It’s warm, and Ragnhild needs to pee. She’s kneeling on her bed, with her elbows on the windowsill, looking out at the birch tree that stretches its branches toward the window, rocking on her heel, which she’s sitting on to delay going to the bathroom. As the birch branches wave back and forth in the drowsy wind, she sees through them over the road and up to the field where one of her cousins is lying on a sun lounger with one knee pulled up and her arms slightly out to the side. And she sees one of the boys from next door over by the fence that divides the two properties, lying on the ground peeping in through the planks. He’s the cutest boy in the neighborhood, the one everyone’s in love with, and her cousin knows that he’s lying there, that’s why she’s pulled up her knee. A girl always looks better with her knee pulled up. Ragnhild’s heel is holding in so much pee now that she almost feels sick. But she carries on rocking to keep it in even longer. The toilet sits in the danger zone, a danger zone where creaking doors might burst open and great vacuum cleaner pipes might suck you into the living room and spit you out by the piano. Grandpa has been so looking forward to it, they’ll say, and you’ll have to sit down on the piano stool, feel the ridged fabric under your thighs, because the thin dress you didn’t really want to wear because you think you’re too fat for it—but it’s still better than shorts—rides up when you sit down; you’ll have to look at the music, which you’ve looked at a hundred times before, and still think it looks illegible and completely unknown, you’ll have to feel your heart thumping, the sweat on your fingers, and you’ll have to play, on keys that get slippier and slippier. The first line, knowing all the time that you have to play two more pages before you can stand up and take the applause you know you don’t deserve because you’ve made so many mistakes along the way. And you’ll get a hug that smells of aftershave and feel the thin shoulders under the thin shirt and say hmm, hmm, right, when they say that one day, in a few years’ time, you’ll make your debut in the concert hall, the Aula, at the University of Oslo, and you know that it’s impossible and blatantly not true, and that everyone knows that, that the Aula is just something they say, and you hate it, you hate that hall at the University of Oslo, you want to scream and shout that you hate them all because you have to play the piano for them when you can’t and only make mistakes, and it’s not fair to force someone to do something they don’t want to do. And that what they’re saying about the Aula in Oslo is just rubbish. Aaauulaa. It’s a big, horrible word that makes her shudder.
* * *
She is NOT going to go to the bathroom. She rocks and rocks. Moves over to the small window next to the main one, lifts the latch and gently pushes it open with her finger. Carefully checks the windowsill to make sure there are no spiders, one of those big black ones that come out at dusk and stare at her lying on the bed, reading or dreaming, because she doesn’t want to be out there, where you have to wear shorts, and where you’re always being bothered by wasps and bees and all kinds of insects, which make it impossible for her to have the window open at night, so her parents have to sneak in after she’s gone to sleep and open it, because they can’t bear the thought of her sleeping in that boiling-hot room. It’s not healthy, they say, it’s not surprising that you get so many headaches in summer, which sometimes make her howl with rage, and they don’t dare open it again for a few days. Sometimes she catches them just as they’re about to close it again in the morning, before she’s woken up, or so they think, but she’s awake, and she leaps out of bed and shouts: DID YOU OPEN IT? making them jump as they stand there in their nighties or underpants, before she forces them to inspect the window and curtains and ceiling for spiders before she can go back to sleep, but more often than not, she lies in bed looking up at the ceiling to see if any of the knots in the wood are in fact moving. Maybe she regrets shouting. Then she’ll put on her shorts and go out into the garden for a while and play badminton with her dad. And often there’s not as many wasps out there as anticipated. But she doesn’t say that. And now she needs to pee so badly she’s about to burst. But she keeps rocking, pushing harder against her heel, and then a wasp brushes over her hair and flies into the room, turns abruptly and bashes into the window, making a horrible, flat sound as her hammering heart, which plunged into her pee and squeezed out a few drops as she moved her heel to dodge out of the way, slowly pushes itself back into place in her chest, hammering all the while, and she bolts out of the room and slams the door.
