Søren was never interested in this kind of sixth-form talk.
‘Okay, so this new bloke had started over at Huset. Jimmy, his name was, and I sussed right away he was on drugs and began to score off him. I was giving him all my wages every month and then eventually I told him I wanted to see his dealer.’
‘Tell me about the dealer.’
Søren’s mouth crumpled.
‘Now you’re being hard on me.’
‘Where did he live?’
‘Second-floor flat on Lille Colbjørnsensgade. You always had to go up to the third first.’
‘How come?’
‘The pigs used to lie in wait and you’d have to shout the alarm so he could stick his stash up his arse. His bags often smelled of shit.’
‘What did it look like, this place of his?’
‘It was just an ordinary two-room flat. His girlfriend was on the game, she used to wave from the bedroom with some old git on top of her. He was known for good-quality white Pakistani. Istedgade was very sharply divided in those days. White smack was the stretch between the main station and Gasværksvej, and the dealers there were Danish. After Gasværksvej it was all foreigners and they sold the brown stuff.’
‘What’s the difference between white and brown?’
‘The white’s more of an upper. You can snort it, or you can add a few drops of water and then shoot it. The brown’s heavier and has to be mixed with citric acid and heated up on a spoon until it goes sticky and caramelises. It’s got to be down to thirty-seven degrees before you can inject it, but if you buy it on the street to shoot in a gateway and the pigs come, then you’ve got to do it straight away while it’s hot, and your whole arm feels like it’s on fire then.’
Søren knocked back his second Gold and ordered two more and an Arnbitter to go with them.
‘Where did he used to sit?’
‘On his settee, like they all do. Great big, ugly leather jobs. With a big mirror flat in front of him on the coffee table. He was always sitting there cutting dope. He only ever used one arm.’
‘Why was that?’
Søren looked up at the ceiling and then at me.
‘He had gangrene in his other one. A big seeping wound it was. It stank so much he had to keep holding it out of the window.’
Søren’s hands tightened around his bottle.
‘One time, he pulled his arm back in and started picking great big scabs off it. I can’t describe the smell of it, but it was like rotten cheese. Once he’d picked off all the scabs he got his tackle and injected himself straight into the wound.’
Søren got to his feet and went outside. People were sitting out at L’Education Nationale eating their French lunch dishes; there were bottles of rosé on the tables and knives with proper serrated edges. He gasped for breath. I fetched him a big glass of water and left him alone for a bit.
‘When was the first time you shot heroin?’ I said after a while.
‘There was a group of us around here who messed about with smack, but we only used to snort it. Then one day one of the hard lads said I was going to have to make my mind up – if I was going to just mess about or do it properly. One of the worst things was the day Signe said to me: “I don’t know you anymore, Søren. Have you met someone else?” And I had, too, in a way, but I couldn’t tell her that, could I?’
‘Tell me about the first time you did it properly.’
‘Do we have to?’ he said. ‘I’m having a hard time here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Okay, we’ll start with your first fix next time,’ I said.
‘So that’s what I’ve got to look forward to, is it?’ he said.
Søren caught sight of the gnomish guy with the pointy beard and immediately made a deal involving two hundred kroner from out of my pocket.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ I said.
‘Course I am, I’m Søren T-shirt!’
Bernhard had arranged for me to meet the marketing department, but insisted that Helene and I have lunch together first, ‘to iron out any differences of opinion’.
I ordered the pâté again. Hopefully because of the sour pickles.
Helene was in a flimsy short skirt and was wearing lipstick.
She had a salad and looked like she regretted it.
‘Have you written anymore about our private life together?’ she said.
She winced as I read her the bit about the negative tendencies in our relationship and didn’t agree with me that Once Upon a Time in America could be dismisssed as a tacky Scorsese pastiche.
‘All right,’ she said, extending her hand across the table. ‘I hereby give you permission to publicly humiliate me.’
‘Let’s have a glass of white wine and drink to it,’ I said.
To my surprise, they had a Leon Beyer Riesling.
‘I’d have lost my job if I’d gone against this book of yours,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You remind Bernhard of the intellectual left in its more scandalous days. As a publisher he’s very old-school. Above all else, the word! It makes him amazing to work for. He would have chosen your book over me if he’d been forced to decide.’
‘So you’re only giving me your permission under duress?’
‘I’m very proud of you.’
We parted with a prolonged hug, conscious of each other’s bodies, separated only by our flimsy summer clothing.
The meeting with marketing took place in the most exclusive room in the building, all wood panelling and the finest herringbone parquet. Unfortunately, the furniture was from the early nineties and horribly unmusical in design. A busty girl whose name started with Ka – Kamilla? Katrine? Katinka? – closed the window and shut out the pleasantness of late summer that had been drifting in from the street outside. There were eight of us around the table, and Mark’s name was the easiest to remember. He was the new man in charge, headhunted, in his own words, to at long last bring the illustrious publishing house into the present. He had come from a similar job with Carlsberg and was wearing a grey suit that I judged to be Calvin Klein because of the unbecoming salesman’s crotch.
The others only spoke to comment on the coffee.
