The Half Brother: A Novel (40 page)

Mom came in with supper. I didn’t touch a thing. She took my temperature and went out again. Later on Fred came in. He went to bed and lay for a while listening. I didn’t say a thing. I could smell tobacco and beer. “Don’t you feel like telling your brother?” he murmured. “Or are you just a half brother?” “What, Fred?” He groaned. “How it went with the ring, of course.” I thought a bit. “I didn’t give it to her,” I told him, my voice low. Fred sat up in bed. “You didn’t have the guts, you mean? You chickened out, like a damn wimp?” “No!” I all but shouted. “I was in her home!” Fred sank back down on his pillows again and stared up at the ceiling a long while. “You said something about her mole, didn’t you?” I crept as far under the quilt as I could. “Yes,” I whispered. I could hear the sound of singing down in the street. It was Boletta. She was singing hits everyone had grown sick and tired of ages ago. Mom began bustling about and rushed down to get her before there were complaints and the caretaker was roused. Then the night became quiet, except for my heart. “I told you you shouldn’t say anything about the mole,” Fred whispered. “Don’t you listen to me any more?” “Yes, Fred. I do listen to you.” “Think of all you could have mentioned, Barnum. Her eyes, her mouth, her ears. That’s what girls like to hear.” “Her nose too?” I asked cautiously. “Yes, her nose too. And her neck, her hands, her feet. But wait a bit as far as her bum and her tits are concerned, Barnum. Till the coast is clear.” “Ill wait,” I whispered. I could see Fred shaking his head in the dark. “Is she nice-looking?” he asked. “Yes,” I told him. “I’ve never seen anyone nicer.” “And you manage to mention her mole instead. You’ll have to put things right, Barnum. Otherwise, you’ve messed up big time.”

I think Fred went to sleep. That was the best conversation we’d ever had. I had the urge to go over to his bed and lie down beside him. Mercifully I didn’t. I lay where I was, thinking about everything I could put right. It was something to draw comfort from. I saw before me the ship that had slid out from the Akers Mek dock and sank in the black water. But it still wasn’t too late. The ship could be raised and brought back to its dock; it could be welded together and made seaworthy once more. That was how my thinking went. My bed was my dock. And there I lay for the remainder of the autumn holidays, while others in my class picked potatoes on farms belonging to cousins in Nittedal, or raked leaves beside white country cabins on the fjords. I wondered what Tale was doing, and then the mercury in Mom’s thermometer rose so dangerously high that she was on the point of phoning for a taxi to take me to the doctor. But I survived. And when Monday came, I declared myself fit and well, got up and went to school with the ring in my pocket.

I didn’t see her at recess. But I did see something else. The girls from her class stood crying by the sheds. Next period I couldn’t concentrate. Something was wrong. Knuckles was even paler than usual and asked what I, for one, had done during the potato holidays. Laughter spread through the class, and Mouse managed to say:
They thought Barnum was a Kerr’s Pink spud,
before he got the pointer on his neck like a whip and had swallowed half his tongue, as dust snowed over the sudden silence. Nor was she there at lunchtime either. The sheds were quiet now. Not even the other girls were there. Preben was standing with Hamster and Arnold be- side the drinking fountain, staring at me. The janitor had turned off the water. I went the long way around the first year classroom and ran in the back entrance, past the school cafeteria and up to the fourth floor. All was utterly still. It was lunchtime. Someone had dropped a sausage sandwich and just left it lying there. The coat pegs stuck out emptily from the walls like a row of shiny question marks. The ring was in my pocket. Something was very wrong. Slowly I walked the length of the corridor. The door to her classroom was open. I stopped and cautiously peered in. The girls sat quietly, their heads bowed, in a circle around a desk on which a white candle was burning. Someone was crying, soundlessly. On the blackboard in large letters were the words
Tale, we miss you.
I retreated. I hid under the pegs. Then Knuckles came around the corner, and I ran straight into her. Her hand came down heavily on my shoulder. “And what are you doing in here?” she demanded. But, for one reason or another, she didn’t seem angry. I decided to tell the truth. I had nothing else to lose. “I just wanted to give Tale something,” I whispered. She lifted her hand, and it grazed my cheek. Her fingers were cold. She crouched down. “Tale isn’t here any more,” she said, her voice low. “Has she changed schools?” I asked. Knuckles twisted her hands till the nails cracked, and it was absolutely true — she stank of old medicines as if her face were an ex-pharmacists. “Tale is dead,” she murmured.
Tale is dead,
I said inside myself.
Is dead. Dead.
“That can’t be right,” I said. Knuckles gave the tiniest of smiles and held my hand. I wished she would let it go. “Tale died during the vacation, Barnum.” I pulled back my hand. “How, though?” “She had a terrible disease. Cancer.” Knuckles leaned closer still, whispered. “Her mole. It was malignant.” “I have to go,” I said. “The bell will be ringing soon.” I went back down the corridor. I ran my finger along the pegs. And I thought to myself,
Now Tale cant tell on me. Now I’m safe. Now she cant tell anyone I came around with my arm in a sling and lied.
And I thought at the same time that this was the wickedest thing I’d ever thought. “What was it you were going to give her?” Knuckles asked. I stopped and turned around. She was standing outside the classroom, and some of the girls peered out, pale and silent. I picked up the piece of bread at my feet and slowly ate it. And what I said now was really even more wicked than what had gone through my head. “Nothing,” I said. Then I ran down the staircase to the bathrooms, fell on my knees and vomited up everything inside. After that I dropped the ring into the toilet bowl and pulled the chain. But I regretted it as soon as I’d done it. Fortunately the toilet was pretty blocked and had been for a long time. I stuck my hand down as far as I could into the brown water, searched with my fingers through soft lumps and paper, and in the end found it. I dried the ring as best I could on my jacket and slipped it back into my pocket. T for Tale. T for Tongue-tied.

