What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  “But it doesn’t take any longer. We can take off our shoes and walk along the beach. Just like they do in films.”

  “It’s too cold,” I said. “It’s very windy down on the beach. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t tell him what was holding me back. I just needed some time before going down to the beach and the wild, whipping waves. I don’t think I could’ve explained it to myself. I just couldn’t go down there. Not yet.

  “Welcome to Klitmøller.”

  The couple was staring at us, especially Alex, there was no smile.

  We had eaten some porridge for dinner, discovered to our dismay that the television didn’t work, and had gone into the dunes to watch the sunset, a flame-red sky in the background. The wind was warm, and we had come back to enjoy the benefit of a little shelter up against the house. I sat on the steps smoking and Alex was blowing a high-pitched tune through the blades of the broad-leafed couch grass he had picked in the dunes. A chorus of grasshoppers had tuned in as well, and perhaps this was why we only noticed the couple when they were standing right in front of us, staring. The woman was holding a hand-picked bunch of blue and white flowers in front of her chest—like an exorcist would wield a wooden cross.

  I stubbed out my cigarette on the steps and hurriedly wiped my right hand on my shorts before offering it to the man; as he was the one who had stepped up to the plate. The man greeted me with a warm, dry hand that held mine no longer than absolutely necessary. The woman remained standing half-hidden behind her husband’s broad back.

  They looked like a solid couple. In their late forties, early fifties. The man was wearing jeans, brown sandals, and a white T-shirt with the logo of a machinery plant in some town I hadn’t heard of. The woman was wearing comfy Ecco-shoes and a cobalt-blue T-shirt with a collar: Mr. and Mrs. Klitmøller.

  “Good evening . . . ”

  I smiled at them both as the woman fussed with the ribbon bound around the flowers, taming a few imperceptibly wayward stalks in the bunch before finally presenting the flowers to me.

  I took the bunch, and sniffed obediently. I didn’t know what else to do—or say—for that matter. The flowers had no definable smell. White yarrows mixed with blue forget-me-nots.

  “From our garden,” she said. “Well, we just wanted to say hello. See who’d moved in next door.”

  She was very tan and weather-beaten in a way I imagined most people living on the North Sea coast must be. Given time, wind wears away the surface of a stone, so there was no telling what it could do to soft facial skin exposed to it every day. Her hair was a nice, even-colored dark brown, and utterly lifeless. I reckoned the color came from a tube of L’Oréal. A product I used myself when I was a teenager.

  “Yes, well . . . that would be me.”

  “And this is your boy?”

  The man nodded in the direction of Alex, who was sitting against the wall, sucking on a bottle of water. His silhouette was golden-black in the mild evening light and the fine Arabic bridge of his nose stood out majestically in profile. Their reluctance was palpable, and I returned it whole-heartedly.

  “Have you rented the house from Agni?”

  “This is my grandmother’s house.”

  They exchanged looks.

  “Then perhaps you’re on . . . holiday?”

  “We’re only staying until . . . ” I trailed off. Until the dust had settled at the Welfare office in Hvidovre . . . until the smell of warm piss had faded from Lisa’s memory. No, I didn’t know how long we’d be staying.

  The man cast Alex another long, measured glance. The wife was already scraping her Ecco shoes against the cobblestones. She’d heard and seen enough, I imagined. Ella Nygaard had returned, Pakistani son in tow. Ella Nygaard, of all people. Who would have thought it, hey?

  “And what will you be doing in Klitmøller?” The man—he still hadn’t introduced himself—was asking through pursed lips.

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I don’t work. I live off the dole. That is, just as long as my application for a state pension is still pending.”

  They would probably have been slightly less antagonistic had I lied and said that I was studying to become a teacher, but I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. Admitting that you’re on the dole is an excellent conversation stopper, and now the man had a shoe trawling the gravel. The wife had laid a hand on the back of his neck, like you would grip the collar of a vicious dog.

