Child Wonder (7 page)

Even reading had changed quite a bit, now it had to be the Bobbsey twins again, of whom I was heartily sick, a gang of kids who had God knows how many parents and uncles and aunts, and
Mette-Marit at the Ballet School,
which Mother had read as a child and had also tried to foist on me, I couldn’t stand Mette-Marit. Anyway, Linda didn’t want to read very much, she just wanted to listen to the first page and a half again and again, as if she lost the thread as soon as the story got going, or perhaps because she had an especial predilection for repetition.

But lying there under the ceiling has an atmosphere of its very own, with your arms tucked behind your head, knowing you have to keep your mouth shut about your needs, knowing that this is appreciated, and Mother made sure it was, with a new look she had added to her repertoire; we had become, as I said, a team, with the task of looking after someone we hadn’t quite deciphered yet, nor would we until a good three months later.

As I mentioned, Mother came from a pretty large family, three elder brothers and a mother who had turned grey and retired to a rocking chair. Now she spent her days indulging in games of patience, and innumerable glasses of sherry, but she always brightened up when she saw me, and asked how things were at school. It was important to do well at school. But she never listened to my answers.

“Pick a card,” she said.

I picked a card, and if it was the seven of clubs, that meant I was going to have a prosperous life, and the jack of diamonds meant more or less the same. But normally we didn’t stay long, apart from on Christmas Eve, on the ground floor in an old working-class tenement in Torshov, where there was just a kitchen and one room, and in that room, which for some reason was not called a sitting room but a parlour, there was an enormous cylindrical black wood-burning stove that was always so hot it had to be shielded behind a fireguard, itself almost as hot.

When we turned up on Christmas Eve I had to join Uncle Oskar in the cellar and chop wood, which was a pleasant midway stage between the freezing cold walk from Årvoll and the pork-ribs aroma of a Christmas Eve fought out in the parlour where now there was a spruce tree wilting next to the red-hot stove. Gran still used real candles which had to be replaced all the time because the wax ran down onto the bone-dry spruce branches like snot.

Uncle Oskar was much older than the others and had been a merchant seaman in the War; he didn’t have any children or a wife and was on the dole, he whiled away his time doing simple carpentry, but even so had “coped”, as Mother put it. He always arrived early on Christmas Eve and put the ribs in the oven and then chopped kindling in the cellar wood store for hours on end to help Gran, so that she would have something to get the coke going over the winter. When I turned up he showed me how to chop and pile the wood and smiled and was good-humoured and nice, but he didn’t say much. And even though I looked forward to the presents, the hour down there with Uncle Oskar was without doubt the best part of the whole evening, as the others, for some reason, liked to have a go at him, especially when we were sitting around the table, saying he had developed quite a stoop since they last saw him or his hair had greyed or had he still not won the pools.

My mother joined in, too, and I didn’t like that, even though she was more restrained than Uncle Bjarne, who was a dreadfully serious engineer at an out-of-town paper factory, and therefore seldom seen except on this one day of the year.

The youngest of the brothers, Uncle Tor, was a waiter at Hesteskoen and Renna and Grefsensetra and … it kept changing. He was cheerful and lively and danced with Mother after the presents had been distributed and the drinks appeared on the table. He also danced with Uncle Bjarne’s bad-tempered wife, Aunty Marit, who loosened up as the evening progressed, so much so she had almost come apart by the end, unlike her spouse, Bjarne, who was always given books for Christmas and who, as soon as he had said his piece about Uncle Oskar, liked to settle down to read on the kitchen bench where, apparently, he had also spent most of his childhood, books which he managed to finish before the evening was over and it was time to gather the herd of kids and his unsteady wife and wend his way to the taxis in Sandakerveien. The kids in question were my three cousins, all belonging to Bjarne and Marit, who conversed in dialect and were forever making sure they hadn’t soiled their frocks with pork fat. The eldest, whose name was also Marit, was two years older than me and quite interesting; she liked to bamboozle me with conjuring tricks.

