What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  “Mom,” he said. “The house is shit, but this is really neat. How long are we staying?”

  I didn’t reply.

  We had reached the top of the last dune, and we could see down to the house, where a green sedan was parked. A guy was snooping around in the garden with a fat, black yapping dog following in his heels. He lifted the garage door and kicked at the foundation. I backed up, and sat down in a dip between the dunes. If we waited long enough, he would probably disappear again, whoever he was. But Alex had already acquired a sense of ownership.

  “Shouldn’t you ask him what he wants? It is our house, after all.” His face was dark and wary. “What if he steals something?”

  “Then he’d be sorely disappointed,” I said, running a tuft of lyme grass through my fingers.

  “Come on!” Alex peeked over the dunes. “He’s still there. He’s going into the garage.”

  He stuck his hands into the pockets of his shorts, just like he often did when one of my fits started building up.

  “Fine,” I said, and got up reluctantly, taking my cigarettes and lighter out of my back pocket in the same motion. “But you must know that we run the risk of pissing him off when he finds there’s nothing to steal but my battered Nokia and your crusty lunch box. He might even shoot us. Thieves are designer-label freaks.”

  Alex tried to smile, but didn’t succeed all too well, and he still had his hands in his pockets as we walked the last stretch to the house.

  “Was there something in particular you wanted?”

  The guy, who had now disappeared into the dark interior of the garage, popped up in the doorway and squinted at us through the sun, not otherwise looking especially suspect.

  “Yes, excuse me,” he said, coming out into the light on the yard. Smiling. “I thought I might as well take a look around while I waited . . .”

  He was about my age, between twenty-five and thirty years old. Track-suit pants, sneakers, and a thin, long-sleeved sweater, an earring in the left ear, and an infantile anchor tattooed on his neck. Probably a fisherman’s son or a fisherman-wannabe who’d had a one-week holiday job on a fishing boat between the eighth and ninth grade. His hands weren’t rough enough to have grappled with rope, fishing tackle, and salt-water for an extended period of time.

  “Waited for what?”

  The guy looked at me intensely for a moment, then his smile broke into a broad grin.

  “You, it seems. Ella? Have you just arrived?”

  “I got here yesterday,” I said.

  “I can tell it’s you by the wild hair,” said the guy, pulling a smoke from his pocket. “We went to school together, perhaps you remember? My name is Thomas.”

  “I can’t remember anything,” I snapped and made for the front door, steering Alex ahead of me with a firm hand between his shoulders.

  I could feel the guy’s eyes in my back as I paused next to his dog. It lay chewing on something half-rotten, lazily wagging its tail.

  Thomas.

  I couldn’t remember him. Nothing. Faces from the past were pale shapeless moons against a black sky. I could have had friends. Perhaps I’d even missed them after the grown-ups packed me out of town. I couldn’t remember if I had—all I knew was that I had no desire to find out one way or the other.

  “Hey, wait up a minute.”

  He took several long strides after us. This guy Thomas was clearly not the type who could take a hint, and his broad west-Jutlandic accent irritated me just as much as his intrusive overfamiliarity. He spoke the language of my parents, and it made my skin crawl, my pulse throb.

  “My dad asked me to let you know that he’s interested in buying the house, if the old lady wants to sell. It’s a large plot. And this is the last house that was built before the area became part of the conservancy; no neighbors in your back yard, and only one hundred yards to the sea.” He whistled, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together by dint of demonstrating the property’s capital value. “The house has been empty for a few years now, but perhaps you’re thinking of staying?”

  I didn’t answer. Kept my back turned to him.

  “Have you talked to her? Your grandmother? Usually she doesn’t let anyone come anywhere near the house. People say she’s crazy. Either that or senile—or both.”

  I turned to face him, and saw that look in his eyes I knew so well. Poor little girl. I was someone who inspired the same response that neglected puppies and performing bears at a circus did.

  “She has that old guy Bæk-Nielsen keeping an eye on the place. Perhaps you’ve seen him? He’s the one who told my dad that you were here.” He stubbed out his smoke in the sand.

  I thought about the old man Rosa and I had seen before. Apparently my grandmother’s supervisor had been spying on us.

  “I haven’t spoken to her in years,” I said, quick-stepping to the door once more. “We don’t have . . . We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  When I put the keys in the lock, it stuck, and I inwardly cursed the city-paranoia that now was costing me precious seconds. My pulse was hammering through my whole body, with every heartbeat the clamor rang louder in my ears. Thomas had come up next to me, and, seeing me fumble with the lock, put a hand over mine.

  “Here, let me try,” he said. “I think it could do with some oil. It’s pretty rusty. I can come over and see to it some time, if you’d like.”

  He might as well have burnt me with an iron rod, so swiftly had I pulled my hand away, but he didn’t seem to notice. Just pushed the door open, taking a ridiculous bow as he did so. I didn’t invite him in.

  “My mom still talks about what happened,” he said. “And then you just disappeared. Puff. René still lives here, and Robert and Mette got married. They’ve got the bakery.”

