‘What are you doing?’ Nora whispered. The smell of the animal was sharp and it was also beautiful. The rusty sound of Anouk coughing came from the truck. ‘Red. We have to go.’

‘I know that.’

The antler that was entangled in the grille had pulled slightly away from the buck’s head, leaving a gap underneath that was ruddy and fleshy, like the blood-filled socket after a lost tooth. Nora straddled the deer’s muscular shoulders, its thick neck, and there so close was the soft, white fur lining its ears. There were its long black lashes and the bony racks behind the ears from which the antlers, like polished, grainy wood, sprouted.

With one hand she gripped the trapped antler by its thorny base, and with the other hand she pushed the top of the deer’s skull and in this way tried to separate the two. The flesh and skin at the base of the antler pulled like gum, but still held. Her mouth filled with spit. She gagged, her throat tight. She looked to Red for help, but he had moved away and was looking down the road at nothing.

This was too gentle. She shifted her weight and got a better purchase with her heels in the snow, and with this new leverage tightened her thighs around the animal’s shoulders and pulled harder, eyes closed, pulled the head back until the antler began to crack away – a grinding sound and wet. She moved her hands closer together and gave a bit of a twist to the antler, and finally felt antler and head separate. She released the buck’s head and it dropped heavily to the snow. The antler was still in the grille but could now be twisted easily from the bars.

‘We should keep this,’ she said, out of breath, a little nauseous, holding the antler up to Red. A shred of skin and brown-grey coat, and also a shard of bone, hung off its base.

Red turned. Looked at her face and then the thing she held in her hand and back at her as if she were a stranger.

Again, ‘We should keep this.’

Red ran both gloved hands up and down his beard, then moved to the buck and gripped its back legs under each of his arms and began to haul it to the ditch, carving a guilty trail in the snow. Blood dripped thickly from the hole where the antler once was.

‘I can’t believe I did that,’ Nora said, daring to be proud of herself, and helped Red to kick snow over the carcass. A gesture of burial at least.

‘Well. You killed it, so.’

She wiped her hands in the snow to get rid of the smell, but the smell stayed and maybe she didn’t mind it so much. She loaded the antler into the back of the truck, careful not to soil their things with its bloody stump.

21

Pieter

Karmøy Island, 1942

I already told you that my grandfather – my father’s father – was the storyteller in our family. He was also the archivist, the keeper of records. He survived my grandmother by a decade and when he died, partway through the war, your mother and I packed up their little house on Karmøy, the house by the sea where I spent most of my summers as a boy.