When I got back to the house Alex was standing by the garage, triumphantly waving a fishing rod in the air. He had already eaten his breakfast and decided to go on a scavenger hunt in the yard, starting with the stable and the garage, where he was sorting out a large pile of junk: the yard was now furnished with a set of rickety old garden chairs, an equally ugly, grey plastic garden table, a yellow handcart, a rack of empty bottles, and a woman’s black bike with neither tires nor saddle. But there was no mistaking that it was the pile of rusty tackle, spoon-bait, and reel of fishing line that had captured his fancy most. His dark eyes were alive with glee.
“Where can you go fishing around here?”
“Down by the harbor,” I said automatically. “You can fish from the pier or in the harbor itself.”
“Do you want to come along?”
“I’ll come down later.”
He looked a little disappointed, but the thrill of finding the fishing gear wasn’t that easily to kill. I helped him unwind the rusty pile of hooks and bait, and we finally managed to assemble the tackle, reel, and line onto the rod. For good measure, I armed him with a knife from the kitchen and a plastic bag to carry his bounty—should he be so lucky as to catch anything.
He disappeared, walking tall and barefooted over the dunes, and I waited till he was out of sight before laying the rose down on the garden table.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that someone in Klitmøller still mourned the loss of my mother. Before she died out there, she must have had a life. Perhaps she’d had friends, or gone to choir practice, Italian classes, or whatever the hell it was you did to pass the time on the wind-blown evenings in Klitmøller. I just had a hard time believing that my mother had had that kind of life.
In the hardcover Book of Childhood Memories that my second foster mother had made for me—a couple of months before I smashed all the mirrors in her house—there were several pictures of my mother. The book had only traveled with me during the first couple of moves, and then disappeared, but I could remember the pictures clearly: fuzzy snapshots of a serious-looking woman with me sitting on her lap, my mother wandering down an anonymous road with me in tow. In all the pictures her shoulders were hunched around her ears like an old woman, her eyes avoiding the lens of the camera.
She looked like someone who was always alone, even in the company of others.
You always recognize your own affliction in other people.
I untied the note from the stalk and slipped it between two of my grandmother’s thick books on the bookcase in the lounge. Afterward I went back outside, loaded the rack of empties onto the handcart and took them to the camping site for recycling. A return of almost fifty kroner. Enough for a packet of tobacco and two kilos of potatoes from the improvised grocery store next to Tourist Information. I considered swiping a roll of chocolate cookies for Alex, but felt the sting of a bad conscience when I saw the exhausted expression on the face of the woman behind the counter. Life as the owner of Klitmøller Camping—pearl of the northern North Sea coast—was clearly something that wore on both health and humor. Many things had been easier in the faceless Netto in Hvidovre.
We wished one another a nice day! with a smile.
I sat outside in the sun and rolled myself a couple of smokes. In fact, a drink would have been in order. I felt sufficiently calm without one, but when my hands weren’t occupied with cigarette rolling, they tended to rap a rhythmical riot, now combing through my hair, now tapping on my thighs, now drawing glowing smoke-rings in the air. Thomas’s words dug into my flesh.
I was there.
Had I seen her die?
I pulled out my phone and scrolled down my pathetic list of contacts till Kirsten’s number came up. She picked up after a single ring.
“Ella, for God’s sake. Klitmøller?”
“How did you know?”
“You’ve changed your address. That kind of thing doesn’t get past us. Did you really think I’d just let it go and forget all about you?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I think you should do. I no longer live in your jurisdiction.”
“Christ, Ella.” Kirsten was breathing hard on the other end of the line. “I was seconds away from notifying the police and sending out a search party. I thought you were suicidal, that you were headed for Copenhagen harbor and taking Alex with you. You had just been released from Psych, for Christ’s sake! What else should I think?! Luckily Rosa called and told me you’d gone up North before I had a chance to initiate an investigation. Every time you pull a stunt like this, it goes on your file. It isn’t good for you, and it isn’t good for Alex. And that business with Lisa . . . If she had pressed charges, you would have been finished for sure, Ella.”
