STORY: Innocence, a Novel
A slice-of-life story about all the little ways in which a person's innocence erodes away during the long process of coming of age.
Innocence, a Novel
Christina Nordlander
All the shops were open on Christmas Market night. Mum and Liselotte walked around a decorating shop where a whole wall was full of little boxes made from wood-shavings with painted flowers on the lids. The prettiest one was powder-blue and almost no bigger than a thimble. She took it off the shelf to look at it, but her thumb went straight through the bottom. Mum had to buy it.
It lay on the little ornament shelf over the headboard of her bed. Mum had fixed it with transparent Scotch tape that you couldn't see unless you picked it up.
*
“Lottie!” Mum said from the kitchen. “Your ballet teacher has died!”
She ran out into the living-room, she didn't know why, and pressed herself against the side of the green easy-chair as if she needed to hide. When Mum got there, she bent over her and comforted her.
Died. She hadn't known her, even less than she knew the school teacher. Her name was Natalya, she was from the Soviet Union or something, and had big black hair and a big smile. She'd only seen her at the lessons anyway. Would it be better if she thought that she'd just gone to some country far away and was never going to come back?
Mum and Dad let her continue to go to ballet in a new school, in an apartment in town. The teacher was young with a long ponytail and was named Isabella. She only went there for a couple of weeks, because it felt like Isabella might die too.
*
“You wanna know a secret?”
Filippa, thin and yellow-haired, at the quiz walk in the darkness of the forest, far away from the other pairs. When Liselotte mumbled, she went on:
“I cheated when we got our swimming badges. I stood on the bottom sometimes when the teacher wasn't looking.”
She couldn't answer that. Long afterwards she wanted to tell someone, maybe not the teachers or the swimming-pool people, just someone. She didn't, not to be nice to Filippa, just because it was a secret.
Once she asked Dad what you should do if someone had confessed something and asked you not to tell. Dad said that you should tell anyway, but she never did.
“What about you, have you done anything you never told anyone?”
*
It was once in church, in the dark autumn, with the scouts. The clergyman, not Valdemar but some new woman, had talked some drivel about how “everyone has a conscience”, and she'd whispered, so quietly only she could hear it:
“Like hell I do.”
Did it count, if she hadn't said it out loud? She couldn't go back and change it. She didn't even know if God existed, but she'd cursed in church. Was there a more certain way to go to Hell?
A year later, when she was eleven, she said “hell” again, this time out loud and to the choir leader.
*
Jonas and his mates had teased her for several days, and when she asked Dad what to do, he sighed.
“Use words”, he said. “You're good at words, aren't you? Tell him he's as thick as two sumo wrestlers tied together, or something.”
So at the twenty minute break in the morning, she walked up to Jonas where he was talking to some guys under the basketball goal on the wall. He was shorter than her, but broader, his hair so light it was almost white.
“Congratulations”, she said.
He turned around, harmless with big surprised eyes.
“Wha, for what?” he asked.
“To having the smallest brain in all of southern Sweden.”
Then he spat on her. White spit landed on the sleeve of her brightly coloured winter jacket.
She rubbed the spot with water and soft soap in the school bathroom. That would take it out, wouldn't it? She had to wear the jacket anyway. He had infected it.
*
Mum sat warm on the bedside, like when she'd been reading to her when she was a kid.
“You have to understand, Lottie, your father and I still like each other, but... it's not working out any more.”
She didn't have to explain more. That tone and those words could only mean one thing.
“Can't you wait a few years, please?”
In five years she would be eighteen. They could get a divorce when she'd moved out.
The days after that she mostly lay on her quilt reading The Lord of the Rings. It'd used to make her feel better, but for the first time it was hard to focus on the words for more than a minute at a time.
It was Dad she was going to lose. She'd always thought it was better to have a divorced parent than a dead one, because then you could still meet them. That had been before this. She would have wanted to press them to her chest so that they couldn't walk off in different directions without tearing her. Tear-stains got on the pages, and when Dad came in to say goodnight she turned the page so that he wouldn't see them.
Earlier that summer she'd thought a lot about Nietzsche's saying, whatever does not kill me makes me stronger. After this, she thought that she didn't want to become strong if this was the price.
*
The time with dissociative identity disorder was the absence of memory. Her family and Magnus told her later about their visits, what the couches and wall-paintings at the psychiatric clinic had looked like. Perhaps she ought to have asked them more, so she wouldn't just have a void in her memory from the time when she'd been a different person. What she remembered was from before she was committed, when she'd sometimes been sitting at the nocturnal window and wondered whether she ought to jump, because it never got better.
She'd graduated and got married, but at some point, several months after returning to her normal life, she'd re-read a novel where one of the characters was in a lunatic asylum, and wondered if you weren't fully an adult until you'd had a mental disorder.
