Child Wonder (10 page)

“I can’t breathe,” I said. Mother told me to wait while she got dressed and crossed the road to the telephone booth by Omar Hansen’s and called the doctor. Before he arrived, I was moved down to Linda’s bunk while Linda lay on her stomach on Mother’s bed watching me being examined.

His name was Dr Løge, he made me sit up, however much it hurt, and banged a knuckle and some cold, hard fingertips against my chest bone and my back, listened with his stethoscope and peered at me from under his white eyebrows before removing the stethoscope and looking quizzically at Mother.

“Seems as if he may have cracked two or three ribs. Has he had a fall?”

“Ribs?”

“Yes, or they’re broken. We’ll be able to see on an X-ray.”

“Did you fall yesterday, Finn?”

Yes, of course I did, I fell all the time.

“But I didn’t hurt myself.”

“You’re not trying to tell me you broke two ribs doing cross-country skiing, are you!”

Dr Løge looked at me with renewed interest, he must have been in his mid fifties and wore bifocals and peered over the top rim.

“It was a long trip then, was it?” he asked with a smile.

“Yes, quite long.”

“It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” Mother persisted. “Did he hit you?”

“Who?”

“Kristian, of course. Come on, spit it out!”

“Naah …”

“What are you two talking about?” Dr Løge broke in.

“Nothing,” Mother said, crossing her arms tightly and biting her lips, before her gaze fell on Linda, whereupon she rested her face on one hand, as if she had had as much as she could take, and it struck me that now something incomprehensible was going to happen again, and intolerable, I began to hope she would break down, so that we would get the whole thing over and done with, but she just stood there, and Dr Løge sat and sat there with his bushy eyebrows and the clear look of wonderment through his matt glasses which magnified the pores in his skin into deep craters, when with a sudden effort of will Mother said:

“Well, I’d better be getting off. We have to …”

“But the boy has to be X-rayed.”

“Marlene will take care of that,” Mother said without emotion. “I have to go to work. Up you get, Linda, and put some clothes on. Are you hungry, Finn?”

“Wouldn’t mind a slice of bread with goat’s cheese …”

Dr Løge looked from one to the next and sensed that this was more an audience than a doctor’s visit, and that his time was up.

“What do I owe you for the … visit?” Mother asked.

He stuffed the stethoscope in his bag, grabbed his coat and sat with it over his lap, watching Linda play with Amalie on the bed while Mother went into the kitchen. He smiled and stroked Linda’s cheek and asked what her name was, to which she made no response, just held out Amalie who had now had her operation wound sewn up, her floppy leg re-attached and her face equipped with shiny new button-eyes.

I was given a slice of bread and a glass of milk as the doorbell rang and in walked Marlene, with apple-red cheeks and a layer of glistening snow on her lacquered hair, which she never hid under a hat. Marlene had become Mother’s confidante in a very short time and was now being briefed in whispers about the situation, I suppose, I heard another sharp exclamation in the hall, like the dry pop of a silencer, as it were, and “I can’t take any more!” from Mother, “so if you wouldn’t mind?”

Not long afterwards she called to the doctor, who still hadn’t put on his coat.

“You didn’t answer my question, doctor.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said calmly, getting up and proffering a pen and a small pad with white pages and a blue-black carbon sheets which fluttered as he left the bedroom, like dry leaves, it is autumn even though it is winter, I thought, chewing away but I couldn’t swallow any of the food and I knew I wouldn’t manage the milk either, me who loves milk. As the front door banged to behind Mother, and I saw that the alarm clock on her bedside table already showed ten, I knew that Marlene must have been late today, or that Mother had overslept, and that I was going to be sick.

However, Marlene came into the bedroom and was gentle, still shrouded in the winter cold and she sat on the edge of my bed and asked me how I was, stroked my hair and joked and took a bite of my bread and said what I already knew, that we would have to go and get the X-ray done, a trip to town, that would be O.K., wouldn’t it, eh, with Linda?

Yes, it would.

