by Agnete Friis
Two weeks had passed since she’d stepped out of his car, and now she was nowhere to be found. When he sat down in the dunes in their usual meeting place, there was nothing but cold wind, sand, and the shredded sky above.
More than once he imagined that he had seen her. Between two containers on a building site, behind a shelf at the store, a shadow outside the window, on a street in Thisted. He ran after a woman on the road, but when he caught up with her and put a hand on her shoulder, it was a stranger’s face that greeted him in return. Another time, he drove to Holstebro and parked across the street of the house on Aurikelvej. It was a small, ugly bungalow with a red-brick façade. The curtains were closed, and there had been no signs of life in the two hours that passed while he was parked there, but she was probably . . . at work, or visiting her mother—if she had one. He felt as if he knew her, knew her innermost being, but in fact he knew so desperately little about her. Once she’d told him that she worked in the field of cultural relations, whatever that was. Parents or siblings she never mentioned. There had always been more important things to talk about. A book she had read. A photography exhibition in Århus. Ex-boyfriends she never mentioned either, although there must have been at least one significant partner, the father of the boys she had lost. But the house showed no signs of a man’s presence, and if there had been one, he was of one of the useless sort; the gutters were coming undone and the window frames were rotten, and he returned to Klitmøller with a renewed sense of relief coupled with a deeper desperation in his bones.
He was the kind of man that knew how to look after his own. He was a rock. You could harness him to a plough and he would turn up the soil of an entire meadow in the space of an afternoon. He could build things with his bare hands, and when he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, the bulges on his upper arms and the muscles that played under his skin when he flicked his wrists were testimony of his immense physical strength. But none of it could help him now. He was falling apart, and it was all because of her.
Her and Anna.
The two unhappy women who needed him—each in their own way. But he was just one human being with just one soul.
Anna was going to pieces too. It was as if they glided past each other much more frequently than they had before. On those rare occasions that he had tried to hold her, she was unable to soften in his embrace—or he was unable to open his arms to receive her. They repelled each other like two negative poles of a magnet.
He knew that she had tried to regain contact with an old friend. A woman she had met in a support group for people who had been expelled from their church. Anna and the woman had fallen out over something a number of years previously, and he had never met her, but apparently she was a rehabilitated drug addict, and this only added to his unease. It seemed as though Anna was moving even further away from him now that he was finally ready to come back.
He clenched his jaw. He’d already shot a couple of squawking pheasants earlier that day. Every shot had eased the tension in his muscles. The buck was meant for the butcher.
He could hear the animal’s haphazard flight through the undergrowth and he followed after it patiently. There was no need for haste, there were plenty of daylight hours left, and there was nothing to hurry home for. Above him and beyond the tops of the dense fir trees a cold autumn rain was raging, but the raindrops never reached him. And then he spotted the buck. It was lying on its side, panting, its head lifted to the sky. The worst of the animal’s panic had dissipated along with the drainage of blood, and for a while he stood watching it from a distance. It was a fine roebuck. Not one of the young bulls. In several places its coat bore dark patterned patches, presumably from deathly duels over the females in the herd. Warm clouds of breath rose from its flared nostrils.
He crept closer through the brush. He would prefer to shoot at close range, but he didn’t want to scare the buck any more than he’d done already, nor did he wish to look him in the eye. Not today.
He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The animal shuddered and the shot resonated briefly in the air. A couple of pheasants were startled higher into the trees, and then the forest was completely still.
He went over to the buck and lifted its antlers. The flesh was torn on the edge of its jaw, the eyes dull against the shimmer of light. He bent down, gripped the forelegs in his hands, and slung the animal over his shoulder. Then he forced his way back through the scattered undergrowth.
The car was parked where he had left it, but when he opened the boot to spread out a few black garbage bags in the back, something seemed out of place. The cold had a hint of perfume in the air that disappeared the very instant he tried to capture it.
Christi.
He glanced rapidly over his shoulder, but there was nothing to be seen among the dense fir trees. Out in the clearing the cold rain poured down over him, and he flipped the hood of his sweater up over his head. He flung the dead animal into the trunk together with his rifle, opened door on the driver’s side, and stumbled back. There was a tiny doll sitting up against the grey upholstery. Not a baby doll, but a ragdoll with yellow threads of curly hair. Next to the doll lay an oblong white plastic tube that he first mistook for a thermometer, but after closer inspection he identified it for what it was: a pregnancy test. On countless occasions Anna had used a more primitive form of the tests over the span of years she’d tried to conceive before Ella was born. Sometimes, when she’d been particularly desperate, she had done three tests on the same day. The white strips of paper lay scattered on the edge of the bathtub, on the sink, on the tile floor, each displaying its own, solitary purple stripe.
He carefully lifted the doll and sat down with the tube in his hand. Two purple stripes were visible in the display.
The test was positive.
From her perch on the passenger seat the doll stared at him with embroidered, light-blue eyes.