The bell rang. I went home. There was no one there. I got the key to the loft and sneaked up there. I was a bad person. I knew it. I was a bad person — that was the only sizeable thing about me, my badness. I stood up there in the drying loft among the low-slung clotheslines. Drops of water fell from the window. The wind made the puddle on the floor tremble. My thoughts were ranged in a circle of blackness at the back of my eyes. How could she die when her father was a doctor? And the only thing I could see was her mole; it spread over the whole of her face and grew until it covered her entire body. Then I became calmer. Then I felt cold and empty. I went back to the coal shaft and hid the ring there, under the rusted hatch beside it. Then I found something else. Under a piece of sacking there was a bottle. Eau-de-vie was written on the label and it was half full. I uncorked it and drank. My teeth hissed with fire. But afterward laughter rose up in my head. It was a kind of laughter I liked. I drank some more and put the bottle back under the sacking. The laughter was so good in my head. I climbed the ladder to the attic window and opened it as wide as I could. I was barely able to hold it. I looked out over the city. Everything was moving. Nothing would stand still. The weathervanes took off and became a distorted flock over the fjord. But when I looked away toward the graveyard to the west, the dark trees stood like swords under a gray sky. And a procession of black-clad people bore a white coffin between the stones and stopped at a place where the ground was exposed like a newly picked scab. I tore off my jacket, stuck my right arm over the edge, left it there, drew in my breath and let the window drop. I was aware of it crashing and in the same instant the laughter in my head was snuffed out. I lost my footing, but remained hanging from the window, before bringing shards of glass with me and tumbling down the ladder, rolling around the clotheslines and meeting the floor — elbow first.

With half an eye I could see Boletta. She was crouching over by the coal shaft, poking around under the sacking. Then she found the bottle that was lying there. She drank. I wasn’t dreaming. It was real. I’d been out for a long time. I don’t know how long, it was just time. But in the shattered attic window, darkness was already sinking between the fragments of glass. Blood was pouring from my arm, which lay crookedly at my side. The skin had been torn in one long strip and something white and shiny glittered at the very heart of the wound. I fell into a faint again. And then Boletta turned around. She screamed and I heard the bottle falling from her hands, and the scream that followed was closer. So it was that Boletta carried me down the staircase, and the whole time she did so she talked — to herself, to everyone, to God. “I’m going to burn down that loft. Yes, I am. I’m going to burn that loft to the ground!”

