by Ane Riel
He did it very carefully, just like when he drew, and although she was very small and skinny she suddenly looked quite beautiful as she lay there. My baby sister. I so wished that she wasn’t dead.
He had put out a stool for me so I would have a better view of everything. It was strange because, in one way, I wanted to run away – to run upstairs and hide in the bedroom with Mum or outside to hide in the container with Carl.
In another way, I wanted to stay on the stool and watch everything. Be there with Dad.
It was just as well that I was there because he really needed me now. My, oh my, did we use a lot of gauze. I handed him one roll after another and he wrapped my baby sister in it. He started with her tiny feet and continued all the way up over her tiny head so her whole face disappeared under narrow strips of thin fabric. No air must get to the skin, he explained.
When she was finally swaddled from head to foot I thought that we had finished. But no. He just poured more resin over her, and then it was back to the gauze. And so we carried on until Dad finally said that he thought it was enough.
And then he did something that took me completely by surprise. He fetched a drawing. A new drawing. And this although it was a long time since I’d seen him draw anything at all. This one was different from his other drawings because it was made with black ink on a thin wooden sheet. He held it up so that I could see it. ‘Do you think it looks like her?’ he asked.
I didn’t, as it happens, seeing as she had grown so skinny and was now wrapped in all sorts of things. But it looked like her right before she drowned in salt.
I nodded.
‘We’ll place it on top of her face, so we can always remember what she looks like inside.’
Dad put the drawing in place and attached it with more gauze along the sides. Then he took a big piece of canvas and wrapped it around her. It was quite incredible how much she was wrapped up. He also cut an oval hole in the canvas over her head so that you could see the drawing.
Now my baby sister looked like one of those wooden dolls that fit one inside another. We had once found some in a living room in Vesterby. Only ours was bigger and there was only one little girl inside.
Finally she was placed in the tiny coffin Dad had made for her. I had heard him sawing and hammering and planing and sanding while I was sitting in the container.
I had started spending a lot of time in the container, even if there was no sign of strangers turning up. Come to think of it, no strangers ever called these days, except for the postman, who would pull up by the barrier and get out of his car to put our letters in the post box. I was, of course, extra careful about hiding around the time when he usually called. I could see him through the holes. Even though he was far away – so far away that he was only a small man dressed in red – I was sure that he looked up at the house and at the three small holes in the container every time. I always held my breath and sat as quiet as a mouse until he had driven off again.
But even when the postman had been and gone, Dad would still whisper for me to be careful. The postman might come back, he said. Or other people might spot me and take me away.
In time he only made a sound – a hiiiiish – which meant I had to hide quickly.
I guess I could have stayed with Mum in the bedroom. I would probably have been able to find a place to hide or made one for myself, if I moved some stuff around. But the container was better, Dad said, because no one would ever think to look there. I got the impression that he would rather I wasn’t with Mum, and I couldn’t understand why.
Perhaps he was scared that I might let something slip.
In the end it was easier just to stay in the container with Carl and look out of the holes towards the gravel road. I could tell Carl everything, but he didn’t stroke my hair like Mum, and I couldn’t really cuddle him. Luckily, I had found a big brown teddy bear in a box. It was a little scruffy, but nice to touch. I could cuddle that.
Whenever I needed to touch something that touched me back I would take one of the rabbits from the house with me into the container. The rabbit felt soft and warm when it moved under my hand, and the feeling gave me sunshine in my tummy. And yet I was terrified. Terrified that Dad might notice, because he had told me that the rabbits must stay in the house. They might make a noise in the container.
When I sat in the darkness, looking out of the holes, I would get very scared at the thought of anyone coming. And yet whenever a movement down by the gravel road turned out to be a rabbit or a fox and not another human being, I got a little bit disappointed. I couldn’t understand why.
I also kept an eye on the trees. The area between the forest and the gravel road had always been grassy, but recently a lot of small spruces had started shooting up. It was as if the forest was spreading. Perhaps it might cover all of the Head one day. And I would be safe in the container, right in the middle of it all.
She should be with me, Dad said, when he had finished my baby sister’s coffin.
So that we could keep one another company.
We pushed aside some of the old tyres and shifted some sacks so that she could lie in her coffin next to my spot in the container. If I removed the wooden lid, I could look down at her.
The coffin was the nicest thing I had ever seen Dad make. Mum had told me about Grandad’s famous coffins, but they couldn’t possibly have been more beautiful than the one Dad made for my baby sister.
To begin with, it was a bit odd, her lying there next to me. But in time I grew used to it. Somehow it was nice that we were together, all three of us: my twin brother, our baby sister and me. All of us dead.
Except that I was only reported dead.
Dear Liv
What day is it today? Have you had your birthday? It’s so dark here in the bedroom. I wish I could get your dad to move some of the things blocking the windows, but he doesn’t come here very often these days. Perhaps you can reach the stuff at the top, if you stand on something? Only I don’t want you to get hurt. You might easily get hurt by that big radio at the top.
