The Last Thing to Burn - Will Dean Page 0,2

a selfish act. But I think my parents would understand, they’d know I needed the book to stay sane and the ID card to stay me and the letters to get up each morning and go to sleep each night. They’d forgive me.

He picks up the photo and holds it by the corners so as not to touch the image. He puts it inside his oil-stained overalls and then he stretches up and takes the jar off the kitchen cabinet. It looks like something you’d find in a sweet shop, tall and made from glass with a screw-on metal lid. It contains tablets the size of pencil erasers. He won’t tell me exactly what they are, but I know. He’s a farmer. He can order them without anyone asking any questions. He takes out a pill, the white dust marking the cracks of his calloused fingertips like some rock climber or weightlifter, and then he snaps it in two. He places half back inside the jar and screws on the lid so tight I can’t budge it, and then places the jar back on top of the cabinet. I’ve drugged him before, of course. Well, I tried to, did you think I wouldn’t? Fragments dissolved into hot gravy. Almost two pills. But he’s very particular about his food. He tasted something off. By then he’d eaten most of his dinner. I watched him, praying, pleading, begging. He got sleepy, and then, dozy like a furious wasp at the end of summer, he came at me. That’s how I lost my own clothes and the silver ring my grandmother gave me when I left home. He tasted the horse drugs in his chicken pie gravy. He’s more careful these days.

‘Have this.’

He pours me a glass of water from the tap and hands it to me along with the snapped half-pill and I take it and swallow it.

‘Can I have the other half, please, Leonard?’

‘You’ll get poorly, you know you will.’

The pill’s taking effect slowly. I urge its haziness down my body towards my ankle, faster, willing it down there through the blood vessels and nerve pathways to dull the pain away.

‘We’ll see about rest of pill. Maybe after you’ve had your tea.’

That is hope right there. The chance that I might black out, be swept away by the tide into a deep and dreamless sleep. He’ll be watching me, monitoring me, he always is, gazing, staring, owning, but I will be at the bottom of the sea by then, a break from this fenland life, a sabbatical from hell.

‘Better get sausages on while I watch tapes. I want it like me mother did ’em, proper brown and no pale bits.’

I try to stand from the sofa but my ankle’s too raw, even with the horse pill kicking in. I drag myself over to the fridge while he sits at the old PC, careful to unlock it with his password, his broad back shielding it from me. The screen lights up. Everything in his fridge is his food. Oh, I’ll eat some of it, but I didn’t buy or grow or pick or choose anything. I drop the sausages, Lincolnshire, into a cast-iron pan on the Rayburn. He’s scanning through the tapes, the tapes from the seven cameras installed by him in this house, his house, to monitor me every single day. The sausages spit in the pan. I watch the fat liquefy and boil inside the sausage skins, bubbles moving, and then one bursts open from its side and fizzes.

‘You’ve had quite a day, ain’t you?’ he says, pointing to the screen, to me a few hours ago collecting my belongings, my four objects that are now three, and leaving this place through the front door.

‘Quite the little holiday, you’ve had, ain’t you?’ he looks over at the potatoes in the sink. ‘Make sure there’s no lumps in it this time, Jane.’ He turns back to the desktop screen. ‘Me mother’s never had lumps. I don’t like eatin’ no lumps.’

Chapter 2

I put his plate down in front of him and place a fork by his glass of lime squash. He demands it the colour of morning piss, his words, so that’s what I give him.

‘Looks all right,’ he says, eyeing up the plate. ‘We’ll see.’

I take my food and place it opposite him. I look down at it, at the browns and the beiges. I can’t put too much pressure on my ankle so I cross my legs carefully and let