Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  Gradually I became aware of that distinctive creaking sound floating down the narrow staircase of Mr and Mrs Carter’s two up, two down cottage. I pulled myself to my feet struggling with an overwhelming gravity. I stretched. At the foot of the stairs hanging over the slim pine bannister was the waitress’s overall. The bedsprings creaked manically. The strangled puffs and pants and squeals of human contact swirled like dregs in the salty air. I walked straight past the stairs - I needed some freshness in my lungs - picked up my own coat from the table and slipped out of the back door, night lapping me up as I emerged. I breathed, taking great gulps of air, fancying that I could smell the wild neglect of the Carters’ little garden mingling with the fresh saline salute of the sea. I walked and walked and to my eternal regret I never turned back.

  I walked back down to the sea-front and along the beach. The tide was higher this time but on its way out, leaving its ebbing print upon the sands. I had a beer in a pub with formica topped tables and a dartboard which hadn’t been turned in thirty years. It reminded me of The Roebuck back in BC - Before Carter. I discussed the superiority of deep-sea fishing over the freshwater variety with the landlord despite not having a clue about either. Then I walked to the station and got on the next train home. I felt as if I had been awake for half a lifetime and I wanted my mother’s cooking and a fresh bed.

  I still had a key for my parents’ home and I let myself in. In fact, like Jon, I didn’t see the flat as my home, more a rehearsal room with beds and beer. I still did much of my everyday living - the eating and sleeping stuff - at my parents. The flat was Cal’s really - after all, it was his Dad’s gift. Despite the hour, my mother appeared in the kitchen door within moments of my arrival.

  ‘Frank,’ she whispered.

  ‘Hi, Mum. America finished early. It didn’t really work out,’ I managed brightly.

  ‘That’ll disappoint your father. He’s told everyone at work that you’re going to be on the Ed Sullivan Show.’ Perhaps she was chuckling to herself. ‘Do you want some stew?’

  The next morning when I walked round to the flat, the police were already there. It was Wendy who told me and comforted my tears when they came. The waitress had gone back the next morning, that morning, to show her brother where Cal Carter lived, found the back-door still open just as she’d left it and Cal lying at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘He fell down the stairs, Mr Dane. But we don’t believe it was that what killed him. We’re working on a suspected drugs overdose,’ said the police officer. He was writing my name in his notebook. ‘Of course, there’ll have to be an inquest.’

  ‘Why was the door open?’

  ‘She said he told her to leave it open for you, Frank,’ said Wendy. I felt sick down to the soles of my shoes.

  I answered all the policeman’s questions sitting on the wall holding Wendy’s hand - our heels kicking against the brickwork like kids - and I went into the flat for just a minute. My head was pounding and I needed a glass of water. I put my hand into my coat pocket for my paracetamol but they weren’t where I thought they were. I found the jar in the opposite pocket and it rattled shyly like a broken toy. Inside there were just two tablets left. I took them and, as I went back outside to where Wendy had her car, I gave the jar to the policeman.

  34

  South of France, 1979

  The road had been pitch black for some half an hour and now we were turning off it onto a dirt-track. The grit spat and cursed beneath the tyres. The sky was clear; the stars silver. When we stopped to lift the entrance barrier the only sounds were the rustle of trees and the distant rushing of the waves across the sand.

  The barrier had to be pulled back like a great single barred gate. It was heavy and I was tired. Wendy smiled at me through the windscreen of the hire car as I struggled with the thing, her hands resting on the steering wheel. When the paltry light from the single lamppost caught her wedding ring it sparkled like the eye of a beast.

  The dirt-track became narrower still, the branches tapping on the windows like long fingers, one after the other as if a coven of witches were lining the road. You couldn’t see the caravans - just the little blue numbered plaques standing in the soil marking the bays like flags on a putting green.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Wendy, peering forward into the gloom.

