Child Wonder (18 page)

“What?”

“Just do it.”

Mother holds up her right hand with an expression of bewilderment and shows me a floppy plastic bracelet, which looks like a roll of tape, with her name on it, I can see, once I have collected myself, and some numbers, but then she snatches back her hand – as if afraid I would find out more.

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” I say, turning to leave.

“You’re not going anywhere, Finn,” she shouts after me. “I’m serious!”

That is what she thinks. Finn does go. Little Finn. The mummy’s boy. He walks down the stairs, still barefoot, it’s the 17
^th
of August. Everyone is back from holiday ready to start school on the Wednesday, Wednesday the 18th. The street is full of children, bikes, noise, laughter, love and war, you just have to throw yourself into it.

Freddy 1is as white as snow and even a little taller than when we left him. But he has some ball bearings in his hand which he shows off and is admired for and now he tries to sell them to Raymond Wackarnagel. But Wackarnagel knows they aren’t Freddy 1’s ball bearings but mine and orders him to give them back – I have always had a soft spot for Raymond Wackarnagel, the good bad guy in the decade that invented him.

“They weren’t for keeps,” I say grumpily to Freddy 1 who is put on the spot, and he is nowhere near as good at lying as Mother. “You can’t sell them. They’re
mine.”

“I was going to buy them back of course.”

“When?”

“Don’t know.”

Freddy 1 has a think.

“How much will you give me if I give you them back?”

“They’re bloody mine!”

“Yes, but I’ve
got
‘em!” he says in a raised voice, and I can see he has a point, standing there with his right hand clutching his pocket. And now Wackarnagel has turned his back on us to address more pressing concerns.

“Ten kroner,” I suggest and I see Freddy 1’s jaw drop, his overheated brain must have been reckoning on between thirty and forty øre; he always thinks small, does Freddy 1, even when he is at his greediest.

“Eh?”

“Yes, they’re worth over a hundred kroner,” I say.

“Don’t talk crap.”

“They are,” I say, giving him a Boris look, a no-bullshit look, as calm as the sights on a gun, and Freddy 1 falls for it, that is the reason Freddy 1 has been put on this earth, to have the wool pulled over his eyes, he hauls out the leather pouch, heavy as lead, worth its weight in gold, which has made him go weak at the knees and he holds it in his hand and is about to open it when I see my chance and grab it.

Of course I do.

I snaffle
my
pouch. But without moving from the spot. I don’t run away with my own valuables, even if Freddy 1 is twice my size. And he has no choice but to pounce on me. But it is not Freddy 1’s day today. It never is. It is not always mine, either. But today it is. I smack the pouch into his hooter, he falls to his knees, and he holds his face, blood trickling through his grass-stained fingers.

Around us everything has gone quiet. And it is time for a quick getaway. But I am still rooted to the spot. With the pouch dangling from my right hand. And in all probability Freddy 1 is lying there checking to see if he is going to die again. He won’t this time, either. He straightens up and looks at me and doesn’t recognise me. He has been knocked down by a different person. Now this scene has attracted about as many spectators as can be gathered in Traverveien on this 17th of August, and that is the whole street, thronging round this mismatched pair of mismatched friends who have declared war on each other.

I feel the shakes starting somewhere beneath the soles of my feet and spreading upwards through my stomach and shoulders until a familiar voice breaks the silence:

“Take it easy now, Finn!”

Wackarnagel wants to settle this matter; it is not a fight, only a misunderstanding.

However, my nerves jangling, I stand looking down on Freddy 1 wondering in all seriousness whether to finish him off with the ball bearings. It is an all-embracing thought. It permeates my bones and my blood. All I can see is Freddy 1 and all his wretched awfulness having his skull smashed by this unlikely weapon given to me by Kristian, for which in fact I had had no other plans than to hold them in my hand, to feel how good they felt, these ball bearings that I used to bribe Freddy 1 to come on holiday with us, that bloody holiday, they have become an extension of my arm, a club and a murder weapon, and Freddy 1 sees what is going through my wrecked brain, his eyes like floating prayers in a storm.

