I wait under the sheet. The single lightbulb over the bed is on, it’s always on for nights like this, and I look through the cotton and see him looking back down at me. He undresses, folding his jeans and his socks and his shirt and placing them by the linen cabinet. Still watching.
My head turns to the right under the sheet. It’s an automatic response now, a learnt coping mechanism. My entire existence is a learnt coping mechanism.
Does he plan this? Does he think about me? I never want to be inside his thoughts. I want pain to strike him if he ever thinks of me.
The skin on my legs is chill.
He steps closer to me and I can feel his thighs against my feet and the bed creaks and the mattress moves slightly.
I am as still as a marble statue of myself and just as dead. Just as cold.
I close my eyes and initiate what I think of as a mental epidural.
It’s all I have.
I claim my body from the navel and higher. This is me. The rest is not me. From the navel and higher I can think what I want and be who I want to be. Anything covered by this sheet, his mother’s sheet, is me.
It’s now I try to go back home. To the weekend feasts my mother and father would prepare for us. My brother and my sister and I would sit around the food. Neighbours would drop in, my mother’s colleagues might come, we’d have uncles and aunts invite themselves. The spread was unimaginable. A mosaic of colours and sauces and herbs. Every taste catered for. I try to recall the scents and the spices and the noodle broths and the fruit, but my taste buds have been worn down as if they’re oak nubs and they’ve been sanded each night.
He climbs onto the bed.
I sink as his weight bears down into the mattress.
When I think of Kim-Ly now, she’s in Manchester, out with friends, maybe even on a date. They’ll get Phở if it’s available, and salad rolls and they’ll drink ice-cold beers straight from the bottle. They might see a film. They’ll laugh and she’ll be able to say whatever she wants. Do whatever she wants. She’ll be wearing her own clothes and walking without pain and she’ll be making plans for her future.
His face is close to my shoulder and I can smell his soap through the cotton sheet but the epidural is holding. I will not let this happen to me. I can’t do anything about the rest but navel up is mine and I am somewhere else right now. He’ll pay the price for his deeds in this life or the next.
My sister and I thought we’d be working in a shop, that was the deal my parents negotiated. With an agent who’d check up on us once a month. What a joke. They said there’d be substantial travel costs to cover, we knew that, and living costs afterwards, but we were guaranteed retail work and we were guaranteed we’d be able to stay together.
And then they took us in a van from the container to the first farm.
We worked for twelve hours a day six days a week. We had to live there in a wooden shed. But we had a shower and toilet block and we had decent food and they paid us. Not much after the accommodation costs and the interest and the random extra charges, but we received an envelope each Friday. We had a day off to rest. And most importantly, we had each other. We wrote to our parents and they wrote back to us. It was a start. And then the day came when they took Kim-Ly away, and they sold me to Lenn.
He rolls off me to the side and then the bed begins to shake. He can’t finish with me. He can’t do it. He has to roll off and finish himself. He uses the towel. I count this as a minor victory, a hollow one, the most pyrrhic victory of them all.
And then it’s over. I let the epidural wear off and reclaim my lower half. I wriggle to the end of the bed, him still next to me in the foetal position, and I pull on my nightie, and walk out and grip the banister and hobble down to the bathroom.
I feel sick. Always. Sick to my very core.
I keep the bathroom door open because that’s the rule. But he’ll stay up there for a while now, he always does. At least I have that. A window of relative privacy. I clean myself. Perhaps I need to move up to three-quarters of a horse tablet, pig tablet, cow tablet, whatever they are. It’s too much for me to be this aware every day. I need more escape. More numbness. I’ll ask him tomorrow.
The toilet seat is ice cold and the floor, the linoleum floor, is soft and lumpy. The door is open but he won’t come down. This is a relatively safe time. He’ll stay up there rolled into a ball on the bed with that small towel. I look down at my feet. My right ankle is swollen and my toes are pointing to the bathtub instead of straight ahead. The house is silent. No electric boiler here like we had back home. No air-conditioning unit. The place is deathly quiet. Lost and alone in the flatlands.
I almost re-smashed my ankle a few years ago, I don’t remember when exactly. I’d had enough. My plan was to reset the bone, to allow it to fuse with the foot in the correct forward position, to recuperate, and then to flee. I almost went through with it. Desperate and stupid as it would have been. I was sitting on the small back bedroom floor with his claw hammer by my side. I lifted it and placed it back down. Felt the weight of the head. The smooth, oiled wood of the handle. I was ready to hit my swollen ankle, to undo and redo some of the damage. I was ready to twist my torso and lift the heavy head and swing and smash it into my own body. But I couldn’t go through with it.
Before my ankle injury life was god-awful, but it was better than this.
Before my ankle injury I could walk and I could jump and I could pivot and I could simply step into a bathtub.
Before my ankle injury there was always hope. Always a chance I could run away.
He’s probably asleep up there now, so I won’t rush. If I wait a while I’ll be able to sneak in and maybe I can sleep without him getting anywhere near me, with my head facing away from him, with my eyes to the wall, with his breath nowhere near mine.
I stare up at the mould spores on the bathroom ceiling.
My first escape attempt, all those years ago, was almost my last.
I took thirteen possessions, all I had left at that time. I still owned my own trainers and normal clothes and I had my purse and I had my card with telephone numbers written down on it.
The preparations were thorough. I knew exactly what I’d say to the first person I met. How to ask for help. To take me to a police officer. I thought through how I’d struggle and fight if I met one of his friends. If I bumped into Frank Trussock from the farm up by the bridge. I was optimistic. It was my time to leave.
I was maybe 400 metres from the road when he spotted me.
There were cars and trucks, not many but some, driving from left to right and from right to left on the horizon. I could hear their engines. The sounds as they changed gear. There was a sign to this very farm, his farm, on the side of the road. It’s too far away and too small for me to see from here. There was a green bus approaching in the far distance and I was running, I used to be a good runner. I was sprinting. But he got to me.
I fought him, I was stronger back then. With my head bent towards the bus I yelled for help, but my voice was carried on the winds back out to his farm and out to sea. I wriggled and scratched and bent my body this way and that to evade him. I kicked like a mule and I screamed, but his rough hands smothered me and he loaded me into his Land Rover as if I were a child mid-tantrum. He took me back to the house and he was angry although he didn’t show it. He didn’t say a word in the Land Rover. But he was bleeding from his neck and I could see his hands were tense on the steering wheel. I’d almost escaped. He took me into the tool shed next to the house and my leg twitches just thinking about it. He took me into the shed and sat me down on the tool bench and he took a pair of steel bolt cutters off the wall. There was no glee in his expression. No fury. He was calm, like this all made sense. I remember begging him. I didn’t fight, he was too strong for me, and I was too exhausted, and we were too far away for any mortal soul to hear. I begged him for my life. He told me about his rules and about how much I’d cost him. He told me this was for my own good. That things would be better and more simple from then on. No more messing about. And then he swung his bolt cutters around like a golf club and he smashed them into the ball of my ankle.