book. Instantly Heinz wonders what she can be reading.
A novel? A manual? Heinz inspects the shop from one end
to the other. Now he’s here, he might as well make a
thorough job of it. He picks up various gadgets, handcuffs,
and whips, pondering and appraising them. Then he flips
through the naughty underwear, but it makes him oddly
depressed. It sickens him. The shop assistant clears her
throat. Heinz assumes it means she wants him to pay up.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
174 n Katrine Marie Guldager
On his way home he passes a 7-Eleven and sees some-
thing is going on inside. He halts in front of the automatic
doors which fail to open. Two people who look like drug
addicts have been apprehended with their pockets full of
all sorts, from packets of ham to sweets. The staff are
trying to restrain them until the police arrive. The situa-
tion is at once desperate and utterly routine. People stand
and stare, but not for much more than a couple of seconds.
The customers are queuing up again already. The world
doesn’t come to a stop on account of a pair of junkies.
When Heinz gets home he chucks the magazines into
his car and drives out to Vestskoven. He finds a place to
park up and masturbates over a picture of a blonde in
chains. He collects the semen in a handkerchief which he
later throws away.
Heinz lives in a small flat near the Café Intime, not far
from Frederiksberg town hall. He is a professional painter
and decorator, but in recent years he has been cleaning in a
bar on Frederiksberg Allé. When he comes off work he
generally goes home and takes the dog for a walk, but
lately he has taken to going to Tivoli. He has invested in a
season ticket. A couple of days ago he chanced to meet a
nice lady who happened to be sitting by the fountain
opposite the concert hall drinking a mug of coffee from a
flask she had brought along. Heinz sat down on the bench
next to hers and asked,
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
A Bench in Tivoli n 175
‘Do you have a season ticket?’
The lady smiled and gave an elaborate answer, and her
answer opened so many doors that it was easy to carry on
the conversation. Heinz told her he was a professional
decorator, but for the past couple of years he had switched
to cleaning. Funnily enough the lady had been married to a
decorator and knew quite a number of the union people
out at Lygten. In fact she had been there several times
herself. The lady offered him a coffee and passed him a
mug. In her lap lay a napkin with a check pattern, and she
asked if he wanted a bit of powdered milk. Heinz smiled,
convinced that the coffee would taste horrendous but he
was pleasantly surprised. They were both surprised. In no
time they realized they had been chatting for several hours,
and Heinz offered to see the lady home. But the lady said
she’d prefer to meet up with him the following day.
Next day, when Heinz enters Tivoli he fears he is too
smartly turned out. He is freshly washed and shaved and
has put his best clothes on, but then instead just as he is
passing the Pantomime Theatre a picture from one of his
magazines eats into his brain. A picture of a red-haired
woman in leathers, down on all fours. Heinz halts right in
front of the Pantomime Theatre and thinks:
Have I destroyed myself?
The lady is late. Heinz fidgets impatiently on the bench
outside the Concert Hall. He falls into conversation with a
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
176 n Katrine Marie Guldager
young mother and her baby which keeps crawling off into
the flower bed. The mother asks him to take a photo of the
pair together. In the background is a balloon seller. After
an hour the lady still hasn’t shown up, and finally Heinz
realizes he might as well leave. She isn’t going to come.
When he gets home he collects the dog and takes a
walk in Søndermarken. He can’t get the lady from Tivoli
out of his mind. Maybe he could find out where she lives.
Maybe he could visit her privately in her home, just for a
coffee together, some chat. But that might seem forward.
That would seem much too desperate. He would look like
the loneliest person on earth, and she his only salvation.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
As the Angels
Fly
Naja Marie Aidt
‘ Part me from the angel, and I shall be well
Part the angel from me, and I shall sicken
Easy and hard is my life with him.’
——Gunnar Ekelof
No one could deny that that winter was frost-clear and
very cold, and we felt deliriously special as we sailed over
the ice-bound streets in the late dawn light, thin and
dressed all in black. Only the street lamps showed our
piercing pupils, and in actual fact we were not sailing.
We flew. But otherwise all was dark. Dark all the time.
All we saw was each other’s shadow, and every day our
movements traced new patterns—gliding towards each
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
180 n Naja Marie Aidt
other we hugged hard and tight, and pulled back to find
new release in another encounter, a new body.
We did so want to fly. It lasted all winter, and that year
the winter felt endlessly long. Long and white and cold.
The house was meant to be pulled down in the spring.
