Child Wonder (27 page)

“But we have a triumph card,” she said, interrupting my thoughts.

“It’s called a
trump!”
I shouted angrily.

She laughed and took a swig of wine.

“You’re unbelievable.”

“What is it then?” I yelled. “The trump?”

She looked straight at me and said, coolly:

“It’s
you.
You’re related to her. It’s a blood …”

“Blood tie?”

“Yes, you’re her only relative, apart from the mother. Neither her nor … your father have any surviving …”

“So you don’t need to marry Kristian after all,” I exclaimed, and she stared dreamily at the Christmas tree, at Freddy 1’s Christmas heart, or so I reckoned, it distinguished itself by being the biggest, the clumsiest and by some distance the yellowest that has ever been hung on a Christmas tree. But then she spotted something which I had hoped she would not, and which, in the light of the latest phase of the conversation, I had made up my mind to hide away, so long as she didn’t notice it, that is, a final present concealed behind the base of the tree, a small cylinder in green paper with a home-made tag.

“What’s this?” she asked, getting to her feet and picking it up.

Linda had read out the names on the presents this year, but she had forgotten this one or intentionally ignored it, and now Mother was studying the tag. To Kristian from Linda.

She searched my face, of course Mother and I hadn’t bought anything for Kristian, as far as I was aware, for all the good reasons in existence for not giving someone a present, it means altogether too much in a situation like ours.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. But those days were gone, for ever, she only needed to look at me. “A drawing,” I was forced to admit. “I think it’s a horse.”

“A horse?”

“Yes, a
horse!”

And so ends the evening, Christmas Eve, with Mother clutching a rolled-up drawing of an unrecognisable horse which she cannot decide whether to open or hide or hand over to the rightful owner, and I look down at the faded letters in the book I have been given and make myself more comfortable on the sofa, so that the last thing she said will not vanish into the night, the bit about the trump, “hope it will work”, hear the patter of feet in the flats all around us, voices and muffled laughter, a door slamming and a tap being turned on, the sounds of the building, the murmuring bloodflow of the radiators, and also the rubbish chute – the hatch and the fall and the clatter in the cellar – and the footsteps that fade away before the world awakens to the smell of candle wax, gravy and spruce twigs. It is night time on the estate. The night of the year. I see Linda running towards me, see her dissolving into thin air and slipping between my fingers as I awake in a sea of sweat to the sound of thunder.

But it is the sound of sleep.

A faraway island in the dark.
Two
islands, Linda and Mother, breathing, and I lie listening to the turbulent sky that only a mother can create and also only a mother can destroy, until the sweat on my body dries, for everything becomes clearer from a vantage point such as this, looking down from the pinnacle of night, all I have to do is get up and fetch the watch from her bedside table and take it to the kitchen and retrieve the hammer from the shoe box where we keep the tools high in a cupboard above the sink, and with one well-aimed blow smash the bloody watch to pieces on the formica table.

I sweep up the bits, the cogwheels and hands and slivers of glass, and put them in a pile beside the hammer, like one of Freddy 1’s Christmas decorations, and go back to the bedroom.

“What was that?” she mumbles.

“Just me,” I whisper, climbing onto the top bunk and going to sleep.

Next day the weather is clear and bright. Uncle Oskar drops by, with a pork joint under one arm and a bottle of aquavit under the other, Uncle Oskar who never touches a drop and will not do so now, neither he nor Mother. They are sitting at the kitchen table, each with a cup of coffee, and finishing a serious conversation when Linda and I come in after a hard session on the ski slopes, where Linda has made great progress, depending on how you see that, but she has not attracted as much attention as Freddy 1, who was given jumping skis for Christmas.

“Ah, here come the young ‘uns,” Uncle Oskar chuckles, and Mother looks at us as though she is of like mind,
my
young ‘uns, the trump card and his sister, she can’t even be bothered to help us off with our boots and clothes, we have to do that ourselves. But she sits there watching, with the same smile that had been on Uncle Oskar’s face in the gleam from the paraffin lamp in Gran’s wood cellar when he discovered that Linda was no different from everyone else, the man who had never seen her before, as though fresh eyes were needed.

