Child Wonder (12 page)

“Er … no.”

“Fear. That’s why you must never be afraid, my boy. And you must go to school for as long as you can. Will you promise me that?”

Yeah, yeah, I’d never had any plans to do otherwise, and I didn’t see Mother as some shrinking violet either, although she was frightened of the dark and could never really feel at ease even before Linda came into our lives despite the fact that we were doing fine. And what was going to happen now?

“I don’t know,” Mother said. “We’ll have to take things as they come.”

That was what we did, and it started in the middle of the night when Linda stood beside my bunk wanting to play. Then she wanted to go to the lavvy, after that she wanted something to eat. But she couldn’t sit still and instead ran out to the sitting room to fetch something, only to forget what it was she was looking for, she said oops and went back to the kitchen, where something else occurred to her and she ran back and scurried around the meagre space that is available in a three-room flat minus one for a lodger. Then she began to shake and knocked over a chair, then she sent a glass flying and began to fling her legs and arms about. Mother held her tight, locking her in a vice-like grip, put her to bed and restrained her while I ran into the sitting room and sat on the floor behind the television with my hands over my ears, unsure whether I was dead or alive, with the screams and a tingling in my skin, with the smell of Bakelite and teak oil searing my nostrils, and I read the Chinese symbols that were supposed to make the electricity work, but which could not drown the noise, until the enormous sitting-room window turned grey and filled with light, like drawing paper, and I heard Mother shout that I had better get myself off to school.

Which I did, without any breakfast.

There were only four lessons today, though, and when I returned nothing had changed, Mother was in bed with Linda, who was wriggling and squirming, and her face was blue and white. The whole flat smelled of vomit, of Linda, who never cried but who was beside herself now, like a circular saw cutting through rock. But I knew Marlene had dropped in, for there was food on the table, and when I had eaten and still didn’t know whether I would live or go up in smoke, Mother shouted through the door I couldn’t bring myself to open – out of fear that I would see something I would never forget – that I could watch T.V. and sleep in the sitting room.

But the night was to be no more peaceful.

At six the following morning Kristian came in wondering what the hell was going on and found himself being chased back into his room.

“And you stay there!” shrieked Mother, who obviously had the strength of a horse and was carrying Linda round the flat and comforting her with strange words I had never heard before, incantations that did not work and therefore had to be repeated
ad infinitum.

But then at long last she fell asleep, and Mother sent me off to school, this time with a packed lunch and an absent-minded hug, and admonitions not to say anything, not even to Essi, be strong, she said, as though the terrible things that were going on inside Linda were only the half of what would assail us if anyone on the outside caught wind of it.

As I was leaving, along came Marlene, who was not stupid and never had been, and spent the whole day with Mother, who didn’t go to work that day, either.

That evening Linda slept for more than two hours before the hullabaloo started afresh, just as I was about to go to bed. But by then Mother had also managed to get some sleep. And again I was lying in the sitting room with cotton wool in my ears and a tingling sensation in my body as the battle raged on in the bedroom. I didn’t wake until Marlene was sitting in the armchair beside the sofa asking me how I was.

“How are you doing, Finn?”

“It’s ten o’clock,” I said, sitting up with a start because I thought something was wrong.

But there wasn’t. I was soaked in saliva and sweat. Everything was calm, still and light. In the middle of the floor stood the doctor we had spoken to at the check-up in Sagene, in his coat, without a hat, and he uttered some reproachful but friendly words to Mother, who had put on some make-up and looked ready for work. She couldn’t be expected to do everything on her own, he said, whatever that was supposed to mean. And she answered:

“That child is not going to any home!”

“No, I appreciate that, but …”

“She’s never going to leave this house. Never ever!”

The doctor said no again and hung his coat beside Kristian’s, as if he lived here as well, and carefully took Mother by the arm, led her into the kitchen, sat her down on a chair and started to examine her arms and hands which had acquired some bluish-red crescent shapes I guessed were bite marks.

