Resin Read online

  While I thought about my dream, I mended a hole in my teddy bear. Mum had taught me to sew, just like she had taught me to read. One day I had been given my very own sewing box, which Dad had made and Mum had filled with needles and thimbles and elastic bands and thread. It was with me in the container, right next to my baby sister’s coffin.

  The teddy bear tended to get holes. And when it did, something white would come out of them. It didn’t look like the things that came out of rabbits and deer and foxes and people. This stuff was white and dry and soft and looked like snow when I threw it up into the air before I put it back inside the teddy bear and closed up the hole. I didn’t know why the teddy got holes. Perhaps I cuddled it too much, or maybe it was the mice. But at least it wasn’t rotting.

  Mum was a different matter. And that might have been the real reason I was so sad that day. I had gone to see her with some tinned food, which I had heated on Dad’s camping stove. I had also brought her water from the pump. It was easier to get it from the pump than to try to reach the kitchen sink. I would like to have brought her some milk, because she loved fresh milk, but our last cow and the goats didn’t produce any now. They needed children to produce milk, Mum had explained. There were no children, and the billy goat had died. It was just lying in the field, stiff as a board, looking way too skinny. I don’t know why we didn’t take it away. All the animals had started to look skinny. Perhaps they didn’t get enough to eat. Dad said he gave them what they needed, but I wasn’t so sure …

  Perhaps it was because their feed was starting to look strange. It smelled odd, too. Some of it was stored in the living room because there was furniture taking up space in the feed store. The gaps between Dad feeding them grew longer and longer, and yet he didn’t seem willing to let the animals out to graze any more. I could hear them. I think they were calling out to Dad. Or for grass.

  Or maybe they were calling out to me.

  But I didn’t dare do anything without Dad’s permission. And I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go to the barn on my own, mostly because I was terrified of what I would find there, I guess.

  That morning the noises had been even more mournful than before. I thought I could hear the horse cry.

  But it wasn’t the animals that had made me the saddest that day. It was Mum.

  Mum was also full of holes, but they weren’t small, dry openings that I could stitch. They were big, festering sores. When I helped her wash with the flannel and the bowl and she moved about on the mattress, I could see them. They were caused by her lying down so much and being so heavy, she explained to me on her notepad. It was tiny compared to Mum, and the pen practically disappeared inside her hand.

  She was so big.

  And yet it was as if Mum’s body had changed. It distributed itself differently on the bed. It had grown limper – like the teddy bear when too much of the white stuffing had come out of a hole and I hadn’t put it back in yet. Perhaps it was because I didn’t bring her food as often as I used to. I tried to, but it was difficult. Dad told me not to give her too much.

  I no longer knew what Dad was doing. He was there, and at the same time, he wasn’t.

  The worst thing was that the holes grew worse, and Mum was crying. That morning she had written on her notepad that she had asked Dad to go to the main island. He needed to get something from the chemist to heal her sores. And painkillers. I didn’t understand the last part. How did you kill pain? The same way you killed a person? Her handwriting had changed. The sentences had grown shorter, and her handwriting wasn’t as neat as it once was.

  Better still, if he could get a doctor, she added at the end. We need help now.

  That last line really freaked me out, because Dad had told me about doctors. They were the kind of people you needed to watch out for more than anyone else. They made people sick, he said. And interfered in things they shouldn’t. They took people away.

  Imagine if they took Mum away. And what about me? What if a doctor came here to visit Mum and saw me? Would he take me away? Make me ill? What if he killed me? I didn’t want to die for real.

  So I didn’t understand what Mum was talking about.

  I had also come to the conclusion that I didn’t understand Dad either. I understood nothing at all. Carl couldn’t help, but it was nice that he was there, so that we could not understand anything together.

  I didn’t know what I hoped Dad would come back with. I had seen him drive down the gravel road and disappear behind the spruces by the barrier. Before he left, he had taken some money from the money box in the container. The box was jam-packed with banknotes with people and lizards and squirrels and sparrows and fish and butterflies on them, and small brown coins and slightly bigger ones with the face of a lady who could be the butcher’s wife in profile.

  Dad didn’t like money leaving the box. ‘We need to look after it, just as we look after you and the things and your baby sister in the coffin.’

  I was tempted to add: ‘And Mum in the bed and the animals in the barn.’ But I didn’t.

  We also had animals inside the house now. There were rabbits everywhere. I can’t imagine where they had come from – we had only had two to begin with. As we always closed and locked the doors, they never came outside unless I took one of them with me to the container. That was the upside to there being so many of them: Dad would never know if one was missing.

  Sometimes I wondered what would happen if the rabbits inside the house met the ones outside? Would they be able to talk to each other? I had never been scared of the wild rabbits, but the ones in the house frightened me because there were so many of them. Somehow they seemed wilder than the wild ones.

  Then there were the noises they made. When only one of them made a small noise, I didn’t mind, but when the whole house grunted, it stopped being nice. And it wasn’t just the rabbits making noises; there were other animals: shiny animals darting down the walls and across the floor, where they would make a crunching sound if you accidentally stepped on them. I never did so on purpose. Glossy blue-green flies buzzed around open cans. Faded butterflies bashed their brown wings against the windowpanes somewhere behind all the stuff, or where they had been caught in a web, rotating themselves to death. Small mice and much bigger mice with very long tails. Something was always scratching, grunting or squeaking somewhere. At times it would be Mum.

