Ane Riel - Resin

I’m not sure how long my granny stayed with us, but I think it must have been a whole month. It was definitely in the time leading up to Christmas because she taught me to make paper hearts and to sing carols about Mary and Jesus, who I kept calling Jens. I still wasn’t clear about who Jens’s dad was, but I liked the idea of him being born in a stable. At night.

When I asked Mum when Carl and I were born, she replied that it must have been in the afternoon, that there had been a lady to help, and that giving birth to us had been fairly painful. I wished that she had waited until it was dark, but I was glad that at least Carl and I had been together. I’d never liked being alone.

Perhaps that explained why I liked looking at the drawings of Carl and me. They hung from a nail over the bed in the master bedroom. Dad drew them. He drew us every year when the honeysuckle blossomed, and you could tell from our faces how we had changed and yet continued to look alike. The new drawings were put on top of the old ones, so that you could flick back and forth and see how we looked as babies. I liked posing, sitting still as Dad drew me, because I could watch him and keep an eye on his hair and his beard, which was growing bigger and bigger.

Dad had also drawn Mum once. That drawing was on a wall in his workshop in a fine little clip frame. I’ve never seen other drawings of her. But I’ve also never seen a more beautiful drawing of a beautiful woman.

Although my granny had moved into the room behind the workshop, it felt as if she had taken over the main house. Carl could sense it too, but to begin with we thought it was so exciting that it never crossed our minds it might also be dangerous.

When my granny came to the bedroom and sat with me on the bed that morning, it was the first time that I spoke to an outsider, I mean properly, where it was just the two of us. For some strange reason I wasn’t scared at all. Yes, to begin with, of course I was, because Mum was in the laundry room behind the barn and Dad was out by the Christmas trees, so neither of them would be able to hear me if I screamed.

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.