The Seventh Child (16 page)

One thing made Orla stand out from everyone else on his street and in the neighborhood where he grew up: he had only ever lived with women. First, all the misses and governesses at the orphanage, then his own mother who never (as far as anyone knew) brought a man inside her home at Glee Court.

But even though Orla Berntsen measured up with most girls when it came to intuition and empathy, his feminine side was strangely lacking the character traits one might expect: tenderness, compassion, gentleness.

“There’s something broken inside him,” the psychologists at Kongslund would have said. With a demonstratively regretful shrug of the shoulders, they would have added another piece of paper to the unfortunate child’s ever-thickening record. But they didn’t, because he didn’t tell anyone about the visions that tormented him during those early years.

For that reason, his first experience with the opposite sex was an unfortunate one—and it was the only time he reached out spontaneously to another human being, summoning all the confidence he could muster.

The boy raised by so many women met a girl raised by two men (both the aging, unskilled laborer Sørensen and his son worked at the big shipyard in the central city). For some reason she still wet her pants at age eight, and one day as they stood by themselves on the road staring at yet another ominous puddle at her feet, Orla pulled out a bag of licorice candies from the pocket of his anorak. He extended it to her, but she just stared at him with her inscrutable gaze, no hint of delight or thankfulness could be seen in her eyes. Orla, age eleven, stepped close to the girl and whispered, “I’ll teach you a game that nobody else knows
…
” he promised, making his voice sharp and sly. “It’ll make us sweethearts, or it’ll
kill
us.”

She looked at him, saying nothing.

“It goes like this,” he said. “I line up eight candies, and if you haven’t given me a kiss before I eat the last one—the
blue
one—then I die. Because that one’s
poisonous
.”

Orla assembled the colored candies on the curb, and they squatted down. He now sensed her gaze in a way he didn’t understand; it wasn’t a worried or mild look as he expected—it was rapt, hopeful. First he ate a yellow candy, then white, red, and orange, then another white, then a green and a brown, and then suddenly the only one left was the blue one. Her eyes were shining as if they were full of tears or she was overcome with fever.
How could she let him eat the blue one? She couldn’t let him eat it when she knew he would die from it, could she?
She’d
have to follow his plan and give him the kiss that would save his life.
Instead, she cocked her head and looked at him with filmy eyes; the little tip of her tongue appeared in the space between her front teeth, nestled there, waiting.

That’s how Orla Pil Berntsen discovered that he was merely a tiny flake in an enormous universe; that he was just a little boy with freckles, a pig nose, and a dirty hand frozen halfway to his mouth, who suddenly faced his own death, forced to it by his life’s first and only love.

Right then she said the words that no boy or man would ever forget: “Can’t I kiss you
and
watch you eat the blue one?” (I think this question was the first inkling of the impending women’s liberation movement, but Orla Berntsen was too young to understand its significance.)

The shock didn’t hit him in earnest until that night, when he lay in his dark bedroom.

What should he have said?

This was the spring that Fate knocked down the last remaining bulwarks Orla the Lonely had so painstakingly constructed around himself—with a single incident that, more than anything, seemed coincidental.

When the evening bells sounded in Søborg Church, the front door opened, and Orla stepped out with a tin bucket in his hand, a searching and cautious glare in his eyes. The bucket was a light-yellow color, dented, maybe fifteen inches tall. As usual, Orla trudged down to the boarding house at Maglegårds Boulevard, walked to the back of the house where the kitchen was, and said hello to the cook, who jovially tousled his coarse hair and filled his bucket. Then he walked back home under the streetlights until his curiosity got the best of him; he lifted the lid and stuck a finger into the thick gravy filled with Cumberland sausages, rissole, meatballs, and steamed potatoes—all of it glinting white in the brown sauce. He stood for a bit in the shade of a tree licking the gravy off his fingers. Lost in his thoughts—which I would understand only much later—the food grew cold.

Catastrophes sometimes have peculiar, innocent entry points. If he understood the game of which he was part, he would have regretted the evening he worked up the courage to ask Erik, the most popular boy on Glee Court, to join him as he carried the yellow bucket to the boarding house.

On the way home, Orla bent over and raised the lid and stuck a finger into the steaming brown liquid so that his friend could see for himself the delights that awaited Orla and his mother.

“Yuck,” said Erik. “Gross meatballs.” He was already full, and in his home, meatballs weren’t served in a yellow bucket but in a cozy kitchen, with a clatter of pots and pans, his mother humming as she stirred; the meatballs were ladled from a beautiful glass serving dish onto his plate, and his mother would hold onto the dish with thick, sky-blue gloves
she’d
crocheted herself.

“Yuck,” he repeated, as Orla licked the gravy off his index finger. “Look, you’ve got a
wart
on your finger!”

The focus shifted abruptly and brutally, and Fate awoke with a start. It was true. There really was a big gray-brown growth right below the knuckle on his right index finger, and the gravy made it shine.

He reacted swiftly, and the reaction proved disastrous. “Did you know that if you pop a wart you can make a wish for anything in the world?”

Erik looked at him skeptically but was so fascinated by the brown growth on the dirty finger that he stood motionless. Then Orla squeezed the wart, rubbing it hard between his index finger and thumb and let this recklessness take control of the most decisive moment of his childhood; up to this point, he could have stopped, he could have admitted that he had no secret, had never had one, and maybe then everything would have been different. Maybe his life would have been like his mother’s—from youth to old age—a quiet commute from the house to an anonymous office, cloaked in a gray shadow, slipping in and out of an anonymous front door. But it was too late.