I got up. She dressed us both and we went down at a time of the day when the estate looked like a bed sheet covering an enormous hospital, in which all the children lie lifeless and laugh through soundless open mouths. I could hardly walk and barely breathe, I was dizzy, nauseous and shaking with a chill that I must have brought back with me from the forests.

But Marlene helped me, and I was given a seat on the bus like an elderly person, she made sure of that, even though sitting hurt much more than standing, and it was a long way, a journey I had in fact made many times before, when I was going to visit Mother in the shoe shop, but which was quite different now and we went through a district I had never seen. Nevertheless, we got off at the familiar Gasserk which was such a monstrous presence with its long, black intestines on the outside and it roared and burned and hissed and it was like a World War.

Across the road and into the casualty department.

I concentrated as hard as I could and looked at Marlene who did not lower her gaze for anybody, she who had been to grammar school, and was forthright and plain-spoken and gave my name and Dr Løge’s, and yes, thank you, we’ll wait, take a seat over there, will you? Then she went back out and queued up in front of the little kiosk, she waved to us through the window and bought two lollipops, one green and one orange, which Linda and I took turns to suck because we both liked the orange one best, we timed each other using Marlene’s solid gold wrist watch, which she said was just gaudy junk, ha ha.

“But I was given it by a prince!”

She had even brought a book with her, which she read from in a whisper, to Linda, whenever Linda stopped her in the middle of the story she repeated the passage again and again. And I could feel that now I wasn’t tensing my muscles so much any more, and was gradually able to sit back in a sprawl. But I gave a start when someone called my name and I had to grimace when I was helped up and led into a silent, white room to be sat down on a large, hard iron chair and laid on a bench and stood inside a yellow and white cabinet where I held my breath and let it out, surrounded by only smiling people, who thereafter wrapped me up with rough, brutal hands in a large white bandage that held me erect and prevented me from breathing in more deeply than I needed to, whereupon I was bundled out again, as stiff as a poker and given a hug by Marlene, who became embroiled in yet another frank conversation with the receptionist, bent down to us, made secretive, mischievous faces, as though she had just managed to pull the wool over someone’s eyes, and whispered as she pushed us out into the winter cold that now we were going to take a bloody taxi, which
she
had arranged for us!

A taxi home.

With Linda and me on the rear seat. Marlene and the driver sat at the front smoking filter cigarettes and talking as if they had known each other all their lives, the way Marlene talked to everyone and the way everyone talked to her. Marlene was born to mend all the wayward and the weird in life with her words, her beauty and her red-lipped smile. She talked the driver into taking us right up to the entrance, the lad’s not well, you see. And it created something of a stir because, as it happened, school was over, and the black Volga we rolled up in was almost on a par with an ambulance. Anne-Berit asked Linda what was going on, although I didn’t hear whether she got an answer. But I made a few more faces and was very stiff, as Marlene signed a slip of paper and said bye-bye to the driver before steering us through the crowd of kids in through the door and up the stairs.

Mother was already home from work, and in quite a different frame of mind from when she had left us, gentle and full of energy, with food on the table, rissoles and creamed cabbage, and she wanted to know exactly what we had done during the course of the day and most of all how I was.

Well, not so bad, I ate as I had never eaten before. But then I had to have another lie-down, this time in Linda’s bed, on the lower bunk.

“Linda can sleep with me,” Mother said, pinching her cheek. Linda had been on my bunk once and there had been a hell of a to-do, caused by fear of heights, Mother reckoned.

I stayed there for a full week.

That might have been a bit over the top, seven days in bed on account of a few ribs, but I read the whole time, books and comics, and Linda entertained me by sitting still in Mother’s bed and looking in my direction, in case I needed anything, volume four of the encyclopaedia, for example, a glass of water with fizzy drink powder, and I paid her with small scraps of paper with numbers on, I called them bank notes, which she collected in a little shoe box and I forced her to add them up, to keep a kind of balance sheet, to no avail, but she did at least want to keep them in piles, sorted by size.

