Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Tabitha had taken her exclusion from Debora’s group of vengeful women as the beginning of a new era. All the rules had held her back, and all the secrecy about their real names and identities had seemed childish. Eva was a ridiculous name. Her own name, Tabitha, was also from the Bible anyway.
She was a grown woman, and she was intelligent, so why the hell should their preaching restrict her?
Oh, so you want me to stop hurting people, Debora, she had thought when she had left the house. Who was she to decide that?
It took her a few days to think about how far she wanted to go. She naturally did not want to be caught by the police again, but, if it happened, she would tell them that she had been brainwashed by Debora. She could deal with a few months of so-called deprogramming in a psychiatric ward if it meant that Debora would be the one going to prison. Tabitha would relish seeing her being picked up from her fancy house, with all the delicate china cups and cake forks and all that kind of shit, and dragged off to the slammer. The word made Tabitha laugh.
She was ready to kick things off.
It all began quite innocently. Debora had been sitting in the corner of a café writing notes at a table already bursting with croissants, cakes, and coffee. Tabitha had sat down at the next table and smiled at Debora’s excess as she complained about the waitress being slow. And before long, they were sitting at the same table talking about the world and Denmark and the people they came across, and about how everything and everyone in the country was going to the dogs.
Tabitha later realized that it was a carefully rehearsed process that Debora used to recruit suitable members for her group. She praised Tabitha, called her classy and clever, and listened to her like no one else; it put Tabitha in a euphoric state where she not only felt special but also chosen.
She did not fully realize that she had been handpicked for a crusade against immorality until the day when she stood smiling after having given a tourist a slap across the face for spitting on the floor in a McDonald’s.
Tabitha loved her new role, and no one who challenged her ethical worldview escaped. She was ever-vigilant and came down hard on the perpetrators with tirades, slaps, and sometimes worse. Her enemies were pickpockets, petty officials, shop assistants who left their customers waiting, cranky bus drivers, people shouting in the streets, people who pushed by when they went past or just pushed to the front of the queue, and people who gossiped or bad-mouthed others. It later became lecturers who canceled lectures and know-it-alls who said “obviously” in every sentence and manipulated others. These people were everywhere when she looked around, and she learned to despise what she called “societal decay.”
At the monthly group meetings when Tabitha gave an account of her activities, Debora was over the moon, and she felt like a warrior fighting for her country. She had not felt the long arm of the law until she was arrested on the street for smashing an empty champagne bottle on a man’s head because he was kicking a homeless person’s dog. The arrest in the middle of the pedestrian shopping area caused quite a commotion. While people slipped in the blood of the unconscious dog abuser, they shouted and screamed that the bastard had deserved it and that the police should just get the dog to safety or go to hell. The support was all fuel to her fire but did not help her with the authorities.
Her case was still pending, and it would probably remain that way due to the extensive backlog in the courts. But she did not get off so lightly with Debora. At their first meeting after the episode, Tabitha was told to get up and leave and never return. And to top it off, she was sent off with a torrent of words threatening that if she told anyone about their group activities, she would come to regret it.
Tabitha was as cold as ice and left a note in Debora’s mailbox stating that this was the death blow for the group, because once the court case came up, she would sing like a canary.
They’re hardly going to kill me, she thought.
The very next day, Tabitha continued her private crusade by striking hard wherever she found someone to be lacking in her world.
She had been cruising around Copenhagen when three guys with their caps on back to front swerved their BMW in front of her, causing her to brake hard. She just managed to catch a glimpse of a couple of middle fingers through their rear window and was swearing to herself when she saw cigarette butts and paper cups thrown from one of their side windows onto the road in a cloud of ash. That was when she decided to repay their provocation in hard currency.
She followed them from a distance and soon saw that it had not been an isolated act of littering. They finally ended up on Sønder Boulevard and parked in a disabled parking spot.
Tabitha parked her car on the other side of the road and took out her knife from the glove compartment. Twenty seconds later, she had slashed all the tires of the BMW. Then she strolled over to the lawn that separated the two lanes and collected an entire bag of rubbish and dog shit. She waited patiently until they returned in high spirits, each with a cigarette in their mouths and a rehearsed and slightly too laid-back gait.
As soon as they had eased themselves into the car, she calmly stepped across the lane and knocked on the driver’s window.
