‘Make me sandwich, I know it’s early but make it anyhow.’
He’ll see the tapes before dinner like he has every day for the last seven years. Should I tell him about Cynthia now or let him wait?
I take his Mighty White from his mother’s enamel bread bin. I untie the see-through bag and make his sandwiches. Six. Margarine and pre-sliced mild cheddar cheese and pre-sliced cooked ham. I hold the margarine knife in my hand and look at it and imagine his neck like I’ve imagined it a hundred times before. I place it down. He likes his sandwiches cut on the diagonal into little triangles that look like the kites we flew as children on the hills above our town. I prepare a bag of ready salted crisps, never opened, never on the plate. Lime squash the colour of piss. I place it all down on the table.
‘Bitter out there, ain’t it? Never a good wind from east, never a goodun.’
‘A woman came.’
‘You what?’
I sit down opposite him.
‘A woman came by to rent a field for a horse.’
‘For a what?’
He stares at me.
‘Horse,’ I say.
‘An ’orse?’
I nod.
‘What did you tell her then? Every word. What did you say to this lass?’
‘That she would need to speak to you about it.’
He looks at my eyes one at a time, back and forth, and then he picks up a triangle of sandwich, tiny in his filthy hand, and takes a bite.
‘Who is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She comes back,’ he swallows his mouthful, ‘and I’m not round, you keep door locked and get yourself up them stairs, you hear me?’
I nod.
‘No more chattin’ with nobody, you hear me?’
I nod.
‘Keep front door locked or I’ll keep you upstairs ’til spring.’
‘OK.’
He eats the rest of his lunch as I wash up and then I bleach the sink and clean the surfaces. He puts his boots back on and puts his jacket back on.
‘I can see everywhere from anywhere on me farm, Jane,’ he says. ‘Every corner. It’s as flat as dinner plate and I’m always here. Don’t forget it.’
I spend three hours sewing and repairing his shirts and his socks and some of his mother’s cloths now they’re dry. With every puncture of steel needle through fabric I imagine it’s his skin. Rough. Punctured all over. Dying. I drink beige tea, I’m used to it now, and I think some more about Cynthia. Maybe she has a boyfriend. A man who listens to her, really listens. Someone to remember her birthday and hug her when she’s tired. A man to lean on and who’s man enough to lean on her. Maybe she has someone like that in her life. I know she has a car, a VW Beetle, and maybe she has a job she enjoys, something she finds interesting. My mother was a teacher in Vietnam and she adored it. She still passes men and women in the street and they say can you remember me and she says of course I can and they say you were my favourite teacher. That’s a beautiful everyday thing. It’s a legacy.
He comes back in when it’s dark and tells me I’ll get a bath tonight. He reviews the tapes as I’m cooking his, our, cod in parsley sauce with boiled potatoes and frozen Birds Eye peas. The pans are on the Rayburn stove and the fire box is full of thin logs. He lingers over Cynthia, or rather, as he can’t see her on the tape, the camera doesn’t pick up anything from outside, he lingers on me talking to her. Back bent over. His massive hand covering the mouse in its entirety. He’s replaying the tapes and watching me as I wait for his boil-in-the-bag fish to heat up. Why do people here boil their food in plastic bags?
We eat. He mushes his overcooked cod pieces into the sauce and the potatoes and peas so it’s one big gloop and then he shovels it all into his mouth with his fork.
The phone rings.
We both look at it, or rather, the heavy metal box covering it that he’s bolted to the floor joists. The wires go down through the floorboards into the half-cellar. The desktop PC is connected to the outside world through this telephone line. It rings and the box shakes and we both stare at it. Who’d ring this man?
The phone stops.
‘Get that bath run while you wash these up.’
I do as he says.
Instead of me sitting by his feet while he watches TV, I wash up and then I undress and then I climb into the steaming hot bath. He’s there watching my every move but I do not acknowledge him. He’s invisible to me. Irrelevant. I have to be careful not to slip. I let my arms support me as I climb in and settle down, my eyes focussed on the water and not on him. My deformed ankle slips under the surface and out of sight and the pain changes. It doesn’t go away but it’s underwater now.
He comes into the room as I’m scrubbing my skin. The soft floor compresses under his weight. He’s holding a mug of tea and he’s watching me, taking sips, his eyes darting to my face, then to my body, then back to my face. Then he leaves and I can hear the news programme begin.
The bath is good. Piping hot. Clean. I let my mind wander to whatever Kim-Ly is doing right now in Manchester. In her last letter she told me the nail bar is open later these days, open until eight on Fridays to take advantage of women, some men but mainly women, who want a manicure before heading out for a fun evening with friends. I like to think of her going out on a Friday as well. She tells me there’s a Chinatown in Manchester and she can find some of the fruits and herbs of home, not the same, but similar. She can buy quýt and long nhãn and buởi. She can buy ngò and húng cây and húng quế. Maybe she can make something wonderful out of it all. A recipe from our mother’s mother. Something to take her back home for a few moments.
But this hot bath also marks the beginning of a long night and the beginning of the next three weeks in his front bedroom.
I dry off and pull on my nightie, his mother’s nightie, and keep a small towel wrapped around my hair. I pull myself upstairs and sit on the end of his bed.
The TV goes quiet.
Footsteps.
Chapter 5
I dry off my hair, rubbing at it with his mother’s towel.
He’s washing himself downstairs in the bathroom. I can hear the water draining away into the fields and into the dykes and into the sea. I open his mother’s linen closet and take out a fresh white sheet and this one is older than the rest, it’s almost see-through like muslin cheesecloth. I throw it into the air to unfold and let it settle gently on the bed.
He’ll need his special towel. I lay it on the right-hand side of the bed. He’s brushing his teeth down there. Spitting. Gargling. I hear the toilet flush and then the bottom stair creak.
‘Good bath, was it?’
He says bath with as short an ‘a’ as you could possibly imagine. Other people say ‘baaath’ and some say ‘baath’, I do, and he says bath. If the letter ‘a’ could be any narrower, any more compressed, then that’s the letter ‘a’ that he pronounces.
I nod and pull my nightie, his mother’s nightie, up over my head.
He looks.
I stare straight ahead.
I lie on the bed and pull the thin cotton sheet over myself. I adjust it so the sheet’s covering me from the navel and higher. This is, in some ways, the worst of it. The waiting. Because it drives the truth home like a hammer would drive a nail through a plank of rotten wood. I have no say in this. None. I fought the first dozen times. The first hundred. I fought and pleaded and struck him. I scratched at his thick hide and I bit him so hard one time he jumped in the air. He’s not a violent man, not usually, but he’ll always take what he wants in his own horrifically gentle way.