I noted that the message from Michael had come in at three in the morning when my phone slipped out of my pocket for the third time and landed on the floor under my barstool.
My ruddy-faced new best friend, Morten from Vanløse, had bought me four shots and three beers and everything was coming at me in a delayed succession of waves. The light from the spots in the low ceiling unraveled into dashes and Morten’s arm reached for the beer on the counter in clips of motion to his lips and back again. We had long since stopped talking, were just sitting there next to each other, enjoying our respective trips for ourselves. I sat submerged in the pulsing heat, lucky to have registered the fall of the phone from my pocket at all. It was a surprisingly arduous and complicated task to bend down and find the finicky little devil on the floor.
I squinted at the display.
hi ella, here’s what i could find . . . please note that some of this information is confidential. a favor for my mother. okay?
Idiotically, I nodded in agreement before reading the list Michael had inserted below his message:
1961-1984 lea finnbogadottir lives in thorshavn, faroe isles.
1984 marries, takes on the name poulsen and moves to århus.
1989 divorces, moves to holstebro, then viborg, then back to århus.
1994 changes name to christi johansen, no fixed address.
1997 changes name to helena petersen. lives in holstebro.
2009 changes name to barbara jensen and moves to hagevej 7, klitmøller. this is her last-known address. something else i thought might be useful: in 1990 lea poulsen was charged with kidnapping and gross negligence. she picked up her two boys, aged 4 and 5, from kindergarten and took them to an apartment in århus. she was high on drugs, only checking on the boys sporadically. a friend found her, took the boys to hospital, where they received treatment for dehydration etc. the boys were returned to their father. the court denied lea any further contact with the boys.
I leaned against the bar, reading the message again with great difficulty. I had to keep squinting to prevent the letters from flooding over the ends of the display.
The world was so incredibly small, everyone was connected; Barbara was on Michael’s list. I downed the last of my beer, and read the list again with a creeping sense that I had missed something. Lea became Christi who became Helena who became Barbara, but it was only once I read the message out loud to Morten that I understood what it meant.
Lea was Barbara, and Barbara had been lying to me all along. That’s what it meant. Barbara had known my mother. She’d been my mother’s best friend. And now she had Alex.
The nausea that had been stalking me all evening swelled upwards as the realization dawned, quickly followed by images of the implications. Alex was alone with Barbara in my grandmother’s claustrophobic little living room; those long nails in his hair, against his neck. I didn’t know what she was capable of, but there must be a reason why she had wrapped herself in such an intricate tangle of lies.
I leaned on the bar and got to my feet, knocking my glass over on the counter in the process. I needed to get to the exit, but the door was a blurry quadrangle framed in matte-black panes on the other end of the room, and the air was an impenetrable barrier of smoke. I tripped over the leg of a barstool, banged my shin on the edge of an unexpected step, and chafed my chin on the grain of the pinewood floor as I hit the deck. Someone helped me back onto my feet and I managed to fight my way out onto the street in the hopes of finding a quiet corner.
The next implication took shape as I twisted my ankle on the cobblestones and landed on my ass on the sidewalk. Pain shot up from my coccyx. At best, there were six hours separating me from Alex and Barbara. More, if I waited for the next train to Thisted.
I needed to get a hold of someone to drive me home. But there was only one person I knew who would come and get me in the state I was.
The telephone rang and rang in Jens and Rosa’s bedroom, and I let it ring till the beep at the end. Then I called again. And one more time. Mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. My thoughts were slow, soft as cotton-wool in the midst of my panic. After the fifth try, Jens finally grunted something into the phone.
“Jens . . . can you come get me?” I could feel that I was on the edge of tears. He was a ship a long way off on a wildly whipping sea.
“Ella? Where are you?”
He sounded tired, but clear-headed. Sober. I closed my eyes and thanked heaven and a host of gods I didn’t usually make a habit of calling upon.
“I’m on Istedgade,” I said. “Jens. You need to help me get home. Now. There’s something wrong with Alex, and I can’t . . . ”
My phone cut out. I was standing on the curb, alone with the noise of the road; drunkards calling after hookers on Helgolandsgade, the smash of bottles against the cobblestones, high-pitched laughter. I collapsed onto the stone steps in front of a darkened apartment building glaring at the dead screen on my phone. I rested my forehead against the cold of the wall, stuck a finger down my throat, and threw up on the steps.
Some time passed as the world revolved around me. A young couple touched my shoulder and asked me if I was okay. I was just fine, thank you. A man tripped over my feet, and swore loudly, as did two young girls who came out of the apartment building, swerving to avoid me and the pool of sour vomit on the steps.
Throwing up had helped to clear my head a little, and the cool evening air gradually made it easier to focus. At last I saw Jens’s lemon yellow Volvo coming down Istedgade at a snail’s pace, Jens’s upper body hanging halfway out the rolled down window. Finally, he pulled up to the curb next to me and waved jovially.
“Hop in, Beautiful. You can fill me in on the way there.”
“I am very drunk, Jens,” I said, leaning hard onto the glove compartment. “But she has got Alex.”
I didn’t hear whether he answered or not, I dropped out of time, but at one stage, I woke up and heard him talking next to me. About Rosa. That she had been far too drunk to be running around alone in the middle of the night.
“It’s a dump,” Jens was saying about Pub48. “It’s just a pile of shit-faced people up to no good.”
I tried to nod but my head kept lolling forward onto my chest. Rosa had been just as pickled as I was. And then an idea crossed my mind, slow as tumbleweed blowing in from the prairie.
“Rosa talked to Barbara, who is staying with me, didn’t she? On the telephone. They were on the phone for more than twenty minutes. She told Barbara everything, didn’t she? About the names Michael had found in the social registry.”
Jens shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, Ella. I can’t remember shit from the last two weeks.”
My brain protested against the strain of coherent thought. Through the window I watched the lights of the city trail like the tail of a meteor across the night sky. I resorted to help from my fingers. First came day one, day two, and finally day three. On the first day, Rosa talked to Barbara. On day two and three, Barbara was away without telling me where she was going. It was on the last day that Rosa ended up under a car in a drunken stupor outside Pub48 after an argument with a redhead. The fingers added up.
I threw up in a crumpled Netto bag lying on the floor in front of me.