Astrid the Unstoppable

by Maria Parr

  Astrid’s reply was drowned out by Mr Hagen’s yelling, which came rushing through the winter air like a hurricane. You’d have thought he was the one who had almost been run over.

  “That’s it, Asny, I’ve had it with you!”

  Mr Hagen was so angry that the snow melted beneath his feet. Astrid straightened her back and sighed, while Mr Hagen’s ranting filled the winter air.

  Astrid didn’t know then that she had just saved somebody. She knew nothing of the fact that Mr Hagen had already been angry with another small person when he’d heard the racket by the gate. No, Astrid had no idea that there was a young boy standing behind one of the campsite cabins, watching with horror as Mr Hagen hurled all of his rage at a red-haired girl with a sledge, instead of him. And the young boy behind the cabin, who was in fact so scared of Mr Hagen that he thought he might die, was utterly astonished when he saw that the red-haired girl wasn’t scared in the slightest. She calmly gathered up the letters and newspapers as if Mr Hagen weren’t there yelling at her.

  There was one other thing Astrid didn’t know. She didn’t know that one of the letters she was picking up from the snow was the start of something that would change everything.

  The small brown envelope was addressed to Gunnvald Glimmerdal. And Gunnvald Glimmerdal was somebody Astrid knew very well.

  “I can take this letter for you,” she told Finn.

  Then she saluted in her cycling helmet, like a miniature general, and shuffled off back up the glen, pulling the sledge behind her. But this time she didn’t sing.

  Even Astrid felt that enough was enough.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Astrid, Dad and Snorri

  the Seagull have dinner

  There aren’t many people who know about Glimmerdal. It’s just there, hidden away – a bit of a secret. But not for Astrid, as it’s where she’s always lived. She knows all the rocks and the little nooks and crannies down by the river. She knows which trees are good for climbing, and she knows the name of every single mountain that makes a wreath around Glimmerdal. That evening, she stopped in the farmyard back at home to look at the dark silhouettes of the mountaintops against the twilit sky.

  Cairn Peak, that’s the highest mountain. Some eagles have a nest on the steep slope close to the summit. Then there’s Noon Peak, which is where the sun sits at midday. Sometimes avalanches start from there in the winter. The Nape, that’s the smaller mountain right behind Gunnvald’s farm; it has a square patch of spruce forest on its belly, looking like an apron. Gunnvald’s grandfather planted those trees with his own hands. And then there’s Storr Peak, the dark mountain that casts its evening shadow over the glen.

  “My mountains,” Astrid murmured. “And my houses,” she added, when she turned and saw the two houses on the farm.

  Astrid and her dad live in the new house, and so does Astrid’s mum when she’s home. Nobody lives in the old one. Astrid’s uncles moved away before she was born and got married wherever it was they got married, while her grandparents moved back to her granny’s home town two years ago. They only really visit Glimmerdal in the summer now. But the lights are often on in the old house anyway, as Auntie Eira and Auntie Idun always stay there when they come home. Astrid and her dad sometimes stay there for a bit too, so that the old house doesn’t feel totally neglected.

  In the new house, in the light of the kitchen, Astrid could see her dad. He was pottering back and forth, probably making dinner. Snorri the Seagull was sat on the coffee pot, watching him. It was Astrid’s mum who had brought Snorri home when he was a little chick and had been trapped in a fishing net. He was almost dead when she found him out along the coast, so she took him back home to Astrid and her dad. Snorri had spent a whole summer in Glimmerdal, and when his wing had healed, he hadn’t wanted to leave. He was as happy as anything there beneath the mountains, even though he was a seagull.

  “In that case, he can stay,” Astrid had decided.

  Snorri was given his own box in the corridor and his own bowl in the kitchen. He was three years old now and had grown into a fat and noisy seagull of the worst kind. Astrid and her dad loved him. He got up to all sorts of things, and he reminded them of Astrid’s mum. She must hear seagull cries all day long when she’s working by the coast or out at sea, and that’s where she often is. If you’re going to learn things about the sea and oceans, then you have to be by the sea, otherwise it’s no good. And if you’re farmers in Glimmerdal, like Astrid and her dad, then you have to be in Glimmerdal, otherwise it’s no good either. Astrid often wondered what on earth her mum and dad were thinking when they fell in love. They mustn’t have been thinking at all.

