Child Wonder (24 page)

“Dundas,” Linda says, as though talking to herself.

“Dundas?”

“Nickname,
ad undas,
a boy in her class, meaning drowning, failing,” I say, feeling a sudden rage I know will be hard to dispel, and perhaps this day should not last for ever, after all.

“What else has he said?”

But here we have to state an irrefutable fact:

“Dundas is a little shit,” I say. “He’s got so many poisonous green bogeys up his snitch that every time he breathes a load come flying out and you have to run for cover and that’s how the bogeyman got his name …”

“That’s enough of that, Finn.”

But Linda laughs and Mother smirks, her face averted in the hope she won’t encourage me, then I continue to elaborate on the rottenness of Dundas, drawing on my whole repertoire, the full range of Traverveien’s tribal code of invective, we laugh and shout, and when we start arguing about who was going to ring the bell for the bus to stop and have almost returned to normal, Mother says aloud:

“Did she really say our bedroom smelled of pee?”

As Mother gets down to preparing dinner I take my rage and the pouch of ball bearings, the hardest currency I have ever owned, and go up to Freddy 1’s and present the matter to him, Freddy 1, who I suppose would have joined in anyway, without the offer of two more ball bearings, to rough up Dundas, Freddy 1 who is usually the one on the receiving end.

We walk over to No. 7 and press Dundas’ bell, which is rung so seldom his mother feels obliged to study us with the utmost scepticism as we ask if Dundas can come out.

“That’s not his name.”

But Dundas does not suspect a thing and can hardly pull on his sweater quick enough before flying down the steps like a shuttlecock, with us hard on his heels, and when we confront him with what has happened to Linda, he gets the wrong end of the stick and takes this as a direct invitation:

“She’s gonna die! She’s gonna die! …”

He jigs around and puts on a show on the barren grass, which makes things even easier, we pounce on the little shrimp, each with our own designs, we knee him, we slap him, we punch him, first in improvised, uncoordinated fashion – Dundas hasn’t a bloody clue what is going on – then gradually with more purpose until he is knocked flat and starts babbling, by now semi-conscious. The rage inside me subsides as I feel our bodies approach irrevocable ruin, the explosive moment when someone has to intervene before reality takes over. But I can still see Linda bawling her head off and Flintstone’s yellow finger, I can see her bed and an idiotic teddy bear and the sketch pads with animals from an alien planet, all of this cycle is so out of control that it cannot be broken unless I do it myself. But at the sound of a crack somewhere beneath me, I come to my senses nonetheless and start shaking, screaming that I heard something snap, and lay off, but Freddy 1 just looks at me through his new-found savagery and yells:

“He’s not even bleeding!”

He smacks a fist into the snotty nose making it crack once again. And again. Shouting has no effect. The silence is a wall, a mountain between the houses. I have to drag him off and roll over in the mud with him, I fight my way onto his back, Freddy 1
,
who with all his strength has no idea of restraint, staggers up and swings around with me still on his back, yelling:

“Lemme go, you shithead, I’m gonna kill ‘im!”

But I do not let go, and Freddy 1 sinks to his knees gasping for breath, I am holding his life in my hands, he senses that, and perhaps he senses something else as well, because Dundas is lying on his back, motionless, he is unrecognisable, a hollow wail resonates between the blocks of flats. I release my grip and survey a deserted and dinner-eating estate one cold Sunday afternoon in October, the trumpeting sound fills my ears, my body and blood, I see Dundas move an arm and a knee and open an eye. But then the rage is back, and Linda’s voice echoing around an empty bus. I stoop over the bulging eye and see it is brimful with terror, pure and unadulterated, it occurs to me then that if at that moment I had felt an ounce more defiance, he would never have stood up again.

So I do have it in me.

I get up and go, with this new, heavy burden. Freddy 1 goes too, with odd, unsteady steps, our legs are like rubber and we cast glances at each other, ensure that we are leaving the battlefield at the same time, look over our shoulders before clambering up our respective staircases and see that Dundas is still lying on the ground and making some terrifying attempts to get to his feet, Dundas who has never had a friend, but who is soon to have one.

