Close your eyes and touch your nose with your right index finger.”
I did as I was told. I was used to being asked to behave like an idiot. In a moment he’d ask me to repeat the exercise with the left hand, and then he’d ask me stand on one leg, then look up and down, and sideways. The shaking had already stopped in the ambulance, but the staff outside the hospital had dutifully wheeled me into Emergency, which had sent me to Neurology, which had sent me to Psychiatry with all the other shaky people.
They didn’t dare touch me at Neurology. MRIs cost a packet and all attempts to diagnose me with anything other than “uncontrollable shaking” had, till now, proved fruitless. I was checked for epilepsy and brain tumors and nervous diseases and life-threatening conditions, but there was nothing to be seen that the real doctors could hang their hats on. My brain persisted in depicting a fine, uniform grey mass on their screens. It practically beamed with vitality, as they said—not without a small measure of admiration. But this fine mass of grey matter obliged doctors to pronounce a psychiatric diagnosis, and the most awkward of its kind to boot: hysteria and neurosis. And after the charming environment of Neurology I found myself relegated to the worn linoleum floors, the heavy, brown curtains, and scratched tables of the waiting room in Psychiatry. I’d been there for two days, but this guy was the first doctor I’d spoken to.
“And now with the left hand . . .”
The doctor, a two-meter giant, sounded just as washed-out as I felt. He had, no doubt, skimmed my file with those little reading glasses of his.
“Panic attacks?” he asked, once we’d been through the gymnastic exercises. “You’ve had episodes of this kind before?”
I shrugged and traced a finger along one of the long, thin scars on the inside of my forearm. Something I almost always did—without thinking—when someone wanted to talk emotions. When I was a teenager, I’d had a predilection for decorating my body with razor blades. Before I was old enough to buy vodka, this had been a particularly effective way to tone down the fear. It had been years since I’d made my last cut.
“For once, we’ve got a free bed,” he said. “You’re welcome to spend another night here. Perhaps we ought to adjust your meds. New ones come onto the market all the time, and it is, after all . . .” He paused, turned to his computer and pushed his reading glasses up his nose. “It is, after all, a whole year since you’ve last been here.”
I fought a sudden urge to be blatantly honest. I never took the antidepressants they prescribed. The meds did not work. They just made me soft in the head and unbearably tired. The fear sat in my bones—not in my head—and when I felt an attack coming on, it was the vodka and soap operas that made me feel better. The Family on the Bridge on TV3. Gustav and Linse. Or a documentary about people with weird diseases. But I couldn’t admit this to a doctor—no matter how trustworthy he seemed. Doctors had a heightened duty to report to the authorities, and Welfare could scrap my social benefits if I refused treatment.
The great thing about having a so-called “organic anxiety syndrome” is that the potential range of treatment is never-ending. The people at Welfare started each and every conversation with a new, optimistic prognosis. My capacity for work could, in principle, have doubled in the interim. Had the frequency of attacks diminished? Not likely. But there was certainly cause for a fresh occupational initiative, a new offer for a subsidized job—or what about a newspaper delivery route? The possibilities appeared endless from the bottom of a trash can; there was plenty of blue sky to reach for.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I just want to go home.”
He nodded. “Is there someone we can call who could help out a little back home? You must be . . . physically exhausted.”
He was right about that. I felt as if I’d run a marathon and my T-shirt stank of sweat. It still bore signs of my tussle in the mud with Alex and I’d had to stuff the pair of baggy underpants the hospital had given me down so they didn’t stick out of my tight denim shorts.
“I’ll manage,” I said, trying to sound flippant. “There’s nothing wrong with my legs.”
Self-irony suited people on the dole and psychiatric patients alike. Without it, we were not only crazy but devoid of charm, and then not even professional caregivers would touch us with a barge pole.
The doctor smiled despondently as he picked at the grey bristles on his chin. He tried to pin me down with his eyes.
“The particular kind of episodes you have are unusual,” he said finally. “It’s rare to see such extreme symptoms without some physical foundation. Do you have any idea what could trigger them?”
In a split second I heard the roar of the breakers, like thunder in the dark.
“A bad gene pool,” I said. “Did you know that if you cross a kind and docile dog, a golden retriever, say, and a bat-shit-crazy pit bull, the whole genetic system short-circuits? When my parents got together, it was like a wolf fucking a sheep.”
“That’s not quite how it was phrased in the books on genetics I have read,” the man said in a conciliatory tone. “Have you ever heard of PTSD?”
I shook my head, feeling an all-consuming craving for a smoke. I hadn’t had a cigarette since early that morning; I’d managed to sneak out onto the lawn in front of the main entrance and power-puffed on a smoke before a guard came over and told me to get lost.
