Alex was sitting in our back yard trying to untangle a fishing line. His gaze was intense, his face locked like a fist.
He didn’t notice me standing in the driveway watching him. In the three weeks since our arrival in Klitmøller, the city boy had been replaced by a barefoot fisherman. Sandals simply got in the way; they filled with sand when you went on the beach, and this is where he was most of the time, either with Lupo or his fishing tackle over his shoulder. He had stopped wearing his T-shirt—to spare his clothes, he said. The muscles and tendons of his arms and shoulders played under his skin as he worked.
Up on the road, Magnus revved the engine of his car and drove off. We had listened to music on the way home and I jerked him off in a parking lot. It never got any more passionate than that and I doubted that I would be hearing from him again.
“It’s really cool you’ve got a son,” he’d remarked. “Were you one of those chicks who just couldn’t wait? Like in The Young Mothers?”
“Alex was an accident. There was nothing in the world I wanted less than a child.”
Exit Magnus with the beautiful locks of hair.
Alex looked up and smiled when he saw me. “Take a look, Mom.”
He pointed to a blue plastic bucket standing on the drive. It was filled with sand.
“What is it?”
“Lugworms.” He smiled broadly. “Thomas showed me how to dig them up with a spade. There are a couple of brush worms as well.”
He dug a hand into the sand and pulled out a finger-fat worm. Its body was covered in red hairs and it wriggled furiously between his thumb and forefinger when he held it up under my nose.
I grinned, knocking the worm out of his hand, and it fell onto the ground between us. There was a long red stripe along the ridge of its slimy body. Its blood supply line. You have to avoid this line when you attach the worm to the hook, or it will die and float motionless in the water. I could hear my father’s voice; see his rough fingers on the thin membrane of the worm as he slipped the hook in, twisting it around and up against the counter hooks; careful and gentle as an angel to avoid bursting its body.
“Did you know that those worms can bite really hard?”
Alex nodded. “They’re really gross, but I can sell them up at the camping site. Ten for thirty kroner. It’s better than collecting cans.”
“What about Barbara?” I shot a sidelong glance at the house. “Has she come back yet?”
Alex nodded without looking up, absorbed in untangling the fishing line once more. “She’s painting in her room. It looks like shit, if you ask me. Is she moving in? Nobody has said anything to me about her moving in.”
“Of course she’s not moving in.”
“I’ll paint over it again in a couple of weeks. But I wanted to give it a try. It’s going to be just marvelous, don’t you think?”
I glared at the bare walls for a moment before turning to face Barbara. She was wearing a pair of three-quarter Bermuda shorts, splattered with white paint, and a loose-fitting man’s shirt, drawing broad strokes over the floral wallpaper with a roller as she spoke, exhilarated.
“You could’ve asked first. This isn’t your house. It’s not even mine.”
“I’m here to help you, Ella. But I need to work or I’ll go stark raving mad. It’s a must, and besides, nobody can raise any objections to white-washed walls. Not even Bæk-Nielsen. It’s classic, for Christ’s sake. There’s something to drink in the fridge, if you want some.”
“No thanks.”
Barbara shot me a glance as she dipped the roller into the tray and continued painting with hissing strokes. She was painting the last wall in her room; she’d been very industrious while I was away.
“Come now,” she said, slightly out of breath. “It will be great. Take a look at some of the sketches lying over there.”
I glanced at the stack she had spread over the floor in a corner. They looked like murals depicting a religious motif. Priests and bishops and dukes in a raging tower of flames, their arms reaching for the sky, the Devil fucking a witch in one corner, a malicious grin on his face, and angels with rigid wings and golden trumpets.
“Are you creating the nave of a church?”
“I think of it more as a back-drop,” she said. “I like the idea of having all this around me when I sleep.”
“You could’ve done it at your place.”
She had taken up the roller again, and her back was turned once more. “The light is better here.”
Something unsaid quivered in the hazy dust between us. I gave Barbara’s mural with its clumsy Bible motifs another look. It was probably never intended to be either tasteful or beautiful, but in her hands, the pictures became grotesque—just like everything else she touched. Perhaps it wasn’t just because she was a lousy artist. Perhaps something in her vision consistently twisted reality.
“Do you believe in all this stuff? The Bible?”
