Am I Cold

by Martin Kongstad

  ‘How can you remember that?’ I asked her, but she’d shut her eyes.

  Søren rallied for a moment. ‘Gorgeous has had a Rohypnol and now she’s tired. I’m as fresh as a daisy.’

  His fag dropped from his hand.

  ‘You’re asleep, Søren T-shirt!’

  ‘I’m thinking, that’s all.’

  It wasn’t until we had arrived at the flea-market green that I realised how delicate my situation was. Partly because it had been my idea to leave the gorgeous softness of bed and venture out into the unbearably cheeping and twittering heat of day, and partly because to my horror I had realised that I was initiating Diana into a world to which I no longer wished to belong. The Sancerre of the night before repeated on me like slow-release medicine and I was sweating glycerine. I was also paranoid. The protest generation were laughing at me and waiting for their moment to pounce and put things in their correct historical context, to tell me all this free love stuff had been done before – and done better, at that. I bent over the first box of old LPs and flicked through them absently: Phil Collins and Dire Straits, but also Zambassa’s Mørkristet, an Aarhusian Latin album that was near impossible to lay your hands on. A voice behind me began to sing a line from it:

  I can’t live without you. But you can live without me.

  Levinsen was in narrow royal-blue shorts and a wife-beater of Egyptian cotton.

  ‘The Japanese collectors would give you a grand for that,’ he said.

  Levinsen and Diana each did a funny little skip, and knocked their foreheads together in a bollocksed-up air-kiss.

  ‘I’ve just sent the family back off to Aarhus,’ he said.

  ‘Are you here staying with people?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m checked into the Strandhotel. How about you?’

  ‘We’re with Nikolaj Krogh and Mille.’

  He tried to conceal the flurry this put him in. If there was one thing Levinsen would love, it would be to sit and talk about Frieze Art Fair over a glass of white in Nikolaj Krogh and Mille’s garden. I bit my tongue and abstained from making the casual invite he was anticipating, and he pretended he wasn’t bothered.

  A murmur went up and people stepped aside. Søren T-shirt came strolling across the green in cut-off jeans, Tuborg in hand. Levinsen was now clearly at a loss; how on earth did we know people like Søren? Was he some eccentric son of wealthy stock? An eighties poet?

  Levinsen put his hand out in greeting, but Søren ignored him.

  ‘See you later, then,’ said Levinsen. ‘Still the Bistro, is it?’

  I had to stop myself feeling sorry for him.

  ‘Who was that knobhead?’ said Søren.

  ‘Be nice to Levinsen,’ said Diana.

  ‘He looked like a guy who’s had his hands in the biscuit tin,’ said Søren.

  ‘He’s a gallerist,’ I said.

  ‘Like I said,’ said Søren.

  ‘We need to get back and do that interview,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’ said Søren.

  ‘You’ll have a hangover tomorrow as well, Søren.’

  ‘I need to relax a bit.’

  ‘You’ve been relaxing since 1988.’

  ‘I’ve been a drug addict since 1988. That’s the equivalent of a stockbroker’s career. Hard graft eighteen hours a day.’

  ‘You’re not a drug addict anymore.’

  ‘I’m not a well man!’

  A mousy stallholder interrupted us.

  ‘Do you mind going somewhere else to discuss your personal problems?’ she said.

  Søren gulped down his beer and put the can down so hard on her table it knocked over her little Balinese deities. A big antique dealer bloke in a leather waistcoat came striding up with his chest out and laid his hands on our shoulders.

  ‘I think it’s about time you found somewhere else to go, don’t you?’

  ‘Get your grubby hands off, you fucking idiot,’ said Søren, calmly removing the guy’s hand and gripping him by the throat in a single seamless movement.

  ‘Would that be all, Tarzan? Would it?’

  Søren had never been the violent sort, but twenty years of hustling on Istedgade had taken its toll. The antique dealer began to whimper. Søren glanced about at the crowd that had gathered and let him go.

  ‘Send a real man next time!’