She held an artistic pause, breathed deeply, and I could hear her making her way down the long corridors of the governmental buildings of the social services offices in Hvidovre. Kirsten had always preferred to conduct her private client conversations in the bicycle shed.
“Are you all right?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“And Alex?”
“He’s fishing down at the harbor.”
I could detect Kirsten’s smile beaming down the satellite connection.
“Okay. So now that we’ve established that you’re okay and that Alex has gone fishing, why are you calling? There’s not much I can do for you from my end. As you so rightly pointed out, you are very much out of my jurisdiction.”
“I want my files.”
“Which files do you mean?”
“Everything. Everything on my childhood. The court case, the foster parents, Bakkegården—the whole damn lot. I want to see if there’s anything written there about my mother.”
Kirsten was silent for a while.
“Naturally you’re entitled to see your files, Ella, but, quite frankly, I’m not comfortable with you reading those papers when you don’t have a psychiatrist on standby. One who knows you. You’re not exactly stable, emotionally. And I still think you should get Alex professional help. Your apartment is still available until the end of the month, and I’m sure that Lisa . . . ”
“I want to see those files,” I said flatly. “Just tell me what I need to do to get hold of them. I don’t want to argue with you on this.”
Another pause.
“Send me an official application, and I’ll see what I can do. But I’m still worried about you.”
“My case is no longer a matter for your concern. And we’re fine. Really.”
She was quiet for a bit.
“Ella,” she finally said. “I’ve known you a long time, and I like you, although God knows you’re hardly a model client. You’re too bright and too angry to be caught up in the system. That has always been your problem, my girl. I think you should come home so we can work this out. Here, where we know you best.”
Something softened in my chest. Kirsten had always had a power over me that stemmed from her deep voice, her round form, and her willingness to reach out and take me in her arms. Then and there I was glad she was no more than a voice on the end of a line.
“What will happen if I come back, Kirsten? I want you to be completely honest. As a friend to Alex and me. What will happen, Kirsten?”
A long silence. I knew she was at war with herself, and I knew what this meant. Kirsten was an excellent social worker, she’d been working for the department of social services for a hundred years. She wasn’t the one who was trying to take Alex away from me, but she had seen enough to know if others were.
“Thank you,” I said. “You have my new address. I’ll look forward to hearing from you about those files.”
Then I cut the connection.
Alex sat dipping his rod in the water at the far end of the pier when I got to the harbor.
The wind had picked up, and white foam was whipped into the air by the brutal meeting of sea and stone. When I slid down next to him, I saw that he’d actually had a bite. Something dark and wet lay in the plastic bag, the knife was smeared with blood and torn intestines.
“Three.” He had to shout to be heard above the roar of the sea. “I’ve caught three flat fishes. One of the surfers killed the first one for me, but the other two I killed myself. We can eat them for dinner tonight.”
I kissed him on the forehead. It was cold and salty.
“My big, strong huntsman,” I said. “Beats collecting cans, huh?”
He laughed, and pointed towards the beach.
“That surfer guy from yesterday helped me. He said I could try his surfboard later. Can I?”
The long-haired wetsuit, Magnus, looked over in our direction and waved. I looked away. I told myself I had no illusions what the guy was after, and it had nothing to do with either Alex or the surfboard. I also told myself that I wasn’t flattered.
“You go on ahead,” I said. “I’ll take care of our fish in the meantime.”
Alex drew in his line, left the rod lying next to me, and bounded off to the beach. We hadn’t spoken about leaving Hvidovre, or the spasms that had lasted deep into the night. The only remaining signs of the fit the night before lingered in my aching legs. I took the three fat fish out of the bag, slit their bellies, and cleaned out the black, congealed blood and insides with my index finger. I ran a hand along the sandpaper-rough surface of their skins and felt a wild, child-like joy spill from a spot just below my breastbone. Then I climbed down between the boulders and washed the fish in the waves. One more thing I knew how to do. My mother or father must have showed me how to clean fish. I hoped it was my mom.
