Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Our downhill race of beds, through the years. How many beds have I piled up in the basement now and around with friends? We pursued the perfect mattress, the one that could best suit Charles’s back; one where my weight on the mattress would bother him as little as possible, a very hard mattress, like sleeping on wood, I thought, a mattress like a door. And then we would usually end up in separate rooms anyway because the morphine and the pains chased him round in the bed and out of bed so that he could smoke. And then I could not sleep. And if I did not sleep, almost everything made me cry, I confused one thing with another – the paper boy jumping on the steps I thought was thunder. I had a hard time recognizing my neighbours, they sprung forth from the same fogs.

  The other day I went walking with Edward’s dog on a lead, too long, I am ashamed to say that it walked onto the road, but it was not a very busy road. Suddenly a car stopped, and the face of a strange woman appeared in the window: ‘Is that any way to walk your dog?’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said and looked down and turned around. The car did not drive off, but remained idling in front of me, now I was really going to get a telling-off I thought, then the lady said: ‘Camilla, it’s me,’ and the strange face transformed into Alma’s.

  What is wrong with me?

  Why did I not recognize my best friend straight away?

  The first bed I shared with Charles was Swedish, back then we barely took any notice of the quality of the mattress. I was overwhelmed by how tall and wide he seemed, maybe because the man I had been with for a long time was a runt. We were attending a course, each our own, same place. I noticed him, he stood smoking on the terrace coughing and shoulders hunched up. Last year we were in Tenerife together; the hotel room had a balcony. Charles had pneumonia, on top of all the other troubles. The cough made the pain in his back worse, but he did not smoke any less, and when I saw him completely hunched over from coughing lean over one of the cheap white plastic chairs, I remembered the first time I saw him, wearing a leather jacket, in Sweden, and how empty it quickly came to feel if he was not in the vicinity. This feeling of longing was love. From the hotel a donkey could be seen. It stood tied to a tree all day. It was meant to make you stop and notice the greengrocer that lay behind. The donkey had a money box attached to the head strap, where it was written ‘Donkey-food’. The money box supplied the sorrowful donkey with even more sorrowfulness. It could not earn a living just by being an advert – for the shop, for all things Spanish as such, and stand under the tree all day getting stiff legs. When you put a coin in the slot, it felt like you put it into the donkey’s brain, but then a reassuring metallic clink was heard when the coin hit the other coins in the money box. The shop sold Tenerife bananas. They are short and sweeter than other bananas, they are like confectionery. The banana is a herb, isn’t that surprising? Queen Victoria (the stout monarch who cast a shadow over almost an entire century, if for a moment I might be permitted to sound like the narrator in a programme about British history) suffered from indigestion and believed that the Tenerife banana helped, therefore she ordered increased cultivations of bananas on her colony of Tenerife. It was all written in a guidebook to Tenerife. The shop also sold almonds. They tasted very good with bananas. Charles talked about needing a long stay at a convalescent home. He never did, but now he has moved in to a guest house where he is served good and nutritious food three times a day. He has reduced the elements of existence to a minimum. He eats an orange. He lies on his back and looks up at the sky. He keeps in contact with very few people. Not with Alma, not with Edward, not with Alwilda, not with Kristian, and practically not with me either.

  Every afternoon, all week, on Tenerife, I went to the zoo and attended an eagle show. Even though I saw it so many times, it is nearly impossible for me to recount what I saw. But it gave me a feeling of Hell, yes yes a dreadful whirring of the fallen angel’s wings, the sluices of heaven unleashed a shower of birds, and every time I did not understand how once again I had voluntarily seated myself on the bench in the arena, beneath the sky and the burning sun, as the heavy American eagles as well as vultures and falcons plummeted towards the earth with wings raised and claws outstretched, when their trainer, standing in the middle of the arena, clapped the leather glove and called them down. They flew right above the heads of the audience, and we kept being (through the megaphone) ordered to sit still because the birds could react to movement by attacking (all the same a rather shabby-looking couple with a large group of children let their son run into the arena and were called to order, but they must have given up holding onto him, because a little later he ran in there again, it was really very nerve-racking), and then landed on the trainer’s glove and were rewarded with a clump of raw meat. After the large predators had been sent off and had circled high above the arena and were called back (while the furious beating of a drum reached a climax as they were landing), a jumble of various birds were sent into the arena, music made them appear like they were dancing; there were cranes that came and pecked corn out of the spectator’s hands (not mine), and there were blue storks and our own storks with the red legs, and there were many other birds I did not know, the air was full of wings. It was a fanfare when they were called in, a fanfare when they were sent off again, and they were free during that time, they could all have flown off, the eagles could have never come back. Next to the arena the vultures again sat on their separate stumps, chained, it was the forecourt to Hell, that’s what Satan’s soldiers looked like and with bowls filled with raw stinking flesh in front of them, they stared at you when you walked past, so you felt reduced to something that soon could end up in the bowl …

  Sweden, far out in the country. When I had passed Charles who stood in his leather jacket, freezing and smoking on the terrace, I noticed his gaze follow me, and I tried to make my stride light and beautiful. At last, on the final evening, there was a party. Finally we were the only ones left in the banquet hall. We thought. In the middle of a long kiss, when I opened my eyes, at one point I sat on the table surrounded by toppled bottles, with my clothes in disarray and Charles’s hands on my back and my shoulders under my shirt, the course leader stood there watching us. I don’t know how long he had been standing there. I closed my eyes and kept kissing – as if he would disappear if I could not see him. But a little later when I opened my eyes, he was still there. He must have been a voyeur. Now Charles had also turned his head towards him, the man put his hands to his side, like an embodied superego, and asked us to find somewhere else.