* * *
When she opens the door a crack thirty seconds later to see if the wasp has flown out, it’s banging against the ceiling, like a shark in an aquarium, she thinks to herself. She closes the door. When she opens it a crack again, the wasp is at the window, buzzing up and down in fizzing strips, the sting waiting in its tail. She thinks it’s settled. So now she has to decide what to do. She wants to watch what’s happening out in the garden. And she doesn’t want to play the piano. It’s not easy to think straight; she’s full to the brim with pee. Light-headed and aching with pee, she puts one leg in front of the other and clenches her thighs together, sits down so she can clench even harder, but doesn’t quite manage to hold it in, clings to the door handle, doubles over, twisting and turning: she HAS to pee. Has to go down into the danger zone. Has to tread on the creaky stairs as lightly as possible, tiptoe down the hall, open the door that always jams against the frame and you can’t open it without pulling it hard so that when it finally lets go it makes a noise that lets everyone know: someone is going to the bathroom, and it must be Ragnhild, because she’s the only one who’s not in the living room, where they’re sitting drinking coffee because Grandpa has come to see them, and now they’ll have to go out and get her to come in and play the piano, because he’s been looking forward to it so much. She treads as quietly as she can. Holds on to the banister and tries to step in the places where it creaks least, holds her breath and grits her teeth every time the pee almost bursts out between her legs, which can’t be clenched on the stairs. Gets down. Looks to the right; the door to the living room is closed. She hears them laughing; a good thing, as they maybe won’t hear her hurrying to the bathroom door, pressing down the handle, trying to open it carefully, carefully, bent over, one foot in front of the other, clenching and clenching, pulling and pulling, but it doesn’t help, she has to yank, yank; the door makes a loud noise as it opens, she almost leaps into the bathroom, her legs tight together, pulls up her dress, pulls down her underwear, but when she’s finally sitting on the toilet her body has forgotten how to pee, what she has to do. And then she closes her eyes.
And pees.
* * *
But she doesn’t flush when she’s finished. That would make too much noise. Instead she puts in extra toilet paper, tears the sheets ever so carefully from the roll. Now she has to creep out into the kitchen to get a jam jar, which she can use to catch the wasp, like she’s seen her dad do when he doesn’t want to kill them; he puts the jam jar over them and then slips a thin piece of paper between the windowpane and the jar opening, lifts the jar slowly away from the window and then holds it out of the open window and pulls away the paper. Then the wasp flies out and you have to close the window quickly before it decides to turn around and fly back in. She pulls up her underwear, pushes open the door, which makes a noise, but not enough for anyone to hear it, she reckons; she steals out into the hall, stands there, listens. No one comes out. By now the boy from next door has probably emerged from his hiding place and said hello, in that nice way that he does.
* * *
The kitchen door is shut, completely, and it’s impossible to open the kitchen door without making a racket. The doors in this house are so old! It annoys her immensely that they don’t have new, silent doors, or that no one has at least oiled the hinges so that the old doors they do have creak less. She studies the two doors, the living room door and the kitchen door. She’s in a risky midfield position. Either could open at any time. People could come out, get her to come in. And when she opens the kitchen door with the inevitable noise that that entails, one of her parents might already have gone into the kitchen from the living room and they’ll be standing there and will force her to go into the living room and sit down at the piano. She tiptoes over to listen at the living room door, and after a while, she’s heard all three voices, so can establish that none of them have gone into the kitchen without her noticing. She tiptoes back to the kitchen door. Puts her hand on the handle and then realizes that she still has another door to go, the cupboard door, and that if the kitchen door hasn’t already given her away, then the cupboard door certainly will, because it makes a really distinctive sound when it opens. She’s lost the battle. And by now her cousin will have smiled her lovely smile and said hello back. Ragnhild opens the door, goes into the kitchen, opens the cupboard door, which makes its distinctive sound; she takes out a medium-sized jam jar, closes the cupboard door, walks out of the kitchen, closes the kitchen door, and runs up the stairs.
Thunders up.
* * *
She opens the door to her room a crack, nervous that the wasp might now be banging into the doorframe, and that it might fly straight into her face and sting her. But nothing happens. She opens it a little wider, systematically scans the ceiling, the walls, the window; she can’t see the wasp anywhere. Nor can she hear any buzzing. She boldly steps into the room, clutching the jam jar to her chest; she ventures farther in, slowly; it’s not there. She sits down on the bed, puts the jam jar on the windowsill, and then she sees her cousin and the boy from next door, who is now sitting beside her on the grass and it looks like they’re chatting, it looks like they’re having a nice time, her eyes get hot, she hates her cousin, she hates the doors in her house, she hates the heat, she hates everything.
