I figured the problem might be that I didn’t mix the egg and sugar together properly before putting in the milk and flour, so I decided to start over. I got a new bowl and cracked two new eggs and put the sugar in. But when I added the flour the same thing happened again.
I figured the reason I couldn’t get the batter right was because I wasn’t able to mix it properly using my left hand. I needed more power. So I decided to get the mixer out of the cupboard. There wasn’t a lot of room left on the kitchen counter but I managed to squeeze it on. I cracked the last two eggs into the bowl and put more sugar in.
I put the mixer on full speed and went over to the table and started measuring the flour and baking powder. After a couple of seconds I noticed that the mixer was moving, probably due to the full speed. It moved closer and closer to the edge of the counter. I hurried over to save it – but I was too late and the mixer crashed to the floor, the bowl flew across the room and the batter spilled everywhere.
Then my dad walked into the kitchen. “What the hell is going on?”
I looked at the mess I had made. There was batter all over the floor and it had splattered on the drawers of the kitchen counter and on the fridge. I looked at my dad.
“No grieving mother should receive store-bought biscuits,” I whispered.
My dad looked at me. “Okay,” he said.
My dad helped me clean up the mess. We mopped the floor and threw out all the lumpy batter that was left in the mixing bowls. We unloaded the dishwasher and then we reloaded it and then we wiped down the kitchen counter.
When we were done there were still traces of flour on the kitchen counter and some batter running down the fridge, but I didn’t care. I sat down at the table. My dad was just standing in the middle of the room, staring out the window. But it was an empty stare. Like he wasn’t focusing on anything. “Dad?”
He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes before looking at me. “Yes?” he said.
“Do you know how to make waffles?” I asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Biscuits?”
“Afraid not.”
“Oh.”
My dad looked out the window again and stroked his moustache a couple of times.
“Maybe we could get someone to help us?” he said.
“Who do we know that bakes?”
I thought for a moment. Then I said, “Aunt Lillian.”
My dad laughed, and that made me laugh too. Across the road from us, in number seventeen, there lives an old widow with no children, named Ågot Ueland. My dad said that women like her would die to have someone to bake for. So he went over and asked if she could help us. Apparently, he was right, because a couple of hours later she came over with a basket full of baked goods.
“I made some cinnamon rolls,” she said, “and then I made some muffins in case she doesn’t like cinnamon rolls. And then, just in case she doesn’t like muffins, I made oatmeal cookies too.” She looked at me with eyes that smiled even though her mouth didn’t. Her grey hair was all out of order and she had millions of tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“Of course I forgot to ask if your aunt has any allergies. If that is the case I can go home and make something else.” I said it was okay and thanked her. Ågot looked slightly disappointed and said, “Well, let me know if you need anything else.” Then she went back to her house.
I looked at the basket and wondered if it was all just a waste, because I’ve read somewhere that losing a loved one also makes you lose your appetite. Nevertheless I picked up the basket and headed over to Knuds Street so
I could give it to Aunt Lillian. It felt like I had a thousand bricks in my stomach and I didn’t really want to go.
If I got to be God for one day, I’d change things around so that Magnus didn’t crash his moped on Gustav Street. In fact, I’d change things so he didn’t drive his moped at all that day. He just ate dinner, did his homework and then watched TV with his mom. And nothing else happened.
I know it’s selfish. I know it’s not allowed. I’m just saying. Who wouldn’t?
24
Where Magnus
Used to Live
According to Google Maps, Knuds Street is a ten-minute walk from my house. I normally walk it in somewhere between eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds and nine minutes and forty-three seconds. The basket was heavy to carry with only one hand, so I had to stop and take quite a few breaks. That was okay, because I wasn’t really eager to arrive. Even though I took my time and walked slower than I ever had, it only took fifteen minutes and nineteen seconds before I stood outside Magnus’s house. What used to be Magnus’s house.
I rang the doorbell and waited for Aunt Lillian to answer the door. I realized that I didn’t know what to say to her. Was I supposed to say kondolerer? When I was eleven, my grandma died and a lot of people came to our house to give us flowers and drink tea. After a visit from some of our neighbours, I heard my mom tell my dad that she hated that word. “Kondolerer is a terrible word,” she said. I didn’t really understand why, because all it means is that you are sorry that someone died: “my condolences”.
Then Aunt Lillian opened the door. Her eyes were sore and red and her hair was in a bun on top of her head. And even though it was only a couple of days since Magnus crashed his bike, she already looked thinner.
“Oh, hey, Malin.” When she smiled she looked even more tired. “What a nice surprise.” “I brought baked goods,” I said.
I guess the polite thing to do when someone shows up on your doorstep with a basket of baked goods is to invite them in. And I suppose the polite thing to do when someone invites you in is to accept.
As we walked through the living room I noticed that there were flowers everywhere. They were on every side table, shelf and everywhere else one could think to put bouquets of flowers. Carnations, white roses and lilies. And those white ones with the long petals with the yellow centre.
It looked like a flower shop in there. It smelled like one too. That’s when I realized that I forgot to buy flowers.