I woke in a bed at the doctor’s. Mom was sitting beside me, and she ran her hand through my hair. I think she’d been crying. My right arm had been stitched. Thereafter I was wheeled through to another room where it was put in a plaster cast. I tried to raise my arm but couldn’t manage. “How did we get here?” I asked. Mom smiled and kissed my brow. “We took a taxi, Barnum. Don’t you remember?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t. Blast,” I said. But I got to take a taxi home the following morning, my arm in a sling, a white sling. And slowly my memory came back. Everything I’d wanted to forget became clear. Now I didn’t have to pretend. I had become the one I was. Mom and Boletta had to help me up the steps. I drank some cocoa, swallowed a round pill, laughed a little and went to sleep. The next time I came to Fred was standing at the window, his hands in his pockets. “Hi, Tiny,” he said. “Hurt yourself, huh?” Then Mom came in and I had to go back to school. I tried to protest. But it wasn’t working now. She helped me with the sling and fastened it at my shoulder with a safety pin. Boletta had made a packed lunch with eggs and herring, but I was hollow and full. And so I wandered out, into that which I’ll call my second life — my life after Tale — along the path of the low and all but white autumn sun, the length of Church Road. Esther leaned out of her kiosk and gave me a bag of sugar candy. I didn’t have to buy a ticket on the tram. A lady got up and gave me her seat. The conductor supported me going down the steps. It was just as I’d wanted it to be — this was what I’d dreamed of. But now it didn’t give me any pleasure, nor did it give me any sorrow to rejoice in — just an even greater emptiness.

I was the only one in the playground. The bell had rung. Slowly I went up the steps. I heard the echo of my own footsteps long afterward, and once or twice I could hear the echo
before
I put my foot down. Then I stopped outside the classroom. It was utterly still. It was horrible. My arm hung heavy in the sling. I knocked. The stillness lasted a little longer. Then I heard Knuckles’ voice. “Come in!” I opened the door. All the boys were standing beside their desks staring at me, and on the blackboard, in huge letters, were written the words
We’ve missed you, Barnum!
I wanted more than anything to go back out, but Knuckles led me over to her table and there was a cake the girls in the other class had made. I had to eat the first piece, and it had a thick, gray glaze on top and solid-baked raisins; I ate as Knuckles took off my schoolbag and helped me to my seat.
We’ve missed you, Barnum.
I chewed and chewed and couldn’t get the cake down, and when there was nothing left on the plate Knuckles hung up a color drawing representing the inner parts of an arm and pointed at me. “Now you can tell us what happened, Barnum.” But I had nothing to say. I had a mouth full of cake and lies. Knuckles just smiled and pointed to the drawing. “All right then, Barnum,” she said. “But our arms are the most vital work tools we possess. When we stand tall the tip of our middle finger will reach to about the middle of our thigh. But our right arm is generally about three-sixteenths longer than our left, since that’s the one we use most frequently.” All of a sudden she interrupted herself. “And what are you laughing at now?” she demanded, very loudly, because everyone in the class, except me, was hanging red-faced over their desks laughing. And I was almost happy, because now things were as they were before. Knuckles came down from her table, her pointer in the air. I swallowed the last of the cake, and suddenly Knuckles turned around to face me instead, and lowered the pointer. “Did you say something, Barnum?” I hadn’t said a thing, nothing I’d heard myself. And I was afraid I’d let slip some unheard words,
Knuckles’ fanny,
and now everyone was looking at me and I had to say something. I asked a question, for surely a question can’t be a lie? “Would you sign my cast?” I asked. Knuckles hesitated a moment, as if greatly perplexed. Then she fetched her fountain pen and wrote her name slowly on the cast in small, wobbly letters —
Miss K. Haraldsen, M.A.
Then the bell rang.

And during recess the whole class lined up to sign my arm. The girls from the other class came too — yes, soon enough the whole school had written their signatures. In the end it was Preben’s turn and the other boys stood in a noisy huddle, because in a playground everyone knows everything — all that’s said gets passed on. There are no secrets here, and here the rumors fly. “Do you know why your right arm is longer?” Preben asked. And he answered his own question. “Because that’s the one you jerk off with.” He signed his name beside Knuckles’. “So now your left arm’ll become just as long,” he said, and joined the others in one big circle of laughter. They laughed and laughed. I began to laugh myself. “Not if you do it for me,” I said. There was utter stillness. They gaped. They shuffled forward. Everyone in the playground stared at us. But they couldn’t beat me up now. They knew it. I knew it. I’d just asked for a complete and utter hammering at some point in the future.