Child Wonder (14 page)

“Right, so today we’ve got another sickly landlubber, have we, on a mirror-calm sea.”

The unimaginable dizziness did not wear off until we came ashore a good hour later and I could lie on my back on the quay and stare up at the sky with my eyes closed and lie still until everything was calm inside and around me.

We were on the island of Håøya.

A green paradise in the middle of Oslo fjord. With narrow paths for walking and not many houses and three beaches and some flat grassland that wound inwards to a forest packed with birdsong and rocks and slopes and thickets and scrub and insects and deep ravines, this was the kingdom of the dragon, we just didn’t know yet whether it was good or evil.

It appeared that an order of its own reigned out here, predominantly manifested in one person who came to talk to us as soon as we arrived on the quay, no doubt because we were the sole passengers to need a rest after arrival while the others launched themselves into a kind of race to the centre of the island, all vying for the best camp sites, we were soon to learn.

He was the age and size of a grandfather I suppose everyone must have dreamed about at one time, a bit on the short side, and dressed in what looked like a tailor-made costume for this particular island and this particular season, very long shorts, well, a sort of cross between bathing trunks and a uniform, which gave him the appearance of an outdoor type and a policeman, plus a small skipper’s cap with a white plastic anchor, pulled well down over an iron-grey mane, an equally grey beard and small bright eyes that were both intense and friendly, but also evasive, especially when he clapped them on Mother who was now sporting a bikini top and had put her sun glasses on top of her hair, turning them into a tiara of black diamonds.

After she had given him a few faltering details and told him we had left our map behind, he sighed and mumbled:

“Ah yes, Kristian, that Kristian.” And his sun–tanned face displayed a whole musical score of differing expressions. We were quite unnerved, but fortunately he saw that and informed us in a low voice that you couldn’t just come and expect to have a tent pitched here for ever, there were such things as moving days, so that people didn’t grow roots and occupy the same spot for weeks on end. By which he meant that you could not stay in the same position for more than two nights. After that you had to pull up your tent pegs and move somewhere else. Furthermore, you were not allowed to consume alcohol, and there was something about food and a shop that I didn’t catch.

“You can call me Hans,” he muttered by way of conciliatory closure to all these rules of which we understood neither the wording nor the purpose.

“Why?” I asked, and felt my leg being kicked by Mother, who continued to stare at the little skipper with an element of pleading in her eyes, we weren’t the kind to stand around unaware that we were in someone else’s power.

“Well, er, that’s my name,” he said, disconcerted, and steered his gaze from Mother’s bikini top down to Linda who had simply decided this was none of her business.

Mother:

“So there is no tent here then?”

“Well, there is, yes,” Hans said in his inscrutable wisdom, at which point Linda woke up, looked at him with a serious expression and drawled:

“We’ve had an ice cream.”

“Er … is that right? Well, it must have been good, I imagine.”

“Yes.”

Silence. Linda:

“We’re on holiday.”

“Yes, right. Mm …”

That was all it took. Hans grabbed our kitbag and said come along with me, and also carried it as it was meant to be carried, led us across the field where the holidaying masses were in full swing erecting their tents, then turned down a narrow path and guided us through dense hazel thickets up a slope between a few crags until a small, flat grassy clearing appeared in the otherwise hilly terrain, a high-lying oasis with a view over the sea and a few other islands, unless it was the mainland, whereupon he stopped and listened, as if for a tent, only to discover it, so to speak, our six-man tent; for there it was, next to the forest in the northern corner of paradise. It was as blue as the sea and the sky and the day, there was a large awning too, which was orange, two semis, one whole house.

Mother asked if this was the one, and Hans said yes, this was Kristian’s tent. There followed a vague, to put it mildly, account of – I presume – what it actually was that entitled Kristian to have his tent sited here, a permanent fixture, as it were, contrary to all the regulations, plus a request that if anyone should stumble upon us and ask when we were going to move, we should say we didn’t know we had to, take down the tent and pitch it over there, six to eight metres closer to the forest, but at an angle to it, so that there would be no more room for another tent for sure. If, however, no-one asked, which was more probable because this place was a secret, then we didn’t have to dismantle the tent at all, a statement that left us with a somewhat disquieting sensation with which we were already all too familiar, the feeling that we had to live under cover and on someone else’s terms.

