by Ane Riel
But she didn’t seem dangerous. The lady. She smiled and perched on the edge of the bed, and said: ‘Hello, Liv, what are you doing?’
Now I thought that was a silly question; surely she could see that I was sitting in the bed, looking at the drawings.
I didn’t say anything, but I pointed. Up at Carl and me.
She looked at us too. For a long time. Then she got up and walked over to us and started flicking back to when we were babies. She had her back to me.
‘We look like one another,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘My dad did those drawings.’
She nodded again.
I stopped looking at the drawings. I started looking at the lady who I still didn’t know was my granny, who was looking at Carl and me as babies. And I wondered if I should tell her about the accident.
‘Something happened to my twin brother,’ I said at last.
She nodded again. It really was about time she started doing something else. I wondered if perhaps she knew about Carl after all.
Finally she turned around and looked at me. She was smiling.
‘Do you like pancakes?’ she asked.
I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know what pancakes were. And so I mimicked her.
I nodded.
I soon discovered that I liked pancakes a lot. She sprinkled sugar on the first one, then rolled it into a sausage and gave it to me while she started cooking the next. And I took a bite and I forgot to squeeze the sausage together and sugar trickled out of the end, and I could hear it sprinkling on to the floor and the lady say something. But I didn’t care because it was the sweetest mouthful I had ever tasted.
She swept the floor and stroked my hair, and I got another pancake with sugar, and when I ate my fourth one I had to sit on the floor, in the middle of the sugar, and she said that it didn’t matter and we started to laugh.
And then Mum came in.
The strange thing was that neither of them said anything. They just looked at one another, then Mum turned and left. She went to the barn, I think. To begin with, I didn’t know whether to go with her or remain in the sugar. But then the lady started talking, and I stayed put.
‘Do you have some nice friends to play with, Liv?’
I nodded. After all, I had Carl and all the animals.
She looked at me, but I didn’t say anything because I had already nodded.
‘I mean, do you see any other children?’ she said, handing me a fresh pancake. ‘Now, mind the sugar, sweetheart.’
I nodded again and reached out for the sweet roll.
‘Yes, I see Carl.’
The pancake remained suspended in the air, and this time it was her fault that the sugar went everywhere. It took a moment before she gave it to me.
Carl joined us in the kitchen. He stared at the lady and I think he was a little scared of her. She looked so strange. Then again, she did have white hair. Very white.
For several days she got up and made us pancakes every morning. The first times she used ingredients from some boxes she had brought along. But when they ran out I helped by getting eggs from the chickens and milk from the cow and flour from the bags which at that point were in the hallway, I think; and those pancakes were even yummier because I’d helped make them.
Dad didn’t eat very many and he didn’t say very much. Mum ate quite a few and said nothing. I ate as many as I could.
My granny and I ended up spending a lot of time together because Mum and Dad had things to do, but I think they were really trying to avoid her. Dad was busy selling Christmas trees and driving them to the main island and running errands, and then there was the Christmas present he was making. That was why I was banned from the workshop in the last few days before Christmas. Mum was also busy doing something very secret in the bedroom.
I had no idea what they were making. The year before it was a puppet theatre and a pair of rabbit-skin gloves.
Dad had started hanging things from the living-room ceiling a long time ago so that we could move about the floor more easily. I liked sitting on the green armchair, gazing up at everything. He had made a magical cave and as the piles grew higher than the windows it got darker and darker. More and more magical.
One of my favourite things was the violin that hung from a piece of string over the wood-burning stove. When the fire was lit, the violin would twirl like a weathercock. And talking about birds, the chemist’s stuffed owl would watch me from a corner. It sat on a sofa, which was on its end behind the tailor’s dummy and a pile of magazines. I loved that owl. When I was out at night I practised being as quiet as it was. To be honest, it took me a while to notice that the chemist’s owl was in fact a dead owl. After all, it behaved exactly like the ones I saw in the forest.
Every now and then I thought that, by now, we must surely have collected absolutely everything on the island, and yet there were always more things to bring home. For example, the day before the lady arrived Dad came back with a piano he had swapped for a Christmas tree. Some of the keys and a pedal were missing, but apart from that there was nothing wrong with it, he said. By moving some suitcases he found room for it in the living room, on the floor even. Then he placed three big radios on top of the piano – and a plaster bust of someone who was said to have played it once. This really got me thinking, because the man had no arms and no legs.
Unfortunately I got the absolutely crystal-clear impression that the lady didn’t like there being so many things everywhere. She would cough – almost as loudly as she snored – when she came into the living room and she often muttered something about how what had happened in just a few years was just terrible. I had no idea what she was talking about.
