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
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.
Or maybe they were calling out to me.
But I didn’t dare do anything without Dad’s permission. And I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go to the barn on my own, mostly because I was terrified of what I would find there, I guess.
That morning the noises had been even more mournful than before. I thought I could hear the horse cry.
But it wasn’t the animals that had made me the saddest that day. It was Mum.
Mum was also full of holes, but they weren’t small, dry openings that I could stitch. They were big, festering sores. When I helped her wash with the flannel and the bowl and she moved about on the mattress, I could see them. They were caused by her lying down so much and being so heavy, she explained to me on her notepad. It was tiny compared to Mum, and the pen practically disappeared inside her hand.
She was so big.
And yet it was as if Mum’s body had changed. It distributed itself differently on the bed. It had grown limper – like the teddy bear when too much of the white stuffing had come out of a hole and I hadn’t put it back in yet. Perhaps it was because I didn’t bring her food as often as I used to. I tried to, but it was difficult. Dad told me not to give her too much.
I no longer knew what Dad was doing. He was there, and at the same time, he wasn’t.
The worst thing was that the holes grew worse, and Mum was crying. That morning she had written on her notepad that she had asked Dad to go to the main island. He needed to get something from the chemist to heal her sores. And painkillers. I didn’t understand the last part. How did you kill pain? The same way you killed a person? Her handwriting had changed. The sentences had grown shorter, and her handwriting wasn’t as neat as it once was.
Better still, if he could get a doctor, she added at the end. We need help now.
That last line really freaked me out, because Dad had told me about doctors. They were the kind of people you needed to watch out for more than anyone else. They made people sick, he said. And interfered in things they shouldn’t. They took people away.
Imagine if they took Mum away. And what about me? What if a doctor came here to visit Mum and saw me? Would he take me away? Make me ill? What if he killed me? I didn’t want to die for real.
So I didn’t understand what Mum was talking about.
I had also come to the conclusion that I didn’t understand Dad either. I understood nothing at all. Carl couldn’t help, but it was nice that he was there, so that we could not understand anything together.
I didn’t know what I hoped Dad would come back with. I had seen him drive down the gravel road and disappear behind the spruces by the barrier. Before he left, he had taken some money from the money box in the container. The box was jam-packed with banknotes with people and lizards and squirrels and sparrows and fish and butterflies on them, and small brown coins and slightly bigger ones with the face of a lady who could be the butcher’s wife in profile.
Dad didn’t like money leaving the box. ‘We need to look after it, just as we look after you and the things and your baby sister in the coffin.’
I was tempted to add: ‘And Mum in the bed and the animals in the barn.’ But I didn’t.
We also had animals inside the house now. There were rabbits everywhere. I can’t imagine where they had come from – we had only had two to begin with. As we always closed and locked the doors, they never came outside unless I took one of them with me to the container. That was the upside to there being so many of them: Dad would never know if one was missing.
Sometimes I wondered what would happen if the rabbits inside the house met the ones outside? Would they be able to talk to each other? I had never been scared of the wild rabbits, but the ones in the house frightened me because there were so many of them. Somehow they seemed wilder than the wild ones.
Then there were the noises they made. When only one of them made a small noise, I didn’t mind, but when the whole house grunted, it stopped being nice. And it wasn’t just the rabbits making noises; there were other animals: shiny animals darting down the walls and across the floor, where they would make a crunching sound if you accidentally stepped on them. I never did so on purpose. Glossy blue-green flies buzzed around open cans. Faded butterflies bashed their brown wings against the windowpanes somewhere behind all the stuff, or where they had been caught in a web, rotating themselves to death. Small mice and much bigger mice with very long tails. Something was always scratching, grunting or squeaking somewhere. At times it would be Mum.