The Summer of Ellen Read online

  “You should hope you don’t have girls,” said Mom. “It’s a bit more difficult.”

  “Why?”

  She gave me a cryptic look, stuck her hand in her coat pocket and took out a cigarette, which she lit with a single click of her lighter.

  “You can figure that out for yourself,” she said.

  I shook my head, and she laughed so I could see her straight but yellowed teeth. Coffee, tea and smoking will do that to you. She was forty years old, and attractive except for her teeth. A knee-length skirt and a loose white blouse. Her coat draped over her arm on account of the sudden arrival of summer.

  “You remember what happened to Irene Poulsen last winter, right?”

  What had happened to Irene P. was widely known, but as far as I could tell, it hadn’t much to do with Toad’s trip to Randers, or wherever she was. They didn’t look like each other. Irene P. was hot. Hot, hot, hot. Big breasts, a pout and eyes lined in black. Glam rock and tight pants. Officially, she’d moved to the boarding high school in Grenå because she needed a “change of scenery,” as the adults called it. Unofficially, everyone knew that she’d been raped by some bastard who’d offered to drive her home from the disco in Hornslet sometime after Christmas last year.

  But Irene was Irene, and Toad was Toad.

  “Toad isn’t . . . It’s not the same.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Mom. “All girls are in danger of that kind of thing. It might be hard for you to understand because you’re such a good boy, but there are men out there who are . . . would do it to anyone. Not just the pretty girls. And they can’t control it.”

  I trampled past her and put my own key in the lock, hoping strongly she wouldn’t say anything more. My mother could be very direct when she wanted to be. Even vulgar. Back then, with Irene, she’d tried to tell me how to know if a girl “wanted to,” which was painfully embarrassing to hear from your own mother.

  I kicked off my shoes in the hallway, still not looking at her. Her perfume was everywhere.

  “Will you tell your father that I’m with my sister?”

  I could hear the tension in her voice. The attempt to sound happy and carefree.

  “Can’t you tell him yourself?”

  “It might be better coming from you,” she said. “Then I don’t have to talk to him. Please?”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh”—she blew me a kiss—“that’s great, honey. Thank you.”

  Her footsteps on the stairs were followed by heels in the pearly gravel. Quick, in the direction of the bus stop.

  “Did she say when she’d be back?”

  Dad leaned back into the sofa so his shirt crept upward, revealing his hairy white stomach.

  “No, not really.”

  He had poured his first beer into a glass and took a hefty gulp.

  “And what about you, Jacob? Are you coming with me tomorrow?”

  I shrugged.

  “You can earn twenty-five kroner an hour over the summer,” he said. His breath reeked of alcohol. “I need the four regulars on the floor. We’re behind with everything.”

  He got up, went out into the kitchen, rummaged for a moment before returning with two plates, a knife, liver pâté and a bag of rye bread, which he set on the coffee table.

  There was always extra work at Feed Stuffs when they were clearing out the storehouse. The big silos had to be emptied and prepared for new truckloads of grain. And orders for the winter feeding crops were already coming in. I’d helped out before when it was needed. Driven the forklift and moved around the heavy paper bags without breaking them. Compound feed, powdered milk, calcium nitrate and pink-stained corn seed. It was a good job, and I liked the men in the storehouse, slow and dawdling with heavy stomachs and broad, fleshy shoulders. Their T-shirts and button-downs were shields of sweat, and when they took a sack or gunned a forklift’s transmission, their sinews and muscles rippled in wide wrists and upper arms. They often gave me a soda when we sat breathless on the loading ramp.

  It was Dad who was the problem. In the mornings, he sat in his glass cage at the end of the storehouse. Jovial and drunk enough that anyone with eyes could figure out he was an alcoholic. Told bad jokes to the haulers who stuck their heads in to arrange receipts and bills. Pasty and friendly on the constantly chiming phone, and with his beer standing freely on his desk in between curled order notes, dried-up pens and a stapler that never had staples.

