Child Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page A

you put your mind to it.”
    But:
    “Is she going to live here?!”
    At last it was beginning to sink in.
    “You’ve known all the time!” I shouted, in a sudden outburst of indignation. “We’ve been doing the place up and we got a separate entrance so that they could live here!”
    “No, no,” she interrupted, for the first time, in a manner which inspired some confidence and that was much needed. “She can’t take care of the girl. I’ve looked into it and … she’ll be sent to an orphanage if we don’t …”
    “So she
is
going to live here?”
    Mother sat without moving, but nonetheless appeared to give a nod. “We’re
not
having a lodger, then?” I persisted in desperation.
    “Yes, we are …”
    “We’re having a sister
and
a lodger?
    “Mm.”
    “But not the hairdresser?”
    “She’s not a hairdresser, Finn! No, she’s got to go in for some treatment, I don’t know …”
    “So
she’s
not living here!”
    “No! I keep telling you. Listen, will you!”
    Ten minutes later. Mother is sitting on the new sofa with a cup of Lipton’s tea and I am in the armchair with a bottle of Solo lemonade, even though it is the middle of the week. We are getting on better than we were ten minutes ago. We are on the same wavelength. A new wavelength, for I am still a changed person, I am just a bit more used to the change, it is all tied up with Mother’s new confidentiality, because she has changed too, we are two strangers speaking sensibly about how to cope with another stranger, a girl of six called Linda, the daughter of a crane driver who also happened to be my father.
    I know that it cannot have been an easy decision to make, in her earlier life Mother had not been full of kind words about this widow and her daughter, but now she has clearly been imbued with an unshakeable sense of direction, solidarity some might well call it, but we are not the highfalutin kind here, we live on credit and we are inscrutable. And in the course of these two weeks Mother has not only calculated the costs, she now tells me, but she has also considered what people would say if we did
not
take the girl in. And how we would feel. As well as how she would feel being in a children’s home. Besides, and I would come to appreciate this in later life, would it not be preferable to be the widow who managed to do what
had
to be done rather than the person who threw in the towel and shunned her responsibility because of something as idiotically self-inflicted as drug addiction?
    This, I have to admit, smacked of a victory for Mother over the person who had gone off with her crane driver and who was perhaps the indirect cause of him falling to his death, the man whose memory still caused Mother such pain that photographs of him had to buried in a locked drawer.
    With that I also have to ponder the question, which as yet remains unanswered, concerning the widow’s pension.
    “No, we won’t see any of that,” Mother says, obviously prepared, but with a quiver of emotion in her voice. “I wasn’t intending to adopt her. And …”
    But this is not in fact where I want to go. I want to know whether Mother, with this new venture, has at last seen the opportunity to have her wish fulfilled, to have a daughter. Then I change my mind and keep my mouth shut, probably so as not to destroy this new equilibrium of ours. I finish my Solo and go to my room to do some homework, leaving the doors open so that we can hear each other: Mother pottering about in the sitting room and the kitchen, the evening’s sonatas and the shipping forecast on the radio, which means bedtime is approaching. I can chew on my pencil and look out onto the block where Essi lives, peer at the light in his window, which is off at this moment, at the lights in the windows of all my friends, Hansa, Roger, Greger and Vatten, the estate that shuts one eye after the other while I sit by the Matchbox toys lined up on my windowsill and for some reason begin to look