by Agnete Friis
Something softened in my chest. Kirsten had always had a power over me that stemmed from her deep voice, her round form, and her willingness to reach out and take me in her arms. Then and there I was glad she was no more than a voice on the end of a line.
“What will happen if I come back, Kirsten? I want you to be completely honest. As a friend to Alex and me. What will happen, Kirsten?”
A long silence. I knew she was at war with herself, and I knew what this meant. Kirsten was an excellent social worker, she’d been working for the department of social services for a hundred years. She wasn’t the one who was trying to take Alex away from me, but she had seen enough to know if others were.
“Thank you,” I said. “You have my new address. I’ll look forward to hearing from you about those files.”
Then I cut the connection.
Alex sat dipping his rod in the water at the far end of the pier when I got to the harbor.
The wind had picked up, and white foam was whipped into the air by the brutal meeting of sea and stone. When I slid down next to him, I saw that he’d actually had a bite. Something dark and wet lay in the plastic bag, the knife was smeared with blood and torn intestines.
“Three.” He had to shout to be heard above the roar of the sea. “I’ve caught three flat fishes. One of the surfers killed the first one for me, but the other two I killed myself. We can eat them for dinner tonight.”
I kissed him on the forehead. It was cold and salty.
“My big, strong huntsman,” I said. “Beats collecting cans, huh?”
He laughed, and pointed towards the beach.
“That surfer guy from yesterday helped me. He said I could try his surfboard later. Can I?”
The long-haired wetsuit, Magnus, looked over in our direction and waved. I looked away. I told myself I had no illusions what the guy was after, and it had nothing to do with either Alex or the surfboard. I also told myself that I wasn’t flattered.
“You go on ahead,” I said. “I’ll take care of our fish in the meantime.”
Alex drew in his line, left the rod lying next to me, and bounded off to the beach. We hadn’t spoken about leaving Hvidovre, or the spasms that had lasted deep into the night. The only remaining signs of the fit the night before lingered in my aching legs. I took the three fat fish out of the bag, slit their bellies, and cleaned out the black, congealed blood and insides with my index finger. I ran a hand along the sandpaper-rough surface of their skins and felt a wild, child-like joy spill from a spot just below my breastbone. Then I climbed down between the boulders and washed the fish in the waves. One more thing I knew how to do. My mother or father must have showed me how to clean fish. I hoped it was my mom.
Down at the beach the surfer guy had helped Alex up onto his surfboard and was literally showing him the motions. Alex had been kitted out with an orange life vest and they were standing knee-deep in the waves together. Alex clambered up onto the board on wobbly legs, then opted to kneel on the board instead. Even from a distance, I could see his smile, both exhilarated and awkward at once.
Klitmøller was as good as a holiday for him. If Kirsten’s colleagues in Hvidovre managed to convince the welfare office in Thisted that I was unfit to be a mother, then at least Alex would have experienced this. He had seen the sea. The closest we had ever come to a holiday was taking the bus to Amager Strand while the sun melted the rest of the city of Copenhagen.
The surfer-guy waved at me, and I waved back. I had returned the fish to the plastic bag and was climbing my way up onto the pier when my eyes leveled on a pair of well-worn, brown leather shoes. I looked up to meet the gaze of the man I had seen on the road outside our house on our first day in Klitmøller. He was a lot older than I had first assumed—he looked at least eighty years old. His shiny scalp was covered in liver spots, he was skeleton-thin, but the broad hands and shoulders gave me the impression of someone that once had been a big man.
He smiled down at me.
“Ella?”
I scampered up onto the pier and nodded in his direction, just once.
“My name is Bæk-Nielsen. I’m looking after your grandmother’s house. Perhaps you saw me the other day?”
I shook my head, very slightly. It had always been a strategy of mine to tell other people as little as possible. When your most intimate secrets are pooled in a database that is shared with ten thousand government-appointed caregivers you tend to fiddle with those precious few details you had to yourself.
“Your grandmother has asked me to drive you—you and your son—to Thisted. She would like to see you both.”
I felt an ice-cold jab in my stomach. She had no business in contacting us. She was sick and senile and dying. She was already half dead fifteen years ago, for Christ’s sake.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “I’m not interested in reviving the acquaintance.”
“You’re living in her house.”
He practically had to shout to be heard over the howling wind. His broad beige trouser legs fluttered against his knuckle-thin thighs; he hardly amounted to any kind of physical threat. And I could just take off if I had to. I glanced over my shoulder at Alex and the surfer. They were still standing knee-deep in the waves, maneuvering the rocking surfboard.
“I didn’t realize this obliged me to talk to her. This wasn’t stipulated in her letter, and quite frankly, I don’t feel like listening to her shit.”
The old man raised his eyebrows, but stood his ground.
“As you may know, your grandmother believes your father is innocent.”
I shrugged. “If that’s what she wants to believe, it’s fine by me. She’s his mother. I’d probably feel the same should Alex blow his girlfriend’s brains out one day. A mother’s love is blind.”
“She believes you might know something that could help him.”
I had trouble suppressing a sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh. The rumors about my grandmother’s insanity weren’t exaggerated.