Down at the beach the surfer guy had helped Alex up onto his surfboard and was literally showing him the motions. Alex had been kitted out with an orange life vest and they were standing knee-deep in the waves together. Alex clambered up onto the board on wobbly legs, then opted to kneel on the board instead. Even from a distance, I could see his smile, both exhilarated and awkward at once.
Klitmøller was as good as a holiday for him. If Kirsten’s colleagues in Hvidovre managed to convince the welfare office in Thisted that I was unfit to be a mother, then at least Alex would have experienced this. He had seen the sea. The closest we had ever come to a holiday was taking the bus to Amager Strand while the sun melted the rest of the city of Copenhagen.
The surfer-guy waved at me, and I waved back. I had returned the fish to the plastic bag and was climbing my way up onto the pier when my eyes leveled on a pair of well-worn, brown leather shoes. I looked up to meet the gaze of the man I had seen on the road outside our house on our first day in Klitmøller. He was a lot older than I had first assumed—he looked at least eighty years old. His shiny scalp was covered in liver spots, he was skeleton-thin, but the broad hands and shoulders gave me the impression of someone that once had been a big man.
He smiled down at me.
“Ella?”
I scampered up onto the pier and nodded in his direction, just once.
“My name is Bæk-Nielsen. I’m looking after your grandmother’s house. Perhaps you saw me the other day?”
I shook my head, very slightly. It had always been a strategy of mine to tell other people as little as possible. When your most intimate secrets are pooled in a database that is shared with ten thousand government-appointed caregivers you tend to fiddle with those precious few details you had to yourself.
“Your grandmother has asked me to drive you—you and your son—to Thisted. She would like to see you both.”
I felt an ice-cold jab in my stomach. She had no business in contacting us. She was sick and senile and dying. She was already half dead fifteen years ago, for Christ’s sake.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “I’m not interested in reviving the acquaintance.”
“You’re living in her house.”
He practically had to shout to be heard over the howling wind. His broad beige trouser legs fluttered against his knuckle-thin thighs; he hardly amounted to any kind of physical threat. And I could just take off if I had to. I glanced over my shoulder at Alex and the surfer. They were still standing knee-deep in the waves, maneuvering the rocking surfboard.
“I didn’t realize this obliged me to talk to her. This wasn’t stipulated in her letter, and quite frankly, I don’t feel like listening to her shit.”
The old man raised his eyebrows, but stood his ground.
“As you may know, your grandmother believes your father is innocent.”
I shrugged. “If that’s what she wants to believe, it’s fine by me. She’s his mother. I’d probably feel the same should Alex blow his girlfriend’s brains out one day. A mother’s love is blind.”
“She believes you might know something that could help him.”
I had trouble suppressing a sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh. The rumors about my grandmother’s insanity weren’t exaggerated.
“The man was convicted. He has served his sentence. I fail to understand how I could be of any use to him now. And even if I could . . . why would I want to help my mother’s murderer?”
Bæk-Nielsen followed my gaze towards the beach and Alex, who was still frolicking in the waves.
“I’m not sure I believe your father is innocent,” he said kindly. “But there may be some good in this for you. You’ve never had a family, so you don’t know what you’re missing. Family isn’t love. That’s nothing but sentimental blubber. Family is an extension of your own body. Many youngsters believe they can live without the bonds they are born with, but for most of us, these bonds are the only ties we have in the universe. This you will realize when you’re older, but right now, I am here as your grandmother’s friend. Not yours. She has lost everyone who has ever meant anything to her, and now she would like to see you. And your son.”