*
Magnus' parents had asked her to clean the kitchen on Tuesday and Thursday nights. That included doing the washing-up, wiping all surfaces and vacuuming. She'd calculated that she needed one hour twenty minutes for everything. It was already dark out. Magnus wasn't coming home today, he was at a conference with his university. His parents had gone upstairs, and Juliane was finally asleep.
She rinsed the last glass and pushed it into the bottom compartment of the dish rack, then took the rag and swept onion skins and strips of used clingfilm into the sink. When she did the table, she had to stretch a bit to reach. It was a lighter job, almost frivolous, but after that she would have to vacuum. That took half of the time she'd set. She always had to move all the chairs out in the hallway, then put them back afterwards. Not even the vacuuming would have been so heavy if there hadn't been furniture to move. Cleaning the bathroom took a couple of minutes.
Before she pulled the vacuum out, she had to open the front door and take a step outside, to cool the sweat that plastered her shirt to her back. It was too cold to stand outside for long, but the sky was still beautiful. It hadn't blackened completely, but it had cracks of blue, space blue, like when she and Jakob had been watching the New Year's fireworks with Dad.
She turned back into the warmth. The vacuuming was the only thing left to do, then she'd have time to proofread a couple of pages before going to bed.
She'd done the square shaped by the doorway and the worktop without issues, but when she rolled the nozzle across the blue rag-rug, Juliane started screaming. She tried to vacuum a few more pulls, now that the girl was awake anyway, but her scream had that note that was almost impossible to bear. When she tightened her shoulders, it felt like something snapped red.
“Go ahead and scream, you little moron!”
It was at the top of her voice. When she finished she was faint and perhaps sick.
It was quiet while Juliane drew a breath, then she screamed again. Liselotte was on the verge of running to her, but she'd frightened her. She'd ruined something.
Oh, little girl, little honey. She was going to do everything for her that could possibly obliterate this: learn to knit, learn to crotchet, so she could give her clothes that nobody else had, of hot pink and sea green. She was going to hold her in her arms every night and sing and tell stories until she fell asleep.
When little Juliane had hiccuped and mumbled and gone back to sleep, she could comfort herself with the fact that she wouldn't be able to remember this. Juliane wasn't even a month old: what did she remember from her infancy? Maybe it would stick as some sort of unconscious fear, the roar of a monster that wasn't Mum. Even that might be improbable.
It was the first ruined part of Juliane's innocence. She could be nice to her for as long as she lived, but she couldn't repair it.
THE END
Innocence, a Novel
Christina Nordlander
All the shops were open on Christmas Market night. Mum and Liselotte walked around a decorating shop where a whole wall was full of little boxes made from wood-shavings with painted flowers on the lids. The prettiest one was powder-blue and almost no bigger than a thimble. She took it off the shelf to look at it, but her thumb went straight through the bottom. Mum had to buy it.
It lay on the little ornament shelf over the headboard of her bed. Mum had fixed it with transparent Scotch tape that you couldn't see unless you picked it up.
*
“Lottie!” Mum said from the kitchen. “Your ballet teacher has died!”
She ran out into the living-room, she didn't know why, and pressed herself against the side of the green easy-chair as if she needed to hide. When Mum got there, she bent over her and comforted her.
Died. She hadn't known her, even less than she knew the school teacher. Her name was Natalya, she was from the Soviet Union or something, and had big black hair and a big smile. She'd only seen her at the lessons anyway. Would it be better if she thought that she'd just gone to some country far away and was never going to come back?
Mum and Dad let her continue to go to ballet in a new school, in an apartment in town. The teacher was young with a long ponytail and was named Isabella. She only went there for a couple of weeks, because it felt like Isabella might die too.
*
“You wanna know a secret?”
Filippa, thin and yellow-haired, at the quiz walk in the darkness of the forest, far away from the other pairs. When Liselotte mumbled, she went on:
“I cheated when we got our swimming badges. I stood on the bottom sometimes when the teacher wasn't looking.”
She couldn't answer that. Long afterwards she wanted to tell someone, maybe not the teachers or the swimming-pool people, just someone. She didn't, not to be nice to Filippa, just because it was a secret.
Once she asked Dad what you should do if someone had confessed something and asked you not to tell. Dad said that you should tell anyway, but she never did.
“What about you, have you done anything you never told anyone?”
*
It was once in church, in the dark autumn, with the scouts. The clergyman, not Valdemar but some new woman, had talked some drivel about how “everyone has a conscience”, and she'd whispered, so quietly only she could hear it:
“Like hell I do.”
Did it count, if she hadn't said it out loud? She couldn't go back and change it. She didn't even know if God existed, but she'd cursed in church. Was there a more certain way to go to Hell?
A year later, when she was eleven, she said “hell” again, this time out loud and to the choir leader.
