My childhood home looked the same as I had remembered in flashes.
A redbrick façade. A front garden with a patchy lawn, scoured by relentless salty gusts. The new owners had abandoned what was once a spacious lawn behind the house. Heather and tumbling roses crept all the way up the walls, their path broken by two wind-blown flowerbeds and a rusty swing. A plastic scooter was parked in the drive and a Disney princess ball had rolled in under the hedge, but other than that, there were no signs of life. The garage was empty.
I shot a glance at the neighbor’s blank windows, then strode up to the front door. I slowly reached out to touch the door knocker. It was cast in bronze, in the shape of a lion’s head that I remembered from a different angle—the feeling of standing on tip-toe to reach the knocker, the low metallic thud it produced—if I tried hard enough. There was no fear bottled in the sound. No inner tremor. Not yet.
I walked around the house, staying close to the walls. I could see names and hearts carved into the brick surface at a child’s eye level. I traced my fingers along the grooves till I was at back of the house. I like Tom and Annette and Anne-Mette came up repeatedly. Perhaps the names of girls who had lived there after me. Children living a carefree life in the room I had left behind. They had counted the same knots in the wooden ceiling, climbed into the same bathtub with salt and sand matted in their hair. Perhaps they went on to study at the Gymnasium or enrolled in the University in Århus to study biology or English Literature. But I was looking for something that belonged to me, some sign that I had been there also, and finally I found it, etched into the wall near the terrace sliding door.
Ella. 7 years old.
I sat on my haunches and stared at the lines cut into the dark brick. Of course I had known that the house existed, that it was only a couple of hundred yards from my grandmother’s house, but all at once, I could see her. Me. A girl. My house. I had lived here with my parents, with my mother.
Something warm pierced my chest—it felt like a crack peeling open. A faint vibration from the core of my body. I pulled out my flask of vodka and gulped down three mouthfuls. A donation from Barbara’s ample depot. The alcohol burned a hot trail down my throat, spreading calm into my muscles along the way. I stood up and carefully tested the terrace door. It wasn’t locked.
I hadn’t planned on breaking into the house. It seemed natural to open the door and slip inside the semi-darkness. My body remembered the place. It seemed to recognize the way the light fell through the living room windows, the creak in the wainscoting, the particular odor of the air that had penetrated the walls, that part of the house that would remain the same irrespective of who was living there.
I sat down on the couch in the corner of the narrow living room. Fragments of scenes played before me, voices from the depths of consciousness bubbled to the surface. Our couch had stood in the same corner. The lamp and the coffee table also seemed familiar. When I looked at the door that I instinctively knew led to the kitchen, I imagined I could see a figure, my mother, appearing there to ask me a question.
More vodka.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. Red shadows flickered on the insides of my eyelids, and then the images I had seen a thousand times in my dreams came to the surface. The pictures that crowded my nightmares in the dark.
My father raising his hand and hitting my mother in the face. She doesn’t defend herself. Doesn’t even look up. The faces are indistinct, but I know they belong to my mom and dad, and the fear keeps rising like water in a bathtub. A wild, wild fear that makes me scream, hammer against my dad’s back. And then the pain at the back of my head, the blood is flowing from my eyebrow, and it just won’t stop.
I took another sip of vodka, got to my feet, and climbed the stairs. Once again I had that strange feeling that my legs knew the way before my brain could register my location. The curve of the stairway, the door to the left that led to my parents’ bedroom, the door to the right that led to the bathroom—I let myself be sucked in, and then I was standing on the same blue bathroom tiles I had studied at close range as a child, balancing precariously on the edge of the toilet seat. I remembered my own smell, my bare feet, the distance to the toilet paper on the wall was much too great; you could lose your balance and tip over at any moment if you weren’t careful.
I knew it now, this is where he had hit me, where he had hit us. And as I tried to focus on the tile where the blood had trickled to the floor, an absurd thought intruded: an image of me making colored dripping candles there instead. There was nothing on the tiles, of course. The floor must have been washed a thousand times since.
It was hot in the bathroom. The sun came streaming through thin white curtains that had once been floral-print. I bent over the sink and let cold water run over my hands, splashed it onto my face and forehead. I went out onto the passageway once more and stared at the door at the opposite end. As a child I must have walked down this passage many times in the dark; woken by a bad dream, crawling into bed with my parents, simply going to the toilet. And in the mornings, I must have padded along the fir-tree floors on soft, bare little feet. The smell of wood, soap, and suds from my childhood penetrated my mind and I remembered a nightdress I used to wear. It was pink with little flowers on it and a white ribbon running down the front.
