Child Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page B

door.
    “Come in,” we heard. We went in. And there was Kristian sitting as quiet as a mouse in a burgundy armchair reading a newspaper I had never seen before.
    “Aren’t you ever going to watch that T.V.?” Mother said.
    “You can watch it. I don’t actually give a shit about the damn thing.”
    I knew this sort of language unsettled Mother. And she told him she wasn’t having any of it.
    “Have you had dinner?” she asked huffily.
    “I don’t eat after five o’clock,” Kristian said in the same flat tone, still with his nose buried in the newspaper.
    “Surely you can’t mean that,” Mother said. “Come and have some supper with us.”
    Then Kristian did more or less what I do when she is in that mood: got up with a wan smile and said thank you very much.
    “I don’t want this to become a habit, mind you,” he added as we left the room.
    “Don’t worry, it won’t,” Mother parried, relieved that the use of vulgar language was obviously a one-off occurrence. “Please do take a seat.”
    “If you skip the formality,” Kristian said, sitting at the end of the table where no-one had ever sat before. “It’s not right.”
    “Oh?” said Mother, cutting the wholegrain bread into thinner slices than usual.
    “No, we’re working-class stock.”
    That was quite an argument. But I was with Kristian on this. The language that Mother used whenever we met the outside world, which was so necessary in the shoe shop, didn’t actually belong anywhere else but there.
    “And what’s this young fellow going to be then?” he asked me.
    “A writer,” I said without pausing for breath, at which Mother burst into laughter.
    “He doesn’t even know what a writer is.”
    “Well, that may be an advantage,” Kristian said.
    “Oh?” Mother said again.
    “Yes, it’s a demanding profession,” Kristian said, and seemed almost to know what he was talking about. Mother and I exchanged glances.
    “Have you read
The Unknown Soldier?”
I asked.
    “Stop that now,” Mother said.
    “Of course,” Kristian said. “A fantastic book. But I suppose you don’t know anything about that yet, do you?”
    “No, I don’t,” I conceded. But the atmosphere was now so agreeable that I could concentrate on my food while Mother smiled and said that Kristian should not be surprised if he were to bump into a little girl here soon as we were expecting an increase in the family. Crikey, said Kristian, it certainly didn’t show. And they chuckled in a way that I am not going to bother to describe here, I will, however, mention that Kristian ate in the same way that he stood and walked, calmly and with dignity, waiting between each slice of bread until Mother urged him to take another, do help yourself to a bit more, etc. She could not understand what craziness it was not to eat after five o’clock, while Kristian considered there were doubtless many people in this country who would soon have to learn a little about asceticism.
    “Because it’s not certain that all this is going to last.”
    “And what do you mean by that, if I may ask?” Mother said in a tart voice. Whereupon he pointed good-humouredly at her with his knife and smiled.
    “There you go again, being formal.”
    But I couldn’t listen to this, anyway for ages I had been dying to get the T.V. going. We had spent the last few evenings in the sitting room, Mother with her knitting and cup of tea, me with a comic, casting restless glances at the teak colossus standing there and staring at us with its blind, green-tinged eye. The future resided in that box. The world. Large and unfathomable. Beautiful and mysterious. A slow-working mental atomic explosion, we just didn’t know about it yet. But we had an inkling. And the reason it was still so utterly mute was, I gathered from Mother, that the lodger might feel that we would be acting out of turn if she were to let me press the ivory-yellow “on” button. Or he might hear the noise from his temporary digs