by Agnete Friis
13
“Ella Nygaard?”
The man standing outside in the pouring rain was from social services. I knew exactly who he was before he opened his mouth to say his name: He was in his mid-to-late-forties with an extended academic education behind him; he’d been a teacher before he became a social worker, specializing in juveniles or drug-addicted prostitutes when he was younger, but now that he had the Family & Kids, he’d settled down behind a desk in a job with regular hours; he trained the little leaguers on Wednesdays and Saturdays with a still discreet but increasingly visible tummy perched above his one-time muscular legs.
And he had illusions about knowing how to handle people. How to handle me. He was a horse whisperer with a master’s degree in the Socially Unfit. I could feel it in his confident handshake, his steady gaze. He already had plenty of information about me; all he needed was a personal impression, then he’d be set to type a report on his computer and send his recommendation to the social services committee.
“My name is Henning, and I work for Thisted Social Services. May I come in?”
“What happens if I say no?”
He didn’t as much as blink.
“If you say no, I’ll come back another day with a piece of paper and a colleague. According to the Social Welfare Office in Hvidovre, there seems to be cause for concern about you and your son, and I’m here to find out if that’s true.”
“Come inside.”
Henning from Thisted had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the doorframe. He continued hunchbacked into the kitchen from there, carefully surveying his surroundings along the way.
“Coffee?” I nodded towards the cups standing in a row on a shelf just next to the stove.
“Yes, thank you.”
He offered me an almost sincere smile, perched himself on the edge of a kitchen chair, and followed my movements with his eyes as I went to fetch water from the tap in the bathroom.
“I understand that the house belongs to your grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“And you live here free of charge?”
“For the time being.”
“Yes. That certainly must be a great help, considering your current financial situation,” he said. “I guess one can live with the odd cosmetic defect.”
He shuddered, his eyes taking in the browned blisters on the walls and cupboard doors that were thick and bulging with several layers of paint, most recently, a pale, curry yellow. When I failed to comment, he hauled his shoulder bag up onto his lap and took out a pen and notepad.
“You should know,” he said, “that we at Thisted Social Office follow a very conservative policy with respect to the placement of children outside of the immediate family. We always exhaust all other avenues first. Family planning, support within the original home, assistance and support from the family’s own social network . . . Do you know anyone around here? I know you have a history in Klitmøller, but . . . ?”
I didn’t answer, just put the cup down in front of him on the counter and fetched some milk from the fridge.
“The reason I’m asking is . . . yes, well, to put it bluntly, we take the whole context into consideration. And we would hate for Alex to be left without support, if you were under considerable psychological strain yourself. It isn’t healthy for a child. And where is the young man, if I may ask?”
“He’s gone fishing,” I said drily.
“In this weather?”
I nodded. The rain hadn’t deterred Alex. In fact, he had been out fishing every single day since he found the fishing rod. His determination had already been rewarded with several plaice and a handful of cod. At the end of the third fishing day, he sold his catch to some tourists down at the harbor and came home with two steaks and a ready-made packet of béarnaise sauce from the store in exchange. The next day, he collected cans on the beach as well as going fishing and came home with lunch and two chocolate pastries in textbook hunter-gatherer style.
“Healthy boy. But do take care of him now, won’t you?”
Henning wrapped his knuckles demonstrably on the counter, took a single sip from his coffee cup, and got up with a relieved smile on his face. The worst part was over. The client had been sufficiently amenable throughout the interview. There had been no screaming and yelling, no slamming of doors. All that remained were a few quiet hours at the computer. He was almost at the door when he turned round and faced me.
“I knew your father, you know,” he said gravely. “He was a carpenter, as you know, and I did a couple of odd jobs for him when I was a young man. A nice guy. And a fair boss.”
I froze with my cup in my hand. Dared not as much as look at him.
“It’s a real tragedy, such things,” he said. “So sad when people can’t take leave of one another in a proper fashion. And the court case. I understand that most people felt he should have been given a suspended sentence . . . It couldn’t have been easy for you, I imagine. Do you still have contact? I heard he moved to Thailand at some stage?”
“That may very well be. We don’t really keep in touch . . . ”
For some reason I played along, took great pains to match his polite, conversational tone, as if what he was saying had something to do with me—or him, for that matter. But still, something rankled.
“What do you mean he should have been given a suspended sentence?”
Henning was looking at me evenly. Perhaps his grand illusions about knowing people were not altogether illusory after all. At the very least, he must have seen something in my eyes that made him soften his tone that now became more singsong, more pronounced in its West-Jutlandic ring.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you knew all about the court case, but of course it was . . . you were away. In my opinion, he was not accountable for his actions when he did it. He was beside himself in court. Very distraught. But he was standing with that bloody gun in his hand when the police arrived on the scene.”
He lifted his arm, but it stopped in midair.
“Ella, we will make sure that you and Alex get all the help you need. Call me if there’s anything I can do. We’ll be drawing up an Activity Plan for you very soon. You know the drill, don’t you?”
