Child Wonder (3 page)

Through the door I heard talking, intense mumbling and what sounded like crying.

As time went on, they seemed to be on the verge of reaching agreement, there was even some hysterical laughter. And when at last Mother opened the door, I thought they had become the best of friends. Instead it turned out that Ingrid Olaussen had departed, leaving Mother more thoughtful than ever as she prepared dinner.

“Isn’t she going to live here?” I asked.

“No, she will not, I can promise you that,” she said. “She hasn’t got two øre to rub together. Her life is all over the place. And she’s not even called Ingrid Olaussen, either …”

I wanted to ask how Mother could know all of this. Or to enquire how a total stranger might open her heart to her in this way. But a strange unease had settled over me in the course of the half hour I had spent in the bedroom, and the answers to the two questions must have been that Mother already knew her or she recognised herself in this woman. I didn’t want to hear confirmation of either, I preferred to concentrate on my food, but was nevertheless left with a quite tangible feeling that there were sides to Mother of which I had little understanding, not just her sudden absence the day before, on Thursday, for which ultimately there was a reason, a sofa, but the fact that a total stranger could enter our hitherto uneventful but now over-renovated home life, break down on the new sofa, divest herself of all her secrets and then be chased away again; I was not only facing an insoluble riddle but a riddle to which I perhaps never
wanted
to find a solution.

I sat stealing furtive glances at her, my nervous, frightened of the dark but on the whole so stable and immortal mother, my bedrock on earth and my fortress in heaven, now wearing an unrecognisable face.

The lodger project was now put on hold for a few weeks, as though Mother was afraid to have a new mystery darken her door. But, as I mentioned before, we had committed ourselves to an agreement to save backwards, so there was no option but to put another advertisement in the
Arbeiderbladet,
at fifty øre a word. She was still testy and distracted: she put the wrong things on my slices of bread, she didn’t listen when I was telling her things and she lost her place when she was reading aloud in the evenings.

“Anyway you can read better than I can now,” she said defensively when I protested. But that was not why I had learned to read, we had a heap of books, and we were going to read them all, children’s books, Margit Söderholm, the Jalna series, an encyclopaedia called
Heimskringla
and Captain Marryat’s
Peter Simple,
as well as one solitary book left by my father, a Finnish book entitled
The Unknown Soldier
by Väinö Linna which we had not read yet and which, according to Mother, we had no plans to read, all piled up in a box in my bedroom waiting for the bookcase which we would buy on credit, if only we could hook this damned lodger of ours. And it was on one of those occasions when she wasn’t listening that it struck me I was someone else, I had changed. It wasn’t a clear or a palpable feeling, but intrusive enough all the same for me to ask:

“Which of us are you talking to now: me or him over there?”

This did not go down well.

“What do you mean?” she snapped, and lectured me about my being quite incomprehensible at times, a lecture she had delivered once or twice before, perhaps it had something to do with my being aboy and her thinking life would have been easier with a daughter.

“I don’t understand what you’re on about,” I said, ill-humouredly, and went into my room to lie down on the bed to read in peace, a Jukan comic. But, as is the case with protest reading in general, I couldn’t concentrate, I just got angrier and angrier lying there with my clothes on, wondering how long a small boy has to lie like that waiting for his mother to come to her senses and assure him that nothing has changed, irrespective of whether Yuri Gagarin has blown us all sky high. As a rule it does not take very long, not in this house at least, but this time, oddly enough, I fell asleep in the middle of my rage.

It wasn’t until next morning that I discovered she must have been there, as I was in my pyjamas and under the duvet. I got out of bed, dressed and went to the kitchen. We had breakfast as usual and laughed at some chicken-brain on the radio using words like “baritone” and “U Thant”. Nonetheless, there was an irritating distance about her that meant we couldn’t quite resolve our differences, I felt, as the door across the corridor slammed and I put on my
peau de pêche
jacket and my school bag and shuffled off to school with Anne-Berit.

So had I perhaps changed after all?

Anne-Berit, at all events, had not changed. I have never known a person to avail herself to such an extent of the opportunity to be herself: pretty, self-assured and unimaginative; there was not a trace of her lumpen parents in her, she was never the one to come up with any fun things to do and never laughed until she was sure there was something to laugh at, which as a rule there wasn’t. But today all this was fine, in a way, for while I was usually the one to say something, neither of us said anything, and the silence became so oppressive that she said:

“What’s up with you?”