  At that moment, Astrid’s mum was away in Greenland, finding out how much ice was melting. Astrid and her dad received emails from her almost every day, with pictures of all the things she was seeing, and telling them about all her experiences.

  “It’s brilliant,” she had written. “Greenland’s absolutely brilliant.”

  Quite often, at night, Astrid dreamt that she was in Greenland. In one of her dreams, she was swimming among the ice floes with the seals, wearing only her swimming costume, but she wasn’t cold. It was the most amazing dream she’d had in a long time.

  Astrid opened the back door and stomped into the passageway together with a wintry gust of evening air.

  “Hi, lads!” she shouted, startling both Snorri and her dad.

  “I thought perhaps you’d decided never to come back,” her dad said.

  “I had to take a letter up to Gunnvald,” Astrid explained, sitting down at the dinner table, which was already laid.

  “Why? Has something happened to Finn?”

  “Almost,” Astrid mumbled, thinking about what would have happened if she’d flattened him with the sledge. “Gunnvald went all weird when I gave it to him. He turned it round and round, and looked at it as if he’d never seen a letter before.” She chewed her food pensively, remembering the sight of Gunnvald with the brown envelope in his hands. It was as if he’d stopped breathing for a moment when he’d seen the return address.

  “Who was it from, then?” Astrid’s dad asked.

  “I don’t know; it was none of my beeswax.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Astrid’s whole body was exhausted but she felt good after her long afternoon out and about. Her toes stung and tingled.

  “Mr Hagen called,” her dad said suddenly.

  “We shouldn’t worry about what Mr Hagen says,” Astrid replied quickly. “Gunnvald said so.”

  Her dad smiled behind his beard. “Well, if Gunnvald says so.”

  He gave Snorri a small ball of cheese. The cheese immediately got stuck in his beak, so he sat there with his mouth wide open, looking worse than a patient at the dentist’s.

  Astrid laughed so hard that milk came out of her nose.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In which Astrid sets out

  to find some disgusting snus,

  and ends up in a real fight

  The next day, when Astrid and her dad had finished their Saturday morning cleaning, she ran over to Gunnvald’s to see how the sledges were getting on. But Gunnvald wasn’t working on the sledges. He was in his kitchen, holding his fiddle and doing nothing.

  “Are you just sitting there?” Astrid asked him, stomping out of her snow boots.

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Gunnvald.

  Then Astrid saw something strange out of the window: tracks in the snow leading up to the little summerhouse at the edge of the forest.

  “Have you been in the summerhouse? What were you doing there?”

  Gunnvald’s grandfather had built the summerhouse over a century ago, when he’d been abso-head-over-heels-lutely in love with a girl called Madelene Katrine Benedicte. Madelene Katrine Benedicte had a blue silk dress and fifty-two suitors, so Gunnvald had told Astrid. Gunnvald’s grandfather was the fifty-third, but instead of giving her roses and rubbish like that, he’d built her a really good summerhouse.

  �
�That has to be the most elaborate way of getting a girlfriend ever,” Auntie Eira had said once. “Imagine if Peter took a leaf out of Gunnvald’s grandfather’s book and hammered together a summerhouse for you, Idun. Not bad, eh?”

  Madelene Katrine Benedicte had never seen anything as beautiful as the little white house with its big windows. And she’d never met a more dashing man than Gunnvald’s grandfather. That’s how Gunnvald had ended up with the world’s most beautiful grandmother and a summerhouse at the edge of the forest.

  In summer, it’s nice to sit in the summerhouse, playing cards and drinking squash while thinking about Gunnvald’s grandfather and the beautiful Madelene Katrine Benedicte. Gunnvald and Astrid often do that. But now it was winter. What on earth had Gunnvald been doing up there?

  “You know that letter from yesterday?” Gunnvald said eventually, after Astrid had spent a good while badgering him.

  “What about it?”

  Gunnvald groaned. He seemed annoyed. “It was a letter saying that somebody I used to know has died.”

