Child Wonder (11 page)

I take her with me to a coin-tossing game, push her into the crowd of spectators with an invisible hand, or I show her a knife-throwing game, one which also requires a crowd of spectators, or else she can make dams with the slush in the street, which as a rule only involves the participants themselves. But none of this is much to Linda’s taste, it seems, even though she is fond of repetition.

She also has the chance to witness another of Freddy 1’s breakdowns, this time over his new bike, which is not new but old and black and bought by his father off scrap dealer Adolf Jahr in Storo for fifteen kroner, and is about as much use as a wooden leg. His performance is so dramatic that Linda takes my hand and tries to drag me away, I almost have to tear myself free, wondering how the others do it, how they get away from clingy younger siblings. But I see no way out, this skill is invisible, I can’t even see anyone clinging, as if everyone, great and small, knows how to deal with siblings and friends. And Mother?

Over dinner she says:

“Well, how was it today, then?”

“Great,” says Linda with a smile, and then Mother doesn’t ask who she played with, or what she played with, instead she looks relieved that nothing bad has happened.

Marlene starts sending Linda on shopping errands, up to Lien’s, which is usually my job, so that we have potatoes and bread for when Mother returns from work. But also that little journey crosses my field of vision. From Hagan I see Linda go into the shop and she does not re-emerge for ages, and then she is empty-handed, so I have to go down and ask what has happened, only to have the note written in Marlene’s handwriting shoved in front of my nose. I take Linda into the shop again and explain to her that the idea is not that she should hide behind the shelves but nail herself to the floor in front of the counter and she shouldn’t budge an inch, neither for women, nor children, until fru Lien catches sight of her, and then she should pass over the note, snappy, like this.

Two days later she comes out empty-handed again.

“What’s up this time?” I ask, irritated and out of breath after having to break off what I was doing yet again. Once more I am shown Marlene’s list, and realise at length that there might have been a problem deciphering her handwriting, was that one or two loaves?

“You’ve got to
speak,”
I say. “Come here.”

We go back, I demonstrate my skills to Linda and catch myself shouting, all too late, however.

“One loaf! Wholegrain!”

“Goodness me, Finn,” fru Lien says, rolling her eyes. I blush in the crowd, take the loaf and drag Linda out.

“Now you just carry this and go home –
alone,”
I say sternly, still crimson to the roots of my hair. But she doesn’t want to, she stands hugging the bread with both arms, as if afraid it will make a getaway.

“Come on now. I’ll watch you until you have passed No. 8.”

After much hithering and thithering she goes, backwards almost, down Traverveien, but not around the corner, not at all, she stops right on the borderline between her world and mine, and starts mooching around and looking up at me, until there is nothing else I can do but go after her yet again and walk home with her, where I say to Marlene, who is listening to the radio and humming and singing while pairing off an ocean of small, almost identical socks:

“Can’t you bloody write properly!”

“What are you talking about?”

“This!”

I show her the note and explain, but Marlene is not the type to be knocked out of her stride by any old scribble, not even her own.

“Why don’t you ask fru Lien to learn to read?” she says. “Smart-arse.”

I close my eyes and visualise a deserted plain with a tiny apple tree. Then I open them again and tell Linda who is still clutching the by now almost flattened wholegrain loaf:

“Tomorrow I’m going to take the note off you, then you’ll have to
say
what you want, got that?!”

Above all, this was the spring when old one-eyed Ruby disappeared from the house in Hagan and the last light was extinguished in her window. And so we children could tear down the rest of the fence and climb the trees and burn the heaps of wood and launch the final destructive attack on the house itself, smash the windows and break down the doors and burst in and steal all the things that were not there, for the house was as empty as the sky and razed to the ground by two bulldozers in a single hour.

A new day-care centre was going to be built here, and a shopping centre with a hairdresser’s and an Irma supermarket and a photography shop and a fishmonger’s and shoe shops, because the satellite town is devouring everything, even inwards to its own core. Blocks of flats have appeared now at the bottom of the estate, cars, children, roads and noise are springing up, there is only one way this is going, to hell, according to our lodger, Kristian, who is not moving after all, it transpires, he is content to exchange his winter coat for his spring coat and walk up and down the new short cut, which he has been doing for close on six months now, are his temporary digs going to become permanent?

