by Maria Parr
And so it happened again. Lena lashed out.
A gasp spread through the whole group. Kai-Tommy staggered backward, but it wasn’t a knockout this time like three years earlier. He blinked a little, touched his jaw, and then launched himself furiously at Lena. For a second, the rest of us stood there, paralyzed, while they beat each other up. Big Kai-Tommy and little Lena.
“No!” I shouted, diving into the fight.
Halvor and Abdulahi grabbed Kai-Tommy. Andreas and I got hold of Lena. We managed to separate them before the teacher came.
“You’re a complete moron, Kai-Tommy!” Lena shouted. Tears were running down her cheeks, and she was bleeding from a cut above her eye. “You’re a bunch of little morons, the whole herd of you.”
Then she ran off.
Birgit stood outside the girls’ changing rooms, pale and speechless. Kai-Tommy glanced over at her and wiped some grit from his cheek.
“That girl’s a total nutcase,” he mumbled, holding up his hands half-apologetically.
But what was wrong with me? I just stood there feeling pleased that finally Birgit had seen what Kai-Tommy could be like. By the time I turned to run after Lena, I realized that Andreas had already followed her.
Lena’s desk was deserted for the rest of the day. There was a strangely charged atmosphere in class. Ellisiv, who didn’t know what had happened, watched us with a furrowed brow. I knew that whatever she did, Lena would never, ever tell anybody what had happened. Should I tell? I decided to leave it.
When I got home, Lena had gone to soccer practice with her new team. Some days she’d have to leave straight after school to catch the ferry.
I sat down in our empty kitchen and picked at some crumbs on the table.
“Isn’t Lena here?” asked Mom, who was feeding Inger in the living room.
I shook my head.
As dusk came, I stood behind the cedar tree and watched her cycling home. Should I go over to the Lids’ kitchen? Was she mad at me? Blasted soccer! I wished it had never been invented.
Before I could decide what to do, her door opened again. Lena ran across the fields and down to the boat shed. I peered through the dark. There were lights on down there. Grandpa was doing some work on Troll. What did they talk about when they were together, Lena and Grandpa?
I turned around and went back inside.
As the end of winter approached, Grandpa was always showing up wearing dirty overalls. He was working on Troll and was keen to get his boat ready for the next fishing season.
“Can’t you wait until spring comes?” Dad asked him. “What are you going out in the cold for now?”
Grandpa pretended not to hear him. He just looked across at me and said, “I think we’ll be ready in time for the cod, Trille.”
I nodded and felt a guilty conscience simmering in my stomach. It was ages since I’d last been with him to the boat shed.
When he went out, Grandpa didn’t stay out for very long at a time, though. My new little sister often had gas, and she couldn’t whimper more than a smidgen without Grandpa dropping whatever he had in his hands and rushing to her aid.
“We need expertise here,” he’d say, turning Inger so that he was holding her round belly in the palm of his hand.
Then they’d walk around the house, Grandpa and Inger, while he gently rocked her and stroked his other big hand over her little back.
“Listen to that!” he’d shout proudly at each fart and burp that came out.
He usually called her his “wee dumpling,” but every now and then he’d say her name. When he did so, he said it quickly and in a slightly embarrassed voice, more or less like when Lena called Isak “Dad.”
One day, I realized to my astonishment that I’d started carrying Inger like Grandpa did. My hands were smaller, but just like before in the boat shed, they were starting to act like his, even though I wasn’t really doing it on purpose.
“Listen to that!” I said to Mom one day, grinning as Inger let rip with an explosive fart while I was carrying her, Grandpa-style.
“Mini-Lars,” Mom said, ruffling my hair.
It was a long time since anybody had called me that.
Suddenly I had a burning need to get down to the boat shed. I leaped into my boots and ran across the fields. Troll was laid up ashore, and Grandpa was painting the bottom of the hull.
“Would you like any help?”
“No, you’ll only get dirty,” said Grandpa, looking at my clothes.
“Pssshh,” I said. “I can put on some oilskins.”
