Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (2 page)

“Ha, they can’t read,” he muttered scornfully. “There’s nobody here under seven years old!”

He had not received any reply other than a friendly smile from the plump lady, whom he now knew was the director. “But you can call me Agnes. That’s my name.”

Agnes was not present now. The adults at the supper table were far younger. The man even had bad acne. The lady was quite pretty, with long blonde hair she had braided in a strange and lovely way, beginning right at the front of her head and ending with a red silk bow. The man was called Christian and the lady’s name was Maren. They all sang a short little song while holding hands. He did not want to join in.

“You don’t need to if you don’t want to,” Maren said and was actually really kind. Then they started to eat.

Jeanette, who had refused to say hello to him that morning, was sitting by Olav’s side. She was slightly overweight, too, with brown unruly hair in an elastic band that kept sliding out. She had protested about sitting beside him, but Maren had firmly squashed all discussion. Now she was sitting as far over on the opposite side of her chair as possible, causing Roy-Morgan to poke his elbow into her side continually and yell that she had cooties. On the other side of Olav sat Kenneth, who at seven was the youngest in the house. Struggling with the butter, he ruined a sandwich.

“You’re even more clumsy than me, you know,” Olav said contentedly, grabbing a fresh slice and neatly spreading a generous portion of butter before placing it on Kenneth’s plate.

“What do you want on top?”

“Jam,” Kenneth whispered, sticking his hands underneath his thighs.

“Jam, you dope! Then you don’t need butter!”

Olav grabbed yet another slice, slapping an extravagant tablespoonful of blueberry jam in the center and using the spoon to spread it out with awkward movements.

“Here you are!”

Clattering the spoon onto the plate, he helped himself to the buttered slice and looked around the room.

“Where’s the sugar?”

“We don’t need any sugar,” Maren said.

“I want sugar on my bread!”

“It’s not healthy. We don’t do that here.”

“Do you actually know how much sugar there is in the jam that nitwit there is gobbling up?”

The other children ceased their chatter and listened attentively. Kenneth, scarlet in the face, stopped munching with his mouth full of jam and bread. Maren stood up. Christian was about to say something, but Maren walked around the table and bent over toward Olav.

“You can have some jam as well, of course,” she said in a friendly voice. “Besides, it’s low-sugar jam, look!”

She reached for the jar, but the boy got there first with a lightning flash movement one would not have thought possible of him. Moving so quickly that the chair toppled over, he flung the jar across the room, banging it on the refrigerator door. The impact inflicted a large dent on the door, but amazingly the jar was still intact. Before anyone had the chance to prevent him, he was over at the tall kitchen cabinet at the opposite end of the room, snatching out a large sugar canister.

“Here’s the sugar,” he screamed. “
Here’s the fucking shitty sugar!
 ”

Tearing off the canister lid and throwing it onto the floor, the boy raced around in a cloud of granulated sugar. Jeanette
started to laugh. Kenneth burst into tears. Glenn, who was fourteen and had already begun to grow dark hairs above his top lip, muttered that Olav was an idiot. Raymond was seventeen and a sly old fox. Accepting it all with stoic calm, he lifted his plate and disappeared. Anita, sixteen, followed him. Roy-Morgan’s twin, Kim-André, clutched his brother’s hand, excited and elated. He looked across at Jeanette and began to laugh uncertainly.

The canister of sugar was empty. Olav made a move to throw it on the floor but was stopped at the last moment by Christian, who took hold of his arm and held it firmly, as in a vise. Olav howled and tried to tear himself free, but in the meantime Maren had advanced and placed her arms around his body. He had incredible strength for a twelve-year-old, but after a couple of minutes she could feel that he was beginning to calm down.

She spoke to him the entire time, gently in his ear. “There, there. Take it easy now. Everything’s all right.”

When he determined that Maren had control of the boy, Christian took the other children with him out to the dayroom. Kenneth had thrown up. A small and unappetizing heap of chewed bread, milk, and blueberries was sitting on the plate he had held hesitantly in his hands as they walked to the other room, the same as all the rest.

“Just leave it,” Christian told him. “You can have one of my slices!”

As soon as the other children had gone, Olav calmed down completely. Maren let go of him, and he sank down onto the floor like a beanbag.

