Marie Skov still had a photograph of herself, her brother and sisters taken in the back garden of their childhood home at nineteen Snerlevej. In the foreground, her baby sister Lea sat on her nappy-clad bottom while big sister Julie, with braces on her teeth, stood at the back. In the centre of the picture, standing in front of a blue paddling pool, Marie was holding the hand of her twin brother, Mads. Each of them had a kazoo in their free hand; they had different shades of brown hair, but the same bright blue toddlers’ eyes. Marie thought it was funny how much the children looked like the adults they had grown into. Julie was very tall, Lea very cute, and Marie already looked ordinary, even then.
The photograph was one of the few to survive Marie’s mother’s frenzied attack with a pair of scissors when Mads died. The fever had come on suddenly and the doctors had assured Marie’s parents, Frank and Joan, that it was not their fault. There was nothing they could have done; it was a very aggressive form of meningitis. Even so, Joan had cut up all their photographs and screamed over and over that she would never forgive herself. This was not something Marie could remember. Julie had told her. Julie was six years older than Marie and seven years older than Lea and she could remember everything. It was Julie who had given Marie the photograph.
‘Here,’ she had said, as she put it on the desk in front of her. Marie had been about ten at the time. ‘Dad wanted you to have it. But promise you won’t show it to Mum, Marissen?’ she added. ‘It’ll only make her sad.’
Marie had promised.
*
Before Joan had had her children, she had been an art student at Kunstakademiet and had been predicted a great future. She was a weaver and inspired by female expressionists, whose paintings from the early twentieth century she reinterpreted in vast tapestry wall-hangings. They were best suited to large exhibition halls and public spaces with high ceilings, and she sold several. Once the children were born, she took a job as an art teacher at Dyssegårdsskolen in Vangede, but carried on weaving in her spare time, smaller pieces that Frank would sell locally for quite respectable sums. When Mads died, Joan had gone on sick leave but lost her job shortly afterwards. The loom was left to gather dust and Frank had had to drop out of his civil-engineering degree course. Even though they could live cheaply in the house on Snerlevej, which they had inherited from Joan’s parents, and even though their firstborn daughter, Julie, was a great help around the house, they could not make ends meet. Having to quit his studies was a big loss of face for Frank, who had promised his father he would make something of himself. Frank’s father had worn himself out working at a canned-food factory and had taken to drinking. When he was on his deathbed, he had regretted his wasted life. ‘Do you want smoker’s lungs like mine?’ he had rattled. ‘Rotten teeth? A fatty liver?’ Frank had sworn to his father that he would not squander his talents. His father had died soon afterwards.
Frank was forced to take work on a building site where he was soon promoted to foreman because he was good with his hands. But he loathed his boss, an unskilled oik, who was younger than Frank but had had the construction firm handed to him on a plate by his father, all ready for him to take over; Merry Christmas, son. The boss could not stand Frank either; he always frowned when he inspected his work and would order Frank to carry out practically impossible jobs on his own. Frank felt like punching the man’s nose into his brain, but instead he trailed a coin along the side of his car one day when he hobbled home from work, having put his back out after his boss had told him to move a large pile of bricks.
When Frank arrived home, Julie would have his dinner ready as usual. She was twelve years old now and starting to get fat. This irritated Frank. Joan had lost her looks – grief had made her ugly – and he almost couldn’t bear to look at her. She couldn’t manage anything, these days; it was as if she had lost her mind when Mads died. That was why Julie had to cook all their meals.
Frank was seething with anger at his boss. His back would hurt all weekend and he would not be able to work on his new shed. The old shed had burned down and his tools had been rusting under some tarpaulin in the garden ever since. God only knew if he would ever have time to finish it.
Lea and Marie were in their pyjamas and circling his legs, like starving pigeons. Frank asked the girls if they had remembered to clean their teeth. Straight away they opened their mouths as wide as they could and Frank inspected them. He did not want his kids to have rotten teeth. Some people never bothered with the little things, yet it was those details that defined social divisions in Denmark. Otherwise how would his kids be able to change social class as he himself had done? He dismissed the idea of ‘social heritage’. Frank had come from nothing, and when he was a boy, no one had cared about his teeth. His father would work, come home, watch telly or go to the pub, and his mother would sit in front of the telly or work night shifts. Frank and his brothers and sisters ate whatever they could find in the cupboard or they would make eggnog from five eggs and half a cup of sugar. But Frank had promised his father to be somebody. Once Joan went back to work and started behaving normally again, he intended to resume his studies. Until then he had to settle for being the best-looking and most overqualified builder in Copenhagen. He shaved every day, he had got himself dentures in Sweden, his clothes were impeccable, never expensive but immaculate, and he took an interest in the children’s teeth, their education and manners. He tidied up the front garden, he cleaned the windows until they shone and he disciplined their dog, Bertha, with a firm hand. None of the neighbours should be able to criticise his family.