*
Jonas and his mates had teased her for several days, and when she asked Dad what to do, he sighed.
“Use words”, he said. “You're good at words, aren't you? Tell him he's as thick as two sumo wrestlers tied together, or something.”
So at the twenty minute break in the morning, she walked up to Jonas where he was talking to some guys under the basketball goal on the wall. He was shorter than her, but broader, his hair so light it was almost white.
“Congratulations”, she said.
He turned around, harmless with big surprised eyes.
“Wha, for what?” he asked.
“To having the smallest brain in all of southern Sweden.”
Then he spat on her. White spit landed on the sleeve of her brightly coloured winter jacket.
She rubbed the spot with water and soft soap in the school bathroom. That would take it out, wouldn't it? She had to wear the jacket anyway. He had infected it.
*
Mum sat warm on the bedside, like when she'd been reading to her when she was a kid.
“You have to understand, Lottie, your father and I still like each other, but... it's not working out any more.”
She didn't have to explain more. That tone and those words could only mean one thing.
“Can't you wait a few years, please?”
In five years she would be eighteen. They could get a divorce when she'd moved out.
The days after that she mostly lay on her quilt reading The Lord of the Rings. It'd used to make her feel better, but for the first time it was hard to focus on the words for more than a minute at a time.
It was Dad she was going to lose. She'd always thought it was better to have a divorced parent than a dead one, because then you could still meet them. That had been before this. She would have wanted to press them to her chest so that they couldn't walk off in different directions without tearing her. Tear-stains got on the pages, and when Dad came in to say goodnight she turned the page so that he wouldn't see them.
Earlier that summer she'd thought a lot about Nietzsche's saying, whatever does not kill me makes me stronger. After this, she thought that she didn't want to become strong if this was the price.
*
The time with dissociative identity disorder was the absence of memory. Her family and Magnus told her later about their visits, what the couches and wall-paintings at the psychiatric clinic had looked like. Perhaps she ought to have asked them more, so she wouldn't just have a void in her memory from the time when she'd been a different person. What she remembered was from before she was committed, when she'd sometimes been sitting at the nocturnal window and wondered whether she ought to jump, because it never got better.
She'd graduated and got married, but at some point, several months after returning to her normal life, she'd re-read a novel where one of the characters was in a lunatic asylum, and wondered if you weren't fully an adult until you'd had a mental disorder.
*
Magnus' parents had asked her to clean the kitchen on Tuesday and Thursday nights. That included doing the washing-up, wiping all surfaces and vacuuming. She'd calculated that she needed one hour twenty minutes for everything. It was already dark out. Magnus wasn't coming home today, he was at a conference with his university. His parents had gone upstairs, and Juliane was finally asleep.
She rinsed the last glass and pushed it into the bottom compartment of the dish rack, then took the rag and swept onion skins and strips of used clingfilm into the sink. When she did the table, she had to stretch a bit to reach. It was a lighter job, almost frivolous, but after that she would have to vacuum. That took half of the time she'd set. She always had to move all the chairs out in the hallway, then put them back afterwards. Not even the vacuuming would have been so heavy if there hadn't been furniture to move. Cleaning the bathroom took a couple of minutes.
Before she pulled the vacuum out, she had to open the front door and take a step outside, to cool the sweat that plastered her shirt to her back. It was too cold to stand outside for long, but the sky was still beautiful. It hadn't blackened completely, but it had cracks of blue, space blue, like when she and Jakob had been watching the New Year's fireworks with Dad.
She turned back into the warmth. The vacuuming was the only thing left to do, then she'd have time to proofread a couple of pages before going to bed.
She'd done the square shaped by the doorway and the worktop without issues, but when she rolled the nozzle across the blue rag-rug, Juliane started screaming. She tried to vacuum a few more pulls, now that the girl was awake anyway, but her scream had that note that was almost impossible to bear. When she tightened her shoulders, it felt like something snapped red.
“Go ahead and scream, you little moron!”
It was at the top of her voice. When she finished she was faint and perhaps sick.
It was quiet while Juliane drew a breath, then she screamed again. Liselotte was on the verge of running to her, but she'd frightened her. She'd ruined something.
Oh, little girl, little honey. She was going to do everything for her that could possibly obliterate this: learn to knit, learn to crotchet, so she could give her clothes that nobody else had, of hot pink and sea green. She was going to hold her in her arms every night and sing and tell stories until she fell asleep.
When little Juliane had hiccuped and mumbled and gone back to sleep, she could comfort herself with the fact that she wouldn't be able to remember this. Juliane wasn't even a month old: what did she remember from her infancy? Maybe it would stick as some sort of unconscious fear, the roar of a monster that wasn't Mum. Even that might be improbable.
It was the first ruined part of Juliane's innocence. She could be nice to her for as long as she lived, but she couldn't repair it.
THE END