Astrid the Unstoppable

by Maria Parr

  “Come on,” she said, taking Nils by the arm.

  “It’s got a mind of its own,” Nils complained, pointing at his frame.

  Astrid took baby steps as she walked alongside the old man. When they got to the old ice-cream table, they had to stop for a break.

  “Is it true that little Heidi’s come home?” Nils asked hazily.

  “Little” wasn’t quite the right word, Astrid thought, but she nodded. Horrible Heidi. Then it all came spilling out of her, all the awful things that had happened over the past few days. It was a long and almost endless tale of misery. Nils listened and nodded and said “hmm”. He probably wasn’t really listening, Astrid thought.

  But when she’d finished, he fumbled around for his snus and said, “I remember the day she left.”

  Nils’s eyes weren’t looking at Astrid or the quayside any more. It was as if they were looking inside him, back to the old days, back to that time almost thirty years before, when Nils still drove a lorry and lived in his own house with Anna, and when Gunnvald still had black hair and was the strongest man in Glimmerdal.

  “The day Heidi left, Gunnvald came down to me,” said Nils, his voice not as unclear any more. “I’ve never seen a more devastated man, Astrid. Gunnvald loved that daughter of his so much that nobody else could understand. And poor Heidi, she was so fond of Gunnvald—”

  “She wasn’t! She left him!”

  Astrid’s voice was as angry as Gunnvald’s had been at the hospital. Nils manoeuvred his horrible snus into place under his lip and chuckled a little.

  “That’s what Gunnvald says, yes. But it was that blinking Anna Zimmermann who was to blame for the whole thing, Astrid. She was the one who took Heidi away. As if she were a parcel,” he added, clearing his throat.

  “But Heidi went with her,” Astrid said, as harshly as before.

  With some difficulty, Nils turned round and fixed his blurred eyes on her. “Have you never wanted to go with your mother when she leaves on her expeditions, you little thunderbolt?”

  Astrid huddled up on the bench.

  Ah yes, those days when Astrid’s mum packed her computer and all her important papers into her watertight red bag. Her woollen goodbye jumper that smelt of the ocean. Her dad standing in the doorway with Snorri, looking at Astrid’s mum with his lovey-dovey eyes. Her mum’s hair when she was just out of the shower, reaching all the way down her back. Astrid always wondered what it was going to be like by the sea, where her mum would unpack her things, in a small cabin, or on a big boat. And each time she wondered how long it would take for her dad to start looking forward to her mum coming home instead of being sad that she’d gone. Astrid could never leave her dad. Or could she? If her mum asked her? If her mum asked if Astrid wanted to come along on an ocean expedition? Wouldn’t Astrid go with her then so she wouldn’t have to hang around being motherless all the time?

  “Maybe,” she said, looking sadly at old Nils.

  “Grown-ups do lots of stupid things, Astrid. I should know, sitting here drunk on a Wednesday afternoon.” He shook his head at himself. “But there’s one important thing to remember.” He turned towards her. “Nothing is ever the children’s fault.”

  Nils prodded his finger down at Astrid’s knee as he said it, as if he wanted to leave the words stamped in her mind. “Nothing – is – ever – the – children’s – fault.”

  “What’s never the children’s fault?” Astrid gasped.

  “Anything. All the things grown-ups do wrong.” Nils’s voice was clear and certain.

  They sat there in silence for a long time. The seagulls shrieked around them, and the waves lapped beneath the ferry landing.

  “And Gunnvald’s never got that into his thick head,” Nils grumbled eventually. “Heidi was only a young girl back then.”

  “But she went with her,” Astrid said again, more softly this time.

  “What else was she to do? Heidi was a fiend at the fiddle. She knocked spots off her father. When Anna Zimmermann found out, she went ahead and decided that Heidi should go to Germany and learn properly. Just you ask Gunnvald if he ever called his daughter after she left. Or if he sent her letters, or if he went to visit her. You ask Gunnvald about that, Astrid.”

  Astrid huddled up even more on the bench. “Did he?”

