‘It’s all too offbeat for me,’ said Stig Nissen.
He took a swig of unfiltered biodynamic wine.
Then he stood up and waved Anders over.
‘I’m not doubting this bog water is the latest thing, but do you think you could find us a really spitzenklasse Chablis?’
‘Chardonnay would be a mite too exaggerated for the razor clam,’ said Anders.
‘I’m not having anymore,’ said Stig, and handed him his plate.
I tried in vain to establish eye contact, but Anders had already gone to get another bottle.
‘I’ve promised Mille she’ll know one way or the other by tonight,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
‘He’s off again. Is she in the club?’ said Stig Nissen.
Anders returned, poured him a splash of Chablis and swayed impatiently on his heels.
‘I know you’ve told the wife you’ll put in a word, Nikolaj, and, hey, I respect that. But wouldn’t she be out of her depth here? I mean, it’s ten years she was driving the bus. What say the girls?’
Anders had run out of patience.
‘Would you care to taste the wine, please?’
‘Are you still here? Just get pouring. Girls?’
Lisa was falling asleep.
‘I’m from Budapest,’ said Diana. ‘Ask Mikkel.’
‘I think Mille’s new music would be just the job,’ I said.
Stig Nissen lowered his head, then knocked three times on the table.
‘Rock ’n’ roll! Your wife just joined the team, Nikolaj!’
Nikolaj Krogh gave my thigh a squeeze under the table.
Diana took off her jacket, and I wasn’t the only one to be thrown by her breasts. Stig Nissen looked like he’d been given a fright.
‘Onion for everyone,’ said Anders, and placed a hand on Stig’s shoulder. ‘It’ll go well with your Chablis.’
‘Onion?’ said Stig Nissen.
It was masterful: onion compote with chicken stock, fresh stems of ramson, decorative onion leaves and a bouillon of onion and pearl sago. The taste was so deeply seductive you had to concentrate so as not to climax.
‘Onion! They’ve got to be bloody joking!’ said Stig Nissen.
He stood up and waved Anders over to the table again.
‘Do me a double vodka and orange.’
Lisa was fast asleep. Stig Nissen was not.
‘What do you say, Diana, do you need the go-ahead from your boyfriend, or can you say yes yourself?’
‘I haven’t got a boyfriend.’
‘I think you need to make a little investment in the jewellery department, Mikkel,’ he said.
Anders came back with his drink.
‘Since you’re dining at Noma, we’ve taken the liberty of doing our own interpretation of your vodka and orange. The vodka is from a small Finnish distillery south of Tampere, while the juice is sea buckthorn.’
Stig Nissen took a sip.
‘Well, it’s sour enough!’
Anders hurried away. Stig Nissen gave us a crafty look.
‘Now, I’m going to pop off to the little house, and when I come back I’ll tell you what we’re going to call our new venture, okay?’
Nikolaj Krogh leaned across the table.
‘It’s rather liberating, all his grand designs.’
It worried me that Diana was still in bimbo mode.
‘Do you want me to say no for you?’ I said. She didn’t answer.
Stig Nissen came back with a smile on his face.
‘Are you ready for this?’
He leaned forward on his chair.
‘Dusk,’ he said, in Jutland English. Dosk.
‘Dusk?’ said Nikolaj Krogh and I.
‘After my favourite Fleetwood Mac album.’
Nikolaj Krogh looked obliquely towards the ceiling. ‘The double LP, right?’
‘Monster album,’ said Stig Nissen.
‘Isn’t it called Tusk?’
‘Tosk? What’s that supposed to be? It works in Danish as well as English. Sunset and tuft of hair. Can you see where I’m heading, Diana? That little tuft of yours?’
He was talking about her cunt.
The main course was reindeer, and not in my wildest fantasies had I imagined they would be able to keep up the standard. Two pieces of meat that melted in the mouth, wafer-thin slices of celery root, jellied discs of wild herbs, raw apple, beetroot and a sauce of browned butter and ramson. I am not capable of explaining how good it was.