His hand brushed mine as he walked out the front door, and for a second, I wondered whether I would always be doomed to feel that yearning to have someone say my name, put their arms around me, without having been paid to do it first.
The shaking struck as I closed the door behind him. It hit me so suddenly, so violently, that I didn’t get a chance to reach for the bottle of vodka. I fell to my knees at the kitchen counter, raking kitchen towels and newspapers down on top of me.
Black and white dots were darting before my eyes, the stench of rotten seaweed and blood in my nostrils. I got as far as thinking that this was new, interesting even, that my super-senses had failed me this time around, that this time they just left me floating in a soup of images torn from memories and dreams instead.
“Here, Mom, let me help you to the couch.”
Alex must have come back, because he was bending over me, trying to catch my attention as he frantically pulled on my arm.
The smell got stronger. In front of me, black shadows gliding in and out of an impenetrable fog. I screamed for my mom until I was hoarse. The next glimmer of light I saw was Alex, standing right over me, but he wasn’t alone. Barbara’s face loomed up behind his, framed in a halo of hair that was so red I had to close my eyes again. Just for a little while. I didn’t register that I’d been dragged to the couch and laid on my side so I could breathe freely. All I knew was that I had stopped shaking. And that I was terribly, terribly tired.
14
“Tell me about it.”
Barbara was sitting in an armchair with her legs pulled up under her, a glass of vodka balanced on the arm rest. I had slept through most of the day and the
better half of the night. Barbara had taken care of dinner for Alex. Rye bread and liver pâté. The same thing she’d fed me on the couch. My legs had refused to carry me anywhere.
“Tell you about what?” I stared at my nails. They were chipped and dirty. Barbara had the long, square kind that clicked against her glass.
She sighed, and narrowed her eyes. The near dark deepened the red of her hair and the wrinkles under her eyes had become black craters.
“I can’t help you, if you don’t talk to me.”
I studied the holes in my socks. I had absolutely no intention of telling her anything. I had already said too much. The shock of the fit, the long sleep, and the vodka had loosened my tongue, but now I had to pull myself together. I leaned back in my chair and took a sip. It was my fourth glass of vodka, which was bordering on the excessive, but still on the safe side of the worst hangovers. The floor dipped under me, I was afloat in a rocking boat—and I liked it. Even the soreness in my muscles felt comfortable and warm when tempered by the right amount of alcohol. It was three o’clock in the morning, and up in my bed, Alex was sleeping like a stone.
“I can’t recall having asked you for your help,” I said. I could hear the words tripping over my tongue. I couldn’t feel my lips.
“Alex called me,” said Barbara. “Not an ambulance or the police or the fire brigade. He called me. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Your number is jotted down on a piece of paper on the kitchen counter.”
“He called me because you’re both on shit row if Welfare gets wind of your panic attacks. That’s what he told me, and right now, I’m the only person you know in Klitmøller. Isn’t that right?”
Barbara’s words were equally slurred, and she refilled her glass. I was glad I wasn’t the only one who was drunk.
“I’m guessing that all that in there . . . ” she pointed a finger at my head and smiled her chalk-white smile. “All that going haywire in there has got something to do with your mom and dad. I’ve heard some talk in town about your childhood.”
“What have you heard?” I said, trying to sound lighthearted; I thought about feathers, and smoke, I imagined being in one of those shithouse-sized hot air balloons that you sometimes saw floating over Damhus Lake in fine weather. I meditated on the state of weightlessness.
“I took a course in hypnosis once.” She smiled weakly.
Of course you did, I thought. Barbara was a classic example of those forlorn souls who were staunch believers in deep breathing techniques, healing crystals, and reincarnation. It was always women. They bathed themselves in soap fabricated from the departed souls of flowers collected in the northern mountains of Norway, and their gurus were always men, whom they worshipped with the same abandon as teenage girls idolized their boy bands. I wasn’t a fan of self-delusion on that kind of scale. On the other hand, my homegrown solution of a bottle of vodka above the sink and Alex dabbing my brow with a wet cloth was hardly sustainable in the long run.
“Perhaps the shaking would go away if you remembered what happened that night,” she said. “Perhaps you would be . . . free.”
I curled myself into a ball on the chair and closed my eyes. If Barbara’s powers of psychoanalysis were comparable with her artistic prowess, I was in trouble. Her drawings were awful, but the most disturbing thing about them was the complete lack of self-awareness looming large behind her vigorous pencil strokes. Somewhere in her mind, she actually believed that she could make a living from her art one day.
But she could have a point about the childhood memories. Doctor Erhardsen and the majority of my psychologists had said something similar. But there was a reason why my brain denied me access to that part of my life. It was looking out for me. And what if remembering it all just made me more fucked up than I was? I was already balancing on the tip of total destruction, as Alex would say.
“I want go to sleep,” I said. “I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”
Barbara lurched to her feet, took a woolen blanket off the arm rest, and spread it over me.