“Finn!”

Wackarnagel says my name the way it has to be said. And as I lower my hand and look around and pretend I am not out of my mind, I discover the pouch and close my fist around it, as if the whole scene were merely about getting Freddy 1 to return something to me he had borrowed.

I walk barefoot across the grass into the entrance to our block and up the stairs, feeling the cold stone steps under the soles of my feet, into the flat where my mother is in the kitchen with a tea towel and a coffee cup, and I say:

“Sorry.”

Carry on into my room where Linda is in bed flicking through a picture book I gave her so that she could learn the alphabet before starting school.

I lie down beside her and ask her questions, what is that letter – an h – and that letter, and that one. She answers, as she always does, and we think of animals beginning with such and such a letter, if possible different ones from those the book suggests, we want a dragon and an eagle owl and a pig and salt water and
piassava,
because Linda loves words too, long and short. I have to stick my nose into her hair to check that she has had a bath this evening. Linda has relied on me all summer long, and I haven’t told her the truth, not about anything. I say:

“That’s an aitch. Some people might say it’s a haitch, but that’s a lie. It’s an aitch. Can you say it?”

Linda says aitch. I take out the pack of cards Gran gave me for Christmas and say that now she is going to learn to play whist, it is more difficult than Crazy Eights, but it is a proper game, and Linda does not want to play. Nevertheless I spread out the cards over the duvet cover and start explaining.

“You’ve got to play!”

She looks down and to the side and tries to wriggle out of it. But I will not give in. And she learns. It is the last day before school begins, the last day of a holiday that has changed everything. It comes to an end with me teaching Linda something she doesn’t want to learn, I have no choice, nor has Linda, while Mother pops in now and then, and stands watching us and pops out again without a word, and comes back and stares because she doesn’t understand a thing about what we are doing.

The first school day starts with a ring at the door while we are sitting in deep silence having breakfast. Mother goes to open it, comes back and whispers, all in a flap:

“It’s that friend of yours.”

That is how she refers to Freddy 1. I am taken aback, but go into the hall anyway and see Freddy 1 with a swollen nose and two fearful shiners, but also an eager smile, Freddy 1 who says we are going to school together.

I let him in, he sees the breakfast table, Linda and Mother, heaves off his satchel, sits down in the place usually occupied by our lodger and scans the table and says:

“I’ll have one with brown goat’s cheese.”

Dumbfounded, Mother smiles.

“Right, help yourself.” She passes him a knife while wincing in my direction, which is meant to signify “What sort of manners are these?” But of course she
has
to ask: “What on earth happened to your face?”

“Nothing,” says Freddy 1 fumbling with the margarine as I lower my eyes, overwhelmed by more shame than I can deal with and a muddled fury that blazes up again. Fortunately, though, Mother takes the knife off him and butters a slice of bread that Freddy 1 wastes no time squeezing into his gob before explaining the reason for his presence, and so we can barely understand what he says. But it is about the ball bearings again. The fact of the matter is, I gave him two of them, he claims, he can prove it, look.

He produces the letter I wrote before we went on holiday, where it is actually stated that I promised him these two ball bearings.

But that was on condition that he joined us on the island!

While Linda and Mother try to follow, we toss this back and forth until it occurs to me that this might be where I have a chance to be myself again, so I give in and go to my room and take two ball bearings from the pouch and give them to him, two ball bearings which Freddy 1 stares at with a singular gleam in his bloodshot eyes, and then stuffs in his pocket and says he wants a glass of milk.

“There you are,” Mother says, banging the glass down hard on the table.
“And what do you say, then?”

“Thank you,” Freddy 1 and Linda say in involuntary unison. And we laugh and watch Freddy 1 drink up his milk in the same time it would take to pour on the floor.

Then we go to school.

Mother has started working full-time at the shoe shop, but she has taken today off to accompany Linda to school, later the idea is Linda will go with us when her lessons are at the same time or with the twins across the corridor.

