The Cold Song (21 page)

Do you think about Milla’s mother? About Amanda? I do all the time. I think about her father too, he was such a quiet man, just standing there, broken, beside his wife when she was shouting at us.

I want us to write that letter.

What do
you
think about when you think about Milla? I keep thinking about Amanda, can’t get her out of my mind, all alone, night after night, wandering from room to room, screaming out her grief.

The thing is, Siri: I got rid of the diary. I went into the woods when it was clear she was not coming back and I ripped it up and threw it in the lake.

If I told you all this, if I had let you read this note before I deleted it, would I have lost you then?

“
WELL, WHAT IF
I write something like this?” Alma said, looking at Jon.

Alma was not speaking to her mother or her sister.
Fuck, cunt, shit, prick, cock, stupid, ass, screw
. Alma didn’t give a shit about all these people and all the shit that surrounded her wherever she went.

“Try again,” Jon said, and Alma wrote:

Alma was not attending school at the moment. Expelled. Not wanted. Instead she found herself, along with Siri and Jon, in the office of a psychologist, with a policewoman present, being interrogated, as if Norway were a
bloody dictatorship
, for God’s sake. The policewoman and the psychologist looked exactly alike, like sisters, both wore big glasses and had curly hair and tremulous red-wine lips and soppy, school-milk eyes. They both puckered up their faces as a way of expressing concern, frowning so hard that you could crawl into one of the creases in their brows and hide there. The psychologist wore a white blouse and had ice-cream-cone breasts.

Alma found it impossible to answer any of their questions, the psychologist did most of the talking anyway, but sometimes she stopped talking and looked at Alma, as if waiting for her to say something, they all looked at her: the psychologist, the policewoman, her mother, her father.
Why, Alma?
But Alma had no answer. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to say anything, she just couldn’t, couldn’t explain what had happened, and in any case she kept getting distracted by those ice-cream-cone breasts.

“Why did you do it, Alma?”

Do what? Cut off the teacher’s hair? Well, it was bound to happen, really. They had been planning it for weeks. The whole class had been in on it, so the fact that Alma was sitting here now, having to take all the blame, was unfair and stupid—like everything else in this stupid world. Three thousand kroner she had been promised for doing it. No one believed she would actually dare to. No one else dared to. They all wanted to, though. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Eva Lund.
Her English classes were actually pretty good.
My name is Alma. I am thirteen years old, I live in Oslo, I attend a very nice Norwegian school, my hobbies are horseback riding and reading, my mother’s name is Ms. Brodal, my father’s name is Mr. Dreyer. I am a very happy student
.

Alma shrugged, and said, “No idea!”

The psychologist lady’s nipples were totally hard, like Alma’s nipples after a cold dip in the sea in the summer at Mailund. Like the nipples of a bikini model. And this lady must have been fifty at least. It was crazy. Gravity, grave, the gravity. Did Alma understand the gravity of the situation? Did Alma have anything to say for herself? The breasts were pointing straight at her. Alma said, “Shouldn’t you really be wearing a bra when you interrogate children? Shouldn’t there be a law about that or something?”

Alma would never be going back to that school. That had been decided. She was no longer welcome there. That too had been decided. Alma and Jon and Siri would be going for sessions with the psychologist for an
indefinite length of time
. But not now, because now it was almost the end of the semester and the point was to think seriously about what she had done. All these decisions had been made on her behalf. And they wouldn’t be going to Mailund either. Milla disappears,
everyone goes crazy, and then all of a sudden no one’s going to Mailund. Alma wanted to see her grandmother. The only person in the world she could talk to was Jenny. Not because she’s her grandmother (she’s not like other grandmothers—Jenny wears high heels, never leaves the house without lipstick on, and takes people seriously). And not because she’s so old (though she did turn seventy-five the day Milla disappeared). But because she
understands
what Alma says and does and thinks, without asking a whole lot of stupid questions. When Alma called to tell her she’d cut off her teacher’s hair, and that she might read about it in the paper the next day, Jenny said, “Well, sometimes you just can’t help yourself.”

“It’s always a good idea to write
Dear so and so
, rather than
Hi
, when you’re writing a proper letter,” Jon suggested. “Like this:
Dear Eva Lund—
”

“Oh, hello-o! Daddy! Come on! I’m not writing
Dear
. Nobody writes
Dear
. It’s not like we’re living in the seventeenth century!”

The last image Alma had of Eva Lund, before Alma pulled away, scissors and all, was of her teacher’s gaping mouth, from which weird sounds were emanating. Lips distorted, tongue, teeth, and all that soft, pink flesh, the bread crumbs in the corner of her mouth. It had been more of a howl than a scream. It lasted only a second or two. Then Eva Lund’s hands flew up to her face, covering her mouth, as if she had to physically stop her own screaming. She stared at Alma—first in disbelief, as if she really couldn’t credit what she was actually seeing: little
dark-eyed Alma with a pair of scissors in one hand and her own thick, blond plait in the other. And then came the tears. Eva Lund’s eyes filled with two lakes that proceeded to flood over her cheeks.

But why? Not for the three thousand kroner.

Not because everybody had said she didn’t dare and she was determined to show them.

It was the hair itself, always braided in one long blond plait that dangled down Eva Lund’s back; that and the fact that it was indeed doable. That it was mind-bogglingly doable. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year she had sat in that classroom, looking at Eva Lund and her long plait. When Eva turned to face the board it was hard to look at anything else. Sometimes with a hair elastic at the tip, sometimes a little blue ribbon. How long would it take to cut it off (one million, two million, three million, four million, five million), five seconds tops, with a decent pair of scissors. She would have to do it when Eva was standing like that, with her back to the class, writing English vocabulary on the board,
my head, my face, my arms, my hands, my tummy, my legs, my feet, my body
, she would have to sneak up on her, she would have to grab hold of her, no, not of her but of the plait itself, give it a tug, and then snip, snip, snip. Mind-boggling, overwhelming, beautiful, doable.

As if it was all Alma’s fault. As if the whole class hadn’t been in on it. As if Theo hadn’t been sitting with his phone ready to film the whole thing. As if Nora and Sofie hadn’t uploaded the pictures that same day. As if the whole class hadn’t bet her that she wouldn’t dare.

“Spare me your smiley faces,” Siri said. “Have you still not grasped the gravity of the situation, Alma? What’s gotten into you?”

“Now we’re going to use the rest of this year to think and talk,” Jon repeated.

Siri had been very angry after the meeting with the psychologist and the cop. Siri had been angry about Alma’s remark about the breasts. She was angry about Eva Lund’s plait and she was angry because Alma had become this
strange, baffling child
.

Alma had heard her mother say to her father one evening when they thought she was asleep: “How did she become this strange, baffling child?”

Her mother had been crying. Her father too.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed! So bloody awful, all of it. What’s gotten into you, Alma! You’re so goddamned uncouth.”

“Couldn’t you just make up your mind to be angry about one thing at a time?” Alma said coolly.