Outside the cafe, in front of the bright and cheerfully decorated department store in central Copenhagen, was a mother with two small children. Probably in her mid-30s, she looked frozen as her children pulled her hands to get her into the toy shop next door. It was cold and they were all three dressed in the kind of outfits that made them look like colored marshmallows with legs. The mother’s tousled hair hung in wisps around her face, and her eyes had a haunted expression. She looked like one of those women who often felt as if they were a single mother, even though they were married. That type of women would often suffer in silence and they seem to be able to do everything alone, and preferably before it’s necessary. Therefore, they have lost in advance, and they know it, and it makes them restless at night.
With a whispering voice, I began to sing the Alice Cooper song I had heard as an eighteen year-old; a song which made so much sense to me. I dreamed about meeting the singer and thank him for making it absolutely clear to me how most men look at women:
Man got his woman to take his seed
He’s got the power oh she got the need
She spends her life through pleasing up her man
She feeds him dinner or anything she can...
Next to the young mother was an elderly lady busy choosing a poinsettia from a street vendor. She took each plant up and considered it from all angles, so she could get one with exactly the right mix of red and green; another example of Christmas success criteria. I thought of my own desire for perfectionism in plants. The way plants unfold into life when they grow wild is one of the most beautiful symbols of life’s diversity. To kill off the enthusiasm for life that plants show with their growth is a very sick way to control life. To call some plants weeds tells me more about the human inability to enjoy life than the number of suicides in the spring.
A young man, probably a student, hurried past with several large and beautifully wrapped boxes in plastic bags. As he stopped at a red light, his girlfriend appeared beside him. She had perhaps been looking in a shop window and now she wanted a kiss, perhaps to make sure that he was okay with the fact that she had made several detours and let him be the pack mule. She seemed to be dressed in expensive clothes and this gave the finely wrapped presents more meaning; they were out shopping for Christmas gifts with her money.
The girlfriend looked almost longingly at the two children who struggled to pull their mother along the street. One of them bumped into the elderly lady with the poinsettia and she got an annoyed expression on her face and looked reproachfully at the mother, who sent an exasperated glance back. Real Christmas atmosphere; joy to the world.
I’m glad that I had never become a mother. I had been a quiet, introverted and very easy to manage child, but unfortunately there was no guarantee that you got one like that yourself. Nowadays, it seems as if half the children are born with attention deficiency disorders; I would have to give away such a child.
When I was only in my twenties, not long after I was raped, I had visited a private hospital to discreetly get sterilized; I would not risk anything and get pregnant. Several doctors had pointed out, at various stages of my life that I could possibly come to regret that I had not had children when I went into menopause and lost my fertility. They did not know me very well; fortunately.
A child, quiet or not, would pose a threat to the life I had created for myself where I could always do what I wanted. A child would be in the way, a drag and then would grow up and start to question their upbringing and delve into other areas of my life; my morality would be no concern of theirs.
Some of my contacts had children during our acquaintance. Usually this meant that they were phased out of my network because they were typically rarely able to talk about anything but their babies and their excitement could not give me anything. I felt that I was eaten up by their words, feeling desperate as they tried to make sense of the chaos that it was to reproduce.
The hunt is my offspring. The feeling of possessing another person’s will without the person’s knowledge is nourishment for my introverted enthusiasm. I need it. I long to feel the warmth that spreads through my body brought on by success and triumph on my terms.
I was married once and my husband had been exceptionally wealthy and quite a bit older than me; he wanted children but I did not. When he realized that I would not give in he was furious and beat me and began to talk of a divorce. After a while I begged for him to stay in my life and persuaded him to go on vacation, saying I needed to think and suggested that maybe I could change my mind. We went on a luxury cruise to Alaska with a small exclusive company; a second honeymoon we told acquaintances.
One night I told him I wanted to go out on deck and at the front of the ship I rubbed up against him, inviting him to take me right there in the freezing cold with the silhouettes of the icebergs in the background. As usual, he could not resist me and I egged him more until I sat up on the railings, my legs wide apart and opened my fur coat. I was naked beneath it, my nipples hard and small and he just shed his own coat, opened his trousers and climbed up to me.
Balancing on a 5 cm wide piece of white painted metal, he moved inside me and I pulled him deeper, whispering his name and he was soon lost in the excitement. Once he had finished, cramped and out of breath and leaning on the railings, I had simply slipped down, grabbed his ankles and tipped him over the side; amazingly easy. The icy water engulfed him in no time; there was no fighting, no shouting and I guessed that the cold had killed him almost immediately.
Mikael’s body was never found; only his coat, which he’d thrown on the deck. I left it there to sow the idea of a heart attack or suicide; I’d decided that was a better option than throwing it to him to ward off the cold.
In consultation with the lawyer who dealt with his will, I created a fund that gave financial support to the survivors of people who had disappeared on cruises; apparently it was not an unknown phenomenon. When I found that out it was a cause of much private amusement as I considered meeting all the other women who might also have tipped their men overboard.
