by Agnete Friis
“Did you know that those worms can bite really hard?”
Alex nodded. “They’re really gross, but I can sell them up at the camping site. Ten for thirty kroner. It’s better than collecting cans.”
“What about Barbara?” I shot a sidelong glance at the house. “Has she come back yet?”
Alex nodded without looking up, absorbed in untangling the fishing line once more. “She’s painting in her room. It looks like shit, if you ask me. Is she moving in? Nobody has said anything to me about her moving in.”
“Of course she’s not moving in.”
“I’ll paint over it again in a couple of weeks. But I wanted to give it a try. It’s going to be just marvelous, don’t you think?”
I glared at the bare walls for a moment before turning to face Barbara. She was wearing a pair of three-quarter Bermuda shorts, splattered with white paint, and a loose-fitting man’s shirt, drawing broad strokes over the floral wallpaper with a roller as she spoke, exhilarated.
“You could’ve asked first. This isn’t your house. It’s not even mine.”
“I’m here to help you, Ella. But I need to work or I’ll go stark raving mad. It’s a must, and besides, nobody can raise any objections to white-washed walls. Not even Bæk-Nielsen. It’s classic, for Christ’s sake. There’s something to drink in the fridge, if you want some.”
“No thanks.”
Barbara shot me a glance as she dipped the roller into the tray and continued painting with hissing strokes. She was painting the last wall in her room; she’d been very industrious while I was away.
“Come now,” she said, slightly out of breath. “It will be great. Take a look at some of the sketches lying over there.”
I glanced at the stack she had spread over the floor in a corner. They looked like murals depicting a religious motif. Priests and bishops and dukes in a raging tower of flames, their arms reaching for the sky, the Devil fucking a witch in one corner, a malicious grin on his face, and angels with rigid wings and golden trumpets.
“Are you creating the nave of a church?”
“I think of it more as a back-drop,” she said. “I like the idea of having all this around me when I sleep.”
“You could’ve done it at your place.”
She had taken up the roller again, and her back was turned once more. “The light is better here.”
Something unsaid quivered in the hazy dust between us. I gave Barbara’s mural with its clumsy Bible motifs another look. It was probably never intended to be either tasteful or beautiful, but in her hands, the pictures became grotesque—just like everything else she touched. Perhaps it wasn’t just because she was a lousy artist. Perhaps something in her vision consistently twisted reality.
“Do you believe in all this stuff? The Bible?”
“No.” She turned to face me, smiled her chalk-white smile. “I don’t believe in any of it. I believe in neither heaven nor hell, and I have always done as I pleased when it came to sex and alcohol. But I really like the paintings. They’re beautiful. And they portray the world as it is. Not in heaven or hell, but as things really are—here, on Earth. We have all been thoroughly done over by this fellow, for instance.”
She pointed to a furious devil hunched over a farmer’s wife. His cock was enormous and furnished with several prickly counter hooks along the shaft.
“Love hurts.”
“My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said, mostly to change the subject. “Do you know anything about them?”
“Yes, I do.” Barbara laughed. “They believe that the Day of Judgment is on our doorstep and that only a select few—those belonging to their church—will be granted access to heaven when that day comes. It’s quite an arrogant point of view, but I guess we all get caught up in our own beliefs.”
“Judgment Day.” I followed the contours of a sketch with my hand. Traced a finger along the flames of hell. “I guess all religions believe in some kind of judgment day.”
Barbara had started working with her roller again, covering the wall with long, determined strokes.
“All religions and the rest of us. Global warming, overpopulation, the loss of phosphates in industrial farming. The world is going to hell. The difference between the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the rest of us is that we don’t expect a savior to show up and rescue a select few—or any of us, for that matter. All we can do is prepare to die when the seas begin to boil. Fortunately, till then, we’ve got one another. Where have you been? Have you been talking to your grandmother?” She laughed again, but a sharp edge had crept into her voice. She sounded angry.
“Yes. I spoke to her a couple of days ago. She says my father is innocent. That someone else shot my mother. Or perhaps she shot herself. And she told me that my mother tried to commit suicide soon after she married my father.”
“Does it matter what your grandmother says?” Barbara was watching me intently now. “I thought you had decided to let things be. You know what happened. You saw your father with the gun, didn’t you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve started remembering. Nothing from that night, but bits of my father. He taught me how to fish. And my mother . . . I visited my aunt today. My mother had a friend. Someone who’d been excluded from the church—like she was. I think I should try to find this woman.”
“You should have spoken to me first,” said Barbara. “All Jehovah’s Witnesses are liars. Her whole life your aunt has been lectured that everything beyond the walls of the church belongs to the Devil; she doesn’t feel obliged to tell you the truth. I’m not saying this to upset you. But you need to know the truth. The truth about them.”
I traced a finger along my scars. The skin was pink, satin smooth; it didn’t feel as if the skin belonged to me. I missed Rosa. She had never been especially affectionate, but she was always the same, and she knew how to keep her distance when I needed some space. With Barbara there was always an angle. She expected the same obedience from me as a mother would expect from her daughter.