  “Ask Gunnvald,” Nils snuffled.

  Astrid thought about the time Gunnvald had thrown a chair at the wall because her uncle had asked if Heidi was ever going to come back.

  “I’ve probably said too much. You’d better take me home, otherwise my dear little Anna will hit me over the head with a rolling pin,” Nils mumbled, scratching his head anxiously and spitting out a disgusting glob of snus.

  Astrid was very deep in thought. She’d dropped Nils off at the sheltered housing and was shuffling back up Glimmerdal. But then she was torn out of her thoughts. There was Theo, standing outside his hair salon, smoking.

  “Didn’t you stop smoking?” Astrid asked him crossly.

  “Yes,” said Theo, “but Matisse’s pups are killing me. It’s that mongrel of Able Seaman Jon’s that’s the father. They just don’t look right,” he complained crossly. “Now they’re starting to grow and they’re getting restless.”

  Astrid couldn’t cope with any more problems, and certainly not any that were canine-related, but Theo dragged her into the salon.

  “There! Look!” he announced.

  Matisse, Theo’s petite white show dog, was lying in a large basket, and crawling around her were five puppies that looked slightly odd, to put it mildly. Astrid wanted to run away, but before she knew it, she was standing there with one of the small spotted creatures in her hands.

  “Take him!” said Theo. “You can have him, Astrid.”

  Astrid was terror-stricken and held out the puppy at arm’s length. He was tiny and kicked his legs in the air.

  “Take him,” Theo urged again.

  “I don’t want to!”

  She looked at Theo in panic, but just as he was about to take the puppy back, she held the sweet little dog close to her. His heart was thundering like a tractor inside his tiny, soft body.

  “All right, I’ll take him,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In which Heidi and Astrid engage

  in a kind of trench warfare that

  not even Mr Hagen can disrupt

  The afternoon sun was resting on Storr Peak when Astrid finally arrived. Her legs shook as she crossed the farmyard, walked past the flagpole and up the steps to the house. The puppy had been whimpering a bit on the way there. So had Astrid, if truth be told.

  She knocked at the door. Nobody answered. Cautiously Astrid tried the door handle. Locked. She went round the side of the house and peered into the kitchen. Heidi’s back was covering half of the window. When Astrid knocked on the window, Heidi turned round and looked at her grumpily, then pulled the curtains shut.

  “I’m not leaving!” Astrid shouted. “I’m going to stay here until you open up, got it?”

  Back on the doorstep, she took out her woolly hat and put it under her bottom. You could catch a chill if you sat on cold stone steps for too long – and Astrid was planning on sitting there for as long as she had to.

  “There, there, little pup, we’re just going to wait here,” she comforted the dog, stroking it with trembling hands. “I’ve got to get rid of you, you see.”

  Thus began a real trench war in the glen. On either side of Gunnvald’s door sat a stubborn-as-nails girl from Glimmerdal, waiting with clenched teeth. Heidi was waiting for Astrid to leave; Astrid was waiting for Heidi to open up.

  When Astrid had been sitting on the steps for over two hours and the time was half past six, Mr Hagen came storming up to the farm, his car brakes screeching.

  “Have you locked her inside?” he asked Astrid.

  “I’m the one who’s locked out,” Astrid explained.

  Mr Hagen asked Astrid to move. Astrid didn’t move.

>   “Adelheid Zimmermann! This is Mr Hagen!” he shouted. “We had an appointment at six o’clock!”

  Astrid lowered her head, hiding a smile beneath her jacket collar.

  “Wipe that smile off your face, Asny,” he snapped, clearly annoyed. “If you think you can ruin this deal, then you’re wrong. Adelheid Zimmermann!”

  He walked round the side of the house and knocked on the kitchen window. He knocked hard and kept knocking for a while.

  But there wasn’t a sound from inside Gunnvald’s house and eventually Mr Hagen had to leave. He spat out some spectacularly bad words about all the preposterous women in this glen and roared away in his big car. It was so gloriously quiet when he’d left that Astrid sighed with happiness. She leant against the doorframe and closed her eyes.