  I found it grotesque the way Mille constantly nagged Nikolaj Krogh and disheartening that he never answered back. That afternoon, it was his homemade bread she complained about. He had used wholegrain spelt, honey and Graham flour, and the result was definitely not satisfactory, that much I had to acknowledge, but someone really needed to have a word with Mille and tell her that not only was she humiliating her husband, she was also casting herself in a seriously unflattering light.

  Later, when Diana and I biked over to Liseleje and were walking along the beach, I asked her whether Mille’s behaviour bothered her.

  She looked out over the water.

  ‘Mille told me they hadn’t fucked in two years,’ she said. ‘We must get them some sex.’

  We cycled back through the woods and stopped at a secluded spot where I’d often foraged for chanterelles. I asked her to take her clothes off, then watched her walking naked among the trees and in the long grass. Gnats assailed her naked body, and when she bent over I could see her cunt open up. A branch snapped. A hundred metres away, a man was approaching.

  ‘Just stay where you are,’ I told her, and retreated.

  The man passed close by, greeting her politely and pretending not to notice, but some way further on he stopped and looked back at her exposed cunt. I picked a swishy branch up off the ground with some withered leaves on it.

  ‘Do you enjoy being naked?’ I asked, and began flicking her with it.

  ‘He’s watching us,’ she said. The man stood staring from behind a tree.

  I whipped her bare bottom and drew blood, and she whimpered and began to play with herself. Her inner thighs trembled uncontrollably as she climaxed amid the anthills and the toppled trees, and I stuck my cock inside her and fucked her like a convict. We lay there, smelling of meat again.

  That night I made an old-fashioned roast chicken with braised fennel and new potatoes. Søren asked Mille about the early days of her career. Diana stared out into thin air with a faraway look in her eyes. What lay in those absences of hers? She seemed to be in an almost meditative state, and I imagined our voices to be background music. Absences were usually ominous. What are you thinking about, darling? Nothing, darling. I never asked her. Diana returned to us with a smile. ‘Can my friend Lisa come up and stay for a couple of days?’

  Mille cast a glance at Nikolaj Krogh, who had no objections.

  ‘Do you want me to look after the kids tonight, so you two can go out?’ said Diana.

  Mille gave her a big kiss, vanished into the bathroom for an hour and came back all flowing sleeves and swept-up hair.

  Their marriage might have been strained, but Nikolaj Krogh and Mille still made a striking couple as they strode out along Nordhusvej that evening, tall and dressed in black, confident of their status as summer royalty.

  Søren and I tripped along behind them, trying our best to keep up.

  Tour disco, said the sandwich board outside the Bistro, and of course it was hardly suited to Mille, but before long Nikolaj Krogh was dancing awkward salsa steps to Ricky Martin. Everyone was dressed in white and the atmosphere was Bacchanalian. There was dancing everywhere. Chairs gave way and broke, tablecloths ripped under high heels, and the cordial local bar staff, who had grown up on edifying bedtime stories and soft alto saxophones, struggled to keep up amid the hoarsely delivered orders. Søren danced with his arms above his head and a wine-bar flourish of his hips and was immediately assailed by a twenty-year-old lad with briny hair and thick lips.

  ‘Weren’t you the one who got into that fight down at the flea market?’

  ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m a bloody hero!’

  ‘Can I get y
ou a drink?’

  Levinsen was standing just inside the door with a sloppy mojito. He clearly wasn’t intending to play down how well we knew each other, and greeted me with a hug that was rather too prolonged.

  ‘The Bistro’s jumping! Life can only be understood backwards, but it’s got to be lived on the two and four.’

  He glanced with shameless insistence at our party, and before I managed to introduce him, he had thrown himself at Mille.

  ‘I know we always talk work and career in Tisvilde, but I’ve had The Görlitzer Hangovers Revisited on repeat in my gallery for the last six months. It doesn’t stop growing.’

  He was right in her face. She took a small step back.

  ‘It’s a mind-blowing album!’

  He flashed what he thought was a coy smile.

  ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. My name’s Morten Levinsen. Just a nutter from Aarhus who lives and breathes for those rare moments when the sky comes that little bit closer.’

  He shook Mille and Nikolaj Krogh by the hand.