The fund was financed by just a very small fraction of the assets that had been created by my deceased husband exploiting and cheating unsuspecting investors; I felt no guilt seeing the money transferred to my own account.
I mourned for a year, or so it seemed to the outside world, wearing black the few times I left my apartment; I was keeping a low profile just in case. Considering how well known he was I was a little scared of the attention his death might bring from the authorities, but I felt no remorse and certainly no need for the recognition of my accomplishments. To look at the state of my bank account was accolade enough.
In that year of thinking about the death of my husband, I grew to understand the meaning in my life. Mikael had beaten me and treated me badly, just like my father, my uncle, a guy in a tunnel and my very first boyfriends. No one would be allowed to do that anymore, anyone who did would simply be punished.
So I slowly grew out of my false mourning to a fuller, brighter future where my life would have meaning, not just for me, but for many beaten and abused women. Little did I realise it at the time, the hunter was born one fateful day when I was seventeen and now I was free to act at will. My true character and the path of my life could not have been clearer.
I knew I would never experience love since that was reserved for each new pair of shoes I buy. Getting a new man was not about love, but each relationship would have a similarity with the shoes, the feeling of having acquired something that I would eventually tire of and discard.
There have been men in my life since Mikael, mostly men while traveling; travels they never returned from. Men who spoke French or Afrikaans, men from the UK, Australia and Italy. Men who had something in common … they were dead.
9
Marie looked out through the tunnel onto the railroad tracks, rivers of fallen leaves spread beside them, in autumn golden, orange and re
d. She had taken a walk along the lake as she listened to the crows; their shrill, hoarse cries sounded like frightened shrieks. So it was with Marie - there were always so many things that made her think of death.
She had continued at a brisk pace through the small and familiar forest that was close to the orphanage in one of the suburbs of Copenhagen. It was beautiful in the forest at this time of year, a hint of frost on your nose and the clear azure sky finding its way through the almost naked trees as they waited for their final, multi-colored leaves to fall. But for Marie, this setting was yet another reminder of death and decay, when the wet leaves lying on the rails were ground into pulp by the trains, as if falling from the trees were not enough and they had to be totally destroyed.
This was how her life could feel; one day everything was light and good and she felt at peace with the world; the next she would wake up and there was only darkness and it seemed as if only her death could rescue her from the pain she felt inside. She had the distinct feeling that this was not the case for other seventeen year old girls. Their only problem was choosing whether they wanted to go to this party or the other, whether to buy the skirt or the jeans, whether or not to dye their hair. But Marie was not like ordinary girls and this was a fact she’d known for a long time.
It was right back in Kindergarten the first time she felt that she was different. Not wanting to play with the other children, she had sat down under the big pear tree in the garden. But rather than sitting with her back to it and looking out, she had faced the tree and simply stared at the bark. Then she slowly reached out and she began to pick at it, inserting her small fingers and nails between the cracks in the tree’s rough surface and bits of bark started to come away. So she picked at it some more, her actions speeded up as if there might be some prize hidden beneath, but the pieces she managed to remove were only small and they fluttered to the ground like lifeless brown bugs.
But to Marie it felt as if the world was a little less heavy when she pulled the bark off and she sat there creating a small bald patch on the old tree until an adult appeared and discovered what she was doing. They took her inside and told her that when you peel the bark of the trees, they die. Marie felt a flicker of delight at the thought that, as small as she was, she could have power over a living creature vastly bigger than you were and it could do nothing other than stand still.
The next day she sat down next to the tree again and resumed her attack and as the patch got bigger she liked it that underneath the rough exterior the wood was slippery and smooth. Whilst she would never have understood the concept at the time, she knew later that the idea of the tree being vulnerable was immensely appealing.
So as an adult she continued to think of the wood under the bark and it reminded her of wounds with brand new skin. Tender, fragile, and sensitive, just as she had been as a child when faced with opposition that was much more threatening than an old pear tree.
Now that seemed long ago as she sat there in the tunnel beside the tracks; still only a teenager and wondering whether she should just lie down on the cold, wet metal, close her eyes and simply wait. There was not much left of her delicate, fragile and sensitive inner child, life and the world outside was waiting but she felt no part of it. There was no escape from the never-ending walls she could not see, feeling as if she were one of the insects she used to capture beneath an upturned glass jar. She would study it briefly before squashing it or removing its legs or wings, as other kids do out of curiosity;’ in Marie’s case it was to identify with the abusers in their life.
At other times Marie felt like she was a bouncy ball, one of those transparent ones with nothing of note in the middle except a few swirls of colour. No matter how much you throw it at things, kick it or squeeze it, it seems unaffected. It felt good to be like that, unable to be pinned down by anyone and it was impossible for them to get to the bits inside. Her swirls of colour were her feelings, but in fact they never counted; to those on the outside of her. Like that bouncy ball, she had no opinions or views of her own. But again like the bouncy ball, if someone deemed to try and get them, she would never give up the secrets in the middle.