Mother said thank you and that’s nice, and “I would never have thought it”.

“And there’s no sign of any fire damage, is there?”

“No, I think it was only one pole and a bit behind here,” Hans said, nodding towards a brown stain which we would never have spotted.

But now I had the key, and I unlocked the little padlock and crawled into the awning, where the temperature was two hundred and nineteen degrees centigrade and there was a terrible stench, from a pair of gym shoes, it turned out, which Hans coaxed out with a stick and hurled down the slope. However, it was possible to open the tent at the front and the canvas at the back, so that a gentle, liberating summer breeze could sweep through the boiling greenhouse. Inside, there were sleeping bags and lilos, a sun lounger and four rickety camping chairs, an equally rickety table as well as the famous canvas bag we were supposed to use to fetch water and hang on the tree, over there.

“And you can make a fire here,” Hans said, motioning towards a circle of stones surrounded by another circle made of old tree stumps to sit on.

“Yippee!” I yelled.

“Oh no,” said Mother.

“I want to have a fire, too,” Linda said.

While Hans smiled as though he were already an associate member of the family, or had gathered at any rate that here were people he could really impress, three novices to be initiated into the joys of camping.

“You’ll find some dry wood in the forest,” he told me and instructed me to take the canvas bag, showed me the way to the closest freshwater tap, as well as how to hang the bag on the tree. Then something was also said about the mysterious food, that there was only one shop here, and apparently it opened for just a few hours on certain days, which hours was a bit unclear, so you would be wise to get stocked up with food from a boat that called in now and then from Dreøak, that too at rather irregular times, or go there yourself and shop, which perhaps was the easiest, yes, I reckon it is, he concluded.

So, the long and short of this seemed to be that people shouldn’t take anything for granted out here and make themselves so comfortable that they stayed.

“Yes, well, that’s the way it is,” Hans said with a contented smile.

But by then Mother had begun to mooch around instead of getting to grips with the unpacking, a sign, I deduced, that now we could not take any more goodwill from Hans without running up the same enormous debt we already owed to Kristian. He sensed that.

“Well, let me know if there is anything. I’m in Vika.”

Mother thanked him again, shook his hand, and Hans left.

We were alone in a paradise we had not lifted a finger to deserve, but it would be wrong to say we didn’t know how to appreciate it. We were in raptures, especially me, as usual. But there was no doubt that a load had also been taken off Mother’s mind in the last hour, the endless journey, by bus and boat, and Linda had already gone to sleep three times, in different sleeping bags, and got up again before the primus stove had been lit and the pork and the sausages had been thrown in the pan. Summers are often given a name or several, and at first this one was called the summer Linda learned to swim.

Now, this was no simple matter, of course, teaching Linda how to swim. You see – after stopping the medicine – she had not only begun to sleep less and eat less, she had also shown tendencies to go her own way. Mother had brought this subject up with me on a number of occasions.

“Don’t you think Linda’s been pretty headstrong recently?”

In particular, there had been a huge fuss about a month ago when there had been some disagreement over the working practices of the tooth fairy; the rate for molars and front teeth had, it transpired, soared since my time, upon which I had taken the liberty to remark, only to be put down brutally by Mother. But Linda had insisted on giving me the krone coins she found in her tumbler in the morning, which led to the rate taking a sudden dive to an all-time low, which Linda refused to accept and so on and so forth, we had been talking about these teeth for weeks.

Now, Linda was a great fan of water and put on her bathing costume with my old swimming belt before breakfast and was out all day until she was dragged ashore by force. But she would not do what we told her, stay in the shallow part, she waded out so far her feet were off the bottom and she bobbed around like a fishing float, up and down with her tightly pinched lips, treading water, or whatever it was she was doing, which meant that Mother and I had to paddle around like buoys and try to manoeuvre her in the right direction, in other words shorewards, while shouting – to no effect – that she should waggle her arms. She used them to cling to the belt and nothing else, which was quite unnecessary since Mother had tied it so tight it left a chess-board pattern all over her upper body.

