Ane Riel - Resin

Before my granny arrived I never wondered why we celebrated Christmas. I guess I thought we did it because it was nice. Mum and Dad never explained why, and I never asked. By talking to my granny I discovered that there was a connection between the man called Jesus and the Christmas tree and my star of bicycle spokes and our geese and the fishmonger’s garden gnomes. What exactly it is, I still don’t get.

Nor did I know what a container was before it arrived. This happened just after New Year. A very big lorry drove up with it on its bed. It rattled and shuddered as it came up the gravel road, and I raced round from the pump behind the barn to see what was going on. The container was set down right behind the workshop. It was a large, rectangular enclosed box of dark blue metal. Its sides came together at the top, and on one long side there were three double hatches.

‘Ordered by someone called Else Horder,’ I heard the man say to Dad. I don’t think he realized that we had killed my granny. Then the lorry drove off without the container and the driver waved to me. It was the last time for a very long time that any outsiders saw me.

Dear Liv

I don’t know if it was right for us to report you dead. But we were so scared, so scared of losing you. What we did to your granny was terrible. But what she intended to do to us was even more terrible.

We had no choice.

I’m choosing to believe that we had no choice.

Deep down, Jens Horder might have known that his mother only wanted what was best for them; that her proposal was an expression of concern and love. He might even have realized that she had cause to be concerned. Nevertheless, he was incapable of interpreting Else’s suggestion as anything other than a threat, a red-hot premonition of yet another unbearable catastrophe.

Maria cried when they lay together in bed that night. He hadn’t seen her weep so pitifully since the accident. Since the last time his mother had been with them.

‘You have to send her away,’ she had sobbed. Inside her, a new life was growing. Yet another life. The other one was sleeping the sleep of the innocent in her little bedroom down the passage. With her dagger on her stomach. Alone.

It was at that moment that something snapped inside Jens: the last thread that connected him to his mother, the remains of an umbilical cord.

He clasped Maria’s hand. ‘Yes, I’ll send her away,’ he whispered as he stared up into the darkness. ‘Far away. There’s nothing else for it.’

She was the one person they could manage without.

‘I’ll do it before Christmas.’

His wife heard the words he whispered. She understood exactly what he meant. And she knew that she should protest. But she couldn’t.

Jens got up from the bed, leaned over Maria and kissed her forehead before he got up and got dressed. Then he disappeared.

Soon afterwards, she could hear him working in his workshop.

Else Horder also heard him from the white room where she, contrary to her usual habit, had yet to fall asleep.

She concluded that Jens must be finishing some last-minute Christmas presents, but even so it was odd for him to be working in the middle of the night. Then again, there was very little her younger son could do these days that would shock her. He and his little family seemed to live in a world of their own, where everything was chaos. Else knew about isolation better than anyone, including how it could mess with your head, but this… this was serious.

She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. Not for all of it, of course, but still. And though it broke her heart, she no longer had any doubts that she had to save Liv from the fate she was being dragged into. The girl didn’t appear to have been seen by a doctor for years, because her parents ‘didn’t like doctors and that kind of thing’, and Else suspected that the girl had never played with, or possibly even spoken to, another child. It was true that Maria was academically inclined, but she was unlikely to be able to home-school a child, as she claimed she wanted to. Liv had to be desperate to get out and meet other people – people who weren’t busy eating themselves to death or turning their home into a junkyard. There was nothing normal in the poor girl’s life.

And then there were the night-time excursions, which worried Else, not to mention the business with Carl. Truth be told, the whole thing might end up a matter for the police, a tragic case. If that happened, she could only hope that they didn’t start asking questions about the accident and reopen old wounds. That was the last thing anyone needed.

Something had to give, and Else had set the process in motion by ordering and paying for a skip, which would arrive just after New Year. Jens hadn’t suspected that anything was amiss. He had just dropped her off at the post office one day and picked her up a little later, as they had arranged. With some help from the post-office lady, Else had found a skip company, called it from the post-office telephone and sent them a cheque immediately. It was pricey, but necessary, Else thought. She knew that the cheque wouldn’t bounce because her ever-helpful cousin had insisted on making a contribution towards unforeseen expenses. Else was sure that Karen would understand about the skip, if only she could get in touch with her. Else was starting to worry. Karen wasn’t answering her phone. She hoped nothing bad had happened to her.

As for ordering the skip behind Jens’s back, Else didn’t feel entirely comfortable about that; she was aware this would be seen as serious meddling. But once the skip arrived surely it would represent an opportunity, she thought, to start clearing up and to bring a breath of fresh air into the house. Perhaps it was the only way she could help her son out of his chaos.

Else would have loved nothing more than to stay on and help out for as long as it took, but she didn’t have much faith that she would be allowed to. She had resigned herself to thinking that perhaps it would be better if she wasn’t there to interfere.

But she couldn’t be so passive when it came to Liv. Else had decided to contact the authorities, but not until the New Year. For now, they would just have to try to make the most of Christmas.

When she finally managed to rid herself of her troubling thoughts and fall asleep, she did so to the sounds of constant sawing and hammering in the workshop next door.

The night before Christmas Eve they ate in silence. Else had insisted on shopping and cooking, and she had an inkling that she had only been permitted to do so because Jens’s jaw was so clenched that he was incapable of replying with anything other than a nod.

She had tried and failed to catch her son’s eye all day. Once he had helped himself to a cup of coffee that morning, he kept well out of her way. As had Maria. She had clammed up like an oyster and didn’t say even good morning when she came downstairs, but her red and swollen eyes were evidence that she had had a troubled night. During the day Else could hear her potter about the house, and she saw her move laboriously around the barn, but she never showed herself in the kitchen. That was probably just as well; given how little space there was, the two of them were unlikely to fit in at the same time. Liv came and went, but even she seemed as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. At one point, Else watched her disappear into the forest with her bow across her back. She didn’t come back for several hours.

This reminded Else of a time when she had stood in the same kitchen, watching her sons disappear in between the same trees. In those days Mogens was always the one who returned first, and he would usually be heading purposefully towards the workshop with some new idea in his head. Jens would stay away for so long that she would get worried. When he finally came back and she asked him what he had been doing, all he would say was that he had been with the trees. Silas had never worried about him.