The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

Mathias listened to his own breathless gasps.
It was right. He just knew it. Everything fitted. His mother’s coldness to his father. The
conversations they thought he couldn’t hear; his father’s desperate threats and pleas for her to stay,
not just for his sake but for Mathias’s sake, good God, they had a child together, didn’t they?! And
his mother’s bitter laugh. Grandfather in the photo album and Mum’s lies. Of course, Mathias
hadn’t believed it when Stian from his class had said that Mathias No-Nips’s mum had a lover
living on the plateau, he said his aunt had told him. For Stian was just as stupid as the others and
didn’t understand anything. Not even when, two days later, Stian found his cat hanging from the top
of the school flagpole.
Dad didn’t know. Mathias could feel it in his whole body that Dad thought Mathias was was his.
And he must never know that he wasn’t. Never. It would kill him. Mathias would rather die himself.
Yes, that was exactly what he wanted. He wanted to die, wanted to go, to go away from his mother
and the school and Stian and everything. He got up, kicked the snowman and ran to the car.
He would take her with him. She would die, too.
When his mother came out and he unlocked the door, almost forty minutes had passed since she had
gone into the house.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Mathias said, moving on the back seat so that she could see him in the mirror. ‘I saw him.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, putting the key in the ignition and turning.
‘The snowman ’
‘And what did the snowman look like?’ The engine started with a roar and she let the clutch go with
such a jerk that he almost dropped the car jack he was clinging to.
‘Dad’s waiting for us,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to get a move on.’
She switched on the radio. Just a newsreader droning on about the American elections and Ronald
Reagan. Nonetheless she turned up the volume. They drove over the crest of the hill, down towards
the main road and the river. In the field ahead of them stiff, yellow straw poked through the snow.
‘We’re going to die,’ Mathias said.
‘What did you say?’
‘We’re going to die.’
She turned down the voice on the radio. He steeled himself. Leaned forward between the seats and
raised his arm.
‘We’re going to die,’ he whispered.
Then he struck.
The jack hit the back of her head with a crunch. And his mother didn’t seem to react, just sort of