He had a surprise for her in the living room: two baby rabbits that had been left in a box for collection along the roadside. She experienced a strange, unknown joy as she stuck her hand into the cardboard box and stroked the animals’ soft fur. They would be allowed to live in the house; they wouldn’t be caught in snares in the forest and be flayed and eaten as ragout. The small, living rabbits looked cheerfully at her and chewed and munched and moved about the hay in soft jumps. Liv’s heart leapt.
And yet, for some reason, she still began to cry when she climbed into her mother’s bed. And for some reason, her mother also cried. Then they ate sweets and biscuits and snapped them and shook them and read a book about a woman who was very much in love. It was Liv who did the reading aloud but her mother who recognized being in love and felt it ripple deep inside her.
And one day the child arrived. Too soon. Maria gave birth in the bedroom, which at that point she could just about leave. But only just and only if she forced her way out.
Her husband and daughter helped welcome the baby.
Liv stared at the drama unfolding in front of her eyes. The head. The tiny head that came out towards her like a marbled moon before it became a complete head that stuck out of the bottom of a giant body.
She marvelled at the effort, the fluid, the small body attached to the tiny head which eventually followed it outside, but with great reluctance. A transparent, wet and far too small body with a long, grey-and-white snake squirming from its tummy.
And she heard her mother make noises that grew louder and louder as the hours passed. They weren’t screams, not the loud, high-pitched cries of a bird of prey. They were cries that came from deep inside the earth. Deep roars without consonants.
And the earth fought with itself in the bed. The big body lay like a trembling landscape with mountains and gorges and wild shrub fighting in front of Liv.
Shouting.
At something or for something.
And then the tiny person dangling in front of her.
At the head.
And her father holding its feet and slapping it.
Why did he slap it?
And then the silence.
Carl was terrified.
Liv was told to cut the cord with her dagger. They attached a clip. And some gauze. In time she had picked up so many rolls of gauze and compresses and white surgical tape from the small ‘help yourself facility’ on the outskirts of the Head that a sign had been put up asking the islanders if they really needed quite so much gauze.
The child also fought. It really did. It had fought its way out of the earth, out of the water, out of the darkness, and now it gasped for air, surrounded as it was by so much of it. Without vowels or consonants. It just opened its tiny lips. Like the flounders.
And then it stopped.
It couldn’t do it. It was far too small to live.
Liv tried to cover Carl’s ears when their father screamed. He screamed like the owl, like the seagulls, like an injured hedgehog; like a deer screams for her lost fawn; like a badger screaming out of passion. He screamed like a child screams when he finds his father dead in the heather.
His scream was as high-pitched as it was possible to scream. A shade of white so blinding and luminous that it was like looking straight at the sun at noon and seeing nothing and everything at once.
But more than anything, Jens Horder screamed as he had screamed on the inside when he discovered his baby boy under the cradle with his skull broken – and at that moment realized the unbearable truth: that in his rush of expectant joy he had forgotten to put in the final screws, that he had failed as a carpenter and a father, that he had killed his own son. And that he would never ever be able to share that truth with his darling wife out of sheer terror of also losing her.
With numb hands he had picked up the side piece and screwed it in place so that no one could tell the two cradles apart. Then he had knelt in front of the lifeless child on the floor. He hadn’t touched it; he had stared at the small head in the scarlet halo and finally screamed at the top of his lungs until Maria had come running and picked up the child and held it tight and screamed in unison with him.
The back of Carl’s soft head had hit one of his father’s toolboxes as he fell. A merciless, steel-grey corner.
That was how Jens screamed now. And Liv recognized her father’s scream from an early memory.
Maria cried herself to sleep with soft vowels, and Liv washed her bloodstained mother while her father disappeared with the small, lifeless body.
‘It was a girl,’ was all he said as he walked away with the child in his arms.
Dear Liv
We should never have tried to give you a baby sister or brother, but your dad insisted. We must have two, he said. Just like before. Just like he had had a brother, and you should have had a twin brother. We would restore the balance, he said, and after all, I loved him. I still do.
But perhaps that child was never intended to live because we wouldn’t have been able to look after it, not properly. I was scared of giving birth to it. Scared of giving birth to it far too soon and scared that it would be alive when it got out of me. I was frightened of the child. Frightened for the child.
So I didn’t press it out as I should have; I tried to keep it inside me. I squashed it; perhaps it suffocated. Perhaps I killed my own child.
Or perhaps some children aren’t meant to live. Perhaps your baby sister wasn’t meant to live, and perhaps it isn’t my fault.
I don’t know, Liv.
I’ve also tried to come to terms with Carl’s accident, but I’ve failed. I suspected your granny because she was on medication, which made her unpredictable at times. It mostly made her drowsy, but she could also suddenly become irascible, wild. It frightened me, and deep down I think it frightened her as well.
Carl cried a great deal, and perhaps she couldn’t handle it. That’s what we think happened. She couldn’t handle his crying, and so she took him from the cradle, shook him, and dropped him on the toolbox on the floor. Perhaps she did it on purpose? We think so. That’s why it was a relief when she moved. And yet I cannot find peace because I will never know what really happened.
Perhaps it wasn’t her at all. What if it was me? I got so little sleep the days blurred into one another, and I too was sick in my own way, in my head. Exhausted and frightened for the future. At times I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Might I have hurt your twin brother?
If I had, could you forgive me?
The Pub and the Child
When a brutal storm grabs a big chunk of coastline, people notice. Men with pipes and briefcases tucked under their arms stand in far too smart shoes for the harsh landscape, narrowing their eyes before taking measurements with too long strides in the morning fog and making notes about the direction of the wind and the risk of mudslide on lined notepads with blue ballpoint pens before they drive back and drink coffee. But when a peaceful sea decides to lick its way quietly through a headland, no one pays attention, at least not to begin with. Who would notice if a little sand disappears on each side? How the sea intrudes inconspicuously, adding inch after inch to itself.