  ‘You made all the right choices on that album,’ he said. ‘The sound of that snare drum! Where did that come from?’

  Mille told him about the English producer who was always fucked up on coke but still managed to perform miracles when they eventually got him sat down at the mixing desk.

  I wasn’t in the mood, but I stayed put, buffeted by senselessly intoxicated upper-class kids.

  Søren had become the night’s novelty attraction for a group of Hellerup lads who plied him with whisky and fell about laughing at his slightest movement. I went home with Nikolaj Krogh and Mille. We sat in the garden drinking beer. The sun was on its way up.

  ‘How are you two actually doing, anyway?’ I said.

  ‘Nikolaj?’ said Mille.

  ‘In the day-to-day run of things we work pretty well together,’ said Nikolaj Krogh. ‘We’re very good at the practicalities, and we agree on the majority of issues. We don’t spend a lot of time arguing about how things should be done, do we?’

  ‘We haven’t got a sex life,’ said Mille. ‘Don’t you miss it at all?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Nikolaj Krogh, and I could tell just by looking at him that he only said it because he knew it was the right thing to say. He was completely out of touch with that side of himself.

  ‘Do you even masturbate?’ said Mille.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘Do you use anything? Do you look at porn on the Internet?’

  ‘I’ve still got my stack of old Playboys,’ he said.

  Mille laughed.

  ‘Isn’t he sweet? Even when he masturbates he keeps up a standard of aesthetics.’

  ‘Why don’t you just be friends?’ I said.

  ‘We are,’ said Mille.

  ‘If you agreed to keep living together as friends and allowed each other pleasure, as friends do, you wouldn’t be frustrated anymore about your relationship not working. Then maybe you might be able to reclaim your sex lives. With others.’

  ‘That’s a very dynamic idea, Vallin,’ said Mille.

  Next morning, Mille drew me aside after breakfast.

  ‘The children are frightened of Søren,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to talk to him.’

  I found him passed out in his cabin, reeking of alcohol. I slapped him awake and dragged him out for a walk, and he insisted on bringing his fishing rod, babbling about wanting to catch a sea trout. Amazingly, he did catch one within a few minutes of casting his line into the sea, so we returned to the house to present this offering to Mille. It did the trick and gave Søren a stay of execution.

  Mille and Nikolaj Krogh’s kids, Knud and Druhde, sat on the counter in the kitchen, and Søren told them about which fish were to be found at the surface of the sea and which kept to the bottom. He showed them the gills and explained what they were for, and then they helped each other clean and gut the fish and get it ready for the barbecue.

  The kids wanted a disco after dinner and Søren was the DJ playing the air drums. He dug out a best of Creedence Clearwater Revival and asked Mille up to dance, leading her like a gentleman, until he put ‘Up Around the Bend’ on for the fifth time and she took the record off, claiming that she wanted us to be able to hear the lovely local birdsong.

  The kids wrapped themselves up in blankets and Søren told stories from his childhood, while Mille put a rhubarb pie in the oven and asked whether I’d like to read some of what I’d written out loud to them all. Søren’s behaviour all evening had been impeccable, but I could tell he was getting steadily drunker and that things might end up going awry. He’d already absorbed a bottle and a half of white wine when Nikolaj Krogh produced a cognac from Jon Bertelsen.

  I read the chapter where Søren and Signe go to the cinema and he does speed during Jean de Florette, and he whistled and bragged all the way through, but when I got to the bit about the psychological ramifications of the Internet he suddenly changed his tune and furrowed his eyebrows.

  ‘What’s all that pocket philosophy doing in a book about Søren T-shirt?’

  ‘Let Mikkel read,’ said Mille. ‘In this house we respect people who have courage enough to lay themselves on the line. We shut up and listen when others have got something to say.’

  Søren fumed and guzzled two glasses of cognac while Nikolaj Krogh went to get the rhubarb pie.

  ‘This isn’t crème fraîche, Nikolaj!’ said Mille, pointing at the dollop of white that accompanied her slice.

  ‘It’s skyr,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.