She hates the whole world.
There’s a knock on the door.
NO, she says.
* * *
But here she is: the ridged fabric against her thighs because her dress has slid up. The pedals are freezing cold under her bare feet, and the lines of music seem endless. She looks at the first note and can’t think where it is on the piano.
* * *
She thinks her dad understands her confusion, she thinks he’s looking at her back, realizes that she has two hands that have no idea where to begin, he hums the first note, just like that, as though he just thought of a note and had to hum it. She thinks, it’s an F. F is there. F. F
* * *
She pulls her hands away from the keys, scratches her forehead, leans in toward the music again to show her audience that she has to think about it, ponder, before she can start, that there’s a lot to be considered before you can even open with an F. Hmm, she says. F.
* * *
The piano is a closed window. She scratches her forehead. F. F, F, F
* * *
She gives it a try. But she can hear straightaway that it wasn’t an F. Her dad hums an F again, and now it’s no longer just a coincidence, now it’s quite obvious that that’s the note the whole piece starts with and that the pianist is having problems finding it on the piano. The pianist concentrates on the keys. Has seen a key that might possibly be the right one. The difficulty now is to play it so quietly that the pianist, and not the audience, can hear whether or not it’s the right one. So the pianist has to conceal her hand movements, and the key, so they can’t see it being pressed down. The pianist has to move forward on the piano stool, accept that her dress is pulled even farther up her slightly too fat thighs, that is to say, pull it down with her left hand, then press her elbows in to her sides, position her right hand flat over the keys, lean forward so that her back becomes a screen, and then press, as gently as possible, the key that might prove to be F.
* * *
A miracle: it is F.
* * *
So here she is: this is one of Grandpa’s favorite pieces, which is basically why she’s been practicing it, and when no one is listening, when the house is empty, when all the windows are closed, she plays it well, she can play it by heart, she never wonders where to start, she can play the whole thing with her eyes shut. Can look out into the garden while she’s playing, watch the magpies land on the pear tree, then fly off again. But now everything’s clouded, there’s a tremor in her arm, and she is not playing well, she feels quite distinctly like a fat, ugly child who doesn’t like the sun, and who can’t play the piano, who says no and starts over and over again, who hacks her way through Grandpa’s favorite piece, and is dreading the final chord, which she knows she can’t do and she’s almost guaranteed to start crying, but she refuses to do that, she has to get it right, and now there’s only half a line left, and here comes the chord, and it’s wrong, it’s totally wrong, she has to do it again, she takes a long time to check that her fingers are in the right place, on the right keys, before pressing down.
* * *
The applause from only three pairs of hands sounds so strange, she turns toward them and smiles gingerly, she’s got a lump in her throat, but she swallows it down, smiles with tight lips. “Come here!” Grandpa says, and she gets up from the piano stool and goes over to Grandpa, who has a really proud look on his face, she doesn’t understand, he looks so proud, he’s smiling, he gives her a hug, she can smell his aftershave, then he holds her firmly by the upper arms and looks into her eyes, still smiling, and she sees that he has tears in his eyes and one is rolling down his cheek, and she’s embarrassed, she doesn’t know what to do. She laughs a little, and parrots: “Well, it’s the University of Oslo concert hall for you next,” and they all laugh, and Grandpa hugs her again.
* * *
Then she’s free to go. She goes to her room, but doesn’t thunder up the stairs. She’s bewildered because she’s not angry, but actually quite happy. She looks out of the window. Her cousin is playing badminton with the boy from next door. Her cousin is not very good at badminton, but the boy from next door seems to like that. He laughs, runs after her, throws the cock in her hair, grabs her round the waist, swings her back and forth. Ragnhild wonders what he would say if he found out that she is actually very good at badminton, much better than her cousin. She lies down flat on the bed. In a while she’ll go down and ask her dad if he wants to play badminton. They won’t play in the garden, but rather out on the road below her cousin’s house. The boy from next door will see that she can return all the shots that are too far forward and the ones that fly straight into her face. He’ll be surprised, he’ll stop and stand there watching her and her dad, watch them playing, he’ll see that she’s awesomely good. He’ll see that she’s the best. He’ll think: I had no idea … She’s looking forward to it. She almost can’t wait.