by Agnete Friis
Husband and wife exchanged glances once more, but then apparently decided to take pity on a concerned brother. The woman even tilted her head to one side and nodded sympathetically. He guessed that they weren’t very pleased with their neighbors.
“There has been a woman here matching your description. Quite recently, in fact. She used to come to the house with the son, but that was a long time ago, and she looks a lot better now. Nice. She has her own key, and she seems to come and go as she pleases. I don’t know her name. But she scratched our car once, when it was parked on the sidewalk. Crashed right into it on her bicycle. Peter got her number so we could call our insurance and sort it out, but she never called back, and we haven’t seen her since.”
A grim line appeared around the corners of her husband’s mouth.
“There was something wrong with that number . . . ”
He took a deep breath. So he couldn’t count on her showing up there again. Fuck. He didn’t even know if Christi was her real name, it could have been a name she had taken from the nameplate on the door. She had never wanted him to find her. And she didn’t want him to find her now, either. Especially not now. It had always been her who had contacted him, and it seemed she had no intention of changing the status quo.
“Thank you.” He nodded at the elderly couple, politely wrote down the number they gave him on a business card in his wallet, said his goodbyes, and walked back down the garden path. He felt very old and heavy as a stone. Too old to run after girls and have children, and definitely too old for this—whatever this was.
There were lights on in the windows when he turned down the drive, but neither Anna nor Ella appeared to greet him when he dragged the dead buck into the garage, swearing under his breath as he began to partition the carcass. He cut out the lungs and the gullet and pulled the tongue through the slit neck.
But it was too late. Of course it was too late. The stomach was already swollen with digestive gases, the intestines and stomach lining punctured when he finally removed the internal organs, their reeking contents oozing into the abdominal cavity and spilling out over the dead animal’s stiff coat. The meat was ruined. There was nothing to be saved.
He left the carcass lying prostrate on the garage floor, scrubbed his hands and forearms, and went indoors with a feeling of defeat.
“Anna!”
No answer. No answer from Ella either. He glanced at his watch. It was six-thirty, someone ought to have started dinner by now. If everything had been as usual, Anna would have been at the kitchen counter making carrot salad with Ella, chatting about seagull feathers and the wind blowing in over the sea, all the way from America.
But the kitchen was cold and dark.
He went into the living room, and there she was, Anna. All the lights were on and she was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. The television was running without sound, pictures of the war in Yugoslavia flooded into the room; children crying in make-shift refugee camps, ancient, toothless women wailing at the sky.
Seeing her, he was overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of tenderness. Not desire, not a need to penetrate and melt into her, but a glowing warmth; a stream of images and words they had said to each other over the years, trivialities that had become something else, something heartfelt. She looked haggard. Thin. Her wrists and hands were bony and frail, resting on her unevenly buttoned shirt front. She was not beautiful, not like Christi, but he knew her. Even when Anna was the darkest version of herself, he knew her, and he knew that she would never have toyed with him the way that Christi was toying with him now. Anna had no intrigues about her. She was herself.
He took a blanket from the foot of the sofa and carefully draped it over her. He wanted to grant her the rest she needed, but when he laid a hand on her forehead, it was damp and clammy with sweat.
“Anna!”
No response. Her motionlessness seemed unnatural. Even for someone who was sleeping deeply, she seemed unnaturally still, reminding him of a picture of Sleeping Beauty in a glass case in one of Ella’s fairytale books. He shook her gently by the shoulder.
“Don’t wake her up.”
Ella was standing behind him with her wildly salt-and-wind-swept halo of hair.
“Where have you been?” He said, turning back to Anna, shaking her lightly again. Touched her cold lips.
“I went to play at Thomas’s house. Mom said she wanted to lie down for an hour or two.”
He felt a stab of cold in the ribs. A feeling of entering yet another uninhabited house.
“How long ago was that?” he asked gently, not once taking his eyes off Anna’s face. He felt her wrist, counted her pulse. “How long have you been at Thomas’s house?”
Ella shrugged and changed channels on the television with a tired look on her face. He shook Anna a little harder, then slapped her in the face, hard. Once, twice. After the second blow, she waved her arms weakly in front of her face, as if to protect herself. Ella stared at him with huge, frightened eyes.
“Ella, go up to your room.”
She shook her head mutely, but he didn’t have time to explain.
“Anna! Anna!” He pulled her up into a sitting position, threw her arms over his shoulder, picked her up, and carried her swiftly up the stairs. She hung over his shoulder like a dead weight, not moving once till he lowered her into the bathtub as gently as he could. He had to spray cold water directly into her face before she sputtered and lashed out at him.
“Let me go.”
He slapped her again.
Ella, who had followed them into the bathroom, screamed at the top of her lungs and pounced onto his back, her small teeth digging into his neck. He winced and shrugged her off roughly, hearing her fall onto the bathroom tiles with a thud. Then he bent over Anna again.
“Dad, no . . . you’re not allowed to hurt Mom. Don’t hit her, Dad. She was just sleeping . . . ” Ella was crying now.
