Barbara drove me to Thisted station. I bought a ticket for the first stretch of the five-hour trip to Copenhagen and used the last of my cash for a bag of rye-bread rolls and a bottle of water.
The weather was beautiful; the corn fields bellowed in yellow waves under blue skies that made me feel sad, like when you watch a beautiful love scene in a film, but have already seen the trailer and already know that the lovers part in a hailstorm of vicious words in the end. Soon I would be surrounded by a landscape of telephone wires, road work, and asphalt playgrounds, but for the moment, everything was filled with the beauty of what once was.
The train conductor was a friendly, dark-skinned man who merely glanced at my ticket and hurried on. This gave me some hope that he would overlook me on his next round, perhaps just remember me vaguely but forget where I was headed. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. Made as if I was sleeping for half an hour, and then I actually did fall into a light, dreamless sleep with my legs tucked up against the edge of the table in front of me. The first time I woke, we were already in Southern Jutland and I ate two rolls with a little of my water at the stop at Fredericia. The next I knew, we were on the outskirts of Greater Copenhagen with a view of the concrete blocks of Høje Tåstrup, followed by the villa gardens in Valby, and finally, the filthy end of Vesterbro with its intricate network of railway tracks sprinkled with diesel-blackened stones and crossbeams. The electric lines loomed above, weaving in and out of each other under a pale night sky.
I called Jens again.
I still couldn’t get a hold of him, but when I did, I would personally break his fingers so he couldn’t open any more beer cans. I ducked into the S-train tunnel, hopped onto the train to Hvidovre, and jogged the last stretch of the way to Hvidovre Hospital along one of those anonymous highways leading into the city of Copenhagen.
Actually, she looked okay, Rosa, as she lay there on the starched white sheets. You could see that she had bumped her head, but apart from that, she had come clean with a broken hip and some additional patchwork to her already patched pelvis. It was after nine in the evening and visiting hours were over, but the nurse let me in with a reminder to be absolutely quiet. Not that there was anything else I could do; Rosa had just been wheeled out of operation number two, and her consciousness was still hovering somewhere in the deep. Jens had been in to see her about lunchtime, the nurse kindly informed me, but they’d been obliged to throw him out because he was making such a racket, clearly under the influence of alcohol.
I sat down on a chair by the bed and watched Rosa’s face of medicated calm; it was probably the best trip she’d ever had. At least that was something. How she was going to manage with a piss-drunk husband at home and a broken hip was another matter. But there was their son, of course.
I tiptoed out of the room and on down the corridor to the nurse’s station, where I carefully rapped on the window.
“Yes?”
It was a different nurse to the one I had spoken to earlier. An elderly woman with a round face and a sharp gaze.
“Rosa Jensen,” I said. “Do you know if her son has been informed?”
“Nobody but her husband has come to see her,” said the nurse. “As I far as I know, she specifically stated that her son should not be informed.”
“But you do have his number?”
She nodded. “Yes, we can find most things in the system.”
“So I could give him a call?”
“Ye-es . . . ” she began with a shrug. “I can’t prevent you from doing so. The number isn’t a secret, just hard to find when you happen to be one of several hundred Michael Jensens in Copenhagen.”
She had already pulled the number up on the screen and briskly scribbled it down on a yellow Post-it.
“There you go.” She handed me the note with a reserved smile. “I hope someone comes to take care of her. Else she won’t be getting out of here anytime soon.”
Rosa and Jens’s son was twenty-three years old and still plagued by pubescent acne.
I had nodded a brief hello to him on the staircase in Hvidovre when he came on one of his rare visits, but Rosa had never let me come close or talk to him, terrified as she was that both her own misery and that of her neighbors would scare him off for good. He shook my hand like a polite teenager when he arrived at the hospital, although we were roughly the same age.
“It was nice of you to call. I had no idea Rosa was in the hospital. But I managed to get hold of Jens on the phone. Jesus Christ.” He bobbed a little on his toes and avoided my gaze, and I could see an inkling of Rosa’s awkwardness in her son.
“Is Jens okay?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. He bawled the whole time, and it was hard to tell if he was sober or not. Jesus, I had no idea they had started drinking again.”
He sat down next to me on the low wall bordering the hospital parking lot and offered me a smoke that I accepted gratefully. I had already bummed two smokes off arbitrary passersby, but it was starting to get dark, and soon there would be no one left to ask.
“So . . . can you take care of her?”
He was staring at his hands. They were nice-looking, clean. He was a computer nerd, and—according to Rosa—a really bright one at that. Welfare had found him a good foster family and his somewhat stunted size and lack of coordination seemed to be the only damage inherited from a childhood in a concrete block in Hvidovre, a prenatal development in Rosa’s alcohol-stewed uterus before that.