“Look at me, Finn,” she said, and did something with her fingers that was supposed to be magic and then, all of a sudden, in a hand that had only a split second before been empty, she was holding a Christmas heart. But this one was easy to see through.

“It’s in your other hand.”

“Look now,” she ventured.

“Now it’s behind your back.”

But that didn’t wipe the smile off her face; she just held out one hand, slowly, as if to magic a coin from inside my ear, but instead pinched my cheek, making tears well up, and I howled with pain.

“See,” she said, turning to the others in triumph.

“Ha, ha, Finn fell for it again, hook, line and sinker.”

This expression came from Uncle Bjarne, I recognised it. He loved this sort of thing:
a spanner in the works, Mary, Mary quite contrary
(for Mother), not to mention
Knock, knock, is anyone at home?
– which he used on Uncle Oskar – idioms, rhymes and catch-phrases my mother and I considered embarrassing. She didn’t like Uncle Bjarne, not him, not his wife, nor his pack of kids: I had also caught her mumbling “twit” and “muttonhead”, or worse, when she thought no-one was listening.

But, well, there was something about Uncle Oskar, who appeared not to hear the jibes directed at him. He smiled with good humour at everything and ate slowly and to repletion after the long wood-chopping session in the cellar. He even had his work-clothes with him, which he hung in the minute bathroom before donning his blue suit for the meal. Mother was always tight-lipped and touchy when we were here, never went to the loo, because it was so dark and cramped in there, and she needed a day or two to recover, kept mumbling it was good to get it over and done with as we trudged home in the freezing cold, late at night, like last year for example, each of us carrying a rucksack of presents, past the Ragna Ringdal day centre, across the Ring Road and through Muselunden, my route to school, past the shanty huts – belonging to the men we called Yellow, Red and Black – covered with glittering snow, all looking like Joseph and Mary’s stable with Trondhjemsveien’s line of silent, fog-yellow Bethlehem stars in the background. Except that the idyll was broken by the sound of beasts of prey, unless it was the sound of snoring, Mother shivered and increased her pace and murmured “Poor things” and said:

“We’re doing fine, we are. Remember that, Finn.”

Though she was relieved to have got Christmas Eve in her childhood home out of the way.

The year we had Linda, she sent her apologies, told me she wasn’t up to it, what she wrote on the Christmas cards she sent round the family I have no idea. However, we were to be on our own, the three of us. And it was one of the best Christmases I can remember, even though it got off to a shaky start. We had been to the Årvoll Senter and bought a Christmas tree which we were dragging home on Essi’s fish sled when, half way down Traverveien, we discovered that Linda didn’t know what presents were.

“What are presents?” she said in a very quiet voice, after Mother and I had been talking in excited tones about Christmas lists, what we might get, our sky-high expectations, Mother’s relief this year at not having to think about whatever it was she thought about in connection with the family down in Torshov, and about Kristian, who had not only paid his rent for December on the dot but also given her an advance for January, so she would have a bit more to play with over Christmas, as he put it.

The significance of Linda’s question sank in slowly for her, it didn’t sink in at all for me, even though I ought to have realised from the pallor of her face, Mother’s, so all I was able to come out with was:

“Don’t you know what presents are? Are you stupid or something?”

Then I heard something I had never heard before:

“Now you just shut your mouth, Finn, or I’ll murder you.”

“She says
gifts!”
I screamed. “She understands
gifts!
Don’t you, Linda, you understand
gifts,
don’t you.”

We stared down at Linda in expectation. But there wasn’t a glimmer of comprehension. Scared by all the commotion, she had again held Mother’s two fingers in an iron grip, her eyes boring into the depths of eternity, and she wanted to go back home.

The rest of the day was taken up with long, comforting monologues from Mother’s side. About there being many ways to celebrate Christmas, Linda didn’t need to rack her brains, some people gave each other presents, others didn’t, there was no limit to diversity in this world, and we could in fact see that Linda was looking forward to the presents
she
would soon be getting when at length she understood what it was all about.