Out in the breakers Alex had managed to stay standing on the board for a brief moment, long enough for him to feel the surge of the sea and lift his arms high in triumphant glee.
“She’s unhappy,” I said. “I can understand that. But I can’t help her. Tell her I’m not interested.”
Bæk-Nielsen looked like he wanted to hit me, but he couldn’t force me to come. And we both knew it. I shrugged, tried to swallow the painful lump in my throat. Then I picked up the fishing rod, walked past him, and left him standing on the wind-blown pier. My hands had already started to shake, and it was only a question of time before the remainder of my body followed suit.
It was time to leave.
I was out of breath and weak in the knees by the time I reached Alex and surfer-Magnus. The surfing lesson was over, and Alex was sitting in the sand, frozen stiff in his wet jeans. His lips were blue and his teeth were chattering, even though Magnus had wrapped a towel over his shoulders. A big-breasted girl in a bikini was woven into the luxurious terry cloth of his towel.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
“But Magnus said I could have another go once I’ve warmed up,” protested Alex.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But we have to get our dinner into the fridge, don’t we? Otherwise it will spoil.”
Alex bought my excuse. Anxious about his loot, he sprang to his feet, as did Magnus, who had exchanged his wet-suit for a pair of large, floral-print boxer shorts.
“I’ll walk you guys home.” He smiled and passed me a can of beer that he’d already opened. It wasn’t vodka, but better than nothing. I took a gulp and stole a glance at the pier. The old man was nowhere to be seen.
We walked along the beach with the fishing rod and a six-pack that Magnus had hooked on the last digit of his index finger. I was relieved to hear that he wasn’t from Klitmøller, he came from Aalborg, and was hardly likely to have been born when infamy came my way. He was harmless, almost soothing in all his boyish ignorance, his words devoid of depth. The conversation floated as easily as newspapers on the wind and waves.
Magnus liked techno and had a dog named Dirk that his parents took care of while he was away. He’d been surfing in Australia, and one day, he was going to move down there, live on Bondi Beach and go surfing every day, earning money on the stock market while everyone else was asleep—if he wasn’t eaten by a great white shark first, that is. Hah, hah.
I let him talk. Talk suited me just fine.
“I also like skiing and motor-bikes,” he said. “What do you like doing, Ella?”
He caught my gaze, and held it till I felt that well-known lurch in my belly. I was drinking fast—I had downed the first beer and was well on my way with my second by the time Alex had run on ahead to have a warm bath and get his fish safely stowed in the fridge.
“Would you like to sit in the dunes for a while?” I said.
Magnus looked at me with a smile that was supremely self-confident, bordering on the arrogant. This was exactly how I liked my men. I knew his type. He could get all the women he wanted, but he was a bit lazy, and preferred the easy conquest, the imperfect girls, so he could get in fast and leave just as swiftly. Girls like me, for example. I had no illusions about marriage and a white picket fence. I never had.
We walked into the dunes where we wouldn’t be visible from the beach. I drank one more beer before he leaned over and kissed me, long and deep. Exactly as I had hoped. Then he pulled off my T-shirt and ran his fingertips down the thin scars along the insides of my arms.
“Where did you get these?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I was a fucked-up teenager.”
“And now . . . ?”
“Now I’m a fucked-up adult.”
My tongue traced along his collarbone and continued down till I found a nipple. It tasted of the sea. I had one hand inside his floral-print boxer shorts as he lovingly took care of my lower body. His rings were cold, but he was good with his hands. Very, very good. I wasn’t his first true love, that was for sure.
Afterward we had a last beer each; we were sitting leaning up against one another. His hands played in my hair.
“I think I’ll be off, now,” he said quietly. “Will I see you again?”
I mumbled a “maybe” that I hoped was sufficiently vague to prevent him from making plans for the next day. I liked taking my liberties in so far as I had any to take.
“You know where you can find me,” he said. “Alex is welcome to come by and surf, anytime.”