I took the orange oilskins from the hook in the boat shed. It had been ages since I’d last worn them. A faint and familiar smell of fish and seawater stuck to my body.
“Is it time to put her back in the water tomorrow?” I asked, crawling all the way underneath the boat to the hardest-to-reach part.
“Looks like it, lad,” said Grandpa, looking happily at me. “Tor’s promised to lend a hand.”
It was so good to be lying under the boat there with Grandpa, just working away. I wished we could carry on all afternoon, but he had almost finished. The job was done in half an hour. I hung the oilskins back up, and we strolled off along the track home.
“Thanks for your help,” Grandpa said with a nod.
“No problem,” I said. I was just about to follow him inside when I spotted Birgit.
She was coming down from Hillside on her bike at top speed. I felt a pang of excitement in my stomach. Was she coming to see me? I was about to hurry and meet her, but then I was stunned to see her turn the other way.
I felt completely dismayed. I knew where she was going. It was getting clearer from conversations I overheard between Birgit and Kai-Tommy that they’d been hanging out at the ferry landing after school. I gulped.
“See you later, then,” I mumbled to Grandpa, heading up to the garage to find my bike.
Soon I was sitting there at the ferry landing, outside the shop, dangling my legs. Mopeds roared around me while Kai-Tommy, Halvor, and a couple of high school students sat over on another table. There was no sign of Birgit. Was this not where she’d been heading after all? I’d been into the shop to look for her. Now I was sitting with a Coke in my hand, feeling like a fool.
Then Lena came along on her bike, with her soccer bag on the carrier rack and wearing a tracksuit in the unfamiliar red color of the team in town. She spotted me as she parked her bike and tilted her head as if examining a rare orchid.
“You’re sitting here?”
I nodded. As if to prove the point that I was now one of the kids who sat around on the ferry landing, I leaned to one side and casually spat on the pier. Lena bit her lip. I knew her. She was trying not to laugh.
“What?” I said, holding out my arms in protest.
Lena hopped up onto the table and sat down next to me.
“You look like a moron, Trille. You’ve gone completely coo coo ca choo.”
Oh, couldn’t she just keep her trap shut?
“Hey hey! It’s the two turtledoves of Mathildewick Cove!” Kai-Tommy shouted at us from the other side of the parking lot.
At that very moment, Birgit arrived on her bike. I was ready to shove Lena off the table. What if Birgit got the wrong idea? But Lena just sat there firmly, looking tiredly at Kai-Tommy.
“I really hope he gets washed away in a flood one day,” she grumbled.
I waved to Birgit as she went into the shop.
Kai-Tommy kept gawping in our direction, and I could feel the tension growing. Ever since the fight, he’d been rotten to Lena. He’d arrogantly declared that she had serious problems with her temper — although he did have a point there — as well as saying that it wasn’t normal to beat people up like she did. And to prove that he was right, he’d taken every opportunity to get her fired up again. He’d come pretty close to succeeding a few times, but amazingly Lena had managed not to explode.
Now she unzipped her tracksuit top and looked at me, eyes sparkling. She looked like she mi
ght burst at any moment.
“What is it?” I asked.
Lena smiled wide.
“What is it? Have you won a million or something?”
“We’re going to have a baby,” she said, her voice bursting with pent-up joy.
“Really? Is that true?”
Lena nodded with the happiest of grins on her face.
“Congratulations!”
“Congratulations for what?” Kai-Tommy had ridden his bike over to us and was now propping himself up against the table with one foot.
“Nothing,” said Lena.
Kai-Tommy calmly opened his bottle of soda pop and took a swig from it. He was only wearing a hoodie, even though it was freezing cold.
“Dressed like a pro, I see,” he said sarcastically, pointing at Lena’s tracksuit.
Lena didn’t respond. Instead she looked at the ferry, which was just docking.
“How’s it going in town, then?” Kai-Tommy asked after a pause.
“Fine, thank you,” Lena replied, still not taking her eyes off the ferry. “I’m getting on well at my own level.”