  ‘Skyr?’ said Mille. ‘I am not having yogurt with rhubarb pie on my summer holiday. I want crème fraîche, and I want it oozing with butterfat!’

  ‘Go in and get some, then,’ said Søren.

  ‘You’re a guest here, Søren. Nikolaj and I converse as we see fit!’

  ‘You’re on his back constantly, the poor sod. It’s excruciating!’

  ‘No one’s keeping you,’ said Mille. ‘You’ve been steeped in alcohol ever since you came, you’ve not so much as lifted a finger or offered to contribute even a penny. You’re a joke, Søren.’

  Søren laughed contemptuously.

  ‘I heard your CD the other day. You’ve got fuck all to say, I’ll give you that much!’

  I went with Søren to the station and he seemed relieved.

  ‘She’s a dreadful woman,’ said Søren. ‘In the top five. Worse than the caretaker who used to puncture our footballs at break.’

  I listened for reproach in his voice. The little yellow train rattled in.

  ‘When I was in hospital the other week,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

  He narrowed his eyes and crushed his fag end underfoot.

  ‘What was it, then?’ I said.

  ‘I’d run out of things to do.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I think I’ll go to Floss.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I’d promised myself I’d tell you while we were here.’

  We gave each other a long hug, and he smelled of smoked mould.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  I stood there until the train had gone from sight.

  Next morning, Mille and the kids left for Anholt, and Nikolaj Krogh’s reaction was not as one might have expected. He sat in the garden listening to Schubert’s Fourth. Culturally conservative by upbringing, Nikolaj Krogh was always punctual and ever considerate, putting others before himself and striving to impart value into each and every day. His devotion to and admiration of Mille was touching. That she was treating him badly had probably only occurred to him that evening, the moment Søren T-shirt, a complete stranger, had brought it to his attention, and now he had been left to think about why he allowed himself to be trampled on, and then to decide whether it was a state of affairs he was willing to allow to continue.

  I sat writing in the cabin, inspired by Mille and Nikolaj Krogh’s situation. And yet it was hard to ignore his dejection; even Di
ana seemed affected by it. She had put a little folding table up in front of the cabin and was trying to draw, but I could sense that she was getting nowhere.

  There was no communal lunch that day. We made our own sandwiches with no trimmings.

  At a quarter to five I decided to cut through the misery and booked a table for Diana and me at the Helenekilde Badehotel. Diana put on her midnight-blue velour suit and I insisted we walk along the beach.

  ‘Up there was where the Tisvilde Badehotel used to be,’ I said, pointing up at the hill. ‘The guests would be in dinner jackets and evening gowns and there was dancing to a proper orchestra. Kai Mortensen, the band leader, married a waitress here called Tytte.’

  I dragged her up the steps and pointed into the cement.

  ‘Tytte Kai Mortensen! He wrote that on their wedding night.’

  I told her about the fishermen who moved out into their sheds in the summer so they could rent out their cottages to society people from Copenhagen, and I was just getting to the bit about the first parcelling out of summer house plots when Diana put a finger to my lips.

  The sun was big and orange above the hotel patio. On the little lawn, a group of attractive children were playing, all in soft corduroy, angora and cashmere in the noblest of colours: royal blue, sand, lavender and Bordeaux red. Four Filipino girls were keeping an eye on them. One day, the children now running about so freely would all be sitting nicely on the terrace above them, like their parents were now. The restaurant seemed filled with light-hearted chatter as we entered, the diners having satisfied the anxious questions that always arose on arrival: who else is here? Who do we know well enough to say hello to? Will they give us a table befitting our status?

  We arrived into this scene as though sent from heaven: not only did we legitimise, on the strength of our garb alone, their choice of Tisvilde as a rather alternative summer destination, more creative and relaxed than Hornbæk, less pretentious than Skagen; we also served as a welcome distraction from the excruciating intimacy of their own tables. A manicure-happy group of girl friends in their thirties decoded Diana’s outfit and sent us bleached smiles, and a young solicitor-type even got to his feet, lauded the interview in Berlingske Tidende, which he had found eminently entertaining, and shook us both by the hand.