  I had slept in many places around the house. Upstairs in my own little bedroom, until I could no longer get in because of all the stuff we kept there. In the furthest room, until it got too difficult to reach it. With Mum, until there was no longer room for two people. In the living room, at the bottom of the stairs, even right inside the door in the workshop. After all, I could take my duvet anywhere.

  But now I nearly always slept in the container with Carl. It was quiet. At most a few mice would be pottering about. Small ones. I liked the small ones, but I never forgave the one who tried to eat my baby sister.

  I slept most of the day. The light felt sharp, so sharp that it hurt, unless it was mixed with darkness.

  I preferred being outside in the moonlight, where the darkness glowed by itself. Or I would use my torches. I had them in all sizes and strengths and with many different types of batteries. But whenever I sat in the container, I lit a pillar candle which I placed inside a small lantern.

  I liked watching the flame.

  If the container hatch was ajar, or there was a draught coming from one of the holes Dad had made, the flame might flatten, get up and twist around itself. The rest of the time it would just dance around its wick. I tried to imagine the flame hardening like resin, so that millions of years later people would find it, bite it and say: ‘Yes, that’s an old flame. Once upon a time it was fire.’ And a child would be allowed to look inside it and see the ancient wick.

  But I couldn’t escape the light completely. The daylight. You see, Dad had started sending me into the forest to collect more resin. I drained the trees and I brought back as much as I could – in
small buckets which he tipped into the barrels.

  ‘We need more, Liv. Fetch me more. The trees don’t mind. Cut holes in more trees. We need more. Much more.’

  I didn’t know what he was going to do with it all, but I didn’t mind because it made him start talking to me again. Even if it was just to ask me for more resin. I was sad that he didn’t want to come with me to the forest. I think it would have done him good. I enjoyed being out there, but I missed him. The forest wasn’t the same without Dad.

  The upside was that he was back in the workshop. Him working on something was much better than him being around without really being present. One day when he had driven to Korsted to fetch something, I went to the workshop to have a look. I was pleased to see that he had tidied up around the workbench, which made it easier for him to move about. There was a pile of planks and I could smell fresh wood. It was so nice that I started to smile. It reminded me of something I liked.

  And yet I felt uneasy. Because soon afterwards he came back with a lot of junk. I also caught a glimpse of a bag of gauze and cans of grapeseed oil.

  There was too much of everything.

  When I realized what he was making a few days later, it stopped being nice. It was huge. It was many times the size of the tiny coffin he had made for my baby sister.

  The day it happened I was sitting in the container, closing up the teddy bear and thinking about the holes and Mum and the waterfall and the money and the rabbits and the doctors and resin and the frozen fire. And Dad’s coffin.

  That morning I heard a scream.

  It wasn’t a bird of prey or an owl or a badger or a human being who had just seen a newborn baby die. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, but I was sure that it was an animal. And I was pretty sure that it had to be a dog.

  Something inside me told me that it must be caught in a trap. Except that our traps weren’t the kind of traps that made you scream; not even in daylight. A fox had once trapped its paw in a rabbit snare at the edge of the forest, but it didn’t scream, it was just stuck. I don’t think it had been sitting there very long when we found it and freed it. Dad covered its head with his jacket while I cut the string. The fox limped a bit as it ran off, but I think that it was happy. After all, we were kind to animals and we didn’t eat foxes.

  But this sound. That was an animal in a lot of pain; I could feel it in my tailbone. When I knew that someone was in pain, I would get a long shooting sensation going down to my tailbone, as if my tummy was pulling itself right into my back and down towards the ground. I got the same feeling when I visited Mum and saw her sores.

  If Carl had had a real body, I’m sure he would have felt exactly the same – after all, we were twins and inside one another. We had merged together, that was how I saw it. I was a little bit of a boy, and he was a little bit of a girl. Somehow, he was a little bit alive, and I was a little bit dead. Our baby sister was another matter; she was definitely dead. But at least she was here, right next to me, and that made me happy.

  It was a terrible scream.

  And then I remembered the new traps that Dad had set to keep unwanted visitors at bay – or at least warn us if anyone was coming. I hadn’t been allowed to see them all. He had just told me where they were and ordered me never to go near them. And he had looked at me in such a way that I could see that he meant it.

  I knew about the three traps along the gravel road, of course. If you followed the path around the barrier when you walked up the gravel road towards the house, you would soon trip over a wire, and it would make some tins close to the house rattle. But tripping over a wire didn’t hurt much, did it? Not enough for anyone to scream. And I hadn’t heard the tins rattle.

  If you somehow managed to evade the tripwire, you would meet another obstacle a little further on. Dad had dug a couple of shallow trenches in the road and covered them with thin pieces of cardboard with gravel and leaves and pine needles on top. If you stepped on the cardboard, your foot would go right into the trench. Now that might hurt a bit, so perhaps you would cry out, but it would also cause some junk to make noise in a nearby tree. That was to warn us. In particular me, so that I would have time to hide.

