The Dinosaur Feather

table.
    ‘Not that story, please,’ Troels’s mother called out from the kitchen table where she was scraping leftovers into the bin. ‘The girls won’t want to hear that.’
    Troels’s father leaned towards Anna and Karen.
    ‘Troels wet his bed until he was six,’ he announced.
    Anna looked uncomfortably at Karen who seemed to be mesmerised by Troels’s father.
    ‘We were at our wits’ end, weren’t we, Troels?’ his mother said, still at the kitchen table. ‘All of us, you included, isn’t that right, darling?’
    Anna looked at Troels and something inside her turned to ice. Troels made no reply, silent, as his half-eaten choc ice slowly melted in his hand.
    His mother carried on while she dried an oven-proof dish, ‘We tried everything. We tried bribing him with sweets and toys, we gave him more pocket money, we even made him wear his soaked pyjamas all day, but it was no good. He just carried on wetting his bed.’
    Karen was still smiling, so Anna kicked her under the table.
    ‘And do you want to know how it stopped?’ Troels’s father asked, blithely.
    ‘Ouch,’ Karen exclaimed and sent Anna a furious look. Anna glared back at her. Finally, Karen noticed Troels.
    ‘Tell the girls how you stopped wetting the bed, Troels,’ his father ordered him. Troels whispered something.
    ‘I can’t hear you,’ his father said. ‘Speak up.’
    ‘When I pooed my pants on my first day of school,’ Troels said in a flat voice.
    The girls looked at each other.
    ‘And you can’t poo your pants at school, can you?’ his father went on. ‘The other children will laugh at you. So you have to stop, don’t you? If you ever want to have any friends, that is.’ His father gave Troels a matey slap on the back and roared with laughter.
    ‘Stop it!’ Anna burst out. ‘Stop it!’
    But his father had already got up to leave, the dishwasher had been loaded, his sister had disappeared, and his mother was folding clothes in the utility room; they could see her through the open door.
    ‘That was a lovely meal, thank you,’ Anna muttered. ‘I have to be home by seven.’
    When Anna and Karen had put on their shoes and coats and shouted ‘byee!’ from the utility room, Troels was still sitting at the kitchen table with the melting choc ice in his hand.
    ‘Bye, see you tomorrow,’ he said and sent them a pale smile.
    Cecilie called Troels’s parents one day to tell them she could do with some help around the garden and offered Troels fifteen kroner an hour to do the work. While Cecilie spoke to Troels’s father, Anna was in the kitchen, listening to her mother’s high-pitched chirping. Cecilie slammed down thetelephone at the end of the conversation and when she joined Anna in the kitchen, she smiled stiffly and smoothed her dress.
    ‘Done,’ she said. ‘Five hours a week. Thank God.’ She flopped down on the kitchen bench next to Anna.
    ‘Phew,’ she exhaled and smoothed her dress again.
    One evening, when Anna was twelve years old, she overheard her parents talking about Troels. It was the late 1980s and by now Jens had officially moved to Copenhagen, but he visited them constantly. They had just said good night to her, but before she fell asleep Anna remembered she had forgotten to give her mother a letter from school and got out of bed.
    Halfway down the stairs, she heard Jens ask: ‘What makes you think he hits him? You have to be able to prove it, Cecilie. It’s a serious charge.’
    A pause followed. Then Anna heard Cecilie cry.
    ‘I want to help, but I can’t!’ she sobbed. ‘That beautiful, fragile boy. Look at him! He’s suffering and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.’
    Jens said something, which Anna couldn’t hear, and Cecilie replied: ‘I know, Jens.’ She sounded irritated now. ‘I’m aware of that. You’ve told me a thousand times. I just can’t bear it that he has to live like that.’
    Cecilie blew her nose. Anna was getting cold on the stairs and hoped that one of her parents would notice her. That they would carry her to the living room and let her fall asleep under a blanket while their voices grew muffled, just like when she was little. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Right now she hated Troels. Her parents seemed to preferhim to her. She felt all alone in the world. They started discussing Jens’s job. Eventually Anna trundled back to bed.
    One summer day Troels dropped by unexpectedly. He seemed happy. His parents had gone to Ebeltoft to