“The man was convicted. He has served his sentence. I fail to understand how I could be of any use to him now. And even if I could . . . why would I want to help my mother’s murderer?”
Bæk-Nielsen followed my gaze towards the beach and Alex, who was still frolicking in the waves.
“I’m not sure I believe your father is innocent,” he said kindly. “But there may be some good in this for you. You’ve never had a family, so you don’t know what you’re missing. Family isn’t love. That’s nothing but sentimental blubber. Family is an extension of your own body. Many youngsters believe they can live without the bonds they are born with, but for most of us, these bonds are the only ties we have in the universe. This you will realize when you’re older, but right now, I am here as your grandmother’s friend. Not yours. She has lost everyone who has ever meant anything to her, and now she would like to see you. And your son.”
Out in the breakers Alex had managed to stay standing on the board for a brief moment, long enough for him to feel the surge of the sea and lift his arms high in triumphant glee.
“She’s unhappy,” I said. “I can understand that. But I can’t help her. Tell her I’m not interested.”
Bæk-Nielsen looked like he wanted to hit me, but he couldn’t force me to come. And we both knew it. I shrugged, tried to swallow the painful lump in my throat. Then I picked up the fishing rod, walked past him, and left him standing on the wind-blown pier. My hands had already started to shake, and it was only a question of time before the remainder of my body followed suit.
It was time to leave.
I was out of breath and weak in the knees by the time I reached Alex and surfer-Magnus. The surfing lesson was over, and Alex was sitting in the sand, frozen stiff in his wet jeans. His lips were blue and his teeth were chattering, even though Magnus had wrapped a towel over his shoulders. A big-breasted girl in a bikini was woven into
the luxurious terry cloth of his towel.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
“But Magnus said I could have another go once I’ve warmed up,” protested Alex.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But we have to get our dinner into the fridge, don’t we? Otherwise it will spoil.”
Alex bought my excuse. Anxious about his loot, he sprang to his feet, as did Magnus, who had exchanged his wet-suit for a pair of large, floral-print boxer shorts.
“I’ll walk you guys home.” He smiled and passed me a can of beer that he’d already opened. It wasn’t vodka, but better than nothing. I took a gulp and stole a glance at the pier. The old man was nowhere to be seen.
We walked along the beach with the fishing rod and a six-pack that Magnus had hooked on the last digit of his index finger. I was relieved to hear that he wasn’t from Klitmøller, he came from Aalborg, and was hardly likely to have been born when infamy came my way. He was harmless, almost soothing in all his boyish ignorance, his words devoid of depth. The conversation floated as easily as newspapers on the wind and waves.
Magnus liked techno and had a dog named Dirk that his parents took care of while he was away. He’d been surfing in Australia, and one day, he was going to move down there, live on Bondi Beach and go surfing every day, earning money on the stock market while everyone else was asleep—if he wasn’t eaten by a great white shark first, that is. Hah, hah.
I let him talk. Talk suited me just fine.
“I also like skiing and motor-bikes,” he said. “What do you like doing, Ella?”
He caught my gaze, and held it till I felt that well-known lurch in my belly. I was drinking fast—I had downed the first beer and was well on my way with my second by the time Alex had run on ahead to have a warm bath and get his fish safely stowed in the fridge.
“Would you like to sit in the dunes for a while?” I said.
Magnus looked at me with a smile that was supremely self-confident, bordering on the arrogant. This was exactly how I liked my men. I knew his type. He could get all the women he wanted, but he was a bit lazy, and preferred the easy conquest, the imperfect girls, so he could get in fast and leave just as swiftly. Girls like me, for example. I had no illusions about marriage and a white picket fence. I never had.
We walked into the dunes where we wouldn’t be visible from the beach. I drank one more beer before he leaned over and kissed me, long and deep. Exactly as I had hoped. Then he pulled off my T-shirt and ran his fingertips down the thin scars along the insides of my arms.
“Where did you get these?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I was a fucked-up teenager.”
“And now . . . ?”
“Now I’m a fucked-up adult.”
My tongue traced along his collarbone and continued down till I found a nipple. It tasted of the sea. I had one hand inside his floral-print boxer shorts as he lovingly took care of my lower body. His rings were cold, but he was good with his hands. Very, very good. I wasn’t his first true love, that was for sure.
Afterward we had a last beer each; we were sitting leaning up against one another. His hands played in my hair.
“I think I’ll be off, now,” he said quietly. “Will I see you again?”
I mumbled a “maybe” that I hoped was sufficiently vague to prevent him from making plans for the next day. I liked taking my liberties in so far as I had any to take.
“You know where you can find me,” he said. “Alex is welcome to come by and surf, anytime.”
I watched him as he strolled barefooted along the beach. A handsome young man, who would certainly never end up living on Bondi Beach. He would get married to a nice girl who worked in a bank, fixed her hair, got her nails done and her chassis waxed. The kind of girl you could show off to both your friends and your family with pride. They would buy a nice, prefabricated house on the outskirts of Aalborg. I wasn’t bitter. And my body had finally found some peace.
