Ane Riel - Resin

He kept on talking to me, and I kept on not replying.

‘Please help me get down.’

‘I won’t hurt you. I just want to talk to you.’

‘You can’t leave me hanging here.’

Like that.

I didn’t budge.

‘I spoke to the woman in the bedroom. Are you two related? She asked me to help you.’

At that point I may have twitched ever so slightly.

‘Help us?’ I said after a while. I could see that he couldn’t hear me, so I walked a little closer.

‘Help us?’ I asked him again.

He nodded, which actually looked quite funny because he was upside down and turning around. He started rotating gently the other way.

When he was face to face with me again he narrowed his eyes.

‘Are you a girl?’ he asked me.

I nodded.

‘Did you shoot the dog?’ he said then, and my heart crept all the way up into my mouth. I tried nodding and shaking my head at the same time.

‘Yes, but it wasn’t me who—’

And it was at that moment that Dad appeared in the farmyard. He looked at us. Then he set down all his plastic bags and walked slowly towards us, using the safe route along the workshop. I saw his head glide across the piles, and in between I could also see his whole body. He carried on staring, but I couldn’t tell whether he was staring at me.

A man was hanging upside down between us. Perhaps he was staring at him.

Dad told me to make space in the white room. I had to clear a passage to the bed Dad usually slept in, the one where my granny was killed. Dad had already moved the heaviest things.

I did as I was told without knowing why. But I was scared. Scared about what would happen to the man, and scared about what would happen to us.

Just as I had pushed the last bag blocking the way aside, the man appeared in the door. The room was dim, and he had the midday sun in his back, so I couldn’t see him clearly at first. But I could see that it was him because he was bigger than Dad and, when he took a step forwards, I could also see that he had something tied around his face. It looked like a big sausage made from cloth had been squashed into his mouth.

He didn’t make a sound.

I didn’t make a sound.

Then I noticed that Dad was standing behind him. He told the man to lie down on the bed. I pressed my back against a box as he came closer. He looked at me, and I looked away.

When he turned towards the bed I saw that his hands were tied behind his back. I could also see the knife in Dad’s hand. It was the same knife which had once cut into my baby sister.

Something in me wanted the man to have evil eyes. But his eyes weren’t evil, not now, and not when he had been dangling from the harvester. I couldn’t help thinking about the dog and the trap, and how the man had wept when he saw his dog. Evil eyes don’t cry, do they?

Dad tied him to the four bedposts. One of the man’s trouser legs had been pushed up slightly, and I spotted a red groove around his ankle, just above his sock. It cut deep into his flesh and it was also bleeding a little. My stomach churned at the sight. It must have really hurt hanging from the harvester. It must really hurt now.

And that was when I realized how much all the rabbits in all those snares must have hurt, if the dark hadn’t been able to take their pain away. I had freed lots of dead rabbits from lots of thin snares and seen how the string had cut deep into their fur and flesh. What if they hadn’t died straightaway? What if they felt the wire carve itself deeper and deeper into them and the darkness had never taken away their pain?

I watched the man’s eyes carefully. When they looked at Dad, they looked scared. When they looked at me, the man looked like the dog when it pleaded for help.

Dad turned to me.

‘Stay here and keep an eye on him, Liv. But from a distance. Fetch me if he tries to escape.’ Then he made his way towards the door. ‘We’ll need him later.’

‘Where are you going?’ I asked anxiously. I didn’t want to be alone with the man. Carl being there, on and off, didn’t really count.

‘I’ve got things to do in the workshop. I’ll leave the door open,’ Dad said from the doorway.

‘Please may I go and see Mum?’

‘No. I want you to stay here. Your mum needs to be alone.’

Then he left.

How could you need to be alone?

I watched the man from the doorway. I had my dagger in my belt. My bow and my quiver of arrows were ready right outside the door. I had placed them there, next to the camping stove, when I moved things around in the white room.

The man just lay there.

He tried speaking through the fabric sausage, but only managed strange noises, which I couldn’t understand. So he stopped. I thought it might be nice if he could write things down instead, but it would have meant me freeing one of his hands, and I didn’t know whether he was right-handed or left-handed. I didn’t want to risk untying them both.

I was left-handed, we had discovered, Mum and I. She was right-handed, but she said that either was fine. In order to prove it, she would sometimes write with her left, always capitals. Perhaps the man could also write with either, so it wouldn’t matter which hand I freed. But in any case I would still need something he could write with and on, and that was upstairs with Mum. And I wasn’t allowed up there. Then I remembered that Dad didn’t want me to loosen anything at all.

I knew that I wasn’t supposed to untie the man. But Carl had turned up, and he wanted to.

He kept pestering me.

All at once, I burst into tears. The man looked at me and made a noise. He flapped the fingers on his right hand.

I stared at them and cried even harder.

Then I went to the workshop.

Dad was also crying.

He was sitting on the edge of the big coffin; the plastic bags he had brought back lay scattered around him. Some gauze had rolled out of one of them. There were canisters of oil over by the workbench, and behind them three sacks of salt.

He didn’t scream or howl. He sobbed quietly, just like I used to. The tears trickled into his beard, and I thought that his beard must be very heavy and wet.

When he saw me he reached out his hand to me. He had nice eyes. Evil eyes can’t cry.

Slowly, I walked up to him. Finally, I was near enough that his hand could grab my sleeve. He pulled me close and put his arm around me. I stood sideways between his legs, and his giant wet beard tickled my neck.

We both cried. I’m not quite sure why I cried, but perhaps it was mostly because I didn’t know why he was crying.

His hand felt warm and nice through my sweater. It was a long time since he had held me like that. I guess that was another reason I was crying. Or perhaps it was because of the coffin.

‘There’s something we have to do,’ he suddenly whispered.

I stood very still behind his hand.

‘I have to help your mum, Liv.’

I said nothing.

‘We want her to be OK, don’t we?’

I nodded and looked right ahead. At the workbench. I could see the sacks of salt and the oil canisters.

‘And we want her to stay here with us. We want to keep her. Don’t we, Liv?’

I nodded again. Tentatively. I really did want to keep Mum, but I wasn’t sure that now was a good time to nod.

‘I’m scared that we’ll lose her if we don’t do something. And we’re the only ones who can.’

‘Help her?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Help her.’

‘What about the man?’

‘He can’t help her. But he can help us help her.’

That made no sense to me.

I realized that we had stopped crying. My neck felt thick on the inside and wet on the outside… where his beard had brushed it.

‘But how…?’