I watched him as he strolled barefooted along the beach. A handsome young man, who would certainly never end up living on Bondi Beach. He would get married to a nice girl who worked in a bank, fixed her hair, got her nails done and her chassis waxed. The kind of girl you could show off to both your friends and your family with pride. They would buy a nice, prefabricated house on the outskirts of Aalborg. I wasn’t bitter. And my body had finally found some peace.
I closed my eyes and let the sand run through my fingers. It was cold sitting there on my own, now that the clouds were blocking out the sun.
A flash of myself in shorts and red sandals with white flowers on the straps. I’m watching two people woven into each other. A man and a woman. They are fully clothed, but their clothes are rumpled, they are heaving, pressing their bodies against each other in rhythmic movements. The woman’s long hair is covering the man’s face, and they don’t notice me, even though I’m standing relatively close by, watching. Seeing them gives me the same feeling I get in my belly when I watch a fight at school. Fear, mixed with a heat that spreads from my chest all the way down between my legs. Then the woman turns her face towards me. It is contorted, as if she were in terrible pain.
I back up, tumble down the side of the dune, and run back to the boy who is waiting for me on the shore.
“Did you see it?” he says with a crooked smile. He knew. “Did you see them? They were doing it in the dunes.”
We were woken, hot and thirsty, by the burning rays of sun slanting in through the roof window.
Alex had woken me twice in the dead of night, bolting upright in bed, screaming, sweat pouring down his face. His nightmares had always been terrifying, but the torments of the night before had been particularly bad, even for him. The kind where he screamed in pain and terror at invisible beings that threatened to tear out his flesh.
But by morning all was forgotten.
The heat and the light from the window reminded me of the dancing patterns of light that Tommy from Bakkegården used to beam onto ants, beetles, and human eyes with his magnifying glass. I rolled out of the beam of light, bouncing both Alex and me out of the bed as I did so. He laughed.
I forced myself to stand under the cold stream of water in the shower for five minutes before we ate breakfast and walked into town. Or rather, I walked. Alex danced ahead, still wearing the same jeans shorts he’d been wearing for the last week. I had already tossed a pile of underwear and a chunk of flaking hand soap into the archaic washing machine in the kitchen. Washing powder was one of the first things I would have to get hold of somehow.
I needed money. Soon. The money I had borrowed from Rosa would only last for a couple of weeks, if that, and then only if I was very careful what I spent it on and found some kind of supplementary income in the interim. Of course we could collect empty cans in Klitmøller, there were plenty of tourists, and where there were tourists, beer was consumed. But I hadn’t staked out the hunting grounds yet and I had no idea who else would claim the territory.
The grocery store was small and dark compared to the neon-lit Netto I was used to from Hvidovre and there was only one other customer gliding along the aisles as we came in: a middle-aged woman with henna-colored hair and tinkling bracelets on her liver-spotted arms. I collected a tray of frozen chicken on sale, rice, tomatoes, and half a gallon of milk, and while Alex was distracted by a display of brightly-colored beach toys and fishing nets I managed to smuggle half a liter of vodka and packet of chewing gum in under my sweater. The store owner himself was commandeering a boy in the storeroom out back and Henna-hair was nowhere to be seen.
I had stolen before.
Mincemeat and coffee and toilet cleaner from Netto, Lego blocks from the slap-provokingly garish Toys “R” Us, and mobile phone covers from Fona Electronics. Usually it happened towards the end of the month, when I was broke, but sometimes I did it because I felt like it. Doctor Erhardsen would say it was because I was angry. He would probably be right. The hideous advertisements called for it. Across the board, they were tritely inviting, styled in well-composed scenes of perfect people in perfect worlds; a pseudoscience that relies on Photoshop and the manipulation of our senses, and it worked with everyone—including me: the flat-broke-weirdo consumer that belonged in the shabby, low-performance consumer bracket that the advertising industry habitually ignored. But the world pissed on me, so I pissed on the world. That was my moral, if I had one. But the grocery store owner could be a problem in the long term. I didn’t want to know the people I stole from.