“They used to call it shell shock. During the First World War, a number of soldiers came back from the trenches with physical symptoms that couldn’t be linked to any physical injury. They were blind, or lame, their muscles reacted in spastic movements . . . uncontrollable shaking. Like yours. Residual stress and fear from the trenches that flipped certain neurological switches. I’m a doctor, not a psychologist, but I’m not blind to the fact that sometimes it’s a good idea to clear up a little in our past. Find out what has shaped us.”
The breaking of waves again. The wind, the sharp smell of the ocean.
“I can’t remember anything,” I said.
“Unless you have a very unusual brain, that’s a lie.” His voice was laden with the authority that came from having passed judgment on idiots from behind his desk for the last thirty years. “All our experiences are stored somewhere in our brains and if the right buttons are pressed, a dark corner can be exposed to a sudden sharp light. Like the pop of a flash in a cellar. You can get help to find that button, Ella . . .”
“Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I know exactly what I am.” I met his gaze. “The nurse said I could go now?”
I had a hand poised on the pack of smokes in my jacket pocket and he nodded without taking his eyes off me.
“Have you got money for a bus home?”
He held up a twenty-kroner coin between his thumb and index finger. I took it like a schoolgirl being sent into town by her mother, all the while neurotically calculating how many smokes the coin could buy me. When you’re short of cash and have plenty of time, there’s no need to take a bus. As I said, there was nothing wrong with my legs.
The moment Rosa opened the door I could see from her face that something was wrong. It was more red than usual and the too thinly-plucked eyebrows were drawn together in a frown above her water-blue eyes.
“Ella, I sent Jens to get you at Bispebjerg Hospital. At first we thought you’d been taken to Hvidovre. I called . . . ” She ran her red hands through the brown-and-platinum-blonde hair. “Well, he’ll probably come back, when he can’t find you. They’ve been here to get Alex.”
A cold fist grabbed my guts.
“Who . . . who came to get him?”
“Welfare, of course; that foster mother of his from West Buttfuck Farm, followed on the heels by your social worker. They waltzed in here and gave Jens and me the beady eye, as if we were a couple of convicted pedophiles.” Rosa looked at me as if I’d been personally responsible for the insult. “They told him to fetch a couple of his things from your place, and then they just left. Yesterday. We tried to get hold of you.”
I cleared my throat. Picked at the smokes in my pocket.
“How did Alex react?”
“He was dead calm,” said Rosa. “But he wasn’t happy about it. That much was clear. He was white as a sheet, and his eyes looked all weird. They asked where you’d been taken, but I didn’t know, for fuck’s sake. And I was tired. The boy screamed all night, you know, the nightmares. I tried putting a cold cloth on his forehead. My mom used to do that . . . ”
She trailed off. The Welfare people were her worst nightmare. They had been ever since the day they came and took her son. It was the way they looked at her, she once told me. Everything they knew. Personally, I had trouble believing that anyone at the welfare office still read Rosa’s file. She’d been awarded her pension and could, in principle, take care of herself, until she clocked into the big welfare office of eternity. But of course it was there, her file. And all sorts of awful and shameful things were written in it.
“Okay.” I breathed deeply and tried to smile at her. “It’s probably just a misunderstanding. They probably just mixed up the weekends he’s supposed to go out there.”
Rosa looked at me with an inscrutable gaze. Her water-blue irises jerked on their blood-shot background; a legacy from a life as an alcoholic made it difficult for her to maintain eye contact with other people.
“Be careful what you say and do, Ella. You know what can happen once they’ve gotten wind of some crazy idea. Whatever you say is wrong. It gets used against you. They twist everything.”
I didn’t care for the note of comradeship in her voice. As if we were sworn compatriots. This was not the same as what happened with Michael. There was no comparison.
I spun round and went into my own apartment. I found a pair of jeans in the washing basket and grabbed a clean T-shirt. Then I packed a bag for Alex. He’d forgotten most of his things. His school books, his favorite T-shirt, and the only pair of jeans he had without holes at the knees were still lying on his bed. I had a painful lump in my throat, but Rosa came over and sat down on a chair at my kitchen table and this put a damper on my emotional outburst. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, but for once, she offered me a cigarette in a silent gesture of solidarity. Rosa never stood on ceremony and she was pretty stingy, but she wasn’t completely devoid of empathy.
“Has Jens come home with the car?”
She nodded.
“Can you give me a ride?”
She nodded again, jiggling a pair of car keys that she’d pulled out of her padded vest pocket.
“I’m ready when you are.”