Child Wonder Page 3

  But the news of my breakdown had reached the school playground, of course, and there was no mistaking Anne-Berit’s smile on our way home. By now Yellow and Black had got up – Red was nowhere to be seen – and they were sitting outside their huts drinking from shiny cans and calling us over, so that Black could show us his squirrel, which caused Anne-Berit to crumple up in a strange giggle.

  “Murderers!” I shouted at the top of my voice. Black got to his feet and did a Heil Hitler salute and yelled something we didn’t catch because we were running for our lives towards the Youth Hostel and not drawing breath until we had passed the tennis courts, where I saw some of my friends were busy stoking a fire and I asked Anne-Berit if she wanted to join in.

  She stopped, looked me in the eye and said first of all something about her mother not liking her clothes smelling of smoke, especially not of tar, and that I had enough mud on my overshoes already and some other blather, it was quite unlike her to be so talkative, so I thought she had forgotten all about my breakdown.

  But late that evening I heard the doorbell ring and fru Syversen came in and engaged in a hushed conversation with Mother, who straight afterwards took up a stance in the new doorway, with her arms crossed, she eyed me as she would a stranger as I lay in bed trying to read.

  “What exactly do you get up to during the day?” she said so laconically that I was unable to brush her aside. But there was not much else I could do, either, so I just lay there, gawping at Jukan until the situation began to feel like trench warfare – had I seen anything?

  But not even now did she do what a mother should do to retrieve a lost son, instead she gave a sorrowful toss of her curls and went into the kitchen. But she left the door open, the door of the lodger’s room that Frank had installed, and the sitting-room door, so I could hear her washing up, which was my job, a chore from which I seldom managed to escape, while she did the drying and tidied away.

  I flung the comic aside, got off my bed and went to the kitchen and gently pushed her away from the sink, but avoided splashing and waving the brush around for once, with the result that we ended up standing there like an old married couple with nothing left to say to each other, washing and drying milk glasses, plates and forks for Olympic gold in the longest silence that has ever reigned in this flat.

  However, I had done with crying now, I could feel, so I maintained the front until I felt, would you bloody credit it, that I was going to laugh. At that moment I smacked the brush into the dirty water so that it splashed all over her face. She lurched backwards and let out a howl of fury, but caught herself and stood, sombre-faced and strange, with one hand on her hip and the other over her eyes, before plumping down on the nearest kitchen chair and saying with an air of apathy, as the soapy water ran down her hair:

  “You’ve got a sister.”

  “What?”

  “A half-sister.”

  Not much I could say to that. I knew about this sister, of course, who was somewhere out there enjoying the widow’ pension that should have been ours. But then everything fell into place.

  “The hairdresser?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes, the hairdresser, Ingrid Olaussen, whose name by the way was not Ingrid Olaussen, was the mother of this girl called Linda, who was six years old, and she had seen our advertisement in the newspaper because we had been stupid enough to give our names and not to use the box number, but who on earth thinks of that kind of thing?

  “Box number?”

  The next information lay deeper. Mother had to dry herself first. She did that in the bathroom, at some length and with great care, while I stood on the footstool, which actually I had outgrown, staring down at the washing-up brush which I used to stir the murky soapy water, leaving long, thick furrows in its wake until I felt faint and she returned, having removed the make-up which was so necessary in the shoe shop, looking as she did at the weekends, when there were only the two of us, when she was at her most attractive.

  “But she isn’t up to looking after her,” she said and fell silent. And again I had to stand there on my pedestal brooding and aching and manoeuvring the brush to and fro, waiting for her to continue, because still I could not bring myself to ask, and she spoke to me in such a soft voice, taking one step at a time, the way you give medicine to a baby, Ingrid Olaussen was not just a widow, she was also a drug addict, the first time I had heard that expression, by the way, she was on morphine, oh right.

  “And I’m telling you this because I know you’re old enough to understand,” Mother said. “If you put your mind to it.”