It was one of the old style swimming belts, lined with reindeer fur, I think, which absorbed water and slowly but surely shifted from being a floating device to a lead weight, and at regular intervals had to be slapped against a rock or trodden on so that some of the water drained out, and was often hung up in the sun as well. However, it never dried out completely, it was wet the whole summer long, and cold, making Linda shudder every time she put it on, with the result that she preferred to keep it on all the time, which Mother would not allow.

“You’ll get ill, you will.”

Furthermore, she was badly sunburned, on the shoulders and face, which was about all there was above water, and she had to be covered in Nivea and forced into a white blouse, even when she was swimming. At the same time Mother again did what she always regretted afterwards, but still could not stop herself doing, she enquired about what Linda had done in previous summers, questions which were enough to make Linda stand up and walk away, regardless of what we were doing, as though she had been summoned by a higher power, so that Mother or I, or both of us, had to run after her and walk beside her and say whatever came into our heads, until she came to a halt and looked at us with the expression that said she had heard something she liked and at that moment she forgot everything the thoughtless question had caused to swirl up inside her.

Linda had a way of fixing us with her gaze that made me wonder what actually went on inside her. In fact, looking at Linda was like pressing your eye deeper and deeper into the lens of Kristian’s microscope in the hope that you might catch a glimpse of something recognisable, or comprehensible.

Luckily, this summer could also be called the summer with Boris, whom I met on the second day we were on the beach. He was my age, my size, with a quiff like mine, came from an estate much like ours, and was interested in comics and books and coins and trees and ball bearings and words and outer space, he didn’t even have a father, yes, we were as good as identical.

But he had an “uncle” who was there with his mother and some elder brothers and “cousins”, so Boris was the odd one out, that was why his “uncle” introduced us to each other.

“Hey you, can’t you play with ‘im ‘ere?” I heard beside me from out of the blue while I was on all fours digging in the sand for what is only to be found in heaven. And there stood a large, bald man in black, and far too tight, bathing trunks which did not appear to be accommodating anything beneath a naked, nut-brown belly, and with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. At his side stood Boris, sinewy and small and brown, as though he had lived here all his life, clad in over-sized bathing trunks, and his eyes bored down into my hole of dreams which was slowly filling up with black water. I don’t think I gave him much of a response. The “uncle” took the hint and said:

“Do you know how to catch crabs?”

“Er …,” I said.

“Boris’ll show you. Won’t you, Boris?”

With that he turned his back on us and waddled off in beach shoes that flipped on and off and seemed to stick to the soles of his big feet while he flicked ash into the water and trained his eyes on a pink point somewhere in eternity in the cloudless sky.

Boris didn’t move and looked around, and I suppose I did too, until he looked practically straight at me and said “Come on” and started to walk over the sand to a big rock in the water.

I waded apprehensively after him, two or three metres behind, feeling my mother’s eyes fixed on my back, out to the rock, I hadn’t been there before, and stood with barnacles chafing against my feet; I admired Boris who strode straight through a big pile of seaweed without suffering any ill effects and bent down into the sea until it covered the roots of his hair and he brought up a cluster of mussels which he threw at my feet.

“How are we going to open them?” I asked, pretending to know what this was all about.

“We’ll smash ‘em,” Boris said. “With this.”

He had his own stone for the purpose, and under the stone there was a line and a plastic bag. Boris’ line and Boris’ plastic bag.

“The gunge sticks to one of the shells,” he said. “That’s what the crabs are after.”

We were fishing for crabs. We crouched down with the sun beating down on our backs and chucked a mussel in and pulled up a reddish-green crab and put it in the plastic bag which we filled with sea water. Boris showed me how to catch the buggers and bring them up, not too fast, not too slowly, you have to be patient, and perhaps more than anything else he showed me there was nothing to be frightened of, not even with crabs, if you know what you are doing, all the time I had Mother’s eyes on me, Mother who was lying in Kristian’s deck chair on the beach and squabbling with Linda about whether a quarter of an hour had passed or not between her last swim and the next swim, which for the sake of family peace ought to have started twenty minutes ago.