“I want you to move out,” I said quietly. “I’m okay now.”
“Are you?”
Barbara put down the roller and came over to me. She had been an attractive woman once—that much was clear. She was tall, her large breasts inviting, and without all that make-up I could see a glint of the intensity she must have radiated when she had a lover or an enemy in her sights.
“Are you really okay, Ella? You’re completely alone in the world, and nobody loves or takes care of you. That surfer guy isn’t here to stay, is he? Your phone never rings. Nobody from your previous life misses you, and half the time you’re lying on the floor, shaking uncontrollably. Does that sound like somebody who’s okay?”
She was so close to me that I could feel her red-wine breath on my face. She must have been on the sauce for a while; it was not just her breath, the alcohol was oozing from her pores.
My body prepared for battle. I had fought all my life. It’s exactly like riding a bike. The body never forgets. All the blows it has taken, all those it has delivered, are stored in the cells. You don’t have to think, just listen to the beat, and follow the rhythm.
“You have to leave,” I said.
She laughed. And for the second time that day, a woman opened her arms and pulled me close. “I’m going to be the first person you cannot scare away, Ella,” she said. “I will look after you.”
I stood stiff, rigid as a pole, although I instinctively wanted to kick free of her nauseating stench. Red wine and oily hair. In the absence of sexual attraction, physical contact had always been anathema to me.
“I want you to move out,” I whispered again. But I remained standing where I was. I was good at fighting, but not much else.
“I’m staying here for as long as you need me,” said Barbara against the skin of my neck. “I’m not going anywhere.”
29
&nbs
p; I called Rosa in the middle of the night. Alex had woken me with one of his nightmares. It was the second attack he’d had since our arrival in Klitmøller.
He sat up in bed and screamed and screamed. The nightmare was wordless, they always were. He never told me what they were about. Never saw me at all, just struck out at invisible enemies with that unfathomable fear in his eyes. Finally he lay down on his side, his body steaming. His hair was soaked in sweat and water from the wet cloth I had used to dab his forehead. I couldn’t tell if it helped, the cloth. I just had to do something. Anything. Chimpanzees and sunflower seeds. We all need to feel useful.
“Hey, it’s me.”
Rosa fumbled with a phone somewhere in Hvidovre. “Ella? Do you know what time it is?”
I looked at the display on my phone: 1:30. “Alex woke me.”
“No need to make that a problem for the rest of us as well.”
Jens grunted in the background, I could hear Rosa getting out of bed and going into the living room. A door being closed.
“What’s up?”
“I think maybe it was a mistake.”
“What was?”
“Everything. Coming up here. Keeping Alex. What if I ruin him?”
Silence.
I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke towards the open window in the roof of the loft. My first memory of the room had surfaced with the image of my erotic experiments on the mattress, but now I remembered something else. It was here that my grandmother had read Icelandic fairytales to me. The soft, rolling syllables rose and fell as I stared at the torn floral tapestry. More fucking flowers.
“Ella. You know I’ll come and fetch you if things get really bad. But, to be honest . . . ” She hesitated. Rosa seldom hesitated, but it could have something to do with the fact that it was 0-shit-hundred in the morning. “There is nothing for you here, Ella. Welfare is ready to dig their claws into both of you the minute you stick your noses across their district line. What you did won’t be forgotten in a hurry. And there’s something else . . . ”
Again an unnaturally long pause, the heaving of breath. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was either crying or throwing up.
“What is it?”
“Jens has started drinking again . . . It’s not bad, not like before. It’s only happened a couple of times that he’s become . . . that he’s come home with . . . but it’s bad enough. I know the drill, right? I know where we’re headed. He’s going to lose his job. He’s going to come home and put his beers on the table, and I know I’m going to drink them. I might have to move out. I’ve thought about you a lot the last couple of days, and I’m so happy that you and Alex aren’t here. That the two of you are together on the other side of the world.”
I closed my eyes. Jens. It felt like receiving news of a death in the family.
“In many ways being here is just like living in Hvidovre, Rosa. We’re just digging up lugworms instead of collecting cans. And there aren’t nearly as many stores where you can nick your booze. It’s quite a challenge.”
Rosa grunted. “Do you have anyone you can talk to? Neighbors? A local lover boy? Knowing you, you’ve probably bagged a line of guys already.” Hoarse laughter.
I ignored the jibe. “There’s this artist woman that’s moved in. A hippie-freak living off some or other social pension. She’s definitely not living off her art.” I thought of telling her about my revulsion for Barbara, but it was too complicated.
“You’ve always been good at keeping folk at a safe distance,” she said. “This—and the booze—have saved your life. So . . . should I come and get you or not?”
I paused. Got up and looked out of the window. The sea was a continuous roar behind the dunes, but I’d gotten used to it; I tried to tune into the frequency of the waves, pulled hard on the last drag of my smoke, and finally flicked it out the window.