Lea opened her mouth even wider and pushed in front of Marie. ‘Aaaaah,’ she said, getting on Frank’s nerves. He went into the living room to watch the telly.
The summer when Marie started school, Joan rediscovered her creativity and wove a wall-hanging that Frank managed to sell to Helsingør Town Hall.
‘And it was luck rather than design, let me tell you,’ he said to Joan, when he came home after having delivered it and slammed down four thousand kroner on the dining table in front of her. ‘Do you think you could try weaving something a little less glum? Otherwise we’ll run out of customers. Normal town halls want joy in their corridors, not hysterical women with snakes in their hair.’
‘But it was inspired by Caravaggio’s painting of Medusa,’ Joan objected. ‘Caravaggio invented the chiaroscuro technique – he revolutionised painting. It’s about light and shade.’
‘That’s all well and good,’ Frank said, ‘but I’m telling you, a little colour wouldn’t go amiss.’
But Joan started making clay figures instead. Tiny creatures with tortured faces.
‘How about making some angels with wings?’ Frank asked. By this time, he had been sacked from the building site and hoped to sell the figurines at various markets. But Joan refused, so Frank had to drop his market-stall plans; besides, people could buy much nicer ceramics in IKEA for next to nothing.
‘Never mind, it’s the process that matters,’ Joan said to the children, when Frank was out of earshot. ‘The product means nothing.’
Joan carried the figurines out into the garden and arranged them on the sooty spot where Frank’s old shed used to be. Marie, Lea and Julie stood in the living-room window happily watching their mother. She carefully adjusted the figurines so eventually they made up a witches’ circle of rugged ceramics. Then she straightened up and waved to her girls.
‘Mum’s having a good day,’ Julie said, and smiled.
*
Every day Julie and Marie walked home from Dyssegårdsskolen together and Julie always carried Marie’s satchel. When Julie went into the sixth form, she continued to pick up Marie from the after-school club and carry her satchel. Lea was too young to go to school yet and was looked after by one of their neighbours, a woman called Tove.
The walk home from school was Marie and Julie’s special time, Julie said, as they skipped along. Sister time, Julie called it. ‘We’re two peas in a pod,’ she used to say. Marie didn’t know what that meant. When they came home, Julie had to take Bertha for a walk. Bertha had been a Christmas present from Frank, who’d thought he had bought a cocker spaniel, but in less than six months Bertha had turned into a fully grown St Bernard.
The girls loved Bertha and only Joan complained about her size. Couldn’t they have got a small dog instead, one that would fit in her handbag? Frank said that a big family like theirs needed a big dog, though he conceded he had not thought Bertha would be quite that big. When Frank was at home, he would train Bertha and assiduously picked up her poo from the garden, but he was not home all that much.
While Julie walked Bertha, Joan and Marie would have a pretend tea party. Joan would perch on the edge of the sofa, and no one could hold an imaginary teacup in such a refined manner as Joan. She cooed over Marie and would kiss and hug her when she wasn’t sipping her invisible cup. ‘Where is Countess/Princess/Empress Lea?’ she would ask. Marie would pretend that Joan’s spiky hair was a queen’s crown and she would reply that Her Royal Highness/Countess/Princess/Duchess Lea was visiting Tove. ‘Oh, yes,’ Joan would say. Then Joan would want to hear all about her day at school. Joan remembered everyone at Dyssegårdsskolen. ‘Does Mr Nielsen still carry that massive bag around?’ she would ask Marie, and ‘How is Sune? Is he still making trouble during lunch?’ Marie would answer all her questions. Then Joan would ask if she wanted her to read aloud from a Donald Duck comic, and Marie would say, ‘Yes, please,’ and carefully snuggle up to her mother. Sometimes, without warning, Joan would burst into tears and press Marie to her chest so hard that Marie could barely breathe. When Julie came home with Bertha, it was time for a quick snack; ‘Hurry, hurry into the kitchen,’ Julie would say. While Julie wrapped a blanket around Joan and gave her some water, Marie would eat lard and salt sandwiches cut into soldiers in the kitchen. It was her favourite snack and Julie made it for her every day.
‘Mum is missing Mads a bit today,’ Julie said lightly, when she came out into the kitchen to Marie and softly closed the door to the living room. ‘You never recover from the loss of a child.’
‘Or a brother?’ Marie asked, with her mouth full of lard and bread.
Every day at five o’clock they would pick up Lea from Tove’s house and Marie could not wait to see her baby sister. She asked why they didn’t pick Lea up earlier so she could join in the tea party with Mum. ‘No,’ Julie said, ‘not until five o’clock.’ Marie would then get the buggy from the garage because Lea refused to walk the hundred metres home. Julie said that a four-year-old was quite simply too old to be pushed, but Marie just swerved the buggy from side to side in large curves, so Lea would laugh and stop behaving like a spoiled brat.