‘You’ve got a great product, Mikkel!’ said Mark, his eyes darting from face to face. ‘Some people in the business don’t like me calling books products, but before we know it your auntie’s going Christmas shopping and we need to make sure she buys a book and leaves that new electric kettle well alone. Henrik, will you give us the good news?’
A guy with ponderous eyelids picked up a computer printout.
‘We’ve struck a deal to go on the buses.’
‘Bus ads?’ I said.
‘You’re an old Østerbro lad, aren’t you?’ said Mark. ‘Can you see yourself all along the side of a number fourteen bus? All right lads, remember me?’
Bernhard entered and tried not to attract attention.
‘We put out dozens of titles in the run-up to Christmas,’ said Mark. ‘We’ve got to make priorities, it’s no good chucking a heavy marketing budget at a poet who’s never going to lift more than two hundred copies. You’re our number-one priority this Christmas, Mikkel. With the right backing you could go a long way.’
He looked at Bernhard and something was clearly going on.
‘Would you like to take it from here, Kamilla?’ said Mark.
‘We’ve been discussing your title,’ she said. ‘If we’re going to go out there with guns blazing it’s vital we communicate unambiguously.’
‘The Ballad of Signe and Søren T-shirt is unambiguous,’ I said.
‘Nobody knows either Signe or Søren,’ said Mark. ‘Do you see where I’m heading?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘You get on the S-train and it’s a war zone,’ said Mark. ‘Dog eat dog, everyone scrapping for your attention. You’ve got TV screens in all carriages and ads all over the shop. It’s all about sticking out and making an impact.’
‘
Get to the point,’ I said.
His teeth were beginning to annoy me.
‘Farewell coupledom and thanks for nothing!’ said Mark. ‘Bang! You got my attention. Farewell coupledom? Hey! What’s he mean by that?’
‘The divorce rate in Denmark is over forty per cent,’ said Kamilla. ‘And that’s only those who are actually married. If you add in those who never bothered making it official we’re well over the sixty per cent mark, at least.’
‘All good communication contains an insight,’ said Mark. ‘You go straight to the heart, because we’ve just been arguing over breakfast, haven’t we? Who’s taking the kids to school, who’s picking them up? Packed lunches, all that shit.’
Bernhard cleared his throat and took the floor.
‘You’ve got a book coming out which everyone here is extremely excited about. But it’s worth considering whether your loving portrait of Søren T-shirt needs its own platform.’
‘You want Søren out?’
‘I want to make sure both projects are accorded the best possible opportunities for success. I see you as a writer with a host of books inside you waiting to get out, and Søren’s story could be an arresting and very different follow-up.’
Bernhard stood up and everyone else followed suit.
One of the women said she’d put feelers out to the monthly magazines, another suggested some dates for a photo session and a third wanted to know whether I could spend fifteen minutes on the eighth of October filling in some booksellers on the idea behind the book.
‘Looking forward, big-time!’ said Mark, the adverb in English.
He clearly thought we should hug, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
Maybe it was the thought of my impending appointment with the alcohol coach, but whatever the reason, I had succeeded in keeping my drinking in check for a week.
Diana was in a sort of limbo and had told herself she couldn’t make any kind of step forward until the exhibition kicked off.
‘Can I give you a job?’ I said.
I missed seeing her hunched over her drawing paper.
‘I’d like you to do some illustrations for my book,’ I said.
‘What kind of illustrations?’
‘Draw what we do. Draw people and situations.’
‘There you go. You see, you can be my daddy, no problem,’ she said.
‘Whatever, just get started,’ I said.
She had done the first four drawings by the time Jan called us to dinner. Her pen was black and tremulous and picked out all the right details: Mille with her bum in the air, looking libidinously over her shoulder. Lisa’s way of holding her champagne glass at an angle. The quiet couple at the Helenekilde Badehotel and the slight look of surprise in the eye of the au pair.
Jan had prepared a Korean barbecue and definitely hadn’t held back on spending Diana’s money: the meat was organic and we drank the hysterically overestimated cult wine of the Lebanese Château Musar.
He studied each of the drawings for a long time.
‘You’re playing about, Diana!’
‘They’re for Mikkel’s book.’
‘Set me free! I want a job like that too.’
They talked about how imposing restrictions could be inspiring and I pictured Charlie’s bedroom; stuffed full of games, cuddly toys and clothes for dressing up, but did any of it make him happier than the kids in an African village playing with a ball made of rolled-up elastic bands? How could I argue that something as loosely defined and as unpredictable as a relationship between two human beings restricted self-realisation? Were all these thoughts of uniting socialism, Christianity and free love just a distraction from the truth that monogamous coupledom might be the greater challenge? If restriction could be liberating, then Søren T-shirt’s way of thinking made some sense: you meet a woman, fuck her and have kids. Just to break that statement down: who do you meet? How do you fuck? What kids come out of it? And what do you do then?
‘Why aren’t we a couple, actually?’ I said to Diana.
‘He is rather cute, our Mikkel, isn’t he?’ said Jan.
