I had no idea what they were making. The year before it was a puppet theatre and a pair of rabbit-skin gloves.
Dad had started hanging things from the living-room ceiling a long time ago so that we could move about the floor more easily. I liked sitting on the green armchair, gazing up at everything. He had made a magical cave and as the piles grew higher than the windows it got darker and darker. More and more magical.
One of my favourite things was the violin that hung from a piece of string over the wood-burning stove. When the fire was lit, the violin would twirl like a weathercock. And talking about birds, the chemist’s stuffed owl would watch me from a corner. It sat on a sofa, which was on its end behind the tailor’s dummy and a pile of magazines. I loved that owl. When I was out at night I practised being as quiet as it was. To be honest, it took me a while to notice that the chemist’s owl was in fact a dead owl. After all, it behaved exactly like the ones I saw in the forest.
Every now and then I thought that, by now, we must surely have collected absolutely everything on the island, and yet there were always more things to bring home. For example, the day before the lady arrived Dad came back with a piano he had swapped for a Christmas tree. Some of the keys and a pedal were missing, but apart from that there was nothing wrong with it, he said. By moving some suitcases he found room for it in the living room, on the floor even. Then he placed three big radios on top of the piano – and a plaster bust of someone who was said to have played it once. This really got me thinking, because the man had no arms and no legs.
Unfortunately I got the absolutely crystal-clear impression that the lady didn’t like there being so many things everywhere. She would cough – almost as loudly as she snored – when she came into the living room and she often muttered something about how what had happened in just a few years was just terrible. I had no idea what she was talking about.
She must also have been very clumsy because she kept bumping into things. One day she cried out when she bashed her big toe against the record player just inside the kitchen door. She didn’t think it belonged there, even though it had been there for as long as I could remember. But that was nothing compared to the scream she let out when she bumped into the bookcase in the bathroom and a whole crate of tuna in brine came crashing down on her head. Dad came running from the workshop to see what all the fuss was about. I remember him standing in the doorway, staring at her without saying anything, and her leaning against the sink staring back at him and shaking her head. Then he left. After all, he had seen for himself that her head was still attached to her neck, it was all in working order.
After a few days she stopped looking for a cardboard box of Christmas decorations which she felt sure had to be somewhere. Instead we made decorations from things I had found. We plaited hearts of brown paper from a roll in the scullery. They turned out amazing. I couldn’t work out why she would have preferred that we made them out of differently coloured paper. What was wrong with brown? And anyway, real hearts are quite brown.
She had brought Christmas presents from the mainland, she said, and I wondered whether it might be the small radio and the board game I had found in one of her cases. The things had been carefully wrapped in very shiny paper, and after I’d examined them I wrapped them up again in the exact same way, except that I wasn’t very good with the sticky tape.
When Dad brought in the tree and hoisted it up in the living room, I thought it was the finest Christmas tree I had ever seen. Carl agreed. The star that I had made from bicycle spokes glowed grey and fine right under the ceiling beam, and from the base of the trunk there was at least a metre to the floor, which left plenty of room for presents.
Christmas was a few days away, and I still didn’t know that the lady was my granny. In a way, I’m a bit sad that she never got to see our go-kart. Or her own.
Sometimes I’d join her in the kitchen early in the morning, trying to find a place to sit. I wasn’t scared of her, but Carl was a bit. I liked talking to her and her stroking my hair. And she smelled so nice.
She had some really exciting things in her luggage, which I spent a long time investigating when she wasn’t around. Besides the presents, I found things you applied to your face, and shoes and clothes the like of which I had never seen before. Lilac nylon tights and pale brown leather shoes. I had no idea such beautiful shoes existed.
The lady was always keen to hear what I’d been up to, and so I told her what I could remember. Maybe I’d made more arrows for my bow or explored the piles of things or helped with the animals. And one morning when she asked me why I was so sleepy I mentioned that I’d been out stag hunting. I didn’t mean to tell her; I’d promised Dad not to tell anyone what we did at night. We had even been extra careful with the pickup truck and left it further down the gravel road so she wouldn’t hear it start.
‘Do you often go out at night… rather than sleep?’ the lady then asked me. She gave me such a strange look that Carl nudged me to make me go outside with him. But I stayed where I was.
I thought long and hard about whether now was one of those times when you had to lie.
‘Carl does,’ I said eventually.
I liked hearing her talk about the mainland. It sounded like the city she lived in was enormous. I imagined that there must be a huge amount of stuff in it – probably more than we could ever find room for on the Head. She also talked a lot about there being children who played together over there. And that they all went to school, where they learned to read and write and do sums.
‘Tell me, Liv. Do your parents ever talk to you about you going to school? In Korsted?’
I already knew there was a school in Korsted. Sometimes when we drove past it I saw children in the playground behind the wall. Someone was always screaming and an adult was always telling someone off. And no one carried a dagger. There was nothing in the playground except tarmac and white stripes.
Dad said that he didn’t like it.
It was news to me that I was meant to go there.
‘Mum has already taught me to read and write,’ I said. ‘And Dad is teaching me to make things from other things and turn a club on the lathe and cast sinkers and arrowheads and build a meat press and set snares and flay rabbits. And it doesn’t hurt them as long as they die in the dark. And I also know the game where you go and get things without waking people up. Besides, I have a dagger, and I also play with that.’
She gave me another look and I started wondering if I had said too much. I was pretty sure I had. I wasn’t used to having to watch my tongue. It was exhausting.
‘I think it would be very good for you to go to school,’ she said eventually. ‘And leave your dagger at home.’
Now it was my turn to gawp. Carl ran to get Dad. I didn’t know what to say. But she didn’t seem able to stop.
‘Liv, I don’t think it’s good for you to live here on the Head with all this rubbish and dust and dirt. You might have an accident or fall ill… I think it would be better for you to get away for a bit. I’ll need to speak to your father about it.’
‘How do you really know my dad?’ I asked. I was starting to get very suspicious. Perhaps Carl had been right all along that there was something not quite right about her.
She hesitated for a second.
‘Your father is my son. I’m your granny.’
That made no sense at all. And Carl wasn’t there for me to check the facts with.
‘It was your grandfather, my husband, Silas, who taught your father to make all those beautiful things out of wood. And the cap that your father always wears… it once belonged to my father.’