His new friend leaned close, having completely forgotten his earlier skepticism, and Orla sensed his disgust mutate into fascination. He felt his warmth and his breath, heard air pushing through his nose and sucking in through concentrated lips, and he felt his friend’s body close to his; it was the most wonderful moment
he’d
ever experienced: they were buddies; everything was suddenly so oddly intimate as if Erik was his brother. He squeezed with all his might, squeezed harder than
he’d
ever squeezed anything or anyone before, and
…

Then the wart burst, and Erik let out a loud, desperate shriek.

A long squirt from the pierced growth struck him right in one eye, and a foul yellow fluid stained his left cheek. He danced around on the sidewalk as if in a convulsion of insanity, holding both hands to his face, shielding his eyes, screaming.

“Now we get to make a wish!” Orla shouted to drown him out. But his friend made no wish, none at all, just sobbed.

“I want a big red bus so we can all go to Bellevue for a swim!” Orla shouted. “A London double-decker!”

But Erik had started running, at full speed, toward home. Orla ran after him, the food in the yellow bucket sloshing so much the lid came off. He didn’t notice.

“I want a Bluebird car so we can go five hundred miles an hour
…
and you can have it!” he shouted. This was his second wish, and it was the best thing he could come up with.

“You’re
…
a freaking idiot
…
stupid idiot!” Erik shouted in between loud, gasping sobs. “I’ll grow warts in my eyes
…
I’ll go blind!”

Orla saw it in his mind’s eye: how the contagious fluid penetrated Erik’s skin, how a brownish, shapeless mass grew out of his beautiful blue eye and covered half of his face—a boy who would always have to hide behind a mask or wear a hood over his head. He felt the earth and the flagstones slide from under his feet, nausea bubbling from his trembling gut, and then Erik disappeared around the corner by the garages. A moment later, Orla heard the front door slam, and the wailing subsided. His forlorn friend had made it home.

Only then did he discover that gravy, meatballs, and steamed potatoes had splashed out of the bucket while he was running. There was no food left, and his mother would go to bed hungry. In a few minutes, his little misstep had become a complete disaster. He left the bucket on the flagstone by the front door and ran, as fast as he could, to the wetlands. He fled into the darkness he had always known. This was how most children from Kongslund reacted when they felt trapped. I knew it better than anyone.

Here he crouched behind a thorny bush on the opposite side of the creek, near the bridge; he put his shaking, disfigured finger—which now bled and stung—into his mouth, closed his eyes, and felt fear grow in his belly. It rose up and dribbled down his chin like a warm, seeping fluid. It wasn’t like blood from an Allied commando at the Siege of Tobruk (that kind of blood would have portended an honorable death). But blood mixed with boarding-house gravy and gall and acidic yellow fear—because he knew what was about to happen: from now on, the other boys—Palle, Bo, Henrik, and Jens—would torment him more than ever. They would
never
stop, they would chase him wherever he went; they would never talk to him again.

The rain began around midnight, as his mother was going from door to door on Glee Court, the yellow bucket in her hand, asking for her son with a slightly tremulous voice; and in so doing, losing the last shred of respect
she’d
garnered from the other boys’ parents.
(
What kind of home is it when a mother can’t control her child?
)

Resigned, the fathers got up—anything else would be too insensitive, after all—found their flashlights, and walked in a line toward the creek.

Just before the men burst through the bushes, Orla heard a voice in the darkness, no louder than the rustling of the wind in the leaves, a whisper that repeated itself again and again as if it were inside his head:
I wish I were a star.
Orla thought it was a sentence from a world that had existed long before the flashlight beam shined on
him (“
Here he is, the little idiot
!”), long befor
e his terrible decision to squeeze his wart into the face of the boy who had been his friend for a short, almost unreal instant.

With closed eyes, he stood, the hand with the wart jammed into his mouth as he concentrated deeply on his third and final wish. The men with their flashlights never knew what he was thinking about in that moment—but I think I know what he wished for.

From that day on, rage was the only fixed point in Orla’s life. He lay awake in the dark after his mother had gone to bed, thinking about the enemy, the only name he had for his troubles. The enemy was faceless and merciless, and during his twelfth year, Orla developed a taste for violence that followed him many years into the future.

Something drew him time and time again to the garages where his neighborhood ended, and which were built into a hill covered by a giant hawthorn hedge. On the other side of that hedge, yellow tenements rose six stories into the blue sky. This is where the families who couldn’t afford their own homes (even a row house) lived. Over the years, the hedge had grown so tall and so wild that you couldn’t look over it any longer. At least once a week, the children from the low red houses showered the other side with rocks in an attempt to hit their invisible foes from the tenements, and during those months, no one threw more rocks, or threw them harder, than Orla. It was as though a mighty and fearless rage had taken hold of his squat body, making him jump higher than anyone else as he hurled rocks toward the sounds and voices behind the hedge. When a throw was rewarded with cries and the pounding of running feet, he laughed in a way that almost frightened his allies more than his adversaries; they were on his side of the hedge, after all.

Now, a year or so before puberty set in, there might have been a way to save someone as peculiar as Orla, or so the psychologists at Kongslund would’ve no doubt claimed.

They would defend the theory, based on careful research, that even the most serious damages could be contained, perhaps even alleviated and concealed.

“Orla was a healthy boy,” they would have said. “He was teased some, to be sure, but he never failed to get back up. He always bounced back!” And they would light their pipes and nod to one another encouragingly over the shining frames of their glasses.