  But:

  “Is she going to live here?!”

  At last it was beginning to sink in.

  “You’ve known all the time!” I shouted, in a sudden outburst of indignation. “We’ve been doing the place up and we got a separate entrance so that they could live here!”

  “No, no,” she interrupted, for the first time, in a manner which inspired some confidence and that was much needed. “She can’t take care of the girl. I’ve looked into it and … she’ll be sent to an orphanage if we don’t …”

  “So she is going to live here?”

  Mother sat without moving, but nonetheless appeared to give a nod. “We’re not having a lodger, then?” I persisted in desperation.

  “Yes, we are …”

  “We’re having a sister and a lodger?

  “Mm.”

  “But not the hairdresser?”

  “She’s not a hairdresser, Finn! No, she’s got to go in for some treatment, I don’t know …”

  “So she’s not living here!”

  “No! I keep telling you. Listen, will you!”

  Ten minutes later. Mother is sitting on the new sofa with a cup of Lipton’s tea and I am in the armchair with a bottle of Solo lemonade, even though it is the middle of the week. We are getting on better than we were ten minutes ago. We are on the same wavelength. A new wavelength, for I am still a changed person, I am just a bit more used to the change, it is all tied up with Mother’s new confidentiality, because she has changed too, we are two strangers speaking sensibly about how to cope with another stranger, a girl of six called Linda, the daughter of a crane driver who also happened to be my father.

  I know that it cannot have been an easy decision to make, in her earlier life Mother had not been full of kind words about this widow and her daughter, but now she has clearly been imbued with an unshakeable sense of direction, solidarity some might well call it, but we are not the highfalutin kind here, we live on credit and we are inscrutable. And in the course of these two weeks Mother has not only calculated the costs, she now tells me, but she has also considered what people would say if we did not take the girl in. And how we would feel. As well as how she would feel being in a children’s home. Besides, and I would come to appreciate this in later life, would it not be preferable to be the widow who managed to do what had to be done rather than the person who threw in the towel and shunned her responsibility because of something as idiotically self-inflicted as drug addiction?

  This, I have to admit, smacked of a victory for Mother over the person who had gone off with her crane driver and who was perhaps the indirect cause of him falling to his death, the man whose memory still caused Mother such pain that photographs of him had to buried in a locked drawer.

  With that I also have to ponder the question, which as yet remains unanswered, concerning the widow’s pension.

  “No, we won’t see any of that,” Mother says, obviously prepared, but with a quiver of emotion in her voice. “I wasn’t intending to adopt her. And …”

  But this is not in fact where I want to go. I want to know whether Mother, with this new venture, has at last seen the opportunity to have her wish fulfilled, to have a daughter. Then I change my mind and keep my mouth shut, probably so as not to destroy this new equilibrium of ours. I finish my Solo and go to my room to do some homework, leaving the doors open so that we can hear each other: Mother pottering about in the sitting
room and the kitchen, the evening’s sonatas and the shipping forecast on the radio, which means bedtime is approaching. I can chew on my pencil and look out onto the block where Essi lives, peer at the light in his window, which is off at this moment, at the lights in the windows of all my friends, Hansa, Roger, Greger and Vatten, the estate that shuts one eye after the other while I sit by the Matchbox toys lined up on my windowsill and for some reason begin to look forward to an event which a mere two weeks ago would have seemed like a catastrophe: having a sister, a little sister.

  4

  First of all, though, the lodger had to be sorted out, our new source of income. And that was still no trivial matter. We had three callers in as many days; Mother served coffee and cakes to a young woman who was the spitting image of Doris Day, but who exhibited two rotten teeth behind her blood-red lipstick when she forgot herself and smiled, at which point negotiations came to a halt.

  We were visited by an elderly man who stank of alcohol and some indefinable pungent odour and was incapable of explaining himself, so even though he wafted more hundred kroner notes before us than I had ever seen, he too was shown the door.