  “Well, naturally you’re both very welcome to Klitmøller,” she said, meeting my gaze fleetingly. “We are your closest neighbor, and here in Klitmøller we like to help one another out, it’s such a small town. It’s a wonderful place to live. Folk living here know how to treat one another. Our house is right over there.”

  She pointed to the roof of a red-brick house nestled in the row of dunes directly behind ours.

  I nodded, and lit another smoke. Cupped the flame in my hand as I clicked my lighter.

  “You should take care with fire in the dunes,” said the man. “Not everything out here is sand.”

  His wife took his arm gently, and they commenced their retreat with cool smiles.

  “Thanks for stopping by.”

  I gave them a smile, lifting two fingers in a half-cocked salute. I could handle Mr. and Mrs. Klitmøller. I could handle the whole fucking world.

  7

  ANNA, 1994

  Ugly.

  This was the first word that came to mind as Anna parked the car in the driveway and saw the gaping front door. The black hole in the wall looked like the entrance to a ghost house. The word came to her before she realized that the pane of the door was broken, before she looked for Helgi’s car, before she registered that no lights were burning. She knew that nobody was home, and the door ought to have been closed against the rain and unseasonable storm.

  She switched off the ignition and sat watching the house for a moment until she finally persuaded herself to get out.

  “You have to go in there. The door wasn’t closed properly. It blew open. That’s all. No reason to panic, Anna.”

  Even the broken pane and the long, awl-like splinters of glass in the entrance could be explained; the door had been blown open, smashing it against the wall. The flurry whipped a few loose pages of paper over the floor as she carefully picked her way over the glass and closed the door behind her. The air was rushing through the frame.

  “Hello? Helgi?”

  Silence. Nothing but wind and darkness. In the kitchen, chairs knocked over. Jars of flour and pasta were shattered, their contents spread over the dinner table, smeared together with marmalade and marinated herring from the fridge.

  Anna turned on the light and stood looking at the scene of destruction for a long time. Break-ins were not unusual in Klitmøller, but the summer houses were seldom targeted. And break-ins were rare after the high season, when the more rebellious teenagers in town couldn’t run after the tourist girls any longer. Then all that frustrated teenage sexuality was channeled into drinking yourself into a stupor, and whatever desires couldn’t be numbed by alcohol were sated by thievery and vandalism. But this was . . . unbelievably thorough. Anna picked her way to the range hood by the stove where some wise-guy had perched one of Ella’s ragdolls. A message had been stuck to its belly with a safety pin.

  Jesus is coming—look busy.

  The doll’s painted pupils and curling eyelashes had been painstakingly scraped off.

  Anna took down the doll and tossed it into the trash can, which, miraculously, had been left standing upright.

  In the living room the telephone cables had been ripped out of the wall. The line was stone dead—but who should she call? Nothing much had been stolen, she noted. Just a CD-player and a couple of hundred kroner from the petty cash bowl in the kitchen. It was the extent of the destruction tha
t upset her most. Books were ripped out of their shelves and a couple of white porcelain vases had been viciously shattered, their remains sprinkled like snow over the living room floor, as were the shredded pages of her photo albums from the bookcase.

  The terrace door had been left wide open and the curtains waved eerily in the cold. She hurried to close the door to her pitiful garden, but stopped dead.

  A wooden stake had been driven into the middle of the lawn.

  At least this is what it looked like from where she stood. She blinked against the driving rain and went outside with a renewed sense of dread. Neither Ella nor Helgi would dream of hammering a stake into the lawn. It had been her garden ever since they had moved into the house. Not that she was particularly fond of that wind-swept patch of earth. Nothing could grow there. The apple tree she had planted fifteen years ago was no more than a dwarfed and crooked trunk covered in scab, and she had yet to see a single apple blossom bloom. The hedge, which was meant to offer some wind protection to the west, was frayed and sparse, and in her flower beds a couple of razed pansies with yellow leaves and split stalks shuddered in the wind. The only plants she’d managed to save were her potatoes and the sea hollies she’d rescued from the dunes—hardly a victory over Mother Nature.

