What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  Jens didn’t answer, just sat staring straight ahead, his jaws chewing on thin air; he had plenty of demons of his own to contend with just then. The cold surged from the pit of my stomach and spread to the extremities of my body, but the all too familiar shaking did not take over. My body remained mine. Nothing was shaking as I directed Jens onto the sandy road leading to my grandmother’s house.

  The first thing I saw was Lupo. He was squashed up against the front door. His coat was wet and rough, his head turned up at an awkward angle against the doorframe. Even when I got out of the car, he remained where he was instead of running up to me as usual.

  The dread kneaded and keeled over my insides as I looked around me. All the windows were closed and dark. Alex’s fishing rod as well as the spade he used to dig out worms lay on the ground in front of the garage. The weathervane whirred in the wind.

  I strode over to Lupo. He tried to turn his head in my direction and growled deep in his throat, but didn’t move. Someone had put a noose around his neck and tied it to the door handle on a leash so tight that he had to balance on his hind legs to avoid being strangled. The noose was locked round his neck and I couldn’t pull it loose with my fingers.

  “Barbara!” I called in through the window. Nothing but darkness behind the dusty reflections. I set off at a stumbling run to the garage where I found a rusty garden scissors and ran back to cut the noose. Lupo yowled, tumbled backwards, and sprawled, but finally stood up with a hesitant wag of the tail. His coat was bloody where the noose had chafed into the skin.

  “Is everything okay?”

  Jens had climbed out of the car and was standing next to me with his hands hanging down by his sides. An old man. He looked like something that could be carried away by the wind at any moment, but I was glad he was there. Sober, Jens was as gentle as a lamb. Actually, he was equally gentle as a drunk, but drunks—especially drunk alcoholics—thought only of themselves and their next drink. You can never rely on a drunk. I opened the door into the hallway and was met by a strong smell of methanol and gas.

  “Alex!”

  There wasn’t a sound apart from the faint creak in the rafters when the wind lashed into the house. My heart fluttered in my throat.

  “Alex, I’m home!”

  Not a sound. If he were asleep, irrespective of how deeply, he should have heard me. Either Alex or Barbara. But the house was quiet as the grave.

  When I got to the doorway of the kitchen I sensed the heat and the smell before I saw the glowing hot pot on the stove. A single flame had been lit below an unidentifiable, charred mass. The carpet was wet, soaked in petrol; my shoes left dark tracks on the thin grey piling as I cut the short distance to the stove and killed the flame. The air was thick and hazy with smoke. My eyes watered.

  “Come out of there, Ella.” Jens was standing in the kitchen doorway and nodded emphatically at the toaster that was placed on the soaked carpet on the floor. “This place is going to go up in flames any minute.”

  The wires of the toaster sparked, almost invisible blue flames hovered just above the piling. I spun on my heels.

  Alex!

  Jens stepped back as I rushed past him up and bounded up the stairs. In our bedroom, duvets and quilts were spread helter-skelter over the floor together with remnants of my files, papers, and reports. My grandmother’s journals and notes were torn and scattered everywhere, arbitrary chunks of text loomed large . . .

  . . . new foster family. Ella is uncooperative, she shuns physical contact and interaction with her foster parents. She says she wants to die, that she isn’t a human being . . .

  . . . in my opinion, Ella has a stunted emotional intelligence for her age . . .

  . . . Ella is not suited to foster care . . . Ella requires intensive professional care in a secure, institutionalized environment . . .

  . . . Ella misses her mother . . .

  The windows in the roof were wide open and the bits of paper were swept up in the draft. I searched all the rooms, opened all the cupboards, even though they were ridiculously small, but there was no sign of my son anywhere. Then I heard the flames take in the kitchen below; it sounded like a rushing river colliding with a cliff. I salvaged my rucksack from under a mattress and charged down the steps, darted out the back door of the washing room. I could feel the flames like a wall of heat in my back. My hair stank like pork roast.

  Jens was standing outside on the yard with a smoke, watching the fire in resignation.