  Thereafter came one more man, in a hat and coat, a trifle distant, but a pleasant fellow, smelling of after-shave, the kind that Frank wore on Sundays and which I was told – by Anne-Berit – was called Aqua Velva and which could also, in an emergency, be drunk. He had clear, calm, colourless eyes that watched not only Mother but also me with a certain curiosity. He had been at sea, he said, had come ashore, and was working now in the lucrative construction industry and needed temporary digs until he found his own place.

  Neither of us had heard of “digs” or “own place”. But there was something modern and reassuring about this man, as if he had an education, Mother declared afterwards. But in fact he seemed absolutely normal, or the way we had imagined a lodger to be, except of course that he wore a hat and coat, like a film star. What settled it, however, was the following remark, as he was standing in the new doorway peering in at my desk with all my comics and Matchbox cars, nodding slowly:

  “Cosy.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it …?”

  “But no room for the T.V., I can see.”

  “Oh, you’ve got a T.V., have you?” Mother said, as though it were natural to have a T.V. set when you didn’t even have a place to live. “We’ll have to put it in the sitting room then,” she said with a coquettish curtsey, upon which he returned her smile with a simple:

  “Yes, of course, I don’t watch it much anyway.”

  In a way that was it, the deal was done.

  His name was Kristian and he moved in the following Saturday. By then I had moved in with Mother, who all of a sudden didn’t know what to do with herself. After a bit of to–ing and fro–ing, she also ended up in temporary digs, in her own bedroom, that is, staying where she had always been, where by the way we were in the midst of preparations to receive the new member of the family, six-year-old Linda.

  “This must be a bit odd for you,” she said, giving me a sympathetic look.

  No, I didn’t think there was anything odd about it, now I had a view of the blocks opposite, and I had plenty of friends there, too. Not only that, we were in the fortunate position of having a bunk bed which Mother had bought cheap three years ago and split into two parts. Part two was in the loft storeroom. It just needed to be brought down and assembled on top of mine, a straightforward procedure for which we didn’t even need Frank’s help.

  But there was something else worrying Mother, and that was that the T.V. set, which had indeed been installed in the sitting room, just stood there and was never switched on, because after Kristian moved in, we didn’t see a great deal of him for a while, apart from his hat and coat, which hung in their appointed place in the hallway beside Mother’s two cloaks and my peau de pêche jacket. He hadn’t asked whether the room came with access to the kitchen, which of course it didn’t, it came with access to the toilet and bathroom, one bath a week. So he must have been eating out, or he kept some provisions in his room, in private, if he was ever there, that is, we never heard a peep out of him. One evening Mother decided enough was enough, went into the hallway and knocked on his door.

  “Come in,” we heard. We went in. And there was Kristian sitting as quiet as a mouse in a burgundy armchair reading a newspaper I had never seen before.

  “Aren’t you ever going to watch that T.V.?” Mother said.

  “You can watch it. I don’t actually give a shit about the damn thing.”

  I knew this sort of language unsettled Mother. And she told him she wasn’t having any of it.

  “Have you had dinner?” she asked huffily.

  “I don’t eat after five o’clock,” Kristian said in the same flat tone, still with his nose buried in the newspaper.

  “Surely you can’t mean that,” Mother said. “Come and have some supper with us.”

  Then Kristian did more or less what I do when she is in that mood: got up with a wan smile and said thank you very much.

  “I don’t want this to become a habit, mind you,” he added as we left the room.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t,” Mother parried, relieved that the use of vulgar language was obviously a one-off occurrence. “Please do take a seat.”

  “If you skip the formality,” Kristian said, sitting at the end of the table where no-one had ever sat before. “It’s not right.”

  “Oh?” said Mother, cutting the wholegrain bread into thinner slices than usual.

  “No, we’re working-class stock.”

  That was quite an argument. But I was with Kristian on this. The language that Mother used whenever we met the outside world, which was so necessary in the shoe shop, didn’t actually belong anywhere else but there.

  “And what’s this young fellow going to be then?” he asked me.

