by Agnete Friis
I shook my head.
“Why don’t you and your dad get the old man to talk to her? You both know him, don’t you? Bæk-Nielsen, right?”
“We’ve asked him, and he doesn’t want to,” said Thomas. “He reckons it’s between you and your grandmother.”
“Hmm . . . tough luck for you guys, huh?”
A flash from my confirmation ceremony. I couldn’t recall having invited my grandmother, but she’d showed up anyway. Even back then she seemed to have one foot poised on the edge of the grave. She spoke Danish with a thick Icelandic accent, you could barely understand what she was saying, and between the roast pork and the ice cream, she gripped my elbow and went on and on about my father. About how sorry he was that I’d never answered his letters.
I fled, and went back to join in on the festivities. A whole row of teachers and advisors had donned their nicest party dresses; there was a telegram and two thousand kroner from social services. Not a dry eye in the house.
I hadn’t answered her letters since.
“Perhaps it’s tough luck for you too,” said Thomas, watching me all the while. “It could be a good deal for you as well. Having your family around is usually a good thing.”
“I just live here,” I said. “Can’t you get your dog to stop that?”
Thomas’s black Labrador-runt was still hollering at the side wall abutting the old stable.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.” Thomas dug both hands into the pockets of his sweater. “I think you’ve got a marten in your loft. The dog’s gone nuts.”
“You don’t say.”
I smiled stiffly and tried to close the door, but he was too quick, just managing to jam a foot in the door.
“I also wanted to ask, if you . . . if the two of you maybe wanted to go down to the harbor for an ice cream. We could chat about old times, you know. It might be fun.”
“No thanks. I’m just fine with things the way they are. Don’t you have stuff to do yourself? You look like a fixed-day-job-followed-by-a-little-TV-in-the-evenings kinda guy. A guy who jerks off Wednesdays and Saturdays.”
The last bit might have been unnecessary, but it felt like he was rubbing himself up against me on the dance floor, for Christ’s sake. His penetrating chumminess called for an aggressive defense.
He glared at me. I could almost hear the cranking behind that thick skull of his. It had probably been his dad who’d come up with that ice-cream-down-at-the-harbor routine, and once that had crashed to the floor, he was completely blank.
“Or I could show you where your mother was shot,” he said.
A gust of wind tore at his sweater and flapping track-suit pants, but his body was rooted to the ground. He just stood there, looking at me, his legs slightly bowed, his hands buried deep in his pockets. A flash of light at the edge of my mind; a pounding pain above the right eye, heated voices, an attic bathed in yellow light. It wasn’t enough to push me over the edge, no spasms in my body, no foaming at the mouth, but enough to sharpen what I called my live eye. An eye for all that was naked and ugly in my immediate environment; the cracks in the stable wall, the flapping garbage bags over gaping windows, the sharp, yellow fiber-glass pushing through the ceiling. I leaned a hand against the doorframe.
“Why would I want to see that?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. His eyes weren’t unfriendly, just curious—as if I were a fascinating case of perfect idiocy.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I guess I would want to know, if it had been me, who . . . If it had been my dad who’d blown my mother’s head off just outside my doorstep. You could end up in that hollow in the dunes before you know it. Most of us locals avoid the place, but the German tourists often sunbathe there in the summer. They don’t know any better, of course.”
I breathed in deeply.
I’d never thought about where the whole episode took place. To my mind, it was merely an impenetrable and dark terrain—not an actual place. But that was before. I looked out over the dunes, wondering whether I would feel anything standing on the actual spot. A cold wind, a hint of terror hovering in the air. I was neither religious nor superstitious, but I had always given my childhood home a wide berth. Like the coward that I was.
I heard Alex rummaging around upstairs—he was probably getting dressed and going about his compulsively thorough hand-washing routine. Sometimes he only needed to do it three times to avoid death in a car crash, sometimes seven times; sometimes he didn’t have to wash his hands at all. The magnitude of his fear swung in time with the frequency of my fits like an eerily precise pendulum.
“It’s so long ago now that it doesn’t matter anymore,” I said. “But if it makes you happy to be the designated tour guide, then fine. Let’s go.”
We walked through the lyme grass with the dog frisking around us.
“This entire area has now been placed under conservation,” said Thomas. “You aren’t allowed to build anything here, and you have to stay on the paths; if the lyme grass is trampled and disappears, everything would blow away.” He smiled briefly. “Do you recognize any of it?”
I shrugged. “I recognize the scene. The landscape, the houses, the sounds and smells. But the actors and the story are missing.”
He nodded, and we turned along a path that led in the direction of the sea.
“The body remembers those things, not the brain,” he said. “I read about it once. Memory is a finicky little devil.”
We had reached the top of a dune and could see the ocean. An enormous bird of prey hovered in the sky, its wings spread wide over the water. I followed its motion with my eyes. Suddenly, it tucked in its wings and plunged towards the sea. A white-tailed eagle. One more thing I knew without knowing how or why. Thomas cast a searching glance into the dunes.
“There,” he said, pointing.