  The wooden stake was a good two yards long and thick as an arm. Fir-wood, if she wasn’t completely mistaken. It still bore its scaly bark. Only the top part had been carefully sharpened with an ax or a large knife. A sticky, dark mass of blood and tufts of grey hair strutted from the light wood, and she recalled what Helgi had said about the neighbor’s cat the day before. That it had been killed by a marten.

  But that cat wasn’t killed by a marten, Helgi. It was a band of teenage boys with too much time on their hands and too much alcohol in their systems. That’s all. No hocus pocus. Plain and simple. Primitive human behavior.

  And yet, an all too familiar Bible quotation flashed in her head:

  . . . when the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

  She clenched her jaw in grim determination and heaved the stake up out of the sandy ground. Ella was not to see the stake. Nor Helgi.

  She didn’t want to talk about it.

  Neither about death nor what the stake meant. It was nobody’s business but hers.

  8

  Whatever is written on my birth certificate is irrelevant. In my mind, I was born in the back yard of a villa in Aalborg, and the memory of the day I came into this world is one of the most vivid memories I have.

  I am about eight years old, and my foster mother at the time is yelling at me from the bottom of that tree I’ve crawled up into. In my hand I’m still holding the stone I’ve used to smash her greenhouse. All the panes, all the way round. The roof I couldn’t reach. A blessing, really, for had I shattered the roof as well, glass would have rained on my head. But things are bad enough as they are. I have a deep gash in my right upper arm, it’s bleeding, and my foster mother, whose name I cannot remember, is screaming for me to come down at once. But I’m not listening. She’s an evil cow, and she isn’t my mother. I pitch a glob of spit through the leaves below, it splatters on her upturned face.

  That was the summer I got the first cut on my arm, and it was also my first conscious memory after the “family tragedy,” as Dr. Erhadsen poetically insisted on calling it. He had a tendency to embroider when reality became too concrete for him.

  Whatever had given rise to my destruction of the greenhouse remains a mystery. There were snippets of a blue bathroom, floral tiles, a man going for a walk with a dog. But those memories could just as easily have stemmed from a later stage. I had been with seven foster families in five years. Nobody liked me, and, as a rule, the feeling was mutual. I knew I needed someone, but it wasn’t Hanne, Lene, Bodil or Bentha—or whatever it was the bitches were called. Irrespective of who they sent me to, the result was always the same: I screamed and yelled, thrashed out at the adults, bit the children, if there were any.

  I was a freak.

  I knew this already, and I wasn’t the only one who knew it. The rest of the world could see it as well. It had been written in the newspapers, and it was written in those piles of papers that followed me from foster family to foster family, followed me to the Bakkegården Institute—home sweet home—and finally, the web of welfare programs, flexi-jobs, sick leave, and the Guidance for Young Underprivileged Mothers. Everyone had always known. My father had blown my mother’s brains out. At times, I was absolutely certain it was written in my face; the tainted mark of shame. This was definitely the case in Hvidovre, and the first day in Klitmøller was no different, even as Alex and I ran barefoot along the sandy paths among the dunes, the roar from the ocean looming larger and larger.

  At the top of the final dune, Alex stopped and turned suddenly, staring out over the grey-blue hills of sand, eyes shining bright with glee.

  “Fucking amazing,” he said after a long while. “Is this where you come from?”

  I nodded, something knotting in my chest. This was the first and only thing from my childhood I had ever shown Alex—and it was really beautiful. The sea was mine; it had rested in me like a deep, slow rush from a faraway place. And now the smooth, grey giant of a dune lay in front of me, untouched by the time that had come between us.

