The Seventh Child (17 page)

Of course that was all complete nonsense.

One week after the episode with the wart, Orla took the final step on the road that ended his childhood so abruptly: he hurled a ball high up over the garage roof and the hedge.

Spontaneously, he leaped up, grabbed hold of the garage gutter, and put his hand into the excrement left by a stray dog.

I didn’t need Magdalene’s telescope to see the terror in his eyes. Sitting behind the hedge, I witnessed his life’s support columns tumble down; small, seemingly insignificant events can be the most destructive.

For the rest of the day and the rest of his short childhood on Glee Court, this new nickname would become the bane of his existence:
Orla Turd-Hand Orla Turd-Hand Orla Turd-Hand
. The boy I had somehow come to understand ran home as fast as his sturdy legs could carry him and put both his hands under scalding water in the bathroom sink. A moment later he threw up, gasping and sobbing, as his tears mixed with the brown water, as if his insides had overflowed and would never again be able to shut off the stream of brackish water. He ran to the wetlands—where else?—but this time nobody came to fetch him. For a moment he thought he heard his mother’s plaintive call, but it was merely the wind in the trees.

The next day he heaved a very large rock over the hedge, toward the boys from the yellow tenements—and this time he didn’t just hear screaming, but police and ambulance sirens—and the loud voices on the other side of the hedge wheezed and shouted at the same time. Rumor had it that a boy ended up in the emergency room with a terrible gash in his foreh
ead. “
He might die
,” an adver
sary on the other side of the hedge yelled, but for some reason there was never any investigation. The two adversaries, whose worlds were separated by the hedge, didn’t even know each other’s names.

A few days later, the lady from No. 16 knocked on her kitchen window and waved at Orla, who was sitting on the curb staring into a puddle.

She invited him in and served him bread with blood-red marmalade and hot cocoa. At the end of the kitchen table sat her husband, a man known as Mr. Malle. Every day he walked home in a black police uniform carrying a brown briefcase. Orla thought he might bring up the episode with the boy from the yellow tenements, but Mr. Malle merely smiled at him; and in the subsequent months, Orla was the only one on the street to whom the big man said hello.

Maybe his friendship with the police officer made him reckless, because he was unprepared for what happened when he wandered between Lauggaard’s Boulevard and Gladsaxe Road—on the outskirts of the yellow tenements—scanning for his enemies. Carl Malle stood in a doorway with his hand on a thin boy’s shoulder. The boy’s head was wrapped in a thick bright-white bandage (he looked like Lawrence of Arabia
,
which Orla had seen at the Søborg Theater). The policeman wasn’t in uniform, but
he’d
put one of his black berets on the wounded boy’s head, and there it sat, nesting proudly on the white gauze.

Orla would have normally called out to his friend, but not a single word passed his lips.

Instead he turned on his heels and ran to the wetlands, where he stayed until nightfall. Something inside him had ruptured, and he didn’t understand what it was. In his thirteenth year, Orla spent most of his time in the wetlands. He wandered about on the big lawns between Grønnemose Boulevard, Horse Hill, and Hareskovvejen, up and down the creek, far into the woods.

Inside a little clearing was a granite boulder that only the strongest boys could climb. One night, sitting there with his eyes tightly shut so they wouldn’t run over with brackish water, he thought of his father who had never returned. His mother had once told him a story (and here all the psychologists at Kongslund ought to lean close and take careful notes) about a man who had been transformed into a boulder by the cruel gaze of a giant. And I watched him stroke the boulder exactly as though it were a long lost beloved. I watched him put frogs and insects on it—even butterflies whose wings
he’d
clipped—piercing their bodies with splinters of glass
he’d
found on the path; he did it so absentmindedly, as if his thoughts were somewhere else. At day’s end, he would cleanse his sacrificial site of butterfly wings, spider legs, frog’s eyes, and once again tenderly stroke the boulder with a soft, dirty hand. It was a peculiar sight, and I would go home to Magdalene and cry until the visions faded.

This was how Orla Pil Berntsen spent the last few months of his childhood, in an ever more desperate loneliness that no one bothered to understand. Between a foggy fantasy of his petrified, vanished father and the all-too-real visage of Gurli sitting in the high-back blue chair looking at the wall above his head as her fingers slowly trembled and shook and glided across the armrest in fine circles.

It all ended early one evening as the sun was setting over the high-rises at Bellahøj, casting a long shadow over the wetlands. He heard the pop of an air gun down by the creek and warily crept closer.

Two boys stood in a clearing watching a wounded sparrow spin, like a fly on a needle, on the forest floor. Leaves swirled about. The boys howled at the trees in laughter.

This is how Orla met real evil: Karsten, thickset, square, with a crew cut; and Poul with his blue, blue eyes that were mean as all hell. They introduced him to Benny, their odd friend: a six-foot-eight dullard who wandered about restlessly in the wetlands. For the most part, Benny hid in the woods on the slopes along the river, where his thick voice ricocheted between tree trunks (the people in the neighborhood had grown used to him—they called him the Fool—and Orla had often seen him, just a shadow in the evening dusk).