“Would you do me a favor, Rosa?”
“If I can.”
“Your son works for the municipal office in Copenhagen. In the IT department, right?”
“Yes . . . Michael is good with computers.”
Rosa was always on guard as soon as Michael was mentioned. He was the god that seldom graced the cement hell of Hvidovre, and when he did show, Rosa hushed up the entire block and served salad with the meal, by turns mum as a church mouse or all atwitter. I guessed that if you didn’t do good by your son in the early years, you never know which visit will be his last.
“Do you think he could find a person for me in the system? A woman called Lea Poulsen. She’s from the Farøe Isles originally and she lived in Thisted in the middle of the nineties.”
“I can ask him.”
“And stay away from Jens’s beers, Rosa. It takes an awful long time to kill yourself like that.”
Afterward I lay watching my son in the grey hours of morning.
I hadn’t had anything to drink for three days, but the shaking had not resurfaced. Kirsten and the other caseworkers at Hvidovre headquarters would have clapped their small hands and declared a complete recovery and 100% fitness for work.
My own prognosis was more conservative. I felt like a landmine excavator who had just begun to clear the topsoil of an area being combed for landmines. Even with patience and a steady hand, things could still go badly wrong. And I had neither of the two.
30
Henning from Welfare showed up sooner than I had expected.
It was pissing rain and I saw him flip up his collar before he got out of his car and strode across the yard. I wondered whether he had seen me watching at the window and whether I still had time to bolt the door. Barbara’s empty bottles of red wine were piling up in the pantry and two days’ dishwashing crowded the sink in the washing room. Social workers didn’t care for rows of empty wine bottles, but they cared even less for uncooperative clients. People with attitude problems lost their kids.
So I opened the door. Of course I opened the door. I may have been an awkward, recalcitrant client who was devoid of shame, but basically, I was a good girl who did as she was told.
“Hey, Ella . . . ” He turned and waved briskly into the sheet of rain. He’d brought a woman along, I now noticed, a dainty dolly-girl, about my age, the kind of she-being that carries her entire feminine frailty on a pair of high heels, even out in the field.
The doll picked her way over the brick driveway with delightful, ladylike charm. Thin legs, knocked knees, agile ankles. Her hair was brushed into cascading waves that were kept in place by a pair of sunglasses; the lip gloss was peach. I ought to introduce her to Magnus, I thought.
“Ella!” Henning turned towards me again, and smiled broadly. “I’ve taken the liberty of bringing Agnete with me today. She’s doing her practical training with us at Thisted and will be looking over my shoulder today.”
I replied by failing to reply. Doctor Erhardsen had also taken the liberty of inviting medical students to sit in on consultations when I was pregnant with Alex. As a rule, they entered the room when I already had my feet in the stirrups, my underwear and leggings lying crumpled in a heap on the floor.
I stepped aside for my guests, and the pretty Agnete feverishly raked a hand of slender fingers through her mane. Raindrops dotted her sunglasses like pearls.
“So, Ella . . . ” Henning grinned and rubbed his hands together gleefully, his shoulders up around his ears, as if my kitchen was the coziest place he’d been in years. “It’s been a while since I was here last. How are the two of you getting on? Is Alex getting any bites on his line?”
Agnete smiled and cocked her head.
“Yes . . . it’s . . . Tea or coffee?”
I went into the washing room and rearranged a stack of crusty plates so I could fill the kettle with water, could see the scene with their eyes. The grey linoleum counter was pocked with holes and curling up at the corners around the sink revealing rotten br
own patches under the plastic.
“Do you have any herbal tea?” Agnete was perched on the end of a kitchen chair, surveying her surroundings with interest.
“No.”
“Oh . . . well . . . then I’ll have whatever you’ve got.”
I took one of Barbara’s tins of diuretic tea from the cupboard, dropped a tea bag into a cup, and served it to Agnete with the most accommodating smile I could muster. Henning preferred instant coffee. This I knew already.
“And where is Alex? He’s probably sitting in front of the TV on a day like this.” Henning craned his neck in the direction of the living room door.
“The TV is broken.”
“What a shame.” He pulled a face. “Then again, on a hot summer evening it can be blessing not to be glued to the box.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, I believe that in America many parents are making a concerted effort to wean their kids off all forms of electronic media. Television, computers, iPad, iPod . . . whatever it is they’re called these days . . . it’s the latest pedagogic initiative.”
“I would buy a new one if I could afford it,” I said. Agnete bared her white teeth and tilted her head once more. In my experience that chimpanzee grin appeared on a social worker’s face whenever the awkward issue of money came up; there were extremely sensitive municipal budgets to take into consideration, one had to factor in the aged and the youth of the nation, and all those diligent taxpayers who weren’t keen to finance a television for people on the dole. She was a quick study, our Agnete.
“Perhaps you should try quitting the smokes,” Henning suggested with a disarming smile.
“Would you like to talk to him?”