Free Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen Page A

too, while I’m here?”
    “She’s having a bath,” Mother said curtly, and Uncle Tor looked down at his formal get-up, ill at ease.
    “Yes, well, I suppose I should have brought her a present.”
    “Yes, you should.”
    There followed a few more moments of embarrassment before Uncle Tor showed us one of his party pieces, a three-step shuffle on the lino, chin on chest, shadow boxing with me:
    “Watch out for the jab, lad, watch out for the jab …”
    Upon which he opened the door, said oh well and Happy Christmas, and made off down the stairs.
    “Rascal,” Mother said, then strode into the kitchen, turned, came back and said, as if mustering a troop of elite soldiers: “Come on, Finn, now you get yourself dressed and this year you’ll be smarter than ever before, both you and Linda.”
    We plucked Linda out of the bath water, which had become quite cold in the meantime, so much so that she was shivering and her teeth were chattering. But she laughed when Mother tickled her through the towel, these lovely, almost inaudible gurgles we had heard only once. And indeed we did look smarter than ever before, and stiffer. That wasn’t such a problem for Linda who was to a large extent stationary. But I couldn’t sit still while eating the meal, which even today we ate in the kitchen, no ribs this year, it was roast leg of pork with oodles of gravy.
    I had to read out the names on the presents as I was the best in the family at reading. And it is strange how you get a true picture of life standing like that, with a stiff collar chafing away at you, beside a sparkling Christmas tree, reading names on presents and working out who can be relied upon in this world and who cannot. Gran, for example, doesn’t get a very high score this year: Linda and I each get a card game, and Mother gets nothing. Uncle Bjarne and Aunty Marit have given us nice presents as usual, but neither has given Mother anything, while the previous year she at least got a weighty ornament which was more expensive than anything she could have afforded herself.
    Only from Uncle Oskar did we all get what we wanted, Linda a jigsaw puzzle she couldn’t do, a magnifying glass for me, and Mother a primus stove. But she just snorted at it, even though she had said she wanted one just like it after the old one gave up the ghost on a picnic last autumn.
    Kristian, too, had bought presents for everyone. Mother got some jewellery, which silenced and irritated her, and caused her to busy herself with anything else but what we were doing. Linda got a pair of Dutch skates and I got two books, number eighteen in “The Famous Five” series and the 1961 edition of
Hvem Hva Hvor,
an almanac, in which a bookmark had been inserted and a sentence underlined about the rapid rise of television viewing:
    “It has been our experience that gifted children soon prefer reading books and magazines to spending their leisure hours in front of the screen, while there is an increasing tendency for less gifted children to spend their time watching television …”
    “What’s he mean by that?” Mother said, snatching the book and perusing it with a furrowed brow before returning it and devoting her attentions to the strange jewellery which, squinting through the magnifying glass I was given by Uncle Oskar, I could see had 585 written on it; it was a hare holding its paws in front of its eyes.
    Linda was given most presents, it turned out, including from me. But that didn’t matter, because most were clothes which had to be tried on and taken off and tried on again while we ate marzipan and cakes, and laughed and laughed until she fell asleep in bed amid the skates and all her clothes, and I was on the point of dropping off myself after no more than three pages of Kristian’s boring book, although at least it did have a picture of Yuri Gagarin, when, sad to say, Mother came into my room with tears in her eyes, whispering something about it having been nice on our own, hadn’t