Benny had one amazing talent. With a few dangerous twists and jerks of his head—and with his index finger and thumb bent like claws—he could pull his left eye out of its socket, letting it hang halfway down his cheek, dangling off sinews and nerve threads, and then he would swiftly put it back. It was a remarkable trick that awed even hardened bullies like Karsten and Poul. When they asked if he could see with his eye hanging on his cheek, he nodded cheerfully and shouted, “Yeah! Yeah!” But Poul didn’t believe him. To him, lying was the worst thing anyone could do (he knew everything about lying from his besotted dad at home on Søborg’s Main Street). Orla shuddered at the sight of those small light-blue eyes—like fiery steel balls—observing the big man; at times they glowed with such malice that Orla felt feverish, and one night, when they were sitting as usual staring at Benny, something happened that no one in the neighborhood would ever forget.

Karsten had gone off to pee on a tree, and Poul was poking a stick in the ground—or so it seemed—and the Fool was between them, humming merrily, proud of his trick and glad to have company, his eye hanging on his cheek, when a blackbird suddenly shot out of darkness and swooped down on his little white eyeball bundled in blood-red nerve threads. Immediately he understood what was happening and the abyss that had opened. “Nooooooooooo,” he screamed, desperately clutching at his tormentor’s muscular lower arm. But it was too late.

With a snap, the strong boy’s hand tore Benny’s hated eye from his head and tossed it high into the air; it flew over the creek in a low arc and landed with a little plop in the water, barely audible unless you listened for it. And there it sunk.

Orla, Poul, and Karsten bolted through the wetlands, shoulder to shoulder, cackling like the demons they had finally become. Behind them, Orla could hear the distressed giant’s screams—which were drowned out only by Poul’s snickering whenever they stopped to catch their breath—and it sounded as though he was splashing about in the creek. Then it was quiet. The three boys looked at one another and then circled back to the site, reluctantly leaving the shadows of the tall trees and creeping closer to the creek bank. From there they saw the Fool’s one-eyed face in the water, floating within a cluster of lily pads. The eye socket resembled a black hole. “He’s dead, you moron!” Karsten whispered. Poul and Orla glanced at each other without responding.

One of the giant’s arms lay motionless, like a broken stick. It was stretched out as if
he’d
tried to hold on to life. They stood in silence for a few minutes, staring at the Fool peacefully floating in the water.

“Stay here
…
I’m gonna go get something,” Orla whispered.

Five minutes later he returned with a little bundle in his hand. “This is Erik’s hat. He always hangs it on the handrail of the staircase.”

The others stepped closer, and Orla saw their eyes shining in the light from the lamppost on the other side of the creek. They all hated Erik Goody Two-Shoes.

“Look, he put his name in it.”

Many years later, Orla would remember only this one image from the creek: the giant in the water and his two friends, standing like gunfighters in a Western playing at the Søborg Theater. But the enemy was already dead. In dreams he saw Benny sitting there, smiling and goofing around with his dangling eye, still alive; he saw the furious shadow rush forward and downward toward its prey, and he glimpsed the hatred behind the movement leading to the catastrophe—but he can’t see the face behind the hand; he feels nothing at all.

They left the hat in the grass, right where the dead giant’s sleeve had caught a tree root that jutted from the ground. Later that night they drank Wiibroe beer on the Søborg Square and broke into Orla’s school, stealing a slide projector and an Eltra tape recorder, and listened to Jim Morrison sing “Light My Fire” until dawn.

Two days later the police picked up Erik. For hours he sat with his dirty blue-knitted cap on the policeman’s desk and cried. In a way his fate was worse than Orla’s, because although his parents swore that he was at home in bed by 10:00 p.m., a shadow of doubt would always cling to him; he couldn’t explain how his hat had ended up beside the dead man. Nor could the police explain what had happened to Benny. Perhaps
he’d
simply drowned (and a fish or toad had nipped out his eye); certainly, the officers found it hard to believe that the trembling, sniveling pup before them could have overpowered and murdered the Fool, then brutally removed his eye and set it on a lily pad to stare up at the sky (which is how they found it). In the end, they let the boy go.

In his bed in the darkness beneath the photo of the man and the boy with the orange beach ball, Orla felt the heat from Erik’s body like a physical touch and almost sensed his breath against his cheeks and forehead. He skipped school and fled into the wetlands; he sat on the granite boulder and rocked back and forth; he went to the creek and got on his knees and stared at his reflection in the water, like the pixie in the old song
…
and the reflection asked him:
How is it possible that you are so ugly?
He didn’t look like anyone he knew: his nose, his hair, his eyes that always watered whenever he leaned forward. He knew nothing about himself. In the picture, his father smiled at the beautiful boy with the sea in the background.

Was his mother’s story about the Rigshospital and Kongslund even true?

“What are you thinking about?”

Orla flinched.

“A thirteen-year-old boy studying himself in the creek, daydreaming. It’s got to be about something good. A girl is it?” Carl Malle winked, teasingly. He wasn’t in uniform.
He’d
never shown up in the wetlands before.

“Nah
…
I’m just thinking
…
not really about anything.”
Had Malle been sent to fetch him?

“I’m just checking up on you. You look like someone I once knew. It takes a lot to knock you down.” There was a peculiar sense of pride in the policeman’s words.

Orla slipped off the boulder. “I’ve gotta go pick up our food.”

“No, you don’t. Your mother ate with us tonight—and we talked about your future.”

Never before had his mother eaten at anyone’s house;
she’d
never eaten anything but the contents of the yellow bucket. Orla was shocked.