“I only eat sugar on my bread,” he mumbled. “Mum says it’s okay.”

“Then I suggest one thing to you,” Maren said, sitting down beside him, with her back against the damaged refrigerator. “When you’re with your mum, you eat sugar the way you’re used
to, but when you’re here, then you eat what we do. Isn’t that a good deal?”

“No.”

“Maybe that’s what you think, but unfortunately that’s the way it has to be, really. Here we have a number of rules, and we all have to follow them. Otherwise it would become quite unfair. Don’t you agree?”

The boy did not respond. He seemed totally lost. Gingerly she placed a hand on his bulky thigh. His reaction was instantaneous. He punched her arm.

“Don’t touch me, for fuck’s sake!”

She rose quietly and stood there looking down at him.

“Do you want something to eat before I clear it away?”

“Yes. Six slices of bread and butter with sugar.”

Smiling hesitantly, Maren shrugged her shoulders and started to cover the foodstuffs with plastic wrap.

“Do I have to go to bed hungry in this fucking dump, or what?”

Now he looked her directly in the eye, for the first time. His eyes were completely black, two deep holes in his pudgy face. It crossed her mind that he could have been handsome, were it not for his size.

“No, Olav, you don’t
have
to go to bed hungry. You’re choosing that yourself. You’re not having sugar on your bread, not now, not tomorrow. Never. You’re going to starve to death if you wait for us to give in before you eat. Got it?”

He could not understand how she could remain so calm. It bewildered him that she did not give in. What’s more, he could not understand that he had to go to bed hungry. For a moment it struck him that salami was actually tasty. Just as quickly, he cast the thought aside. He struggled to his feet, snorting with exertion.

“I’m so fucking fat I can’t even stand up,” he said to himself in a low voice as he approached the living room.

“You, Olav!”

Maren was standing with her back turned, examining the dent on the refrigerator. He stopped without turning to face her.

“It was really good of you to help Kenneth with his bread. He’s so small and vulnerable.”

For a second the twelve-year-old new boy stood, hesitating, before turning around slowly.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“Oh, right.”

Olav went to bed hungry.

 • • • 

Raymond was snoring. Really snoring, like a grown man. The room was large, and in the faint light that entered through the darkened window Olav could discern a huge Rednex poster above his roommate’s bed. In one corner there was a dismantled off-road bike, and Raymond’s desktop was a chaotic jumble of textbooks, food wrappers, comics, and tools. His own desktop was completely bare.

The bedclothes were clean and starchy. They smelled strange but pleasant. Flowery, in some way. They were far nicer than the ones he had at home; they were adorned with Formula 1 racing cars and lots of bright colors. The pillowcase and quilt cover matched, and the bottom sheet was entirely blue, the same color as some of the cars. At home he never had any matching bedclothes.

The curtains stirred in the draft from the slightly open window. Raymond had decided that. He himself was used to a warm bedroom, and although he had new pajamas and a cozy quilt, he was shivering from the cold. He was hungry.

“Olav!”

It was the director. Or Agnes, as she liked to be called. She was whispering to him from the doorway.

“Are you sleeping?”

He turned over to face the wall and did not reply.

Go away, go away,
said a voice inside his head, but it was no use. Now she was sitting on the edge of his bed.

“Don’t touch me.”

“I won’t touch you, Olav. I just want to have a little chat. I heard you were angry at supper tonight.”

Not a word.

“You have to understand that we can’t have any of the children behaving like that. Imagine if all eight of you were to bounce sugar and jam off the walls all the time!”

She chuckled softly.

“That would never do!”

He still remained silent.

“I’ve brought you some food. Three slices. Cheese and sausage. And a glass of milk. I’m putting it down here beside the bed. If you want to eat it, then that’s fine; if not we can agree that you’ll throw it in the trash early tomorrow morning without any of us seeing it. Then no one will know whether you wanted it. Okay?”

Moving slightly, the boy turned around abruptly.

“Are you the one who decided I have to stay here?” he asked loudly and indignantly.

“Shhh,” she hushed him. “You’ll wake Raymond! No, you know perfectly well that I don’t decide these things. My task is to take good care of you. With the other grown-ups. It’s going to be fine. Although you’re most definitely going to miss your mother. But you’ll be able to visit her often, you mustn’t forget that.”