She must also have been very clumsy because she kept bumping into things. One day she cried out when she bashed her big toe against the record player just inside the kitchen door. She didn’t think it belonged there, even though it had been there for as long as I could remember. But that was nothing compared to the scream she let out when she bumped into the bookcase in the bathroom and a whole crate of tuna in brine came crashing down on her head. Dad came running from the workshop to see what all the fuss was about. I remember him standing in the doorway, staring at her without saying anything, and her leaning against the sink staring back at him and shaking her head. Then he left. After all, he had seen for himself that her head was still attached to her neck, it was all in working order.
After a few days she stopped looking for a cardboard box of Christmas decorations which she felt sure had to be somewhere. Instead we made decorations from things I had found. We plaited hearts of brown paper from a roll in the scullery. They turned out amazing. I couldn’t work out why she would have preferred that we made them out of differently coloured paper. What was wrong with brown? And anyway, real hearts are quite brown.
She had brought Christmas presents from the mainland, she said, and I wondered whether it might be the small radio and the board game I had found in one of her cases. The things had been carefully wrapped in very shiny paper, and after I’d examined them I wrapped them up again in the exact same way, except that I wasn’t very good with the sticky tape.
When Dad brought in the tree and hoisted it up in the living room, I thought it was the finest Christmas tree I had ever seen. Carl agreed. The star that I had made from bicycle spokes glowed grey and fine right under the ceiling beam, and from the base of the trunk there was at least a metre to the floor, which left plenty of room for presents.
Christmas was a few days away, and I still didn’t know that the lady was my granny. In a way, I’m a bit sad that she never got to see our go-kart. Or her own.
Sometimes I’d join her in the kitchen early in the morning, trying to find a place to sit. I wasn’t scared of her, but Carl was a bit. I liked talking to her and her stroking my hair. And she smelled so nice.
She had some really exciting things in her luggage, which I spent a long time investigating when she wasn’t around. Besides t
he presents, I found things you applied to your face, and shoes and clothes the like of which I had never seen before. Lilac nylon tights and pale brown leather shoes. I had no idea such beautiful shoes existed.
The lady was always keen to hear what I’d been up to, and so I told her what I could remember. Maybe I’d made more arrows for my bow or explored the piles of things or helped with the animals. And one morning when she asked me why I was so sleepy I mentioned that I’d been out stag hunting. I didn’t mean to tell her; I’d promised Dad not to tell anyone what we did at night. We had even been extra careful with the pickup truck and left it further down the gravel road so she wouldn’t hear it start.
‘Do you often go out at night … rather than sleep?’ the lady then asked me. She gave me such a strange look that Carl nudged me to make me go outside with him. But I stayed where I was.
I thought long and hard about whether now was one of those times when you had to lie.
‘Carl does,’ I said eventually.
I liked hearing her talk about the mainland. It sounded like the city she lived in was enormous. I imagined that there must be a huge amount of stuff in it – probably more than we could ever find room for on the Head. She also talked a lot about there being children who played together over there. And that they all went to school, where they learned to read and write and do sums.
‘Tell me, Liv. Do your parents ever talk to you about you going to school? In Korsted?’
I already knew there was a school in Korsted. Sometimes when we drove past it I saw children in the playground behind the wall. Someone was always screaming and an adult was always telling someone off. And no one carried a dagger. There was nothing in the playground except tarmac and white stripes.
Dad said that he didn’t like it.
It was news to me that I was meant to go there.
‘Mum has already taught me to read and write,’ I said. ‘And Dad is teaching me to make things from other things and turn a club on the lathe and cast sinkers and arrowheads and build a meat press and set snares and flay rabbits. And it doesn’t hurt them as long as they die in the dark. And I also know the game where you go and get things without waking people up. Besides, I have a dagger, and I also play with that.’
She gave me another look and I started wondering if I had said too much. I was pretty sure I had. I wasn’t used to having to watch my tongue. It was exhausting.
‘I think it would be very good for you to go to school,’ she said eventually. ‘And leave your dagger at home.’
Now it was my turn to gawp. Carl ran to get Dad. I didn’t know what to say. But she didn’t seem able to stop.
‘Liv, I don’t think it’s good for you to live here on the Head with all this rubbish and dust and dirt. You might have an accident or fall ill … I think it would be better for you to get away for a bit. I’ll need to speak to your father about it.’
‘How do you really know my dad?’ I asked. I was starting to get very suspicious. Perhaps Carl had been right all along that there was something not quite right about her.
She hesitated for a second.
‘Your father is my son. I’m your granny.’
That made no sense at all. And Carl wasn’t there for me to check the facts with.
‘It was your grandfather, my husband, Silas, who taught your father to make all those beautiful things out of wood. And the cap that your father always wears … it once belonged to my father.’
The pancake started to burn.
‘… And we’ll have to talk about Carl,’ she went on, quickly taking the pan off the cooker.
‘But he’s not here,’ I said, hoping that Dad and Carl would turn up soon.
‘No, I know,’ she said. ‘But do you know where he is?’