“No.” She turned to face me, smiled her chalk-white smile. “I don’t believe in any of it. I believe in neither heaven nor hell, and I have always done as I pleased when it came to sex and alcohol. But I really like the paintings. They’re beautiful. And they portray the world as it is. Not in heaven or hell, but as things really are—here, on Earth. We have all been thoroughly done over by this fellow, for instance.”
She pointed to a furious devil hunched over a farmer’s wife. His cock was enormous and furnished with several prickly counter hooks along the shaft.
“Love hurts.”
“My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness,” I said, mostly to change the subject. “Do you know anything about them?”
“Yes, I do.” Barbara laughed. “They believe that the Day of Judgment is on our doorstep and that only a select few—those belonging to their church—will be granted access to heaven when that day comes. It’s quite an arrogant point of view, but I guess we all get caught up in our own beliefs.”
“Judgment Day.” I followed the contours of a sketch with my hand. Traced a finger along the flames of hell. “I guess all religions believe in some kind of judgment day.”
Barbara had started working with her roller again, covering the wall with long, determined strokes.
“All religions and the rest of us. Global warming, overpopulation, the loss of phosphates in industrial farming. The world is going to hell. The difference between the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the rest of us is that we don’t expect a savior to show up and rescue a select few—or any of us, for that matter. All we can do is prepare to die when the seas begin to boil. Fortunately, till then, we’ve got one another. Where have you been? Have you been talking to your grandmother?” She laughed again, but a sharp edge had crept into her voice. She sounded angry.
“Yes. I spoke to her a couple of days ago. She says my father is innocent. That someone else shot my mother. Or perhaps she shot herself. And she told me that my mother tried to commit suicide soon after she married my father.”
“Does it matter what your grandmother says?” Barbara was watching me intently now. “I thought you had decided to let things be. You know what happened. You saw your father with the gun, didn’t you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve started remembering. Nothing from that night, but bits of my father. He taught me how to fish. And my mother . . . I visited my aunt today. My mother had a friend. Someone who’d been excluded from the church—like she was. I think I should try to find this woman.”
“You should have spoken to me first,” said Barbara. “All Jehovah’s Witnesses are liars. Her whole life your aunt has been lectured that everything beyond the walls of the church belongs to the Devil; she doesn’t feel obliged to tell you the truth. I’m not saying this to upset you. But you need to know the truth. The truth about them.”
I traced a finger along my scars. The skin was pink, satin smooth; it didn’t feel as if the skin belonged to me. I missed Rosa. She had never been especially affectionate, but she was always the same, and she knew how to keep her distance when I needed some space. With Barbara there was always an angle. She expected the same obedience from me as a mother would expect from her daughter.
“I want you to move out,” I said quietly. “I’m okay now.”
“Are you?”
Barbara put down the roller and came over to me. She had been an attractive woman once—that much was clear. She was tall, her large breasts inviting, and without all that make-up I could see a glint of the intensity she must have radiated when she had a lover or an enemy in her sights.
“Are you really okay, Ella? You’re completely alone in the world, and nobody loves or takes care of you. That surfer guy isn’t here to stay, is he? Your phone never rings. Nobody from your previous life misses you, and half the time you’re lying on the floor, shaking uncontrollably. Does that sound like somebody who’s okay?”
She was so close to me that I could feel her red-wine breath on my face. She must have been on the sauce for a while; it was not just her breath, the alcohol was oozing from her pores.
My body prepared for battle. I had fought all my life. It’s exactly like riding a bike. The body never forgets. All the blows it has taken, all those it has delivered, are stored in the cells. You don’t have to think, just listen to the beat, and follow the rhythm.
“You have to leave,” I said.
She laughed. And for the second time that day, a woman opened her arms and pulled me close. “I’m going to be the first person you cannot scare away, Ella,” she said. “I will look after you.”
I stood stiff, rigid as a pole, although I instinctively wanted to kick free of her nauseating stench. Red wine and oily hair. In the absence of sexual attraction, physical contact had always been anathema to me.
“I want you to move out,” I whispered again. But I remained standing where I was. I was good at fighting, but not much else.
“I’m staying here for as long as you need me,” said Barbara against the skin of my neck. “I’m not going anywhere.”