Its rooms were big and dank, with paint peeling off the
walls; lone words and phrases stood out from the masonry,
sprayed on with black paint. An almost constant acoustic
echo rang through the tall empty rooms.
The house was uninhabited. But people lived there.
Creepy lived there, and several others. They lived on scat-
tered mattresses, with their guitars and reptiles, their full
and empty bottles rolling around the floor, their little white
stashes of speed and cocaine and stuff in plastic bags and
corked tubes, hidden in pockets and locked away in cash
boxes. Mirrors and razor blades. Jewelry hung heavy from
thin wrists and young tense necks.
We dyed our hair black or white or red, and dressed in
tight rubber and leather. The girls’ stockings were torn and
finished half way up the thigh, because that was the look.
That was how we wanted it; deeper and darker and more
endless with each passing day. With each windy night.
Letting our brains explode and seeing the light that always
comes after. When visions and demons take over and the
body follows those secret paths which are so full of painful
desire.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
As the Angels Fly n 181
Creepy was the only fixture in the house; the rest of
us came and went. His room
was at the very top of the
building, you had to crawl up a narrow stepladder, and the
only light he had was an ultraviolet neon tube suspended
over a big cage. A kind of heat lamp. In the cage lived
Plexus, a four-metre-long anaconda boa constrictor, fully
grown and yellow with intricate black markings. Creepy
fed it on rats and young guinea pigs. He never forgot its
mealtimes, and didn’t disturb it when it was digesting.
In the centre of the room lay a long black coffin lined
with white satin, stained from years of use. For Creepy
slept in the coffin, and he fucked in the coffin. He had
drilled five or six holes in the lid, so you could breathe
when you lowered it over you. The holes looked like small
stars in a dark sky, because light came through when you
saw them from below: a freaky purple light from the neon
tube. A length of black material covered the small attic
window in Creepy’s room. It smelled in a special way
of Creepy, his clothes and his semen and his skin, and of
Plexus, the sand at the bottom of the cage, the remnants of
its meals. Of dust and meat. From a nail in the ceiling
dangled a white mask with a big red mouth, swaying.
Clothes and shoes were heaped all over the floor. Apart
from the coffin there was only one other piece of furniture:
a low bookcase along one wall. It held a dead bird in
formaldehyde and a little shrine made of dark wood.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
182 n Naja Marie Aidt
That was where Creepy hid his gear. The click of the lock
when he opened it and picked out a little bag. The sweet
shivers you felt at the back of your neck.
All the girls were wild about Creepy, he was so ugly and
so sweet and so brutal with us in the coffin, and we loved
that too, for it was as though the madness lifted us all the
way up to God when we lay there under the stars, naked on
cool satin, and let ourselves be split apart. By Creepy’s
violent and desperate thrusts and the ferocity of his sharp
nails raking red tracks across our skin. Creepy loved only
Plexus, but he needed us. That’s what he said. He said we
were his dolls, and couldn’t tell our names apart. But we
were after all nameless that winter, so it wasn’t an issue.
Creepy on the other hand had his name, and his own
room, and he had Plexus. And he even had, alone of all of
us, a job. He made rubber masks for horror films, and was
so in demand he produced them for abroad too. The
money he made was for the most part sugar white, and
he earned a lot. He could snort as many lines as he liked,
and that too was quite a bit. Even so he wasn’t mean when
it came to sharing the goodies; you could always count on
a great fix if you went in the coffin with Creepy. We were
really pretty crazy about him.
In the evening and all through the night loud, loud
music boomed from the speakers and made the walls
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
As the Angels Fly n 183
shake. We shook too, we danced and danced and banged
our heads against each others’ ringing skulls.
Our noses were dry and irritable from snorting up
heaven. Our genitals were full of small scratches and
sores, for we put the cocaine straight on them, and
I have to admit it works. As a supplement to the real
ecstasy. The restive rattling of handcuffs and chains grew
out of the dark; when the music was over short shuddering
shrieks broke the morning stillness. Crosses were torn off
their chains and left marks on throbbing necks. We bit
each other till we drew blood.
That was when spring was on the way with its harsh
light. In the end only the sight and smell of blood could get
us high enough. And we did so want to fly. Wings nearly
sprouted from our backs when teeth and sharp little knives
marked us out for each other. Allowed us to feel.