Linda was also sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast and drinking cocoa, she was smacking a tea spoon on the cocoa skin and smiled sheepishly as I padded in. Mother burst into laughter in a way that reminded me of death, and I felt Marlene’s hand on my head, steering me towards the table and I seemed to be pressed down in front of a plate with four slices of bread, typical Marlene slices, buttered and cut to the sounds of “You Can Have Him”, I grabbed one and took a cautious nibble.

“Linda’s been ill,” Linda said.

“So have I,” I said and shivered and chewed as the visitor beside me stopped doing what he was doing and everyone’s eyes focused on me. Mother had to get up and go to the bathroom to wash her face and apply make-up for a second time, and came out again blinking at the doctor and the light and asked if she was fit to go to work, “looking like this?”

“And you’re asking
me?”
he smiled.

“Who else should I ask?” she said.

“Yes, well, if you absolutely must. I’ll give you a lift.”

“She’s not going to work,” Marlene decided, and Mother crumpled, half turning, but in doing so made a stupid movement with her head in my direction, believing I wouldn’t notice, and the doctor seemed to catch sight of me in among the others and bent over the table and the plate and my food and asked, with that broad mouth of his, if I had done my homework yesterday, and I had, good, he said, then he wanted to know how many pupils there were in my class …

“Mixed class? Ah, I see. Any nice girls in it?”

“Tanja,” Linda said, and the doctor smiled while I was trying to recall if I had in fact done my homework yesterday. I had, yes I had, I remembered the hymn verse and the piece we had to retell from our reading book, about Halvor who comes home and is very upset; I knew it off by heart, which was not the purpose of the exercise as we were supposed to use our imagination and write it in our own words. I had done that, so, anyway, I wasted no time in telling them about what happened in Heia to the sick horse that couldn’t stand up after a fall in the forest, and how the vet thought it needed some water, then it perked up, the nag did. And strangely enough, for once, everyone was following and laughing and seemed to be very interested, Mother too, I just had to finish the story and drink my milk and get up and go to school. But it was getting on for eleven o’clock.

“You can stay at home today, Finn.”

“Tell me again,” Linda said.

It is quiet and warm and summer and holiday time in the streets of Årvoll, and I have to teach Linda to climb trees, I feel. She is no longer afraid of heights, has become thinner and is a tiny bit taller, I don’t want to exaggerate, it is easy to exaggerate when there is progress; in our house we take things one step at a time, we are prepared for the worst and we are caught on the hop if things just go moderately well, for example a whole evening in front of the television without Linda having any relapses, as Mother calls the last vestiges of her old life.

But she has grown stronger. When we practise on the clothes drying frame in front of our block, she can not only hang by her arms for eight seconds, she can also swing along the bars, two, three grabs, or perhaps four, before she falls into my arms. Linda trusts me, I always catch her, I like to be trusted.

“That tickles,” she says.

When I stand on the iron bench and help her up onto the frame, she can also sit astride the gap between the frames reserved for Blocks 1 and 2 and cling onto the clothes lines with enough pluck to hang on for four to five minutes. The days are ours. And Freddy 1’s. Freddy 1 is not on holiday, either, he is big and heavy and no climber. But he can swing himself the whole way along the whole frame making it shake and sway like the rigging on a sailing ship in a storm. And while Linda is sitting over the gap he lies down on his back on the concrete flagstones with his arms behind his head and tells her to jump onto his stomach. She doesn’t dare.

“Come on,” says Freddy 1. “It won’t hurt.”

Linda considers it, and I suspect that Freddy 1 is lying on that particular spot so that he can see up her yellow-flowered dress. I suggest that she lies on her stomach and slides down from the bar and lets go when she can’t hold on any more. She does as I say, and after an awkward fall of a metre and a half she lands with her sandals firmly planted in the stomach of Freddy 1, who coughs and goes red in the face just as Mother comes out of the bomb shelter wearing sun glasses and carrying a deck chair and two women’s magazines.

“What are you kids up to?! I mean, really, Finn!”