‘Have you had a look in your diary, Mikkel?’ said Stig Nissen. ‘We need a briefing over in the control bunker.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t find the time,’ I said.
‘We’re talking popping over on the plane, an hour’s spiel and back home again the same night with fifteen biggies in your back pocket.’
‘I’ve got a book to write,’ I said.
The evening was exhausted. We had an annoying dessert involving freeze-dried hazelnuts, and Stig Nissen looked at his watch. Rolex, of course. Ugly, ugly.
‘What do you want from me?’ said Diana.
Stig Nissen leaned across the table.
‘I want your cunts to be the concept. I want them on the walls, on the carrier bags. I want them on T-shirts, and I want all of us to be totally on board. Literally, in the picture.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’re going to be the models in the photo.’
‘What photo?’
‘Ads in all the papers. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, have you?’
‘I’m not sure about photos.’
‘How much do you want?’
‘Can we give it some thought tomorrow?’ I said.
‘You can, but the bus’ll be gone by then. Toodle-pip,’ said Stig Nissen.
‘How much?’ said Diana
‘A hundred big ones,’ said Stig.
‘A hundred and fifty!’
Stig Nissen produced a contract and entered the figure.
‘Sign here.’
Like me, Charlie felt at home in the Borgerkroen. He sat next to me with a Coke and a glass full of ice cubes. He imagined they were sweets, and the nice bartender provided him with paper for his drawings. I made a rule for myself and stayed on coffee and mineral water until I’d written a thousand words. Then we celebrated, and I had a beer and Charlie another Coke.
The impossibility of constructing a perpetual motion machine is down to entropy. ‘The amount of unavailable energy in a closed system can only increase,’ says the second law of thermodynamics. No matter how cleverly such a machine might be constructed, the closed cycle will continuously transform a measure of the available energy into unavailable energy.
Place your hand on the back of your fridge. It is made to create cold, and yet it is hot. A perpetual motion machine will in time run out of available energy, for which reason machines need energy from outside in order to perform. And still we kept on forming little closed systems of couplehood, promising each other to be faithful till death do us part.
Twenty years from now people might look back indulgently on our time and wonder with a smile why we so desperately clung to traditional coupledom when everything around us indicated its demise. There was a time when coupledom was of practical importance, but Dad no longer has to get up and milk the cows in the morning and Mum doesn’t darn the family’s socks anymore. Sentiment, children and convention keep us together. Everyone agrees that children need as much love and support as possible, but surprisingly few have the guts to contest the framework for this secure upbringing, despite the consensus that dysfunctional instances of coupledom can be quite as traumatic to children as divorce. The epicentre of the modern family is still monogamous coupledom. The perpetual motion machine. Supplying the energy is the man’s and the woman’s job, and this self-consuming state of inertia contrasts sharply with the changes that are occurring all around us. It is all in flux. Traditional media is dissolving, governments scramble to maintain national boundaries, and new generations feel
equally at home in Tel Aviv, Brooklyn or Østerbro. Nationalism has been superseded by communities of reference, and where people happen to be in the world is insignificant. A weekday is no longer divided into eight-hour modules, work can be done anywhere and whenever, and companies sense there are advantages to allowing employees’ work hours to integrate with family time and leisure.
Gender has levelled out, the word homosexual has all but disappeared from the language, and sexual preference is an utterly irrelevant distinction. Boundaries have melted away, barriers toppled around us, and yet we keep on with our units of coupledom as if nothing has changed.
My phone rang. It was Kaspar Moritz, he wanted to meet up right away and suggested the café in the Design Museum’s garden.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
We were surrounded by grandmothers from the intellectual left. I’d installed Charlie at a table just out of earshot to carry on with his drawings.