My feet carried me towards my bedroom door, twenty-one years had passed since I’d tiptoed down that passage in the dark, looking in vain for my mom and dad in their bedroom. Time wound backwards. I became younger and younger with every step to my old bedroom, and I thought I could hear voices—a ruckus coming from my parents’ bedroom.
Get out. A woman’s voice rises up out of the dark, sharply cutting through time. What are you doing? If there is an answer, it’s too soft for me to hear. More palaver and noise. Things being smashed against the wall—now the noise is coming from the living room downstairs. I sit down at the top of the stairs, terrified, my pink nightdress glowing ever so slightly in the dark. There is something evil in the house. I can feel it all the way down to the tips of my toes. Something that wants to hurt my mother.
Ouch, ouch . . . stop. Leave me alone . . . A woman crying.
I jerked myself away from the past and took another swig of vodka. With my free hand, I carefully opened the door in front of me and stopped short, my feet rooted to the ground.
The bed stood where it had before, built in under one of the slanted walls. In front of the window there was a white-washed table and on the floor a girl sat cross-legged, staring up at me.
“Oh, I’m sorry . . . ” I took a step backwards and lifted both hands in a gesture that I hoped was universally understood sign language for non-threatening behavior. The girl didn’t reply. She must have been about eight years old. Old enough to be home alone, and to know a strange woman shouldn’t be in their house. She had dark ponytails, high cheekbones, and a determined line about the contours of her mouth. She was not afraid.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, backing up even more. “I’m looking for your mom, but I guess she’s not home?”
The girl shook her head. “She’ll be back in half an hour. She’s at work.”
Shit, shit, shit. I nodded and turned to go. Whatever I managed to say would only make matters worse. If I got the hell out of there, the girl might forget all about me. Eight-year-old girls can be forgetful. Show them a lip gloss or a pink plastic pony, and the rest of the world disappears. Unfortunately, I had neither on me just then.
“I’m gonna go now,” I said, smiling. “Perhaps I’ll pop in again later.”
The girl fixed her calm, brown-eyed stare on me. “Wait. What’s your name?”
I didn’t answer, tried to smile again, and made for the door. I could hear that the girl had stood, that she was following me on almost silent stockinged feet.
“You’re welcome to wait,” she said. “I know how to make coffee.”
“No, thanks, that’s really kind of you, but . . . I’m actually in a bit of a hurry.”
I started moving down the stairs but realized that I had taken a little too much onboard this time. Everything was pitching under me and I had to hold onto the banister in order to navigate a straight course through a rocking universe.
It was so damn hot. Fucking Thomas. The whole escapade was ridiculous, I’d been doing just fine without his help. I had survived both my childhood and my youth, and one day, I would have survived my adult years without having known the details about what my father had done or why.
“My mom will be home any minute now.”
The girl jumped down and planted herself at the foot of stairs, perched one hand on her hip and twirled a pony-tail with the other.
“I really gotta go . . .” I tried to skirt past the girl without touching her, but this was proving to be difficult.
“I could get you a glass of juice instead, if you like.”
Again that steady, insistent gaze from a little grown-up. I was trapped. The vodka was no longer enough; I could feel the internal tremor penetrating my ribcage, up and outwards.
There is a man, it must be my father, standing in the dark in the living room with a telephone in his hand. He looks angry, but the words coming out of his mouth are kind and loving.
Of course we will be together. I’ll leave Anna. My love . . . please don’t . . .
The cut on my eye has stopped bleeding, but the back of my head is pounding. I am thirsty, but I don’t want anything to drink. I am afraid of him now; I must not fall asleep.
“Water?”
The child was standing in front of me with a glass in her hand that she thrust in front of my face. If she could have, she would have poured the water directly down my throat, exactly as she liked to do with her dolls, no doubt.
I took the water and drank, still standing with one hand on the banister.
“I think it’s the heat,” said the girl pragmatically. “You have to remember to drink enough water when it’s so hot.”
I gently reached out a hand and touched one of her long, smooth ponytails. She didn’t look like me, but she was the girl who was sleeping in my bed. An absurd homesickness took hold of me; my body knew its shape, and recoiled.
“I have to go now,” I said. “But thanks for the water. You’re an angel.”
“Not really,” said the girl, smiling for the first time. Proudly. She waved as I limped down the road, hoping that nobody had seen me.