by Maria Parr
“I’ve got all day,” Grandpa replied.
I sat down on the deck. Imagine if our bottle really did manage to cross the sea. We’d written a message in English with our names, where we lived, and a telephone number. We’d even put in a picture of ourselves. If somebody in another country found it, maybe they’d invite us to visit them.
“People from other countries are really cool,” said Lena. “When I went to Crete . . .”
Grandpa and I exchanged a look and rolled our eyes.
“That’s it. I can’t be bothered sitting around here like a sea snail all day,” Lena suddenly said behind me. Then she threw the bottle overboard with all the strength she could muster.
“Lena!” I shouted angrily. “We’ve only just come out onto the fjord.”
My best friend gazed mournfully at the bottle. It bobbed up and down a little in the water and started gently drifting back inland in the breeze.
“Maybe I should jump in and get it back,” she suggested.
“No, thank you, Lena Lid,” said Grandpa. “I need my fishing gaff for other things today.”
Lena flung herself down dramatically on the deck next to me. “Am I seriously going to be held hostage on this boat for the rest of the day? Have we got any cookies?”
We chugged along the shores of the fjord until the sea opened up ahead of us. Out there, the swells rocked us like a great lullaby, and all the noise from the shore was left behind. My frustration about the bottle disappeared.
“Shetland’s straight that way,” I told Lena, pointing to where the ocean met the sky. “And there’s Kobbholmen.”
The small, dark island lay all alone amid the blue water. All that stood there was a lonely lighthouse.
“Is the island deserted?” Lena asked.
“Well, it is these days,” said Grandpa. “But people used to live there in the past.”
Lena and I looked at the little island and the peaceful lighthouse. Imagine living there, in the middle of the sea. As we came closer, we could see a house and a shed too. Small patches of grass came into view among the dark rocks. Grandpa stood still for a time. He was looking at Kobbholmen as well.
“You know, your grandmother grew up out here, Trille,” he said after a while.
“Huh?”
Grandpa nodded and began to maneuver the boat toward a buoy that was swaying in the sea a short distance away.
“You have a grandmother?” Lena asked, astonished. “Where have you been keeping her?”
“She’s dead,” I said. “She died when Dad was little.”
“Oh.”
Lena didn’t say any more. She just stared at the lighthouse, deep in thought.
Grandpa moved calmly as he prepared to draw in the fishing line, as he’d done so many times before. He doesn’t speak about my grandmother very often. But we always take two bunches of flowers when we go to the churchyard cemetery. One for Auntie Granny’s grave, and one for Granny’s. Auntie Granny was Grandpa’s sister. My real granny’s grave has a small round gravestone that looks different from the others. At the bottom, it says: Sadly missed.
I kept looking at Kobbholmen. It was as if a light had started shining around the island and the lighthouse. To think that my grandmother had grown up there. Had her father been the lighthouse keeper?
“Look out,” said Grandpa as he started the winch.
The machine screeched and shook a little, then it started reeling in the line. Line fishing is an adventure. You never know what you’ll find hanging on the hooks, and Grandpa always catches some fish. Nobody knows the fishing grounds around here better than he does. Once, when he was young, he caught a halibut that was bigger than he was: I’ve seen a picture of it. I dream of that happening again. That’s why I always lean right over the side of the boat when we reel in the line. Grandpa lets me. He’s not strict when we’re out at sea. The only thing he looks out for is that we don’t fall against the winch, as that’s how Uncle Tor lost half a finger when he was little. Dad’s always nagging Grandpa to install an emergency stop button on the winch. It’s supposed to be a requirement, Dad says. But nobody gets to tell Grandpa what to do at sea. If somebody tries to tell him what to do with his boat, there’s no way he’ll do it.
“It’s better to teach the young ones to be careful,” he says, in answer to Dad.
Lena and I leaned as far as we dared over the side of the boat, telling Grandpa every time we saw a fish approaching the surface. About halfway along the line, we saw something big and slippery writhing in the dark water.
