by Maria Parr
I glanced up at Grandpa. Was he getting fed up with all these questions about Granny? No. He looked happy.
“Well, I’d say she was living here when she fell in love with me!”
“Pfft,” said Lena. “You’re just boasting.”
Then Grandpa told her gruffly that he had once been young and handsome too, whether we believed it or not.
“But I wanted to be an oceangoing mariner and sail to Shanghai and Liverpool and Baltimore. I wasn’t about to fritter my time away in Mathildewick Cove and get married. Not on your nelly!”
He shook his head. “You two should’ve seen the long line of girls I’ve turned down in my life!”
“Yes, I’d like to have seen that,” Lena said dryly. “Was Trille’s granny in that line too?”
Grandpa smiled and looked out to sea.
“Yes and no,” he murmured.
A gentle breeze began to rustle softly through the grass around the steps.
“We’d better get in the boat, young ’uns!”
“How do you know where to put these fishing lines, anyway?” Lena asked as we approached the buoy.
Grandpa laughed. Nobody will ever share the secrets of how to find their best fishing spots!
“Inger,” he said. “She was the one who showed me the best places out here. Goodness knows I could’ve kept close to the shore, fishing for kelp cod with Thunderclap Kåre and Co., but that wouldn’t have been as much fun. Can you reach the buoy, Trille?”
We didn’t catch any halibut, but we got a whole heap of tusk and cod. Grandpa looked strong as he hooked them with his fishing gaff and pulled them onto the boat. Maybe I wasn’t as much like Grandpa as I’d thought, I wondered, feeling sad in a strange and new way. Girls weren’t going to be lining up anywhere near me.
That evening, I cycled to the churchyard alone. Lena’s often tried to scare me off from going there. She tells me about ghosts and grave robbers and Satanists and goodness knows what else. But I’ve always liked it there. This time it felt especially good to open the gate and walk in under the cool trees. My head was pounding from too much sun and sea.
I walked past Auntie Granny’s grave and over to the small, round gravestone on the other side of the churchyard. Inger Yttergård, it said in gold writing. Born May 6, 1933, died November 22, 1968. What was she like, I wondered, this lady who had been married to Grandpa? Mom had told me that she’d died of cancer. My heart felt crushed when I thought about it. Grandpa had lost her, and so had Dad. Long before I was here. Is it possible to miss somebody you’ve never met? I patted the smooth stone, and suddenly my fingertips remembered something. I took a step backward and looked again at the gravestone, which I’d always thought was a little odd.
It was a boulder from Kobbholmen.
Autumn was on its way. From my window, I could see Troll chugging cheerily out across a grayish-blue late August fjord. The school bell was about to start controlling my life, but Grandpa could carry on like before: fishing, drinking coffee, and having a peaceful time.
As I turned away from the window and lifted up my backpack, I realized that I was looking forward to school a bit after all. Today I would get to see Birgit again. For the first time in my life, I spent a long time standing in front of the closet, pondering what to wear. I didn’t think any of my clothes were especially cool. I pinched some of the hair wax that Magnus keeps in the bathroom.
Usually Mom gets up before me, but that morning, on the first day back at school, she was still sleeping.
“Is she ill?” Magnus asked as he rummaged in the fridge.
“She’s just tired,” said Dad. There was a wrinkle on his brow.
I packed my lunch as quick as the wind and leaped into my boots so I could walk with Minda and Magnus to their bus stop.
“Minda, did you notice that Dad was worried?” I scurried along beside her.
“Dad’s always worried.”
“But Mom usually comes to say goodbye and tell us to have a good day,” I said.
Minda stopped. “Have you ever thought that Mom isn’t just there to get up and say goodbye to you, Trille? Maybe she’d like to sleep in for once. Maybe she’s got her own life to get on with!”
I opened my mouth to say something.
“And if you don’t stop wearing those boots to school soon, there’ll be no hope for your social life,” she finished, and ran off to the bus.
