Child Wonder (6 page)

“Only child.”

Made it sound like a diagnosis, on a par with having a limp. I had of course also had a few half-articulated thoughts of my own along these lines as we were assembling the new bed – I had even slept in it one night – and especially while Mother was sitting lost in thought in the interim between the decision to take Linda and today, or when she went into the loft and came down with our enormous suitcase covered with sticky labels marked Lom and Dombås, which turned out to be full of her childhood clothes, those she had worn when she was Linda’s age, six, and she went through them one by one, holding them up and thinking and mumbling and saying: “Well, I never, and oh my God, what is this then and none of that’s any good, except for this maybe?” A doll called Amalie that didn’t look up to much, the stuffing poking out of a gash in her stomach – because her brothers, I was told, had performed an appendix operation on her. She had dangling legs and a loose, floppy head with dull beads for eyes.

“Isn’t she cute?”

“Mm.”

She put Amalie in Linda’s bed, where she had been lying now for the past week, until she was gone again, that happened this morning.

“Where’s Amalie?” I wondered on waking up. But Mother didn’t answer me. “She’s coming today, isn’t she? Linda?”

“Course,” Mother said, as if this were sufficient reason for Amalie to be back in the loft, so there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings between her and Linda, I suppose, what do I know? The sheets on the bed had been changed again, for the third time, and there was nothing between them, the bed was waiting.

Then at long last the bus came. It stopped as well. But no-one got off. Quite the opposite, a number of passengers got on, and Mother and I stood looking at each other. The pneumatic brakes hissed and the folding doors clattered and shook and threatened to close. Mother threw herself forward at the last moment and shouted “Stop”, and the conductor jumped up from his seat, came and took her by the arm and in the same movement pressed the door fully open with his knee.

“Careful now, madam.”

Mother said something or other, at any rate the bus didn’t move off as she disappeared into the interior, behind the filthy windows. She was gone for ages. Then there was some shouting from inside until, at last, she reappeared, puce-faced and agitated, dragging behind her a little girl in a tight dress and white knee-stockings in the raw autumn weather and carrying a tiny, light-blue suitcase.

“Thank you, thank you,” she shouted to the conductor, who answered, “Not at all” and “My pleasure” and made several other comments that only made Mother’s face even redder as she stood straightening her hair. I walked in a circle, staring at the new arrival, at Linda, who turned out to be small and fat and quiet with her eyes boring into the tarmac.

At length the bus set off, and Mother went down on her knees in front of our new family member and tried to make eye-contact, without much success, from what I could see. But then she completely lost her self-control, Mother did, she started hugging the gawky creature in a way that filled me with grave concern. But Linda didn’t react to that, either, and Mother dried her tears and said, as she tends to do when she is ashamed of herself:

“Oh, what am I doing? Come on, let’s go up to Omar Hansen’s and buy some chocolate. Would you like some chocolate, Linda?”

Linda was bereft of speech. She smelled strange, her hair was unkempt, all over the place, and her fringe hung right down over her face. But she did put her hand in Mother’s and clasped two of her fingers, making her knuckles go white. Then Mother lost her composure again. And I couldn’t watch any more, this grasp which I knew instinctively was a grasp for life, which would change most things not just in Linda’s existence but also in mine, one of the grasps that lock themselves around your heart and hold it in a vice-like grip until you die and it is still there when you are lying rotting in your grave. I snatched the small sky-blue suitcase that weighed almost nothing and swung it around my head.

“She’s asking you if you want some chocolate!” I shouted. “You deaf or something?”

Linda gave a start and Mother sent me one of those murderous looks of hers that are usually reserved for larger gatherings. I took the hint and kept a couple of paces behind them as we walked up the hill, Mother talking now in a pseudo-friendly and much too shrill voice and saying “This is where we live, Linda,” and she pointed through the traffic fumes across Trondhjemsveien.

“On the second floor over there. The one with the green curtains. It’s No. 3, the third block from the bottom, one of the first to be built …”

And a load more drivel to none of which Linda responded.

