How to Deal with Fuel
Poverty in Britain

by Leah Mullen

In accordance with government advice, via a leaflet through the door, you use the baby as a hot water bottle. You and your siblings fight over your skeletal Nanna. You win. Breath against a cheek as she coos your old bedtime songs means the other side of your face feels the chill more acutely.

When mum comes back from work, she has to enter a makeshift airlock, trapping the outside cold in its folds. Skip-dived curtains duct-taped to chipboard. Those are from the murder house, your little sister whispers, and it smells that way.

There was a radio broadcast recently: How to Deal with Fuel Poverty. Hook your boiler up to a treadmill, that sort of thing. But you hadn’t heard it, because you didn’t want to plug in the radio. There, 14p per kWh saved.

In this new life, trial and error is everything. You know now to throw baby the bones of meat you’ve boiled to gnaw as she teethes. You’ve learnt to trust her sharp elbows and heels to stave off advances from a brother or sister.

It is a dankness and a mouldy sort of darkness that penetrates as you try to retreat further into yourself, shrinking from the cold. Maybe you expected piercing wind, but what you’ve got is just whimpers at bedtime. And the occasional thud of a pensioner on the frozen pavement.

Furniture; books; brownfield debris from behind the Farmfresh Foods; even cupboard doors: you’ve experimented with them all, and some of them burnt well, but there isn’t anything left now. A nearby family’s ill-advised bonfire of belongings incinerated their home. The whole borough was jubilant in the radiance. The fire brigade warmed their hands.

You cultivate your armpit and pubic hair.

You eat in the bathroom, where there are no windows. You are all hunch and motheaten wool under GAP fleeces and a fuzzy absence where your extremities should be. You experience intrusive thoughts about self-harm which you would act on if only you could stand to disentangle yourself from the teratoma you and your siblings have become, one shivering lump of hair and teeth.

One day, the doorbell goes with an uncharacteristic thump. Mr. Amazon is crushing the space heater delivery with his still and silent weight. “Maybe his heart,” says Nana offhand, and she helps you drag him past the murder house curtains and heft him into the tub. The baby is crying.

You light a match.

Leah Mullen is an American who’s been living in the UK since 2003 for the free healthcare. Her work has appeared in Five on the Fifth, and she was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for flash fiction in 2022. She hates WB Yeats and Ernest Hemingway and loves Mariana Enriquez and Chaucer.