  “He’s not in there, Ella,” he said. “I smashed a window at the back of the house to check that room as well . . . ” He nodded over at Barbara’s bedroom window. “Nobody is in there either.”

  The fire broke through the spine of the roof and a warm pillar of smoke rose up into the blue sky. I went around the back to Barbara’s room in time to see the heat blacken the pictures of Judgement Day, peel them off the walls and ceiling. I felt Jens’s hands on my shoulders, and briefly leaned back against his body, let him hold me for a moment. I fleetingly wished that someone were there for me. I was so utterly worn out by being alone. And this wasn’t something I could handle on my own.

  “Ella . . . you need to think,” he whispered. “Where is she? Where could she be?”

  People had started gathering round. Mr. and Mrs. Klitmøller in the front row, Mr. Klitmøller with a finger raised in the air to gauge the wind-direction in relation to his own thatched-roof house. He looked like an irate and aged schoolmaster, ready to give one of his favorite hobby horses a good kick in the ribs.

  “One of the last surviving houses of the historic town of Klitmøller,” he said, as I walked past him. “I told you to be careful with fire out here. It’s very dry, and the wind is always . . . I told you to . . . ”

  I left the burning house to the spectators and set off at a run, my rucksack bouncing on my back. As I turned down the road where we used to live, I could hear the sirens like a drawn-out, melancholy howl above the din of the wind. My childhood home stood naked and unprotected in the morning sunshine, but it was the house next door I was after. Here the hedge had grown thick and dense over the years so as to provide sufficient shelter to a garden that had become dark and lush as a jungle by comparison.

  “Thomas!”

  I called his name several yards before I reached the stone steps in front of his house, and I called it again as I hammered on the massive, oiled wooden door. I remembered the house fleetingly; screaming-yellow water pistols, tattered Donald Duck comics, and the taste of raspberries and golden gooseberries, absurd memories that muddled in rising panic. I couldn’t shout anymore, so I settled for banging furiously on the door instead.

  “Hey! What’s going on?”

  Thomas had popped up from behind the house and stood watching me with his arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing a sleeveless vest draped over his rod-thin torso. His shorts looped down from his waist like huge sails.

  “Can I borrow your phone?”

  “Okay,” he came over to me and fumbled in his pockets. “What’s the matter with yours?” he asked, finally handing me his.

  “It’s dead,” I said, emptying the contents of my rucksack onto the ground. The pages were still intact, and the relief in my chest was so great I could have sobbed. There was the note from my grandmother, and there was the telephone number for Helgi Nygaard in Thailand.

  I didn’t allow myself to think, just punched in the digits. My father deserved no ceremony. This was for Alex. My core was hard and smooth and cold as stone on the shore.

  The line crackled.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Thomas had caught sight of the pillar of smoke over my grandmother’s house. The sirens moaned in the wind, then suddenly stopped.

  My head lolled on my shoulders. A distant, metallic ringing tone went through, and then a voice answered in English.

  “Hello? Hello?”r />
  Hard and smooth and cold. I was granite and steel.

  “Is this Helgi?” I said in Danish.

  Scratching interference, alternating with dead air. The connection dulled out, as if a finger were pressed to my ear.

  “Yes, this is Helgi. Who is this?” He switched to Danish.

  I wanted to reply, but the words were stuck in my body. My throat closed painfully.

  “Who is this . . . ? Ella? Is that you?”

  The broad West-Jutlandic lilt made all the difference. It sliced into my flesh like a newly honed knife. It was him. My father. The feeling of his hand in my hair, a sharp, physical pain above my eye. My knees gave way, and I sank onto the steps.

  “She’s got Alex,” was all I said.

  Silence. Dead fucking air.

  “Ella . . . I am glad that you called. Very glad. But I don’t understand what you are saying? Who has . . . is Alex your son?”

  “Barbara has my son. Barbara . . . or Lea . . . or Christi. You used to know someone called Christi,” I said. “She has taken Alex, and I don’t know where they are. Oh, God . . . ” The sobs racked my throat. “Where are they, Helgi?”