The list of things Lea would not do was a very long one. Eat up, for example, even though Julie made her sit at the table for hours. Or have her hair washed, even though Julie put Lea’s beloved dolly on a tall shelf out of her reach. Or come home with them from Tove’s house.
Marie, however, was a logical child and could not see the point of these battles. She just fetched the buggy and pushed it at racing speed to make Lea laugh.
Sometimes Frank would come back so late from wherever he had been that Marie and Lea were already in their bunk beds, Lea at the top and Marie at the bottom. Lea had threatened to cut the hair off all Marie’s dolls unless she got the top bunk, and Marie had caved in immediately. Frank would stumble on the runner on the stairs when he came home late. In the middle of the night, he would impress upon them the importance of getting a good education because working as an unskilled labourer was hell when you were intelligent and overqualified, especially if your boss was a moron. Lea asked him what a moron was, but Frank told her not to worry about it. Frank smelt of cigarettes when he came home late and occasionally of something sweet. When he inspected their teeth, Marie would hold her breath. Lea, however, just said, ‘You stink, Daddy,’ and Marie would curl all ten toes under her duvet.
Every evening Frank would ask Marie, ‘What kind of day has the best Marissen in the world had? Is she just as clever now as she was this morning, I wonder?’
‘A little cleverer, I think,’ Marie would reply happily. She was in her first year at school and her teacher had already remarked that she was very able.
‘I knew it,’ Frank said proudly, when Julie repeated the conversation she had had with Marie’s teacher. Frank had forgotten Marie’s parents’ evening and had failed to come home in time, so Julie had cycled to school on her own.
Sometimes Frank would nibble Lea’s feet if they stuck out from under her duvet. Then Lea would squirm with laughter and call out, ‘Again, again!’
On a good evening Frank would then say, ‘Only if my little Loopy-Lou has been a good girl. Have you?’
And Lea would reply, ‘Yes!’, even though it was a lie. But Frank would often bite her too hard and he got annoyed when Lea screamed.
Marie felt sorry for Lea when Frank got cross with her. Julie was forever saying to Marie, ‘You’re the apple of Daddy’s eye and my little treasure, and Mummy’s big, lovely girl.’ But she never said anything nice to Lea, so one day Marie gave Lea all her shiny stickers.
‘Are you sure?’ Lea asked, and dried her eyes on her sleeve.
Marie nodded. ‘You can even have the ones with the glitter puppies. Here you go.’
If only Lea liked going to school, Marie thought. Frank was brilliant at helping with homework – if you could be bothered to do your homework, that was, and Lea unfortunately could not. Doing homework with Frank was one of Marie’s favourite activities. ‘Sharpen your pencils, Marissen,’ Frank would say, ‘and I’ll be with you in a moment,’ and when he came up to Marie’s room, he would always bring tea and chocolate biscuits, and he knew the answers to everything and had really nice handwriting when he wrote numbers. You had to be good at maths if you wanted to be an engineer, Frank explained.
But Lea didn’t want to be an engineer – she wanted to be a rock star or a model – and it made no difference that Marie told her to try doing her homework with Frank.
Lea, however, did like drawing and every now and then Joan and Lea would draw together. They would both slip into an electric silence when they drew and Marie loved sitting in the kitchen, pretending to be reading a book, but secretly watching her mother and sister, who were lost in a world of their own at the dining table.
‘And up at the castle,’ Lea explained, making sweeping movements on her paper, ‘there are dragons as well. You can see in their tummies how many princesses they have eaten. That one has eaten eight.’
Joan studied Lea’s drawing for a long time. ‘I really like your figures, Lea,’ she said at length. ‘They’re simple, but you use clear lines and shapes. You’re telling a story.’
Lea beamed from ear to ear and Marie loved seeing Lea so happy.
Marie also loved Julie’s stories about the old days.
‘We were very happy,’ Julie would say dreamily, as she patted the sofa seat next to her. She would get Marie and Lea a bowl of sweets each, Dracula lollipops, Jenka bubble gum and liquorice humbugs and pull their small backsides very close to hers.
‘Mum and Dad would throw these amazing garden parties,’ Julie told them, ‘with Chinese paper lanterns, home-made salads in big, ceramic bowls, bread that you tore chunks off so shards of glittering, coarse salt would fall to the ground, and they would run an extension cable through the basement window so they could play records under the open sky. And nobody ever complained about Mum and Dad’s parties,’ Julie continued, ‘because they invited all the neighbours.’
Julie had been five years old when Joan discovered that she was pregnant with twins.
When Frank had come home from university that day, Joan pointed to two eggs she had managed to balance on a crack in the coffee table. Frank’s face had been one big question mark at first, but then he spotted four tiny socks on a chair, and on the stairs eight dummies had been lined up. Upstairs, on their double bed, Joan had placed a large paper heart and, at the centre of the heart, she had written that they were expecting twins. At this point, Julie jumped out of the laundry basket and Frank hugged them both.
