Negotiate the matter, it costs money. Which means that the cousin’s papa, for fun, names a sum of money that he claims he has seriously calculated it would cost to take care of a girl like Doris until she becomes an adult, including the money to pay off the people in the Outer Marsh and so on. If she gives him that sum of money, to be delivered by hand, he might possibly take the matter seriously under consideration. Not even rotten eggs are free, the cousin’s papa repeats. Rotten egg is the cousin’s papa’s nickname for Doris Flinkenberg. Comes from Doris herself, actually: how Doris has a habit of imitating the cousin’s papa’s way of saying the word, which he often says anyway, in general so to speak, in relation to everything and everyone, but the cousin’s papa imitates Doris only when she isn’t around.
Something in Doris makes it so that when Doris is in the cousin’s house the cousin’s papa stays out of sight. But Doris is also good at noticing things; all of her senses on alert, observant.
The cousin’s papa names this sum and the cousin’s mama believes him. Aastriid. A ray of hope lights up in Astrid’s eyes. At closer reflection: is extinguished again. Cannot give in. Is lit.
I go up to the mountains with my lonely heart. It is rather terrible to see.
“Children’s mama.” For a moment I forget that all of it is a game.
I’m with the cousin’s mama in the washroom with the big washing machine and the mangle set up in a basement up in the town center. We have taken the bus there. With dirty laundry, bedclothes, and light-colored clothes, from some summerhouse on the Second Cape.
We stuff the dirty laundry in the machine. I fumble a little, and the cousin’s mama, who never loses her patience, suddenly becomes angry and yells at me. I start crying. Then everything falls apart for her as well and she takes me in her arms and talks about that child, Doris, whom she’s thinking about all the time, it’s so terrible to see.
“Solveig. If only one could come up with a solution.” And that she has money, but it’s not enough.
The cousin’s mama has been saving and she counted all the money she has, but it really isn’t that much, coins and some bills in a glass jar and now she takes all of the cleaning and washing jobs from the Second Cape that she can get, but it isn’t enough. The cousin’s papa says so too, all the time: “So much more is needed.”
And thinking about Doris, how time is passing.
I nod.
Not enough. Both of us know that, the cousin’s mama and I. But I know, as said, something else that I will know the whole time. None of the cousin’s mama’s money will ever be enough. Because for the cousin’s papa, it isn’t a matter of money. This is a game to him, a game, something to pass the time with.
The cousin’s mama doesn’t understand, still. Can’t take it in. “Children’s mama.” Yes, maybe. But also: she comes from a different landscape. And that’s why I can’t say anything to her; I am ashamed of the other landscape, about the fact that I suddenly know it inside and out, as if I were there. I’m not there. I’m not there.
I’m here, cousin’s mama, another landscape and it truly is—and look, cousin’s mama, sun cats!
And that is what overwhelms me in the midst of everything. The sun that has now started shining anyway, after it having been so cloudy all morning.
“I like your name.” Which the cousin’s mama said to me many years ago when she came to the cousin’s house. “Solveig. There is so much sun in it.”
“Look, cousin’s mama! Sun cats!”
Then, in the basement washroom, I do the following: I start dancing. Like the sun cats are dancing. Call to the cousin’s mama again, look at the cats! How they are forcing their way into the washroom under the ground through a window that is almost in the ceiling. But still, in any case, dancing over the heavy mangle that is turning, creaking over the wrinkled, slightly damp sheets.
How I am dancing! Carefully going up on my toes, before throwing myself head-first pretty much, like the high jump for women from Lore Cliff, Bule Marsh, in the dance.
Carrying out my own sun cat’s dance to sun cat accompaniment, on my tiptoes!
Doris-light.
This occupies me completely, precision: because I don’t know the dance, rising up in the dance is difficult, because it is also the idea after all that my dance should be reminiscent of how Doris Flinkenberg dances in the cousin’s kitchen in the evenings.
And: dancing in order to make someone happy. The cousin’s mama, who has become so inconsolable.
And of course, which I know at that moment but prefer not to think about. So to speak influence myself into the right mood by suggestion. To another landscape. Where I should be quite naturally, not in this knowledge: that shit of hopelessness.
Regardless of how I stretch. Tiptapandontiptoe.
I have gone up on my toes. Become tall, tall, so large. And it is impressive, of course, so tall for my age.
But from that skyscraper height I suddenly don’t see stupid little Solveig without fantasy, who has to think in order to go up in the dance. But something else. The opposite. The influence of suggestions inside a square. Applause. What a performance.
“You did that well, Solveig.”
“Look look, Astrid! Sun cats!”
“Don’t be silly now, Solveig.” The cousin’s mama smiles a bit tiredly. “We have a lot of sheets left.”
I go back to work. But hopeless. What happened, what was thought in the dance, does not leave my head. A plan that unfolds, a secret to everyone. “You did that well, Solveig.”
In vain, from the beginning. But the other, it is so much stronger.
The cousin’s papa’s money. The parlor, the cousin’s house, the closet. The cousin’s papa who is an old-fashioned idiot who can’t imagine keeping his money in the bank. He brags about it too, in general, in vague terms, about all the money he has. Sometimes you’ve seen some of it, in the open. Like when Björn was going to buy the moped, for example.
“There’s always more money.”
If you sell the Second Cape you get a lot of money.
Is kept in an old, dungy boot, in a closet. I’m the only one who knows that secret. In addition to the cousin’s papa, of course, but he doesn’t know that I know.
I haven’t told anyone about the money, not even my sister Rita. Because from the beginning Rita was more impatient than me, despite the fact that we look so alike. Just as tall, dark. So different, essentially different, compared to Doris Flinkenberg, for example, small and plump, flaxen hair, light. In general, light.
A bag with money somewhere would for Rita be something you needed to do something about; not necessarily take it and go, but still, attend to in some way.
And now. Maybe lacking that necessary caution, that mood, for example, which would cause everything to go out of control. It can’t get out of control. It’s a matter of Doris Flinkenberg, a child.
And now in other words it isn’t so that Rita would have been badly affected by little Doris’s fate, that she would, for example, have anything against Doris Flinkenberg becoming the fifth wheel at the supper table for good. After all, Doris has spent many nights in our cottage.