He supposed that with time you could get used to the strangeness of things. His father didn’t live in the same house as he did and after six years he was quite used to that. Having a father who lived in another country now seemed almost normal. His father suddenly having a new wife called Lone – what sort of name was that? – was still a little strange because he’d assumed men only had one wife. But apparently no: you could have any number so long as they were in sequence. He had wanted to go to Denmark and visit his father and the new Lone but his mother said no. He’d tried to argue but his mother cried so he stopped arguing. Now he had to get used to his mother being dead. People said things like ‘passed on’ or ‘with the angels’ but the fact was she was dead. Dead as a doornail. Not here. Nowhere else. There was time before and a time after and a clear dividing line, and you had to get used to being on the wrong side of the line. Well, he would, people did. After all he was quite old. He was eleven. He’d had since the summer holidays to get used to her being dead and gone and in a couple of days it would be Christmas.
‘You’ll have to get used to Christmases in another country,’ his grandmother warned him. He had to go and live with his father and Lone in Copenhagen. He would have liked to have stayed with his grandmother and so would she, but a judge somewhere had said no, Neil was to live with his father, because Lone was going to have a baby and it would be a proper home. He’d only met his father a few times since he was small and could never think of anything to say to him when he did. But he expected it would be all right.
‘It can’t be all that different,’ Neil said, and his grandmother said ‘Oh yes, it can be.’ There’d be no presents waiting when you woke up on Christmas day, Gran said, and no big, noisy, crowded dinner hours late because the turkey wasn’t cooked, with mince pies so you didn’t stay hungry, and friends and family pulling crackers and putting on silly paper hats.
When the clock struck one on a Christmas day in Denmark, his Gran said, all you would have to eat was cold herring on rye bread. She put some Mars bars in his suitcase so he’d be prepared. She loved him but Neil had the feeling she didn’t like his father very much. Not that Danish clocks actually struck, his gran added, everything was too sleek and electronic. Well, Neil would do his best. He would get used to it. He was certainly better off than, say, Oliver Twist. He’d never gone hungry and his shoes didn’t let in water.
While she was packing the Mars bars Gran found his Neolithic arrowhead tucked into one his shoes and said why on earth are you taking this old piece of stone?
‘I just like it,’ he said, not explaining that he had picked it up on a walk with his father and mother when he was five, and they’d taken it to a museum and the curator had said it was a lucky find and he was a clever boy, and it was actually very late, almost bronze age, and people had been living on that hill for thousands and thousands of years. He liked that thought. It made him feel part of something though there wasn’t much left to be part of that he could see. But it was a kind of lucky charm.
Now the flint was in the suitcase in the back of the car, and he and Lone were on their way straight from the airport to an island where they had their country house. The island was called Møn, with a line through the middle of the o, unlike Lone. It was not easy to pronounce and Lone laughed when he tried. She was very fair all over and quite broad with large pale blue eyes, and a bump in her middle which was the new baby. He thought perhaps his mother had been right to hate her. Neil had worked out the number of miles from where he lived to Copenhagen – 693 – and begrudged every one of them, and now here they were driving and driving on and on in a stupid little eco-car with no power, further and further away from anything he’d ever known. Presently they came to the end of the land and a flat, flat sea and a long bridge which took them over to the island.
It occurred to Neil that the one thing he could never get used to was the landscape. It was wide and flat somehow smoothed out, and empty.
‘You’ll love the house,’ this Lone said. ‘It’s right on the edge of the sea. My father built it. He’s a famous architect. Your father is a famous architect too, but not as famous as my father.’
Neil smiled at her with his bright brave smile and said nothing.
And Lone looked sideways at Neil, and thought this is not what I meant at all. He was a good looking child with his father’s square chin and bright eyes, but dark and gypsy-ish like his mother. And he had a shocked look, almost stunned, as if he had been hit, and a kind of fixed smile which made her uneasy. She wanted to do her best by the child of the man she loved, of course she did, but why Ben had gone to court to get custody she could not understand. Neil was a child, not some kind of unfinished building Ben was obliged to complete. It was very sad that his poor mother had died of cervical cancer, and so suddenly, but his grandmother had been willing to look after him; why couldn’t Ben have left it at that? There was the new baby to consider. And within ten minutes of meeting the boy at the airport Ben’s Blackberry had summoned him back to some emergency, and she, Lone, was left to undertake the long drive on her own. No, this was not what she had envisaged at all. Life with a stepson who rather clearly hated you. Life with a son – she’d had scans and knew – would be bad enough: she had so wanted a girl.