I still didn’t have much to say in reply, we just continued down the grey beaten-earth paths in Muselunden, which according to both Mother and fru Syversen were much safer than the pavement along Trondhjemsveien, even though it was here on the slope down to the road that the tramps made their homes, in small ramshackle huts which in the black, leafless wilderness of late autumn were very visible from all sides, resembling blood-spattered wreckage after a plane crash. Some scary men lived here, whom we called Yellow, Red and Black because Yellow suffered from some illness that had turned him yellow, Red was always red-faced and Black was as swarthy as a gypsy, as we say. We just had to make sure we didn’t go into their huts when they called, because if you did they would chuck you in a mill and grind you into thin brown gruel and make stock cubes out of you. But none of that was relevant today, they weren’t even anywhere in sight, so they didn’t give me anything to talk about either, and I was in a mood to lose my temper with someone.

“Huh, you’re so boring,” I said to Anne-Berit as we entered the school playground. To which she replied: “Piss off.”

This is not a usual mode of utterance on her part, although it is not out of keeping with her temperament, so we parted on unfriendly terms, she on her way to the girls’ class, and I to the mixed class which had been set up to determine whether it was possible for boys and girls to sit beside each other and learn something at the same time.

Being in a mixed class felt good, even though the prettiest girls were in the other one, of course it is often the case that the better you know people the more faults you find in them. But here I could rest my eyes on the blazing black hair of Tanja, who was still a bit of a mystery to me because she never said anything and answered questions in a voice whose volume even frøken Henriksen despaired of trying to turn up. But she turned round every time
I
said something and sent me little smiles, which made me feel that there was nothing else to live for; some said she was a gypsy and lived in a circus caravan outside the botanical gardens in Tøyen, and that didn’t make matters any easier, for what could be more alluring than people who travel the world with a guitar, steal things and operate merry-go-rounds?

Matters had reached such a pass now that I put up my hand primarily to make Tanja turn round, a move I also tried today, on top of which I wanted to get rid of all the mess that was still churning around in my head. But instead of showing off with some witticism, I realised too late that for once I had not done my homework and burst into a terrible and incomprehensible fit of tears. Once it had started it was impossible to control, I lay hunched over my desktop like an idiot, bawling my eyes out, oddly enough under no illusions, even then, that this was going to cost me dear, and that didn’t make matters easier, either.

“Goodness me, Finn, what has happened?”

“I don’t know!” I howled, which was true, and an answer which, by the way, I was more than happy with, because what if I had blurted out the truth: there’s something up with Mother!

Frøken Henriksen took me into the corridor and calmed me down enough for me to be able to comprehend what she was saying: she was going to send me home with a letter to make sure that everything was alright. But I objected with such vehemence – and another torrent of tears – that once again she had to wait until I had composed myself. I sat slumped against the wall staring down the deserted corridor, which conjured up the image of a hospital where all the children laugh without making a noise and the dead have already acquired wings, and frøken Henriksen, with whom by and large I had a good relationship, suddenly said:

“Have you
seen
something?” I gave a start.

“Seen what?”

“No, no, I just wondered whether perhaps you might have …
seen
something.”

“Seen
what?”
I shouted again as the abyss beneath me opened wider, Mother had not only become distant and different, maybe I had also known, maybe I could have predicted it. “I haven’t
seen
a bloody thing!” I yelled.

“Take it easy now, Finn,” frøken Henriksen said, no longer quite so comforting, lethargic rather, and I sat there with some sudden memories or words in my head, we collected words, Mother and I did, and laughed at them and liked them or thought them silly or redundant, words that were so real you could touch them, like “concrete”, “exhaust”,
“piassava
broom”, “petrol”, “leather”, “shoe leather” … I fell into a reverie imagining myself desperate to go tobogganing, on my new sledge, and crying and pestering until Mother took me by the hand and dragged me roughly along towards the slope that ran all the way from Trondhjemsveien down to the estate; there was no longer a clear meandering river of cold glass, but a brown muddy track like a coagulated nose-bleed on a battered face.

“Do you understand now?” she shouted, making my ears ring. “The
winter’s over! It’s spring!”

“Shall we go back in?” frøken Henriksen said.

I looked up at her.

“Yes,” I said, getting to my feet and trying to look as if in the last few minutes we had come to an agreement that nothing at all had happened.

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.