Child Wonder (19 page)

“In fact your mother requested this in person.”

“What!”

He nodded, with conviction furthermore, two or three times. But I simply had not heard him.

“She
can
read, I’m telling you!” I stated for the last time. And the cigarette break was extended even further before he said:

“If what you say is correct, she will be transferred to another class.”

Then I saw something I had never seen before. Flintstone smiled.

“I can see from our records that your mother has a job,” he said.

“But she’s at home when
I’m
at home,” I lied, knowing full well that it was problem children who had working mothers.

“In a shop …?”

“Mm.”

“Have they got a telephone there?”

“Yes. Two.”

I dictated the numbers, and he wrote them down and acted impressed that a man of my cast could contrive to remember two six-digit numbers in the correct order.

“Have you ever rung them?”

“No.”

“But you know the numbers off by heart?”

“Yes.”

“How come?”

I noticed that he was beginning to zero in on me, what the hell was all this rubbish about telephone numbers supposed to mean, as if the old buffer didn’t know that all kids walk around with some neurotic code in their heads ready to be activated whenever disaster strikes. He said:

“That’s unusual.”

“Eh?”

He smiled again, got up and went back to the filing cabinet to pluck out two new documents, and it was no simple matter deciphering them either, I suppose they must have been about me, the trail I had left after frøken Henrik-sen’s charitable reports, he read them and replaced them and seemed to have even more food for thought.

“What was that about my mother?” I managed to mumble.

“It’s got nothing to do with her,” he answered absent-mindedly, writing some figures on a blank sheet with the blue pen, whereupon he raised the sheet, told me to look at it, put it back down and asked if I could remember any of the figures.

I remembered all of them. He chuckled with satisfaction while I wondered whether Linda’s case would be decided on the basis of my ability to remember a string of numbers, perhaps I should have rattled off how many litres of aquavit the Norwegian population consumes per annum, or what a new Hillman costs at Økern Cars & Buses, all the things Kristian and I had talked about, or, the height of Sweden’s tallest mountain. It is called Kebnekaise, you only have to consult a reference book

I could feel I was beginning to become, if not irritated, then at least even more confused, and it was at that moment that I realised he had tricked me, he had tricked the anger out of me.

“You should start to play chess,” he said.

“I already do.”

“Oh? On an organised basis?”

“Eh?”

“In a club?”

“No.”

“There’s a good club in Veitvet, did you know that?”

I didn’t answer. But with that the conversation was at an end. The headmaster lit another cigarette. “Go to your lessons now, Finn, and I’ll review the matter.”

I got up and noticed the sweat on my body had dried, although the scars from Samuelsen’s claws were still making themselves felt. I hitched my satchel onto my back, but still couldn’t make myself leave.

“Naturally, I can’t promise anything,” he concluded, rolling the cigarette in front of his narrow lips as if relishing the thought of shoving it crosswise in his cakehole as soon as I was out of the door.

I bowed my head and left, through the ante-room where the receptionist fru Nilsen sat in her tight, dark secretary-skirt and oval glasses, she was chain-smoking too, and into the empty corridors and the classroom without knocking and I sat down and took out my books ignoring the massed gimlet eyes on me, or even frøken Henriksen’s piqued questions about where I had been.

“With the headmaster,” I limited myself to saying, which caused Tanja to turn and smile, Tanja who had been absent from school in March, but was back again now because her father’s circus wagon had had a puncture, according to Freddy 1, and here at long last there was something else to think about.

“They demolished the homes of Yellow, Red and Black this morning,” I said out aloud.

“What?”

Frøken Henriksen was not used to me speaking out of turn or in riddles, I was her pet, to be honest, but on my way to school I had seen three grown men standing in a line and crying like babies at having their ramshackle sheds razed to the ground, and that sight was far preferable to the thought of Linda.

“They demolished the homes of the men living in Muselund Park,” I said. “With bulldozers. The police were there, too.”

“Oh yes?”

“And I stood and watched. I did.”