  If I went to work with him while Mom wasn’t home, he’d end up sending me out for beer at least twice before closing time, and although I could alternate buying them at the grocer and Hansen’s Drugstore, I couldn’t stand being a laughingstock for holding a bag of rattling bottle deposits and a new six-pack of cold Carlsberg.

  “I promised to help Anton,” I said.

  He pushed his plate farther in on the coffee table and threw his feet up. Wriggled his toes in his holey socks and glared angrily at the news on TV. Soldiers marching in some dusty place in the world.

  “Anton? While Mom is away?”

  “Yeah, it’s a bit different. Their stable has to be whitewashed.”

  “Oh, okay.” He pouted angrily. “Just don’t come complaining to me when there’s nothing else to do down there.”

  I went up the stairs, leaving the light in the hallway on so he could find his way to bed. Lay down and stared up at the sloping wall while I conjured up the girl from the baker’s in my mind’s eye. Her breasts were big, and you could see her nipples through her Vagn’s Bakery T-shirt. For once, I couldn’t really do anything with it. Just lay there, sweating in the summer night until I finally heard my dad stumble up the stairs to the second floor and piss noisily into the little toilet.

  I shaped the comforter into the little baker maid, put my arm around her and fell asleep.

  I was hungry and maybe still a bit drunk when I stepped into my sandals and walked out into the afternoon sun.

  Children were screaming in the municipal wading pool a little farther down the street. The leaves on the slender, newly planted roadside trees were tired and yellow, moving unwillingly in the wind and casting flickers of sunlight across the sidewalk.

  I’d forgotten what summer was like in the city, but through the physical shock of the smell and the noise, I felt an old joy in the meeting of the brutal heat and all the ugliness greeting my eyes. The fluttering remnants of plastic bags and paper. A lost pacifier whose rubber was black and stained with age. The graffiti on the concrete walls. eradicate hunger—eat the rich illustrated with a grinning skull and suck my dick accompanied by an unpleasant depiction of ejaculated semen in all the colors of the rainbow.

  Kirsten had hated it when we’d rented a one-bedroom apartment on Jagtvej. If it had been up to her, we would have lived in a garden chalet community in Amager. It was me who insisted on Nørrebro, and me who spent my afternoons driving from one closed-down factory in the northwest to the other, photographing marred surfaces and broken windows, rusty iron and crumbling concrete. If Kirsten put lipstick on, I smeared it over her chin and down her neck. Moistened my fingers and spread her black mascara down over her cheeks, or colored her eyelids skull-deep.

  Black was the new black.

  I listened to the Sex Pistols and got a crew cut, while Kirsten held on to the passions of her early youth. Acoustic guitar and candles, and even an active membership to some environmentalist movement. They used to hold hour-long meetings on our sofa, where they made a list of impending doomsday scenarios and despaired together.

  Kirsten was blonde—I preferred blondes with long hair—and she was good for me. Agreeable. Unproblematic. Subdued. It was a relief for me when I realized that her body odor wasn’t particularly arousing and far from my natural preference. She was also the first girl who said she loved me, and miraculously didn’t come to meet my parents for the first three years of our shared life. She found it easy to live with what she called my “pangs of morbidity.” All the black, my apocalyptic drawings of towers, like huge space stations looming in a dead moon landscape.

  I kicked an empty beer can—it was the kind bought in Germany and sold under the counter in kiosks. No bottle deposit, so it’d been allowed to lie there long enough to rust. The can rattled out onto the road, where the asphalt bubbled in the heat, stinking of tar and gasoline. When I rounded the corner to Nørrebrogade, the reek mixed with the smell of kebab and pizza from the many small eateries.

  I fished out my cell phone and dialed.

  “Jacob? How are you?”

  My father sounded awake. Up and walking around. So far so good.

  “Fine, fine.”

  “And Kirsten?”