The many phases and hues of punishment, I thought I knew them all by heart, the guilt and the abyss, Mother who doesn’t ask as I come indoors, although she can see it on my face, Mother who doesn’t want to know, and me who says nothing, but munches his supper with a different body because she doesn’t want to know – besides, I don’t understand her.

I go to bed before the others and watch Linda climbing up the little ladder to peer at me from over the edge of the bed.

“Are you frightened of going to school tomorrow?” I ask.

“No,” she says, and crawls right up and wants to wrestle with me, but instead sits on top of me, serious. “Are you?”

“No.”

So I say: “Dundas is dead.”

“No,” she laughs, as if this topic had already been exhausted on the bus from the airport, and she shows me a finger game which Jenny taught her.

Oh, the time it takes for it to happen, half of Monday has gone before we are summoned from the classroom and hauled before Flintstone, where admonitions and grave solemnity hang in a thick smoky fug from cigarettes and radiators on far too high a setting. But the standard procedure has already been upset, perhaps because we don’t look as petrified as we should, even though for once this is serious.

We are led out again and back to our classroom, without exchanging a word. We sit at our desks waiting and our minds are blank. Then I am called back to the headmaster’s office, alone, and this time Mother is there too, sitting on a chair in a coat I have never seen before, expensive, as far as I can judge, with a hat on her head and a small bag on her lap which I haven’t seen before either, her knees tightly pressed together and her back as stiff as a poker, Mother in an official capacity, the shoe-shop assistant who can cash up the day’s takings with pinpoint accuracy. She does not see me now, either. However, I am still her son, I soon realise, for the enemy is divided, Mother and the headmaster are not a united front.

“The boy has broken several ribs,” Flintstone says grimly, referring to Dundas. “He has injuries to one arm, bruising all over his body, two teeth …”

Mother still does not look in my direction, but waits until Flintstone has finished, and into his fog she says undeterred:

“This will not happen again. I’ll make sure of that.”

“Oh yes?” comes the sceptical response.

“Yes,” she persists. “So now we’d better find out why no-one knew that Linda was being bullied …”

“There is absolutely no comparison.”

“Day after day she was forced to leave school while you did nothing. You teachers sent her home …”

“Heavens above!”

“Was anything ever done at all?”

“What are you insinuating?”

There is a lengthy silence. It is Flintstone’s, the silence of the authority and judiciary. I glance over at her and see she has run out of steam, I turn and shout across the desk:

“You’ve had it if you tell tales!”

“What?”

“She didn’t tell tales.”

Flintstone strangulates his cigarette and leans back.

“I see, young man. And what is that supposed to mean?”

Mother is back:

“He means that if she’d said anything she would have been …”

She leaves the sentence hanging in the air and looks suitably drawn by her visions of horror, which I cannot fail to notice makes a certain impression on Flintstone. He shakes his slate-grey head, and Mother drones on until she finishes with the incontrovertible conclusion: “This kind of thing is the school’s responsibility.”

Afterwards she needs another rest. And this time I can’t come up with anything on the spot, but at least I stand erect, so no criticism can be made of my posture. Flintstone is the one to change tack.

“Are things so bad here?” he says in my direction, now on the defensive.

“No,” I say without hesitation. “I mean, yes, they are.”

The most honest answer I have ever delivered. Then Mother wants an end to all of this:

“How long will he be expelled for?”

Flintstone has to take recourse to another cigarette and winds up proceedings with a flat:

“You will be informed.”

Mother rises to her feet.

“Right. Was there anything else?”

There wasn’t anything else.

We emerge into the corridor, which providentially is free of eye-witnesses, and I have some insight into what this performance must have cost her as she staggers to the nearest wall and supports herself on a windowsill, her body taut and bent, I don’t dare to say anything, just brace myself to catch her in case she should fall.

Nevertheless, I have a feeling that this drama is no longer my own, if indeed it ever had been, it is hers and Flintstone’s, a public matter.

