Ane Riel - Resin

‘But doesn’t it have children to look after?’

‘They’re big enough to look after themselves now.’

‘When will I be big enough to look after myself?’

‘Given your skill with the bow, not long.’ Dad smiled, and for a moment I felt very proud and happy. But only for a moment.

‘But what about you?’

‘What about me?’ He made a strange pause. ‘I’ll be with you even when you’re a grown-up and can look after yourself. I’m not going to die anytime soon.’

‘Not before your hair is white, right?’

‘No, definitely not before my hair has gone all white.’

At that time I didn’t know about Grandad and the lightning.

One of Dad’s and my favourite activities was finding books for Mum because she got really happy whenever we came home with a pile of them. You wouldn’t believe how many books people keep in cardboard boxes in their outhouses, and I often felt that they had never read them, or were ever going to. Eventually Mum had a mountain of books and she was definitely going to read all of them. Most were in the bedroom and in the white room, where Dad had built a big, fine bookcase for them. It’s true that over time many other books and things were stacked in front of the bookcase so you couldn’t see it any more – but we knew that it was there, and that was all that mattered, as we were fond of saying.

I liked books too. Mum had taught me to read and write well before my granny moved to the Head. She used to say you’d think I’d learned how before I was even born and just needed to brush up. It came easy to me, and it got even easier when I discovered how happy me reading aloud made her.

And that was why it didn’t matter that my grip on the pencil was a bit odd. I held it like an arrow I was about to launch, and I simply couldn’t get my head round the curved grip with my finger that Mum showed me. Finally we agreed that it was better that I held the pencil wrong and wrote right than the other way round. And if you think about it, it was lucky I didn’t hold the arrow like I was meant to hold a pencil, or I wouldn’t have hit my targets as often as I did.

One morning when I was practising with my bow and arrow behind the house I noticed that Mum was watching me across the laundry she was hanging up.

‘I know which story we’ll read next,’ she said out of the blue.

Now it wasn’t often that Mum said anything unless she was reading aloud from a book or trying to explain something to me. I don’t think she really liked talking, but she definitely loved reading, and I loved to listen to her when we sat in her bed with a book she had chosen. In fact, I don’t really know what I loved more – the stories or Mum’s voice.

Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference. Sometimes I forgot the voice and disappeared into the story; other times I forgot to listen because I was lost in her voice. She didn’t speak very loudly, but loud enough for a person to disappear into her voice. There was air in it. Back then.

Later, I noticed that the air disappeared. Her voice grew weaker until it was only a whisper and my name became a snatched intake of breath.

I’m glad she had time to teach me the alphabet before her voice found consonants such a problem that she could no longer use them. ‘I’ was the last thing she called me: ‘I’. I started going to her bedroom, which she could no longer leave, and I’d read aloud to her from a book I had chosen.

One day the vowels stopped too.

I couldn’t understand why she had lost her voice. She had taught me not to swallow my words when I spoke. But perhaps that was exactly what she ended up doing herself. Perhaps she ended up eating her own voice. First the air, then the sound. She ate so much.

It was Robin Hood she was thinking about behind the laundry.

Dear Liv

I’m sure you must have wondered about my voice. I can’t explain what happened to it other than the words got stuck in my throat. It felt as if they filled the space on their way up and I didn’t have the strength to push them the final stretch. Finally, it was easier not to try.

It was like having a throat infection that you constantly try to soothe by eating hot soup and food that is easy to swallow. That was how it felt. The less I was able to say, the more I had to eat.

In time, a big mass of unspoken sentences was stuck in my throat. Broken words that had nothing to do with one another, interrupted beginnings, unfinished endings, lines with no air in between all piling up.

My grief was lodged there too. And I didn’t want to pass it on to you. Or to your dad. He had his own to deal with. So I kept it inside me. It was my way of protecting you both.

Your dad had other ways.

Jens Horder took only what he needed from nature and nothing more – except when it came to resin.

It all began with his curiosity. His father had introduced him to the golden balm of the trees and told him about its properties. Shortly before his unexpected demise, Silas Horder had even demonstrated to his son how to tap the sap from a pine tree by removing a small patch of bark from the trunk. Below the patch he made a V-shaped spout which funnelled the sap into a cup which he attached below the tip of the spout.

Jens soon discovered which trees were best suited for this purpose, and in time he started tapping them regularly. He always went about it carefully because the tree should not suffer from his intrusion. It should be milked tenderly, just like a cow.

He knew that he was inflicting injury on the tree, but it felt necessary, for reasons he couldn’t explain. Perhaps the resin was a kind of pine-scented high, an aromatic stimulant he couldn’t do without. Or perhaps Jens genuinely believed that he would one day find a use for all the coagulated resin he kept in his workshop – a big, dark mass of irregularly shaped lumps that were reluctant to let go of one another. The sight brought back memories of a bag of stuck-together liquorice-flavoured boiled sweets that he had once shared with his father in a coffin. Nothing had ever tasted more wonderful than the sweets that night.

By experimenting, Jens had discovered a method for removing impurities from a lump of resin. He would place it on a piece of tinfoil which he stretched out over a metal tin and pierced tiny holes in. Then he melted the resin by holding it over a flame. To this end, he had made a delicate construction of iron rods and horseshoes on which the tin could stand. The impurities remained on the foil while the clean resin gathered at the bottom of the tin. Once the resin hardened, he would store it – clean resin in one barrel and discarded impurities in another. That way he could always take some and melt it again for whatever purpose he had in mind. And he had several. Resin had antibiotic properties and, with the right preparation, it could be made into soap or an excellent type of glue. It could even serve as a source of fuel. If he smeared impure resin on the top of a stick, he would have a torch that would burn reliably.

In his pocket he kept the small ant preserved in its amber universe. It looked as it had done all those years ago when Silas had first shown it to his sons on the north beach. And it looked as it had done millions of years before that. It had been that ant’s task to drag tiny pieces of dried resin back to the anthill to guard it against diseases. However, it was the ant’s fate to be trapped in and choked by the sticky substance and thus lose its life, if not its body.

There was something about resin which fascinated Jens Horder. It could heal, protect and preserve. But it could also kill.