I stopped in my tracks. I felt like I needed to bring something. You cannot come to the dead empty-handed; it felt like a lack of respect. My mother was buried in a graveyard somewhere in Northern Jutland, but I hadn’t been there as an adult. My second foster mother dutifully drove me up there a couple of times, but I don’t remember having felt anything in particular when I got there. At most, a gnawing irritation over my fretting foster mother; she had bought me a bunch of tulips on the drive over, and watched me from a distance, wringing her hands, as I laid them on the grave. She seemed to expect tears. I failed to deliver. I just stood there, staring at a gravestone. It was brown, brightly polished, and very ugly. When she’d had enough, we piled into the car and drove home again.
This was different. It struck a live chord in a way I’d never experienced before. It was here my mother had ceased to exist. The thought felt like a slow-motion explosion in my head, a gradual unfolding of something dark and mournful.
I bent down to a thorny bush, Burnet roses, and plucked a single flower. Burnet roses have glittering white petals and a sun-gold center. I remembered that once, a thousand years ago, I’d gathered bunches of these flowers and crushed their petals in a bowl to make perfume for my mother.
Then I followed Thomas down into the hollow. A hard gust of wind whirled sand around us, and I pinched my eyes closed. Fucking wind. I’d only been in Klitmøller two days, and it was already driving me insane.
“She lay here in the sand,” said Thomas. “Do you remember the place?”
I tucked as much hair as possible behind my ears, and looked around.
This hollow between the dunes looked the same as all the others. Sand, lyme grass, thorny hip, and Burnet rose bushes. Nothing to see. No pools of blood, shattered teeth, congealed brain tissue, or splinters of skull.
“Why would I remember it?”
“You were here when it happened—or right after, at least,” said Thomas. “My mom says you were covered in blood when the police finally found you out there.” He was turned away from the sea. “You had fl
ed into the plantation. You could have frozen to death. It was November, after all, and cold as hell. The whole town was out looking for you. I remember sitting up in my room, praying to God they’d find you in time.”
I stared at him.
“That’s a lie,” I said. “Surely I would have remembered that. Something like that I would have remembered.”
I sat on my haunches in the sand and dug a little dip for the Burnet rose so it wouldn’t blow away, but even inside the hole, the wind tore at its frail petals.
“Believe whatever you want. But you can ask anyone in town, and they’ll tell you the same.” Thomas dug a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered me one. I took it without meeting his gaze. We smoked in silence for a while.
“Do you remember that we were really good friends once, you and I?” he said.
“I don’t remember anything.”
I picked up a stick and started drawing in the sand. Anything, as long as I didn’t have to look at him. I knew what he expected to see: grief, perhaps some inkling of sorrow, like when you hear a really sad story. Tears would make me human, but the truth was that I didn’t feel a thing. Yes, I was angry with my father. But I was just as angry with my mother. For marrying the bastard. Women who marry psychopaths are hard to like. Especially if they are dumb enough to have the psycho’s child.
I stared resolutely down into the sand till Thomas sat down next to me. He’d quit staring.
“You were wild,” he said. “Like a boy or a troll. You could run faster than any of us, and you had the most amazing collection of sea urchins. Sea urchins and amber. Our parents let us comb the beach alone, even as kids, and you had eyes that picked up on everything. Once you found a lump of amber the size of a fist. Have you still got it?”
I had rifled through the contents of the suitcase that had accompanied me from foster family to foster family over the first couple of years. There was no amber inside. In fact, I had no idea what had happened to all our stuff. It must have been sold, or thrown away.
I shook my head.
“Well, we grew up with the North Sea, and we were clever enough to stay clear of the water. None of us would dream of going swimming in these waters. Only the tourists do.”
“And what about you? How do you pass your time?”
I worked my stick deeper into the hole, piling dark, wet sand onto the sides.
“Plumbing,” he said. “So let me know if you need to get your pipes done. I live in my parents’ old house, if you remember where that is.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay. Well, it’s close to your parents’ old house, so we’re bound to bump into each other. So remember . . . free plumbing.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t mean anything sexual.”
“I know that.”
I got up, brushed the sand off my legs, and bounded back up the dune. And stopped dead. Three quarters of the way up I had spotted a solitary, long-stemmed rose tangled in the lyme grass. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. I reckoned that it was a couple of days old; the petals had originally been yellow, but now had the hue and consistency of coffee-stained paper. But it was the note tied to the stalk that made me freeze. It had been torn from a checkered pad of paper and there was a black cross drawn in the top right-hand corner. Below the cross, a single word:
Anna.
11
When I got back to the house Alex was standing by the garage, triumphantly waving a fishing rod in the air. He had already eaten his breakfast and decided to go on a scavenger hunt in the yard, starting with the stable and the garage, where he was sorting out a large pile of junk: the yard was now furnished with a set of rickety old garden chairs, an equally ugly, grey plastic garden table, a yellow handcart, a rack of empty bottles, and a woman’s black bike with neither tires nor saddle. But there was no mistaking that it was the pile of rusty tackle, spoon-bait, and reel of fishing line that had captured his fancy most. His dark eyes were alive with glee.
“Where can you go fishing around here?”
