The one good thing about the people down on the main island was that they had everything we needed.
Seeing as Dad didn’t like leaving the Head at night very much now, it was mostly me who fetched things for us. Dad taught me how to do it a long time ago. But I preferred it before, when we went out together.
The two of us used to set off in the pickup truck, usually in the middle of the night when other people were fast asleep. We always found a good place to hide the truck, then we would sneak around and find things in barns and outhouses and sometimes in living rooms and kitchens and other places. Once, we crept into the bedroom of a woman who was so drunk we were able to take her duvet. Afterwards I wondered what she thought when she woke up and found it was gone. Dad told me he saw her in Korsted high street the next day. She looked a bit confused, but who could blame her? It was a goose-down duvet; she’d been left a lot of money, he said. Perhaps she thought it just flew away?
Mum got the goose-down duvet and I took her old duvet – one Dad had traded for a very fine meat press earlier that year. It was filled with duck down. A few months later we got the meat press back from the barber; he was never meant to keep it. The barber and his wife were asleep on the second floor, and the kitchen, where the meat press was, was on the ground floor. They hadn’t even locked the back door. It was easy peasy lemon squeezy. Back then I believed that the barber was completely OK with us turning up and taking our things – or his things, or whoever’s they were. His wife always reeked something awful; you could smell her all the way down in the kitchen. If I was the barber, I’d have wanted someone to take her rather than the meat press. Dad said the smell was perfume.
Mum’s duck-down duvet reeked of the barber’s wife for a long time, but when it was handed down to me it smelled mostly of Mum, thank God, not really of perfume any more and definitely not of duck. But Mum’s new goose-down duvet stank of alcohol. Mum never drank anything stronger than coffee with cream, and at the end she drank only water from the pump; but I’ll get to that part later.
Dad was brilliant at easing open doors and windows. His dad had taught him, he told me. I never met Grandad, but I know that his name was Silas. Dad taught me too and I practised like mad in his workshop on some of the doors and windows we found. There were plenty at the junkyard down on the main island, and we piled up as many as we could on the back of the pickup truck. I can’t understand why people would throw out things like that. You can always repair them – and you can open and close them and play with them.
We avoided houses that had new doors because they were difficult to open if people decided to lock them. Luckily there weren’t many of them around. And if we couldn’t get inside the house, there was usually a barn or an outhouse, and we’d find something to take there. Once we took a pig. We were short of a pig, and the farmer had so many he couldn’t possibly eat all of them himself. I remember wondering why it didn’t squeal; it wasn’t even scared when Dad picked it up. But then again, he did have a way with animals. All animals. He was also very good at killing them so they didn’t feel a thing. It was just another way of being kind to animals, he said.
When the time came for me to go off on my own, I didn’t feel very confident to begin with. Especially because it very nearly went wrong on my last trip with Dad. We found a couple of long, rusty iron girders on the roadside and slid them up on the bed of the pickup truck, but when we drove around a corner in some village one of them hit a wall and made a huge racket. The lights came on in a few houses, but at the last minute Dad turned down a dirt track and we hid behind a hedge so no one saw us. The next day we lugged the iron girders upstairs; we could just about fit them along the corridor. You needed to watch your step after that, or you’d stub your toe on them.
There was another time where we were nearly caught, but that was my fault. I stepped on a hubcap in the plumber’s garage by accident. I hid in a corner and held my breath when I heard the plumber open the door. If his cat hadn’t jumped on him right then, he’d have turned on the light and spotted me. Instead he snapped at the cat: ‘Is that you making all that noise? Get in here.’
When I came out of the garage, Dad was ashen-faced. He was waiting round the back and heard everything, but he didn’t know about the cat.
But I soon found out there were some advantages to going off without Dad. I was smaller and faster, and I’d learned to move as quiet as a mouse. I walked or ran because I wasn’t big enough to drive the pickup truck and I didn’t like riding my bike. And I was much better at seeing in the dark than Dad. ‘You need to be like the owl,’ he often said, and I was, though I couldn’t fly or turn my head round the back of my neck, even though I practised really hard, till I realized I’d never be any good at it. Carl tried as well, of course he did. He had a little more success.
Mum didn’t say very much. I don’t think she really wanted us to go out at night, but she liked the things we came back with. Especially the food from the pub kitchen.
One of the first things I remember from life on the Head is the smell of fresh resin: the funny tickling in my nose, the sticky feeling in the palm of my hand and Dad’s calming voice telling me about the sap inside the tree. It was a strange sap, he said, because it could protect against attack, heal wounds and preserve small dead animals for ever and ever. I remember seeing an ant crawl up the bark of a tree, find a way around the gooey, golden drops and disappear inside a crack, only to come out again a bit further up. Upwards and onwards.
Later I would whisper to the bleeding trees that their wounds would soon heal because resin was their healer and protector. The trees were my friends.
And the ants were our mutual acquaintances. They were always there, small, steely creatures finding a way. Up the trees, down the trees, through the grass, across the yard, through the kitchen, up into the cupboard, down into the honey, through the living room, back home to the anthill. Usually they were dragging food or something that seemed useless – and sometimes a dead fellow ant.
I’m not sure if other people would call the trees behind our house a real forest. How many trees does it take to make a forest? But to Carl and me it was a forest, an enormous one. No, it was more than that. It was a never-ending world of smells and sounds and life which melted somewhere far away into a landscape of singing larks and heather and lyme grass that then merged into the sand, that merged into the water, that continued into an endless sea.
But it was some time before I found out about the heather and the sea. In the beginning there was just the tree; this one bleeding tree and the clever ant that avoided the sticky gold that could have suffocated it.
Later I noticed other trees: the spruces bending their fan-shaped branches towards the earth as if they wanted to hear what it was whispering to them. Spruces always seemed so sad, and though some of them grew incredibly tall, they continued to reach longingly down to the place from which they’d grown. Pines were completely different. They were dense and strong with their bristling needles and bursting cones, and I often got the feeling that they couldn’t care less about the earth. I’m sure they were gazing at the sky and, who knows, they might happily fly away, if they could find a way of taking off from the forest floor. Though I like to think they would come back eventually. After all, they belonged on the Head, just like me.