Aunt Lillian led the way to the kitchen, where the table was also covered with bouquets of more roses and more lilies and more carnations. I didn’t know where to put the basket and Aunt Lillian took it from me and put it on the counter. “Oh my,” she said. “Did you make all these?”
“No,” I said. “The widow down the street did. Old widows would die to have someone to bake for.”
“Oh,” Aunt Lillian said. And I immediately regretted saying the word “die”.
Aunt Lillian put the kettle on and I helped her put the cinnamon rolls, the muffins and the cookies on a glass tray. I brought plates and teacups into the living room and Aunt Lillian moved some flower arrangements to the side to make room on the table. Then we sat down.
Aunt Lillian took a cookie from the tray and immediately took a bite of it. She chewed it slowly and closed her eyes, like she was taking in the taste. “It’s been years since I last had a good oatmeal cookie,” she said and put the rest of it in her mouth. Still chewing, she helped herself to another one.
She pushed the tray closer to me and gave me a nod to encourage me to help myself. I put a cinnamon roll on my plate even though I wasn’t hungry. I looked at the photos on the wall. Aunt Lillian holding Magnus on the day of his baptism. Magnus on his confirmation day. Magnus with a gold medal around his neck, which he was holding up to show to the camera. A thought popped into my head that there wouldn’t be one of him on his wedding day. I pushed the cinnamon roll around on my plate. A part of me kept thinking that, at any minute, Magnus would pop around the corner with his goofy smile and say a corny line. At the same time, I knew that he wouldn’t.
Aunt Lillian finished the cookie and helped herself to a muffin. “When Magnus was a little boy he wanted to become a surgeon. Did you know that?” She laughed. “He was such a klutz as
a child – I wouldn’t trust him with a plastic fork, much less a scalpel.” Then she said quietly, “But when he started swimming he found his real talent.” She broke off a piece of the muffin and put it in her mouth before continuing. “Magnus and I had a lot of disagreements for a while. We were bickering a lot. About small things, that didn’t matter. But when Magnus took his bike out that day, the last thing I said to him was that I loved him. I am very thankful that our last conversation ended on a good note.”
The last thing I said to Magnus was to play with his stupid bike. And that is what he did. I kept pushing the cinnamon roll around on my plate, because I didn’t know what to do with it.
“This was nobody’s fault,” Aunt Lillian said. “It’s just one of those awful, awful things that happens.” “I forgot to bring flowers,” I said.
“Thank God.” Aunt Lillian laughed. “I am running out of room.”
“I was supposed to bring flowers.” She smiled her tired smile again. “It’s okay, Malin.” I came there to be a comfort to Aunt Lillian. But she was the one comforting me. Then Aunt Lillian pointed at the roll on my plate and said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll have it if you don’t want it.”
On my way out I noticed a bunch of photographs on the old wooden desk in the hallway. “What’s this?” I said. “Oh, I was just looking through some old photos,” Aunt Lillian said.
I had a quick glance through them. There was a photo of Magnus as a little boy on a kick scooter, with a Mickey Mouse plaster on his knee. Another was of Magnus on his first day of school, grinning at the camera, his front teeth missing. There were also some pictures of me and Sigve and my mom and dad. Then there was a photo of a baby boy who I didn’t recognize, sitting in a high chair. He had food all over his face and a head full of brown curls.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Why, that is Magnus.”
Magnus? He looked nothing like the Magnus I knew.
Aunt Lillian picked up the photo and smiled. “He lost all those wonderful curls before he turned two.”
It was already dark when I walked home. The air was crisp and when I breathed, smoke came out of my mouth. As I walked down Trysil Street I opened up my coat and took my woollen hat off. I wanted to be cold.
25
Open and Broken
This morning I stayed under the covers and listened to my dad roam around in the kitchen. I heard cupboards being opened and shut and the sound of cutlery and glass clinking together. He was making a lot of racket for someone who normally doesn’t eat breakfast. Maybe he was looking for the coffee. Then I heard him leave through the front door. One hour and eleven minutes later, I heard Sigve leave as well. Then I got out of bed.
I had decided that I wasn’t going to school. My mom was away, Hanna wasn’t speaking to me. And Magnus was gone. So I didn’t want to go to school and I figured my dad wouldn’t notice if I stayed at home anyway.
I got up and brushed my teeth but I didn’t get dressed.
I let Oscar in and fed him. I got out the science magazine and made myself a sandwich with strawberry jam. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and flipped through the magazine, but I had already read all the articles.
After breakfast I went down to the basement and turned the Xbox on. Sigve had got a new game. I think the point of it was to shoot as many people as possible, so I did. I shot people in the head. In the chest. In the back. I shot a guy’s face off and watched the blood pulsate out of his neck before he fell to the ground. Then I felt sick to my stomach and turned the Xbox off.
I wondered what Magnus thought about in the moment of the accident. Did he know that he was going to die? The police said that he didn’t. They said that he died instantly and that he didn’t feel any pain. But how could they know?