I watched her go. What was wrong with wearing wellies to school? It was raining, after all! Then somebody grabbed my hood, almost strangling me.
“Why hello, you little gnome. Ready for our last year at primary? We’re going to rule the school,” said Lena, grinning.
Luckily, she was wearing wellies too.
Our cove is a bit out of the way, so it’s a fair distance to walk to school. The first thing we come to is the road that leads up to Hillside, and after that there’s quite a long stretch with the sea on one side and thick spruce forest on the other. I’ve lost count of the times Lena’s disappeared up into the forest and frightened me out of my wits by jumping out at me farther on. But today she walked with me all the way. We didn’t see Birgit.
“Did you know that Ellisiv’s bought this place?” Lena said as we passed the lone red cottage on the road between the forest and the ferry landing.
“Yes, Mom told me.”
“Maybe we should start walking to school with our teacher.”
Lena looked like she wasn’t sure whether her suggestion was a good or bad idea. She’s very fond of Ellisiv.
The ferry landing was deserted, and the little shop wasn’t open yet. The local teenagers normally hang out there in the afternoons. They ride their mopeds and sit around on the tables.
“Sitting there and gaping at the ferry is enough to kill anybody’s soul,” Lena said once. “Just look at Magnus.”
It wasn’t exactly a nice thing to say about my elder brother. But she had a point.
Kai-Tommy was hanging over his handlebars as we entered the school playground, and he shouted something at us. His voice was deep like a grown man’s, but it broke at the end, and the last words sounded like seagulls screeching.
“His voice is changing.” Lena was impressed and shocked at the same time.
“Are you two hard of hearing?” he asked, skidding to a stop in front of us. He was wearing new black sneakers and a cap and hoodie instead of a bike helmet.
“I didn’t catch what you said because of your new voice,” Lena said frankly.
Kai-Tommy jumped off his bike. “I said: Have you seen Birgit?”
Huh? Had Kai-Tommy met Birgit?
He had. It turned out he and Halvor had spent a great deal of time with Birgit over the past few days. They’d been swimming at the ferry landing, and they’d even been to visit her up at Hillside. It took all my strength not to let my jaw drop. I was the one who’d found Birgit first! Why on earth would she spend time with Kai-Tommy and Halvor? They were the two biggest idiots in the whole school!
Lena told Kai-Tommy that we hadn’t seen Birgit since the great shipwreck a few weeks ago.
“We were at death’s door, and Trille’s dad was so furious that I think she was scared away.”
Did Lena always have to blabber away like that? I didn’t want Kai-Tommy to know anything. Not about Birgit, not about me, and certainly not about Dad.
What a terrible start to everything. Lena stayed there talking with Kai-Tommy, probably because he’d gotten such a wacky voice. I shuffled off inside, looking like an idiot in my boots. It was silent and deserted in the corridor outside the classrooms. Schoolbags were strewn everywhere. The last remains of the summer ran off me. I put my back against the wall and slid down. By now Grandpa would be somewhere out at sea. And I was stuck here.
“Are you all right?”
I hadn’t seen her amid all the bags. It was almost like she was hiding. Birgit. She was even speaking Norwegian now.
“Erm, yes,” I said, blushing. “And you?”
She
shrugged slightly. I don’t know precisely what I’d been expecting, but when Kai-Tommy said they’d been hanging out with her, I’d assumed that she would probably be all stupid and arrogant now. But she was exactly the same. A cautious smile and a soft voice. Was it possible to be like that and yet still be friends with Kai-Tommy?
By the time the bell rang, the crazy morning had gotten better. I’d spoken with Birgit for quite a while. I’d told her about Ellisiv and about the school and our class. Birgit asked if we’d made any more rafts, which I flatly denied. Then she smiled, and my head went all fuzzy.
On Tuesday, it was time for our music lessons to start up again. We’d been having them for the past two years: Lena was learning the keyboard and I was learning the piano. I’d explained to Mom that I’d prefer to play the drums, but for some reason or other that appeared to be out of the question.
“I have a feeling that I might have a talent for the drums,” I told Lena.