As usual, though, I haven’t been paying enough attention. I have been blind, full of Mother’s lies and a summer that was still churning around inside me, so I keep Linda at arm’s length, and at least a week passes before one day I run in through the school gates after all the others and discover that she is on her way to the E-entrance, to the special education class, with satchel and an expectant smile. I stop her:

“You’re not going in there, are you?”

“Yes,” she says.

I sense the rush of anger and the goose-pimples and realise that she has been going in here every day, to every lesson, for over a week, without my noticing because I have been avoiding her, for fear of having to look after her, or to numb the shame that wells up in me every time anyone sees her for the first time and has a suspicion that there might be something more to her than just being small and helpless.

I grab her brutally by the arm and drag her into the playground in a desperate hope that all this may be due to a misunderstanding, that perhaps she should be going to the C-entrance where the other first years are housed. But there is no misunderstanding. Behind us herr Samuelsen, a teacher, comes out to the gateway in his grey smock because he is one pupil short, and shouts:

“Come on now, Linda, the bell’s gone.”

“No!” I shout over my shoulder, pulling her away.

“I beg your pardon?!” Samuelsen says, beside us in a couple of rapid strides, more surprised than annoyed, as far as I can judge, he is not one of the monsters, more the high-pitched clerical type, with opaque spectacles and a voice as soft as velvet. But I have lost the little common sense I had remaining.

“She’s not going in with those idiots!” I scream, and Linda starts crying and Samuelsen’s complexion changes colour and he sticks out a huge, hairy bear’s paw and sinks the claws in my neck and says without mercy in a voice that is neither soft nor clerical:

“I’ll show you what idiots are, you little bugger – come here!”

And drags me like a rag doll across the playground while shouting over his shoulder that Linda should join the others and take out her exercise book, get on with her work, page eighteen, draw …

I recognise the smell of adult man in my nostrils, cigarette smoke, water buffalo and boiled vegetables, and try to break free, in vain. By the time we reach the headmaster’s office I am so battered and bruised that I hardly hear what he says. On the other hand, there is no mistaking the headmaster’s voice.

“Sit down there!”

This was Finstad, he went under the name of Flintstone and was a chain-smoking, rock-solid representative of the old school, grey suit, grey skin, dead straight side parting, armed with two elegant Parker pens in his left-hand breast pocket, one blue to write letters, one red to sign executions.

As soon as Samuelsen had left the room he asked whether I had the slightest idea how it must feel for poor wretches to be called idiots, stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette in a way that told me there was no point telling him about the merciless tribal laws of the playground which stated that a pupil who goes to the special class not only changes behaviour and appearance but also clothes and parents and language and becomes a catastrophe of a child no-one will play or be associated with, not even if related, indeed even the strongest-minded are willing to disown their own brother in cases such as this, not to mention sister, bloody hell, there were biblical proportions to this.

It was, however, these very family ties that were to give this rollicking a new twist.

“Is she your
sister?”
Finstad asked in amazement, leaning back in a kind of waiting mode and lighting another cigarette.

“Yes!” I screamed. “And she knows her alphabet!
Every bloody letter!”

“Don’t swear!”

“She
can read!”
I insisted with saliva running down my chin and neck. And he must have concluded that he was dealing with a hysterical creature here who required more than the usual display of power, for he stubbed out the new cigarette as well and stood up and settled on the edge of the desk and wrapped his hands round his kneecaps and calmly asked what my name was and which class I was in, questions which I only just had time to answer before another outburst overcame me:

“She’s not going to that class!”

“Stop this right now!”

“She is not going to that class. And I will never stop! Never!”

I remained seated as I spelled this out, and now he switched into another gear, that of the objective philatelist:

“So you say she can read, right, hm, interesting …”

I was breathless, but nodded energetically as he walked over to a huge filing cabinet and produced a folder containing two sheets of paper and pored over them, then replaced them in the folder and the drawer, which he shut with a bang. He sat down and at first gazed deep in meditation out of the window, then lit another cigarette: