The bathroom is cold.
The floor is soft underfoot and the mould is growing where the ceiling meets the walls. A web of mould like a fine mesh of lace. I flush the toilet. When I wash my hands the water is still boiling hot from the Rayburn. I look to the dark main room and the locked TV cabinet. Would I leave now if I could? Would I jeopardise my sister’s happiness, her future, her life? For what? What kind of life could I have now with this foot? At what moment did I reach that point of no return? These past years are stained indelibly onto my soul, engraved into my bones.
I sit on the lowest step of the staircase. There’s a camera in here too, one of seven. That day with the bolt cutters, that was my watershed. The voyage to the UK could have been a watershed and the job at the first farm with my sister could have been a watershed. But they weren’t. What he did to me in his tool shed was my before and after. After he’d swung those bolt cutters I don’t remember things very clearly. I think I passed in and out of consciousness, black to grey and back again. But I do remember him retelling me his rules while he twisted and manhandled my foot to ninety degrees. He retold me his rules as he pushed his weight down onto my foot and left me like this for ever.
At school I ran the 400 metres. I wasn’t the fastest, but I was a close second. That was a good distance for me. I wasn’t explosive enough for the short sprints, nor stoic enough for long-distance. The 400 metres was my race.
I reach up for the banister and pull myself up the stairs and go to bed.
Chapter 6
On Christmas morning I don’t wake until eleven. It’s the one day a year Lenn takes off so it is the worst day of the whole year. He’s here in his house all day long, apart from a brief break to feed his pigs. All internal doors open, no opportunity to discreetly read a page of my book or one of Kim-Ly’s letters. No distance from him at all.
My head is foggy. It’s been numb the past six weeks since he agreed to increase my dose to three-quarters of a horse pill per day. Vague. If you ask me what’s happened in the past weeks I would tell you that nothing whatsoever has happened. Time has just moved on. The weather has been wet, and still and nothing at all has happened.
‘Happy Christmas, Jane,’ he says as I stop, panting, sweating, on the rough bottom step of the staircase. ‘I’ll have me mug of tea and one of them mince pies in next five minutes, please.’
I go into the bathroom, door wide open, to wash. One of my back teeth is aching. My expression is that of a recently slaughtered animal. I have sleep crust in the corners of my eyes, and they’re filmed with pink sludge. I pull my nightie over my head and don’t look if he’s there behind me watching or if he isn’t. Chills run down my spine. An addict trapped inside a cage. I need a new pill but I’m sufficiently drowsy still, sufficiently embalmed, to not care about much. And yet, today, this seventh Christmas day here in his house, is the day I have chosen to tell him.
The water from the tap is lukewarm. I finish and dress and try to think of how I’ll word it and what he’ll say in response. What he’ll do in response. My mouth tastes like I haven’t brushed my teeth in weeks, and my right ankle is loose, the bones more fudgy than normal, more liable to snap away.
‘There’s your tea,’ I say to him, placing down his pesticide mug beside his armchair.
‘Horse racin’,’ he says.
The TV is never on in the daytime, but this is Christmas. He’s watching horse racing like a schoolboy, his socked feet pointing at the screen. I use his poker to spread the embers in the Rayburn, my hand gripping its iron handle, my arm less than a metre from his cranium, my head and my heart at odds, again. If I slay this man my sister will have worked here for years and years in vain. If I do it I’ll ruin her life for a single moment of ecstasy. Have to be stronger than that. I shove two knotty logs into the Rayburn and close the fire door shut.
‘Pie,’ he says. ‘Mince pie.’
I warm three mince pies, his mother’s recipe, in the warming oven of the stove, and present them on his plate, and then I stand at the kitchen sink, my hands gripping the porcelain lip like a climber might cling to a granite ledge. The day is sodden. We’ve had cold Christmases, even snow one year, but this is wet November weather cheating us on Christmas Day. I’ve missed the hour where the sun sits just above the horizon, beneath the clouds, above the earth, in the narrow strip we subsist in. I was comatose at that hour. Medicated with a horse pill. Outside, the drizzle is so fine it can’t be seen, only felt.
I’ll tell him later. It’s the one day he’s almost happy, the one day he has something other than the normal. An interruption of the usual food routine. Today we should be having ham, egg, and chips. But we won’t. This is the day I have selected to impart my private news. Something I’ve been in control of these past weeks. If he kills me then, according to his rules, Kim-Ly will be OK. There’s that. If I kill myself she’ll be deported. If I kill him, she’ll be deported, his mate Frank Trussock in the farm past the bridge will see to that. If I escape, she’ll be deported. And she’s so close. Eighteen months from now she’ll be all paid-up. Undocumented, of course, but paid-up and free of the men who brought us here. She’ll be living life. Her future will be in her hands and her hands only. And she’ll be sending money, plenty of money back to Mum and Dad. By then they’ll be desperate for it, if they’re not already. I once thought of whether they were still alive and then I made a pact with myself never to think that again. Of course they are still alive. And on Fridays they drink beer together and eat peanuts. They still share that joy. If I start to imagine the alternative I clench my teeth and dig my fingernails into my palms and that forces the remainder of the thought to stay away.
‘I’ll get your pill, Jane.’
He reaches up for the glass jar. These pills are pale blue and have a groove halfway across. He buys them from an agricultural dealer and there’s never a label or a name or a logo or a list of possible side-effects.
‘Have that.’
I swallow down the three-quarters of a pill. It’s so large I can hardly do it because the edges of the tablet skirt my gullet and I can feel it work its way down into my stomach. By that point it’s already starting to work and I’m light and I’ve pulled in tight within myself. My skin is ten times thicker than before and I’m hiding inside my own skeleton.
‘Better get on with that bird if we’re to eat before Boxin’ Day.’
He disappears into the bathroom and closes the door and locks it. I start peeling his potatoes. The turkey is a crown from the Spar shop. It’s in its own little throwaway baking tray so I just slide it into the Rayburn top oven and let it dry out nicely in there. Considering he’s a farmer we eat like inner-city people. If we had a vegetable patch and a brood of chickens we’d live much better. Richer. I used to suggest it to him. I used to strive to enrich my miserable existence. To make the best of a very bad job. Not any more. I’ll eat the food from the Spar shop and I’ll get through each day and I’ve stopped looking for better.
‘Raiders of Lost Ark in a bit,’ he says, rubbing his hands on his overalls as he emerges from the bathroom. ‘You seen it?’
I peel another potato, my hands dream-like under the water, and I let the point of his mother’s paring knife slip into my index finger. ‘No,’ I tell him, as a fine thread of blood swims and spirals and fans from just beneath my nail.