The Last Thing to Burn - Will Dean Page 0,1

not like this. This is wretched. My mouth is open. A silent cry. A hopeless and unending scream.

He stops and opens the door that I scrub for him each morning and we go inside his cottage. I have failed and what will he do to me this time?

He turns and walks past the mirror and past the key box bolted high on the wall and heads into the one proper downstairs room. In Vietnam my family had six downstairs rooms. He takes me past the locked TV door and past the camera and he places me down on the plastic-wrapped sofa like I’m a sleeping toddler extracted from some long car journey.

He looks down at me.

‘You’ll want pain pill I expect.’

I close my eyes tight and nod.

‘It’ll come.’

He takes the Land Rover keys from his pocket and walks to the lock box in the entrance hall. He takes the key from the chain around his neck and opens the box and places the keys inside and then locks the box.

He comes back in. A man twice the size of my father but half the worth of a rat.

‘Empty ’em.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘Empty your pockets, then.’

I unzip his fleece, the zip buckled as I sit hunched on his sofa, and reach down into my pinny, his mother’s pinny, and pull out my remaining four objects, the four things I have left in the world that are actually mine.

‘Four left.’

I nod.

‘Well, your fault, ain’t nobody to blame but yourself, Jane.’

My name isn’t Jane.

‘Pick one.’

I look down at the plastic dust sheet covering the sofa, at the ID card, which contains the last words I possess in my own language, the last photo of myself, of what I used to look like before all this happened. It’s the last thing with my real name, Thanh Dao, with my date of birth, 3 November, with my place of birth, Biên Hòa, Vietnam. It proves I am really me.

Next to it lies Mum and Dad. My mother with her smiling eyes and her cow’s lick fringe and that half-grin I see in my sister sometimes. And my father, his hand in hers, with love and trust and friendship and warmth shining onto my mother from his every pore, his every aspect.

And then Kim-Ly’s letters. Oh, sweet sister. My life is your life now; my future belongs to you, use every second of it, every gram of pleasure. I stare down at the wrinkled papers and think of her Manchester days, her job, her hard-won independence, soon to be real, complete, irrevocable.

I inherited the fourth item from his mother. I didn’t want it, but I needed it. I need it still. I found it in the store cupboard up in the small back bedroom, the one he makes me sleep in one week out of every four. Of Mice and Men is his mother’s book, but I’ve read from it or thought of it or wished from it every day for years so now by rights I’d say it belongs to me.

I look at him, at his lifeless blue-grey eyes.

‘I need them, Lenn, please.’ I mesh my fingers together. ‘Please, Lenn.’

He paces over to the Rayburn stove and opens the fire door and pushes in a handful of coppiced willow and closes the door again and turns to me.

‘You went leaving here so now you choose one of ’em. If you don’t, I will.’

He goes over to the sink and I see the jar on top of the cabinet.

‘Can I have a pill first, please?’

‘Pick one and then you can take pill.’

My ID card. My photo of my parents. My sister’s precious letters. My book. My, my, my, mine. Not his. Mine.

I already know which one it’ll be. I’ve rehearsed this in my mind. In the middle of the night. Planning. Scheming. Hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. For this.

‘You didn’t even make it one third out,’ he says. ‘Don’t know what you were thinkin’, woman.’

I focus on Mum’s face. I memorise it through my ankle pain, through the hurt and the dry tears. I register the details. The asymmetry of her eyebrows. The warmth in her gaze. I look at Dad and scan his face and take in every mole and line, every beautiful wrinkle, every hair on his head.

I push the photo towards Lenn and gather the letters and the book and the ID card back into my arms and onto my lap and bury them deep inside his mother’s pinny.

This was