  “I didn’t disappear,” I said. “I just moved away. And I can’t remember anything. Isn’t that what I just said, for Christ’s sake? I don’t have a clue who you are, okay? If you want to talk to my grandmother, do it yourself.”

  I pulled Alex with me through the door and closed it behind me, my pulse beating hard and fast in my neck. My fingers hurt, in fact, the whole hand ached, my entire body was vibrating, but I got to the small, rock-hard couch before the shaking took hold with a vengeance. I managed to ask Alex to go on upstairs. He could look through the old Donald Duck comics in the loft in the meantime. I was okay, I assured him. He nodded, and reluctantly left me alone in the dark of the living room.

  Big boy. I vowed to get a bottle of vodka for next time.

  9

  HELGI, 1994

  Sometimes he wondered how his life would have been if Anna had died in the bathtub that night. Like now, for instance, as she stood bent over the tub with strands of her hair wrapped around her neck.

  His life would have been different, of course.

  Perhaps he would’ve gone to Århus to study, just like he’d dreamt of doing once, and perhaps there he would have met a wild and adventurous young girl studying tropical medicine who would have dragged him along to Africa or India or Borneo. Or perhaps he would’ve become a seaman or an oil-rigger or a teacher in Odense with a cheerful woman rollicking in his double bed that they shared with four children in a townhouse with a garden. He had never thought of it before that day at the Art Museum, but now he thought of nothing else. In the prefabs on the site with the boys, when he put on his overalls, and especially when he went to bed with Anna, her soft contours in a white night-dress lying next to him. Her back always turned.

  She smelled of peach shampoo and that fatty Nivea-cream she always rubbed into her skin after her bath.

  Anna. The woman who’d promised to stand by her man till death did them part.

  The only thing he could remember from their early years together was an all-encompassing lust—which was probably as much as one would expect of a seventeen-year-old boy getting his leg over fo
r the first time. Anna had not been beautiful in the way of some of the other girls, but she was pretty and sweet and eager to please. Appetizing. He’d liked her, there was no doubt about that, and they seemed to have been brought together by an unthinking hand that put her at the bicycle shed with a punctured bicycle tire at the exact moment he happened to be standing there, one of the last boys making his way home after school. Of course he had a bicycle pump, and he politely offered to pump some air into her tires—to no avail—and they ended up pushing their bikes home together, they were headed the same way, after all. Talk turned to the party at Eva’s house that night, and he suggested they go there together, but he had never intended to ask her out. He never gave it a thought, nor did he think anything later, when Anna, after far too many drinks, leaned towards him, her lips slightly apart, her eyes blank, black as the night and filled with the same longing he knew from his own lonely evenings in his bedroom at home.

  It hadn’t been love, he could see that now. Just teenage hunger.

  He had been irrepressible and insatiable, and the admiration of the other boys—both those down at the harbor and his classmates from school—was huge and laden with envy. He was doing it; he was having sex with a girl, and Anna had been so warm and willing and smiling. Even in the shameful silence that followed as he pulled on his socks, shorts, and pants once more.

  And then one day she was standing on his mother’s doorstep in tears with a suitcase in her hand. She had run away from home, because she wanted to be with him, she said, but it probably had more to do with everything else. The abortion in Aalborg. And her parents. Her family’s religion was sated in shame, and Anna was inconsolable.

  He felt guilty. Because he was the one who had insisted they didn’t need condoms if he pulled out just before he came against her soft belly or rocking breasts. But that hadn’t worked—of course it hadn’t—and things went badly wrong on more occasions than he cared to remember. He got the girl pregnant because of his unruly dick. Back then, he had thought that was why people got married. The pregnancy was a trick of fate, because more than twenty years were to pass before another child blossomed in Anna’s womb.

  “Would you like to have sauce with the potatoes or would you prefer a chunk of butter instead?”

  She turned towards him inquiringly and smiled, keeping her mouth closed as she did so. A habit she’d acquired after he’d made some remark about her breath. He couldn’t bear having her close to him.

  “Butter is just fine.”

  They ate baked cod with mustard and potatoes to the sound of Ella’s running commentary. Her teacher had drawn an ape on the blackboard, she had grazed her leg in gym class and got a plaster on her knee, Christian had fallen off the swing and she had seen Louise down at the harbor. She filled every silence with the same precision that she used to color in dresses and crowns on the heads of princesses.

  “Do you want to watch a film with me, Mom?” Ella stared at Anna with big, vacant eyes. “Maybe Father of Four?”

  Anna smiled and gently touched a hand to Ella’s hair. “Of course,” she said. “Perhaps Dad would like to go for a walk in the meantime.”

  Again that sidelong glance, a quiet reproach that made his hands ball into fists. But yes, he did want to go for a walk. He needed some air, he needed . . . the warmth in his chest rushed down to his crotch. Perhaps she would come today. Perhaps she was already waiting for him. The lack of certainty was part of the game; the part that was driving him crazy.

  He zipped up his thin jacket, walked down the road and ducked behind the dunes. It was still warm, but the wind had acquired a hint of autumn, the light was soft against the fading blue sky. The thunder at the horizon was carried in over the lyme grass, drowning out all other sound.