I looked down, as if in an act of devotion. Frøken Henriksen was clearly in two minds as to how deep to let herself be drawn into the case of Yellow, Red and Black, so I said they had been arrested for living in their illegal shacks because Oslo Parks and Gardens was going to sow grass there, not only in Muselunden, but also on the slope up to Trondhjemsveien where the wonderful wilderness was doomed. And since a couple of the others also felt spurred on to air their opinions on the matter, without putting up their hands, frøken Henriksen launched into a discussion of social outcasts, the needy, as she called them. Freddy 1 said:

“You mean the tramps, don’t you?”

“No, Fred, I don’t, I’m talking about people who may not have received the love they deserve, and who for some reason or …”

“Uuugghh,” Freddy 1 exclaimed with a broad grin and cast around for an audience. He was rewarded, by the usual gang, but not by me, not today, I stared straight ahead and saw frøken Henriksen take a few quick steps towards him.

“They were merchant seamen in the war,” I chipped in.

“What’s that?” Freddy 1 said artlessly.

Frøken Henriksen stopped, gathered herself and returned to the dais.

“Yes, Finn, can you explain to us what a merchant seaman is?”

“No. But it’s something to do with the war. My uncle was one of them … he chops … wood.”

“Wood?”

“Yes, he chops wood in the cellar.”

Frøken Henriksen started to tell us about the pitiful fate of Norwegian merchant seamen during the war, not to universal applause, to tell the truth we were all heartily sick of the doleful documentaries that rolled over our T.V. screens night after night like funeral processions in a gloomy minor key. But now I could rest my eyes on Tanja’s hair and listen to frøken Henriksen’s voice; she has a wonderful speaking voice, one of very few bearable adult voices. Mother also speaks well, but now and then she can be a bit shrill. Marlene speaks with composure and the same tone, come what may. Jan’s voice is too thin. Kristian talks like the radio, and Freddy 1’s mother has a voice that no human being can be in the vicinity of for more than a minute without losing the will to live.

That was what I was thinking while I sat admiring Tanja’s long hair, which was like a river of shiny ink, I leaned forward over my desk to smell her fragrance, a mixture of flowers and petrol, no-one smells like Tanja, no-one has a more beautiful voice, just a pity she seldom uses it; yes, it is so rare that you sit there the whole time thinking “Come on, girl, talk, I’m dying to hear you!” And I haven’t even mentioned Linda’s voice, because it is her I can’t bear to think about, while frøken Henriksen’s congenial tones have now come to Leif Andreas Larsen and the Shetland Busmen and she slips seamlessly into the Cold War, which is why we must all have a bomb shelter in the cellar with big iron doors that can’t be opened by children under twelve, this is the nuclear age, at which point she returns to Yellow, Red and Black, and I can see that Freddy 1 is aching to interject that Black likes to show his squirrel to young girls. But even Freddy 1 has a hold on himself today, even Freddy 1 is touched by the fate of Yellow, Red and Black.

As the bell rings I get up at the same time as Tanja and happen to nudge her with my elbow, an electric shock goes through me and I apologise, you see, I had a friend this summer who taught me how it can pay to put on a show of manners, and for some reason at this moment I also think of F.T.B., the sign of dangers to come – why is it we humans simply don’t break down?

“Where have you been?” I ask, and to my surprise my voice carries.

“What?” she says, without a word of explanation. We have been sitting within the same square metre for a good three years, minus the months she has been off travelling, and this is the first time I have spoken to her, so it is no wonder we are a bit rusty, but I manage to repeat the question.

“Rumania,” she replies.

I have never heard anything more alluring.

“Bucharest,” I say quick as a flash and follow it up with a few more nuggets of wisdom about Rumania as we leave. “Isn’t that behind the Iron Curtain?”

“The Iron Curtain?” Tanja mumbles vaguely, knitting her brows. And since I am unable to enlarge on this, I continue to pine for Rumania.

“Are you from there?”

“No, I’m from here.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Family,” she says.

“So
they’re
from
there?”

“Mm.”

