs and as I secure each one to the plastic line I study the horizon. If you’ve ever seen a photo taken from the edge of space then you’ll know what I’m looking at. That gentle curvature. Imagined or real. That sense of the edge of the world. There are four spires in this direction and two are obscured by his tool shed from here. Spires, churches, ancient trees, my salvation, places I’ve run towards before my leg, before all this, in the early days. I never made it past his fields. All his. From here they are endless, one after the other, each one vast and featureless, the hedges tall enough to block out everything beyond.
A blackbird beats its wings and flies away towards the sea.
I hobble back to the house and see a glint of bright green in the crack between the stones. He’s far enough away, I think. There’s time. I get to the wall and chisel out the hard-boiled sweet I deposited a few months back. I say deposited because this is my bank account, my savings, my safety deposit box of stored happiness, the only tiny joys that I am really in control of, that I can mete out and ration and use up as I see fit.
He gives them to me from time to time. A carrot as opposed to a stick. He gives me one from the window of his Land Rover like I’m a beggar or a small child. Sometimes I eat it immediately if I can’t see past the end of that day. Sometimes I secrete it into a wall or into the nook of a tree. They get damaged, sure they do. The ones on the south side of the house melt in the summer sun so that they become as misshapen as my right foot. The edges change and fill the gaps like the smallest stained-glass windows ever imagined. The ones in the trees sometimes get nibbled at by squirrels and insects. But on the days when I have nothing, the days when the skies are pitiless and dour, then at least I have my hard-boiled sweets and I draw down from those deposits and I savour them.
I put the green sweet on my tongue. A miniature rebellion.
I hobble around the outside of the cottage, small as it is, my arm skirting the dusty yellow stones, and take in the full terror of my existence. Sweet green in my mouth – some approximation of a remembered apple – and flatlands all around. With my back to the bathroom the view is almost empty. Towards the sea. I can’t see the water from here, I can’t smell the salt today, but I can sense it’s there just like humans have been able to sense since the beginning of time. The land is flat but it also slopes at some undetectable angle. It gently slips away.
I stare out at his pig barn. Damn pigs. I seldom hear them but when I do they sound deranged. When the wind blows in off the sea and the air is right then I can hear their desperate hungry squeals as he feeds them. Distant, very faint, but I can hear those pigs as he cares for them.
I skirt around the chimney breast, warm from the Rayburn on the other side of the wall, and I see the ash pile: burnt willow and burnt possessions. Past it I see the wind turbines. I’m careful not to bite down on this green sweet, it must melt slowly, its sugars pooling with my saliva, me prolonging this earnt pleasure.
He’s coming back.
I swallow the sweet and go inside and start scrubbing the floors with hot water and soap.
‘Now then,’ he says.
I look up from the floor, my right leg splayed behind me like it doesn’t belong.
‘Be back for me lunch in a bit.’
That’s the thing with farmers, or some farmers at least – they’re always dropping in. For keys, for a coffee, to fetch a hat, to eat lunch. They’re always on the farm, and if they’re not then you never know when they’ll return. I have no control over my doors or my food or my body or my clothes or my anything.
I watch him from the kitchen-sink window as he drives off towards the pigs with his plough high in the air behind his decrepit old tractor. He tells me the farm barely wipes its face by which he means it only just breaks even each year. No money to upgrade equipment, so he has to fix and make do. Lunch today will be cheese, pre-sliced, on Mighty White bread, also pre-sliced, with brown pickle. He makes me take out all the bits so it’s the consistency of thin gravy. I eat the bits. Then he’ll have an apple and a glass of lime squash. I have offered to grow food, to save him money, but he refuses. Sell it down shop, he says.
The camera watches me as I scrub down the bathroom, the toilet with its cracked cistern, and the cold iron bathtub. I bleach it, but the stains remain. Brownish red near the plughole. The mould spores bloom every now and then and need to be scoured off the ceiling with Brillo pads and painted over with special sealant paint. The camera follows me.
It’s starting to rain.
Fresh air and the cool scent of water on earth.
I get to the front door, need to bring the cloths in off the line, but there’s someone there. On his track. In my day-old footprints. She’s already past the locked halfway gate and I can see her car parked up by the barns and the old combine and she’s walking towards me. He’ll intercept her of course. There’s no way she’ll make it all the way here. I’ve had a grain delivery man almost reach this cottage twice, Jehovah’s Witnesses once, and what looked like a school group almost made it to the front door, but he always intercepts, he’s good at it. He almost always has perfect visibility on his land. I wait on the doorstep, my heart hard at the back of my chest. If she comes closer maybe I’ll scuttle up the stairs and get my ID card and show it to her. Try to explain this horror. But I know I won’t do it. I can’t. Kim-Ly has almost paid off her debt and soon she’ll be free to live a proper life in Manchester. A genuine life. She’ll be free to make friends and have a family of her own. She’ll control her things. Have the key to her own door and the option to do whatever she wants on her days off. She can watch the television programmes she enjoys, and maybe one day she’ll come back and find me here in this open prison.