I always brought my smallest torch, but I was very careful about using it, especially in the kitchen, where one of the windows could be seen from the road. It was better to wait for my eyes to get used to the darkness, to try to be like the owl. My eyes had grown so used to darkness that in time I saw best at night.
I would take all sorts of things from the stock room. Mainly tins and toilet paper, but sometimes also food from the big freezer. If there were any sweets, I’d always take some because Mum loved sweets. As I mostly picked bags with small pieces, liquorice pastels and gummy bears, say, I didn’t think that they could be making her fat. I also tried very hard to bring back biscuits because there was something very special about eating biscuits in bed with Mum. We would always break and shake them before we ate them. ‘So the calories can fall out,’ she would say. That made us laugh.
But, to be honest, I never really understood what she meant. I never saw any calories fall on to the duvet, the books or the other things. Nevertheless, I would always snap and shake my biscuits. I still do. They taste much better that way.
Every time I would remember to peek inside the fridge in the pub kitchen and I’d often find foil trays with food that was already cooked. Sometimes I’d take them out and hold them for a long time, breathing in the smell of the food. At times I might taste a bit as I stood there, even put a few trays in my bag. But I had to be very careful and never leave the fridge door open for a long time, Dad said. There was a light inside it, and someone might see it through the window. There were no curtains.
The thought of light and noises that might give me away terrified me. Darkness and silence were my friends.
I never took too much at any one time. That was the whole point of the game. Otherwise I might get caught, and that was the worst outcome imaginable. Not only because it would put an end to the game, but also because I didn’t know what they might do if they caught me. The strangers.
To begin with, I thought the game was just for fun, but in time I realized that we played it in order to survive. And that the consequences of being caught were unbearable. In time I realized that this game was deadly serious.
Dad spoke about them, the others. That, yes, they took part in the game, but not in a nice way. The strangers hoped to spot us so that they could do nasty things to us. Carl and I wished that he had never told us because it was hard not to think about it when we were off on our own. The thought would make Carl’s heart beat so hard that I could hear it.
One day when I asked Dad if we couldn’t just stop the game, he said something I’ll never forget: ‘But then your mum would starve to death, and I would be sad.’
He gave me such a strange look as he said it.
It was at that moment that I finally noticed what was happening to his face. His beard had grown enormous. Before, I thought that it looked like the undertaker’s larch hedge just after he trimmed it. And that it was lovely and soft to touch. Now Dad’s beard looked more like a pile of twigs. It was dry and black and white at the same time, and a few wood shavings and bits of cobwebs were trapped in it. I even spotted something stirring inside the beard – possibly an animal trapped in the cobweb, or maybe it was just his mouth moving. His hair had also grown long and strange, and his eyebrows were so bushy they looked a bit scary.
But the weirdest and the worst were the eyes staring at me from under the bushy brows. They were staring without seeing, like a milky layer was covering the kindest eyes I knew. It was as if I couldn’t see Dad any more.
That day the responsibility on my shoulders truly dawned on me. How much depended on what I dragged home in my bag. That day I became big in a very small way because I still had to fit through the basement window in the pub.
Whenever I was in the pub kitchen I always looked around for things that Dad might like. There were all sorts of things in the drawers, and I usually found something for him. It might be a tea towel. Or a soup ladle. Or a roll of cling film or possibly an egg slicer. I didn’t always know what something was, but if I liked the look and the feel of it I was sure Dad would too.
The strangest thing I ever found on my trips was a long thingy under a bed in a holiday cottage. There were batteries inside it, but you didn’t have to take them out and press them against your tongue to make it buzz. You could just press your tongue against the thingy itself, push the button and the whole thing would vibrate! Dad told me it was a kitchen utensil, for making eggnog. But when I tried it out I was very disappointed with the result.
Every now and then I managed to sneak one of the pub’s pots or pans into my bag. I had to be especially careful with them, Dad said. It was best only to take things people wouldn’t notice were missing, at least not immediately. But when I dragged home one half of the kind of bicycle which comes apart in the middle he couldn’t hide his excitement, and he begged me to fetch the other half as soon as I could.
And so I did. And when I realized how happy bicycles made him, I started finding even more. All kinds. It was easy, because I didn’t have to climb inside people’s houses to get them. Bicycles were usually left in places where they were easy to take and, if they were unlocked, it was easy peasy. Carl didn’t really like cycling, so I pushed them home across the Neck. For his sake.
But I’ve got ahead of myself. Before all of that, before Mum got so fat that she could no longer leave the bedroom, and before Dad stayed at home on the Head at night to look after the things, and before I noticed the cobweb in his beard. Before all of that, other things happened.
Such as me getting a baby sister.
The Dead and the Newborn
Maria and Jens Horder reported their daughter missing shortly after the New Year. Sadly, there was every reason to fear that she had drowned in an accident. Jens Horder himself went to the police officer in Korsted to tell him what had happened. Or rather what he assumed had happened:
Liv had been out playing on her own the day before. There was nothing unusual about that. She was used to being out in the fields and the surrounding forest, and she had never given them any cause to worry. However, yesterday she hadn’t come home in the afternoon, as she usually did. When it started getting dark Jens had searched all over the Head for her. Liv would never leave the Head on her own, he assured the police officer. He was afraid that Liv might have fallen and hurt herself in the forest, and he didn’t want to abandon his search and drive to the main island until he was absolutely sure that he had looked everywhere she might possibly be. His wife, Maria, had also searched. Though mostly in and immediately around the house.
Jens Horder had gradually extended his search, he said, and eventually got as far as the north beach, though he didn’t think that Liv would have gone there on her own, as she knew perfectly well that she was not allowed. Nevertheless, there were signs to indicate that she had been there: when Jens Horder had examined the shore in the darkness, Liv’s beloved leather wristband had appeared in the beam of his torch. It had been lying, half buried, in the sand in front of the small wooden jetty where their dinghy was moored; or rather, should have been moored. Jens Horder had not in his wildest imagination thought that Liv might walk as far as the deserted beach and then dare venture out in the dinghy on her own. But she was, he had to admit, a stubborn little soul, and once she set her heart on something, it took almost supernatural powers to change it. Earlier that day she had pestered him to go sailing, but he had said no. It was far too cold for a little girl like her to go sailing in January.