  “Christi! Has Christi taken your boy?!”

  His voice was focused now, and a halting image of him took shape before my inner eye. The two of us on the garage floor, we are bent over his hunting rifle.

  You put the cartridges in here. A brief smile, eyes narrowed, concentrated. And you unlock the safety catch by pulling this lever back, here.

  Cool metal in my hands. I lean my entire weight against the lever. It’s hard, but Dad says I should keep trying. That I can, if I want to. Then, at long last, a satisfying click.

  “Where are they, Dad? Did you know her like that? Was it her you were . . . ? Where do you think she would take him?”

  “Jesus Christ, Ella. I don’t know . . . but she liked churches, and graveyards. Paintings—but it’s such a long time ago. I don’t know . . . ”

  “Give me a church, Helgi. Name me just one, and send the rest in a text later.”

  “Vestby Church . . . She liked Vestby Church. She went there to think about her boys. Ella . . . I . . . ”

  I cut the connection, allowing myself a few precious seconds to breathe deeply and wipe the tears away with the back of my hand. Fucking bastard. He had been in love with Barbara. He’d been screwing my mother’s best friend, then he’d killed her and let Barbara live. And now she’d taken Alex away from me.

  He was nothing to me. If I ever found Alex, and my life turned back to normal, I would erase him from my mind. I would take my son someplace where nobody knew us, and nobody would ever get close to us again. You can collect cans anywhere in the world.

  I got to my feet, fresh tears burning in my eyes. Jens was worn out. He’d driven six hours straight, had chronic withdrawal symptoms, his hands shaking on the steering wheel on the last fifty miles to Klitmøller. I looked at Thomas.

  “Can you drive me to Vestby Church?”

  He nodded.

  “And Thomas . . . you hunt, right? Your gun. I need to borrow your gun.”

  41

  We could see the church clearly from a distance.

  It was perched on a lonely hill surrounded by an otherwise flat landscape of farmlands. The narrow road we were driving along was deserted, the asphalt was light grey, burning hot, and riddled with cracks. I sat in the passenger seat with the rifle on my lap. Thomas had loaded his rifle for me and showed me how to use it. His hair was drenched in sweat.

  “If something goes wrong, Ella . . . ”

  Things already had fucking gone wrong, but I bit my tongue. Barbara had my son, but that’s not what he meant.

  “If things go wrong, Thomas, I am the one with the gun. You could say I threatened to shoot you if you didn’t come with me,” I said. “Everyone will believe you.”

  Thomas pulled over at the foot of the long chestnut alley leading up the hill. If Barbara was in the church with Alex there was no reason to tip her off to our arrival.

  The sun was sharp and white through a thin veil of clouds, but there were no larks swooping over the fields. No buzzing of insects. I imagined a farmer sowing chemical fodder in the soil and leaving the rest up to wind and solar powers. It felt as though Thomas and I were the only breathing beings left on earth as we set off at a jog up that endless alley.

  Right in front of the graveyard entrance Barbara’s green van was parked with the doors gaping wide. Music blared from the speakers, just like it had done on the yard at my grandmother’s house. Glenn Miller. Alex’s favorite CD. “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

  “You check out the grounds,” I said. “I’ll try the church.”

  The rifle lay comfortably in my hand, as if it had always been there. Thomas scanned the graveyard.

  “What do you think she wants? Why do you think she came here?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have the energy to ponder Barbara’s motives, nor anything else she might have planned. If I allowed my mind to think of either, I would fall apart. There were certain scenarios I couldn’t contemplate without going insane. I couldn’t risk losing my mind. That would have to wait.

  “You take the graveyard,” I said.

  I walked along the white-washed walls, found the entrance to the transept and tested the door carefully. It was locked, and I abandoned all attempts at being discreet.

  “Alex!”