The aroma of roast pork in the flat, warmth, a glass of Solo, Christmas all over again, Mother and Uncle Oskar are talking about snow, it is a winter made for young people, and not a word is said about the catastrophic Christmas Eve, nor about the marriage. And when the smashed watch is not brought up either, I realise it must have been a dream.

As we take our places for dinner Jan and Marlene also drop by and Mother says they may as well stay. Marlene, with her new engagement ring, bought on the Swedish border, who drinks aquavit at the same speed as Uncle Tor, without looking any the worse for wear. Stories are told about the summer, about dry ice and the potato race and a shop that is open and closed at the same time, stories that share common ground with photographs in that they can be listened to without your feeling any desire to cry. We sit around the kitchen table talking and chomping on skull-crunching cold crackling and then play Crazy Eights and whist, which Linda wins once, with me as a partner, easy as wink. I meet Mother’s gaze across the table, and we agree – I feel – that now life is bloody well beginning! Now things are beginning to go the way they should, in our family too. And that is how they will continue through the winter and spring, touch wood, and summer and autumn and through the rest of the Sixties, this incredible decade when men became boys and housewives women, which started with some pointless decorating and being hard-up, and especially when the poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with a bombshell in a small, light-blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.

They came for Linda on 8th January, at school. In other words, they knew what they were doing. The same afternoon we were visited by a man in a hat and coat who handed over a document and said they had found her some good foster parents somewhere, who already had a son of my age, so the transition would not be so difficult, she would be fine.

Since Mother could not bring herself to sign the paper, he said it didn’t matter, the formalities were in place anyway, approved by the hairdresser woman and the authorities. So the only question left was whether Linda would be allowed to take any more than her school bag and the clothes she was standing up in, things she was fond of, games, a doll?

Neither Mother nor I had much to say in this regard either.

We sat in our chairs in the sitting room and had stopped living. The man who was here in the name of charity and justice had not. He could understand us, he said, but experience told him things like this were done in the child’s best interests.

Then he left.

Mother and I said nothing to each other that day, as far as I can remember. The morning after we got up as usual, we sat without looking at each other across the breakfast table, and we didn’t eat much either. Afterwards we went our different ways, a mother to work in a shop selling dresses and shoes to whoever might be interested, and a son to school to sit behind Tanja and stare at her black hair, not hearing a word that was said.

We met again at the dinner table and still had nothing to say. But in the middle of the night Mother broke down while I lay motionless, listening to sounds from the time Linda stopped taking her medicine. And when I returned from school the next afternoon her things had gone, clothes, games, books. Amalie. The following day her bed was gone, too, I suppose it must have ended up back in the loft, without any help from me this time. We were paralysed victims of natural forces and sat as still as mice waiting for things to get even worse.

Two weeks later Kristian moved out, he didn’t wear a hat and coat any more but a jumper covered in snowflakes and reindeer. He had bought himself an old Chevrolet which he filled with all his worldly goods. He left behind the microscope and the chess board. He also wanted to leave us the T.V. set.

“Take it with you,” Mother said in a tone that made him take it with him.

There must have been a winter and spring that year as well, a summer too, for all I know, but we stayed indoors, under cover, me back in my old room, the lodger’s room, with a view over to Essi. And Mother in her old room, with a view of nothing. I could not bring myself to look at her any more, we lived our own lives, at the bottom of an ocean of silence, and did not resurface until some time in September. Then we started to do the place up again, at long last we bought a bookcase and adorned the whole flat in an even more discreet wallpaper, costly.

“Can we afford this?” I asked.

“What do
you
think?” Mother said, and cut the wallpaper and stirred the paste at night and went to work during the day, she was working overtime, she went to evening classes and studied book-keeping and checked the accounts for fru Haraldsen, from whom Linda and I had had to hide in a fitting room on one occasion. Then she took over accounts, was put in charge of buying and worked longer hours. We were what everyone else in this country was, we were better off.