I also had some visitors, first Anne-Berit, who was disappointed to find that my bandage was not a plaster cast. Then Freddy 1, who had been sent by his mother with two Fox chocolate bars and hung around the beds, ill at ease, not knowing where to sit, until I made room for him on my bed. We ate the chocolate and played Snakes and Ladders, Ludo and a card game called Pig. While Linda watched.

“Is she not going to play?” asked Freddy 1.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“She doesn’t like games.”

“Doesn’t
like?” Freddy 1
wondered with an intrigued grin, and glanced over at her through his long fringe, Freddy 1 had always had longer hair than everyone else, apart from when he had his hair cut, then he had shorter hair than everyone else, and always looked as if he groomed his hair with a hand grenade. “Can’t you play Pig?”

Linda didn’t answer. She was making heaps with the money.

“I can teach you,” Freddy 1 said.

“No,” I said loudly, and he looked upset. “O.K., have a go then.”

Freddy 1 explained, but Linda looked away.

“See if you can chuck ‘em,” he suggested. “Like this!”

And he started throwing cards around the room. Linda thought that was fun, she even laughed, with laughter that sounded like a wish had come true, I don’t know whether it was hers or mine.

But Freddy 1 didn’t want to take off his coat for some reason, and when at length he left, because he was beginning to boil, I presume, Mother said:

“What’s wrong with him?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s twice the size of you.”

On Saturday afternoon there was a din coming from the sitting room, and when I went to investigate, I found Kristian and Mother involved in a heated exchange which stopped as soon as they caught sight of me.

“I just wanted to give you this, Finn,” Kristian said meekly, holding up his chess board. “As a farewell gift.”

“You’ve no business giving him anything at all,” Mother said.

I beat a hasty retreat, even though I would very much have liked that chess set. But as I was leaving for school on Monday morning I saw that his hat and coat were still hanging in the hallway, and in the afternoon I asked Mother how that could be, but all I got by way of a reply was some mumbling about the lodger having been given a period of grace until he found himself something else.

I would have liked to ask more questions, or say “Eh?”, at least. But this was not the easy matter it used to be. It was past ten o’clock, I still remembered in a vague, hazy kind of way the morning I woke up with three broken ribs, and Mother was going to work even though she was supposed to finish at one that day. Perhaps it was not so strange, or perhaps that was exactly what it was. Furthermore, she was back at home when we returned from casualty, and that was perhaps not so strange either, at any rate it wasn’t worth making any enquiries or delving further, that was just the way things were, the distance between us that had grown with Linda’s arrival, which I thought we had succeeded in bridging, had instead increased.

I was out a lot during the weeks that followed, came home from school, threw my bag in the hall and went out again, even pretended I didn’t hear when Marlene called me, did I want a bite to eat? This isn’t the sort of thing you choose to do. These are decisions that make themselves, and you can allow yourself to be guided by them because something new is happening – such as the coming of spring; for Linda it is a skipping rope and paradise, she has never seen any of this and has to learn everything from scratch. But she is still slower than the usual beginner, and not many weeks pass before my interest in the poor mite is on the wane. And I have to avert my eyes. Well, actually, I don’t, I have a kind of observation post up on Hagan which gives me an uninterrupted view of the estate, and from there I can see Linda sitting on the steps, alone, outside our entrance. And then I have an observation post on the slope facing Trondhjemsveien, and from there I can see her, too, alone, and even though I don’t show it and I allow myself to be swallowed up by the various sudden wave-like movements that surge through a motley group of kids and carry them on to ever new adventures, I see her all the time, and that irritates me, because it seems to me that she is sitting exactly where she is sitting with the sole intention of making me look at her. I go down and ask.

“Why are you sitting here?”

She doesn’t understand the question, smiles, and she is happy to see me and gets up and doesn’t even take my hand, but stands there shuffling her feet, waiting for
me
to take her hand and get up to some fun, which I often do when no-one is watching.

“Don’t sit like that,” I say.

“?”

“With your head down, I mean. Sit up.”

I show her how, and she sits up straight, I nod, but it is not to my complete satisfaction, because something somewhere inside me tells me the reason she is sitting here alone is not just due to the fact that all the others are idiots, but that there is something about her, I can’t work out what though.