Child Wonder Read Free

papered in one evening. Then we spent two evenings doing all the fiddly bits around the balcony door and the large sitting-room window, and one final evening on the wall adjoining my bedroom, which was now to be the lodger’s. The change was there for all to see, it was explosive, it was ear-splitting. We had not gone so far as to invest in a jungle, Mother wanted something more discreet, but we stayed well within the same botanical genre anyway, with rounded borders and flowers, like golden brown scrubland in the autumn. And when two people came round the very next day to look at the room, we were in business.
    No, we weren’t.
    There was something wrong with both of the two prospective lodgers. Then a third came, who thought there was something wrong with the room. These setbacks were a blow to Mother’s confidence. Was the rent too high? Or too low? Before, she had talked about us having to move from Årvoll perhaps, to get something a bit simpler, in the area where she had lived earlier, perhaps, with her husband, in Øvre Foss, where people were still content with one room and a kitchen. But eventually a letter appeared, in spiky handwriting, from one Ingrid Olaussen, who was thirty-five years old and single, she wrote, she would like to see the room this Friday, if that were convenient?
    “Certainly,” Mother said.
    But then she took the drastic step of being absent the day after, when I returned from school with Anne-Berit and Essi.
    I had never encountered this before.
    A locked door. Which was not opened when I pressed the bell, again and again. This seriously threw me off-kilter. Essi took me to his place where his mother, who was one of the few mothers on whom I could rely, aside from my own, comforted me, saying Mother was sure to be out shopping, I would see, I could do my homework there in the meantime, with Essi, who needed some help in his struggle with spelling, he wasn’t much good at arithmetic, either.
    “You’re so clever, aren’t you, Finn.”
    Yes indeed, I was coping very well, it was part of the contract between Mother and me, the delicate balance in a family of two. I was given sliced bread with cervelat, which as a rule I relish, but I couldn’t get a mouthful down; the strange thing is that once you have had a mother, when she goes missing, this is no trifling matter. I sat beside Essi at his broad writing desk, holding a pencil, I was orphaned and didn’t write one single letter. This was so unlike her. More than an hour had passed now. (It was no more than fourteen minutes.) Only when almost two hours had passed did we hear a clatter on the road outside, which turned out to be the exhaust of a superannuated lorry trying to reverse up to the block of flats. Then I saw Mother jumping out of the driver’s cab in her long, flowery shoe-shop dress and running towards the entrance. On the burgundy vehicle’s doors it said “Storstein Møbler & Inventar” in gold-edged ornamental letters. A large man in a boiler suit let down the sides, another man jumped out and together they unveiled a sofa, a modern sofa bed in beige, yellow and brown stripes that Mother had gone out to buy on the flimsy basis of a letter from Ingrid Olaussen, and they hauled it off the lorry and started manoeuvring it towards the front door.
    By that time I already had my school bag on my back and was galloping at full speed down to the ground floor, across the grass and up the stairs following the unwieldy piece of furniture that the two men, with curses and one cry of distress, managed to coax up to the second floor and in through the door which had been locked for an eternity, now open for the first time in my life.
    Inside, Mother stood with a desperately strained expression on her face that came no closer to normality on catching sight of me, because of my wretched emotional state, no doubt, and at once began to apologise, “it had taken such a long time in the shop“. But there was no energy in her consoling