by Maria Parr
When there’s such good weather outside, rays of sunlight come streaming into the hay barn, making it look like a church. I made my way to the far corner, furthest from the door, where Lena had been lying behind a stack of dry hay. The sleeping bag and the blanket were there. The picture of Jesus, too. But not Lena.
“Lena?” I whispered nervously.
What if I had dreamt it after all?
“Up here!” she said.
I looked up. Lena was sitting on the top beam, right under the roof. And then she jumped.
She fell and fell and landed next to me in the hay without being hurt in the slightest. I smiled. So did Lena.
“I’ve fallen off so many high places this year that it’s become second nature. There’s nothing I don’t dare to do,” she said proudly. “Oh, I’m so hungry!”
Walking back from the barn, I wished that I knew how to make scrambled eggs. That would be something very good to give to someone who had run away.
Grandpa was coming from the other barn and looked at me, surprised.
“You’re a happy lad!”
“Well, you’ve got to try and smile when the weather’s as good as this!” I said, clearing my throat.
Not even Grandpa could find out about this!
Mum had finished on the phone. She and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table. Steam was rising from their coffee, and the morning sun lit up the whole room.
“Trille, come and sit down,” said Mum.
I didn’t want to, but I did anyway. My parents looked at me seriously.
“I’ve just been speaking to Lena’s mother. Lena wasn’t in her bed this morning.”
I turned the plate in front of me.
“Do you know where she is?” asked Dad.
“No,” I said, starting to make some sandwiches.
They fell silent for a long moment.
“Trille,” Mum said eventually, “Lena’s mother is terribly worried. Everybody’s looking for her. The police too. Do you know where she is?”
“No!” I shouted, slamming my hands on the table, because now I was so angry that I could have smashed up a house. Nobody was going to take Lena back to town! Even if all the police in the world came to Mathildewick Cove, Lena wasn’t going to leave again. I stomped out of the kitchen in a fury. Grown-ups should never have been invented. Carrying on like this, taking children here and there when they didn’t want to go!
I realized that everyone was going to start searching for Lena. Oh, why did everything have to be so difficult? Wasn’t there a safe hide-out somewhere? I thought about everywhere in Mathildewick Cove, and I couldn’t think of a single place.
“The cabin,” I mumbled to myself in the end.
It would have to be the cabin.
When nobody was watching, I started putting together essentials in a plastic bag. Matches, a loaf of bread, butter, thick socks, rope, a shovel and the cabin keys. I moved quickly. Last of all, I took my toboggan out from its place under the steps and put everything I’d gathered on it, with a blanket on top. Now all I had to do was smuggle Lena out too!
“Where are you going, Trille?” Dad asked as I was putting on my snowsuit.
“I thought I’d go tobogganing and have some fun,” I answered angrily.
And then I went down to the hay barn. I put the toboggan inside the door.
Lena had caught one of the hens.
“What are you going to do with her?” I asked, spotting that it was Number Seven.
Lena told me that she wasn’t planning to starve – despite me bringing her so little food. At least hens lay the odd egg now and then. I shrugged and told her everything. Lena looked away for a moment.
“Yes,” she said eventually. “I’ll move into the cabin.”
Her voice was strangely deep.
“But they’ll see us when we go uphill, Trille,” she said.
I nodded. There were just bare slopes all the way up to Hillside Jon’s farm.
“You’ll just have to pull us,” said Lena with a smile, and, hey presto, she and Number Seven disappeared under the blanket on the toboggan, together with the bread and the butter and all the rest.
“And you mustn’t make it look like it’s heavy or they’ll become suspicious!” she ordered.
Suspicious indeed! They had probably become suspicious a long while ago. At least, Grandpa had. He glanced out from below the balcony as I pulled the toboggan out of the barn. I gritted my teeth, wound the string one more time round my hand and set off.
Lena’s not large, as I’ve said, but strangely it was still hard-going. I pulled and pulled so much I was sweating, while trying to make it look as if I were pulling the lightest toboggan in the world. But it was not the lightest toboggan in the world. It was one of the heaviest.
