Resin

by Ane Riel

  I didn’t know exactly what it was about that cooker, but I had a hunch that it might tumble from the tall blocks it sat on if you went the wrong way round it.

  Dad had made me promise to never ever do that. He trusted me more than any other person in the whole world, he said. It made me happy, but also a little bit sad. I don’t really know why.

  The man didn’t go past the harvester. I think he heard a noise from the barn because he suddenly looked in that direction. Then he went around the farmyard and over to the barn door at the end. He stood there for a long time.

  Meanwhile, I was wondering whether to shoot him.

  I could easily hit him as he stood there, completely still, peering inside the barn. Especially if I crept a little closer and knelt down, because if I did that, I could hit anything I aimed at. By now I was as good an archer as Robin Hood.

  But would Robin Hood ever shoot a man in the back?

  And would Mum even like me shooting a man at all?

  And would Dad mind me not shooting him when I had the chance? I had a hunch that Dad would have shot him.

  You would probably need several arrows and possibly also a club to whack him over the head to finish him off. I didn’t know how killing a man would be compared to killing an animal or a granny, and what if I missed because I wasn’t used to shooting men? I squeezed the bow in my hand.

  And then the moment was gone because the man started walking around the barn. What was he doing in the field? No one but us ever went there, and we had stopped going. Had he come to take our chickens? I wasn’t sure if we still had any. The geese were long gone.

  I followed him. I had to leave my hideaway at the edge of the forest, but I made a quick dash from behind the trees to a new hideaway behind the pile with the yellow bicycle on it. From there I saw him wander along the field down to the end of our house. There were no traps around the back and I started to wonder if perhaps he knew about the traps after all.

  He might see me if I followed him behind the barn, so I opted for the safe route across the farmyard instead. I could always find something to hide behind there. I was good at moving quickly and quietly, even when crawling.

  He was knocking on the pantry door at the end of the house when I slipped behind the bathtub by the corner of the barn. I could hear it, and I caught a glimpse of him when he took a step back from the door. He was looking for something. The key? A moment later I heard him let himself in and saw a rabbit run outside.

  I waited.

  Another two rabbits followed.

  Then I heard his voice. ‘Hello!’ he shouted.

  And then the kitchen curtain twitched. It was dark inside, so I couldn’t see anything through the windowpane.

  What if he found Mum?

  If it hadn’t been for Mum lying upstairs in the bedroom, I would have gone into hiding in the container at that point. Instead I crouched on the gravel behind the bathtub, staring up at Mum’s dark window.

  Then I heard an unexpected crash coming from inside the house and someone shouting. It couldn’t be Mum. It was the man shouting.

  No, he was screaming.

  I don’t think I thought anything at all. I just sat there, unable to move. Perhaps my tears couldn’t move either, because I wanted to cry but I somehow couldn’t. I couldn’t make the tears come. And I couldn’t make Carl come either. He didn’t come. And neither did Dad.

  And the man was still inside the house with Mum.

  Any minute now he would come out of the back door. I had no idea what to do when that happened.

  After a while – I don’t know how long because it felt like a minute and an hour at the same time – the front door opened. I was so taken aback that I jumped. I hadn’t expected to see him there. I had to turn slightly to get a better view. Afterwards, I wondered whether I did it on purpose. Moving, I mean.

  Whatever it was, he spotted me. I’ll never forget it. ‘Oi, you!’ he called out. It was the first time in ages that someone other than Dad had spoken to me.

  Perhaps I should have grabbed an arrow and fired my bow from behind the bathtub. I could have shot him through the heart, I’m sure of it. He was standing at the top of the steps, it would have been easy peasy.

  But deep down I didn’t want to. When your own heart is beating so loud you can hear it, you don’t want to aim at anything. Especially not another heart.

  So I did something else. I ran.

  I picked a safe route along the barn, then dashed in a semicircle to the right towards the place in the forest I had come from. He would never catch me in the thicket and I had a head start. But although I knew that he couldn’t catch me, I felt all mixed up and I didn’t run as fast as I could have.

  It felt as if my heart was trying to pound its way out of my chest. And, at the same time, it was as if someone was beating it from the outside. As if someone were trying to bash it back inside me. Or bash me back? Perhaps it was Carl.

  I stopped and looked for the man once I was some way towards the forest. He was running towards me and seemed to have chosen the safe route around the pile with the cooker on it. He shouted something, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

  All I could think about was that he was making a beeline for me – and that very soon he would reach the silage harvester.

  I wanted to run on, but I couldn’t.

  The next moment I saw the man being knocked over and yanked violently up into the air, so that he ended up dangling from the harvester.

  Head down.

  Just like in Sherwood Forest, I thought.

  His foot was caught in a noose. The other was kicking wildly out into the air, and his arms were flailing, as if he was trying to touch the ground, which was just out of his reach. The dog lead he had had around his neck fell off and settled underneath him, while he spun on his own axis.

  He looked a bit like a fish on a line.

  ‘Get me down from here!’ he shouted.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  I waited for a long time. He continued to shout, and I continued to stand there. Stock-still. I could do that.

