Ane Riel - Resin

I also kept an eye on the trees. The area between the forest and the gravel road had always been grassy, but recently a lot of small spruces had started shooting up. It was as if the forest was spreading. Perhaps it might cover all of the Head one day. And I would be safe in the container, right in the middle of it all.

She should be with me, Dad said, when he had finished my baby sister’s coffin.

So that we could keep one another company.

We pushed aside some of the old tyres and shifted some sacks so that she could lie in her coffin next to my spot in the container. If I removed the wooden lid, I could look down at her.

The coffin was the nicest thing I had ever seen Dad make. Mum had told me about Grandad’s famous coffins, but they couldn’t possibly have been more beautiful than the one Dad made for my baby sister.

To begin with, it was a bit odd, her lying there next to me. But in time I grew used to it. Somehow it was nice that we were together, all three of us: my twin brother, our baby sister and me. All of us dead.

Except that I was only reported dead.

Dear Liv

What day is it today? Have you had your birthday? It’s so dark here in the bedroom. I wish I could get your dad to move some of the things blocking the windows, but he doesn’t come here very often these days. Perhaps you can reach the stuff at the top, if you stand on something? Only I don’t want you to get hurt. You might easily get hurt by that big radio at the top.

Oh, Liv, you’re gone for so long every time. I wish I could get out of bed, out of this room, downstairs. Outside. Please bring the bucket and the flannel soon. And more food and something to drink. I’m so terribly thirsty. It’s the air.

The chef would be back in a few days and the pub would reopen. Roald had finished painting and carried out the repairs, and was now looking forward to the aroma of the chef’s delicious food replacing the smell of paint. He had finished a day early but felt strangely restless. It was probably just another loose end which he could tie up, although he had completed every job on his list. He believed that he had earned his first day off in – what was it now? Six, seven, eight years? He had totally lost any sense of time.

Island time was different to mainland time. Back there, he had seen a clear, straight line on his retina whenever he imagined the passing of the year: a linear path with razor-sharp divisions into end-of-year exams, study leave, holidays and meetings; it was always a copy of the equally fixed routines of previous years and next year’s invariable plans. On the island, a year was an organic entity that wrapped itself softly around Christmas and stretched out in the summer, where it merged with the years before and after. Time hadn’t been suspended; it had just acquired a new velocity. It had become a soft friend that wanted nothing but to be.

Although he had enjoyed the silence while the pub was closed, Roald had to admit that he missed his regulars turning up at the usual time in the bar. He was almost at the stage where he missed the fishcake wholesaler who spent all his visits in front of the one-armed bandit, until the time was exactly eleven minutes to dinner time. It took the fishcake wholesaler nine and a half minutes from leaving his barstool in front of the fruit machine to him leaning his bike up against the wall of his house, he had explained. And then ninety seconds from parking the bike to reaching his dining chair, if he stopped off to wash his hands first.

That was pretty much all the talking the fishcake wholesaler ever did.

Except for stating that crispy pork with parsley sauce should be declared a national dish. Especially if that was what he would be getting for dinner once he got back. On such occasions he could barely suppress his excitement and came very close to leaving his barstool at twelve minutes to. He didn’t care much for fishcakes, he said, but it had been a good business right until the reds turned up and wrecked everything with all their ideas. Roald never got to the bottom of what that meant. Nor was he terribly up to speed with the fishcake market.

Roald had yet to discuss the child with anyone. He had bumped into the police officer a few times recently, so it wasn’t for lack of opportunity, but something held him back. After all, the police didn’t have to be his first port of call. There were others. Perhaps he could speak to someone from the school, or ask around. There was a pretty music teacher he wouldn’t have minded chatting up, except she had recently become engaged to a naval officer and seemed to fantasize about having a flock of children, as many as the von Trapps.

Perhaps he should ask the retired doctor who sometimes showed his face in the pub, and where he would always tell the same joke. After all, doctors knew a bit about people. In view of his profession, he would be subject to a duty of confidentiality, but as with time, a duty of confidentiality was a different entity here on the island.

In the end, Roald decided to pay the family on the Head a visit. Alone.

He had never been there. It wasn’t a place you just dropped by, unless you had business there, and since Roald could carry out most repairs himself, he had never needed a man like Jens Horder.

Horder’s carpentry business – or whatever it was he did – seemed to have ground to a total halt. It was a long time since the sign down on the main island had been removed, and the Christmas-tree sales also seemed to have come to an end. However, the man himself could occasionally be seen with a truckload of junk, and it was said that he would still turn up at the junkyard or sniff around a car-boot sale. Sometimes people would actually pay him to take their junk away.

Roald wondered about the pickup truck, an ancient Ford F, which should have died a death a long time ago. Jens Horder had miraculously kept the beast alive. It was said that the pickup truck used to belong to his father.

Roald had only seen Maria Horder once, several years ago, when she was waiting at the chemist’s. He wouldn’t have known that it was her if it hadn’t been for Jens Horder next to her.

They were an odd couple, the pair of them. They just sat there holding hands, smiling a little shyly without saying a word. Jens Horder’s eyes seemed black, inscrutable. He was slim and well shaped – even beautiful, if such a word could be applied to a man – and he was wearing the finest ivory shirt. She, by contrast, had looked rather big next to her husband, but nevertheless she was really pretty. According to regulars at the pub, she had been slim when she arrived on the island. The more Roald furtively studied her from his place in the queue, the prettier she became. Her inscrutability lay in the smile at the corners of her mouth. Then it was Roald’s turn to be served.

Recently, however, Jens Horder had started to resemble an unkempt savage, and rumour had it that Maria Horder had grown enormous. At least the postman said so, and he was probably the last person to have seen her on the Head. That was a long time ago now.

Then again, the postman might not be the most reliable of witnesses. For instance, he had more than hinted that Horder received monthly letters from the Mafia containing huge sums of cash. To imagine that Jens Horder was in cahoots with the Mafia was pretty much as far-fetched as implying that the man had killed his own mother. Which was what the postman was also insinuating, though God knows how that idea had got into his head. Perhaps postmen were just prone to fantasizing more than other people because they carried so much information around, so many potential secrets, about which they could speculate but never prove, unless they had X-ray vision.