“Giddy up!” said Lena now and then, from under the blanket.
Thank goodness for the icy snow. I had never seen anything like it! There wasn’t a trace of me or the toboggan.
We’d never taken the toboggan all the way up to Hillside Jon’s place before. Not once. We would never have managed, at least not Lena. She only likes downhill slopes and thinks we should’ve built a toboggan lift in Mathildewick Cove long ago. Besides, it’s already high enough for tobogganing long before you get to Hillside Jon’s farmyard. If I hadn’t been pulling my best friend, then I would never have made it. But Lena had come back. I couldn’t stand the thought that she might disappear again.
Now and then I turned round to see if anyone was following us. Grandpa was next to the hay barn. He became smaller and smaller the further up we went. Eventually he was just a tiny dot. When I was finally able to lean against the wall up at Hillside, he was hardly even a dot any more.
“Lena, look at the view,” I panted.
“I can see it,” said Lena, sticking her head out from under the blanket. Number Seven clucked angrily from within.
Lena and I looked at our cove from above – at Mathildewick, our kingdom. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, turning the whole sky beyond the fjord pink. There wasn’t a ripple on the sea. Smoke rose from the chimney at our house. And even though it wasn’t that late, the sky had teased out a star.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked, completely exhausted and absorbed by the view and big thoughts.
Lena rested her head on her hand.
“I’m thinking,” she said in an hoarse voice, “I’m thinking that it’s scandalous.”
“Scandalous?”
“Scandalous, yep. Here we are, up at Hillside, higher than we’ve ever been before, with totally amazing ice on the snow. We’ve got a hen and a toboggan with us, but we can’t go sledging!”
She shouted the last part.
I scratched my head.
“But, Lena, don’t you want to go and stay in the cabin?”
My knees shook from exhaustion. Lena lay completely still. Winter made the whole world look calm.
“I want to stay in Mathildewick Cove!” said Lena with feeling. “And I want to go tobogganing,” she added, getting up slowly and determinedly from under the blanket.
Before I could gather my thoughts, Lena had turned the toboggan on its head, leaving the bread and butter in a heap on the snow. She sat well forward, so that there was space for me too. Lena and I hadn’t been tobogganing together once this winter. We’d been too sad.
“Sit down then! You don’t want to just stand there now you’ve pulled the toboggan all that way, do you? Besides, someone’s got to hold the hen!”
Lena’s eyes narrowed. I looked down the slope. The snow was sparkling. Who in their right mind would say no to a ride like this? I held tightly to Lena’s waist with one hand, holding Number Seven closely with the other.
“Yee-ha!” we shouted in chorus.
“I suppose you’ve never been completely normal, you two,” Magnus said a few days later, when Lena and I had recovered enough to sit at the kitchen table and eat with the others.
“It was about blooming time that T
rille got concussion,” Lena said sharply. As for her, she’d begun to get used to it, she claimed. I smiled. I felt happy all the way down to my little toes. Our concussion didn’t matter.
“What was that toboggan ride like, anyway?” Minda asked with interest. I shrugged. Neither Lena nor I could remember anything.
But Grandpa remembered it. He’d been standing by the hay barn and had seen the whole thing.
“Well, let me tell you, Minda. They flew as fast as a speeding magpie. I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life!”
Lena chewed thoughtfully.
“Smoking haddocks! Why can’t I remember it?” she said angrily.
And then she got Grandpa to tell us – for what must have been the tenth time – how he had seen Lena and me and Number Seven set off from Hillside Jon’s farm. Suffering sticklebacks, he’d thought when he saw us picking up more and more speed on the hard snow. He’d heard the hen clucking and us shouting “yee-ha” until we got to about halfway. Then the hen fell silent, and Lena and I began to shout “whaah” instead. We had good reason to do so, because although we hadn’t built any jumps, we’d been going at such a speed that we’d shot off the bank of snow with enough momentum to fly all the way over the main road.