And one more thing: was it nine o’clock or eleven o’clock the day that Mother couldn’t face taking me to casualty?

The last item of old Ruby’s furniture to be carried out of her house was a venerable old piano. Inside there was a concealed treasure. Sound. We had heard this sound for many years as we sneaked up in the autumn murk through the towering oak trees with our torches and encircled the one eye that shone, and were stopped in our tracks – by sound. No-one had a piano in Traverveien. But there was one here, in this ancient house in our midst. It was now being carried out by four strong men in white overalls, all the same age, the same height, the same hair colour and the same thick, black-rimmed glasses and all with short grey beards, which not only made them look like soldiers in the same army but also quadruplets from the same family – they were carrying out this shiny, black wonder in a perfect, silent synchronised dance as we stood watching from our unnaturally static positions and for the first time I knew what we had heard all these years, thirty, forty children, fifty, sixty … of all ages. In the end there were 183 suburban children who had heard music for all those years and had not known where it came from, until it went silent. Now we stood there paying our last respects, to a coffin being borne to the grave.

“There weren’t
so
many of you present, were there?” Mother said.

“Yes, there were,” I said. “I counted them and I remember.”

“Don’t give me that again, Finn, please.”

“Ask Linda, then.”

“Don’t,
I said!
Don’t!”

She covered her eyes with one hand, which she had done the morning I woke up with three broken ribs, and which at long last I realised meant it was me she couldn’t take any longer, she couldn’t take listening to what I had to say, it was
me
she couldn’t take, not being hard up, not a sudden death, not a lost love, not a pestering lodger nor a Linda who was so quietly wrapped up in her own eternity. No, it was
me.
And I realised that on the evening I was talking about the 183 children who had stood in the involuntary line bidding a dejected farewell to a piano, she was incapable of listening because this was not a sign of childhood but of nascent decadence.

“Well, was it a grand piano or an upright?” she asked, crossly.

“Makes no difference,” I said, and left, for good.

Then a letter arrived. With a crossed-out addressee and our name written in spiky handwriting, in pencil. It was from the health clinic in Sagene where I myself used to go for checkups before the school nurse came onto the scene. Now it was Linda’s turn. And Mother had the bright idea of taking me along, to have a rib-check, as she jokingly called it; she had never succeeded in coming to terms with this injury of mine, you don’t break three ribs doing cross-country skiing, do you. Besides she knew the staff in Sagene, and trusted them more than Dr Løge who had been called only because his practice was in the vicinity.

This was indeed to become an hour of truth. Which started with Nurse Amundsen declaring that Linda seemed somewhat unco-ordinated, distant, sluggish …

“Sluggish?” Mother said with a new facial expression.

Fru Amundsen nodded pensively. “But what about this problem with her knee?” Mother enquired.

“Knee?” said fru Amundsen, she was big and old and dressed in white like fru Lund in the school canteen, had brought four children into the world, lived through two wars and seen most things. But she couldn’t see any sign of the trouble with Linda’s knee that had been mentioned in the letter in the blue suitcase.

“Yes, you know, she takes medicine for it,” Mother persisted.

“Medicine?”

For a moment Mother didn’t know whether to nod or shake her head, and ended up doing neither.

Fru Amundsen leaned over Linda, who was seated on a long, crinkly piece of paper over what resembled an operating table, took off Linda’s shoes and rolled down her tights and felt the left knee with her large hands.

“Does that hurt?”

Linda cautiously shook her head. “And now?”

More head-shaking. Fru Amundsen grabbed her under the arms, lifted her down and asked her to walk towards the wall where the eye chart was hanging, turn around and come back and then walk to the padded door and turn again. She asked what her name was, but Linda did not answer until her enquiring look had received a nod of approval from Mother.