But after we had our chocolate, things improved a bit because Linda gobbled it down and smiled too, more confused than happy, and that made you feel a little less sorry for her, yes it did, I suppose Mother thought she had been eating the chocolate too greedily, and so there was a reason to find fault with her, or there was something one might have wished were different, which I think was good for us all because so far Linda had not uttered one word. Nor did she until we got inside the door.

“Bed,” she said.

“Alright,” replied Mother, nonplussed. “You’re sleeping there.”

At which Linda loosened the iron grip she had on Mother’s fingers, scrambled up into bed, lay down and closed her eyes. Mother and I followed this game, our amazement increasing by the minute, because this was no game, Linda was sleeping like a log.

Mother said There, there, and covered her up and sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair and cheek. A little later she left the room and crashed down at the kitchen table as if she had just returned from the War.

“I imagine she must be all in, the poor thing. Coming to stay with us. So alone …”

I didn’t have any sympathy for this line of thought either, after all, what could be better than to be allowed to stay with us, in a bed that had been made three times already, even though no-one had slept in it? I said as much, too, showed Mother that I was already beginning to get pretty sick of this new family member of ours.

But she was not listening, she had opened the little blue suitcase and found a letter, a sort of instruction manual, it appeared, which told us in spiky handwriting what Linda liked to do – playing (!) and eating: Sunda honey and spiced cheese, and potatoes and gravy, she wasn’t so fond of meat or fish or vegetables. But it also informed us that we should be “careful not to stuff the child with too much food”. Furthermore, she had a problem with her left knee, she needed to take some medicine for it, there were pills in boxes with Linda’s name on, which Mother duly found in the suitcase and held up to the light to have a closer look, two pills every night, or three. “And give her them with a full glass of water,” the letter instructed, “just before she goes to bed so that she won’t get up in the night and raid the fridge.”

Mother lost her composure again:

“Good heavens.”

“What’s up?” I said.

“So sad!” she groaned.

Once more I understood nothing, just repeated:

“What
is
up with you?”

“And she looks so much like him!”

“Like who?” I cried, feeling that I was seriously beginning to lose my temper, not so much because of what she said, but more because of how she looked. She was referring, of course, to the crane driver, my father, Linda’s father, the bloody cause of all this howling, the man who before falling to his death had managed to create so much mess that we no longer knew whether we were coming or going. And as if that wasn’t enough, Kristian came home at that very minute, heard something was afoot and wanted to know what on earth was going on.

“It’s got nothing to do with you!” Mother shouted, totally out of control and making no attempt to conceal her tear-stained face. “Get out! Do you hear me! And don’t show your face in here again!”

Kristian was smart enough to perceive that this was a state of emergency and retreated, unruffled. I was not so smart.

“But who do
I
look like?” I yelled. “You’ve never said
I
look like anyone!”

“What has got into you?”

I was someone else and before I knew what I was doing I had grabbed her hand and sunk my teeth in the two fingers Linda had claimed for herself and bitten them as hard as I could, so that she really did have something to scream about. She slapped me good and hard, which she had never done before, and we stood glowering at one another, both of us even more changed. I even felt a stiff smile spreading across my truculent face, and a cutting chill.

Then I threw up on the floor between us and walked into the hall without a word, put on my outdoor clothes and went down to the street to join the others, those who had no home, it would seem, at any rate they never were at home, the big boys, the losers, Raymond Wackarnagel and Ove Jøn and so on … that night we smashed the window panes in the entrances to No.s 2, 4, 6,
7
and 11 and also the little glass panel in Lien’s stockroom where sago and roll-up tobacco were stored. There had never before been so many windows smashed in the Tonsen estate on a single Saturday night. And perhaps I was the only person to know why, or who at least had a motive, a strange dumb creature who lay asleep in our new bunk bed; I suppose the others did it out of habit, or because it was in their nature, it was not in mine.