Xenia Leth-Hansen ran her practice from Bredgade where she shared a premises with a fashion photographer, a firm of architects and some kind of investment company. The nameplate was polished brass. I’d just washed my hair and was in a pair of grey trousers, brown Clark’s and a dark blue Smedley polo neck. Perhaps it was the hyphen, but I had imagined a detached, rather stooping blonde and encountered a small brunette in trousers that were somewhat on the tight side. We sat under a Richard Mortensen lithograph and on the low table were a jug of iced water with mint leaves and a vase of wild flowers.
‘So you’re no longer reviewing restaurants?’ she said.
I told her about my big come-down and she said aha in the middle of all my sentences and always with a marked exhalation.
‘I absolutely loved your writing,’ she said. ‘I still do, I suppose.’
She asked me about my upbringing and I felt shame at not having run away to sea at the age of sixteen or carved out a career in the armed forces.
‘Was it usual for the family to have red wine at dinner?’ Xenia wanted to know.
‘Yes. And nebulous waffle for dessert,’ I said.
She laughed, clearly aware of how charming she looked when she narrowed her eyes.
‘Don’t I know,’ she said, and proceeded to tell me her own backstory: daughter of a GP from well-to-do Trørød and parents who never missed their drinks time; pot smoking with the older lads and later coke at On the Rox. Xenia could remember that Phillipe Starck had designed the toilets at Isis. Her parents had died within six months of each other and after a four-month binge she opted for treatment and was now into her twelfth year on the wagon.
‘’That was a very entertaining interview you did for Berlingske,’ she said. ‘You certainly thrust your hand into the hornets’ nest there.’
‘I’m not doing it to stir up trouble,’ I said.
‘What about you and Diana? What did you do yesterday, for instance?’
I told her about Diana’s new drawings and mentioned that I had been fairly restrained in my drinking in the week that had passed.
‘I find it interesting that Diana doesn’t want a partner,’ she said.
‘And that everyone else does,’ I said.
‘It’s certainly high time we re-evaluated traditional relationships,’ she said. ‘I’m just not sure you’re the right person for the job.’
‘It happens to be my idea,’ I said.
‘I think you’re taking on far more than you’re capable of dealing with.’
‘You mean I’ve got enough on my own plate, is that it?’
She uncrossed her legs and straightened her back.
‘Diana drinks too much as well, Mikkel. She is well on her way to fulfilling her potential as an alcoholic.’
‘On what do you base that assumption?’
‘The signs are so very easy to spot. I still like to go out. In fact, I was at a certain party in Tisvilde recently.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘I don’t suppose you saw anything in the state you were in, Mikkel.’
‘Did Andreas invite you?’
‘Andreas is concerned too, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Too? Who else are you talking about?’
‘Me, said the dog.’
‘You?’
She accentuated the pause with a smile.
‘I’ve been watching you these last couple of years, Mikkel.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Byens Kro, Andy’s Bar. I like to do the rounds.’
‘Fishing for clients?’
‘You could look at it like that, if you want to. But I see it as my job to help people before they go over the edge.’
I made a point of not folding my arms.
‘You’re an alcoholic, Mikkel.’
‘I certainly drink too much, that’s true.’
‘That’s what alcoholics
do.’
I was already lost in thought as she began to outline a possible course of treatment involving a series of therapy modules and multimedia support. I went straight to the nearest bar after leaving her office.
I thought I had managed to avoid having any kind of expectations ab out Helene and Diana meeting each other, but then I realised there was at least one thing I hadn’t expected, and that was Helene in a polka-dot dress.
The Toldbod Bodega was my choice, a classic drinking-house interior with tablecloths, low-hanging lamps and the kind of furniture you sank back into. Despite the bodega’s reassuring wood panelling, Helene seemed completely out of sorts, so her new dress seemed well chosen, and of course polka dots are a cliché of the same rank as the bowler hat, the use of oft-cited quotations in speeches to the bride, and the French generally.
She wanted to know too much about Diana’s life as an artist and made no bones about how stark a contrast it made to her own existence; the regular salary and the des res in Frederiksberg. Diana was forthcoming in a measured kind of way, cutting a natural figure in her midnight-blue suit. Helene seemed to be continually poised with her next question at the ready, interrupting Diana mid-sentence, or finishing them on her behalf. Diana smiled when Helene played her riff about the artist standing on the shoulders of art history, and at that point I realised it was my life, too, that she was holding forth on.
Helene and I had both been brought up in the force field between Freud and the Irma supermarket chain. Neither of us had ever crossed Albanian mountain passes to flee our country, we had never risked our lives for revolution. At best, we had turned our backs on white flour and empty carbohydrates, or found the guts to wear cowboy boots two weeks before everyone else. And tonight Helene seemed set on reducing herself in Diana’s eyes to some kind of generic arts worker whose only detour from the straight and narrow was her husband running off with someone else. Diana seemed to sense this and came to the rescue:
‘Is that from Commes des Garçons?’ she said.
‘The most expensive mistake I’ve ever bought,’ said Helene.
‘It looks gorgeous on you.’
I’ve always despised all that rubbish about men not understanding women, but I was still surprised by how little it took to turn the mood around.
Am I Cold Page 26