  I was never numb. Quite the opposite. My emotions were in overdrive, demanding attention where they were normally so subdued, as close to the surface as another layer of skin. I listened to Wendy as she spoke. She listened to me and we drove on through the night. She mentioned the ‘I told you so’ pleasure her husband seemed to find in Cal’s fate but apart from that we never talked directly about what had happened. Somehow, tragic and terrible and everything else as it was, we didn’t want to consider death, Cal’s or anyone else’s, yet it underpinned everything we said. Me - with the taste of real human suffering on my breath - I’d never felt so alive.

  We turned into the parking bay by the Carters’ caravan. Silence as the engine died. We both slumped back in the seats. I lit a cigarette and crumpled the empty packet. Wendy looked across and our eyes met in the rear view mirror - an inquiring eyebrow. I took a puff and then placed the cigarette between her lips. In my pocket I found the second of the two packets I’d bought when we stopped in Paris. As I exhaled I became aware once more of the sea in the background like a low level wow and flutter on the intro groove - the waves breaking with the rhythm of a record turning.

  ‘Is that the Côte d’Azur?’ I asked.

  ‘Côte not Coat. I think technically it’s called the Golfe du Lion.’

  ‘Technically?’

  ‘Well obviously all the English tourists think it’s the Côte d’Azur and the French see no reason to disabuse them.’

  ‘Marketing.’

  ‘You sound like Cal.’

  ‘No, you do.’

  The windscreen was steaming up inside.

  I got out of the car and walked towards the caravan. ‘You got the key?’

  ‘No, Frank. I thought we’d break in.’

  I took another step. ‘Looks like someone already has.’

  The door to the caravan was open and the window nearest to it smashed. I pushed at the door and it swung open heavily. Wendy reached round and found the light switch and the strip light overhead stuttered into action.

  We stood in the middle of the caravan. We both looked around. Not having been there before, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. It wasn’t particularly big and not dissimilar to the sort I’d been used to on caravan holidays as a child: pull down table, tiny fitted kitchen, foam-cushioned wall-mounted seats doubling as beds, that sort of thing. The burglars hadn’t trashed the place.

  ‘Is anything missing?’

  ‘The microwave, the TV,’ Wendy opened a drawer, ‘and the radio.’

  In the car we had a box full of food. As I unpacked it and flattened the box to repair the window, Wendy looked around for the bedding.

  ‘Here,’ she said, tossing me a sleeping bag. ‘You can have the big room.’

  In other words, she was having the bedroom and I was on the couch. But when I was lying there alone half an hour later it wasn’t like it would have been had these circumstances befallen me before Cal died. Even though I’d yearned for Wendy for the best part of a decade, I didn’t interpret her decision as a sexual slight and spend half the night poring over the evening looking for where I went wrong or beating myself over the head because of it. I thought about other things and despite everything I enjoyed the sea in my ears and a feeling of space and, when I closed my eyes, Cal’s face in happier times before me. Despite the narrowness of the bed, the thinness of the foam and the hardness of the plyboard beneath, I slept long and late. I was thinking of Cal when I went to sleep and it was of him that I dreamt with a bleak shocking vividness. When I woke up I had that disorientating feeling when you’re not sure where you
are and what’s dream and what’s reality.

  We lived on baguettes, cheese and wine, exchanged the occasional ‘bonjour’ with our neighbour (I couldn’t help thinking that he or someone else on the site was probably watching our telly) and took long walks on the beach. Outside the caravan we set up the deck-chairs and read. I had Down And Out In Paris And London. As I turned the pages, the sea hummed softly in the background beckoning. Meanwhile, on the south coast of England there was an inquest going on into the death of a pop star.

  We were chain smoking and a bottle of wine was always open. At midday on the second day, Wendy looked up from her book. It had been written by someone I had never heard of - Wendy was reading it because he was one of her authors.

  ‘What will you do now?’ she asked me.

  ‘Not the civil service, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Well, I never thought that for a minute.

  ‘No?’

