A Blessed Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

teacher, had been to draw a
lifelike
polar bear. But apart from a few such criticisms, the report was overwhelmingly positive, thought Elisabet after reading it several times, and therefore worth showing to the child’s father. Elisabet told Erika to remember to ring her at least every other day to let her know how she was; otherwise Elisabet would worry. Elisabet did not want to ring Hammarsö herself and get Isak’s new wife on the line. Elisabet told Erika she must bear in mind her father’s nasty, temperamental streak, but also that he didn’t mean anything by it, or rather, he meant
something,
but it wasn’t as bad as it might seem at the time; Erika shouldn’t get upset if he started bellowing. Or at least not terribly upset. Elisabet said Isak had a tongue that could dart out of his mouth like a serpent, spurting poison.
    “But you can choose for yourself whether you want to die of it,” she said.
    Elisabet did not tell her that Isak’s new wife had a name, and that the name was Rosa.
(How lovely! Like the flower!)
Neither did she tell her that Isak and Rosa had a daughter who was almost five, and that she was called Laura and that Laura was thus Erika’s sister.

Chapter 12
    Erika and Laura wore shorts and washed-out pink T-shirts that strictly speaking they had grown out of. Both had long blond hair, long tanned Barbie-doll legs, and little handfuls of girlish bottom that wiggled from side to side as they trudged all that way from the shop to Isak’s house, each with a dripping ice-cream cone in hand. Men turned their heads and thought unmentionable things, but the sisters took no notice of the men; they were having enough trouble keeping their hands and T-shirts safe from ice-cream drips.
    Or they lay in the tall grass in the meadow beyond the white limestone house that Isak had bought when Rosa was expecting Laura.
    “We’re sisters, aren’t we?” asked Laura.
    “Half sisters,” said Erika. “That’s different.”
    “Yeah,” said Laura.
    “We’ve got different mothers, and you have to have the same mother to be real sisters,” said Erika.
    “And the same father,” said Laura.
    Erika pondered.
    “It’s a bit like false croup,” said Erika. “It’s not the real thing, being half sisters,” she added, and sang: “Half. Fake. Lie. Swindle.”
    “What’s false croup?” asked Laura.
    “An illness,” answered Erika.
    “What sort of illness?” asked Laura.
    “Children can’t breathe,” said Erika. “Children go all blue in the face and blue round the mouth and they croak like this…”
    Erika produced a croaking, coughing, rasping sound in her throat, grabbed her neck with both hands, and shivered all over.
    Laura giggled and lay down beside her. Erika felt an urge to take her sister’s hand; it was so small and slim and delicate. Instead she said: “I had false croup when I was little. My mummy was all alone in the world.
Alone and abandoned.
And I nearly died. My mummy was all alone, standing outside with me in the winter night, crying.”
    Laura went quiet; she very much wanted to tell a similar story about her own mother, Rosa, but could not think of one. Rosa was never
alone and abandoned.
Rosa would never
stand outside in the winter night, crying;
she would never contemplate anything so wild. One winter, on her way home from school, Laura had taken her woolly hat off and put it in her schoolbag, and Rosa had been so angry that she couldn’t speak for ten minutes, at least. This—being speechless for more than ten minutes—was the craziest thing she could think of with regard to her mother, who was always utterly sensible and calm. Rosa had been convinced that Laura would get pneumonia, and though Rosa was rarely wrong, on that occasion she was. Laura didn’t even catch cold.
    Erika went on: “But of course, there’s something even worse than false croup.”
    “What’s that?” asked Laura.
    “REAL CROUP!” said Erika, not entirely sure what real croup might be,