  “A writer,” I said without pausing for breath, at which Mother burst into laughter.

  “He doesn’t even know what a writer is.”

  “Well, that may be an advantage,” Kristian said.

  “Oh?” Mother said again.

  “Yes, it’s a demanding profession,” Kristian said, and seemed almost to know what he was talking about. Mother and I exchanged glances.

  “Have you read The Unknown Soldier?” I asked.

  “Stop that now,” Mother said.

  “Of course,” Kristian said. “A fantastic book. But I suppose you don’t know anything about that yet, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” I conceded. But the atmosphere was now so agreeable that I could concentrate on my food while Mother smiled and said that Kristian should not be surprised if he were to bump into a little girl here soon as we were expecting an increase in the family. Crikey, said Kristian, it certainly didn’t show. And they chuckled in a way that I am not going to bother to describe here, I will, however, mention that Kristian ate in the same way that he stood and walked, calmly and with dignity, waiting between each slice of bread until Mother urged him to take another, do help yourself to a bit more, etc. She could not understand what craziness it was not to eat after five o’clock, while Kristian considered there were doubtless many people in this country who would soon have to learn a little about asceticism.

  “Because it’s not certain that all this is going to last.”

  “And what do you mean by that, if I may ask?” Mother said in a tart voice. Whereupon he pointed good-humouredly at her with his knife and smiled.

  “There you go again, being formal.”

  But I couldn’t listen to this, anyway for ages I had been dying to get the T.V. going. We had spent the last few evenings in the sitting room, Mother with her knitting and cup of tea, me with a comic, casting restless glances at the teak colossus standing there and staring at us with its blind, green-tinged eye. The future resided in that box. The world. Large and unfathomable. Beautiful and mysterious. A slow-working mental atomic explosion, we just didn’t know about it yet. But we had an inkling. And the rea
son it was still so utterly mute was, I gathered from Mother, that the lodger might feel that we would be acting out of turn if she were to let me press the ivory-yellow “on” button. Or he might hear the noise from his temporary digs and be encouraged to spread into larger areas than he was entitled to in his contract, he might invade our sitting room and feel it was his prerogative, night after night, there were a lot of sides to this, it wouldn’t help to bellow:

  “I want to switch it on!”

  We had to sit and pretend the whole caboodle was there for safe keeping. And there has never been anything less like safe keeping in our flat. Mother even read the paper to find out what programmes were on, there was “Hit Parade” with Erik Diesen, so we might hear “Sailor” or the waltz “Life in the Finnish Woods”, which you could otherwise only hear on a record request programme, and what about the quiz game “Double or Quit”, which I had heard Essi talk about as the eighth wonder of the world?

  But now when I got up from the table and went straight into the sitting room without a second thought and pressed the button above the Tandberg badge, nothing happened. Not a sound. Not a flash of light. For thirty seconds. Then a crackling snow storm burst into my face, and I heard Kristian’s voice from the kitchen:

  “We’ll have to sort out a licence. And it needs an aerial.”

  He got to his feet, went to his room, rummaged around in a box and came out with something he called an indoor aerial, resembling the galvanised antennae of a monster beetle, which he described as junk. But after he had installed it, at least we had a few fish swimming around behind something curved and wavy lines not unlike the Syversens’ wallpaper.

  “I’ll get a proper one, though,” Kristian said, twisting the antennae and making the waves bigger and smaller.

  We sat looking at the deformed fish, Mother perched on the edge of the sofa, with closed shoe-shop knees and a bent, expectant posture, as if she were waiting for the bus; Kristian was standing in the middle of the room with his legs wide apart, his arms crossed, his eyes fixed on the door to the balcony where presumably the aerial would be set up. He didn’t sit down until bidden, by Mother, and then on the very edge of the chair, pensive, with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin brushing his knuckles, lending him an unsettled air, too. I was the only person who was all there. But during that evening the first foundations were laid for what I think I felt at that time was a friendship.