Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen Read Free Book Online Page B

made several other comments that only made Mother’s face even redder as she stood straightening her hair. I walked in a circle, staring at the new arrival, at Linda, who turned out to be small and fat and quiet with her eyes boring into the tarmac.
    At length the bus set off, and Mother went down on her knees in front of our new family member and tried to make eye-contact, without much success, from what I could see. But then she completely lost her self-control, Mother did, she started hugging the gawky creature in a way that filled me with grave concern. But Linda didn’t react to that, either, and Mother dried her tears and said, as she tends to do when she is ashamed of herself:
    “Oh, what am I doing? Come on, let’s go up to Omar Hansen’s and buy some chocolate. Would you like some chocolate, Linda?”
    Linda was bereft of speech. She smelled strange, her hair was unkempt, all over the place, and her fringe hung right down over her face. But she did put her hand in Mother’s and clasped two of her fingers, making her knuckles go white. Then Mother lost her composure again. And I couldn’t watch any more, this grasp which I knew instinctively was a grasp for life, which would change most things not just in Linda’s existence but also in mine, one of the grasps that lock themselves around your heart and hold it in a vice-like grip until you die and it is still there when you are lying rotting in your grave. I snatched the small sky-blue suitcase that weighed almost nothing and swung it around my head.
    “She’s asking you if you want some chocolate!” I shouted. “You deaf or something?”
    Linda gave a start and Mother sent me one of those murderous looks of hers that are usually reserved for larger gatherings. I took the hint and kept a couple of paces behind them as we walked up the hill, Mother talking now in a pseudo-friendly and much too shrill voice and saying “This is where we live, Linda,” and she pointed through the traffic fumes across Trondhjemsveien.
    “On the second floor over there. The one with the green curtains. It’s No. 3, the third block from the bottom, one of the first to be built …”
    And a load more drivel to none of which Linda responded.
    But after we had our chocolate, things improved a bit because Linda gobbled it down and smiled too, more confused than happy, and that made you feel a little less sorry for her, yes it did, I suppose Mother thought she had been eating the chocolate too greedily, and so there was a reason to find fault with her, or there was something one might have wished were different, which I think was good for us all because so far Linda had not uttered one word. Nor did she until we got inside the door.
    “Bed,” she said.
    “Alright,” replied Mother, nonplussed. “You’re sleeping there.”
    At which Linda loosened the iron grip she had on Mother’s fingers, scrambled up into bed, lay down and closed her eyes. Mother and I followed this game, our amazement increasing by the minute, because this was no game, Linda was sleeping like a log.
    Mother said There, there, and covered her up and sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair and cheek. A little later she left the room and crashed down at the kitchen table as if she had just returned from the War.
    “I imagine she must be all in, the poor thing. Coming to stay with us. So alone …”
    I didn’t have any sympathy for this line of thought either, after all, what could be better than to be allowed to stay with us, in a bed that had been made three times already, even though no-one had slept in it? I said as much, too, showed Mother that I was already beginning to get pretty sick of this new family member of ours.
    But she was not listening, she had opened the little blue suitcase and found a letter, a sort of instruction manual, it appeared, which told us in spiky handwriting what Linda liked to do – playing (!) and eating: Sunda honey and spiced cheese, and potatoes and gravy, she