  We walked slung together into the morning while we talked about how could he think of standing there leering at us. The air was white, there was a creaking and hollow droning from the lake. The ice was breaking.

  It would be a harmonic place to end, at the first meeting, the circle is completed, pure joy. But the mind does not work like that, it pushes on, to stop here would be to park a bus on a flowery meadow.

  When Charles moved out, he did not move that far away at first. Not far from where we lived, and I still live – in a forest of For Sale signs, since the housing market is stagnant as they say (incidentally the estate agent’s where the agent who wanted to write a book worked went to rack and ruin. So now he has time to write, one would think) – there is a hotel with the strange name of 9 Small Homes, (which always made me think of the seven dwarves) the hotel is founded on long-term lets, and as you can read on their website, one guest was so enthusiastic that he stayed for six months. The guest could be Charles.

  Therefore it was unavoidable that we ran into each other on occasion. When I took a shortcut through the Apple Orchard, I sometimes saw him lying on the lawn staring up at the sky, in all likelihood in an attempt to heal a soul that had been torn asunder, maybe he saw me too, but as if according to an unspoken agreement we left each other in peace, yes we pretended we had not seen each other. It was not difficult. He had long struck me as belonging to another world (quite probably the world of the pain and the morphine and thoughts of escape), the past year
I had not had the slightest idea of what happened inside him, I thought about it again the other day when I saw on TV a veterinarian knock on a horse’s skull; as he lay there on the lawn, or when I saw him come out of Spar carrying an orange, I experienced him almost as a mirage, or an after-image like when you have looked at something for a long time and the image of it remains hanging in the air for some time after the thing itself has disappeared.

  ‘For the time being, I don’t want to stick my neck out for another person.’

  When I said that to Alwilda, she looked at me thoughtfully, and the following day she came with a present, wrapped in pink tissue paper. It was a self-help book. For divorced women. I duly thanked her, and when she was gone, I hid it in an underwear drawer, it could not be out with the other books, maybe in the kitchen on the shelf with cookbooks where I have also placed another self-help book, about stain removal. The book had a glossy finish, exuding energy, on the cover there was a woman in a life jacket which at first I interpreted symbolically, but it turned out to be wrong. The characters were all blonde, being dark-haired myself I sometimes get the idea that all blondes look alike. Each chapter consisted of a blonde divorced woman’s account of how she had attained a new life for herself. Leant against the chest of drawers so I could quickly let the book slip into the drawer if there was someone at the door, I skimmed the first four or five chapters, I have always wanted to read as quickly as the critic Malcolm Bradbury who says (he is dead now) that he can read Don Quixote in a couple of hours with the aid of a diagonal reading technique where he lets the eyes race from upper left to lower right corner while it devours everything along its path, the hand long since readying to turn the page. I watch all films on the computer, and every time my Mac identifies damaged areas that it skips over, even on brand new films, whereby it automatically reduces the length of standard ninety-minute feature films to a length of twenty or thirty minutes; simultaneously as I save time, à la Bradbury, my ability to form connections is trained.

  All women in the book had apparently approached their new lives in the same way – they had started to row. Since they all lived north of Copenhagen, they rowed, not surprisingly, in Øresund, although in varying vessels, dinghy, kayak, canoe. Many had met a new man at sea. Maybe there was a masculine version of the self-help book. In that way both genders were sent to sea and rowed into one another’s hearts, then Peterpiperpickedapeckofpickledpeppers met Shesellsseashellsbytheseashore. The women’s accounts were separated by photos of types of boats and sailing equipment with prices discreetly indicated, and at the very back of the book there was a page you could tear out, a form to sign up to Hellerup Rowing Club.

  Well. But that was when I had the idea of buying myself a horse and starting to ride in Dyrehaven just like I did when I was a child and teenager. Instead of looking forward, as everyone encouraged me to do, I could look back, or turn back, to a largely happy period in my life, from when I was thirteen to eighteen years old. Incidentally I was not interested in meeting any men, I had no more interest in that than before I started to read the book from Alwilda. Before, just before, out on the street, the person delivering adverts for pizza delivery shyly asked if I had a boyfriend, and I replied: ‘No, and I would prefer not to.’ He then slinked away, like someone who would have stolen my debit card if I had let him inside. There is no shortage of offers. The painter who had just painted my entire flat in order to tempt buyers also presented an offer. Which I rejected. I worked from home during the days that he painted, and we could not avoid occasionally passing each other in the hall, or other places, ‘I want to kiss you,’ he wrote to me, and when I refused, he wrote something less kind that made me angry. Now I get annoyed every time I look at my freshly painted walls that they were painted by such an unpleasant human being.