That was the night I heard them talk in the living room while I listened behind the door. All three of them spoke, even Mum, and at some point Dad started shouting. I’ve never heard him shout like that before. The next morning his hair had started to turn white.
Christmas was only two days away, and very strange days they were.
No one really said anything. I think they were thinking. And so was I. About her wanting to take me with her to the mainland, about me going to school over there and meeting other children, and something about the authorities and a doctor who ought to visit and a container that she had ordered.
I clearly remember her saying that the place needed a thorough mucking-out. And I could understand why Dad got really upset about that, because he was always very careful to get all the muck away from the animals and out into the field where it could do some good.
Even so I found her a present. It was a small box that had a wonderful smell of tobacco. It was for keeping small things in, I thought. In the end I kept it for myself. I had found a book about butterflies for Mum, and for Dad I had collected a whole tin of resin. I also found a really beautiful red-and-yellow lump of resin, which was going to be his special present because it had a beetle inside it. If he kept it long enough, it might turn to amber, just like the lump with the ant he would usually keep in his pocket or put in a small hollow in the carpenter’s bench where he kept the hourglass. I hadn’t learned to count to a million years yet, but I did understand that it was a very long time.
Before my granny arrived I never wondered why we celebrated Christmas. I guess I thought we did it because it was nice. Mum and Dad never explained why, and I never asked. By talking to my granny I discovered that there was a connection between the man called Jesus and the Christmas tree and my star of bicycle spokes and our geese and the fishmonger’s garden gnomes. What exactly it is, I still don’t get.
Nor did I know what a container was before it arrived. This happened just after New Year. A very big lorry drove up with it on its bed. It rattled and shuddered as it came up the gravel road, and I raced round from the pump behind the barn to see what was going on. The container was set down right behind the workshop. It was a large, rectangular enclosed box of dark blue metal. Its sides came together at the top, and on one long side there were three double hatches.
‘Ordered by someone called Else Horder,’ I heard the man say to Dad. I don’t think he realized that we had killed my granny. Then the lorry drove off without the container and the driver waved to me. It was the last time for a very long time that any outsiders saw me.
Dear Liv
I don’t know if it was right for us to report you dead. But we were so scared, so scared of losing you. What we did to your granny was terrible. But what she intended to do to us was even more terrible.
We had no choice.
I’m choosing to believe that we had no choice.
All my love,
Mum
The Killing
Deep down, Jens Horder might have known that his mother only wanted what was best for them; that her proposal was an expression of concern and love. He might even have realized that she had cause to be concerned. Nevertheless, he was incapable of interpreting Else’s suggestion as anything other than a threat, a red-hot premonition of yet another unbearable catastrophe.
Maria cried when they lay together in bed that night. He hadn’t seen her weep so pitifully since the accident. Since the last time his mother had been with them.
‘You have to send her away,’ she had sobbed. Inside her, a new life was growing. Yet another life. The other one was sleeping the sleep of the innocent in her little bedroom down the passage. With her dagger on her stomach. Alone.
It was at that moment that something snapped inside Jens: the last thread that connected him to his mother, the remains of an umbilical cord.
He clasped Maria’s hand. ‘Yes, I’ll send her away,’ he whispered as he stared up into the darkness. ‘Far away. There’s nothing else for it.’
She was the one person they could manage without.
‘I’ll do it before Christmas.’
His wife heard the words he whispered. She understood exactly what he meant. And she knew that she should protest
. But she couldn’t.
Jens got up from the bed, leaned over Maria and kissed her forehead before he got up and got dressed. Then he disappeared.
Soon afterwards, she could hear him working in his workshop.
★
Else Horder also heard him from the white room where she, contrary to her usual habit, had yet to fall asleep.
She concluded that Jens must be finishing some last-minute Christmas presents, but even so it was odd for him to be working in the middle of the night. Then again, there was very little her younger son could do these days that would shock her. He and his little family seemed to live in a world of their own, where everything was chaos. Else knew about isolation better than anyone, including how it could mess with your head, but this … this was serious.
She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. Not for all of it, of course, but still. And though it broke her heart, she no longer had any doubts that she had to save Liv from the fate she was being dragged into. The girl didn’t appear to have been seen by a doctor for years, because her parents ‘didn’t like doctors and that kind of thing’, and Else suspected that the girl had never played with, or possibly even spoken to, another child. It was true that Maria was academically inclined, but she was unlikely to be able to home-school a child, as she claimed she wanted to. Liv had to be desperate to get out and meet other people – people who weren’t busy eating themselves to death or turning their home into a junkyard. There was nothing normal in the poor girl’s life.
And then there were the night-time excursions, which worried Else, not to mention the business with Carl. Truth be told, the whole thing might end up a matter for the police, a tragic case. If that happened, she could only hope that they didn’t start asking questions about the accident and reopen old wounds. That was the last thing anyone needed.