“And then they sailed in a beautiful arc – the little lass head-first into Krølla’s snowman, Trille with his face smack into the hedge, the hen skywards and the toboggan ‘bang’ into the side of the house!” Grandpa concluded by clapping his hands together to show the sound it had actually made.
“And then Mum came,” said Lena with a smile.
“Yes, then your mum came, little lass, and everything was sorted out.”
The others kept on talking, but I went inside myself and was just happy. Lena wasn’t my neighbour any more. She wasn’t going to be my neighbour for a long time. She’d moved in with us instead! See what grown-ups can do when they set their minds to it.
After we’d recovered from the toboggan crash, I’d asked Mum if there was anything she could conjure up.
“Lena’s mum and I have done some magic,” Mum had answered. “We’ve cast a spell so that Lena will stay here with us until the summer, while her mum finishes her course.”
“Abracadabra!” said Lena Lid, smiling.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Hillside Jon and Hillside Molly
Having Lena at my house was even better than having her as a neighbour, although I wished she would give me back the picture of Jesus. It hung in her room, above the bed she’d been given.
“You’ll get it back eventually, Trille,” said Mum when I mentioned it to her. “Maybe Lena needs the picture at the moment.”
“Yes, but now she’s moved back to Mathildewick Cove, she’s doing fine, isn’t she?” I said.
Then Mum explained that, even if Lena didn’t say anything, she must definitely be missing her mother. Especially when she went to bed in the evening.
“But she never says so,” I argued.
“No, but does Lena usually say things like that?” asked Mum.
I thought for a bit, then shook my head. There are lots of things that Lena doesn’t say.
“She’s never told me that I’m her best friend,” I said to Mum. “Do you think I am?”
Mum smiled. “Yes, I think so.”
“But you can’t be completely sure,” I said.
No, you could never be completely sure if she didn’t say so. Mum had to agree with that.
I didn’t think Lena could be all that upset now, though.
“Isn’t it great that I’ve moved in?” she kept on saying, grinning widely.
“Goodness gracious me, yes,” Grandpa answered. “Trille and I thought it was pretty tame in Mathildewick Cove during that week when you weren’t here.”
In the afternoons, Lena and I had so much fun with Grandpa that we couldn’t get back from school quickly enough. One day when we had come back and thrown our satchels under the balcony, Grandpa asked us if we wanted to go with him up to Hillside Jon’s farm. The snow had disappeared, so we could cycle instead of tobogganing.
But cycling up to Hillside Jon’s, while trying to keep up with Grandpa on his “super-duper-tuned” moped, was almost as tiring as pulling Lena all the way up there on the toboggan. Grandpa had the moped at full throttle and he laughed at us trailing behind. After that day, Lena and I gave Hillside Jon a new name: Hilltop Jon.
When Hilltop Jon was young, he was a sailor, and he lost one of his eyes in an accident. Since then, he’s worn a black pirate’s patch.
“I only see half of the world, and thank God for that,” he tends to say.
Children are often scared of him because of the eye patch, but Lena and I both know that Hilltop Jon isn’t dangerous. On the contrary, there are a lot of good things about him, and the best of all is Hillside Molly, his horse. In summer she grazes at the edge of the forest, and in winter she eats inside her stable.
“That mare is so intelligent that she can practically whinny hymn verses,” Grandpa says.
When we finally got up there, Grandpa and Hilltop Jon sat on the steps drinking coffee, while Lena and I ran into the stable.
“She’s quite an old horse,” said Lena, tilting her head in the semi-darkness.
“She’s intelligent,” I said.
“How do you know that? Can you neigh?”
No, I couldn’t. I just knew, but it was no good trying to explain that to Lena.
We stayed with Hillside Molly for a long while. We stroked her and talked to her, and Lena gave her a boiled sweet. I decided that she had to be the best horse in all the world.
“The horse ate a sweet,” I told Grandpa when we got back to the moped.
“That was probably the last sweet she’ll ever have,” said Grandpa, tightening his helmet.