‘I’ve worked with Diana for six years,’ Moritz said, ‘and as well as being talented she’s really got her finger on all the factors that differentiate artists today: marketing, press, image, integrity. She learned fast. Right now she ranks just under Tal, Kørner, Ærtebjerg and young Bonnén, so it’s essential she makes all the right decisions. It takes ten years to build an artist up, but only one exhibition to bring it all crashing down again.’
‘You assured Diana her cunts would be sold at preview.’
‘I know, and that’s partly the problem, I’m afraid. It’s like with music. Your favourite band puts out a new album, you buy it the day it comes out and give it a few listens, then realise it’s not that good. So you never listen to it again, and when their next one comes out you don’t buy it. Diana’s new stuff lacks the kind of careless abandon that so characterised her first works, and I can’t see anything unsettlingly new in its place. Art is merciless. Works give themselves away once they’re up on the walls.’
He leaned across the table and lowered his voice.
‘Diana has put everything she’s got into her art. Literally.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘That’s for her to reveal, I think.’
He looked out across the garden.
‘In less than a fortnight those drawings of hers are off to Vietnam, and getting them woven is costing over a hundred thousand. If they’re going there, they’re going to exhibition.’
‘Why did you want to see me?’
‘I have a feeling she listens to you.’
He gazed into his coffee. ‘If things start going wrong for Diana, they’re going to go really wrong.’
I dropped Charlie off with Helene and hurried to Diana’s place to find her in buoyant mood.
She had made goulash with genuine Hungarian paprika, laid the table with a fine purple tablecloth and lit all the candles.
‘I’ve coloured one of the cunts today. I should have done it before.’
She threw her arms around my neck.
‘I need to get to work.’
She straddled me. Polo jersey, no knickers.
‘I’ve got this urge to be tied down.’
The staircase was an acoustic catastrophe. The metal banister reverberated and the stairs threw back all sound in an unfriendly echo.
‘Not today, thanks,’ said Søren, but let me in anyway.
There was snooker on the TV and his duvet lay in a sweaty heap on the smooth black leather of his sofa.
‘You weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow.’
‘We agreed on the third, that’s today.’
‘What did you have in mind?’
‘I need a whole load of prosaic detail about your dealer back then. What the flat looked like, who he was, and all that about the difference between white and brown smack.’
He got that surly twist to his mouth again.
‘Oh, great, just what I needed.’
‘We agreed on this three weeks ago, Søren.’
He looked me straight in the eye.
‘Can you lend me thirteen hundred?’
‘What for?’
‘I’ve got this extra heating bill.’
‘I thought your bills got drawn from your benefit?’
‘They do. But the twats never told me I have to pay any extras myself. It’s got to be paid today, otherwise I’ll get chucked out.’
‘I’ve got no money, Søren.’
‘What about that new girlfriend of yours?’
‘She’s got some coming in, but she hasn’t got it yet.’
‘Can’t she borrow, then?’
I thought for a second about how best to tell him.
‘I’m not having her mixed up in all this.’
He narrowed his eyes.
‘All this? You mean me?’
‘I mean your mess, Søren. Not you personally.’
He got up and put on a blue Ralph Lauren jacket.
‘In that case, we’ll have to go and see Camilla White Wine.’
I had met Camilla White Wine a couple of times before. Her consonants started to drift around about six in the evening, but it was only a quarter to twelve in the morning and her flat was in a well-run cooperative association halfway along Silkeborggade.
‘Does she owe you money?’ I asked.
We were on our way up the stairs.
‘She’s got my Ole Appelgreen print.’
Camilla was in a perilously see-through Indian robe. She had definitely been pretty at some point, only now it was hard to tell where anything began or ended.
‘You could have said you were bringing Mikkel,’ she said. ‘I’d have done my eyes.’
She insisted on making us a proper cup of coffee and busied herself with a coffee grinder and an Italian espresso maker. For her own part she was halfway through a bottle of white wine called Sunrise.
‘I grew up with Elizabeth David’s cookery books,’ she said.