  Astrid took one of the home-made vanilla biscuits from the bowl on the table. You wouldn’t know from looking at Gunnvald that he was descended from a beautiful grandmother. His eyebrows resembled two worn-out toothbrushes.

  “Who is it that’s died, then?” she asked him.

  “Nobody special.”

  “Nobody special?”

  “No. Nobody special.”

  Gunnvald laid his fiddle on the table and pulled out his snus tin. It was empty. “Oh, crab apples!” he shouted angrily, throwing the tin on the floor. Hulda was scared and leapt up into the kitchen sink.

  Astrid knew only too well how grumpy Gunnvald got without that yucky snus of his. And now the shop was closed. That’s what happens when you just sit there, thinking and not planning.

  “I’ll take the kick-sledge and pop down to Nils. He’ll have a tin of snus you can borrow,” she said. “You’re impossible to be with when you’re like this anyway.”

  Astrid went to find the kick-sledge, an upright sledge a bit like a chair that you can push around on the ice and snow. It’s a good way to move fast without slipping over. She jumped on the runners at the back, set off down the hill and was soon whizzing past Hagen’s Wellness Retreat.

  “Gunnvald, he needs snus, and bad,

  And when he gets it he’ll be glad.

  Ralla-yalla-halla-yalla-yaaa!

  But if he’s grumpy as a goose,

  There won’t be any rotten snus:

  I’ll take his snus to Timbuktu.

  Ralla-yalla-halla-yalla-yuuu!”

  She looked like a snowman when she finally arrived down at the bottom of the glen and parked outside the sheltered housing where Nils lives. Nils is Peter’s grandfather. Every now and then he has what Peter calls a “funny turn”. That’s when Nils drinks too much beer. Nils’s funny turns can last for a couple of days or they can last for several weeks. Even though Nils says a lot of strange and funny things when he has a funny turn, neither Peter nor Anna – Peter’s grandmother – nor anybody else in Peter’s family, thinks it is any fun. Astrid wondered whether or not Nils would be having one of his turns that day. But most of all, she wondered whether or not he would have any snus.

  Sure enough, he was having one of his turns. And he had some snus too.

  “Anna, Ashtrid wantsh shome shnush!” Nils called out. Then he tottered off into the flat.

  Astrid stood waiting in the corridor, and while she stood there, she heard the old couple having a strange conversation.

  “Yes, Gunnvald probably needs some snus today,” Anna whispered. “It said in one of the Oslo papers that Anna Zimmermann’s died.”

  “Anna Zimmermann’s died?” Nils shouted. “That old bag,” he added.

  “Shame on you, Nils!” Granny Anna scolded him. “You can’t say things like that.”

  “I can say what I want about Anna Zimmermann. She was an old bag,” Nils muttered. Then he came veering out into the corridor with the dreaded snus.

  “Who’s Anna Zimmermann?” Astrid asked.

  “An old bag,” said Nils, scratching under his nose. “Tell Gunnvald he can have this tin on me. He probably needs it.”

  Astrid’s head was swimming as she pushed the kick-sledge back up the glen. Anna Zimmermann? An old bag? Astrid had never heard of anybody called Anna Zimmermann in all her life. Was she the person Gunnvald had been thinking about in his summerhouse? Astrid was so deep in her own thoughts that she passed Hagen’s Wellness Retreat without letting out a single verse of her latest song. It was only when she reached the enchanted forest that she saw something that almost made her eyes pop out on stalks.

  There were two children walking along the road.

  Astrid was so stunned that her mouth dropped open. Two boys! One of them was wearing camouflage trousers, and had a bandana round his head. He was jumping about, kicking lumps of ice. The other was wearing normal clothes and walking peacefully along the verge. Could it really be true? Were there children on holiday in Glimmerdal?

  The two boys caught sight of her and slowed down; soon they were standing face to face in the middle of the snow-covered glen. Astrid was just about to smile when the boy with the bandana opened his mouth.

  “Don’t mess with my brother.”

  Astrid raised her eyebrows.

  “If you so much as touch my brother, I’ll make mincemeat out of you and cook you with gravy,” he warned, glaring at her threateningly. The other boy, the one she wasn’t supposed to touch, looked embarrassed.