24
Kirsten had arranged to have my case files sent to me within two weeks of my request—a not insignificant feat considering just how much paper was involved: two cardboard boxes filled with several hard-backed files and a stack of stapled reports.
I knew there would be a lot. I had, after all, been interviewed by a number of psychologists, doctors, social workers, and counselors over the years, the kind of people who took notes on everything and afterward wrote reports to social services and Welfare authorities and asked others to consider their prognoses.
Even so, I was surprised. I was only twenty-eight years old, and by ordinary standards, an insignificant human being. That I had been deemed worthy of such thorough documentation was overwhelming.
Lying on top of the files in the first box was a handwritten note from Kirsten.
Dearest Ella, I hope you are okay. Call me if you need to talk.
I crumpled the note in the palm of my hand and sent her a mental note of well wishes. Thanks, but no thanks. I paged through the first couple of files and came across one of my psychiatric evaluations from Bakkegården.
Ella Nygaard, 14 years old. Has several self-inflicted lesions on her arms, all stemming from preceding three months of observation. When asked to motivate her actions, the patient claims the cuts were “necessary” but is otherwise aggressive and/or unresponsive to therapy. On two occasions last week, the patient threw kitchen knives, glasses, and forks at staff on the ward. On the whole, the patient responds to her external environment with violence and communication is difficult. Recommend observation re: possible deficits in attention, motor control and/or personality disorders . . . Recommend a course of anti-depressants . . . recommend isolation in the interests of safety . . . recommend long-term behavioral therapy once the medication has taken effect . . . has a close relationship to Amir. NB: Advise on prevention and/or abstention from all sexual activity.
I put the report back into the box with a sense of having read a letter that hadn’t been addressed
to me.
I met Amir when I was thirteen. At that time, he was a mere waif of a boy, a year younger than I was, and already saddled with several convictions for assault. He robbed other boys of their brand-name jackets and extra change. He didn’t earn any points for originality on that score, but he was a vain little devil, and his signature trait was breaking his victims’ pinky finger. He did it every time. Something to do with a jujitsu trick he’d learned from a cousin in Avedøre, if I remembered correctly.
Amir was up to his frail neck in well-worn clichés. A chain-smoker that spewed cuss words like you filthy whore, homo, shit-faced Dane, and I’ll fuck your mother. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck and he only assaulted nice Danish boys, the smooth and well-bred kind with perfect manners, big teeth, slicked hair, and expensive, designer clothing. Amir liked to point them out to me when we went shopping with the teachers from Bakkegården.
“That guy over there,” he’d say. “He’s a real mama’s boy. He’d piss in his pants if you asked him for a hundred kroner. The pretty boys never fight back, do they? They just take what’s coming to them and piss themselves. Just like the family pet does when you break into their master’s house. The dumb dog licks your hand, begs to be petted, and whines when you split. That guy would suck my dick if I asked him to.”
Even if Amir was at pains to live up to every macho cliché in the book, it was his fear of the dark that eventually brought us together. He used to sneak into my bed when he’d had a nightmare. And I let him. He was a late bloomer. Small and weedy, and hairless till he turned fourteen—we didn’t touch each other in that way until nearly two years later, when the force of nature finally took over.
Despite the youth counselor’s repeated warnings and big-pal conversations, within three months after Amir’s fourteenth birthday we had had sex on every horizontal and vertical surface at Bakkegården and its immediate environs. We were both alone, and neither of us had any family, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that we fled into each others’ arms. Nor was it surprising that I got pregnant. Strangely enough, the risk of this happening had never occurred to me. I was, after all, a crossbreed produced by the mating of two forlorn individuals—a victim and a murderer—in inelegant harmony.
I wrestled the cardboard boxes into the living room. Luckily Barbara had gone to Thisted to buy some supplies for her drawings, so I could lug the boxes upstairs unnoticed, and dragged them into the attic room for a later perusal. Bakkegården was familiar territory. It was what came before that I was interested in: the time that stretched back from that day I was born in a greenhouse in a foster family’s backyard in Aalborg.
I went down to the beach to look for Alex.
He was sitting at the edge of the water with Lupo and a boy I hadn’t seen before. Alex was drawing in the sand with a stick, laughing at something the other boy said. Then they got up and strolled barefooted down the beach towards the pier, Lupo trotting in their heels. Alex’s sandals dangled casually from the crook of his finger and every now and then one of the boys would bend down, pick up a stone, and send it flying over the surface of the waves, as if they had never done anything but be on the beach together.
“Anders Mikkelsen.”
A person had come up next to me. It was Thomas, of course. He nodded in the direction of the boys.
“Anders is good company. Not to worry. There aren’t any ghetto boys within miles from here.”
“I’m not worried.”
“The worst thing kids can come up with out here is the kind of game we used to play together.”
I sneaked a glance at him. He was too thin for my liking. In fact, he was a lot thinner than one ought to be as a Jutlander living on the North Sea coast. In Hvidovre, he would have blended in nicely, but you’d think that the combination of fresh ocean air, gravy potatoes, and homemade rhubarb tart with extra cream would foster a more vigorous specimen of a man. But no, his cheeks were hollow and he had an odd, perfectly round, shiny scar between the tendons on his neck.
