Elly by Maike Wetzel

Author:Maike Wetzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC031080, FIC031000, FIC022000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

Elly

My sister has been gone a long time. It was four years ago this Thursday. I am older now. It won’t be long before I’m an adult. I long for that every day. But I’m still not allowed to go out without telling my parents. Sometimes I climb up the hunter’s lookout in the woods with the elder of the two boys from next door. We lie in wait, and when a deer appears in the clearing we press our faces up to the slit in between the boards. We make use of those few seconds to lean our shoulders softly against each other or to let a finger sidle up to the other’s hand. I can feel the boy’s warmth. He smells of hay. When I’ve finished school, I want to go to Australia to be an au pair. I practise sometimes with the boy next door’s younger brother. He can’t remember my sister. He was too young at the time. I love him for that. I bury my nose in his fine, almost white hair. His hands are plump. I put chocolate coins in them. Then the phone rings. It rings inside me. The sound is shrill. It vibrates in my skull. I turn hot, then cold. The ground opens up.

The phone rings. My trainers are outside on the terrace getting drenched by the rain. I’m staring out of the window while I peel potatoes. I still need to practise for a vocab test, so I’m peeling them in a hurry. The telephone doesn’t stop ringing. The sound seems to be getting louder and louder. It echoes. The knife slips. Blood pours from my thumb. My mother beckons me to answer the phone. She doesn’t want to speak to anyone. I lie and say she isn’t in. I’m sucking the blood from my cut when the female police officer on the other end of the line says: We have found a person who fits the description of your sister. Other officials have said something similar a few times before. It was always a false alarm. But this time it’s different. My parents are speechless when I tell them.

The voice on the telephone says the person concerned is a girl aged approximately fifteen years old. Not very tall, thin, with shaggy dark, almost black, hair. She was found lying in between beach huts at a Danish seaside resort. The beach was deserted at the time, back in October; the huts there were locked up. Gulls circled above the foamy sea. A few cars were parked in the street by the beach. The owners didn’t get out, they just reclined their seats, and closed their eyes or stared at the sea through the windscreen. One of these parked-up drivers discovered the girl. She was wearing a black binbag over her clothes, probably to keep out the damp. She had built a camp behind the huts on a set of tyres. She didn’t say anything when the man spoke to her.

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