I had slept in many places around the house. Upstairs in my own little bedroom, until I could no longer get in because of all the stuff we kept there. In the furthest room, until it got too difficult to reach it. With Mum, until there was no longer room for two people. In the living room, at the bottom of the stairs, even right inside the door in the workshop. After all, I could take my duvet anywhere.
But now I nearly always slept in the container with Carl. It was quiet. At most a few mice would be pottering about. Small ones. I liked the small ones, but I never forgave the one who tried to eat my baby sister.
I slept most of the day. The light felt sharp, so sharp that it hurt, unless it was mixed with darkness.
I preferred being outside in the moonlight, where the darkness glowed by itself. Or I would use my torches. I had them in all sizes and strengths and with many different types of batteries. But whenever I sat in the container, I lit a pillar candle which I placed inside a small lantern.
I liked watching the flame.
If the container hatch was ajar, or there was a draught coming from one of the holes Dad had made, the flame might flatten, get up and twist around itself. The rest of the time it would just dance around its wick. I tried to imagine the flame hardening like resin, so that millions of years later people would find it, bite it and say: ‘Yes, that’s an old flame. Once upon a time it was fire.’ And a child would be allowed to look inside it and see the ancient wick.
But I couldn’t escape the light completely. The daylight. You see, Dad had started sending me into the forest to collect more resin. I drained the trees and I brought back as much as I could – in small buckets which he tipped into the barrels.
‘We need more, Liv. Fetch me more. The trees don’t mind. Cut holes in more trees. We need more. Much more.’
I didn’t know what he was going to do with it all, but I didn’t mind because it made him start talking to me again. Even if it was just to ask me for more resin. I was sad that he didn’t want to come with me to the forest. I think it would have done him good. I enjoyed being out there, but I missed him. The forest wasn’t the same without Dad.
The upside was that he was back in the workshop. Him working on something was much better than him being around without really being present. One day when he had driven to Korsted to fetch something, I went to the workshop to have a look. I was pleased to see that he had tidied up around the workbench, which made it easier for him to move about. There was a pile of planks and I could smell fresh wood. It was so nice that I started to smile. It reminded me of something I liked.
And yet I felt uneasy. Because soon afterwards he came back with a lot of junk. I also caught a glimpse of a bag of gauze and cans of grapeseed oil.
There was too much of everything.
When I realized what he was making a few days later, it stopped being nice. It was huge. It was many times the size of the tiny coffin he had made for my baby sister.
The day it happened I was sitting in the container, closing up the teddy bear and thinking about the holes and Mum and the waterfall and the money and the rabbits and the doctors and resin and the frozen fire. And Dad’s coffin.
That morning I heard a scream.
It wasn’t a bird of prey or an owl or a badger or a human being who had just seen a newborn baby die. I had never heard anyone scream like that before, but I was sure that it was an animal. And I was pretty sure that it had to be a dog.
Something inside me told me that it must be caught in a trap. Except that our traps weren’t the kind of traps that made you scream; not even in daylight. A fox had once trapped its paw in a rabbit snare at the edge of the forest, but it didn’t scream, it was just stuck. I don’t think it had been sitting there very long when we found it and freed it. Dad covered its head with his jacket while I cut the string. The fox limped a bit as it ran off, but I think that it was happy. After all, we were kind to animals and we didn’t eat foxes.
But this sound. That was an animal in a lot of pain; I could feel it in my tailbone. When I knew that someone was in pain, I would get a long shooting sensation going down to my tailbone, as if my tummy was pulling itself right into my back and down towards the ground. I got the same feeling when I visited Mum and saw her sores.
If Carl had had a real body, I’m sure he would have felt exactly the same – after all, we were twins and inside one another. We had merged together, that was how I saw it. I was a little bit of a boy, and he was a little bit of a girl. Somehow, he was a little bit alive, and I was a little bit dead. Our baby sister was another matter; she was definitely dead. But at least she was here, right next to me, and that made me happy.
It was a terrible scream.
And then I remembered the new traps that Dad had set to keep unwanted visitors at bay – or at least warn us if anyone was coming. I hadn’t been allowed to see them all. He had just told me where they were and ordered me never to go near them. And he had looked at me in such a way that I could see that he meant it.
I knew about the three traps along the gravel road, of course. If you followed the path around the barrier when you walked up the gravel road towards the house, you would soon trip over a wire, and it would make some tins close to the house rattle. But tripping over a wire didn’t hurt much, did it? Not enough for anyone to scream. And I hadn’t heard the tins rattle.
If you somehow managed to evade the tripwire, you would meet another obstacle a little further on. Dad had dug a couple of shallow trenches in the road and covered them with thin pieces of cardboard with gravel and leaves and pine needles on top. If you stepped on the cardboard, your foot would go right into the trench. Now that might hurt a bit, so perhaps you would cry out, but it would also cause some junk to make noise in a nearby tree. That was to warn us. In particular me, so that I would have time to hide.
As you got near the front of the house, there was another trap in the place where most people would choose to walk if they were aiming for the front door. It was another trench, and if you ended up in it, a branch from a nearby tree would swipe your face. But you probably wouldn’t get that far before you were discovered.
Dad and I knew exactly where the three traps were so we could avoid ending up in them ourselves. He would park the pickup truck a bit further down the road, opposite the trap at the front of the house. When he got near the second trap with the pickup truck, he would drive half on to the grass so the tyres would go either side of the trench. When I walked there, I’d swerve around a particular spruce so as to stay clear of it. It was the safest way and, no matter how dark it was, I could always find that spruce with my torch. It was much taller than the others, and had a branch sticking out near its top which was easy to see against the sky.
The tripwire down by the barrier was also easy to avoid. All you had to do was not follow the small gravel path. But we were the only ones who knew that. Dad always closed the barrier behind him, even if he was only going out for a quick trip in the pickup truck. He didn’t want to run the risk, he said. Anything could go wrong if you weren’t careful; if anyone got too close.