“Played any games yet?”
“No.”
Kai-Tommy rocked a little on his bike. He seemed annoyed that he wasn’t managing to wind her up.
“What was he congratulating you about, then?”
“I was congratulating her because she’s going to be a big sister,” I said in exasperation.
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Congrats, then.”
Without thanking him, Lena stood up, ready to board the ferry. I don’t know whether that was what Kai-Tommy couldn’t stand, or whether it was the fact he hadn’t managed to make her explode. Something snapped, anyway.
He flicked back his bangs and shouted after Lena, “Lucky Isak, getting his own kid. It can’t have been easy for him with you thrown into the bargain, knowing what you’re like.”
I felt myself turning all cold inside. Lena didn’t answer. She just went on board the ferry. Hadn’t she heard? I looked furiously at Kai-Tommy, but I didn’t say anything, as Birgit was coming now. She’d bought some chocolate, which she opened and shared with us, all smiles.
“Is something wrong?” she asked hesitantly.
I looked nervously at the ferry. Didn’t Lena care about what Kai-Tommy had just said? She was Isak’s child too! She knew that, didn’t she? Kai-Tommy peered at me from beneath his bangs, and then he suddenly started sniffing the air.
“Something smells of flipping fish here.”
All the blood drained to my feet. I quickly glanced at Birgit. She cautiously sniffed the air too.
“Seriously, Trille, is that you?” Kai-Tommy looked at me as if I were the most repulsive person in the world.
“No,” I said, pulling back.
I quickly downed the rest of my drink and leaped onto my bike. My whole body felt like it was burning and throbbing with shame.
When I got home, I threw my bike in the garage and almost walked straight into Grandpa. He was outside the house, with a bucket of frozen herring, on his way to the boat shed.
“Are you coming, Trille?” he asked.
“No,” I grumbled, running indoors with my heart pounding.
I hurled all my clothes in with the rest of the laundry and got into the shower, devastated.
The next day, I kept my distance from Birgit. I was too embarrassed to talk to her ever again, fish-face that I was. Kai-Tommy smirked and held his nose when I walked past him. If I hadn’t been so deep in my own misery, I would probably have noticed that things weren’t right with Lena either. But I didn’t.
When evening came and Lena started sobbing because of a deceased hen, I still didn’t see that there was really something else going on. I should have noticed, but what happened with the chicken led to such enormous complications that Lena completely fell off my radar.
It started when Birgit popped by. In astonishment, I let her into the kitchen, ashamed that the dirty dishes from dinner were still on the table.
“You can bring Haas in too,” I mumbled, but she left him outside.
“I won’t stay long,” she said, glancing at me.
No, and I can understand why, I thought.
Birgit looked at me with her kind eyes and was just about to say something when Haas suddenly started barking.
“Oh no, it must be the fox!”
I charged out of the kitchen. We’d already lost two hens over the past month. Dad kept saying that he was going to keep watch one morning and shoot the sneaky creature when it ventured down to the farm, but so far he’d only talked about it. When the first hen, Number Two B, disappeared, we didn’t get too worked up about it. Nor did we when Number Five vanished, leaving just a few feathers and some drops of blood. But that evening was different. I knew that much as soon as I came rushing out into the yard. Lena was already there, and she was absolutely raging.
Number Seven, her favorite hen, was lying on her back right up by the chicken-wire fence. Her head was wounded, but she was still alive. The fox had probably been scared off in the middle of the massacre when Haas started barking. Lena bent down, and when she stood up with the hen in her arms, she was sobbing so hard I was shocked. What on earth? It was only a chicken!
“Lena,” I said gently, “she’s too badly injured to survive. You can’t . . .”
“I know. I’m not an idiot!”
She turned around, walked straight over to the door to Grandpa’s apartment, and rang the bell. I could hear her sniffing as she tried to pull herself together. Grandpa turned on the outside light and opened the door.
“Can you help me see this one off, Lars?” Lena asked, holding the hen out in the light.