Afterward we went down to the beach to watch the surfers at the pier. Alex went down onto the beach to skim stones, exactly as he used to do on the duck pond in Hvidovre Park. A long, beautiful, throw that skimmed just above the surface of the water, the stone bouncing several times before it disappeared into the waves. He was so engrossed in his skimming that I saw the woman before he did. It was the henna-haired woman from the grocery store. The faux radiance of her red hair preceded her long before she stopped to stand directly in front of Alex. She bent down and picked up a stone, handing it to him with same solemnity as the Pale Faces once offered the American Indian shiny beads and blankets on the prairie.
Alex accepted the stone shyly, smiled and nodded as he said something in reply. He stepped back a couple of paces and skimmed the stone over the waves. It bounced over the surface several times, then disappeared. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew that the woman was smiling. Then she turned, looked at me and waved. Her long red hair flew wildly in the wind.
“I would very much like to make a sketch of Alex. He’s a beautiful boy.”
The woman, who had introduced herself as Barbara, nodded in the direction of the parking lot.
“And what would that cost me?”
I didn’t mean to be unfriendly. That’s just the way I tended to come across. And in my experience, it was wise to be on your guard when someone started saying nice things about your children. Alex was a beautiful boy, but it was rare for people to mention it without wanting something from me.
“Nothing.” She flashed a smile with beautiful, film-star white teeth that didn’t fit the rest of the picture. “I only charge the German tourists. This sketch would be for my own work.”
“So you sketch?”
“Yes, I have my own studio just outside town. Perhaps the two of you would like to come over . . . It would only take half an hour to make a sketch, and perhaps take a few pictures. I’d be happy to pay the young man a hundred kroner for his time.”
It was not as if we had better things to do, Alex and I. The long summer days stretched in a blank row before us, at least until a caseworker from Thisted Welfare Office had registered me in their system and started sending me window-enveloped letters with threats of job placement initiatives and pep-talks at the local job center. It would take time. There was a change of address to attend to and a transfer of files and papers. And, even armed with an artillery of files, Welfare would be obliged to send one of their own, probably overly-exerted, caseworkers to talk to me personally so he or she could file an independent evaluation of the case—and that at the beginning of the summer holidays to boot.
So yes, we did have the time. It was Barbara herself I had a problem with. There was something at once aggressive and insecure in the way she had approached us. She was definitely some kind of social outcast, her artist existence a thin veneer for her pathetic life on the fringe of respectable society.
But Alex was game. Barbara’s compliment had won ground with a boy’s pre-teen vanity. But it was more than that. Alex liked to draw as well. He had won a couple of art contests at school. It was mostly ninja warriors and skeletons armed with shields and a large arsenal of knives, swords, and fatal weaponry, but he was clearly keen to see what Barbara had done herself. Not to mention the hundred kroner—a sizable fortune that Alex rarely chanced upon for so little effort. His hopeful gaze rested heavily upon me.
“Sure.” I forced myself to smile at Henna-hair. “It seems he’d like that very much.”
“Yay!”
The woman clapped her hands affectedly like a teenager in a Disney movie and we followed in the wake of her flowing robes to the beaten-up van in the parking lot. The sliding door was open wide and there was a sign propped up against the wheel. Die schönsten Urlaub Souvenirs wird gezeichnet. 150 kr. A couple of laminated portraits in A-5-format were stacked next to the sign. I threw a disparaging glance at the drawings. They looked like those sentimental sketches you find in Good Housekeeping, albeit an amateur rendition. Children with large, expressionless eyes, hair that looked as if it had been glued into place. The shadows were grey and smudged at the edges. The noses were asymmetrical, the lips over pronounced. There were also a couple of aquarelle landscapes of the sea and beach and fir trees and houses in mint green, yellow, and beige. In the back of the van a flea-bitten German shepherd looked on with weary, amiable eyes as Henna-hair packed up her things.