Now he was sitting halfway up in the bed. He resembled a fat demon in the faint light—the outlandish raven-black hair, the wide mouth that even in the night darkness glowed bloodred. Involuntarily, she dropped her gaze. The hands on the quilt belonged to a young child. They were sizable, but the skin was
like a baby’s, and they were helplessly clutching two cars on the quilt cover.

My God,
she thought.
This monster is only twelve years old. Twelve years!

“Actually,” he said, staring directly at her. “Actually you’re my prison guard. This is a fucking prison!”

At that moment the director of the Spring Sunshine Foster Home, the sole institution in Oslo for children and young people, saw something she had never, in the course of her twenty-three years of employment in child welfare services, seen before. Beneath the boy’s black, slender eyebrows she recognized an expression that so many despairing adults had, people whose children had been taken from them and who tarred her with the same brush as the rest of the official bureaucracy pursuing them. But Agnes Vestavik had never seen it in a child.

Hatred.

 • • • 

They sent me home from the clinic with renewed assurances. Everything was absolutely fine. He was just a bit voracious. And that was simply because he was a big, healthy boy. They sent me home after three days to an empty apartment. At the social services office I had been given money for a cot, a bouncing cradle, and some baby clothes. A lady had paid a visit two or three times, and I noticed her stealing glances into corners and then lying about looking for the toilet. Just to check whether my house was clean. As though that had ever been a problem. I scrub and scrub. There’s a constant reek of liquid detergent here.

He filled the apartment right away. I don’t quite know, but it seemed as though from the very first evening he considered that this was his own place, his apartment, his mum. His nights. He did not cry. He just made a noise. Others might have called it crying, but it wasn’t that. There were seldom any tears. The few
times he really cried, it was actually easy to comfort him. Then he was hungry. I pushed my nipple into his mouth, and at that he shut up. Otherwise he just made a racket. A screaming, protesting noise while he waved his arms about, kicking off the quilt and wriggling out of his clothes. He filled the apartment to the bursting point so that I sometimes simply had to leave. I placed him in the bathroom, where the insulation is best, and tied him firmly to the bouncing cradle. For safety’s sake, I surrounded him with cushions on all sides. He was only a few months old, so it was impossible for him to free himself from the chair. Then I went out. To the center, where I had a cup of coffee, read a magazine, visited some stores. Occasionally I had a cigarette. I had managed to stop when I was pregnant and realized I shouldn’t smoke as long as I was breast-feeding. But one cigarette now and again couldn’t do any harm. All the same, I had a guilty conscience afterward.

My outings came to an abrupt halt when he was five months. I hadn’t been away long. Two hours, perhaps. Maximum. When I arrived back home, it was eerily silent. I wrenched open the bathroom door, and there he lay, lifeless, halfway out of the chair with the seat belt around his neck. It must have taken a number of seconds for me to gather myself and unfasten him. He coughed and rasped and was completely blue in the face. I cried my eyes out and shook him, and eventually his face returned to normal. Except that he was silent.

I cuddled him close to me and for the first time felt that I loved him. My child was five months old. And I hadn’t felt anything for him until then. Everything had been abnormal right from the start.

 • • • 

It was late. The new boy was worse than she had anticipated. She leafed through the psychologist’s report despite not being in the right frame of mind to digest much of it. She knew the
vocabulary. It was the same for all the children, with only a few variations in terminology, different combinations.
“Major deficiencies in care over a lengthy period of time”; “Mother unable to protect the boy from bullying”; “The boy is easily led”; “The boy is an underachiever at school”; “Extensive, grave problems in setting boundaries”; “The boy alternates between unrestrained, aggressive behavior and a parenthetical, overreaching, and almost chivalrous demeanor toward his mother and other adults, something clearly symptomatic of the hypothesis of serious developmental disorder as a result of neglect”; “The boy’s lack of impulse control may soon become an immediate danger to his environs, if he is not brought into an appropriate care setting, where he is provided with the consistency, security, and predictability he so greatly needs”; “The boy treats other children with an adult attitude that frightens them, is ostracized, and degenerates into aggressive, antisocial conduct.”