Child Wonder (16 page)

He got to his feet and ran barefoot up the quay and expertly caught the mooring rope the boatman threw to him. And Hans, who had also made an appearance, nodded assent to Boris, it went without saying, Boris who knew these things like the back of his hand, who helped Hans afterwards with the rickety gangplank and stood to attention like a naked doorman, showing the stream of new, clothed summer visitors the way to paradise, novices and veterans alike, we could recognise them now by their style, the former in a state of bewilderment, identical to our own when we arrived a mere four days ago, and those who were in the know, the fight for territory, off at top speed towards the island’s splendours.

Jan also turned out to be one of the veterans. He came ashore with more luggage than an American emigrant and exchanged a few old-hand pleasantries with Hans before coming over to us, with Marlene, who was wearing slightly less make-up today and who once again lifted up Linda and hugged her and remembered me just in time while Boris repeated his party piece of the morning and said “I’m Boris”, which I decided was perhaps not such a brilliant number after all.

I stood back a bit, to be frank, while Mother went up to the tent to fetch her bag. I admired the huge food hamper that Jan had brought, as well as a large plastic-covered creamy-white box whose apparent purpose was to keep our food cool; there was dry ice in it which Jan had got from an ice cream company, he said, and showed us a block of ice with smoke coming off it, which he claimed would last for many days before melting, if it stayed in the box, mind you, but by then he would have had a fresh batch sent over by boat, because he had contacts in Diplom-Is.

“This is in fact a genuine ice box,” he said with a proprietary air, placing a small, tanned hand on the wavy lid.

Yes, indeed. And it had to be transported to the tent by cart, which we borrowed from Hans who had begun to address Mother in formal terms and who said, as she passed, he hoped he would see her again soon, fru Jacobsen. Mother was more concerned with hugging Linda goodbye, and so on. Besides, I was standing there brewing up a storm. She could see that.

“You know I love you, Finn,” she said. “Whether I get a hug or not.”

I suppose this was meant to be a kind of olive branch to someone who had seriously begun to consider what was appropriate and what was not, but instead it was said in such an embarrassingly shrill voice across the quay and the crowded ship’s deck that there was no hug, no nothing. So she repeated how much she loved me, just in case some deaf ninny had not caught it the first time round, and went on board and waved from next to the stern in her flowery dress, which should have made me smell a rat this morning; on the island she wore a bikini top and a bathing costume, a dress was town-wear, a uniform, to be worn in shoe shops and on tarmac streets, which she put on only when Linda and I would not be with her, as the boat chugged northwards again.

Now it was me standing and staring after someone disappearing over the horizon. Of course I could have jumped in and swum after her, I would have bloody caught up with the crappy boat as well, I imagine, I did at least consider the idea, but rejected it and followed the others up to Daisy and just as tears were about to flow from my stupid mug I felt that they weren’t going to come after all. The tears remained inside me. It wasn’t so bad. Or that was how bad it was. All this was so new, it had come in stages or like small landslides over the last six months, as if to sort of hammer it home that the distance between Mother and me was growing and growing, as if guided by an invisible hand hard at work to create a final farewell.

Then the tears did well up. But no good ever comes of crying; if there is anyone who should have known that, it was me, for ever-watchful Marlene heard it, of course, and turned and crouched down and said:

“There, there, it’ll be alright.”

This was the very worst thing she could have said, in the worst possible tone:

“What will be alright?” I shrieked.
“What will be alright?”

I was like a casualty in a cheap soap opera, staring imploringly into the summery face of placid Marlene the Wise, and I thought I saw the all-too-clear signs that she was wondering how much I knew, or how little, and how much I could take, then she decided on the best course of action, still beset by doubts, I later concluded, she straightened up and said roughly:

“Pull yourself together now, Finn. Your mother needs a few days on her own. And it’s about time too. Come on.”

She took three steps along the path through the rustling hazelnut coppice and turned and held out her hand and repeated in a manner that brooked neither disagreement nor discussion that I should come and show her the camp site, without further ado.