  She must have nodded off for a while, as suddenly there was somebody gently stroking her cheek.

  “Don’t you want to come home, Astrid?”

  It was her dad. He looked at the dog and at the closed door. Astrid shook her head.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  He went, and when he came back half an hour later, he’d brought a flask of soup for Astrid, a bowl with some cold food for the puppy, and some warm blankets.

  “You might have a long night ahead of you,” he said, nodding in the direction of the closed door. “Believe me.”

  He tapped Astrid’s nose with a little smile and wandered off back down the hill.

  “That’s my dad,” Astrid whispered softly, her eyes following him all the way home.

  It was during that long night that Astrid Glimmerdal lost her fear of dogs. It just wasn’t possible to sit there all night being scared of a strange, whimpering puppy. When Astrid realized he was freezing, she even tucked him under her jumper, with only the dog’s head sticking out of her collar. His soft coat tickled against her skin.

  She smiled. “I’ve got two heads.”

  Astrid had slept outdoors many, many times with her aunts in the summer. Often they just went over to the edge of the forest, or down to the swimming hole by the river, and rolled out their ground mats. When darkness fell and the birds went quiet, the ceaseless thundering of the river was the only sound to be heard in Glimmerdal. It was the best way to fall asleep. Astrid leant against the doorframe and pretended it was a summer evening. A gentle night breeze stroked her cheeks. And when her dad switched off the lights on the other side of the glen, Astrid fell asleep too.

  At three o’clock in the morning, she woke up freezing. The rain was pouring down! She was absolutely soaked, even through her jumper to where she was holding the puppy.

  “Heidi, you’ve got to open up before we catch something!” Astrid shouted drowsily.

  Nobody opened up.

  Now Astrid really was tired and cold! And there was something else she’d started thinking about: her promise to Lise that she’d never ever in the history of the world skive off school again. What would she do if Heidi still hadn’t opened up in the morning? She would have to go to school.

  “Heidi! Please!”

  No reaction. You would’ve thought Heidi was dead or something. To console herself, Astrid started singing the old goat-herding lullaby. She let out verse after verse there on the doorstep. And when she finished, she started all over again.

  Nobody can sing “Bluey, Billy Goat of Mine” like I can, Astrid thought happily. And nobody can play it as well as Gunnvald, she added to herself.

  No sooner had she thought that than she heard a fiddle playing.

  Astrid felt scared. She’d read the story about “The Little Match Girl”, the poor girl who froze to death on New Year’s Eve. The first sign that she was almost dead was when she started imagining things that weren’t there.

  “Am I freezing to death? How else can I be hearing Gunnvald playing his fiddle?”

  Astrid straightened her back and shook her head. The tune “Bluey, Billy Goat of Mine” was coming from behind the closed door. And now Astrid could hear that it wasn’t Gunnvald playing. The notes were completely different. It was as if the fiddle were toying with the tune and playing something that resembled it but wasn’t quite the same after all. Astrid was mesmerized. So was the dog. He looked around in confusion from the collar of Astrid’s jumper; he couldn’t understand what was going on.

  When the music died down, Astrid got to her feet and leant with her ear against the door. Suddenly, there was somebody opening the door, and Astrid fell into the hallway like a sack of potatoes. She was just able to turn enough in mid-air to land on her back so she wouldn’t squash the puppy into a puppy pancake.

  There she lay, as wet as a sheep left to graze outdoors all year round. Above her stood Heidi, a fiddle in her hands. She didn’t say a word.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  In which Astrid gets to

  hear the end of the book,

  and Heidi reveals more

  “I’ve brought you a new dog,” Astrid said as she lay there on the floor.

  Heidi looked at the little head peeping out from Astrid’s jumper. “That’s the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” she said.

  Astrid nodded. “But he doesn’t bite.”

  Heidi reached out a hand and helped Astrid up, without saying any more.