“Anna! Have you taken something? What have you taken? How many pills have you taken?” Without waiting for an answer, he lifted her out of the tub and bent her head over the toilet bowl.
“Do you want to do it, or should I?”
Anna gasped. She sat drenched and shaking on the floor with her forehead resting on the toilet seat, the water running off her formed a pool around her.
“Again. Do you want to do it, or should I? Anna, help me out here . . . say something . . . ”
“I’ll do it.”
Her eyes were blurred and half-closed, but she pulled herself into an upright position slowly, and he held her over the toilet bowl as she stuck two fingers down her throat and threw up. Two almost-dissolved tablets swam on the surface of the water for a few seconds before disappearing into the murky water. Only two. He felt a wave of relief.
“One more time.”
She repeated the exercise, and this time, only a small cascade of clear fluid was deposited into the toilet.
“Good girl. Two pills. Is that it? Did you only take two of them?”
She shrugged, but then nodded. He let go of her shoulders and stroked a hand over her forehead instead, trying to regain control of his breathing.
“I just needed to get some sleep,” she mumbled. “It was just a couple of sleeping pills. That’s all. I thought you would be home sooner.”
Behind him he could hear Ella hiccupping and crying hysterically.
Later, much later, he stood watching Anna as she slept in their bed. He brushed his fingers across her forehead before leaving her to sleep and going to check on Ella. The light was still on in her room, one of her legs jutted out over the edge of the bed, as if she’d fallen asleep in the throes of a wild kick, her cheeks were streaked with tears and dried snot. The cut over her eyebrow was gaping a little, but a trip to the Emergency Room would have to wait till tomorrow. There was no energy left. Not for him, not for her. He had tried to comfort her as best he could, tried to put s
ome ice on the egg-sized bruise on her forehead from her fall in the bathroom, but she had fended him off with a manic fury. Kicks and blows with little fists that he had borne in silence. He turned off the light and quietly closed the door behind him.
He draped Anna’s soaked clothing over the bathtub and emptied her pockets of coins and hair-clips and a couple of soggy bits of paper that he unfolded carefully.
Where will you be on judgment day?
There was also a photograph in the back pocket of her jeans. He stared at it, stupefied. It was a picture of him and Anna when they were very young. Someone had written Whores end up in Hell in fat red letters across the picture. Anna’s bikini bottom had been cut out. A disproportionately large and grotesque erection had been drawn onto his own bathing suit
He dropped the photo to the floor as if he’d been burnt. He hadn’t seen the picture for a long time, but he knew where it came from: Anna’s meticulously arranged photo albums in the living room. It was a picture from their first summer together. He went to the bookcase and ran a finger along the broad spines of Anna’s albums. He found the first volume and began paging through it systematically. There were a few sharply-focused black-and-white photographs of the two of them doing homework together in his room. He recalled a friend of theirs taking the pictures; he’d been taking night classes in photography. There were also several shots with more classic motifs: He and Anna astride their bikes with a billowing cornfield in the background; the two of them at the prom together, Anna with a forbidden drink in her hand and a glowing smile next to his cheek.
Further.
There was a whole series of photos of the two of them on the beach together. They must have been about eighteen and nineteen years old, a year before they got married. Before the final exclusion from the church, before the harassment and the restraining order. At that time Anna had hoped that some kind of reconciliation with her family would be possible, that perhaps she would be given leave to live on the fringes of their congregation; this had happened before.
Anna is smiling into the camera, for once, stunningly beautiful.
Further. Pictures of them on the beach with a group of friends: Søren and Nils Peter, who had graduated and moved to Århus the following summer, another couple, Helle and Bjarne, were standing a little off to one side. They had moved to Hanstholm in the interim. He and Anna hadn’t managed to keep contact with any of them.
The final series of pictures was missing from the album. A little row of trolls with horns had been drawn in the space instead, like an irrepressible running commentary of scorn.
Christi.
The break-in in spring when everything had been smashed onto the floor in the living room.
The telephone rang. He picked it up, knowing it was her. “Christi . . . ”
Silence.
“Christi, we need to talk . . . ” He took a deep breath. Tried to keep his voice steady, tried to control the wave of shock threatening to overwhelm his body. “Christi, of course we will be together. I’ll leave Anna. My love . . . please don’t . . . I will leave her. If you are pregnant, we will have the baby together. But we have to talk about it.”
Silence.
“My love . . . ?”
“Do you love me?”
Christi’s voice was a faint whisper in a rush of stormy rain in the background. A click from a coin being dropped into a call box.
“I . . . ” He hesitated. He knew he had to weigh his words carefully. God forbid he scared her away before he knew where she was. “We need to talk about us. About the baby. Please don’t disappear on me. I miss you.”
A short laugh, bordering on a sob.
“I’ll kill the child if you don’t want me,” she said. “I’ll get an abortion, Helgi. I’ll flush it down the toilet.”
“Christi . . . Where are you?” He sank into the sofa.
Mumbled words, sniffing.