  Eventually he stopped thrashing his arms about and the anger left his voice. He just hung there, rotating slowly like the violin over the wood-burning stove used to do. And the Christmas tree in the ceiling, if you nudged it a bit.

  He kept on talking to me, and I kept on not replying.

  ‘Please help me get down.’

  ‘I won’t hurt you. I just want to talk to you.’

  ‘You can’t leave me hanging here.’

  Like that.

  I didn’t budge.

  ‘I spoke to the woman in the bedroom. Are you two related? She asked me to help you.’

  At that point I may have twitched ever so slightly.

  ‘Help us?’ I said after a while. I could see that he couldn’t hear me, so I walked a little closer.

  ‘Help us?’ I asked him again.

  He nodded, which actually looked quite funny because he was upside down and turning around. He started rotating gently the other way.

  When he was face to face with me again he narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Are you a girl?’ he asked me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Did you shoot the dog?’ he said then, and my heart crept all the way up into my mouth. I tried nodding and shaking my head at the same time.

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t me who—’

  And it was at that moment that Dad appeared in the farmyard. He looked at us. Then he set down all his plastic bags and walked slowly towards us, using the safe route along the workshop. I saw his head glide across the piles, and in between I could also see his whole body. He carried on staring, but I couldn’t tell whether he was staring at me.

  A man was hanging upside down between us. Perhaps he was staring at him.

  ★

  Dad told me to make space in the white room. I had to clear a passage to the bed Dad usually slept in, the one where my granny was killed. Dad had already moved the heaviest th
ings.

  I did as I was told without knowing why. But I was scared. Scared about what would happen to the man, and scared about what would happen to us.

  Just as I had pushed the last bag blocking the way aside, the man appeared in the door. The room was dim, and he had the midday sun in his back, so I couldn’t see him clearly at first. But I could see that it was him because he was bigger than Dad and, when he took a step forwards, I could also see that he had something tied around his face. It looked like a big sausage made from cloth had been squashed into his mouth.

  He didn’t make a sound.

  I didn’t make a sound.

  Then I noticed that Dad was standing behind him. He told the man to lie down on the bed. I pressed my back against a box as he came closer. He looked at me, and I looked away.

  When he turned towards the bed I saw that his hands were tied behind his back. I could also see the knife in Dad’s hand. It was the same knife which had once cut into my baby sister.

  Something in me wanted the man to have evil eyes. But his eyes weren’t evil, not now, and not when he had been dangling from the harvester. I couldn’t help thinking about the dog and the trap, and how the man had wept when he saw his dog. Evil eyes don’t cry, do they?

  Dad tied him to the four bedposts. One of the man’s trouser legs had been pushed up slightly, and I spotted a red groove around his ankle, just above his sock. It cut deep into his flesh and it was also bleeding a little. My stomach churned at the sight. It must have really hurt hanging from the harvester. It must really hurt now.

  And that was when I realized how much all the rabbits in all those snares must have hurt, if the dark hadn’t been able to take their pain away. I had freed lots of dead rabbits from lots of thin snares and seen how the string had cut deep into their fur and flesh. What if they hadn’t died straightaway? What if they felt the wire carve itself deeper and deeper into them and the darkness had never taken away their pain?

  I watched the man’s eyes carefully. When they looked at Dad, they looked scared. When they looked at me, the man looked like the dog when it pleaded for help.

  Dad turned to me.

  ‘Stay here and keep an eye on him, Liv. But from a distance. Fetch me if he tries to escape.’ Then he made his way towards the door. ‘We’ll need him later.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked anxiously. I didn’t want to be alone with the man. Carl being there, on and off, didn’t really count.

  ‘I’ve got things to do in the workshop. I’ll leave the door open,’ Dad said from the doorway.

  ‘Please may I go and see Mum?’

  ‘No. I want you to stay here. Your mum needs to be alone.’

  Then he left.

  How could you need to be alone?

  I watched the man from the doorway. I had my dagger in my belt. My bow and my quiver of arrows were ready right outside the door. I had placed them there, next to the camping stove, when I moved things around in the white room.

  The man just lay there.

  He tried speaking through the fabric sausage, but only managed strange noises, which I couldn’t understand. So he stopped. I thought it might be nice if he could write things down instead, but it would have meant me freeing one of his hands, and I didn’t know whether he was right-handed or left-handed. I didn’t want to risk untying them both.

  I was left-handed, we had discovered, Mum and I. She was right-handed, but she said that either was fine. In order to prove it, she would sometimes write with her left, always capitals. Perhaps the man could also write with either, so it wouldn’t matter which hand I freed. But in any case I would still need something he could write with and on, and that was upstairs with Mum. And I wasn’t allowed up there. Then I remembered that Dad didn’t want me to loosen anything at all.

  I knew that I wasn’t supposed to untie the man. But Carl had turned up, and he wanted to.

  He kept pestering me.

  All at once, I burst into tears. The man looked at me and made a noise. He flapped the fingers on his right hand.