I wondered whether I should surpass myself and say that I was also from here, but by now we had reached the playground, and although it was impossible to go on talking in the full view of everyone else it was no easy matter to bring the conversation to a close. As if by an irony of fate, Freddy 1 came over and asked straight out what we were talking about, so Tanja was able to lower her eyes to the tarmac and retreat charily towards the gang of girls, by whom she no doubt dreamed that one day she would be accepted.

Freddy 1, who had recently enjoyed a certain amount of success with both the ball bearings and his black eyes, which in the meantime had first turned yellow and then gone back to normal, had also hovered in peril of landing in the special class and maybe for that reason had one or two things to say about the business, at least he felt a strong need to declare that the whole thing was unfair.

“Uhuh?” I said, biding my time.

“Well, you don’t
start
in the special class.”

“No-oo?”

“No,
first,
you go to a normal class, right. When the teacher sees you’re too stupid,
then
you go to the special class.”

There was no getting away from what I had heard from Flintstone a short while ago, that Mother, the very iron in the fire, had not only sanctioned a heartless decision on the school’s part, she had even requested it.

On my way home I walked with Linda and a new girlfriend of hers called Jenny, who was big and quiet and oddly erect, with all her buttons meticulously fastened, and who carried her satchel in a manner which made her look as if she were in the army.

“Where are the twins?” I whispered.

Linda pretended she hadn’t heard and instead enquired why I was accompanying her home. I had to think on my feet now, and I was not fond of this new alliance even though Jenny could be mistaken for a female version of Freddy 1 Nor did I understand what they were talking about because when they did open their mouths they mumbled, and smiled quietly into middle distance, as though they were members of an association of mutes. And as we passed the gleaming blood blister of clay that replaced what had once been the homes of Yellow, Red and Black, I took my leave of them with the feeling that I had done something right, but it had gone seriously awry, not even running helped, but I did run, thinking about Tanja, who had drawn much too close, and a sister, who for all I knew, was being certified as abnormal, once and for all.

No sooner had I entered the doorway than I was met by a storm of rare proportions. For a start, Mother had received a call in the shoe shop, which was not permitted, and secondly I had called Linda and her classmates idiots. She had never heard the like, how could
I,
of all people, and so on and so forth …

But I was on my mettle.

“You
had her put there,” I said coldly, looking at her with a feeling I had never known before, but which nonetheless was part of me. However, instead of defending herself she caved in in a manner which was to have less and less effect on me.

“But, Finn, you can
see
what she’s like!”

I certainly could not see what Linda was like, and I said so. “Haven’t you got eyes in your head?” she persevered.

I repeated:

“
You
had her put there.”

“But don’t you understand? Otherwise … otherwise …” “Otherwise what?”

“Otherwise she would have had to go to a different school.”

I needed a few seconds to digest the import of her words.

“Lippern?” I whispered in disbelief, a school for the mentally handicapped on the other side of Torshovdalen, in children’s parlance a combination of cowshed, prison and laboratory, the most stigmatising place on earth.

Mother covered her face with her hands again and was a wretch you just felt like putting out of her misery, she was an adult for Christ’s sake, and what is the point of anything if you haven’t got the stomach for a fight!

“I can’t take any more,” she howled. “I can’t take any more.”

Nor could I. I walked out.

The same evening Linda was playing with one of Marlene’s little sisters, and mother and son had the arena to themselves, almost; the T.V. had broken down and an acquaintance of Kristian’s had popped by in white overalls, equipped with a tool-box weighing a ton and containing lots of tubes and fuses in small detachable trays. It could of course have been entertaining to watch him unscrewing the back of the T.V. and start examining the contents of the silicosis-infected lungs and the heart and blood vessels. I said this as well, those things, they’re the intestines, aren’t they? But he just looked at me with an earnest expression.

“No, this is a technical appliance. There is nothing human in it.”

“But there’s a shock in it, isn’t there?”

“What do you mean?”

“It can give you a shock, can’t it?”

“When it’s plugged in, it can. It’s called electricity.”