“And what game would that be, exactly?” I asked.
He smiled crookedly. “As I said, you were a very energetic child with a healthy curiosity for the physical activity practiced by . . . err . . . between the sexes.”
I recalled the image that had sprung to mind as I stepped into my grandmother’s loft for the first time, me manically masturbating in the dusty heat, a pillow clenched between my knees. I blushed.
“Don’t worry,” said Thomas. He kicked at a pile of tattered rope at his feet. “We didn’t do anything like that. But we used to spy on people doing it in the dunes. It was foolproof. When the sun was shining, the dunes were crawling with lusty teenagers—and still are, for that matter. All we had to do was follow the couples who separated themselves from the group and headed away from the paths, deeper into the dunes. We were good at it. We waited, only crawling closer once they were so engrossed in each other that they were beyond noticing anything else. It’s just like trout and salmon in spawning season, you know, when they lay their eggs. They tumble round each other just under the surface, and before they know it, you can wade right up to them, simply fish them out of the water with your bare hands.”
I thought of my exploits with Magnus and hoped that the youth of Klitmøller preferred to stay indoors and get their kicks at their computer screens instead. My status as a thief had already been made public.
“You can’t remember anything at all, can you?”
His eyes were crooked and kind when he smiled, and something dislodged in my chest, like small pebbles sliding down a bank. His smile reminded me of that tickling sensation you get when a yellow snail slithers over your hand. Ladybugs and fine green stalks of dandelion. My friend, Thomas.
Some things were coming back slowly. I hesitated. “Nothing that makes any sense. I’m not even sure it’s anything that actually happened.”
“What about this?” He said, sticking a hand into the pouch of his sweater. “I found it when I was cleaning up the loft recently . . . My parents live in Spain for the better part of the year. The plan is that the house will be mine one day. The house and all the junk that goes with it.”
He handed the piece of paper to me, and I took it. Two words in a child’s scrawl, half the letters inverted.
i swayr
I stared at the words intently, but nothing came to mind.
“Did I write it?”
He shook his head. “You forced me to write it down that summer before you left Klitmøller. It was the summer we . . . you know, had our little spying hobby, and our first summer together that I can remember clearly. I missed you terribly after you disappeared.”
“Why did I ask you to do that?”
He paused. Whatever he’d planned to do or say before, he was clearly having second thoughts. I shrugged and headed for the sea. I’d never had the patience for artistic pauses. I’d spent too much time with too many social workers meticulously schooled in the art of communication. Artistic pauses were my cue to beat it. I rarely needed to hear what followed thereafter.
“Ella, wait!”
He jogged to catch up with me.
“I’m not sure whether I should tell you. And it’s none of my business, but . . . ”
I was standing at the edge of the water, letting the waves wash over my bare feet. On the other side of the ocean was England, and a little farther off, on the other side of the world, was America. I had never seen that world.
“During your father’s trial the case attracted a lot of coverage in the media. People still talk about it. You know how it is—nothing much happens out here.”
“And?” I wished he would wrap up his act soon so I could get back to the house. Barbara had taken pity on me and stocked up on vodka from the store.
“And your father initially testified that your mother may have committed suicide, because he had fallen in love with someone else. B
ut when the police arrived on the scene, he was standing there with the hunting rifle in his hands. There was blood on his clothing . . . ”
The water foamed over my feet and pulled the sand away around their contours. My legs were golden brown and streaked with salt. It was comforting yet disconcerting to feel like I was standing at the edge of the European continent with the wind in my hair. There was still time to find another town in Jutland to live before Alex went back to school after summer break. There were plenty of cheap houses in remote rural towns. It didn’t have to be Klitmøller—with or without free lodgings.
“We saw her, Ella! We saw the woman your father mentioned in the trial. We saw them together on the beach. And afterward you got me to write the note. I had to swear that I would never tell anyone we had seen your father with another woman in the dunes. I was six years old when you left. I didn’t know about the court case back then. I spent my time playing soccer and yanking out loose teeth, for Christ’s sake. But you’re back now . . . Aren’t you even a little bit curious? Don’t you want to know why everything became so fucked up in your life?”
I met his gaze. It struck me that Thomas was the only person I knew, apart from my grandmother, who had known me as a child.
“You’re right,” I snapped. “It’s none of your fucking business.”
I could hear how angry I sounded, but I gave myself credit for not walking away. We stood facing each other like two cowboys in a Western, Thomas with his thumbs stuck into the pockets of his jeans.
“When I look at you, Ella, I can see how badly things have gone for the girl I once knew,” he said. “The girl you once were is still in there. I recognized her in you the moment I saw you, but when anybody tries to talk to you, you turn your back on them. Literally. That boy of yours must have been miraculously conceived when you either were too drunk or too high to fend another person off.”