  The sun beat down, and a couple of children ran wild like little savages along the shore, half-naked, white hair flying in the strong breeze. Alex was more reserved. He walked quietly on his own, collecting sea shells, mostly cockleshells and a few finely polished oyster shells. There were also a few bright-red crab claws with big jagged pincers, and bladder wrack that oozed a clear jelly when you squashed it between your fingers.

  “Is there any amber to be found around here?”

  Alex looked at me eagerly. The prospect of finding riches worth more than empty Coke cans was clearly exhilarating. I told him not to look between the stones, but higher up the beach, where the seaweed had gathered in a dark belt.

  “Amber is relatively light,” I explained, not knowing where this knowledge was coming from. “A bit like plastic, so it washes higher up on the beach than the stones. The best time to look is just after a storm.”

  A new text message from Kirsten bleeped in. The seventh since my flight from Lisa and Tom’s Neverland.

  Where are you? call me so we can talk.

  I switched off my phone and watched Alex curiously combing through twisted mounds of murky seaweed.

  Afterward he built a sand castle and dug channels and moats with his bare hands. I lay on the beach, flat on my back, staring up into the sky. You couldn’t swim here, I knew instinctively—just as I seemed to know so much else about this place. Something had happened right here. A stump of memory came swimming towards me.

  I had ignored a direct order and waded out into water over my knees. It is warm, the waves are unusually peaceful, of the kind that neither break nor foam on the top. You can actually see patches of the sand below, as well as a shoal of sticklebacks, and perhaps this is why I am distracted for a moment, my yellow pail has drifted beyond my reach. I think of calling for my father, but he is nowhere to be seen. Behind me the beach is deserted, the dunes a green mountain range. I take a few steps further out, then a few more, until finally I’m swimming a couple of strokes into the sea. It feels harmless, even though there is movement in the water, and I am lifted up from the bottom and dunked down again, the water momentarily splashing over my head. I reach out for the pail that has tilted on its side. I get two fingers under the red handle, reach down to put my feet down, and stand up.

  But I can’t.

  Cold hands are pulling my feet out from under me.
It’s like trying to stand in a rushing river. Every time I try to put my feet down, they are swept out from under me, and I float further, out and away. But it’s only when I turn to look back at the beach that I’m struck with terror. I have been swept so deep into the foaming water that my lonely sand castle is an insignificant dot, a long, long way away. People can die like this, and I know it.

  It’s so easy to die at sea. It happens every year on our beach. Germans and Dutchmen. Those who don’t know this great grey sea, the ones who believe they can ride the monster.

  I move my arms and legs again, try to work my way across the cold, rushing current, but I have to wait till the shore curves to sweep me closer to land, only then can I dig my hands and feet into the sandy, cockleshell seabed and crawl up onto the beach. The sand is ripped away from the soles of my feet. My hands and feet and knees are cut and bleeding, the blood is trickling down my shins in a thin, flame-red stream as I limp back to my sand castle.

  Then I catch sight of my dad on top of a dune, but he’s not looking in my direction. He’s looking at something else. I call out to him, and he turns towards me, shading his eyes against the sun.

  We walk home in silence, hand in hand, don’t say anything to Mom. It’s our little secret. But I’m tired of secrets.

  I got up a little too fast, and called to Alex. The feeling of stretching out a small, ice-cold hand to my father had made me nauseous. The memory was just as intrusive and unwelcome as a visit from one of those door-to-door Animal Rights fundraisers.

  Alex came running towards me, his face alive with wonder. He had tossed his T-shirt, and his tendons trilled below the surface of his thin, boyish body. It wasn’t often I caught a glimpse of him like that, released of a pre-teen child’s critical and crippling view of himself, but every time it happened, I was stunned by the thought that all that beauty had come out of my own body. For my own part, I was thin, pale, and unglamorous. The only thing pretty about me was my hair. It was huge, a curly, dark-brown halo that looked like the work of a professional stylist at any given time of the day. You have to remember to appreciate the little things in life.