Joan got pregnant with Lea when the twins, Mads and Marie, were only three months old. It came as something of a surprise. Still, if any family was going to have lots of children, surely it should be theirs?
They owned a big house.
Joan regained her figure the day after each birth.
Frank was a modern patriarch.
They were good Social Democrats, but not the dull kind.
‘Even the summers were longer in those days,’ Julie said, looking gravely at her sisters.
‘No, I’m telling you the truth,’ she would insist, when Lea refused to believe her. ‘The Chinese lanterns were prettier, the friends were funnier, the sun was out more and the problems were smaller.’
Marie couldn’t remember anything from before Mads had died. She couldn’t even remember Mads. Even so, she loved Julie’s stories. Lea was less impressed. ‘I don’t believe that,’ she would say, when Julie told her something, and when she turned ten, she could no longer be overawed by coloured lanterns, which you could buy for only ninety-eight øre in Søstrene Grene. When Marie showed her the photograph from the garden, she would narrow one eye and say, ‘Alright, the kid looks cute, but how do we even know he’s our brother?’
‘Surely you can tell,’ Marie said.
‘I don’t see it,’ Lea said.
When Lea became a teenager, she was completely done with Julie’s rose-tinted stories and recounted them in her own words: ‘When Mads died, everything turned to shit, big fat piles of St Bernard shit. Joan should have been offered counselling, but she was simply wrapped in a blanket, put on the sofa and given a lump of clay to channel all her talent into. Frank was so crushed by his broken academic dreams that he had to drink beer every day. And there was never any food in the house – oh, no, wait, there were tins of spag bol, which we would eat for days in a row, and we were covered with layers of dirt because no one ever bothered to wash us.’
‘That’s not true,’ Julie said, hurt. ‘We always had food and I washed you every single day. And Mum loved washing you at the weekends – don’t you remember? She even made her own bath oils, which she would put in your bath. We lived in a nice house – and why don’t you ever call Dad “Dad” and Mum “Mum”? And we were lucky that we were allowed a dog! No one in my class at school had a dog,’ she said, and added, ‘Being angry when you’re a teenager is normal, Lea, but now you’re just exaggerating.’
‘Exaggerating? Our brother died and Dad gave us a dog. Great move, Frank. Right until “someone” ran it over on Snerlevej in the dark. Splat and it was a goner,’ Lea said, in a loud voice.
‘You’re mean,’ Julie hissed, and slapped Lea across the face. Marie could see how much it stung because Lea’s eyes welled up. She had had a snakebite piercing the day before and had just cleaned it with hydrogen peroxide. Now she touched her lip gingerly.
If you ignored her facial piercings, which, as well as the two steel fangs, also included a tongue bar and a nose ring, Lea was beautiful. Her hair was long and dark, and she towered in the landscape on her platform boots. As she jumped to her feet and stormed out in a huff, she was at least as tall as Julie, but she weighed less than half as much.
‘Did Dad really run Bertha over?’ Marie asked Julie.
‘No, of course he didn’t. Sometimes you can be so naïve, Marie! Lea’s always making things up,’ Julie said.
Lea no longer lived at home. No one told Lea what to do, these days, least of all Julie, who was now married with children of her own. Julie dressed in long skirts and woolly roll-neck jumpers to hide the weight she had gained during her pregnancies. She had trained to be a nurse and had met her husband, Michael, during her initial practical training at Bispebjerg Hospital, where he worked as a porter.
‘Michael is an oaf,’ Frank always said, and Marie privately agreed with him. Julie and Michael had had two daughters in quick succession, Emma and Camilla, and that was just the way it was, Julie said.
‘On your gravestone, it’ll say, “She poured oil on troubled waters,”’ Lea had once remarked to Julie, who had promptly retorted, ‘Yes, and on yours it’ll say, “She made a big deal out of nothing.”’
Lea snorted and said that was the biggest pile of crap she had ever heard, but for once Julie simply shrugged.
Frank had been pleased when Julie started training to be a nurse. ‘Nursing is honest work,’ he said proudly. But then Julie met Michael, fell pregnant and quit her studies. Now she was working as a home carer, and Frank appeared not to have forgiven her. Maybe that explained why he constantly got at Julie, which encouraged Michael to join in. At family dinners and at Christmas, their treatment of Julie bordered on bullying as Michael and Frank egged each other on. Marie hated it, but never said anything because she had spoken up once and Julie had instantly given her ‘the look’ and later pulled her aside in the kitchen.
‘There’s no need for you to get involved. They don’t really mean it, Marie,’ she’d said lightly. ‘It’s quite enough that Lea flies off the handle over nothing. Let it go.’
Marie accepted the situation and she had to agree with Julie: Lea really did have a special talent for conflict escalation.