“Christi, I know it’s late, but I want to see you. I miss you.” He tried to inject his voice with the same depth of feeling they had shared before; only a couple of months previously their voices and words had entwined like two bodies making love.
“I’ll come out to the dunes,” she said finally. “The usual place. Now.”
She put the phone down, and Helgi got up from the sofa slowly with some remnant of hope. Upstairs Anna and Ella were sleeping. Warm, living bodies. His family.
32
“Hallo?”
My grandmother’s voice was clear and commanding on the line. It was her legs, not her head, that refused to work properly.
“It’s Ella.”
Pause.
“How are you?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Have you stopped drinking?”
“I don’t drink.”
She laughed hoarsely, triggering a memory from a thousand years ago. “You’re more like your father than your mother. Helgi was also good at lying to himself. But the store owner says that the stream of alcohol to the house is thinning out, so unless your surrogate mother is buying your booze in Thisted now, it would seem you’re on the mend.”
I could see her sitting there rubbing her hands together in glee, ready to crawl into my head and take over—just like everybody else. I tightened my grip on the phone. Refused to bite. I hadn’t called her to talk about myself.
“That house my father asked you to check out for him. Do you still have the address?”
“Yes. It’s in a villa-district in Holstebro. The house was empty, but Bæk-Nielsen managed to get hold of a man that used to live there. The son of a previous owner. A drug addict. Coherent communication with the man had not been possible.”
“What was his name?”
I could hear the rustle of paper as my grandmother riffled through her pile of documents. She kept them within reach and had probably done so for the last twenty years. She was an obsessed human being.
“Troels Pinholt. He lived in Århus back then. Across the road from the cathedral. He’s probably still there, lying under a bench or a bush.” The same dry laughter, followed by a string of Icelandic clicks that sounded like cussing.
“Thanks.”
I ended the call and dialed up Information.
Troels Pinholt. There were three of them. Two in Jutland, one on Falster. I started with the two Jutlanders. The first one lived in Ringkøbing and had never been anywhere near Holstebro in his life. The other guy didn’t pick up, so I left a message: if he had lived in Holstebro in the nineties, would he be prepared to tell me about it? I couldn’t phrase it any better than that. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Some connection to my parents in Klitmøller, perhaps, something that could help to explain the change in my father in the months leading up to my mother’s death. I felt a sudden sense of urgency, but perhaps Barbara’s hectic activity back home had rubbed off on me.
The entire house reeked of paint, and Barbara was no longer sleeping at night. We heard her working incessantly on her paintings instead; she only surfaced to refuel on red wine and rye bread. The heat had returned, and she roamed about barefooted clad in white robes splattered with paint. Her legs were dark brown and scarred, the two tattooed snakes that entwined her ankle ballooned, appearing almost three-dimensional in the heat. In the pits of her elbow joints was another cluster of tattoos, which I hadn’t noticed before, dark red drops that looked like blood oozing from her veins.
Alex and I fled to the beach. I didn’t dare nick a tube of sunscreen from the store—too many eyes were watching—so I went for a swim dressed in a T-shirt and otherwise kept close to the shade of the dunes to watch Alex and Lupo cavort in the waves that crashed to the shore.
Although the sun was shining, it wasn’t crowded. There was more beach than one could ever need, but the German tourists, kitted out with sun-loungers, parasols, and plump towels, glared resentfully at Alex and Lupo when t
hey whipped up sand in the wind.
A text from Magnus.
See you on the beach?
I didn’t reply.
The blatant irritation in his eyes the last time I had dragged him away from the waves had pinched the last erotic nerve of our relationship. And I refused to be some kind of burden. Or feel like I owed him anything. Having sex with someone had always felt like an act bordering on humiliation anyway. I would rather find a new man. There were plenty of willing bodies to pick from.
I lay back in the sand and looked up at the sky as I ran a hand along the scars on my thighs. The sky was a series of veils borne in over the sea that dissolved up above me.
My telephone rang. Unidentified call.
“Ella Nygaard?”
The voice on the other end of the line was slurred, and rough.
“Yes.” I sat up and brushed the sand off my legs. Some kind of manic impulse to please. A dumb habit I’d always had when talking to strangers. Lick your fur. Spruce up your feathers.
“You called asking about my time in Holstebro? What was it you wanted to know?”
I could hear a television running in the background. Live coverage of a game. The roar of a distant crowd, the voice of an excited sports commentator.
“I’m not sure, exactly,” I said. “But if you’re the man I’m looking for, then my father was interested in the house you were living in at that time.”
“Your father? Uh-huh, well the house was sold years ago. My sister sold it. I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore.”
He coughed away from the receiver for some time.
“I’d like to talk to you about it anyway. If that’s okay?”
A long pause. More coughing.
“Can you come here?”
“Where do you live now?”
“In Aalborg. I have to be close to the hospital . . . it’s the lungs. I have to stay close by in case of emergencies . . . ”
“Fine, I’ll come to Aalborg,” I said.
I could already hear a laborious tale of pain and suffering unfolding. A record of misery. Troels Pinholt was among the living, but he was not a healthy man.