  I yelled his name as loud as I could, but I wasn’t at all sure that my voice could penetrate as far as the nave within. The solid walls gave the impression of a fortress, and the high, narrow windows were several yards over my head.

  “Nothing.” Thomas had appeared from the other side of the church and shrugged in resignation. “If they’re here at all, they’re in the church.”

  I kicked the door in front of me. It didn’t budge a millimeter.

  “The windows,” said Thomas. “Windows can be smashed. You wait here.”

  He spun on his heels and disappeared behind the massive wall, Shortly after, I heard Barbara’s van crunching over the gravel. Thomas parked the van parallel to the wall, just below one of the windows. The sun blinked through the glass mosaic Madonna above.

  “After you,” he said, bending down on one knee so he could give me a leg up onto the warm roof of the van. There was still a fair distance up to the window ledge, but I could just reach it, and pull myself up. The inner arches of the vault were visible through the red and yellow stained-glass window. Thomas passed up one of the stones he had nicked from the border of the nearest grave and I smashed it through the pane, hearing the rain of colorful splinters crashing to the floor below. Then I heard Barbara. She was singing. Peace I leave with you . . . It was the psalm the congregation sang at my mother’s funeral. I remembered sitting between two strangers, the white coffin directly in front of me. This I could remember, and I remembered the voice of a beautiful, fair-haired woman ringing clear above all others. And just as I remember the voice was light and soft in the fractured acoustics of the church, the tones all wrong, tripping and tumbling over false scales.

  Barbara did not react to the crash of glass behind her. She kept on singing. The rifle lay heavily against my shoulder. I could see her sitting in the first pew, she was facing the altar, but Alex was nowhere to be seen. A combination of relief and renewed fear pulsed through my body. I wondered whether he was in the church at all. He could have made a run for it, escaped down to the harbor. He was a strong boy, and she was an old woman. She could hardly do him any harm.

  But still my heart froze. The stone floor was a good couple of meters below me, so I swung my legs over the window ledge, easing myself down the wall, the tips of my toes just reaching the back of the last pew. I had not been in a church since my confirmation, but as soon as my feet touched the nave floor, I recalled the smell of ancient masonry, candles, an
d charred electric radiators. The altar was small and sparsely decorated. The pews were carved in a dark, polished wood, the carvings dusted in a rust-colored pattern. I recognized some of the faded paintings on the walls from Barbara’s murals. The Devil loomed large and fat and self-satisfied.

  Barbara had not turned round, even though she must have heard me coming, but she had stopped singing, her shoulders twitching slightly instead. Her hair had not been gathered into her usual knot at the back of her head, it hung lifelessly down her back, exposing the curve of her cranium, the grey roots at the base of her scalp.

  “You’re back early,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d get back from Copenhagen before this afternoon. And I would never have expected to see you here. But that’s just how you are, Ella. Out of sync. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  I approached her carefully from behind, as if approaching a wild animal. Let my hands trace along the back of the pews, the plastic ornamental roses displayed there, and caught my breath when I reached the front row. Alex was lying with his head in her lap. She was stroking his hair. His eyes were closed, his lips parted, slightly askew. A damp shimmer at the corners of his mouth.

  Barbara didn’t turn to look at me. She remained intent upon caressing Alex’s forehead with one hand; in the other, she gripped a kitchen knife.

  I had stopped dead in my tracks, one hand resting on the finely carved half-door of the front pew. The thought of dying had always terrified me, but the idea of losing Alex, from one moment to the next, was petrifying. Barbara could so easily stick the knife between his ribs and pierce his heart. Simply sever the pipes of his supple neck. I could see his soft pulse beating, just below the skin.

  I lowered the rifle off my shoulder slowly and aimed it at her face, knowing I knew it was pointless. She had Alex, and she had a knife. And my hands were shaking so badly I was afraid I’d shoot Alex by mistake.

  “Take a seat and look around you, Ella,” she said. “This is my favorite church. It has been for many years. Even when I lived in Århus I would come out here sometimes. Nobody ever comes here. They want to tear it down.”