“Did you draw all of these?” Clearly impressed, Alex nodded at yet another stack of laminated works in the back of the van.
“Yes. Shall we go? It’s just down the road . . . ” Henna-hair flashed her chalk-white teeth once more and motioned vaguely in the direction of the highway. “You could always stay for lunch, if you like. It would be fun. I have a wonderful little place.”
Free grub, I thought. At least that was something. My mood lifted a few degrees.
“Just down the road” proved to be an understatement.
We sped past the Welcome to Klitmøller sign and drove on for several miles without her showing any inclination of slowing down. On the contrary. The landscape flattened out into meadows and plantations of thin, sickly looking pine trees.
“Are you on holiday or do you have your own place in town?”
Our new best friend, Barbara, was smoking with her left hand nonchalantly resting on the rolled down window.
“We moved here a couple of days ago,” said Alex. “We have a house in town.”
“Marvelous.” She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. “This is a wonderful place to live . . . Isn’t the nature fantastic? It’s so peaceful. And you come from Copenhagen, I hear.”
“Hvidovre.” Alex was squinting at the landscape rushing by. “Will we be there soon?”
She nodded, pointing towards a barely visible gap between the pine trees. “I’m just over there.”
The van bumped down a sandy road in the middle of a plantation and stopped in front of a house that resembled my grandmother’s to a T: crumbling and dilapidated, consisting of three ramshackle buildings. Several stray cats raced up to meet us, rubbing themselves up against the warm tires of the car. To the west of the house, in what once must have been an herb garden, there was a junk yard of three rusty cars with grass and sapling trees growing through their bodywork.
Barbara followed my gaze.
“They belong to my landlord,” she said. “The house is great, but he’s a lunatic. I’m only staying here till I find something else. But come inside, come inside.”
She collected her shopping bags and led the way into the low-ceilinged kitchen.
“If you have something that needs to be kept cool, you can put it in the fridge,” she said, pointing to the crouching monstrosity standing in the middle of the room. The extension wires were yellowed by age, and when I opened the lid, I was met with the sour whiff of decomposition. I found space for my milk cartons and chicken inside, banged shut the lid, and followed Alex and the woman into the lounge.
“The light is good over here,” she said, motioning to Alex that he should stand in front of a man-sized, battered easel. Apparently she’d opted for doing a pencil sketch in a larger format than the drawings we’d seen in her van.
“Now if you’d just take off as much of your clothing as you feel comfortable with,” she went on. Alex looked less at ease now. He’d probably envisioned something more in the style of the polo-shirted portraits of children he’d seen in the van. He glanced nervously at me.
“It’s up to you, Alex,” I said. “We can just go home, if you’d prefer.”
He shrugged awkwardly, tossed his T-shirt on the floor, and sat himself down in profile as Barbara had instructed him to. The sun was streaming in through the window and cast a warm glow over his body, the black hair and hooked nose giving him the air and aspect of an upstart Greek god. Barbara got to work.
“Can you make a living on this?” I asked, looking around me. The coffee table at the opposite end of the lounge was overflowing with portraits, half-drawn sketches, cigarette ash, and dust.
“Umm . . . ” Her hands were moving in rapid strokes behind the easel. “It’s probably more a question of living for than making a living from it. I make a little money in town and sometimes customers send me photos to copy in response to an advertisement I have in the local paper. For parties and grandparents, you know. But I only charge a hundred and fifty kroner for a picture and they take a long time to do.”
I nodded. I didn’t know anything about art, but I noted that assembling arms, legs, and torso in some kind of orderly fashion made Barbara pull strained—bordering on pained—faces.
“Of course I would prefer to work on my own drawings,” she said. “Landscapes. And portraits like these. I’ve had a couple of exhibitions at Hanstholm library . . . but people aren’t very interested in original art. They would rather have a print of Monet hanging over the sofa, you know? Seen from that point of view, we live in a poor country.”
