Ane Riel - Resin

Roald had to come up with an excuse to go to the Head. It wasn’t a long trip; all he had to do was cross the Neck. Even so, it felt like quite an expedition.

His acquaintance with Jens Horder was so fleeting that he wasn’t even sure that Jens would recognize him. And he couldn’t just turn up without a reason. Should he be honest and say that he had seen a boy run towards the Head one night, and wanted to know if Jens and Maria knew anything about it? Perhaps they too had been burgled?

No, he had no wish to refer to the child as a thief and risk getting him into trouble. The boy had enough problems already, whoever he was. Besides, Roald couldn’t bear the thought of asking that particular couple about a child.

Perhaps he could invite them to some event at the pub? And then casually ask if they had experienced any break-ins, without mentioning anything about the child. No, that was feeble. Jens and Maria Horder were clearly not interested in socializing on the main island. Jens might have been a guest at the pub a long time ago, when Oluf ran it, but only to help Roald’s uncle with minor repairs, never to sit in the bar or join in darts nights, or the summer party, or the New Year’s Day lunch, or whatever occasion it was that people used as an excuse to drink a little more in slightly smarter clothes. Roald wasn’t even sure if Jens Horder drank alcohol, and he had stopped caring about his appearance long ago.

What on earth could he come up with as a pretext for his visit?

The dog. At some point Roald had expressed a desire to have a dog, and yet he was in two minds about taking on permanent responsibility for an animal. Lars, who usually turned up in the public bar to watch pools football, had told Roald that he was welcome to walk his hunting dog.

Lars suffered from gout and struggled to walk, and his wife never went anywhere but crazy; she had what could most charitably be described as an explosive temper. After she had slapped the postman across the face for turning up with a reminder letter, they had never been known as anything other than Lars and Short Fuse. People knew that she drank a little more than was good for her at home on the farm, but they would obviously never dream of mentioning it. At least not in Lars’s presence.

It was a German wirehaired pointer. The kind that looks like an old, distinguished, bearded gentleman, although it was only five years old and its temper was almost as explosive as its mistress’s. Its name was Ida.

But she was cute, Ida with the beard. And strong. Lars’s instructions were that Roald mustn’t let her off the lead until they were well clear of the tarmac road. Roald couldn’t wait for that moment to arrive because, after a mere ten minutes of being dragged down the road, his arm was close to dislocating from the shoulder.

As he approached the Neck, he reviewed his mission yet again. He wasn’t sure that he knew exactly what he was doing. But taking a dog for a walk up there was OK… or was it? He realized that he had no idea if he would be trespassing on private property. All of the Head couldn’t belong to Horder, could it? But where was the boundary? Was there even such a thing?

It wasn’t just time which had been suspended on the island, Roald had noticed. It was also physical barriers, which seemed to flow rather freely inside the boundaries delineated by the sea. The crops had undulated peacefully between neighbours for generations and boundary posts were mainly located in people’s memories.

It would never have worked on the mainland.

There were no crops undulating now, where the November sunshine rose above the landscape, and the golden leaves from a windbreak had long since scattered in the plough furrows on the field he passed.

When the tarmac finally turned into a gravel road, he released the dog. It galloped off over the Neck and on to the Head as if it hadn’t stretched out for years, and soon disappeared out of sight.

Perfect. He was looking for his dog, which had done a runner. That was his story. He would ask the Horders if they had seen it, and somehow manage to bring up the child in conversation.

The Neck was quiet. Roald looked down the verges of buckthorn and lyme grass and watched a couple of seagulls fight over a crab. The sea sloshed against the causeway from both sides in small, awkward kisses. To the east there was water, water, water until the sea disappeared in a light mist. To the west the blurred contours of the mainland. He didn’t miss it.

And in front of him the Head rose like a broad, dark mass. He felt like Columbus or, better still, Amundsen journeying north. He knew he was being ridiculous, given that the squinting postman came here regularly. It wasn’t unexplored territory. But it felt like it.

In the distance, he could hear the dog.

It was screaming.

An animal is screaming nearby. Is it one of ours? Is it a dog? It sounds like a dog. I don’t like it.

I don’t feel very well, Liv.

I wish you could hear what I’m writing. I wish you were here now.

What’s going on?

The day it happened I was sitting in the container. It was one of my bad days. That night I had dreamt that I was standing under a waterfall, which changed its mind halfway down. I looked up at all the water suspended right above me, and I knew that any second now it would realize that it couldn’t continue hanging there. That only the sea could retreat, not a waterfall. Dad had told me so.

Water falls.

And children drown. Maybe.

When I woke up I tried to carry on with my dream, to turn it into a nice one. I imagined that the waterfall took so long to realize that it was a waterfall that I had time to step back to safety between the rock face and the water, which would soon come crashing down like a heavy blanket. I had read about such things in one of Mum’s books: a secret room you could stand in. Behind the curtain.

But as long as I could only imagine it and not dream it, I didn’t know if I had truly got myself to a safe place. And I didn’t like that feeling.

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.