“Linda, yes, that’s a lovely name. How old are you?”

Again Linda needed a nod from Mother.

“Six.”

“So you’ll be starting school in the autumn?”

Linda nodded.

“She can already spell,” I said.

“Can you? Well, there’s a clever girl.”

“G,” said Linda.

Fru Amundsen nodded appreciation, lifted her back onto the table and shifted her gaze to Mother.

“And what is the medicine you’ve been giving her?”

Mother told her. “Does she sleep well?” fru Amundsen asked.

Mother nodded. “A lot?” fru Amundsen asked. And Mother had to nod again, and mumble under her breath: “Yes, actually she does.”

Fru Amundsen flashed a serious smile and said wait here and went out, while Mother started to roll up Linda’s tights and put on her shoes.

“I can do it myself,” Linda said as she tied a bow in laces.

“Yes, I know, my love, but now I’m going to do it.”

Mother pulled the laces so that they were an equal length, like bows on a Christmas present. Then she suddenly found herself giving Linda a hug, where she was sitting, on the crinkly paper, a hug of the kind that extends right across the entire Atlantic Ocean, and I knew now that the mystery surrounding my three ribs was not going to be solved.

I stepped onto the scales and moved the weights to and fro, and then stood under the angle iron on the wall to measure my height, Mother didn’t stop me, she just stood with her nose buried in Linda’s hair, giving her hug after hug, as if someone were planning to run off with her, so I went ahead and opened the white, safe-like cupboard on spindly legs and peered in at all the bottles lined up on glass shelves like small, tubby dwarfs, picked out one of them and shook it and began to unscrew the top before Mother intervened, but only with a flick of the hand, a weary, resigned gesture.

Then I screwed the lid back on, closed the cupboard door, took the pointer hanging beside the window, gently pushed Mother aside and pointed to the letters on the chart for the blind, one after the other down the pyramid, and made Linda say them, we carried on doing this until fru Amundsen returned, this time with a young man we hadn’t seen before, but who seemed friendly and shook hands with all three of us and asked Linda to walk across the floor and back, as fru Amundsen had done, whereafter he led Mother into another office.

“The children can wait here,” he said over his shoulder as they left.

We waited.

Fru Amundsen gave us an old Donald Duck comic which I read aloud. Then she took us into the waiting room because other people had to come in. Then she came back for us and said we could sit on a small, black leather sofa, which in reality was just a very wide armchair, while she sat behind her desk catching up on her medical records for the day, because now it was beginning to get seriously late.

Mother was only half with us, so to speak, when she returned. She had little make-up left on, her eyes were red-rimmed and dry, and the grip she had on Linda, after having signed three forms with a nib that was needle-sharp, was as firm as the one Linda had applied the day she alighted from the bus.

Nothing was said until we were outside on the pavement listening to the roar of the rush hour traffic, and we realised how quiet and desolate it had been inside the naphthalene-ridden institution.

“Right,” Mother said to herself, with force. “Right.”

She glanced up and down the busy road, as if to plot a route, while Linda and I looked up at her, tense, what was going on here?

O.K., now we were going to a butcher’s Mother knew, to buy some pork and sliced meats, then we were going to a bakery, which she also knew, from her childhood, I gathered from the way she was speaking, much too loud and familiar with the lady behind the counter, who gave us a cake each. After that we took a trolley bus and changed to the Tonsenhagen bus in Carl Berners plass where we also had time to buy two bags of peanuts from the machine outside the Progress factory. When at length we arrived home it was to be pork with gravy, since in our family food is the way we like to settle crises or signal that dangers are over.

But this time events came in reverse order.

This was the evening that there was to be no medicine for Linda, it went down the lavvy, two full bottles, while the prescriptions were locked safe and sound in the drawer with the photographs of the crane driver and Mother, her happily-married life. As proof, she said, after Linda had gone to sleep. She also said that we might have some tough days ahead of us. Plus:

“There is nothing worse than stupidity, Finn. And your mother has been stupid. Stupid, deaf and blind. And do you know what makes folk stupid?”