“It’s a megafish!” Lena yelled. “Oh, holy mackerel. It’s a megafish, Lars. Reel her in!”
An enormous cod smacked onto the deck. Lena howled with delight and started jumping up and down like a yo-yo.
“Next time you come,” said Grandpa, “we’ll try a halibut line.” He laughed and rubbed his hands together. “Then the little lass from next door will see a real fish! That’s if you can be bothered to come on this old Troll again.”
“Bothered?” Lena put one foot on the cod, as if it were a dragon she’d just slain. “Actually, I may very well become a fisherwoman when I’m older,” she said.
“Aren’t you going to be a goalkeeper?” I asked as I fetched Grandpa’s knife.
“Yes, but I’ve got to have something to fall back on when I hang up my gloves.”
We didn’t see the message in a bottle on our way back, and we had plenty of time to look for it, as Grandpa wanted to set a herring net before we returned to shore.
“Mark my words, Trille,” said Lena. “Soon somebody will be calling from Spain wanting to speak to us!”
But nobody did call from Spain. Something else happened altogether. And it happened that very same evening.
I was lying on the sofa, reading, when the doorbell rang. I heard Krølla running for her life so she’d get to open the door, and I was quite stunned when she yelled that there was somebody to see me. Who could it be? Lena never rings the doorbell.
When I reached the door, I was struck speechless. The dog from the forest was sniffing inquisitively at my socks, and there, on the bottom step, stood the sunshine girl.
“I found this,” she said cautiously, passing me the bottle.
What do you mean ‘moved here’?” Lena whispered as she stared skeptically at the girl standing in our yard.
“The family with the dog have moved here! They’re from the Netherlands, and they’re renting Hilltop Jon’s house!”
“Is that allowed?”
“Of course it is. Hilltop Jon lives at the retirement home now. Come on!”
I dragged Lena with me down into our yard. “This is Lena,” I announced eagerly in English.
“Hi. I’m Birgit,” the girl said, clearing her throat slightly and politely reaching out to shake Lena’s hand.
“Huh?” said Lena sharply. She seemed a bit rattled.
“Her name’s Birgit!” I said.
I hoped Lena might jump at the chance to use the English she’d recently learned on Crete to say something welcoming, but clearly not. She stared glumly at the dog instead. He gave her a friendly sniff, like all animals do when they meet Lena. I squirmed in the embarrassing silence.
“Um, do you want to build a floating thing with us tomorrow?” I eventually blurted out.
Lena stiffened beside me.
“Floating thing?” Birgit asked, slightly puzzled.
One evening earlier in the summer, while we were sitting on the balcony, drinking some coffee and having a snack, Dad and Uncle Tor had started chatting about when they were young and had built a raft that they sailed all the way across the fjord to town. They probably hadn’t meant for Lena and me to overhear, as Dad’s face took on a concerned expression when he realized that we were listening. They quickly moved on to talk about something else. But it was too late. If Dad and Uncle Tor could cross the fjord on a homemade raft, then so could Lena and I. Since then, we’d been secretly gathering flotsam and jetsam all summer and hiding
it in the old boat shed.
Now I stood there in the yard, trying to explain to Birgit what a raft was in English. The problem was that I couldn’t remember the word “raft.” I looked helplessly at Lena a couple of times, but she just stared fiercely back.
“It’s a thing that . . . um . . . you float on it on the sea . . . um; it’s a . . .”
“A raft,” Lena said eventually, as if she couldn’t stand listening to me fumbling anymore.
Birgit lit up. I pointed down across the fields to the old boat shed, so she’d understand where our stockpile was.
“OK,” she said a little nervously. “Haas, kom hier!”
Then off she went, vanishing through the hole in the hedge, past Lena’s house, and up onto the road, taking her curly blond hair and everything else with her.
Lena shot off across the yard like a soldier into battle. I ran after her.
“Has something happened?” asked Lena’s mom, Ylva, as we came storming into the living room.