‘You’re from Gentofte, we know,’ said Søren.
‘Have you looked at them recently, Mikkel?’
‘Elizabeth David was ahead of her time,’ I said.
‘And such marvellous illustrations,’ she said.
Søren had a sip of her wine and spat it out in the sink.
‘Fucking hell, that tastes like petrol.’
‘It’s actually rather decent. It was best in a test.’
‘Of what, paraffin and citric acid? It’s a wonder you’ve still got so many teeth left.’
‘Søren’s a bit upset about being middle-aged and still a drug addict,’ she said.
‘I’m not a drug addict anymore. I’m a drinker, like you.’
‘You’re on methadone, Søren. And any kind of pills that happen to come your way.’
‘And you puke over the furniture every night,’ said Søren.
‘I do apologise, Mikkel,’ said Camilla. ‘I used to be rather a respectable girl, you know. I went to Øregård Gymnasium School.’
Søren went into the living room with Camilla White Wine right behind him.
‘You’re not getting that picture, Søren!’
‘It’s mine!’
He took it down off the wall. It depicted a cow looking despondently up at a big black cloud. Camilla grabbed him.
‘You leave that where it is, Søren T-shirt!’
Her voice was shrill. I got the feeling things could get out of hand.
‘Hey,’ I said, and stepped in. ‘What’s the problem, exactly?’
‘That picture’s with me as security, because Søren owes me two hundred kroner.’
‘You can have your two hundred once I’ve sold it,’ he said.
‘Søren, Søren, Søren! You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?’
Momentary deadlock.
‘Listen, is there anything you need?’ said Søren. ‘I can go and get you something. Wine? Coffee?’
Camilla smiled at me sweetly.
‘Well, talking about Elizabeth David just before gave me the urge to do something nice for dinner. W
hat do you say?’
‘I’ll go down and get a joint of beef,’ said Søren.
‘I was thinking about osso buco,’ she said.
‘Osso buco? Does it have to be so fiddly?’
Camilla ignored him.
‘I’ve got tomatoes and fresh rosemary, and some of that good Muti tomato paste. You know Muti, don’t you, Mikkel?’
We went to Netto and I assured him they wouldn’t have osso buco, but he was round the place like a businessman on his way to an airport gate, and once he realised I was right he routinely slipped a couple of bottles of white under his jacket and was out again just as quickly. We got lucky in Brugsen. Søren lifted a couple of packs and somehow made himself invisible.
‘There you go, love,’ he said, and dumped the meat on Camilla White Wine’s counter.
‘But it’s frozen,’ she said. ‘It won’t have time to thaw. An osso buco needs to simmer for three or four hours. Mikkel knows that, don’t you, Mikkel?’
‘Do you know anyone who’s got a microwave?’ said Søren.
We went over to Clara’s to use her microwave. She was listening to the radio – culture and current affairs on P1 – and baking rye bread when we knocked on the door of her flat on I.A. Schwarzgade, but at least she wasn’t in her slippers.
‘So when are we going to see your new girlfriend, Mikkel?’
‘She’s still not my girlfriend,’ I said.
She popped our bricks of osso buco in the microwave and put it on thaw. Søren was put on a chair with a glass of red.
‘I’m having difficulty taking it seriously, Mikkel,’ she said.
‘I know, what sort of bollocks is that?’ said Søren.
Clara had heard all the stories about Søren and was always afraid he was going to make off with the plateware or inject something into his eye, and Søren responded to this lack of trust by becoming despicably anxious to please.
‘Maybe we should throw a dinner party and invite Kreuzmann,’ said Clara.
‘Things go wrong for me when I’m with Kreuzmann,’ I said.
‘Brilliant,’ said Søren.
Erik Brinch came in through the door in his long black leather coat. He had been with Clara for about six months and they made a truly dreadful couple. He was an architect in his mid-sixties and looked like a malicious tortoise.
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