One evening Lea turned up at Snerlevej to fetch some clothes from her old room while Julie, Michael and their children were there. Frank had threatened to take Lea’s belongings to the skip, but her room was still untouched. It bothered Julie. ‘You’re spoiling her, Dad,’ she had said. ‘She’ll never learn that actions have consequences.’ But Frank just muttered that he’d get round to doing it soon and reminded Marie of what a softie he was. They sat down for dinner. Four minutes later Michael and Lea were having a row because Lea had referred to Julie as Michael’s lucky catch and Michael as Julie’s big mistake.
‘Stop arguing,’ Joan said, but no one listened.
Sobbing, Julie ran out into the kitchen; Marie got up and followed her.
From there they could hear Michael get himself worked up over something and it turned out that Lea had pulled down her trousers and mooned at him. Camilla and Emma were about two and four at the time, and Michael shouted that there was no bloody way he would put up with this in front of his kids and followed it up with a lot of swearing. Ah, well, everything’s relative, Marie thought, convinced that Michael’s fruity vocabulary was ultimately more traumatising for his young daughters than the sight of their aunt’s bare buttocks. Marie wondered why no one ever laughed at Michael. Or at Lea, for that matter. She thought they were both being ridiculous. But no one ever joked in the Skov family, and nothing was taken lightly. She wondered why. It was tempting to take Michael down a peg, tease Frank about his double standards, pull Julie’s leg affectionately when she became a little too prim, and Lea’s, too, when she became ultra-provocative. Michael carried on whingeing until Frank told him to shut up, and Joan finally managed to break through the inferno: ‘I told you to stop arguing,’ she said again.
‘Why does Lea do it?’ Julie wept in the kitchen and Marie put her arms around her sister’s large body. ‘Why does she always have to trample on other people?’
Marie didn’t know how to reply. If she had to be honest, she had often felt like mooning Michael herself, but she never had, obviously.
‘Lea was born a megalomaniac,’ Julie sobbed, ‘and that’s why she thinks she can walk all over us.’
When they returned to the dining room, Frank and Michael had gone and the children were watching television in the living room. Lea was sitting at the dining table holding Joan’s hand.
*
When Marie had started at medical school, Frank could barely contain his excitement. That summer Lea was ‘God knows where’, as he put it, so Marie was on the receiving end of his undivided attention. Marie was ambivalent about the experience. She wished the ground would open up and swallow her when Frank boasted to people that she was going to be a doctor and that she had inherited her academic talent from him, but it was lovely when he put his hands on her shoulders and called her ‘Dr Marissen’.
‘Medical school isn’t for losers, Marie,’ he lectured her one evening, as the conclusion to a lengthy monologue about how she had to hold her head up high and be confident. ‘A good doctor believes in herself. How do you think it’ll look when you’re doing rounds? Patients need to see authority when you enter a ward. It’s no good you sneaking along the wall, whispering to Mrs Jensen that she needs a new heart valve, is it?’
Marie almost burst out laughing at the scenario, but Frank looked very serious.
‘When I was studying engineering . . .’ he began.
That night Marie couldn’t sleep. Although she didn’t always recognise herself when Frank or Julie chided her for being quiet, there was some truth in what Frank had said. In the sixth form, her written exams had gone brilliantly, but her orals had been disastrous: she had received an irritatingly low six in history, for instance, which had dragged down her average. It wasn’t that she didn’t know her subject. She knew it inside out. But the moment she sat face to face with her teacher and the external examiner, the words refused to come out.
Marie met Jesper Just during freshers’ week at medical school. He was organising the event and it was now four years since he had been subjected to the introductory fun and games, along with other various types of hazing by which new students were initiated.
‘Medical school isn’t for losers,’ Jesper had announced, when he had introduced himself to the first years.
When Jesper and Marie had started dating, Marie worried that Frank would take an instant dislike to her boyfriend. Jesper drove an environmentally hazardous gas-guzzler, as Frank referred to cars like Jesper’s pearl-white Range Rover deluxe, and, to top it all, he had been ‘born with a silver spoon up his arse’. Frank himself had grafted for everything he had, not least his odd-job business, which he had started some years earlier, and his VW Transporter was purely a working vehicle. No one with a Copenhagen postcode needed a cross-country 4×4 for reasons other than showing off, and Frank didn’t like show-offs – indeed he didn’t as a rule like anyone who had been born rich.
But fortunately he approved of Jesper and made no attempt to hide that he was terribly excited at the thought of husband-and-wife doctors in the family.
Jesper was Marie’s first real boyfriend and her sexual initiation. He was absolutely mad about her. He licked her all the way from the tip of her toes to the hollow under her ear and bit her nipples a little too hard. He adored her breasts and complimented her on being slim while still curvaceous. But he also loved her sweetness, he said. Her shy manner and her bright mind. He stressed that he could never be with an uneducated girl, and what did Marie think about the old proverb that behind every strong man was a strong woman? Eh, yes, Marie thought that sounded just fine, and Jesper nuzzled his face happily between her breasts.