“Down by the harbor,” I said automatically. “You can fish from the pier or in the harbor itself.”
“Do you want to come along?”
“I’ll come down later.”
He looked a little disappointed, but the thrill of finding the fishing gear wasn’t that easily to kill. I helped him unwind the rusty pile of hooks and bait, and we finally managed to assemble the tackle, reel, and line onto the rod. For good measure, I armed him with a knife from the kitchen and a plastic bag to carry his bounty—should he be so lucky as to catch anything.
He disappeared, walking tall and barefooted over the dunes, and I waited till he was out of sight before laying the rose down on the garden table.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that someone in Klitmøller still mourned the loss of my mother. Before she died out there, she must have had a life. Perhaps she’d had friends, or gone to choir practice, Italian classes, or whatever the hell it was you did to pass the time on the wind-blown evenings in Klitmøller. I just had a hard time believing that my mother had had that kind of life.
In the hardcover Book of Childhood Memories that my second foster mother had made for me—a couple of months before I smashed all the mirrors in her house—there were several pictures of my mother. The book had only traveled with me during the first couple of moves, and then disappeared, but I could remember the pictures clearly: fuzzy snapshots of a serious-looking woman with me sitting on her lap, my mother wandering down an anonymous road with me in tow. In all the pictures her shoulders were hunched around her ears like an old woman, her eyes avoiding the lens of the camera.
She looked like someone who was always alone, even in the company of others.
You always recognize your own affliction in other people.
I untied the note from the stalk and slipped it between two of my grandmother’s thick books on the bookcase in the lounge. Afterward I went back outside, loaded the rack of empties onto the handcart and took them to the camping site for recycling. A return of almost fifty kroner. Enough for a packet of tobacco and two kilos of potatoes from the improvised grocery store next to Tourist Information. I considered swiping a roll of chocolate cookies for Alex, but felt the sting of a bad conscience when I saw the exhausted expression on the face of the woman behind the counter. Life as the owner of Klitmøller Camping—pearl of the northern North Sea coast—was clearly something that wore on both health and humor. Many things had been easier in the faceless Netto in Hvidovre.
We wished one another a nice day! with a smile.
I sat outside in the sun and rolled myself a couple of smokes. In fact, a drink would have been in order. I felt sufficiently calm without one, but when my hands weren’t occupied with cigarette rolling, they tended to rap a rhythmical riot, now combing through my hair, now tapping on my thighs, now drawing glowing smoke-rings in the air. Thomas’s words dug into my flesh.
I was there.
Had I seen her die?
I pulled out my phone and scrolled down my pathetic list of contacts till Kirsten’s number came up. She picked up after a single ring.
“Ella, for God’s sake. Klitmøller?”
“How did you know?”
“You’ve changed your address. That kind of thing doesn’t get past us. Did you really think I’d just let it go and forget all about you?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I think you should do. I no longer live in your jurisdiction.”
“Christ, Ella.” Kirsten was breathing hard on the other end of the line. “I was seconds away from notifying the police and sending out a search party. I thought you were suicidal, that you were headed for Copenhagen harbor and taking Alex with you. You had just been released from Psych, for Christ’s sake! What else should I think?! Luckily Rosa called and told me you’d gone up North before I had a chance
to initiate an investigation. Every time you pull a stunt like this, it goes on your file. It isn’t good for you, and it isn’t good for Alex. And that business with Lisa . . . If she had pressed charges, you would have been finished for sure, Ella.”
She held an artistic pause, breathed deeply, and I could hear her making her way down the long corridors of the governmental buildings of the social services offices in Hvidovre. Kirsten had always preferred to conduct her private client conversations in the bicycle shed.
“Are you all right?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“And Alex?”
“He’s fishing down at the harbor.”
I could detect Kirsten’s smile beaming down the satellite connection.
“Okay. So now that we’ve established that you’re okay and that Alex has gone fishing, why are you calling? There’s not much I can do for you from my end. As you so rightly pointed out, you are very much out of my jurisdiction.”
“I want my files.”
“Which files do you mean?”
“Everything. Everything on my childhood. The court case, the foster parents, Bakkegården—the whole damn lot. I want to see if there’s anything written there about my mother.”
Kirsten was silent for a while.
“Naturally you’re entitled to see your files, Ella, but, quite frankly, I’m not comfortable with you reading those papers when you don’t have a psychiatrist on standby. One who knows you. You’re not exactly stable, emotionally. And I still think you should get Alex professional help. Your apartment is still available until the end of the month, and I’m sure that Lisa . . . ”
“I want to see those files,” I said flatly. “Just tell me what I need to do to get hold of them. I don’t want to argue with you on this.”
Another pause.
“Send me an official application, and I’ll see what I can do. But I’m still worried about you.”
“My case is no longer a matter for your concern. And we’re fine. Really.”
She was quiet for a bit.
“Ella,” she finally said. “I’ve known you a long time, and I like you, although God knows you’re hardly a model client. You’re too bright and too angry to be caught up in the system. That has always been your problem, my girl. I think you should come home so we can work this out. Here, where we know you best.”