  “Fine, I think. Kirsten is Kirsten.”

  He hesitated. He’d remained quiet and level when I’d called and told him I was moving out of the house. It was a long way from Randers to Copenhagen, and it had been a couple of years since we’d seen each other. I preferred the phone, because I couldn’t smell or see if he was drunk.

  “Anton called me.”

  “Anton?”

  “Uncle Anton.”

  He sniffed, fumbled with something, and for a brief moment it was deathly silent on the phone. Then he was back.

  “I see. And how is he?”

  I pulled a fifty-kroner bill from my pocket, threw it on the counter in Halif’s Pizzahut and pointed to a piece with ham. Halif or one of his assistants gave me twenty kroner in change and a smoking-hot slice of pizza, abundant in melted cheese. I balanced the cardboard box on a greasy table for one and sat down.

  “He’d like me to find somebody for him. A woman he once knew.”

 
“Well, now.” He coughed dryly and began to fumble with something. “You’d think he’d be too old for that kind of thing, but those two are indestructible.”

  “Are you going over?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  My father grumbled quietly.

  “You live closer to them,” I said. “You probably have more time, too. It’s a bit far away for me, and there’s so much going on right now.”

  The silence at the other end was long enough that I already knew the answer. My father always had to get a running start when saying no to someone.

  Get a running start or be very, very drunk.

  “Me and Anton, we’ve always had a bit of a strained relationship. You know that very well. If he needs help with something, you’ll have to deal with it yourself. It’ll probably be good for you to have something to keep you busy over the summer.”

  “He’s your uncle, not mine.”

  I took a bite of my pizza, burning the roof of my mouth. Cursed.

  “Jacob. I don’t want to get involved in all that. Not with Anton.”

  He clattered with something, and I involuntarily braced for the clink of bottles or the weak wheeze of a can being opened. Old habits died hard.

  “Okay.”

  “But if you want to drop by—”

  “Thanks.”

  My father was gone without any further formalities. He got snappy when he felt pressured, and he felt pressured as soon as he was asked about anything other than sporadic company and small talk. Before the call dropped, I heard the whistling of the wind and the rustling of leaves on the other end. The chaotic cheeping of birds. Sparrows or maybe some invasive species from rugged Spanish mountain ranges. And his image appeared before me, as he was probably standing in his little town house, the phone in his hand. Gaunt and sunburned and alone, completely alone, like he preferred. He’d cut back on his drinking after my mother left him but had the occasional relapse.

  I ate the last of my pizza and walked back out onto the street, oil and garlic running down my fingers. A bit farther down was a hi-fi shop, selling both new and secondhand. The record player they had for sale was okay, and the speakers nothing less than impressive. I paid and got one of the young men to help me drag it all home—a stocky black-haired lad who was no more than eighteen years old, but already equipped with distinctive muttonchops and the kind of well-developed self-esteem that came from having been useful in his father’s or uncle’s shop since the age of twelve. His student cap sat firmly on his head, bearing the marks of the sun, bright nights and an undoubtedly intense partying program.

  He set the boxes in the hallway and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Are you going to listen to loud music?” He laughed. “You won’t be a popular man in the ghetto.”

  I sighed and thought about how loud it was in the building. The crying children of the neighbor above me were clearly heard. My player would end up collecting dust until I found a more permanent place.

  “Yet further proof that man isn’t free,” I said, opening a can of beer. “Can’t find peace from each other anywhere.”

  The lad sent me a long look and shrugged his shoulders.

  “And it would be pretty boring if we could,” he said. “Mind your neighbors and friends, old man. They’re the ones who’ll be bringing you soup when you get sick.”

  I sent him a half smile.

  “Turkish proverb?”

  “Nope.” He laughed. “Universal truth. What goes around comes around.”