Our lessons were one after the other this year too.
“You don’t have a talent for the piano, anyway,” she replied, whirling the plastic bag with her keyboard book in it around her head like a sledgehammer.
“I’m better than you,” I mumbled.
My best friend is absolutely terrible at the keyboard. Ylva loves music and plays all kinds of instruments, but Lena hasn’t inherited a single ounce of musicality. Sometimes when I’ve been listening to Lena mangling a song on the keyboard, I think that father of hers, who ran off before she was born, must have been completely tone-deaf. But I haven’t told Lena, of course. I think Ylva harbors a hope as deep as the forest that her daughter’s got a musical side hidden away somewhere. She’s very keen for Lena to learn the keyboard, anyway.
Mr. Rognstad, our teacher, doesn’t show much understanding for people who can’t play. It’s as if he thinks our lack of talent is on purpose. Lena behaves very strangely when she’s having her keyboard lesson. She looks at the floor and turns into a little jellyfish mumbling “yes” or “OK” and nothing else, no matter how unfair he’s being. Lena, who always speaks straight from the heart! I can’t get my head around it.
“I’m going to quit this year,” Lena said now.
“What about your skis?” I asked. Ylva had promised her new skis for Christmas if she kept up the lessons for another year.
“Ugh, there’ll probably be just as little snow this year as there was last year. I hate music lessons. I can’t keep on doing things I hate.”
“I can’t stop. Mom says —”
“Trille.” Lena paused. “Have you ever thought that maybe sometimes you’re right and your mom’s wrong?”
I sank into my jacket collar and shook my head. But now that Lena mentioned it, it struck me that there were a whole host of things Mom had said and done recently that I didn’t agree with at all.
“Do you think my mom’s been a bit strange recently?” I asked.
“Strange? She’s totally cuckoo, Trille.”
“What do you think is wrong with her, then?”
“Menopause.”
It was as if Lena had been waiting for me to ask about Mom.
“Is that an illness?”
“Not exactly an illness.”
It depended on how you looked at it, according to Lena. Some call it The Change. All women have to go through it when they reach the age where they can’t have children anymore. Their bodies change and start to become like old ladies’ bodies. But before they finish changing, there’s a lot of sweating and nerves and miserable stuff.
“Some of them become fat, and others just feel fed up. I think your mom’s got both sides of it.”
I was shocked. Poor Mom!
“In that case, I think it’s best I choose another time to stop learning the piano,” I said.
“That’s probably wise,” said Lena. “But I can stop. My mom’s from a different generation than yours.”
And then we’d arrived. Lena slowly opened the door to the music school corridor.
“I hope Kai-Tommy’s still before me, like last year.”
Kai-Tommy’s even worse than Lena. For a while, when Lena and he were more enemies than ever, she had insisted on arriving for her music lesson a quarter of an hour early so she could stand in the corridor and take joy in all the slipups and sighs coming from inside.
But today there was a surprise. Fantastic piano music was flowing out from behind the closed classroom door.
“That’s definitely not Kai-Tommy,” Lena declared. She listened to the piano trills, clearly downhearted. “Maybe that’s Mr. Rognstad himself playing,” she said hopefully.
Then the door opened, and out came Birgit.
“Hi!” she said, smiling in surprise. She was carrying a pile of sheet music under her arm.
I felt warm, then cold, then warm again. Could she play the piano too?
“See you next week, Birgit,” said a happy Mr. Rognstad. Then he turned toward Lena and seemed to deflate a little. “Back again this year, Miss Lid?”
I could see that Lena was about to give one of her typical replies, but then she closed her mouth. I don’t know which of them sighed loudest as they disappeared into the classroom.
“How was it?” I asked Lena on the way home.
She had looked even gloomier than usual when she’d finished her lesson.
“All right.”
My lesson had been just all right too. But now it was going to be another kettle of fish. I couldn’t keep playing like a porpoise if Birgit might be listening. Just think, now I could chat with her in the corridor every Tuesday. I could teach her Norwegian words.