  A little later, Astrid was sitting on the sofa wearing one of Heidi’s woollen jumpers. It was like a big warm nightie. Her wet clothes were hanging to dry by the stove. She’d been given some hot chocolate in her own special mug. Some crazy hot chocolate made out of dark chocolate with chilli: Astrid had never tasted anything like it.

  She plunged her head down into the enormous mug, and when she came back up, she cleared her throat. “I’m so sorry about what happened with your dog, Heidi.”

  Heidi brushed it off as if it were nothing. “That dog was vicious. I should’ve shot him ages ago. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I got him from a friend who died, and, well, he’s been living at my farm for—”

  “You have a farm?” Astrid asked her, stunned.

  Heidi nodded. “I’ve got a farm in eastern Norway, but I’m only there from time to time, and I don’t manage it myself.”

  “Because you live in Frankfurt, right?” Astrid said.

  “Well, yes, I own a town house there now too, since Anna died.”

  “And that’s where you live?”

  “Yes, when I’m not in my flat in Hong Kong.”

  “Hong Kong?”

  “Or in Portugal.”

  Astrid’s jaw dropped. “Are you rich?”

  Heidi laughed. This time it was a beautiful laugh. “Yes, unfortunately I am,” she said. She turned her mug round in her hands and stretched out one of her enormous legs on the kitchen floor.

  “Have you been to Greenland?” Astrid asked her.

  “No, I’ve never been there,” said Heidi.

  “Mum has. She works there.”

  “Really?”

  It was wonderful for Astrid to talk about her mother with somebody who wanted to listen. Astrid told Heidi about the rising sea levels, about her mum’s research, and about what it was like in Greenland, the way her mum had spoken about it in emails and on the phone.

  “She’s coming home soon, because she’s missing Glimmerdal now,” Astrid finished.

  Heidi smiled a little. “Yes, it’s hard to forget Glimmerdal as you travel around the world.”

  “Do you miss Glimmerdal, then? When you’re travelling around the world?” Astrid asked.

  “Yes, you miss it then,” said Heidi. “You long to go back to Glimmerdal so much it makes your stomach hurt.”

  “Every day?” Astrid asked, horrified.

  “Every day.”

  Astrid had never seen anybody change from smiling to serious as quickly as Heidi. The tall lady got up suddenly and stiffly. She went over to the stove, mixed in the thin skin that had formed on the rest of the hot chocolate, then turned back towards Astrid.

  “You know Gunnvald quite well, don’t you?” she aske
d.

  Astrid nodded.

  “Does he ever mention me?”

  “Huh?” said Astrid, wishing that Heidi had asked something else.

  “Has Gunnvald ever mentioned my name?”

  Oh, how Astrid wished she could say yes. What a fool Gunnvald had been, never saying a single word about having a daughter. Astrid stared down into her brown hot chocolate, with red pieces of hot chilli bobbing up and down.

  “Has he?” Heidi asked again.

  “No,” Astrid mumbled.

  They fell silent. Astrid squirmed a little on the sofa, wishing that it wasn’t all so difficult. Then she spotted the green book on the kitchen table.

  “You’re almost like the Heidi from the book: you’ve got the same name, and then you both went to Frankfurt.”

  “Yes.” Heidi drummed her fingers on the green book, and then she said that Gunnvald used to read to her.

  “Did he?” Gunnvald had never read anything to Astrid.

  “He did, and this was my favourite book. We must have read it thirty times,” said Heidi. “We used to pretend that I was Heidi from the book, and that Gunnvald was my grandfather. Sally down by the bridge: she was Peter the goatherd’s old grandmother. And Sigurd, your father: he was Peter.”

  “Dad pretended he was Peter the goatherd?” Astrid asked in disbelief.

  “You bet he did,” said Heidi. “We used to run around the mountains every day. For my eighth birthday, Gunnvald bought us two goats, so we could play it for real.”

  Astrid almost felt a little jealous as she sat there. She wished there was a book about a girl called Astrid, too.

  “What happens to Heidi? I haven’t finished reading the book. You and the dog came and interrupted me.”