Outside the tunnel the sun was going down, but the clouds parted briefly and a ray of sunlight hit the ground beside the rails and sent a thrill through her. She was drawn to the sunbeam and got up and went out into it. She gave a deep sigh, leaned her head back and closed her eyes as she enjoyed the feeling of warmth on her skin. The sun was the best thing she knew, the one thing in the whole world which could make her smile and even think about wanting to be alive. The skin on her hands seemed to suck in the warmth as the sun momentarily chased away the cold, replacing the autumn sadness with a feeling of calm and almost peace.
Then the clouds grew back together and the sun disappeared as if it had never been there. Marie immediately felt cold, but there was something else that made her body start to shut itself down. Something else had sucked out any hint of happiness she had to leave her chilled and empty inside. She looked down and folded her arms in front of her as if this could possibly protect her and she crouched a little. She was also ready to run for it, an ancient and well trained response that had carried her away from a potential beating many times in her childhood home.
Slowly she lifted her head and looked straight into eyes that were lifeless and bloodshot through excess alcohol; the man’s skin, with about three days growth of patchy beard, was pasty and loose. He stood two feet from her. He was tall with long arms and claw-like hands, the nails long and broken and dirty. He had shaggy dark hair that had not seen a pair of scissors for a long time; it was unwashed and uncared for. He wore an old green parka that was open to reveal a blue sweater with holes and straggly bits of pulled wool. He had faded brown corduroy trousers with splits in the knees and old boots.
Marie decided his eyes seemed almost non-human, quite oblique and with an expression which was one of the scariest she had ever seen. There was no person behind the eyes, only emptiness; emptiness and desperation…and lust. Her eyes now flicked from side to side as she tried to see a way to escape. Going into the forest was pointless, so one way was the tunnel and the other was the high fences. The seconds she began to climb the fence he would have the upper hand, just like her going into the trees; the only choice was to go back into the tunnel and try and lose him in the darkness.
“Forget it.”
His voice was toneless, almost seeming to be without threat or any undertone of aggression, but his purpose was entirely clear. The words were spoken as if he were simply an uncaring clerk in a boring office; they were more threatening that way. There was no doubt that he would get what he wanted and there was no need to say anything in response.
Her eyes searched the ground for something to defend herself with, a branch, a piece of broken glass, a rusty nail, but there was nothing but the faded, muddy leaves. She knew what was going to happen and she wondered if she should fight. Would he be deterred if she cried for help?
In two steps he was close to her and for the first time she puzzled how he could have been so quiet as he approached her, but perhaps she had been lost in that brief moment of sunshine and happiness. As if he had read her thoughts about escape he quickly pushed a filthy handkerchief in her mouth that made her want to gag and he put his hand over it. His other hand slid around her waist, as if a snake had wrapped itself around her and he grabbed her left arm; he squeezed it harshly, sending her another message.
She could smell him now; a sharp smell of sweat mixed with alcohol and stale tobacco. There was also something indefinable that smelled sickeningly sweet, as if something had rotted. He pushed her back into the tunnel and up against the wall.
“If you kick me, I’ll break your nose and cut your cheeks so you’ll be ugly for life. Your choice…”
The message was delivered with the same flat tone of voice as he looked into her eyes. He had her upper body in a vice. Only her legs were free and he se
emed to know before she did what she was considering. It flashed through her mind that he had done this before.
He pulled away slightly and looked into her eyes for far too long a moment; it seemed like hours. She stared back at first, gave him the most evil stare she could, but her gaze met nothing in the man’s eyes, neither fear nor hatred. She gave up and tried to look away instead. He quickly took his free hand away from her mouth and gave her a stinging slap in the face that made her deaf and almost blind for several seconds.
The pain somehow got her body to relax and he had to hold her so she did not collapse. He pressed his body against her, rolling his hips and put his face close to her and whispered into her ear.
“You know what to do; you remind me of me. I can see myself in your eyes. But you still have some of that vulnerability left in you. It turns me on.”
His tongue came out and like a big wet snail; it slowly slid around and into her ear. Her whole body tried to resist and she gave an anguished cry, muffled by the disgusting gag. That seemed to make things worse and the tongue moved in and out, flicking around her skin and she could feel drops of his saliva running down her neck. Her body was trying to automatically move away from him and his grip became stronger. He whispered to her again.
“You may try and resist, but why not just enjoy it. You’re mine now.”
His voice was more hoarse and deep, as if his personality, driven by his lust, had taken the elevator down into even further darkness. All Marie could do now was to think of the times she had been forced before and remembered, with disgust, that if she participated it went faster. That natural urge to be as far away as possible just had to be overcome.
With her right hand she reached towards his crotch and a bulge met her hand; when she started rubbing and squeezing it, he groaned. He then pulled back a little to look at her and sensing her acquiescence, took the gag from her mouth. Marie gave him a look that would have won an Oscar for the best porn actress. At only seventeen she knew what men wanted and how they wanted her.
Dead Men (Marie and Lotte Book 1) Page 7