  I stared at them and cried even harder.

  Then I went to the workshop.

  Dad was also crying.

  He was sitting on the edge of the big coffin; the plastic bags he had brought back lay scattered around him. Some gauze had rolled out of one of them. There were canisters of oil over by the workbench, and behind them three sacks of salt.

  He didn’t scream or howl. He sobbed quietly, just like I used to. The tears trickled into his beard, and I thought that his beard must be very heavy and wet.

  When he saw me he reached out his hand to me. He had nice eyes. Evil eyes can’t cry.

  Slowly, I walked up to him. Finally, I was near enough that his hand could grab my sleeve. He pulled me close and put his arm around me. I stood sideways between his legs, and his giant wet beard tickled my neck.

  We both cried. I’m not quite sure why I cried, but perhaps it was mostly because I didn’t know why he was crying.

  His hand felt warm and nice through my sweater. It was a long time since he had held me like that. I guess that was another reason I was crying. Or perhaps it was because of the coffin.

  ‘There’s something we have to do,’ he suddenly whispered.

  I stood very still behind his hand.

  ‘I have to help your mum, Liv.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘We want her to be OK, don’t we?’

  I nodded and looked right ahead. At the workbench. I could see the sacks of salt and the oil canisters.

  ‘And we want her to stay here with us. We want to keep her. Don’t we, Liv?’

  I nodded again. Tentatively. I really did want to keep Mum, but I wasn’t sure that now was a good time to nod.

  ‘I’m scared that we’ll lose her if we don’t do something. And we’re the only ones who can.’

  ‘Help her?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Help her.’

  ‘What about the man?’

  ‘He can’t help her. But he can help us help her.’

  That made no sense to me.

  I realized that we had stopped crying. My neck felt thick on the inside and wet on the outside … where his beard had brushed it.

  ‘But how …?’

  It took a while before he replied.

  ‘She’s still not … small enough … for us to get her through the door. I think it’s better that we do it upstairs. Then she can lie there with all her books. That would be nice, don’t you think?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘And dry out?’ I asked cautiously, staring at the sacks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And grow smaller?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘For some weeks. Until you can …’

  ‘Yes. You’ll have to help me clean the resin. And I think we need to fetch the big glass jars from the chemist’s outhouse. I think they’re by the baker’s pile. But we have plenty of time, Liv. We have all the time in world. She needs her bath first, her salt bath.’

  ‘But what about the man?’

  ‘He can help me carry the bathtub upstairs. I can’t carry it on my own, and although you’re very strong you’re not strong enough. So, in a way, it was a stroke of luck that he turned up. I had been wondering how I would …’

  Then he stopped talking.

  ‘But what about the man? Afterwards? Will he leave then?’

  Dad hesitated, then he said: ‘Yes, he’ll leave afterwards.’ His voice sounded strange.

  ‘Then he had better watch out for the traps along the gravel road,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps I could show him where they are?’

  ‘Yes … you may.’

  I could see that he wanted to add something.

  ‘Do you know why he came, Liv?’

  ‘Yes, he was looking for his dog … down by …’

  Suddenly my throat tightened. There was something I had to ask Dad. Something about the dog and the trap which had bit deep into its
leg, making it scream and howl. Something about the trap with the horrible teeth.

  I couldn’t.

  I started to cry again.

  ‘And he was alone?’

  I nodded. The tears poured out of me like two small waterfalls that kept on running.

  Dad pulled me close.

  ‘Don’t be sad. Your mum won’t feel a thing. I have some pills for her. They’ll take away all her pain at once. It’ll be quick and she’ll feel so much better afterwards. I think she needs it.’

  He had also said that she needed to be alone.

  I didn’t want Mum to be alone. I wanted to be with Mum.

  ‘But then she’ll be all alone?’

  ‘No, once she’s ready, she’ll be down here with us. She won’t be crying, and she won’t be ill or hungry, and she’ll never be in pain again. You’ll still be able to read to her, and do you know something, Liv …’

  He stroked my hair.

  ‘… she’ll be able to hear you, because she’ll still have her heart.’

  He reached his hand into the coffin and pulled something out. ‘And we’ll be able to see her.’

  I stared at the most beautiful drawing ever drawn of a human being. I stared at Mum. She was smiling.

  Dad got up without warning and I took a step back. I couldn’t work out what to do. I couldn’t cry. Carl hovered nervously by the door. I could tell he wanted to run away.

  Dad looked bigger than ever.

  He had drawn the picture.

  And he had made the trap.

  And now we were about to kill Mum.

  ‘Come on, Liv,’ he said, and I followed him, without wanting to.

  First we went back to the man in the white room. He lay very still with his legs and arms stretched out and his mouth gagged. The ropes from his wrists and ankles to the bedposts were taut. When Dad entered, he raised his head slightly and looked at us.

  Dad just glanced at him, then pulled me outside. He closed the door behind him.

  ‘You wait here and keep guard, Liv. He can’t escape, but you keep guard and use your bow, if necessary. I’ll go over to the house and move some things out of the way so we can bring in the tub.’