‘We’ll be the perfect couple,’ he whispered into her sweater.
They got married, and when Marie discovered she was pregnant, they took that in their stride. Jesper had graduated, was about to start work and would therefore be able to support his family. When Anton was born, Frank’s joy knew no bounds.
‘He’s a lovely little lad,’ he whispered, as he kept curling and uncurling Anton’s tiny fingers. ‘Can you see who he looks like, eh, Joan?’ Joan nodded, incapable of speech because she was on the verge of tears. She wove a wonderful tapestry wall-hanging for Anton’s room, her first in years. At the centre of it there was a big red sun, and beneath the sun a naked baby boy was kicking his arms and legs in the air. Above the sun was an angel with wings of soft white angora that Joan had worked over with a brush and the angel held its protective hands above the baby, like a heavenly umbrella.
With Anton’s arrival, Marie had started to worry about Frank’s obvious favouring of him at the expense of Julie and her children. Frank and Joan had never shown much interest in Julie’s girls, but Julie had said that was fine. Not all parents were born grandparents, she had said. Now Frank would lie on the floor, tickling the baby and rolling balls to Anton for a whole hour. No one could make Anton laugh like Frank did. Marie asked Julie if she was OK with it, but Julie brushed it aside.
‘Really, Marie, don’t upset yourself with such nonsense. I’m just delighted that Dad loves Anton. Look how happy he is. Some men find women a little difficult and God knows that Dad has been lumbered with enough crazy women to last him a lifetime. He probably needed a boy in the family and I’m happy for you. Stop worrying this instant.’
Julie gave her sister a hug and Marie breathed a sigh of relief.
Frank was so excited about his role as grandfather that he instigated a new tradition: family lunch at Snerlevej every Sunday. He built a brick barbecue in the garden, laid a terrace and bought garden furniture; he even got round to painting the new shed. He would grill steaks, drink red wine and tell everybody what a looker Joan had been when she was young.
Anton had transformed his grandfather.
Lea hardly ever turned up at these events and, if Marie was honest, it was a relief to avoid all the drama.
*
When Marie failed her end-of-year oral exam in medicine for the third time and had to tell Frank during a Sunday lunch that she was quitting medicine, he banged his fists so hard on the table that his plate of rissoles danced. The tears started rolling down Marie’s cheeks. She knew the syllabus back to front and could not explain why her mind had gone blank.
‘Marie will switch to biology,’ Jesper said. ‘She can transfer most of her credits and there are plenty of opportunities for her as a biologist. So just calm down, will you?’ He looked sternly at Frank, who shut up and flipped the cap off another beer.
‘Bloody hell,’ he mumbled, and swigged from the bottle. ‘I’d never have thought that of you, Marissen.’
Lea, who happened to be there to pick up her birth certificate, belched loudly and proceeded to declare that surely a degree was a degree and that, as far as Lea knew, Frank had yet to complete his education and should therefore back off. Lea would turn twenty soon and a thin chain hung from her left nostril to her left ear, her hair was dyed pitch black, she had a silver bar in her tongue, which she clicked, and five visible tattoos. One was a demonic-looking child that covered most of her upper arm. A few weeks ago she had told Frank and Joan that she had started training as a beauty therapist, and even though Frank thought training in the area of ‘beauty idiocy’ was ridiculous, Marie could still detect his relief that Lea was getting herself some kind of education at last.
‘Please don’t start arguing,’ said Joan, and Frank, who had half got up from his chair, restricted himself to sending his youngest daughter an evil stare.
A smiling Julie circulated a dish. ‘Yummy, this is delicious,’ she said. Marie passed the dish on. Jesper winked to her. He loved putting Frank in his place.
*
The biology course had a different tempo from that for medicine. When studying medicine, Marie had mostly been trying to keep up with Jesper, but now she had her own subject area and the time to master it. Even Frank limited himself to saying, ‘I hope you’re not going to let me down, Marissen,’ roughly once every three months, and Marie assured him that she would not.
Almost from the start of her coursework she developed a special interest in the immune system. Millions of white blood cells attacked bacteria and viruses and, in a complicated genetic interchange, determined a person’s state of health and longevity. Marie thought it was wildly exciting. In her fourth term she took a course in epidemiology with the famous professor of immunology and infectious diseases Kristian Storm. Her fascination knew no bounds. She learned about the Black Death that had killed almost half the population of Europe in the late Middle Ages, and about the cholera bacterium, which was regarded as the fifth most dangerous bacterium in the world. She learned about the Spanish flu that had claimed the lives of five million people across the world only a hundred years ago, and gazed tenderly at Anton, who was practically never ill. The vaccine was without a doubt the most amazing invention in the history of medicine, she thought. Benjamin Jesty must have been the bravest farmer in the world. It was he who in the eighteenth century had vaccinated his wife and two sons with pus from a cow that had died from cowpox. Jesty had noticed that the local milkmaids never fell ill from smallpox and he had wondered if this was because they had already been infected with a milder version of the disease from the cows they milked. Vacca was the Latin word for ‘cow’ and thus the word vaccine was invented. Marie thought it was mindboggling and could not imagine how Jesty had dared to use his own family as guinea pigs. He must have been truly convinced of his cause. Or truly desperate.