Yes, if there is anyone you can rely on in this world, it is Marlene. Marlene is a rock, like Mother used to be, not a fickle dove in a storm whose composure can crumble any day of the week, Marlene is as solid as the ground you walk on, round the clock. She never lets you down, she is always even-tempered and she doesn’t know the meaning of fear, she is the type of mother we should have had. Look how she dealt with Boris, for example. He was already up at our camp site sounding off about his local knowledge to Jan, but Marlene knew how to cope with him.

“Run along and play with someone else now, Boris,” she said with the same intractable smile. “I have to have a little chat with Finn. I’ve got a letter for you,” she called in my direction.

Yes, and Boris made himself scarce without any fuss, and I was free to show them how the primus worked, the one we had been given by Uncle Oskar for Christmas, pump here, open the valve, meths, light up and so on, a letter did you say?

I had forgotten it, my plan. The letter was from Freddy 1 the first letter I had received in my life, if we exclude the one that accompanied Linda, but I assume that had been intended for Mother anyway, and even though the one from Freddy 1 could not exactly be classified as a normal letter, with an envelope, stamp, addressee and all that, it was at least a folded sheet of paper with a ragged margin left by the spiral and two lines of quite elegant, dark blue capital letters: “I’M NOT GOING ON HOLIDAY. I’LL LOOK AFTER THE BALL BEARINGS.”

So Marlene knew about my plan, which basically had been to get Kristian to call on Freddy 1 and give him the leather pouch with the ball bearings in exchange for him agreeing to catch the boat and come out and sleep under the awning with me, where I had been alone while Mother and Linda occupied the main part of the tent.

If Marlene had imagined that this rejection by Freddy 1 might take my mind off Mother’s departure, she was quite right. However, I realised something else as well, I realised that neither Kristian nor Marlene had put much effort into persuading Freddy 1, on the contrary, they had accepted his refusal as a reasonable end to the matter, after consultation with Mother, maybe, which in turn meant that Kristian must have betrayed our secret, that was the kind of person Freddy 1 was, he inspired people to exclude him, and that made me furious. At the same time I knew that I would not have seen through this game if I had received his letter yesterday, when everything was normal, there’s something odd about his eyes, Mother had said once, with an unmistakable wince.

I hated that.

So I decided to keep my distance, also from Marlene, and Jan. But now there he was, in a short-sleeved, blue and white striped jumper, showing us how dry ice was so cold it could burn, look at this, a chunk was dropped into the bucket of water, and it didn’t melt, it made the water boil because it brought together extreme opposites, a mystery it was impossible not to be fascinated by. I ran to fetch Boris, who didn’t know about dry ice either, and we experimented with it until Marlene said that if we didn’t stop there was a good chance we would be drinking warm milk for the rest of the week.

When Boris and I left Daisy, later, I at once began to tell him about Freddy 1, because I could not fail Freddy 1 the way Mother had failed me, and I talked about what he liked and didn’t like, what he could do and what he couldn’t do, I let words tumble out, one after the other, and I continued when we were down on the beach to swim and catch crabs, lying on the bare rock-face staring up at the sky I talked about Freddy 1, for there were very few people on this earth who could measure up to Freddy 1.

Boris too had a Freddy 1, he talked about him while we kicked a football around or lay watching F.T.B., and especially when we did dangerous things, for example when on one occasion we were on our way down from the crag above F.T.B. and bumped into Hans, the warden, who loomed up on the path and stared daggers at us, which is where I discovered that Boris did not exhibit the slightest sign of fear, he cold-bloodedly returned the glare, until I realised that it wasn’t
us
who had been caught red-handed but Hans, a grown man, who is a lot more blameworthy in anyone’s book than a child.