Oh, Liv, you’re gone for so long every time. I wish I could get out of bed, out of this room, downstairs. Outside. Please bring the bucket and the flannel soon. And more food and something to drink. I’m so terribly thirsty. It’s the air.
Mum
Northbound
The chef would be back in a few days and the pub would reopen. Roald had finished painting and carried out the repairs, and was now looking forward to the aroma of the chef’s delicious food replacing the smell of paint. He had finished a day early but felt strangely restless. It was probably just another loose end which he could tie up, although he had completed every job on his list. He believed that he had earned his first day off in – what was it now? Six, seven, eight years? He had totally lost any sense of time.
Island time was different to mainland time. Back there, he had seen a clear, straight line on his retina whenever he imagined the passing of the year: a linear path with razor-sharp divisions into end-of-year exams, study leave, holidays and meetings; it was always a copy of the equally fixed routines of previous years and next year’s invariable plans. On the island, a year was an organic entity that wrapped itself softly around Christmas and stretched out in the summer, where it merged with the years before and after. Time hadn’t been suspended; it had just acquired a new velocity. It had become a soft friend that wanted nothing but to be.
Although he had enjoyed the silence while the pub was closed, Roald had to admit that he missed his regulars turning up at the usual time in the bar. He was almost at the stage where he missed the fishcake wholesaler who spent all his visits in front of the one-armed bandit, until the time was exactly eleven minutes to dinner time. It took the fishcake wholesaler nine and a half minutes from leaving his barstool in front of the fruit machine to him leaning his bike up against the wall of his house, he had explained. And then ninety seconds from parking the bike to reaching his dining chair, if he stopped off to wash his hands first.
Except for stating that crispy pork with parsley sauce should be declared a national dish. Especially if that was what he would be getting for dinner once he got back. On such occasions he could barely suppress his excitement and came very close to leaving his barstool at twelve minutes to. He didn’t care much for fishcakes, he said, but it had been a good business right until the reds turned up and wrecked everything with all their ideas. Roald never got to the bottom of what that meant. Nor was he terribly up to speed with the fishcake market.
Roald had yet to discuss the child with anyone. He had bumped into the police officer a few times recently, so it wasn’t for lack of opportunity, but something held him back. After all, the police didn’t have to be his first port of call. There were others. Perhaps he could speak to someone from the school, or ask around. There was a pretty music teacher he wouldn’t have minded chatting up, except she had recently become engaged to a naval officer and seemed to fantasize about having a flock of children, as many as the von Trapps.
Perhaps he should ask the retired doctor who sometimes showed his face in the pub, and where he would always tell the same joke. After all, doctors knew a bit about people. In view of his profession, he would be subject to a duty of confidentiality, but as with time, a duty of confidentiality was a different entity here on the island.
In the end, Roald decided to pay the family on the Head a visit. Alone.
He had never been there. It wasn’t a place you just dropped by, unless you had business there, and since Roald could carry out most repairs himself, he had never needed a man like Jens Horder.
Horder’s carpentry business – or whatever it was he did – seemed to have ground to a total halt. It was a long time since the sign down on the main island had been removed, and the Christmas-tree sales also seemed to have come to an end. However, the man himself could occasionally be seen with a truckload of junk, and it was said that he would still turn up at the junkyard or sniff around a car-boot sale. Sometimes people would actually pay him to take their junk away.
Roald wondered about the pickup truck, an ancient Ford F, which should have died a death a long time ago. Jens Horder had miraculously kept the beast alive. It was said that the pickup truck used to belong to his father.
Roald had only seen Maria Horder once, several years ago, when she was waiting at the chemist’s. He wouldn’t have known that it was her if it hadn’t been for Jens Horder next to her.
They were an odd couple, the pair of them. They just sat there holding hands, smiling a little shyly without saying a word. Jens Horder’s eyes seemed black, inscrutable. He was slim and well shaped – even beautiful, if such a word could be applied to a man – and he was wearing the finest ivory shirt. She, by contrast, had looked rather big next to her husband, but nevertheless she was really pretty. According to regulars at the pub, she had been slim when she arrived on the island. The more Roald furtively studied her from his place in the queue, the prettier she became. Her inscrutability lay in the smile at the corners of her mouth. Then it was Roald’s turn to be served.
Recently, however, Jens Horder had started to resemble an unkempt savage, and rumour had it that Maria Horder had grown enormous. At least the postman said so, and he was probably the last person to have seen her on the Head. That was a long time ago now.
Then again, the postman might not be the most reliable of witnesses. For instance, he had more than hinted that Horder received monthly letters from the Mafia containing huge sums of cash. To imagine that Jens Horder was in cahoots with the Mafia was pretty much as far-fetched as implying that the man had killed his own mother. Which was what the postman was also insinuating, though God knows how that idea had got into his head. Perhaps postmen were just prone to fantasizing more than other people because they carried so much information around, so many potential secrets, about which they could speculate but never prove, unless they had X-ray vision.
