Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen Read Free Book Online Page A

motorised transport and tarmac and, not least, speed. The programme became more and more depressing, and more and more forlorn the longer we sat there gawping, we both had tears in our eyes. Fortunately, though, it ended with Bamse and his ancient owner strolling around a meadow on a large farm and he saw his days out with the sun shining, the flowers swaying and the larks singing.
    “Thank goodness,” Mother said, hurriedly switching off. We sat blinking with the glare from the T.V. in our eyes until she suddenly exclaimed:
    “I’ll deduct it from his rent!”

6
    Then Linda arrived. She arrived by bus. Alone. Because Mother had no desire to meet the girl’s mother again, that was my impression.
    It was a Saturday. We ambled down to the bus stop by Aker Hospital in good time and waited for the Grorud bus, which was due at 1.26, I had been to school and had barely got home with my satchel, I hadn’t told a living soul about this turn of events, about Linda, because I couldn’t find the words. But in a very indirect way I had touched on the subject with a chum of mine, Roger, who had two elder brothers, I had asked him what it was like to have several siblings, an issue which he was quite unable to grasp, until he seemed to understand what I was getting at after all, and said with a smirk:
    “Only child.”
    Made it sound like a diagnosis, on a par with having a limp. I had of course also had a few half-articulated thoughts of my own along these lines as we were assembling the new bed – I had even slept in it one night – and especially while Mother was sitting lost in thought in the interim between the decision to take Linda and today, or when she went into the loft and came down with our enormous suitcase covered with sticky labels marked Lom and Dombås, which turned out to be full of her childhood clothes, those she had worn when she was Linda’s age, six, and she went through them one by one, holding them up and thinking and mumbling and saying: “Well, I never, and oh my God, what is this then and none of that’s any good, except for this maybe?” A doll called Amalie that didn’t look up to much, the stuffing poking out of a gash in her stomach – because her brothers, I was told, had performed an appendix operation on her. She had dangling legs and a loose, floppy head with dull beads for eyes.
    “Isn’t she cute?”
    “Mm.”
    She put Amalie in Linda’s bed, where she had been lying now for the past week, until she was gone again, that happened this morning.
    “Where’s Amalie?” I wondered on waking up. But Mother didn’t answer me. “She’s coming today, isn’t she? Linda?”
    “Course,” Mother said, as if this were sufficient reason for Amalie to be back in the loft, so there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings between her and Linda, I suppose, what do I know? The sheets on the bed had been changed again, for the third time, and there was nothing between them, the bed was waiting.
    Then at long last the bus came. It stopped as well. But no-one got off. Quite the opposite, a number of passengers got on, and Mother and I stood looking at each other. The pneumatic brakes hissed and the folding doors clattered and shook and threatened to close. Mother threw herself forward at the last moment and shouted “Stop”, and the conductor jumped up from his seat, came and took her by the arm and in the same movement pressed the door fully open with his knee.
    “Careful now, madam.”
    Mother said something or other, at any rate the bus didn’t move off as she disappeared into the interior, behind the filthy windows. She was gone for ages. Then there was some shouting from inside until, at last, she reappeared, puce-faced and agitated, dragging behind her a little girl in a tight dress and white knee-stockings in the raw autumn weather and carrying a tiny, light-blue suitcase.
    “Thank you, thank you,” she shouted to the conductor, who answered, “Not at all” and “My pleasure” and