I suppressed a yawn. Barbara reminded me of my neighbors back in Hvidovre. There was a diffuse indictment of the entire world just below the surface of her words. I never get my just rewards. I would bet my next bottle of vodka that, at best, she had two paying customers per month, black market, of course, and that the remainder of her income consisted of a lousy pension from a social office that didn’t know what else to do with her.
I had a sudden urge to get the hell out of there, gratis lunch or not. I got up abruptly. Half an hour had long since passed, especially if you included the drive in the calculation.
“I think we’d better be going . . . ”
Henna-hair narrowed her eyes and bit into her lip with those all-too-white teeth of hers. She had a grotesque amount of make-up on her face. A thick layer of foundation gave her complexion the same color and texture as clay. Her lips were just as fire-red as her hair.
“Already? I was just getting started. Well then, I’ll just take a picture.”
She took out her mobile phone, and, squatting on her haunches, took a picture of Alex from a frog perspective.
“I work better from pictures anyway,” she said. “But won’t you have a drink while I make us a bite to eat?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Is that so?” She walked over to a yellowed pinewood cupboard and took out a nearly full bottle of vodka and two glasses. “And I thought we had something in common, you and I. Free spirits. There aren’t too many of us around here.”
I froze. There was a code underlying her words. An aggressive one.
“Alex, why don’t you go outside and play with the cats for a moment?”
He hesitated, trying to catch my eye, but I simply nodded and looked away, so he put on his T-shirt and went outside.
“What are you talking about?” I was having trouble hiding my annoyance. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been my cue to leave, but the fishwife had driven us out to the middle of bloody nowhere and . . . and Alex had earned his fee. She owed us one hundred kroner.
Barbara handed me a glass of vodka that I hesitantly accepted.
“I saw you,” she said. “At the store. I saw what you did. We’ve got the same taste in liquor, you and I. No need to worry, you won’t hear any recriminations from me. I know what it’s like not having money for the basic essentials. Believe me. But it’s either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to steal from the one and only store in town. You risk complete social exclusion. If someone had seen you . . . ”
I shrugged.
Social exclusion is a blessing if you’re not interested in talking to anyone, but I doubted very much that Henna-hair had a feel for the finer nuances of life in this regard. And I had Alex to think of.
“What I’m trying to say is: I like you,” she said, tying her long, red hair in a loose knot in the nape of her neck. Her long, false nails scraped against her dry scalp. “You’re different.”
I nipped at my glass. The liquor burnt pleasantly down my throat, but couldn’t quell the sensation of something crawling over my skin.
“You don’t know me at all.”
“But I know who you are,” said the fishwife. “Everyone in town is watching you. Poverty is embarrassing, and your story is . . . infested. It’s not easy moving to a place like Klitmøller. I came here myself from Århus five years ago. The houses are cheaper, but it’s a closed community. You are either in or you’re out, and right now, you’re out, just like me. C’mon, Ella, stay for lunch. The drawing is not nearly done yet.”
We ate hard-boiled eggs, sundried tomatoes, shrimp, and rye bread for lunch and sunbathed in tired garden chairs in the yard. I could feel I was getting sunburned on my nose, but after the second glass of vodka I didn’t give a shit. Barbara got her German shepherd, Lupo, to shake hands with his paw and roll over in the sand, making Alex laugh, a Faxe Kondi soda clutched in one hand.
We drove home in almost complete silence, Barbara with a fresh smoke hanging out the window, intermittently gazing into the setting sun. She had written her mobile number on the back of a bus timetable to Thisted and given Alex the hundred kroner she owed him.
“Great place,” she said, when she dropped us off in the yard in front of my grandmother’s house. “Like I said: the nature is fantastic; it’s good for the soul. Call if you need anything. You know where I live.”