Adventures with Waffles (7 page)

“Play, then, for crying out loud!”

My knees shook. My best friend counted to three. And there we stood, on a bench in the middle of the street, playing “Silent Night.” Lena got goose bumps from it. I just looked at my recorder. Nobody clapped when we’d finished. People just walked on by.

“One more time,” Lena ordered mercilessly.

And so we played one more time. People were very hot and busy, it seemed. But suddenly a lady took hold of her husband’s hand and said, “Gosh, look, Rolf. Aren’t they sweet?”

She meant Lena and me. We played again, and then the lady and her husband named Rolf left twenty kroner in my cap. After that, more than seventeen people stopped at once, all wanting to hear our Christmas carol. Again I felt a bit like I was going to collapse, but I closed my eyes and thought of the soccer ball. Everyone was clapping and laughing and shouting, “Encore, encore!” A crowd had gathered around the bench. Lena and I were almost like pop stars. There was even a lady taking photos, who asked what our names were. Lena gave a deep bow every time we finished playing. And I bowed both to the right and to the left, like Dad does when he conducts the mixed choir.

“We must have enough now,” I said eventually.

My hands were all sweaty. Lena peered into the cap and nodded. We said good-bye and climbed down. The cap was heavy with coins. We smiled smugly at Magnus and Hassan and ran up the road to the sports shop next to the local law offices. We’d completely forgotten about Dad.

“You’re forty-two kroner short,” said the man behind the counter once he had counted our money.

His hair was all over the place and looked really stiff. His lower lip was sticking right out too. I could see Lena leaning forward, wanting to know what he had under it. He was a grumpy man.

“Pff, we can make forty-two kroner quicker than you can say ‘stinky sneakers,’” Lena said.

We set up on the steps outside the sports shop. There weren’t as many people there as in the main street, but we kept on playing. Eventually we could play “Silent Night” in nineteen seconds.

After a while, the grumpy man came outside.

“Stop that racket! It’s scaring my customers away!”

“We can’t stop. We still need . . .” Lena looked at me.

“Twenty-seven kroner,” I said.

The man rolled his eyes. Then he stuck his finger under his lip and pulled out a big glob of
snus
, a kind of tobacco that’s sucked instead of smoked. He flung it down in front of our feet and slammed the door as he went back in.

“He could do with a trip to the principal’s office,” Lena said strictly, and then we began to play again.

We only got halfway through before the shop door reopened, and the grumpy man shouted, “Put a sock in it! You can have your ball, you wretched children!”

We were standing outside the shop with our new soccer ball when I remembered about Dad.

“Oh, no!” I shouted, and we started running. The ferry had made three journeys, and Dad was more or less as angry as I had feared. He somehow gets all big and red when he’s angry.

“We’ll never do it again,” I promised, all out of breath.

“Huh! Never do it again indeed! You and Lena never do the same thing twice. You only come up with more insanity!”

Lena looked at him kindly and took his hand.

“Have you seen our ball?” she asked. “It’s a professional one.”

I saw that Dad was starting to look slightly proud of us. He thought it was a nice ball and wanted to try it. But it’s not easy to do tricks wearing a ticket bag and wooden shoes. All of a sudden, both his shoe and the ball flew in a beautiful curve overboard. I slapped my forehead. There we’d been, playing “Silent Night” almost to death, and Dad had sent the ball flying into the sea before we’d even had a chance to try it!

“Well, now you’ll have to dive in and get it!” Lena shouted angrily.

Dad didn’t really like the idea of diving into the sea. Instead, he ran up onto the jetty and borrowed a net from a German man who was fishing there and managed to lift the ball ashore. His shoe disappeared out to sea.

When Dad had sold tickets to all the passengers, he came down to Margot’s shop, where Lena and I were.

“Let’s not tell Mom that you and Lena have been into town by yourselves today, OK, Trille?”

I promised.

But that didn’t help much. The next day there was a big picture of Lena and me in the newspaper. The lady who had been taking photos of us was a journalist.

“You’re a sneaky one, you are, Trille, my lad,” said Mom, peering up from behind the newspaper.

I promised to play “Silent Night” for her one day when I had time.

A
ll sorts of strange things happen when you’ve got a neighbor and best friend like Lena, but sometimes I think I like normal days best of all. Those days when nothing special happens, and I eat liver paste on bread and Lena and I play around with our soccer ball or look for crabs and talk about ordinary things, without anything going wrong.

“Do you think ordinary days are better than Christmas?” asked Lena when I tried to explain what I thought.

“No, but it can’t be Christmas every day,” I said. “Otherwise Christmas would get boring.”