“What do you mean?” I asked in surprise, but by then Grandpa had started the engine and couldn’t hear anything.
When we got home and he’d finally stopped the engine, I ran over and grabbed his hand.
“What do you mean, her ‘last sweet’?”
Grandpa muttered a little, but then he said that Hilltop Jon was so old that he was going to a retirement home, and Molly was so old that nobody wanted her. “Getting old is rubbish,” Grandpa mumbled angrily, shutting the door in my face.
“What are they going to do with Molly, then?” I shouted through the closed door.
Grandpa didn’t answer. He sat indoors being angry because people and horses and grandpas get old. But Lena answered, loud and clear:
“There are no retirement homes for horses. Don’t you get it? She’s going to be put down.”
I stared at Lena for a long moment. Then I yelled, as loudly as she normally does:
“THEY CAN’T!”
“Can’t,” repeated Krølla seriously.
I told Mum and Dad too. I cried and said that they couldn’t put down horses that were as intelligent as Molly.
“But, Trille dear, we send sheep to be slaughtered every single year, and you never make such a fuss about that!” said Mum, trying to dry my tears.
“Molly’s no sheep!”
They didn’t understand a thing!
The next day, Molly was all I could think about. That good-natured horse who had never done anything wrong to anyone but who was going to die. During our Maths lesson I almost started crying. That would have been pretty embarrassing! I glanced across at Lena. She was sitting, looking out of the window. There are no retirement homes for horses, she’d said.
Suddenly I stood up, tipping over my chair.
“Ellisiv, Lena and I have got to have the rest of the day off,” I said, distressed.
Lena had no idea what I was talking about. Still, she stuffed her Maths book into her bag determinedly, put on a serious face and said:
“It’s a matter of life and death!”
And while Ellisiv and the others watched in astonishment, Lena and I stormed out of the classroom with our satchels half-open.
&
nbsp; “Have you got ants in your pants?” Lena puffed as we ran through the woods on our way home.
“We’re going to start a retirement home for horses!” I shouted enthusiastically.
Lena stopped dead in her tracks. Apart from some birds singing and us puffing after all that running, it was completely quiet. I looked at her anxiously. What if she didn’t like the idea? But then came the beaming response:
“What an incredibly brilliant idea to come up with something like that right in the middle of Maths, Trille!”
Grandpa was the only one who was home. That was good. He was the only one who would be any help. I sat down next to him beneath the balcony.
“We can keep Molly in the old stables, Grandpa. She can live there. Imagine how happy Hilltop Jon will be if he doesn’t have to send her to the abattoir! I’ll cut the grass and rake it up and dry it and look after her and feed her, and Lena can help. Right, Lena?”
Lena nodded. Well, she might as well help a bit with that old horse, she said. I could see that she was happy because of missing Maths.
“And maybe you could help too, Grandpa?” I asked weakly, hardly daring to look at him. Grandpa rubbed his tanned, wrinkled hands on his knees and looked thoughtfully out to sea.
“For example, maybe you could be the grown-up who gives us permission,” I said, even more weakly.
It was difficult to ask for something like this. I could feel that the tears were on their way again, and I fought to hold them back. Grandpa fixed his gaze on me.
“Oh, suffering sticklebacks, all right! There’s no reason young Trille and the little lass from next door couldn’t cope with looking after a horse,” he said eventually.
There were two good reasons for riding in the moped box this time, Grandpa said. Firstly, we had to make it up to Hilltop Jon before he sent Molly away on the slaughter lorry. Secondly, we had to make it up to Hilltop Jon before Grandpa had time to think again.
“Because right now I must be off my head!” he said.
We braked suddenly in the farmyard up at Hillside. There was a car there. It was Vera Johansen’s. Hilltop Jon is her uncle. She was helping him with the packing and the cleaning before he went to the retirement home. As for Hilltop Jon himself, he was sitting on a chair, looking helpless. Grandpa stuck his hands into his boiler-suit pockets and nodded silently to his best friend.