  Wendy closed her book. ‘Do you want to go for another walk?’

  I nodded. I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to swim. The bottle of wine was freshly opened and we carried that with us. On the beach, I stripped down to a pair of mauve underpants. Wendy was teasing me, telling me that I’d freeze to death but I didn’t feel self conscious, dumping my clothes in a heap and charging into the waves with a scream. There wasn’t any dipping of the toe, I simply ran and ran until the weight of water made running impossible. The water was icy. My thighs turned purple and then as I waded deeper and deeper slowly numbed and warmed and then felt barely attached to my body at all. I dived, fell forward into the blue water, my hair going under, my ears burning in the cold. Underwater I ran my fingers through my spiky hairstyle until it had lost all definition. I swam a few strokes, slow breast stroke. Back on the shore, Wendy had disappeared. Out to sea I could see nothing at all except a blue that never ended. I was tingling all over.

  When I got out I wasn’t shivering, I was wondering where Wendy was. There were a couple of French kids playing with an inner tube which must have come from a tractor or truck tyre. I essayed a word or two with them but I don’t think they’d seen ‘une femme blonde et belle’.

  She reappeared as I was looking through my pockets for a cigarette and she threw me a towel. ‘Here, Mark Spitz - we don’t want you catching your death.’ I put the towel around my shoulders and my arm around hers. Inside my sodden briefs, my shrivelled cock was struggling back to life. ‘You’d better get dressed,’ laughed Wendy.

  We were walking along the beach when I started talking about the dream I had had. Cal and I were at school, in assembly listening to the head tell his stonemason story. In the story there are two stonemasons both producing beautifully crafted work for the local churches and nobles. But one stonemason works faster than the other so he gets more work and becomes richer. The people assume he works harder and pay all sorts of tribute to him. His work looks perfect, his figures so lifelike that you expect them to rise from the stone to greet you. One day a great fraud is discovered in the church finances and everyone assumes the slower, lazier mason is responsible. Until one day the vicar takes a closer look at the work in his church. The master mason’s work may be wonderful indeed but only the parts which can actually be seen from the nave of the church. Everything behind, everything in shadows, has been left unfinished, untouched. The reason the other stonemason is slower is that he completes every detail with the same care and skill whether it will be seen or not. Who is the fraudster? Although the story was confused, in my dream as in my memory, its message still frightened me. Don’t examine anything too closely, it seemed to say, or you’ll see the flaws. I’d lived my life not examining anything too closely.

  As with most of his stories, the head told this tale once a year but in the dream we were adults, all dressed up to go on stage as The Go-Karts. As I was watching him speak I became unable to move, as if I were turning to stone. Then, as happens in dreams, I was suddenly out of my body, watching like a camera. We had all become models, wax-works I suppose but with great macabre faces like ventriloquists’ dummies: Jon, Charlie, Cal and me. Cal, so much shorter, so much like a child physically, began to spin slowly like a little doll on a podium, his fixed pose, hand over his guitar, his hair seemingly caught on the breeze and then frozen. But me I couldn’t spin. I tried but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move at all. My dream camera floated above my dummy. I could see my eyes struggling but nothing was happening, my torso and limbs strait-jacketed within wax. I was fixed to the wall behind me and the ground beneath me by a slag heap of molten wax like the stalagmite deposits of a billion candles.

  Then I was on a beach and the wax had turned to stone. The waves were lapping over my toes. Mr Blake was there saying to me over and over, ‘The head’s very fond of you, you know, Frankie’ and then the head himself was next to him, now as the old man we’d seen on the beach, nodding but with that nothing in his eyes, misty and distant and then he turned into my father.

  Wendy snorted as a laugh suppressed escaped. ‘Are you making this up?’ she asked but in a way that made it clear she knew I wasn’t.

  In the dream the headmaster’s words repeated over and over. In the dream I was not on the beach I was walking on with Wendy but on that other beach near the Carters’ cottage with my father. In the dream at the end, just before I woke up, it was my father mouthing words. I’m very fond of you, Frank.