  I threw myself onto the mattress and browsed Ekstra Bladet’s web videos on my phone. An attempt to distract myself with things that had nothing to do with reality. In the first clip, a beautiful woman in her midthirties was demonstrating how to give a blow job on a rubber dildo attached to the table in front of her. She lowered her open mouth down over the phallic object until you could see her throat bulging, straightened up and explained the technique, saliva and gag reflex she’d been practicing to get control of it all. She was naturally beautiful, with blonde hair put up in a slightly messy bun. A sexologist named Signe. Resembled to the point of confusion one of the slightly boring but 100 percent healthy women of Østerbro. Academics with husbands and children and creatively messy apartments with stucco features.

  I zapped out. Found the homepage with pictures of refugees in a camp somewhere in Europe. A secret lotto millionaire in Vojens, in southern Denmark, images of Michael Jackson’s corpse at his funeral and Donald Trump, red-faced and furious about something or other.

  The Østerbro woman’s exercises on the enlarged rubber dildo had struck a very weak tone in my central nervous system, and no more. I considered finding a porn clip, but gave up again. Too much work for a predictable, short-term pleasure. I wasn’t in the mood, maybe because of the pain in the pleasure center of my brain.

  A text from a number I didn’t know.

  Stay away. I mean it. Next time, I’ll rip your fucking wrinkly balls off.

  I knew exactly what he looked like. And that he was stronger than me. Younger and angrier, and besides, I was a grown, civilized man. This shouldn’t be happening. I still needed to call Janne and apologize, but she’d stopped taking my calls a long time ago.

  I felt sick now, so I found Ravel’s Boléro on YouTube and closed my eyes, listening. The cellos and bass were without depth, and the fine vibrating notes of the violin were impossible to distinguish from the rest on the phone. A small, compacted version of great sound. Something that reminded you of something, but wasn’t quite it. Just like me and Kirsten the last few years.

  Something big, locked away in little boxes.

  I didn’t want to go to Jutland—I couldn’t. But maybe I had to.

  1978

  I cycled uphill in third gear. Standing up on the pedals. I’d oiled the chain only last week, the gears quietly gripping the clean, shining links.

  My Raleigh Grand Prix was decorated with dark-red sparks and ragged goat-horn handlebars and had so many gears that my father blessed himself when I brought it home. I’d bought it in Auning, four years old and well used, for all my confirmation money and a bit more. The seat post and screws were rusty, there were two long, deep scratches on the former, and the paint was chipped in several places, revealing the frame, but I didn’t give a shit. I was the only one in class who had a racer. Next time I was going to get a Bianchi Strada, the bike of Fausto Coppi on winding Italian mountain roads. The champion’s champion. Ole Ritter had ridden a Cinelli last year, but I’d never seen one. Not even in Aarhus in one of the big bike stores.

  I reached the top of the hill and bent down over the handlebars for the descent, my T-shirt and new Adidas sweater fluttering madly, the air cold against my skin. The rhythmic, insect-like clicks of the gears, getting faster and faster until it all blurred together, becoming a loud whir in the wind. I had my backpack with me, stuffed with T-shirts and underpants and my library books. My drawing things. A sketch pad of the slightly thicker paper from the office store on the main street, and pencils with nibs so soft that the lines flowed like brushstrokes across the pages.

  I was in my drawing-naked-ladies phase.

  Pinups from Dad’s brittle and yellowed men’s magazines in the garage. Posing in bikinis on beaches and across the hoods of broad 1950s cars, but in my artistic interpretation they were all naked, and with a very direct view of the dark cracks between their legs. I’d looked in a few of the art books in the library, staring at she-dogs, cows and sows, and the last uncertainties I camouflaged with dark pubic hair. And despite my having to stretch my imagination for the final details, my drawings were popular collectibles among the boys in my class. They might not be anatomically correct, but as there were already numerous confusing and contradictory bits of information about the ins and outs of pussies, my take on it was just as good as anyone else’s, and it was something to look at during physics class and to appall the girls with during recess so that they curled up and fled, their faces red.