“Can you take her in?”
He shook his head. “I live in a two-room apartment in Albertslund,” he said. “On the fourth floor. It’s not the ideal place to recover when you’ve got a broken hip, but I’ll see what I can do. Maybe I can check in on them back in Hvidovre . . . talk to Jens. Although he sounds totally spaced out. He says Rosa was pushed in front of a car outside Pub48. That she’d gotten into a fight with some redhead bitch. Somebody saw them arguing. Jens has flipped out completely.”
“Yes. Paranoia is one of alcohol’s most prized effects.” Suddenly I felt terribly tired.
“What about you?” He looked at me intently, all at once seeming a lot older than his twenty-three years. A wise old man in a young man’s body. “Rosa was worried about you when you moved out. She said you had made a private pact with the alcohol devil.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” I said. “I’m doing fine. Days can pass without me having a drink.”
“Wow. Entire days!” He laughed, and stubbed his cigarette on the wall. “Did she get you those names I found in the social registry?”
A moment passed before I realized what he was talking about. Of course. Lea Poulsen. He’d found something.
“No,” I said. “Rosa rang a couple of days ago and spoke to the woman who is staying with me, but I didn’t talk to her myself. Did you find that woman, Lea?”
“Yes. It’s not that easy to disappear in Denmark,” he said. “Although I must say this lady gave it a good shot. Five names in a space of thirty years, and a long line of different addresses.”
“But she’s still around?”
He nodded. “Yes. I don’t know all the details off the top of my head, but now I’ve got your number. I’ll send you a message, okay? Have you got a place to sleep?”
I shrugged. “I’ll figure something out. Probably take the first train back tomorrow morning. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, I’ll be getting back to my girlfriend, then. She’s four months pregnant, and she doesn’t like me going out at night. It makes her kind of . . . needy.”
He smiled crookedly, and it struck me that Rosa had been wrong. They hadn’t managed to fuck him up. He was solid. He had a stable core and a place in the world that couldn’t be shaken by what he saw in Hvidovre. I made a mental note to call and tell her so when she sobered up. She would probably get mad at me, but it would make her happy.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and made my way to the train station. It had cooled down considerably, and I hugged my jacket up around my ears. At least I’d had the foresight to exchange my flip-flops for a pair of sneakers, and I congratulated myself accordingly. Barbara wasn’t picking up her phone.
She didn’t pick up either once I got to Copenhagen Central Station and learned that the first train to Thisted was at five o’clock the next morning. The battery of my phone was almost dead and I hadn’t thought to bring a charger with me. I cursed. It was close to midnight and the night-life of Vesterbro was already crawling the streets. If I sat myself down in a bar on Istedgade and turned on the charm, I might be able to score a couple of beers to sleep on for the train home. Alcohol tends to soften the floor of the toilets on the train. It might even do something about the smell. I thought about Kirsten’s advice and what Michael had said about my consumption of alcohol.
Yes, I had been drinking more since moving to Klitmøller. I had been drinking too much. A natural consequence of my surroundings. The dunes, the roses, the lyme grass, and daisy chains. And Barbara. I pictured those long nails of hers, tap-tapping on the glass of a bottle of vodka. It wasn’t a crime to drink alcohol as long as you did it in the company of others, she liked to say. But it had to stop. Once I had finished my business in Klitmøller, once I had found what I was looking for, I would stop.
The bar I went into near Copenhagen Central Station was called Viggo. There was a dart board on the wall and a scratched pool table located at the back of the establishment. The kitchen was closed for the evening but the hint of roast pork and peas still lingered in the cloud of smoke and alcohol-sweat that bathed the guests at the bar counter. The clientele resembled the flock at Friheden so much that I experienced a brief, nauseating bout of déjà-vu, but there was nobody I knew, and nobody I had to talk to about anything other than the weather. I sat down next to a ruddy-faced guy in a checkered shirt, leaning my elbows on the counter. He was relatively old, an indecipherable age between fifty and seventy, and cast from a jovial mold. He was humming Aerosmith’s “Crazy” above the din of corny nineties hits coming from the loudspeakers overhead.
“It’s cold out there, isn’t it?” He nodded at my light jacket that I still had buttoned up to the chin.
I smiled.
“Perhaps you could do with something to warm you up?”
I decided to be honest and spare myself any unpleasantries later. “I’m broke,” I said. “I came here to visit a friend who’s in the hospital, and I’ll be on a train to Jutland first thing in the morning. If you’d like to buy me a drink, I’d be happy to accept, but there won’t be any sex, and no pawing of my tits.”
He laughed. “Good company can also be hard to come by. What can I get you?”
I ordered a beer and a chaser. Then I ordered the same again.