It’s night-time now. They shouldn’t be making any noise.
My Baby Sister
While my baby sister dried out in the salt, I collected more gauze and cleaned more resin and Mum wondered at the smell that lingered about me. You smell of resin, you must be out in the forest a lot, she wrote. And I whispered: ‘It’s a scent, not a smell.’
Then she smiled.
One night I found a big sack of stale pastries behind the bakery, and we spent a lot of time enjoying them in bed. Carl got a little worried that Mum ate so many, at which point I sent him outside. He really could be a pain sometimes. Dad didn’t want any, and that made me a bit sad because I liked it best when we were together, the three of us. These days we hardly ever were.
But what was worse was that he was starting to lose his temper. Not with me, not directly, and not with Mum either. He always spoke nicely to us – when he did speak, that is. So I don’t really know who he was angry with, but at times I would hear him rant and rave when he was all on his own. Perhaps he too had an invisible friend to shout at.
Every now and then I would shout a little at Carl, but never enough to make him disappear from me… become a completely invisible twin brother, I mean.
And other things began to worry me. There really was a lot of stuff everywhere and although I liked all of it, especially the things Dad and I had found together, something felt wrong.
I would compare our house with those I visited, houses where it was much easier for me to move about the rooms. They weren’t quite so dusty and dirty either. And although the mice and the spiders were my friends, it was nice that there were no mouse droppings and cobwebs in the pub kitchen. The other houses seemed so different, and they smelled different too. They had a scent. Especially the pub.
I was old enough to remember that we hadn’t always had as many things as we did now. That we had once been able to use the kitchen and bathroom for their proper purposes, rather than just to store things in.
I think I would have liked it to have stayed that way. Not to have quite so many things. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be without any of the things we had. And Dad had said that we had to look after them.
So this was all weighing on my mind, only I didn’t know what to do about it. I found it harder and harder to talk to Dad, and I was scared of saying anything to Mum that might make her sad – or worse. Whenever I wanted to tell her something that I strongly suspected Dad wouldn’t want me to, I could hear his voice in my head saying: It would kill your mum.
Now, I had killed animals, and I was even quite good at it. But I desperately didn’t want to kill my mum.
I couldn’t imagine anything worse than her not lying upstairs in her bed, waiting for me. Waiting for me to bring her more food and a book to read to her while she stroked my hair and mimed that she loved me. These days it was my favourite thing, now that Dad no longer took me out in the dinghy or even into the forest. Ever since my baby sister had come out of Mum, he rarely went anywhere.
It’s hard to talk to someone when you can’t say what you want. Especially when the person you’re talking to doesn’t say very much, whether they’re your mum or your dad or your invisible twin brother. I think that’s why I loved reading aloud to Mum so much.
That way I could be sure that I still could. Speak, I mean.
But I still wasn’t allowed to mention certain things. And outside the bedroom I was expected to be quiet the whole time so that no one would hear me.
So it seemed odd that Dad sent me down to the main island alone, given how scared he was that someone might see me. He said the same thing every time: For God’s sake, don’t let anyone see you. And don’t tell your mum that I’m not with you.
I didn’t understand why God, who we didn’t believe in anyway, kept getting mixed up in everything. And it made even less sense that Dad stayed at home and looked after the things rather than coming with me so he could watch out for me. I didn’t work out until later that he was even more scared than I was. Of all sorts of things, I think. A little bit like Carl.
And there was another thing I had started to wonder about. Carl had started to feel pain at night, in the darkness. When we walked home across the Neck and our feet got blisters. Or on the night we burned our hands on a wood-burning stove in someone’s living room. Or the night we bumped into an old steel sink someone had leaned against a wall.
Carl had really hurt himself. And I had bled. And perhaps I had hurt myself a bit too.
I was starting to think that the darkness probably couldn’t hold much more pain, and so the pain had to stay inside Carl and in me. The darkness was full to bursting with pain. Just like our house.
Perhaps Dad could feel it too. Perhaps he was also hurting in the dark. But perhaps he didn’t think that I was. And I didn’t know how to tell him.
The body that came out of the salt was totally different to the one I saw disappear into it. My baby sister, who was very small to start with, had grown even smaller. She was so thin, so thin. But perhaps that was what happened to you if you didn’t eat for a month? I wondered whether the same thing might happen to Mum, if she tried it.
Dad put her on the workbench again. It was still very dark from the blood that had run out of her last time – through the quilted blanket and into the wood. There was also a big dark stain on the floor. Now there wasn’t a drop left in her; exactly as he had hoped.
We needed the oils and the resin now. My job was to melt clean resin on the camping stove outside the workshop. I used the saucepan from the pub. The resin must be liquid, Dad said. Not boiling, just liquid. When I came inside with my first batch he had smeared my baby sister in oil. One of the big bottles of grapeseed oil was almost empty, and she lay glossy on the workbench.
I thought it was nice that there was no more blood and that he had closed up the hole in her stomach. He took the saucepan from me and poured liquid resin all over her, and afterwards he spread it with a brush, making sure to cover everything.
He did it very carefully, just like when he drew, and although she was very small and skinny she suddenly looked quite beautiful as she lay there. My baby sister. I so wished that she wasn’t dead.
He had put out a stool for me so I would have a better view of everything. It was strange because, in one way, I wanted to run away – to run upstairs and hide in the bedroom with Mum or outside to hide in the container with Carl.
In another way, I wanted to stay on the stool and watch everything. Be there with Dad.
It was just as well that I was there because he really needed me now. My, oh my, did we use a lot of gauze. I handed him one roll after another and he wrapped my baby sister in it. He started with her tiny feet and continued all the way up over her tiny head so her whole face disappeared under narrow strips of thin fabric. No air must get to the skin, he explained.
When she was finally swaddled from head to foot I thought that we had finished. But no. He just poured more resin over her, and then it was back to the gauze. And so we carried on until Dad finally said that he thought it was enough.
And then he did something that took me completely by surprise. He fetched a drawing. A new drawing. And this although it was a long time since I’d seen him draw anything at all. This one was different from his other drawings because it was made with black ink on a thin wooden sheet. He held it up so that I could see it. ‘Do you think it looks like her?’ he asked.