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Ane Riel

RESIN

English translation by Charlotte Barslund

Liv

THE WHITE ROOM was completely dark when my dad killed my granny. I was there. Carl was there too, but they never noticed him. It was the morning of Christmas Eve and it had started snowing, but we didn’t get a proper white Christmas that year.

Back then everything was different. It was before Dad’s stuff started taking up so much space that we couldn’t get into the living room. And before Mum grew so big that she couldn’t get out of the bedroom, but it was after they had reported me dead, which got me out of going to school.

Or maybe it was earlier? I’m not very good at remembering when things happen, I get them muddled up. The first few years of your life feel like they’ll never end. The lady tells me it’s because when you try something for the first time, it makes a big impression on you, and those impressions take up a lot of space, she says.

There was definitely a lot going on in my life back then, and I was doing a lot of things for the first time. Like watching my granny die.

So anyway, our Christmas tree was hanging from the ceiling. There was nothing new about that. Dad used to hang stuff from the ceiling so he could cram as much into the living room as possibe. He’d stack our presents underneath it, so we always hoped he’d bring home a small tree.

That year the tree must have been quite small because there was room for very big presents underneath it. One of them was an amazing go-kart which Dad had built in his workshop. Mum had made red cushions for the seats. Mum and Dad always made our presents. Back then I didn’t know that other people’s children got presents bought from shops.

I barely knew that other people had children or that they got presents. It never bothered us. Carl and I were just pleased to get something, and we loved Mum and Dad. It’s true there were times when Carl got a bit annoyed with them, but he could never say why.

So what was new about this Christmas was that my granny had just died. We hadn’t tried that before, and neither had she, obviously. She certainly looked a bit shell-shocked, sitting there in the green armchair, staring up at the tree, not blinking. I think she was looking at a brown paper heart I made all on my own. She taught me to weave paper hearts before she said all those things to Dad, those things which she probably shouldn’t have said.

We thought she should be with us round the tree that evening before her send-off, and she had to have her present, of course. OK, so only me and Dad thought that. And mostly me. Mum only gave in because I kept pestering her.

My granny’s feet were on the footstool, I remember, probably because I was sitting on the floor right opposite her. Her purple tights were so thin I could see her knickers through them, and her brown lace-up shoes smelled sort of sweet, like some kind of waterproofing. They were brand new and she had bought them in a shop on the mainland, she told me. She was also wearing a grey skirt, a red blouse and a scarf with white seagulls on it, clothes I found at the bottom of her case. It was me who had insisted on dressing her up nicely for Christmas. Her sitting there in her nightie would have been all wrong.