Later the vaccine was systematised by Edward Anthony Jenner. That was the first vaccine and it was live. Later still, inactive vaccines were added. However, it was the live vaccine that made the biggest impression on Marie. The thought of allowing yourself to be infected with a weakened version of death in order to develop resistance filled her with terror and awe in equal measures.
After the epidemiology course, Marie attended all of Kristian Storm’s lectures, and as time passed, she grew increasingly impressed by him. Storm would alternate his courses of lectures with writing papers and visiting Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. Here he headed the research station, the Belem Health Project, which monitored demographically 190,000 inhabitants in the former Portuguese colony. What was the child mortality rate among children who were breastfed compared to children who were not? What effect did newly introduced vaccines have on the population’s survival rate? Did impregnated mosquito nets help reduce the number of malaria cases? Storm and his local assistants would walk from hut to hut to interview every single family member about the state of their health. The result was a unique database.
With the database as his starting point, Storm had developed controversial views about infection. For example, he discovered that the longer a person was exposed to infection, the sicker they would become. The world of science got terribly agitated about his claims. One single bacterium or one single virus surely made the infected person just as ill as a thousand.
No, Storm said, referring to his database. Children who were briefly infected outside the home became much less ill than their siblings with whom they would share a bed night after night while the bacterium or virus worked its way through the whole family. The loudest outcry came when Storm argued that getting infected by someone of the opposite sex was worse. Absolute nonsense, said Storm’s critics. ‘Well, then, just take a look at my data,’ Storm said calmly.
Marie was spellbound by his confidence and courage.
Kristian Storm was primarily an immunologist, but he was also obsessed with responsible research.
‘And good research is almost a lost discipline in Denmark,’ he had said at a lecture where Marie had filled sixteen pages with notes. ‘Modern research is driven by money. No scientist can carry out research without a grant, and as it is almost exclusively the number of papers published in highly regarded journals which determine whether or not a scientist is awarded that grant, the main research aim of the modern scientist is thus to produce grant-generating papers. But do you think that these highly regarded journals are interested in publishing the outcome of failed experiments? Of course they’re not. The result is that modern scientists carry out less risky research. And this is a death blow to the discipline of research, trust me, because if no one is prepared to risk a leap of faith, how will we ever learn anything new? It might not matter all that much right now, perhaps not even in five years’ time, but one day it will be very clear – also to those blasted politicians – that we have ruined Denmark’s fine research tradition. I sincerely hope,’ he said, looking intently across the lecture hall, ‘that you’ll become good scientists! Real scientists. Driven by curiosity alone, not by competition and commercial interests.’
It was at the same lecture that Marie was introduced for the first time to Storm’s ideas about free research and strategic research. Free research was classic research, Storm explained, where the scientist strives to acquire new knowledge without knowing in advance how that knowledge should be applied. Within free research it was acceptable, yes, almost the point, that the scientist could freely explore their area of interest and be permitted to make mistakes because as long as the fumbling phase, as Storm called it and everyone laughed, was insightful, it offered a unique opportunity to discover something of genius. The vaccine, penicillin and X-rays: these three fundamental discoveries were all arrived at by a fortuitous coincidence. Two steps forwards, three back, and suddenly a flash of insight.
Strategic research, however, allowed no room for that kind of intelligent meandering, Storm explained, and there was no doubt what kind of research Storm preferred and carried out himself. He called free research ‘the door to the cathedral of truth’ and Marie’s mouth got dry just tasting the word. A place where you could work undisturbed, seek answers to the big questions of natural science and get as close to the truth as possible.
‘Until now strategic research has mainly been a matter for industry. But in recent years, where ignorant politicians have demanded a shorter route between research and invoicing, it has started to infect the universities as well, regrettably,’ he continued, while Marie scribbled furiously on her notepad. Storm was angry with politicians and outraged on behalf of Denmark as a research nation. It was a policy that looked attractive in the short term because industrial productivity would rise, but in the long run it was an admission of failure.
‘Politicians don’t like investing in free research so they call it “investing risk capital” or, in plain Danish, throwing money down the drain. And, yes, free research might cost more, but at the same time it’s our only opportunity for new breakthroughs and revolutionary results. If Denmark is to participate in international, elite research, we need to return to free research; so, mark my words: let your work be driven by curiosity. Be nerds. Focus your attention on what looks weird and doesn’t fit with your expectations. Ask the difficult questions. Look under every stone.’
*
After the fifth term, the students had to write their bachelor dissertations and Marie heard herself say that her subject would be immunology and that Kristian Storm would be her supervisor. She was with a group of fellow students at the August Krogh Institute in a break between two lectures and everyone who heard her raised an impressed eyebrow.