The next day was going to be busy. The house had to be decorated, food prepared for Christmas Eve, the presents for Neil and his six cousins wrapped – well, step-cousins, three boys from her elder sister, three girls from her younger. Neil was getting a bicycle. Lone thought it would be wise if they all had presents of equal value, but Ben had said no. This year Neil would get a special treat. Lone was tempted to say better to spend time and attention than money, but she didn’t. Ben would have looked so shocked and hurt if she had.
When they got to the house, she asked Neil to help her unpack the car, but he said quite rudely no, he was going straight down to the sea before it got dark. She let him go, but it irked her and when he came back excited about a bit of old stone which he claimed was a Neolithic axe head she told him not to be silly and if he was determined to keep it to wash it before it made everything dirty.
When she showed him to his really beautiful room – the best spare bedroom all to himself, with the special Baby Elephant Feet wallpaper – he asked where his television was and she told him there was no TV in the house but he could have the radio, he said ‘What’s the use of that. I don’t understand Danish, and I never want to,’ and closed the door behind him, with just the same hurt and shocked look Ben used to get his own way. She could hear him sobbing on his bed. She tried to lure him out with pate and rye bread, and prawns and mayonnaise but he said he’d rather starve. ‘Starve then,’ Lone said, and it was her turn to slam the door. Her turn to lie on her bed too, out of frustration and guilt mixed, and weep. She couldn’t be sure whether she was more angry with Ben or with his son, or with herself for being pregnant.
The next day went rather better. Ben turned up all apologies – it really had been an emergency: a crane had toppled – and he and Neil went for a walk and came back with some more old stones, and Lone bit back remarks about dirt and mess. Later in the morning, while she prepared the meal and cooked the pork, they went to church and Neil came back saying he liked the paintings like cartoons on the walls but he didn’t know the tunes of the hymns. The family arrived and Neil nagged until he was allowed to open his present early, which meant everyone else did too, so that quite spoiled the ritual timing of Christmas Eve. When finally he did get his bicycle he said it was stupid and he didn’t know how to ride one anyway. The cousins were astonished and laughed at him but took him out into the crimson and yellow sunset and showed him how it was done. He learned quickly and within a couple of hours was doing wheelies in the lamplight with the best of them. His body language was like his father’s, and Lone, watching while she stacked the dishwasher, decided that having a son wasn’t necessarily the worst disaster that could happen to a woman.
But the next day, Christmas Day, friends and neighbours arrived and matters got worse. Neil refused to eat smorgasbord saying he wanted something hot, and though Lone piled little potatoes on his plate, with butter, he wouldn’t eat a thing and said Danish Christmases were boring, there weren’t even any crackers or paper hats. It was embarrassing for everyone.
Ben said ‘if you want to go hungry that’s fine, all the more for us,’ and Neil went to his perfect room wearing his dirty outside boots and stomped about. Then someone saw the old stones on the mantelpiece: Lone had been wrong. They were indeed worked axe and arrow heads from thousands of years ago. So Lone went upstairs and apologised to Neil for being so mean, and Neil came down with his own arrowhead and showed it round and everyone congratulated him, and Ben said perhaps his son would grow up to be an archaeologist; Neil had what Ben called ‘a natural talent: an observer’s eye.’ And once again Neil smiled, with his real smile, not the one that had been forced on him.
Lone felt a surge of affection for the boy and said she would bake mince pies for Boxing Day to make him feel at home. And with a jar of mincemeat – dried fruit and nuts with a dash of brandy: nothing to do with meat: just other countries, other customs – borrowed from an Anglophile neighbour, set about making them. Neil showed Lone how his mother decorated the pastry edges with the back of a fork, and that somehow eased things between them, now the mother had been mentioned.
Neil watched Lone work in silence for a little while, and then said, ‘Once upon a time, two hundred thousand years back, there wasn’t an English channel at all, just land all the way. I could have walked from here to home, if I’d wanted to. Seven hundred and fifty-three miles. Except there would have been wolves and tigers so it wouldn’t have been wise. You can call me Nils if you like.’
At that moment the baby kicked and Lone wanted to sit down and Nils bought her a chair without being asked. ‘Thank you Nils,’ she said. She thought it was all going to be okay, after all.
2009