“Yes!” I shouted. “A girl’s moved here, and she’s the same age as us.”
Ylva pushed her glasses up and stared at me. “A new girl?” She clearly couldn’t believe it. “Will she be in your class?”
I nodded enthusiastically. It was a miracle.
“So now you won’t be the only girl in your class, Lena!” Ylva said, all excited. “That’ll be a nice change.”
Lena looked like she’d taken a cream pie to the face.
“A nice change?” she roared. “I couldn’t care less about a nice change! It was Trille and me who were supposed to build the . . . you know what, Trille. And it was a secret.”
Ylva raised her eyebrows in suspicion. “What kind of secret?”
“Nothing,” Lena said hastily.
“Nothing?”
“That’s right. But anyway, it was me and Trille who were going to do it. Not some curlyhead from the Nuttylands who we don’t even know!”
“I was only trying to be kind,” I said.
“You’re always trying to be kind, you are, like some kind of archangel! You’re so kind that it makes me sick!” Lena shouted.
I stared at her, not believing what I was hearing.
“Lena Lid!” It’s not very often that Ylva raises her voice. “Do you remember the day we moved to Mathildewick Cove?”
“No,” Lena said stubbornly.
“Let me remind you, then,” said a stern Ylva. “No more than an hour after we’d arrived, the doorbell rang. There was a kind boy at the door, wondering if you wanted to come out and play. Do you remember who it was?”
Lena closed her mouth and glanced quickly at me.
“Exactly,” said her mom. “Now say sorry, and say it right away.”
For a long moment, it was as if Lena had been switched to silent.
“Sorry,” she eventually muttered. It sounded like she’d had to drag the word out of her appendix.
“I’m sorry too,” I said quickly. I knew I really shouldn’t have told an outsider about our secret raft plan, but why did Lena always have to be so difficult?
“That blasted bottle,” Lena mumbled. “Is Mathildewick magnetic or something?”
“Still, it was somebody from another country who found it,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
In return, I got a sofa cushion in the face.
As I shuffled back home that evening, I had to stop and look out at the fjord. The flat sea was like a mirror below the evening sky. I felt an unfamiliar tingling at the bottom of my stomach. Might Birgit actually show up?
Before we went down to the beach the next day, Lena did some research on the Netherlands. In other words, she asked Isak, the cleverest person in Mathildewick Cove.
“Jiminy monkfish, I don’t need any books or Internet since that guy moved in. All I have to do is type in a search query and click on his belly button.”
She gave me a short lecture while we organized our assembled junk and waited for Birgit. There are loads of people in the Netherlands, Lena told me, and large parts of the country are below sea level.
“Below sea level?”
“Yes, but they’ve built dikes to stop the water seeping in and flooding everything. Isak says it’s a nice country. Plus they’re extremely good at soccer.”
That soccer fact had clearly made Lena look at the situation in a more positive light. She’s the goalie on our soccer team. When she stands in goal, yelling out orders, she’s in her element. As for me, I’m starting to get tired of soccer. I’m no good at it. Everybody in our class plays, but sometimes I think I should just give up.
When Birgit finally peered around the boat-shed door, Lena immediately started talking about soccer. She bombarded her with questions, but Birgit couldn’t answer a single one of them.
“Sorry. I’m not really that interested in soccer,” she apologized.
Lena stood speechless behind our collection of junk, brandishing a hammer. I was afraid the situation might get out of control, so I clapped my hands.
“Let’s get building.”
It was strange having somebody new involved in our project. I hardly dared to look at Birgit. It was almost like having an angel in the boat shed. When she lifted up a plank of wood, she did it carefully, as if she’d never done it before. Maybe she hadn’t? Lena grappled with various pieces of driftwood and nails at a furious pace. The things Lena makes are rarely very pretty, but she usually manages to put them together, one way or another. I started to feel irritated that she wasn’t showing the quiet Dutch girl more consideration.