Roald had to come up with an excuse to go to the Head. It wasn’t a long trip; all he had to do was cross the Neck. Even so, it felt like quite an expedition.
His acquaintance with Jens Horder was so fleeting that he wasn’t even sure that Jens would recognize him. And he couldn’t just turn up without a reason. Should he be honest and say that he had seen a boy run towards the Head one night, and wanted to know if Jens and Maria knew anything about it? Perhaps they too had been burgled?
No, he had no wish to refer to the child as a thief and risk getting him into trouble. The boy had enough problems already, whoever he was. Besides, Roald couldn’t bear the thought of asking that particular couple about a child.
Perhaps he could invite them to some event at the pub? And then casually ask if they had experienced any break-ins, without mentioning anything about the child. No, that was feeble. Jens and Maria Horder were clearly not interested in socializing on the main island. Jens might have been a guest at the pub a long time ago, when Oluf ran it, but only to help Roald’s uncle with minor repairs, never to sit in the bar or join in darts nights, or the summer party, or the New Year’s Day lunch, or whatever occasion it was that people used as an excuse to drink a little more in slightly smarter clothes. Roald wasn’t even sure if Jens Horder drank alcohol, and he had stopped caring about his appearance long ago.
What on earth could he come up with as a pretext for his visit?
The dog. At some point Roald had expressed a desire to have a dog, and yet he was in two minds about taking on permanent responsibility for an animal. Lars, who usually turned up in the public bar to watch pools football, had told Roald that he was welcome to walk his hunting dog.
Lars suffered from gout and struggled to walk, and his wife never went anywhere but crazy; she had what could most charitably be described as an explosive temper. After she had slapped the postman across the face for turning up with a reminder letter, they had never been known as anything other than Lars and Short Fuse. People knew that she drank a little more than was good for her at home on the farm, but they would obviously never dream of mentioning it. At least not in Lars’s presence.
It was a German wirehaired pointer. The kind that looks like an old, distinguished, bearded gentleman, although it was only five years old and its temper was almost as explosive as its mistress’s. Its name was Ida.
But she was cute, Ida with the beard. And strong. Lars’s instructions were that Roald mustn’t let her off the lead until they were well clear of the tarmac road. Roald couldn’t wait for that moment to arrive because, after a mere ten minutes of being dragged down the road, his arm was close to dislocating from the shoulder.
As he approached the Neck, he reviewed his mission yet again. He wasn’t sure that he knew exactly what he was doing. But taking a dog for a walk up there was OK … or was it? He realized that he had no idea if he would be trespassing on private property. All of the Head couldn’t belong to Horder, could it? But where was the boundary? Was there even such a thing?
It wasn’t just time which had been suspended on the island, Roald had noticed. It was also physical barriers, which seemed to flow rather freely inside the boundaries delineated by the sea. The crops had undulated peacefully between neighbours for generations and boundary posts were mainly located in people’s memories.
It would never have worked on the mainland.
There were no crops undulating now, where the November sunshine rose above the landscape, and the golden leaves from a windbreak had long since scattered in the plough furrows on the field he passed.
When the tarmac finally turned into a gravel road, he released the dog. It galloped off over the Neck and on to the Head as if it hadn’t stretched out for years, and soon disappeared out of sight.
Perfect. He was looking for his dog, which had done a runner. That was his story. He would ask the Horders if they had seen it, and somehow manage to bring up the child in conversation.
The Neck was quiet. Roald looked down the verges
of buckthorn and lyme grass and watched a couple of seagulls fight over a crab. The sea sloshed against the causeway from both sides in small, awkward kisses. To the east there was water, water, water until the sea disappeared in a light mist. To the west the blurred contours of the mainland. He didn’t miss it.
And in front of him the Head rose like a broad, dark mass. He felt like Columbus or, better still, Amundsen journeying north. He knew he was being ridiculous, given that the squinting postman came here regularly. It wasn’t unexplored territory. But it felt like it.
In the distance, he could hear the dog.
It was screaming.
An animal is screaming nearby. Is it one of ours? Is it a dog? It sounds like a dog. I don’t like it.
I don’t feel very well, Liv.
I wish you could hear what I’m writing. I wish you were here now.
What’s going on?
The Day It Happened
The day it happened I was sitting in the container. It was one of my bad days. That night I had dreamt that I was standing under a waterfall, which changed its mind halfway down. I looked up at all the water suspended right above me, and I knew that any second now it would realize that it couldn’t continue hanging there. That only the sea could retreat, not a waterfall. Dad had told me so.
Water falls.
And children drown. Maybe.
When I woke up I tried to carry on with my dream, to turn it into a nice one. I imagined that the waterfall took so long to realize that it was a waterfall that I had time to step back to safety between the rock face and the water, which would soon come crashing down like a heavy blanket. I had read about such things in one of Mum’s books: a secret room you could stand in. Behind the curtain.
But as long as I could only imagine it and not dream it, I didn’t know if I had truly got myself to a safe place. And I didn’t like that feeling.