I closed my eyes and let the sand run through my fingers. It was cold sitting there on my own, now that the clouds were blocking out the sun.
A flash of myself in shorts and red sandals with white flowers on the straps. I’m watching two people woven into each other. A man and a woman. They are fully clothed, but their clothes are rumpled, they are heaving, pressing their bodies against each other in rhythmic movements. The woman’s long hair is covering the man’s face, and they don’t notice me, even though I’m standing relatively close by, watching. Seeing them gives me the same feeling I get in my belly when I watch a fight at school. Fear, mixed with a heat that spreads from my chest all the way down between my legs. Then the woman turns her face towards me. It is contorted, as if she were in terrible pain.
I back up, tumble down the side of the dune, and run back to the boy who is waiting for me on the shore.
“Did you see it?” he says with a crooked smile. He knew. “Did you see them? They were doing it in the dunes.”
We were woken, hot and thirsty, by the burning rays of sun slanting in through the roof window.
Alex had woken me twice in the dead of night, bolting upright in bed, screaming, sweat pouring down his face. His nightmares had always been terrifying, but the torments of the night before had been particularly bad, even for him. The kind where he screamed in pain and terror at invisible beings that threatened to tear out his flesh.
But by morning all was forgotten.
The heat and the light from the window reminded me of the dancing patterns of light that Tommy from Bakkegården used to beam onto ants, beetles, and human eyes with his magnifying glass. I rolled out of the beam of light, bouncing both Alex and me out of the bed as I did so. He laughed.
I forced myself to stand under the cold stream of water in the shower for five minutes before we ate breakfast and walked into town. Or rather, I walked. Alex danced ahead, still wearing the same jeans shorts he’d been wearing for the last week. I had already tossed a pile of underwear and a chunk of flaking hand soap into the archaic washing machine in the kitchen. Washing powder was one of the first things I would have to get hold of somehow.
I needed money. Soon. The money I had borrowed from Rosa would only last for a couple of weeks, if that, and then only if I was very careful what I spent it on and found some kind of supplementary income in the interim. Of course we could collect empty cans in Klitmøller, there were plenty of tourists, and where there were tourists, beer was consumed. But I hadn’t staked out the hunting grounds yet and I had no idea who else would claim the territory.
The grocery store was small and dark compared to the neon-lit Netto I was used to from Hvidovre and there was only one other customer gliding along the aisles as we came in: a middle-aged woman with henna-colored hair and tinkling bracelets on her liver-spotted arms. I collected a tray of frozen chicken on sale, rice, tomatoes, and half a gallon of milk, and while Alex was distracted by a display of brightly-colored beach toys and fishing nets I managed to smuggle half a liter of vodka and packet of chewing gum in under my sweater. The store owner himself was commandeering a boy in the storeroom out back and Henna-hair was nowhere to be seen.
I had stolen before.
Mincemeat and coffee and toilet cleaner from Netto, Lego blocks from the slap-provokingly garish Toys “R” Us, and mobile phone covers from Fona Electronics. Usually it happened towards the end of the month, when I was broke, but sometimes I did it because I felt like it. Doctor Erhardsen would say it was because I was angry. He would probably be right. The hideous advertisements called for it. Across the board, they were tritely inviting, styled in well-composed scenes of perfect people in perfect worlds; a pseudoscience that relies on Photoshop and the manipulation of our senses, and it worked with everyone—including me: the flat-broke-weirdo consumer that belonged in the shabby, low-performance consumer bracket that the advertising industry habitually ignored. But the world pissed on me, so I pissed on the worl
d. That was my moral, if I had one. But the grocery store owner could be a problem in the long term. I didn’t want to know the people I stole from.
Afterward we went down to the beach to watch the surfers at the pier. Alex went down onto the beach to skim stones, exactly as he used to do on the duck pond in Hvidovre Park. A long, beautiful, throw that skimmed just above the surface of the water, the stone bouncing several times before it disappeared into the waves. He was so engrossed in his skimming that I saw the woman before he did. It was the henna-haired woman from the grocery store. The faux radiance of her red hair preceded her long before she stopped to stand directly in front of Alex. She bent down and picked up a stone, handing it to him with same solemnity as the Pale Faces once offered the American Indian shiny beads and blankets on the prairie.
Alex accepted the stone shyly, smiled and nodded as he said something in reply. He stepped back a couple of paces and skimmed the stone over the waves. It bounced over the surface several times, then disappeared. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew that the woman was smiling. Then she turned, looked at me and waved. Her long red hair flew wildly in the wind.
“I would very much like to make a sketch of Alex. He’s a beautiful boy.”
The woman, who had introduced herself as Barbara, nodded in the direction of the parking lot.
“And what would that cost me?”
I didn’t mean to be unfriendly. That’s just the way I tended to come across. And in my experience, it was wise to be on your guard when someone started saying nice things about your children. Alex was a beautiful boy, but it was rare for people to mention it without wanting something from me.
“Nothing.” She flashed a smile with beautiful, film-star white teeth that didn’t fit the rest of the picture. “I only charge the German tourists. This sketch would be for my own work.”