Yes, it wasn’t only us who were going through this experience, there were also the friends we could never let down. Such as when we swam across the bay to sit on the big rock to avoid being with Linda and Marlene who, day after day, lay on the spot Mother had colonised, Linda who could swim like a submarine now, without a swimming belt, in the shallow water, surfacing only to breathe, and that was not often, and then stood laughing with closed eyes and the tip of her tongue carefully licking the corner of her mouth to taste the terrible salt water; as the days went by she became browner and browner, browner than me, on the parts of the body not covered by a bathing costume. She also became more agile and climbed after us in places where less than a week ago we could have been certain we would have been left in peace, she ran over beaches and fields without looking too ungainly, soon with such calloused soles that she could also walk on forest paths and piles of barnacles without displaying the stupid barefoot-walk that is so prevalent on Norwegian beaches. Traveller children have soles like wood. They don’t bat an eyelid. Travellers, gypsies and Indians. With grimy faces, bleached, bristly salt-water hair, grazes on their elbows and knees and scratched insect bites. While our eyes just became bluer and bluer as the summer wore on, the most everlasting of all summers.

More dry ice arrived. Food arrived, in varying quantities at surprising times. A blacked-out boat arrived at night with alcohol, which Hans knew about but did nothing to hinder. All of a sudden, mackerel was being sold from a fishing boat at the quay. It was party time for the young with fires and potato races and “You Can Have Him” and a kiosk that had opened to sell Solo and sausages and lollipops. There was football and climbing, up steep rock-faces. And there was dancing for the adults, with “You Can Have Him” yet again, some sang along and some came to blows and Jan and Marlene lived out their love with disgusting, deep, French kisses. Meanwhile we sat in the darkness watching everything, Boris and Linda and I, it was our island, so much so that when we stared into the pulsating cabinet of horrors that was the dance floor for grown-ups, we were able to count at least three pairs of men’s legs with talcum-white dust up their calves.

And then of course F.T.B. also came on the scene, it just took us a while to recognise her, unfamiliar in clothes and in these alien surroundings, in a white cotton dress, and with arms and legs so tanned that they merged into the summer darkness and transformed her figure into an enormous snow-flake as she swung from one man’s arms into another’s, it wasn’t even revolting, it was how it should be, we were at one with this summer, we no longer had an age, only bodies and lungs and blood that pumped vim and vigour into the tiniest nooks and crannies of existence.

And all this time we were living in our peaceful oasis. While the rest of the tented island resembled an estate in constant departure mode, forced as the tenants were to up sticks every third day to rush off to a spot they had eyed with envy, in the hope that the tent there would be taken down, or at least that there had not been time for a queue to form in front of it, for a day or two they could occupy the prized site before having to dread the next move just one day later. It was obvious that since you had camped for two days on a much-coveted spot you would have to spend the next two slumming it, in order once again to seize the right to a place in the sun. These were merciless market forces which I followed with interest and privileged sympathy, through the doughty example of Boris’ family, the exotic “uncle” and the nice, talkative mother whom the “uncle” kept smearing with sun cream because she was so strangely pink and delicate and on top of that so sensitive to draughts, poor thing, plus three brothers and three “cousins”, all doomed to a restless nomadic existence that ensured that only one solitary day out of three would be reasonably peaceful.

“But at least that’s
something,”
said the “uncle” in a philosophical vein, presumably to mollify the six youngsters whose job it was to pitch and un-pitch the tent, under his imperious direction. “Uncle” gave every command with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip and ash rolling down his sweaty and ever browner belly and the tiny trunks that didn’t appear to house anything at all.

“Yep, one day in three, in fact that’s a whole week over the three weeks we’re here.”

If the system had worked, that is. And everyone knows it didn’t. Some people are more conscientious than others. With the result that even that one week often went up in smoke for those who needed it most, it was like the Trotting Stadium in fact, where those who least need the money always win, or as Freddy 1 says: “Crime pays.”

But we weren’t involved in any of this.

For once. We sat outside watching everything, from above. We moved our tent once, about half a metre, the water bag hung from the same tree throughout the summer, the fire burned within the same circle of stones – by the way, that, too, was illegal.

But since we were estate people this did not give us any sense of superiority, it was more like shame. However, the shame was never such that we felt any need to dismantle the tent and wander down to participate in the peripatetic Nazi regime on the flats. It was and remained a fitting shame, it was for internal use, in the sense that we followed Hans’ advice and did not specify where we lived, if anyone asked.