  As you got near the front of the house, there was another trap in the place where most people would choose to walk if they were aiming for the front door. It was another trench, and if you ended up in it, a branch from a nearby tree would swipe your face. But you probably wouldn’t get that far before you were discovered.

  Dad and I knew exactly where the three traps were so we could avoid ending up in them ourselves. He would park the pickup truck a bit further down the road, opposite the trap at the front of the house. When he got near the second trap with the pickup truck, he would drive half on to the grass so the tyres would go either side of the trench. When I walked there, I’d swerve around a particular spruce so as to stay clear of it. It was the safest way and, no matter how dark it was, I could always find that spruce with my torch. It was much taller than the others, and had a branch sticking out near its top which was easy to see against the sky.

  The tripwire down by the barrier was also easy to avoid. All you had to do was not follow the small gravel path. But we were the only ones who knew that. Dad always closed the barrier behind him, even if he was only going out for a quick trip in the pickup truck. He didn’t want to run the risk, he said. Anything could go wrong if you weren’t careful; if anyone got too close.

  Now, like I said, I didn’t know anything about the other traps, the new ones. All I knew was never to take the path left around the juniper bush in order to reach the house, or walk between the tall birches before the thicket, or down the path through the scrub south of the house. If you chose to ignore the gravel road, which was the most obvious route, then they were the most likely ones.

  There were also certain places around the farmyard where I wasn’t allowed to go, and Dad had given me routes to follow in between the piles. Unless I followed them, I would cause terrible damage, he said. I didn’t know how, but I didn’t want to cause terrible damage, so I always did exactly as he said – except for taking a rabbit to the container. And also because he had looked at me with those eyes as he said it. I could tell from them that it was very important.

  Now the sound changed from a scream to a howl, which grew inside my head. I stared out through the peepholes in the container and held my breath. My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear that too.

  And then I spotted it. Down by the juniper bush. Something was moving. It looked like a dog, a big dog, but I only saw it in flashes when it threw itself to one side.

  We were supposed to be kind to animals. I was kind to animals. And the dog couldn’t possibly have come to take me away. But it might bite me. I was a bit scared of dogs because they had teeth, and because I believed that Dad was a bit scared of them too. He had certainly always avoided visiting any houses with dogs that might make a noise.

  OK, so we had been able to visit the insurance salesman, because his dog, which was very long as well as having long ears, never made a sound if we gave it some wine gums. I wasn’t sure that it could get up from its spot by the door to the pantry, even if it wanted to. But it would wag its tail non-stop, and the trick was to put a long, thick sock around it straightaway so it wouldn’t make a noise when it bashed it against the floor. Once we forgot to take the sock off its tail before we left and that caused such a fuss that Dad heard about it when he was queuing in the post office a few days later: the insurance salesman had been showing the sock at the pub. And it turned out to be a sock which the chemist’s wife had knitted for her husband – one of a pair, I mean. Now the chemist was accusing the insurance salesman of having nicked his priceless socks, and the insurance salesman accused the chemist of having treated his Basset hound badly. We still have the other sock somewhere. We must take good care of it.

  Then it struck me that the howling dog might be heard as far as the main island. Perhaps Dad could hear it, wherever he was. Perh
aps lots of doctors would come running and make us ill or take me away if they heard it.

  I had to stop the howling.

  My bow lay near me in the container. I put the teddy bear away and reached for it. And my quiver. Everything was ready for action, only my bow hadn’t seen much use recently, because we didn’t eat that kind of food any more. Tins were easier, Dad said. But I still practised from time to time.

  As I ran down towards the juniper bush, I discovered that I had been crying, but also that I had stopped. My eyes stung a little. Or perhaps it was the daylight.

  My heart was still pounding, but the rest of my body was doing what I told it to. I jumped silently over grassy knolls and zigzagged between the small trees, which were shooting up everywhere, like a forest for very small people. My baby sister would probably think the trees were tall. I could see across them as I ran. The quiver slapped my back softly with every jump; I had made it myself with the pelts from four wild rabbits. And I had moulded the tips and turned the arrows, while Dad told me everything about what wood could do and smiled at everything his daughter could do.

  The dog was lying on its side, and the howling had become long and high-pitched, as if it were about to run out. But it was there. Like an ice pick in my ear.

  Horrified, I stared at its hind leg, which lay twisted on the grass. The lower part was trapped in a metal monster, which seemed to be fixed with a chain somewhere in the ground under the grass and the twigs. Although the grass was taller here, there was a natural passage between the juniper bush and some trees. This was a place I wasn’t allowed to go. One of them. The metal monster looked like a giant set of teeth which had snapped around the dog’s hind leg. The dog had made some attempts to free its leg, but every time the big teeth seemed to sink deeper into its flesh. Its blood was very red in the daylight. There was way too much light. And way too much blood. I’d never seen anything as red as that blood.

  I tried. I really tried my best to pull the metal teeth apart, but I couldn’t. I also tried twisting them apart with a branch, but it snapped. The metal was super-strong.