I didn’t want to think about death any more so I turned the TV on. Animal Planet was showing a documentary about elephants. The narrator said that elephants mostly sleep standing up. Sometimes they lie down, but usually not for more than an hour, because they are so heavy that if they lie down for longer they risk crushing their internal organs.
I remember reading somewhere that elephants mourn the death of fellow elephants. If they stumble upon another elephant’s remains, they lift up its bones with their trunks, balance them on their tusks and put them in their mouth, as if they are trying to determine if they belong to someone they know. Some elephants have been observed standing over an elephant’s corpse for several days, not wanting to leave their side. Apparently, there have also been observations of elephants shedding tears over the loss of a loved one.
Even elephants cry when they lose a family member. So why hadn’t I been able to cry about Magnus yet? Was I a bad person? I had to be. Even animals had more heart than me.
When you’re all alone, and in a big house, it can make you think a lot. So, I decided to go to school after all. I just couldn’t be alone with my thoughts any more. I let Oscar out, got dressed and packed my bag. Then I walked to school.
When I walked in through the main door of Haasund Lower Secondary School I noticed straight away that something was going on. A bunch of kids were standing in line outside Principal Skogen’s office.
I overheard two girls talking about what had happened. Apparently, someone had carved the word whore into someone’s desk. Even before I heard, I immediately knew who the desk belonged to. In Haasund a young girl can have sex a thousand times without anyone giving it any thought. But if she becomes pregnant she automatically becomes a whore.
I walked down the halls to get to class. I hadn’t seen Hanna around school in a while and I hadn’t talked to her in thirteen days, twenty-three hours and twelve minutes. She didn’t even know about my mom.
But today she had showed up to do a test. At least that is what she told me when I ran into her on my way to class.
I came around the corner and there she was.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
“You hurt your arm again.”
“Yes.”
“That sucks.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going home now. I just came in to do a test.”
“Okay.”
She paused. Then she said, “So, I heard. About your cousin, I mean. I heard.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I know how it feels. My grandfather died when I was a child and I loved him very much.”
I had lost two grandparents. It wasn’t the same. They were old and sick. It was sad, but it wasn’t the same.
“So, yeah, I know how you feel.”
She didn’t. She thought she knew everything just because she was sixteen. And pregnant. She wasn’t an adult. Just because she had a boyfriend and was pregnant, it didn’t mean she knew everything. “Whore!” I said, and walked away.
At 10.28 a.m. I entered my classroom and the squeaky door made everyone turn their heads to look at me. This was the second time I had been late for class. Ever. My teacher, Trude Fjell, who was standing in front of the class, turned and looked at me through her red glasses that are just a tiny bit too big for her face.
“Hi, Malin,” Trude said.
“Hello.”
“Do you have a note for me?”
“No.”
“Oh. Did you leave it at home?”
“No.”
She looked at me for a little while before she said, “Okay. Please, take a seat. We were just about to start with some grammar.”
I sat down at my desk and opened my book to page 136, because that was what Trude had written on the whiteboard. First we were going to do some repetition exercises and conjugate a few verbs. This is really simple because there is only one right answer.
Just as I was about to start, Trude came over to my desk. She bent down and whispered, “Don’t worry about being late. I will let it slide this one time.
I know things are not easy these days, with your cousin and all.”
She looked at me as if she wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say because she hadn’t asked me a question or anything. So I just said, “Okay.”
She smiled. “And my door is always open if you need to talk.”
She wasn’t talking about a real door, it is just an expression. Trude doesn’t have an office or anything. She has a desk in the teacher’s lounge upstairs, but that door is always closed.
“Okay,” I said again.
I started to fill in the verbs in the different tenses. It was, as expected, quite simple, so I did the first couple of exercises really fast. For the next task we had to write down some examples of what is typical for Norwegian grammar and compare it to how it is done in English. This required a bit more thinking, but it still wasn’t hard.
When the bell rang for lunch break I lost focus and looked up from my book. Magnus used to say that it was impossible to get my attention when I had my face in a book. I looked at my watch and realized that I hadn’t thought about him in twenty-seven minutes and forty-three seconds. It was good to have something to focus on. I decided not to miss any more school from now on. I took my time packing my things, while thinking about how to spend the next half-hour. My classmates left the room one by one as I neatly put my pencil and eraser in my pencil case.
I went out to the corridor, but I didn’t know what to do, because I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t feel like reading. I looked at my watch. It showed the time was 11.09 a.m. I clicked on the stopwatch function. I noticed that it still had Magnus’s record stored. Four minutes and forty-six seconds. Magnus was gone but his record was still there. And now it would stay like that for ever.
I had a really good stopwatch, but nothing to time. I started to play around with it by starting and stopping the timer at random. I made sure to stop it in time so that it didn’t erase the record. Then I decided to check how long it took before someone wearing a blue sweater walked by. It took two minutes and forty-five seconds. Then I decided to check how long it took before someone with a green sweater walked by. I didn’t find out though, because I was interrupted. By Frida. So I stopped the timer.
The Unpredictability of Being Human Page 10