I saw myself in the mirror as I scraped together neat
lines of snow with shaking hands, and I felt very beautiful
and invulnerable. I looked up at Creepy. He was sitting
watching me in the twilight like a black shadow with his
smooth shaven head cocked to one side. He smiled at me.
I was really pretty crazy about him.
Winter was starting to break up, melting snow dripped
off the roof, the first buds swelled longingly on the bare
branches of the trees. Under Creepy’s heaven the purple
stars winked enchantingly, and exploded in a sea of light
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
184 n Naja Marie Aidt
which filled the entire coffin. ‘You look like a Barbie doll
who wants to die’, Creepy whispered hoarsely, moaning as
he grabbed my nipples between his nails in a long
excruciating grip. I laughed aloud, rocking on the padded
satin. I thought the bird was flapping its wings in its
formaldehyde.
No one could deny the winter had been long, we were
so lacerated by all the cold.
*
She said she was on a good trip. One that lasted. She said
I should mind my own business and leave her alone. Her
laughter was soft and full of contempt and derision. She
did laugh a lot that winter, more than normal, shrill and
bright, while her hands flew nervously all over her arms
and her chest. She rubbed her skin, smoothed and stroked
and scratched her white skin, and she tossed her head so
her long hair was in constant movement. From under her
hair her eyes flickered, she snuffled and moistened her lips
with her tongue.
Our mother had long since given up. Only when she
dug out old polaroid photos of us from when we were little
girls with our hair in plaits and our party dresses on did
she cry. Her tears put out the fag-end of her Cecil dangling
from the corner of her mouth. Otherwise nothing. As
though Sisse was already dead. Yet she was very alive
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
As the Angels Fly n 185
that winter, very restless and alive. For fuck’s sake Sisse,
I said, trying to pin her gaze. She just laughed.
Soon I gave up saying anything much, and did no more
than open the door to her when she rang my bell at all
hours of the day. Of course she wanted money. And of
course I couldn’t stop myself giving it to her. She begged as
though it was sweets she wanted, as though we were
children and she’d emptied her sweetie bag much too
fast, while I had saved up a whole supply in the desk
drawer—anxious as I am.
She was a greedy child, my little sister, and very charm-
ing. That winter too. Terribly charming, with the most
seductive peals of laughter imaginable. She had no idea
how tired she had got. I put her to bed and slept with my
arms round her to be sure she didn’t disappear while I was
dreaming. But she always disappeared. When I woke she
would be gone, only the crumpled bedclothes and h
er
smell in the room showed she had been there. For a long
time I didn’t know where she went to so early in the
morning, and I felt lonely when she took off like that
without saying goodbye. But at Christmas she came home.
Our mum and her fellow Kaj and I tripped rather than
danced round the small over-decorated Christmas tree in
the flat they shared on Gammel Køge Landevej. It was a
pretty sorry show, three grown-up people and the whole
Christmas spiel. Our mum had hidden two cases of beer
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
186 n Naja Marie Aidt
under the kitchen sink. I’m always discovering these
things. Kaj was already plastered when he arrived, though
we pretended not to notice. And we were in the middle of
coffee when suddenly she stood in the doorway. With stars
in her eyes and far too few clothes on.
‘No presents for me?’ she asked in a little baby voice,
dropping into an arm chair.
Our mum lit a Cecil and glanced nervously at Kaj. But
he didn’t care. He started a game of solitaire on the coffee
table. She got a plateful of lukewarm roast duck and one of
my presents. I had removed the ‘to’ and ‘from’ label in the
kitchen. Then she flung her hair back and rubbed her bare
arms. Got up quickly and put her jacket on.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ she said and kissed us both on the
cheek. Her bracelets jingled, her feet hardly touched the
stairs as she ran down. As though she was flying.
Then our mum got quite openly drunk, fetched the
photo album and started snivelling. I stroked her dry
permed hair and turned off the lights on the Christmas
tree. Kaj went to the pub. And that was that Christmas.
‘Don’t say anything to Kaj’, our mum said before she
fell asleep on the pull-out bed, ‘but I slipped her a five-
hundred kroner note. Seeing there were no presents for
her . . . ’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
As the Angels Fly n 187
I took a taxi home; Christmas night was foggy, with a
bit of sparse wet snow falling which melted almost before
it reached the ground.
It was soon after New Year when one day I felt I had to
find Sisse. Or was it the beginning of February? I rang
round some of her girlfriends; it was the usual charade
with them covering for her and not wanting to say any-
thing and acting all innocent. I had a huge desire to punch
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