The Christmas hearts she was supposed to be weaving didn’t go too well, either, but I showed her how to cut up an egg carton and glue two tops together and paint them in watercolours, the way I had been taught at school on the last day of term, and tied a thread to them so that they could be hung on the Christmas tree.

While we were busy doing this, Mother sent me one of her new looks, which meant that she wanted to have a private word with me, and Linda was left in the kitchen fully engaged in her egg-box activities.

In the sitting room she bent right down to my ear and asked if I thought we should send a Christmas card to Linda’s mother since we had received one from her, with very spiky handwriting, and, question number two, whether we should show it to Linda because it didn’t say anything nice or personal, just Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, printed, and she couldn’t read anyway, on top of which she had never so much as mentioned her mother, not even when Mother asked, which she was trying to stop herself doing for that very reason.

I didn’t need to think twice, I answered no straight off to both questions. Apart from that, it was the 22nd of December and from my experience the post was a bit on the slow side around these parts. We found that out when we put the advertisement in the paper.

At first Mother shot me a look of surprise, then of reproach, then without warning she changed and exuded the new warmth. I was even given a hug and packed off into the kitchen where Linda was poring over her third cardboard bauble, which was black with runny yellow streaks.

“You have to wait until it dries, before you paint on top,” I said. “Look.”

I demonstrated while Linda watched. Copied what she had to do. But now that she had got going, there was no stopping her, Mother tried a bit later in the evening, we didn’t have any room for more than four, maximum five, baubles on the tree, after all we were going to put a lot of other nice things on it, shop-bought baubles, tinsel, lights, hearts, flags and some clip-on birds. I had a feeling this was going to be the same process as with the reading, that whatever was done would have to be repeated
ad infinitum,
it was worrying. I think Mother was worried too, for out of the blue she said we should go out to the balcony and look at the Christmas tree, which of course was not to be moved into the sitting room until the following day, because that was the tradition in our house, she intoned in her fairy-tale voice, standing in the cold balcony doorway on the 22nd and admiring the new Christmas tree before it came indoors, as the snow fluttered down from the Arnebråtens’ balcony upstairs, a scene that was redolent of Walt Disney.

Of course, this was a ploy to distract Linda. I took the hint and stayed behind in the kitchen to tidy up all our mess so that only the eight baubles Linda had made stood in a line against the wall. I had to admit that the black one with the runny yellow paint was in fact the best. When they returned and Mother said with a shiver that now it was time to enjoy a nice hot cup of cocoa, Linda had no problem focusing her attention on supper, which today included an extra slice of bread topped, in her case, with spiced cheese.

We decorated the tree on the 23rd, Mother on one stool, me on another and Linda on the floor with her baubles forming a kind of skirt around the branches, like planets in a rough and tumble solar system, and she had never even done that before, so it was another great night, which the tiniest slip of the tongue on my part could so easily have turned into a catastrophe, and Mother was in a very good mood now that Kristian was away with his family and we had the place to ourselves.

On the morning of the 24th I went into the street with Linda for a few hours. For the first time. Brother and sister. And that passed off well enough too, even though I was nervous, and Anne-Berit, the stay-at-home, made the point that Linda didn’t sledge the way she should, she was always trying to come on my sledge. I let her, of course, but it meant she cramped my style, and I suppose I looked more awkward than usual. When any of the other kids spoke to her she did not answer.

“What’s your name, then?”

“Her name’s Linda.”

“Are you visiting?”

“No, she lives here.”

“Where, at your place?”

“Yes.”

“Are you Finn’s sister?”

Neither of us answered that one.

“My mum says you’re Finn’s sister.”

“Mother does too.”

“Is that true, Finn?”

Silence.

“Hey, Finn won’t answer. Is she your sister, Finn? Come on, out with it.”

“Where the hell’s she
been
all this time?”

A boy by the name of Freddy 2 said to her face:

“Can’t you talk or what?”

“No,” Linda whispered, and the whole gang laughed, Freddy 2 loudest of all, he had been given that name because there were no fewer than three Freddys in our street, of whom only Freddy had any personality.