He rolled down the window and his contemptuous expression signaled that he was more than ready to let rip his usual threats of a beating and much worse.
“You dropped something on the road, you damn bastards. Next time remember to take it home with you, okay?” She then emptied the entire bag of filth on his head.
With a torrent of curses, the driver lunged toward his wingman, trying to avoid the stinking mess, while Tabitha ran over to her car and started it, pulling out with the tires screeching.
“You won’t make it far, you idiots!” she shouted out her window and reciprocated their earlier fuck finger. Even the most arrogant guys could not get far in a car with four slashed tires.
And so Tabitha went to work every morning as Dr. Jekyll and returned home as Mr. Hyde. People who were not nice to their children or animals received such a beating with her cane that they could hardly get up, and she did not give a damn whether they were homeless or just imbeciles. Children and animals deserved to be treated right.
Unfortunately, things went wrong for Tabitha just a few months after she had been excommunicated.
Like so many times before, she took the train to Østerport Station, which was a good starting point for her reconnaissance through the broad streets toward Kongens Nytorv. She was standing in front of the rain-soaked newly renovated façade of the train station when she spotted a couple who were walking along Dag Hammarskjölds Allé and videoing everything including a sea of umbrellas, railway tracks, and the Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art. Ahh, Americans, she thought when she heard their boisterous excitement from a hundred meters away. They must be heading toward the Museum of Danish Resistance and on to their beloved embassy.
She shook her head, hoping that at least they were not friends with the ambassador, because you would be hard-pressed to find a bigger fool.
Tabitha looked around and was about to approach the couple when she spotted an old woman on the other side of the busy road who looked despondent at the sight of the occupied bus shelter benches. Her threadbare vinyl bag was weighing down her arm, revealing that she had just done her shopping and that her crooked back was hurting. She seemed to have carried her share of life’s burdens.
Tabitha fixed her eyes on a strong young guy in the bus shelter whose empathy was so lacking that he could not be bothered to stand up for the woman. Tabitha decided to give him a nudge. She crossed at the pedestrian crossing, but in the very moment that she was about to tell him off, the guy stood up voluntarily and offered his seat to the old woman. He also offered to hold her bag until the bus arrived because there was no room on the bench, and the pale woman smiled at him as if he was the first helpful person she had met in a very long time.
Tabitha also smiled but then noticed that the guy was looking in any other direction than Lille Triangel, where the bus would be arriving from.
What is he up to? she wondered and stood near him on the other side of the glass partition so she could stop him if he suddenly made a run for it.
“No, it’s not that bus,” said the old woman when the first bus arrived and passengers started getting on.
The guy nodded. “Good. I’m also waiting for the next one.” He noticed with a quick glance that there were no people waiting with them on the bench anymore.
“Now I can take my bag back and put it next to me. Thanks for the help,” said the old woman, moving over a little and patting the empty seat next to her.
“I’ll carry it on for you when the bus arrives,” said the guy with an emphasis that did not invite protest. And just as the bus pulled away, he took a step sideways and was about to make a run for it.
He had only just managed to take one long leap when Tabitha grabbed hold of the bag strap and pulled hard. But that did not stop the thief—he must have tried this before. He pulled the bag in toward him with a hard tug and heaved, but Tabitha was not letting go either. Then he kicked out at her to make her let go, but Tabitha did not. She only let go when he had pulled her across the bus lane and out toward the road. For a moment, he seemed genuinely shocked as the lack of resistance made him stumble backward out onto the road, only to be crushed against the asphalt with a terrible sound by a truck so big that it should be barred from driving in a built-up area like Copenhagen.
People cried out while Tabitha serenely soaked in the scene. It was at that moment she realized that the couple from earlier were standing in front of the station building, recording with their camera pointing directly at her.
“It was an accident!” she shouted loudly and tried to look horrified as the truck driver leaped out of the cabin and vomited next to what had once been the thief.
Within seconds she was surrounded by people shouting that she had let go of the bag on purpose and that it was her fault he had ended up on the road.
Some people were making phone calls, so Tabitha decided that she had better make herself scarce, and quickly.
But Tabitha was not the only person present who could read the mood, and out of nowhere a strong hand appeared and grabbed hold of her upper arm.
Before long, the area was filled with paramedics and crisis psychologists as well as a group of police officers reading her rights. And so Tabitha’s career as the street avenger was history.