There was a huge hullabaloo afterwards with an investigation involving the caretaker and the housing co-op chairman. There was, of course, no difficulty finding out who was responsible, it was the usual suspects, Ove Jøn and Raymond Wackarnagel etc, the mystery was me, the person who had never done anything wrong, who was known as a mummy’s boy, and not just because I didn’t have a father, but because I was a well-balanced lad, a happy lad with my feet on the ground and a quick brain, as frøken Henriksen had written on my handwriting tests, I could write and do sums, I wasn’t afraid of anything, not even of Raymond Wackarnagel, I washed up almost every night, I was small of stature, but I didn’t pee in my pants and was more than happy to paint a whole sitting-room wall with a brush if asked. Had I just got into bad company? Or was there an unpredictable demon lying dormant in me, too?

This gave Kristian the chance to re-enter the arena.

“Crap,” he said to the housing co-op chairman, Jørgensen, who was standing in our hall, an imposing, magisterial presence, talking to Mother about how to deal with the brat. “There’s nothing wrong with the lad.”

“How can
you
know?” came the pert reply from Mother who on this occasion had deemed it appropriate to kowtow to Jørgensen, she can do the servile bit, Mother can, if needs be, it comes from her background, the youngest of four children from Torshov, with a father who was said to drink, a lot, and a mother who, after he died, had ensconced herself in an easy chair and begun to drink, too.

“Everyone can see that, can’t they,” Kristian said in his indomitable chairman’s voice. “Anyone with their wits about them.”

To be on the safe side, he laid a hand on my head and smiled, God knows why, and went to his room humming.

Mother stood with her arms crossed, fidgeting with the bandage she had wrapped around her two sore fingers, the Linda fingers, a touch less confident now about the unholy alliance she had entered into with Jørgensen, a man who determined when radiators should be bled and kick-sleds should be stacked before being put into summer storage in the bomb shelter.

“Oh well, I suppose we shouldn’t make too big a thing of this,” she ventured, averting her eyes. And that was all it took to start me off crying again and blurt out that I would pay for the window at No. 11 from my savings, for that was the one
I
had smashed.

Mother looked down at me, touched, and Jørgensen knew that the negotiations were at an end, but stood his ground anyway, as if to demonstrate that it was he and not Mother who decided when he was to leave, let alone pronounce when the affair was to be regarded as settled; when he had done that, he left.

Thereafter Mother was free to start on a long diatribe about how I was to keep away from the street gang and what was I thinking of and so on. But all this was pretty ordinary stuff, quite unlike the bombshell that had hit us the day Linda arrived, last Saturday.

Now she was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting.

For supper.

In accordance with the instructions in the blue suitcase, we had already introduced the ruling that Mother would butter slices of bread on the board, and put them on two different plates and place them in front of us beside our glasses of milk. An equal number of slices on each plate, two and a half, with whatever we wanted to eat on top, whereas Mother had only one, with syrup, which reminded her of her own childhood, or perhaps mostly of what she had never had enough of, because times had been lean then, as people said. She stood by the breadboard fiddling with something in a cupboard, or in the sink, and making the occasional funny remark. And there was no more bread and butter for Linda, however long she sat there giving Mother the wordless stare, which under normal circumstances would have cracked the strongest of wills, it would, although she didn’t eat anywhere near as greedily as on the first day and furthermore had realised she shouldn’t grab at food on the table, such as the Sunda honey.

I knew that even if I had felt like another slice of bread on this particular evening, and it had never been an issue whether I ate two or six slices, I would not have said anything, and I received a nod of acknowledgement from Mother, since we were so united in the task of complying with the instructions in the letter. Linda could see how the land lay.

“Read,” she said.

And we read. But first of all the table was cleared and the washing up was done, if you could call it that, because Linda had enough trouble standing on the stool – which I had had to cede – and splashed her hands in the soapy water while I was even more thorough than usual, and I noticed that she didn’t smell strange any more, she didn’t smell of anything, like me. Her hair was also combed, shorter, and she had been given a light-blue hair slide to keep her fringe out of her large eyes so that she could no longer hide behind it. Mother asked if she knew any songs. Linda, after much hemming and hawing, finally mumbled a song title I hadn’t heard before, but Mother smiled and hummed the tune, she knew a couple of verses of this particular unknown song, as she dried and cleared away, and Linda smiled coyly into the washing-up water and went pink, which we considered a good omen, for, to tell the truth, she had not smiled a lot since she arrived.