Eventually Birgit mainly just watched. Did she think we were totally weird? I’d never thought that the things Lena and I do are strange. But now that thought was buzzing around my head the whole time. Did we seem childish?
“Lena,” I whispered when we went out to fetch some more plastic drums. “Shouldn’t we try to involve her a bit more?”
Lena looked at me as if I’d asked her to conjure up a town hall out of thin air. When she went back into the boat shed, she escorted Birgit up into the open loft and gave her a sheet, as well as Krølla’s box of paints, which she’d somehow gotten hold of.
“You can paint the sail,” she explained, and then climbed back down. “Pass me the hammer, Trille.”
Although Birgit was painting up in the loft and we were downstairs putting the raft together, we found out a lot more about her that morning. Birgit’s father was an author and was going to spend a year writing. Her mother was an architect, but she wanted to try something else for a while. They’d been dreaming for ages of living on a small farm in Norway. Birgit’s two elder brothers would be going back to the Netherlands when school started. They were in high school.
Word of the Dutch girl’s arrival had rushed through the cove like a gale, and when we went up to my house to eat lunch, one person after another seemed to casually drop by. Lena’s mom came to buy some eggs, and my older siblings, who were always pretending not to care about anything these days, spent a long time searching for various items in the kitchen cupboards. Mom even put out a tub of chocolate spread, despite the fact it wasn’t Saturday. I could feel the pride growing inside me. I was the one who’d found Birgit!
Eventually, Lena said “Ah-heeeemm!” and nodded in the direction of the boat shed.
We did the last bit of joining in the sunshine out on the foreshore. Birgit sat on a rock, watching. Was it really stupid making a raft? I don’t normally make mistakes when hammering and so on, but that day I hurt my thumb twice. Luckily I managed to act as if nothing had happened.
When we’d finished, Birgit fetched the sail and rolled it out. Lena and I were speechless. She’d painted the sea and the sky, as well as the sun, and at the top she’d painted Lena and me as a couple of pirates. It was the best-looking thing made by somebody my age that I’d ever seen.
“Wow!” I said. “That’s fantastic.”
I stuck out my arms in amazement and turned toward Lena. She was gawking like a fish too, but then she slammed her m
outh shut.
“Is it waterproof?” she asked, sticking to the practicalities.
They’ll be calling us for dinner soon,” Lena grumbled. She seemed in a rush as she grabbed the raft from underneath and dug in her heels.
It didn’t budge one inch. I pushed as hard as I could from behind. Birgit took hold of it on one side, but it was no use.
“Push from the back with Trille,” Lena ordered. “Push hard.”
Birgit carefully nudged the raft next to me.
“Come on, heave, for crying out trout!” Lena yelled.
I looked angrily at her. Getting angry helped. It made us stronger, both Lena and me. The raft scraped across the stones.
As soon as it got some water beneath it, the raft let go of the ground and started gently and nimbly swaying on the waves. Cautiously, we climbed aboard, one by one.
Everything was fine for a couple of seconds, but then we felt something give way. I moved over a little so we wouldn’t capsize.
“Help!” Birgit whispered, grabbing on to the mast.
First there was some bubbling around the boards, then the water started washing across the wood and wrapping mercilessly around our calves, until eventually the whole raft hit the sandy bottom with a sigh.
There we stood. All that was left sticking out of the water was half of ourselves, half the mast, and the sail floating on the surface and turning to watercolors.
“Wood’s no good,” said Lena from behind clenched teeth.
Then we heard laughter from the shore.
Whenever I make a house of cards and it collapses, or I make a raft and it sinks, Magnus appears like a genie from a bottle. I don’t think I’ve ever once fallen off my bike without him seeing it. There he was now, leaning against the wall of the boat shed and slapping his thigh.
“Don’t tell me that’s supposed to be a raft. Don’t say it! I’ll die laughing,” he said in between hiccups.
Lena jumped off. Our vessel rose from the bottom and almost floated up to the surface.