Freddy 1 was ready to defend me, I could see it in his face, but not a sound emerged. Mother came running over and helped him up onto the iron bench where the washing baskets are put, glancing around anxiously to see whether Freddy 1’s mother might be keeping an eye on us from her window or balcony. But Freddy 1’s mother was not keeping an eye on anyone, she was asleep, and Freddy 1’s father was on a building site, and his elder sisters at a summer camp. Freddy 1 didn’t want to go to the camp, not on your nelly, he wanted to be at home in the streets during the time when not a single one of his tormentors was there, the time his tormentors spent in hell, which is what Freddy 1 considered a holiday to be.

We listened to Mother’s warnings and helped her to assemble the deck chair. It took a while. Then we messed around with a ball and sat on the grass demonstrating our boredom until Mother was sick of us and asked whether we didn’t have anything better to do.

We crossed Traverveien and went up to Hagan, out of her sight, where one of the oak trees had branches within reach for even someone of Linda’s stature, where even Freddy 1 could scramble up to base two, as we called it, at the top of the trunk, where the massive branches fanned out and formed a kind of platform, a floor of solid oak with room for four, five or even six children and from which Freddy 1 had once pissed on the head of Freddy 2, who hadn’t been able to climb any higher than base one.

We could see the glowing heat haze over the city centre and the new Disen blocks and Trondhjemsveien and our own estate lying there with deserted streets and the flats and the fields that were in the process of being mown and becoming lawns that had to be tended by the caretaker and Oslo City Parks and Gardens, which of course is a contradiction in itself, an estate without people, an empty shell after all those who had returned to where they had come from, to teach their children to dry hay and to fish and to row and climb trees – Essi, who had been driven by car across the mountains to Romsdalen, Vatten who was in Solør, and Roger in Northern Norway, not to mention all of those who were on Hudøy Island summer camp and had nothing to do but yearn for home in Hagan and us and the dizzying view of the world we sat enjoying, the way it is without all those who belong there, a strange time, the summer, a mystery, on a par with the winter.

But this was to be no usual summer.

In the first place, Linda was there and that put a stop to most of Freddy 1’s ideas, which by and large consisted of stealing something we didn’t need, from a cellar or an attic storeroom, a kilo of flour, shoe polish, peas, which at least we could use in our pea-shooters, or maybe best of all empty bottles from the Trotting Stadium which we could get the money back on and buy ice creams with. I couldn’t take Linda on any of this.

Secondly, because Kristian was sitting at the kitchen table when we came in that evening, Kristian in some khaki shorts that were much too big for him and an even bigger khaki shirt, which made him look like Doctor Livingstone in
Illustrete Klassikere.
He had a surprise up his sleeve, it was to transpire, did we want to borrow his tent and go on holiday?

“You’re just saying that,” said Mother as we slid onto our chairs and I wondered what had occasioned this audience, because Kristian had not been seen since the time Linda fell ill, and that was almost two months ago.

No, really, Kristian had a house tent, as he called it, on an island in Oslo fjord called Håøya, and it was there all summer, he liked to take the boat over at the weekends, he said.

“House tent?”

“Yes, a six-man tent. With an awning as well.”

I wanted to ask what an unmarried lodger was doing with a six-man tent, but he gave me the answer unprompted. “Well, it’s nothing special. I got it cheap – it’s a bit fire-damaged.”

Mother began to laugh.

“You can hardly see the marks,” Kristian protested.

But the very fact that this tent didn’t seem to be worth much made it almost attainable, indeed it made it seem like an irresistible temptation.

“Aren’t you going to be there yourself?”

“No. It’s not being used, that’s what I keep telling you. It’s padlocked. Here’s the key.”

He rummaged around and produced a tiny key that looked as if it would fit a jewellery box, held it up for everyone to admire and placed it on the table between our plates. And it was not fire-damaged, it was so shiny and bright all we had to do was to get weaving.

“Then Freddy 1’s coming too!” I shouted.

“Stop that now, Finn. We’re not going to any tent on an island …”

“Why not?” Kristian said. “You can lie outside and sunbathe just as well as here.”

“Stop it now.”

“You have got quite a tan. It suits you.”

“Stop it, I said.”

“And the kids need some fresh air …”