  He left the low-slung villas behind him and turned into the sandy paths of the conservancy. Just about here. Sometimes she came walking towards him from the deserted, wild no-man’s-land of the dunes, but usually she was already waiting for him.

  And so it was today. She was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, looking over the water, her long, blonde hair flying in the wind. He slid down next to her and took her hand, and she looked up at him with smiling, dark blue eyes. It was always the same, like being sucked into an abyss; a feeling that everything made sense when their fingers entwined and closed instinctively. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “Hey, you.”

  He buried his nose in her hair. How he had missed her. Oh God, she’d been gone for so long.

  “I’ve been losing my mind,” he mumbled. “You didn’t come yesterday.”

  It wasn’t a question. He had learned to accept that she came and went as she pleased, rarely telling him where she had been in the interim. He suspected that she was married. This would explain a lot—but not everything. Sometimes she would disappear for an entire, painful week, and he would masturbate compulsively in her absence, a lump of sorrow and longing wedged in his throat.

  But now she was here.

  “How are things at home?” she asked.

  “We were at the school yesterday to hear Ella’s recital,” he said. “‘Puff, the Magic Dragon.’ She knew all five verses by heart.”

  “Clever girl.” She smiled. “I know that song. We used to sing it when I was at school.”

  He pricked his ears. He collected the merest bits of information about her, whirled her back in time in his mind, back to a scene constructed of black-painted plywood in a high school hall. He could hear her singing.

  “That can’t be very long ago,” he said, brushing a thumb over her chin. “You’re still a child yourself.”

  She laughed.

  “Most people would consider a thirty-three-year-old woman to be all grown up, you know.”

  She dug in her bag and took out a royal-blue box. When she opened it, a jack-in-the-box popped up and swayed on its springs.

  “For Ella,” she said. “I made it myself.”

  “Who should I say it’s from?”

  She shrugged. “I saw her down on the beach one day. I was waiting for you. She looked wild and happy, like a troll, so I . . . I just wanted her to have it.”

  He pushed the jack back into its box and put it down next to him in the sand. His eyes followed the line of her collarbone, the little chain with the golden pendant, further down her V-neck, where he could just see the curves of her beautiful breasts. He swallowed hard and let his hand follow the same route his eyes had taken. He freed one of her breasts from her bra so he could look at it more closely. The nipple was small and pink and hard long before he lowered his head and took it in his mouth. She shifted slightly under his touch, resting her head against his neck as he fondled her nipple with his tongue.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “I miss you all the time.”

  “Hmm . . . ” He straightened up and pulled off her T-shirt. Opened her bra and reached for the other breast. She smelled of flowers, and something sour-salty that he now knew was her cunt.

  There was sand everywhere, but she had showed him how it could be done, how she liked it, when they met in the dunes. She turned round onto all fours, and he felt under her skirt, shifted her panties to the side, and thrust deep inside her from behind. She sighed, and he pushed deeper still; both the technique and his perseverance had been perfected over the long summer months. But the last thrust, just before they came together, was always the same. That bond with the universe, a breathless collapse into each other’s arms. Sand below and blue skies above, their fingers entwined.

  This was right, and Anna was wrong. How could he have lived more than half a life without knowing what love was? He had watched countless love scenes in the cinema with Anna, but it was only now he understood what they were about. Almost fifty years old and never been kissed, that’s how he’d felt the first time he took Christi’s hand in his. The thought of being with Christi at some point in
the future glowed like a mid-summer-night’s ball on the beach—and died just as swiftly again.

  Anna will die if I leave her.

  It will kill her.

  10

  We woke to the sound of a dog barking in the yard.

  Alex had crawled into bed next to me and fallen asleep once the cramps had died down. The sun had been up for hours, and the loft was cooking hot.

  “There’s someone outside,” said Alex. He leaned over the side of the bed and fished a Donald Duck comic up from the floor. “You better go see who it is.”

  “Or I could just stay in bed.”

  I pulled the blanket up over my head, but outside the dog had switched to an insistent falsetto that was difficult to ignore. There was a knock at the door, three firm raps, and I tumbled out of bed, still groggy. The aftereffects of the fit lingered like a stiffness in muscle and limb as I dragged myself down the stairs and opened the door.

  “Were you still sleeping?”

  It was that guy again. Ex-classmate Thomas. I had no difficulty remembering either his name or his neo-pubescent get-up. The choice of the day was a hooded sweater and a steel-blue, serrated earring that looked like a nut sans bolt. I wasn’t in the mood to reply and was pretty sure the question was rhetorical anyway. I was scantily dressed in my T-shirt and panties and peered at him and the world through millimeter-wide slits.

  “It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” he said. “Haven’t you got stuff to do?”

  “Like what?” I held his gaze. Normal people, people with jobs and houses and cars and dogs and summer houses and holidays in Thailand, liked to think of my life was an interesting—almost exotic—affair, subject matter fit for anthropologists and psychiatrists alike.

  He smiled. “Actually, I just wanted to know if you’d thought about . . . about selling the house. Whether you’d spoken to your grandmother?”