  If I had to describe myself I would say: I require time to function. And I would prefer to be experienced in my own surroundings. I am the opposite of someone who looks good from a distance. I function over time. Though not too long, ten years is too long, ten years, and Charles made a run for it so there was lightning flashing from his walking sticks.

  Luckily I had three wedding rings lying around I could now sell to get money for a horse. They are all engraved with ‘Charles’ and the wedding date. Two rather small ones and one large one. The small ones are for the little finger. When I got married, I got a wedding ring for my little finger because it annoyed me the least there. I suffer from restless fingers. (And also from restless mouth but chewing gum can manage that.) Unfortunately I lost the ring shortly afterwards because I had the habit of sliding it up and down my finger. Then I had to have a new one, I again ordered one for the little finger. Then one time when we had to insulate the flat and sprayed filler under the panels, the builder found it under a panel it had rolled under, and handed it to me triumphantly from a kneeling position. Then I had two. However I had started to think that it was too dangerous having a ring on my little finger; when sweating, the ring would slip off easily, and I had developed the habit of taking it off and squeezing it between my upper and lower teeth. It was a wonder I had not swallowed it. For that reason I decided to get a ring for the ring finger since it obviously was the safest finger of all, I got that, yet it was so tight that I had to stop playing with it, and it had as mentioned left an unfortunate mark. So now I had three rings I could sell. The price of gold is good at the moment. Gold is actually the only thing that can be sold at the moment, I realized. After my divorce I have built up an odd attachment to my internet banking, the first thing I do in the morning is check how much I have, what I spent the previous day. So I knew just like that that I could not afford a horse. Numbers are not my friend. The other day I made a terrible blunder. I visited Clea at her sunlit studio and saw a wonderful yellow and brown portrait, painted from a photograph, of Simone de Beauvoir. My walls have become bare after Charles moved out. That was also how they looked before he moved in; and the first time he visited he told me that he felt bad for me because of the bareness. He wanted to fill my walls. Back then I had nothing against naked walls, I thought that the soul rested perfectly on a background of white. But during Charles’s illness I became addicted to colours, and I still am, and the colourless winter looms, it is almost October. So I asked the price of this painting whose colours were like scorched sunflowers.

  ‘Fifteen hundred kroner,’ she said and I replied ‘thank you, I’m buying that.’ We shook hands and parted with a smile, and in my mind I placed it above my sofa with myself beneath it, like being under a shower whose jets were healing colours. It had become rather empty after Charles had moved his things, there were fewer bookcases, lighter, less heavy. It took an entire day to divide the books. We made three piles, one for him, one for me and one to sell at the second-hand bookstore. Seven hours into the process I broke down in tears.

  ‘I got sad before as well,’ Charles said, ‘we are sad that we have read so much trash.’

  ‘Oh, is that what we’re sad about?’ I said and for a moment I recognized him from Once upon a time and started longing to belong together again.

  Back to Clea. Shortly after my visit to the studio she wrote to me that the picture was now packed up, I could pick it up whenever, and I could pay for it over three months.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ I wrote, ‘I’ll transfer fifteen hundred kr. to you.’

  ‘You must have misheard,’ she wrote, ‘it costs fifteen thousand.’

  ‘Oh,’ I wrote, ‘oh oh oh, how could I be so stupid to think that something so beautiful was so cheap oh forgive me, I can’t afford to buy it’ (I pictured the horse going up in smoke).

  Back to the internet banking. In the cool world of the figures I come and go. I calculate and calculate. No sooner have I set a budget than I have to start from scratch, endlessly counting, I assume that I am building dams against feelings for figures.

  Well, but I have to sell my gold, I have to buy a horse. So I start to look at horses. It is very invigorating after having lo
oked at flats for such a long time. Maybe I haven’t said that. When I can no longer dwell on online banking, I normally browse through the flats at www.boliga.dk and www.andelsbutikken.dk.

  ‘Don’t start looking at flats until you have sold yours,’ Alma said, ‘you’re just wasting time, you have no idea how much you’ll get for the flat, how much you have to spend.’

  ‘It’s a good thing,’ Alwilda said, ‘to familiarize yourself with the housing market, then you’re ready to get to it when you’ve sold your flat.’

  (She had come round with a couple of sleeping pills for me – from Alma who didn’t have time to come by herself. My insomnia has little by little taken on oceanic proportions. My eyes hurt so much from all the wakefulness that I wish I could take them out and put them down.

  ‘There you are,’ Alwilda said, ‘at least now you’ll get a couple of nights’ sleep.’

  I was tempted to press a tablet out of the foil at once but I waited steadfastly until the evening, otherwise I would just wake up at midnight. I had been given four pills. Luckily I am the child of a doctor and did not just blindly pop the pill in my mouth, but first checked the name on the product. Ritalin. Alwilda suffers from ADHD. I was so disappointed I could have cried. She had given me the wrong medicine, her own.