“I can’t drive anywhere right now,” she said. “I’ve had too much to drink. I’ll find a place to sleep.”
I could hear her pottering about in the kitchen as she hummed a Billie Holiday song. “Gloomy Sunday.” Her voice strained until it became hoarse and cooing and smoky. She knew the lyrics by heart. But she was off-key, and the song sounded like an antiphonal dirge from a bygone, forsaken world.
“Can’t you remember anything at all from that night?” she called to me from the kitchen. “It was November, right? So it must have been very cold and windy. What were you doing out in the dunes?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
I tried to focus on one of my grandmother’s pictures, which was mounted on the wall next to the window: a black-and-white print of an old painting that depicted a rowing boat in a foaming inferno of water, further out to sea, a glimpse of the stern of a ship at the horizon.
A rescue boat goes out to sea was inscribed below, and all at once, I knew that this was how my grandfather and my father’s brother had died. At sea. My grandfather had been a fisherman, I recalled, and he had fished up my grandmother in Iceland. That was the story I had been told.
“You really can’t remember a thing?”
Barbara was back. She leaned in over me, I could feel her alcohol breath on my face. The exhaustion made her look haggard, her teeth shone even more unnaturally white in her baggy-eyed face.
“No,” I said, and closed my eyes.
•••
When I woke up again, I was still lying on the couch with the woolen blanket draped over me. The house was silent as the grave, even though the sun had already climbed high over the dunes, high enough to fill the living room with a thick and dusty grey light.
The aftereffects of my short, nightmarish sleep lingered in my bones as I crawled up the staircase to the first floor bedroom.
Alex was still sleeping. He was lying on his back and the quilt had slipped down to expose his frail, tan chest. His arms rested by his sides on the sheet, his palms turned upwards, like springtime flowers in bud.
Next to him lay Barbara. Like Alex, she was lying on her back, but she was fully clothed, and her arms were crossed over her chest like a corpse. Her fingers, the long red nails, adorned her collarbones like the wings of a parrot.
“Barbara!”
I whispered hoarsely in her ear, terrified that Alex would wake up and find her lying beside him; he would hate that just as much as I did. The nausea that curled in my stomach since leaving the couch intensified; water gathered in my mouth.
She turned her head and looked at me. Her face was pale, softer without all that make-up. But she looked younger. Stronger. Like a vampire after a solid meal.
I threw up in the toilet as Barbara busied herself in the kitchen and laid the table with cereal, sugar, and milk. The stinking porridge poured out of my throat in generous quantities, consisting mostly of vodka-flavored chunks of rye bread.
Barbara put a glass of water and a cup of scalding hot coffee on the plastic tablecloth in front of me. She reeked of hangover, that particular blend of formaldehyde and formic acid, sleep, and sweat, and my nausea gelled with the intense displeasure I felt in her physical presence. It was a familiar feeling of restlessness, a compulsion to get up and leave the house. I lowered my head, trying to breathe through my mouth.
“I’m going to stay for a couple of days,” said Barbara. “I’ll just fetch some bedding, and my drawings. You can’t take care of him on your own right now.”
There it was again. The brush of an angel’s wing. A human being reaching out to me, even though I was so difficult to love. And all I could think about was getting the hell away from there. Once, I bit Foster Mother Number Three in the arm. The bite was so deep it needed stitches; her arm was yellow and blue for several weeks thereafter. If I r
emembered correctly, the woman had tried to stroke me on the head. Her two well-balanced daughters called me the Pit Bull until I was reassigned a couple of months later.
“I’m not very good at all that living together business. I’ve tried it before.” I said between clenched teeth.
“And you are good at living alone?”
She put both her hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. Her face was so close to mine there was no place else to look.
“Come now, Ella,” she said. “For your own sake—and Alex’s. At some point you are going to have to accept help from somebody.”
I tore myself away, but nodded. Just once.
“I’m going down to the harbor to fish with Alex a little later today. And then we’ll see.”
15
HELGI, 1994
“Why here? What are we doing here?”
He could hear that his tone was harsher than he had intended, but it had been bloody difficult to get away from the site, and she had called the office so many times that some of his colleagues had started giving him looks.
But Christi didn’t seem to notice. She just laughed her girlish laugh, snuggled in under his arm, and pulled him along into the graveyard.
“I’m tired of the dunes,” she said. “And I’m tired of the wind. I just want to hold your hand in a place that has flowers and shelter and sunshine.”
He had to jog to keep up with her, and all at once he felt ridiculous in his clomping construction boots and beige overalls. A plodding and very grown man prancing about like a teenager with his much younger girlfriend in a graveyard. It was undignified, and utterly intolerable. He tried to slow her down.
“Christi, wait . . . ”
She stopped short, and kissed him. Stuck the tip of her little pink tongue between his teeth and bit him on the lip. First softly, and then so hard that he flinched and tasted blood.
“Ouch, bloody hell!”
He pushed her a little away from him instinctively, but just a little. He wanted her. He always did. Even though her behavior was becoming more and more strange.