  When Wendy spoke to me, acknowledged she understood, I could feel something animal growing in my jeans. Doesn’t the fact that we fancy people who seem to understand us prove that we just want to shag ourselves?

  ‘Sometimes,’ I was saying, ‘I feel like I’m still standing by Mr Parker’s confectionary stand. You know at…’

  She finished my sentence for me. ‘Beech Park station. In his bow tie.’

  ‘Just standing there looking at the Mars bar and knowing I can only afford the bubble gum.’

  She stopped walking and removed the packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of my T-shirt. ‘That’s rubbish. You can have anything you want, Frankie.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t change what’s between your ears.’

  She looked up at me - a clipped look of recognition and of not wanting to dwell. ‘Anyway,’ she said, fiddling with the cigarette packet, ‘you’re an artist. You’re creative. You’re supposed to have these painful insights into the human condition.’

  We were walking again, sucking on little sticks of comfort, when she started speaking again. ‘I know what intellectual inferiority is all about, Frank. Cal was my little brother.’ She took a deep breath, more resonant than a sigh, silkier than a groan and it flickered down my spine. ‘Of course, I took Daddy’s job - I’m no fool - though I insisted on a different publishing house.’ She paused, inhaled deeply. Listening to the sea-gulls we could have been in England, France or anywhere. ‘But then of course I am the fool. I married to get out of the house because it was suffocating me.’ She was speaking slowly. ‘But a soulless relationship is suffocating too. It’s a death so slow you wouldn’t notice.’ The wind was whipping up and I put my arm around her. ‘Driving down here whenever it was - two, three days ago, I was thinking Cal was the lucky one. At least it was quick.’ She trailed off but I knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes I’d thought that of my best friend too - death as a favour.

  There was a pause. ‘You’re a long time dead, Wendy,’ I said. I could hear my mother’s voice rather then my own.

  ‘Yeah, I have been,’ she said, walking away.

  That night we ate out at a pizza restaurant where the oven was a five foot square flame blackened hole in a white wall. The devil’s own cauldron could not have been brighter, warmer, deeper or more golden. The candle on our table flickered in deference and we ate in a companionable silence pizzas the size of LPs.

  I was woken by the sound of the caravan door rattling in its frame. I could see the handle rising and falling. Wendy and I met in
the middle of the kitchen just a yard away from the door. She had a giant T-shirt on. Outside I could hear someone breathing. Then he uttered Wendy’s name. We were speaking with our eyes. The burglars were back. She gestured for me to step back. As I did so, Wendy with a deft hand unlocked the door. It flew open propelling the intruder into the middle of the caravan. Wendy brought a stale baguette down onto his head like a cudgel and he slumped to the floor. The figure had a heavy black great coat on and from beneath its tailored hems protruded a pair of golden orange baseball boots.

  35

  The baguette was getting on for four days old and as solid as a shillelagh. On the floor Jonathan stirred, rolled over and rubbed his head. He looked up. Wendy was still standing over him, open-mouthed, the lethal loaf in her hand. He rubbed his head again. ‘What is this, Miss Scarlet in the caravan with the lead piping?’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like a sandwich, Jon?’ I asked. ‘I was just about to make one.’

  He ignored me. ‘Wendy, the door’s not usually locked.’

  She explained briefly about the break-in.

  ‘So you haven’t heard anything then? No radio,’ said Jon. He was sitting up now. I lit a cigarette and passed the packet around.

  ‘Thanks, Frank.’ Laughing, he took off his coat and handed it to me. ‘Here, cover yourself up - now’s not the time.’ I realised that I was completely naked.

  Jonathan had been to the inquest. Cal, he said, had died of hypoglycaemia resulting in liver failure. His low-blood sugar level had been caused by the cocktail of alcohol, amphetamines and paracetamol that he had consumed. The verdict: death by misadventure.