I should probably have realized then that this wasn’t an everyday occurrence for Birgit. If I’d turned around, I would’ve seen that she was twice as pale as when we had the shipwreck on the raft. But at that moment I was mostly thinking about Lena and the hen.
Grandpa gave Number Seven a quick and clean end, as only he can.
“Now, why don’t we see if Reidar can make some chicken fricassee this weekend?” he consoled us, holding the hen up to the outside light to check she was definitely dead.
I heard a gasp behind me and finally turned toward Birgit.
“What’s chicken fricassee?” she whispered, her eyes still fixed on the hen beneath the light.
I explained it like I explained all new words to her.
“It’s a meal. Pieces of chicken in a white sauce. Very tasty.”
Birgit’s eyes shone wide in the dark. “But . . . Lena’s crying,” she spluttered, looking over at Lena, who was carrying the chicken’s bloodstained carcass up the stairs to Mom in the kitchen.
It’s good to make food out of the animals we have to put down: that’s what Dad had always said, and that’s what I told Birgit now. She gaped at me as if I came from another solar system.
“Is it better to eat animals you don’t know?” I asked, confused.
“I don’t eat animals,” Birgit whispered.
“Huh?”
“We’re vegetarians, you know . . .”
“Oh,” I said, gobsmacked. I hadn’t picked up on that. “So you never eat meat?”
Birgit shook her head.
“What about fish?”
She shook her head again.
“But what do you eat, then?” I asked in confusion, as all the dinners I’d ever eaten in my life had involved either fish or meat.
“Other things!” Birgit said angrily, and then she ran off home with Haas.
I stood there in the yard, my whole body feeling powerless. With heavy footsteps, I followed the trail of blood indoors.
The scene in the kitchen was chaos. Lena was crying her eyes out, and Mom was doing her best to comfort her while she warmed up some water in a large pot on the stove.
“Is Reidar going to shoot that fox soon, or is he just bragging?” Lena shouted. I’d never seen anybody so upset before.
“Oh, Lena d
ear,” said Mom, trying to get hold of her.
Lena tore herself away. “It’s Number Seven!”
Mom knew that. She took the hen and dipped her in the hot water for a moment.
“Do you two want to help me pluck the feathers?” she asked.
“No!” Lena howled.
I looked sadly at the hen. Chicken fricassee with potatoes and boiled carrots is one of the best meals I know of. It was one of Granny’s dishes. It’s something really special. Did Birgit think it was disgusting?
“Smoking haddocks, I know what I’m going to do,” Lena mumbled, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “Come on, Trille.”
I should’ve cycled up to Hillside and spoken with Birgit, but I couldn’t face it. Instead I took my bike and followed Lena. I’d been eating animals I loved all my life. The same bottle lambs I fed in the summer, I ate at Christmas. The rabbits that lived under Grandpa’s kitchen window had been turned into soup, one by one. We ate our goat, and we’d had frequent banquets from our chickens. And fish! I’d eaten enough fish to fill a whole swimming pool. Never in my life had I thought that there might be anything wrong with it. Now Birgit, dear, kind Birgit, had stormed off home in horror and disgust. I remembered the beautiful vegetable garden they had up at Hillside. And the sourdough bread with chanterelle mushrooms I’d been given. She thought I was horrible. I smelled of fish, ate animals, and was an utterly revolting person.
As this merry-go-round of thoughts spun in my head, I pedaled on hard to keep up with Lena. Soon we were at the houses by the ferry landing.
“What are we doing?” I asked with a sigh when Lena came skidding to a halt by Halvor’s house.
She didn’t answer. She just threw her bike into the hedge and rang the doorbell without mercy. Halvor opened the door.
“I need to borrow your air rifle,” said Lena. “You’ll get it back at school tomorrow.”
Halvor held his lips tightly closed and looked like he was focusing on something slightly behind her. Once again I had the impression he was a little scared of her.
When we cycled home, Lena had the rifle over her shoulder.