“Thank you,” she says and walks towards the teachers’ exit with her heels click-clacking, leaving me behind in the desolate corridor.

But is this the same as standing on a quay one summer’s day watching her boat recede into the distance? No, it is not, it is quite, quite different, it doesn’t even hurt, because I can see from her back as she glides through the slamming glass doors that she is neither afraid nor unhappy, she might not even have immediate plans to leave us, on the contrary she is relieved as she struts down Lørenveien and disappears from sight behind the leafless scrub.

In a
green
coat?

I am caught between feeling guilty, reprieved and beaten black and blue: catharsis, I think this terrain is called. I stand there until the sounds in the building tell me the bell will be ringing soon, this inaudible rustling in the cement, a kind of latency, the noise that is there before it is there itself and every school child feels it like the rhythm of their own pulse.

Then I walk back to the classroom, knock and enter without waiting for frøken Henriksen’s “Come in”, meet the enquiring gaze of Freddy 1 with a reassuring nod of the head, take my seat and look straight ahead – as though I have carried out an order – at frøken Henriksen of the refined voice, who wonders if she should take the matter into
her
hands too, deal with it in the context of the Second World War perhaps, a moment later we are saved by the bell.

We heard that Dundas had been taken to casualty and was maimed, crippled and dead, and that it was a police and a prison matter. But by Thursday he was back at school, his face swollen, his eyes bloodshot, one arm in a sling and a slowness about the normally-so-fidgety body that enabled him to stand still in the throng and answer searching questions.

There was an aura about him of brimstone, hornets’ nest and sudden death. But I also noticed he was holding something in his hand, an object he rolled in and out of the sling, to and fro, there was an automatic feel about the movements, as though he had been practising, or as if the ball bearing had taken control of him.

I went over and asked:

“Where did you get that from?”

“Freddy 1,” he said without hesitation.

I looked down at the serene little fist holding the ball bearing, and almost flaunting it. Dundas was also two people in one, the poor soul for whom you could feel sympathy and the irritating sod with the howls and the screams and the stream of evergreen snot, someone you just wanted to hurl into the sea. And I knew that Freddy 1 was a repenter. Freddy 1 was a good boy. I was a repenter myself, but I was also a brooder and new to this game and unable to atone for our crime by forgiving Dundas for his, never. Instead I tilted my head, accomplished a kind of nod, turned and left.

That same day Freddy 1 and I had our letters formally handed over in the classroom. We were to pack our things and leave the school forthwith and not show our faces before Monday: a very mild punishment, the typewritten text said in reproving tones, due to the fact that “the incident had taken place outside school limits”.

We walked home, I was relieved, Freddy 1 had concerns of his own.

“I’m in for it now.”

“Is your Dad at home?”

“No, my mother, she’s got a hell of a slap on her.”

“Haven’t you told her?”

“Nope …”

Freddy 1’s family did not possess a telephone, either, and he chucked away the letter we were given on Monday, so the only people left in the dark were Freddy 1’s mother and his sisters who went to Framhald School.

Freddy 1 didn’t go out that night, he was sitting in his window and flashing signals to me with his torch, I didn’t go out either because I was not sure how I would be received.

At home the Dundas Affair had been a non-topic from the Monday onwards, even though it lay there like a rotting carcass at the kitchen table and represented another stage in the mother-son relationship. Not to mention in the son-lodger relationship.

Kristian had, in fact, been made party to the affair and refrained from talking about it so hard you could hear him straining at the seams, as though at long last we were allies and conspirators and could immerse ourselves in the question of how to convert Fahrenheit into Celsius, while I was just thinking about the coin he had once described to me, the history and the wear and tear, now I also knew what inexpiable meant, it was a sin for which there was no atonement nor redemption, an unpardonable crime that is lodged within you and remains there, like a scar.

There was more style about Mother.

“I’ve drawn a line under this business,” she said when I came home on Monday afternoon. “What do you want on your bread?”

“Where did you get that coat?”

“What?”

“The coat you were wearing today.”

“Don’t you dare.”