Lena assured me that it could be Christmas much more often without her getting bored in the slightest, and then we said no more about it. We played soccer out in the sun instead, and while I tried to score against Lena, I thought that this was a nice and ordinary day.

“I ought to have a dad to play soccer with. One who does really hard kicks,” said Lena after she had saved one of my best shots.

I sighed.

We took a break on the lawn, and Minda, who was painting the porch, came and sat with us. Lena and I smiled. Minda is almost as good as Auntie Granny at telling stories and making us feel warm and cozy. She lay down on her stomach and told us why our cove is called Mathildewick.

“The reason is,” she said, “that there was once a Portuguese pirate ship sailing out in the fjord here, and the prow of the ship was mounted with a magnificent figurehead: the beautiful Maid Mathilde.”

“A figurehead?” I asked.

Minda explained that a figurehead is a big wooden figure with flowing hair and a beautiful dress that used to be attached to boats in the old days.

“Then came a hurricane, just out there,” Minda continued. “A real, deadly hurricane, like they used to have in the old days. The ship tilted from one side to the other, making it impossible to steer, and eventually the whole thing came crashing into our cove. The beautiful Mathilde whacked into the rocks by the shore, sending splinters flying—more or less where we traditionally put out bonfires using the muck-spreader.”

“Wow,” Lena and I said, almost in chorus.

“The pirates never got home. They found themselves wives and settled here instead. And they called the cove Mathildewick after the destroyed figurehead of Mathilde that had whacked into the rocks on the beach.” Minda leaned toward us and whispered, “One of them was Grandpa’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. It’s hardly surprising that he’s got pirate blood in his veins!”

I was speechless for a long while, thinking that if this was true, it would be fantastic.

“Minda,” I said at last, “does that mean I have pirate blood in my veins too?”

“You’ve all got pirate blood in you. The whole family does except for me, because I’m an adopted Incan princess.” She laughed. Then she walked on her hands all the way back up to the house to continue painting the porch.

Lena took the soccer ball and threw it up into the air a couple of times while I sat there, almost feeling like I was a different boy from the one I had been a short while ago. I had pirate blood in my veins.

“Maybe that’s why I do so many crazy things. I can’t help it. I’m full of pirate blood,” I said to Lena.

“Hah! You’ve got so little of it that it all runs out of you if you so much as get a nosebleed,” she said sharply.

Lena was probably thinking she wouldn’t mind having some pirate blood of her own.

I looked out over the sea. There was Grandpa in his boat. Naturally! He was a pirate!

“Lena, why don’t we go out in the rubber dinghy?” I suggested. The pirate blood in me wanted to go to sea too.

Lena gave me a resigned look but took off her goalie gloves.

“OK. I call Mathilde! I want to be that Mathilde who got whacked on the rocks!”

When Lena came aboard my bright-yellow rubber dinghy a little later, she was wearing her mother’s long red dress under her life jacket and had a majestic look on her face. I doubted that she was supposed to go to sea in a dress like that, but so be it.

We rowed around the jetty. I felt like a pirate and was happy and contented, but Lena, who was hanging over the prow, quickly began to feel it was boring being a figurehead.

“Here comes the storm,” she announced.

I began to rock backward and forward, making Lena’s hair skim the water below. She remained as still as a chest of drawers. Eventually she turned around and said impatiently, “Are you going to whack me on the head soon or not?”

I shrugged and rowed carefully toward the jetty. The dinghy drifted slowly forward. But at that very moment, Grandpa arrived on his boat. He made large waves, and one of them gave the rubber dinghy such a shove that we smacked into the concrete with a crack.

Rubber dinghies don’t go
crack
. Figureheads, on the other hand, make a tremendous crack. Especially their heads.

“Lena!” I screamed when I saw her hanging lifelessly over the prow. “Grandpa, Lena’s dead!”

Grandpa came as quickly as he could and pulled Lena out of the dinghy. “Hey, come on, little lass, wake up,” he said, shaking her gently.

I sat holding the oars, not knowing what to do. I just cried.

“Uh . . .” groaned Lena. She opened her eyes and looked at Grandpa as if she didn’t recognize him. Then she groaned some more.

“There, there,” said Grandpa. “Let’s get you to the doctor. And you, Trille, my lad, you can stop crying. She’s OK.”

Lena half stood up. “No, just keep on crying, Trille, you smoked haddock! You row like an idiot!”

I had never been so happy to hear someone say something so mean to me. Lena was all right; she’d only gotten a medium whack to her head.

But then Lena realized that her forehead was bleeding, and she let out a furious scream. She had to go into town to see the doctor, and as I waved good-bye to her, I thought that there isn’t really any such thing as an ordinary day when you’ve got a neighbor and best friend like Lena.