  Astrid couldn’t stop herself. She put her kick-sledge firmly to one side, then walked straight past the boy in the bandana and up to his brother standing by the bank of snow. She poked him in the shoulder.

  “You touched my brother!” the younger boy yelled.

  Astrid smiled her broadest smile, but that was all she could manage before the little maniac threw himself at her like a lynx.

  He was attacking her! In her own glen! Rabid ravens, did that make her angry.

  “Aaaaaagh!” Astrid roared.

  They grappled on the ice with such force that the snow poles marking the edges of the road trembled. He pulled Astrid’s hair, pinched, grabbed and hit her, and she did exactly the same back, at least as fiercely.

  But suddenly the boy in the bandana just stopped fighting. “Brother!” he shouted. Or at least that was what it sounded like. It was all so abrupt.

  His brother had gone. Astrid couldn’t believe it was possible to show so little interest in a real fight.

  The young boy ran off shouting, “Brother, wait! Brother!” His voice echoed in the mountains around Glimmerdal. How strange, Astrid thought. Why didn’t he call his brother by his name? Slowly she brushed snow off herself. She was shivering, her hand hurt and her head was pounding. What had just happened?

  Then she noticed something that horrified her. The boy had taken the tin of snus.

  Astrid accelerated her kick-sledge to a dizzying speed and caught up with the brothers by Hagen’s Wellness Retreat. She skidded to a halt, blocking the road ahead of them. She had learnt that from Auntie Eira. It was easy to see that the two boys were brothers, even though one had dark hair and the other was blond. They each had the same bright spark in their eyes.

  “The snus,” said Astrid.

  The younger boy with the straight dark hair was holding the tin in one hand, and he showed no sign of giving it up.

  “Give me that revolting snus, please,” Astrid said again. If only she knew how threatening she looked standing there, the little empress of Glimmerdal.

  “Give her the snus, Ola.” The boy Astrid wasn’t supposed to touch clearly could speak. He turned to her apologetically. “He doesn’t mean it. He just—”

  “You bet I mean it!” the smaller boy shouted, throwing the tin of snus as far as he could. It landed a bit further up the road. “By the way, you fight like a girl,” he snarled, before storming off angrily into the holiday camp.

  �
��I am a girl!” Astrid yelled furiously after him.

  The other boy was still there. The one she’d touched. He looked friendly, with his blond hair and bashful eyes. With all of her heart, Astrid wished he would say something. Something nice. Her nose was bleeding, leaving red circles in the snow. But the boy didn’t say anything. He simply looked down, then turned round and followed the snus thief.

  Astrid was left standing alone outside the gate. “Idiots!”

  Astrid’s shouting made Mr Hagen pull aside a curtain and shoot her a look that would have given most people the chills. But Astrid was only watching where the two brothers had disappeared behind the wall of a cabin.

  “Idiots,” she whispered, turning her kick-sledge round.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In which Gunnvald tells Astrid about

  love, and Astrid tells Gunnvald about

  the teeny-tiniest billy goat Gruff

  Back at Gunnvald’s house, Astrid’s tears began to flow.

  “I’ve been in a fight!” she sobbed.

  An astonished Gunnvald pulled out Astrid’s usual chair and found some tissues, while the little thunderbolt of Glimmerdal let the whole story come gushing forth. Gunnvald wondered if she had landed any good punches, and Astrid thought she had. He found some antiseptic and patched her up. While she sniffled on about how miserable life could be, Gunnvald made some hot chocolate out of real chocolate bars. He placed a steaming mug in front of Astrid, then took a big pinch of snus and put it under his lip. It was the most fantastic snus he’d ever tasted in all his seventy-four years, he said; you could almost tell that somebody had gone through fire and water to get hold of it. Glory to Nils and Astrid and all that was good in the world. Astrid would normally have said how absolutely revolting she thought snus was, but she was still too busy sniffling away. This was the most tragic thing that had happened to her for as long as she could remember. And she had longed so much for other children to come to Glimmerdal!

  “Why do the first children who come here have to be such bullies?” she shouted.