“It’s as if it never happened,” Mother said one evening at the end of October, coming down from the step-ladder and casting an eye over our new world, mumbling, in complete seriousness, that Linda had just been an angel that Our Lord had sent down to patch up her life, we had only had her on loan and should be grateful for the time we had spent together.

I looked at her and knew this was something I would never be able to forgive.

I plastered the walls of my room with pictures of English pop stars and spectacular planets, an unrecognisable orange horse and a blown-up aerial photo of Tonsen estate, the way it looked before we moved there, in the Fifties. The crane driver in the middle of the picture was my father doing his bit for the local community, invisible in the photograph and invisible in life, locked in a drawer with his daughter, now as invisible as he, standing on a beach with Boris and me and
without
a swimming belt.

I started Ungdomsskole the year The Doors sang “When the Music’s Over”. And Gymnas to the tones of Led Zeppelin. Where I met Boris again. We were in the same class doing maths and science and were still like two peas in a pod. But we didn’t have quiffs any longer. We had shoulder-length hair, we wore battered military jackets, talked in code and were preparing for the revolution. We were what everyone else in this country was, we were better off.

The summer I was due to finish school, a letter arrived which I happened to get my mitts on before Mother. I sat looking at it for a while. Typed address and sender, whatever that was supposed to mean. Oslo post mark. An envelope which gave nothing away.

So why didn’t I open it?

Because I was unable to decide which would be worse, terrible handwriting informing us about a tragedy, or a firm, steady hand telling us how everything had worked out fine. Either Linda had landed in a temple of horrors inhabited by idiots who abused and destroyed her. And that scenario tortures my soul. Or she emerged from a car to be welcomed by her new parents, a well-balanced mother and a perfect father, and of course, a boy of my age. She tightens her grasp around the mother’s two fingers, the grasp that her new brother, let’s call him Knut, immediately recognises as a grasp for life, one of the grasps that locks itself around your heart and holds it in a vice until you die and is still there as you lie rotting in your grave.

From then on everything goes the way it should; the family lives on the first floor of a duplex, and Linda starts at a venerable old school in surroundings with more chestnut trees than people; she meets teachers who teach her what she needs to know and makes friends who don’t have to look at her twice to see which frequency to communicate on. In the summer she goes on holiday with Knut and the parents, not in a fire-damaged tent but in a chalet out somewhere where there are lots of interesting activities with which Knut can give her a patient, helping hand. Knut turns out to be a great guy. He turns out to be better than me. So stealing her from us might have been the right option.

This scenario tortures my soul too.

There is nothing in between.

I left the letter unopened and went to see Freddy 1 who, after his parents had separated, lived more or less on his own in the old flat which we called the Eyrie, where I knew he and Dundas would be sniffing his solvent, Dundas with hair down to his waist and well set for a blossoming criminal career that would have been legendary but for the fact that his little body still survived on short-term tactics and had no long-term strategy. As usual, Freddy 1 was happy to see me, and said what he usually said on the rare occasions we met, that he would soon stop sniffing and would start at Gymnas as well.

“Or do you think I’m too stupid, Finn?”

“I don’t think you’re too stupid, Numero Uno,” I say to his broad grin and sit down and tell them I have received a letter from Linda.

“Do you remember Linda?”

“No,” Dundas says.

“Certainly do,” Freddy 1 says, and even brightens up.

“I need some advice,” I say, but I beat about the bush a fair bit before mentioning that I am wondering whether I should show the letter to my mother.

“Have you read it?” asks Freddy 1.

“No.”

We sit recalling this and that about Linda, trying also perhaps to revive those things that on the face of it do not seem open to being revived, until I get a kind of yes from Freddy 1, since Mother is the only cool woman in Traverveien, and a definitive no from Dundas who shivers narcotically and says that everything that has anything to do with childhood should remain buried.