Marie ran to the Ladies and locked herself into a cubicle. What had she been thinking? Everybody wanted Kristian Storm as their supervisor. He was the most high-profile scientist at the Institute of Biology and the main reason that the Department of Immunology was still a crucible of modern international research at a time when other departments were closing. How could she have said something like that? Kristian Storm didn’t even know who she was.
It was not until Christmas that Marie braced herself and wrote an email to Storm; within a few hours she received a response, telling her to turn up at the institute the following day at ten o’clock, bringing her subject reports and exam results.
That night she was unable to sleep.
‘What are you so scared of?’ Jesper grunted, annoyed when Marie turned over for the umpteenth time. ‘Go to sleep.’
*
‘I wonder why you’re so nervous,’ Kristian Storm observed amicably when their conversation had been going for five minutes. His sparse grey hair stuck out as if he had just been asleep, but he was wearing a gaudy shirt that had been ironed for the occasion. His gaze was weatherworn and insistent. Marie was ashamed that her nerves showed so clearly. Storm flicked through the report from her first year and waited patiently for her to reply, but Marie was lost for words.
‘Low marks in all your oral tests,’ he then said, ‘and top marks in all your written ones?’
Marie gulped. ‘Yes, I . . . eh.’
‘Aha,’ Storm declared and looked at her across the half-rim of his spectacles. ‘Performance anxiety. That won’t get you very far.’
Marie left with her tail between her legs. She was pathetically grateful that he had at least been kind. However, by the time she got home, Storm had already emailed her. He had agreed to supervise her dissertation.
*
Marie started to frequent the Department of Immunology at the Institute of Biology, Universitetsparken 15, Jagtvej, more often. The department consisted of Storm, its head, and his former PhD student Thor Albert Larsen, some thirty years his junior, as his deputy. They were supported by a handful of temporary appointments whose research was financed by a patchwork of fixed-term grants. Storm and Thor also shared the supervision of five PhD students and nine master’s students. While Marie completed her third-year undergraduate courses, Storm gradually included her in his laboratory work, let her co-write several of his more general publications about clinical immunology and taught her to think like a scientist.
‘Hmm, you’re somewhat rusty,’ Storm said, when he tried to gauge her opinion about something and she had no idea what to say, ‘but you’ll pick it up, of that I have no doubt. Have you never learned to debate? Didn’t you ever disagree in your family?’
‘Not officially,’ Marie said timidly. ‘When I was a child it was best just to agree with my dad. Anything for a quiet life.’
‘Well, you can forget all about that,’ Storm said firmly. ‘You can have peace when you’re dead. And I tell you, if you don’t know yourself what you think, you’ll never be able to convince anyone else.’
Marie lapped it all up. Storm always listened attentively to what she said and quoted her so often that she started to believe in the validity of her ideas.
They also laughed a lot in each other’s company. That was almost the best thing about Storm. He was filled with infectious laughter.
At night Marie would fall asleep the second her head hit the pillow, happy and exhausted, before Jesper had even brushed his teeth. When she finally woke up in the morning, he would complain in a surly tone that not even an elephant could have roused her.
‘But what about a tyrannosaurus?’ said Anton, who had climbed up on their double bed.
‘Definitely a tyrannosaurus,’ Marie said, and started tickling him. ‘Everybody knows that they make an awful lot of noise.’
Anton squealed with delight and Jesper could not help smiling.
*
The only cloud in Marie’s clear blue sky was Thor Albert Larsen. He seemed almost hostile, she thought, and if they happened to pass each other in the corridor, he would barely acknowledge her. Storm never commented on his obviously rude behaviour and, to begin with, Marie found it baffling. In time she realised that Storm was above such pettiness. He never spoke ill of anyone and he never indulged in gossip.
‘It’s probably because of what happened to his father,’ Marie overheard one of the master’s students say to the department’s lab technician in the senior common room where she was sitting with her sandwiches.
‘You see,’ the postgraduate continued, when the lab assistant looked blank, ‘when my father studied medicine in the 1980s, Storm’s father, Birger Storm, was professor of medicine at the Faculty of Health Science and a highly respected scientist in internal medicine. One day, out of the blue, a female colleague accused him of sexual harassment. I believe it was one of the first really big sexual-harassment cases and the media was all over it. Birger Storm was forced to take leave while the allegation was investigated because students would walk out during his lectures. It wasn’t until he was cleared in court that he dared return to the university, only to discover that mud has a tendency to stick. He killed himself shortly afterwards.’
‘No!’ Marie exclaimed. The lab assistant and the postgraduate student both looked at her.
‘Yes,’ the postgraduate said, ‘so no wonder Storm is completely allergic to intrigues. I would be too.’
Marie was overcome by the urge to go straight to Storm’s office and tell him how awful she thought it was that his father had killed himself.