“Maybe we should ask Birgit if she’d like to go with us next time,” I said.
Lena kicked a stone, which shot off an endless distance down the road. “Didn’t I tell you that I’m going to stop going, you sea cucumber?”
But the next Tuesday, Lena was waiting with her keyboard bag once again.
“Weren’t you going to quit?” I asked her, surprised.
“Do you think I can afford my own skis?” she snapped, glancing over at the junction of Hilltop Jon’s road, where Birgit stood waiting.
Thanks to Birgit, my music lessons were going much better than I’d thought. But soccer was ten times worse.
“You’re kidding,” Lena mumbled as we arrived at our practice. She propped her bike against the fence by the side of the field. “Where’s Axel?”
Our old soccer coach — the one who’d discovered Lena’s goalkeeping ability, and who was the nicest man in the world — was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Kai-Tommy’s dad was standing there.
“Why would he bother to train us?” Lena whispered. “We’re terrible.”
When he was young, Ivar, Kai-Tommy’s dad, used to play in the first division. Kai-Tommy tells that to anybody with ears to listen. Kai-Tommy’s big brother is also a real soccer talent. He plays for a junior team in town and has started training with their first team now and then. He’s the one their father’s been focusing on all these years. On the rare occasions he’d turned up at our games, he didn’t act like the other parents, cheering and jumping up and down however well we were playing. No, he kept totally silent with his eyes picking up everything. Kai-Tommy worked like crazy and shouted twice as much at the rest of us when we were being useless, especially at me.
After one such game, when Kai-Tommy had snarled at me that I belonged at under-tens level and was a disgrace to the team, Lena had explained a couple of things on the way home.
“Kai-Tommy’s got a major inferiority complex when it comes to soccer, Trille.”
“What do you mean, an inferiority complex?” I asked angrily. I hated Kai-Tommy so much right then that steam was practically coming out of my ears. He’d almost made me cry!
“In Kai-Tommy’s family, soccer is the most important thing in the world. His brother’s really good, but Kai-Tommy’s nothing special.”
“He’s the best on our team,” I said harshly.
“Pfft,�
� said Lena. “When he shouts and yells, then everybody thinks that. And he shoots hard. But he’s got poor technical abilities.”
Technical abilities? Where did Lena pick up all these words?
“But . . .” I began.
“Kai-Tommy’s an average player, Trille. And you can bet that doesn’t impress his dad.”
Lena didn’t say any more after that. But it made it easier to put up with all of Kai-Tommy’s nonsense. When he shouted something angrily at me, all I had to think was that he had an inferiority complex. And poor technical abilities too.
But now, at practice that day, I could tell things were going to be different. Kai-Tommy’s father stood in the middle of the field, in a black tracksuit, rolling a ball under one foot. He looked lethal. Kai-Tommy swept back his bangs, making sure he looked good. I realized this inferiority complex was going to come out at every single practice now.
“I bet it’s Axel’s girlfriend who’s made him stop coaching, so he can go with her to the café every single day instead,” Lena grumbled.
We don’t like our old coach’s girlfriend. She’s so pretty that Lena thinks it’s made her crabby, and she doesn’t know a thing about soccer, or about Axel really. We pictured Axel sitting in a deep café armchair in town while we were hopelessly stuck at practice.
“Oh well,” said Lena, pulling on her goalkeeper’s gloves. Clearly she wasn’t about to let the change of coach get in the way of her plans.
All the boys from our class were there, as well as some from the class below. Kai-Tommy’s father hooked up the ball with his hands. He had shiny black hair and was very slim for a dad. Then he started talking.
“We’re going to have certain expectations of each one of you now. Next year, many of you will start playing in town, and if you want to make your mark, we’re going to have to start thinking long-term. That means practicing three times a week, and nobody gets to stay home without a good reason.”
I gulped.
“Gulliver, Halvor’s dad, will be the assistant coach. He’ll take care of the practical side of things. So if you’ve got any questions . . .”
