What My Body Remembers Read online

  2

  Close your eyes and touch your nose with your right index finger.”

  I did as I was told. I was used to being asked to behave like an idiot. In a moment he’d ask me to repeat the exercise with the left hand, and then he’d ask me stand on one leg, then look up and down, and sideways. The shaking had already stopped in the ambulance, but the staff outside the hospital had dutifully wheeled me into Emergency, which had sent me to Neurology, which had sent me to Psychiatry with all the other shaky people.

  They didn’t dare touch me at Neurology. MRIs cost a packet and all attempts to diagnose me with anything other than “uncontrollable shaking” had, till now, proved fruitless. I was checked for epilepsy and brain tumors and nervous diseases and life-threatening conditions, but there was nothing to be seen that the real doctors could hang their hats on. My brain persisted in depicting a fine, uniform grey mass on their screens. It practically beamed with vitality, as they said—not without a small measure of admiration. But this fine mass of grey matter obliged doctors to pronounce a psychiatric diagnosis, and the most awkward of its kind to boot: hysteria and neurosis. And after the charming environment of Neurology I found myself relegated to the worn linoleum floors, the heavy, brown curtains, and scratched tables of the waiting room in Psychiatry. I’d been there for two days, but this guy was the first doctor I’d spoken to.

  “And now with the left hand . . .”

  The doctor, a two-meter giant, sounded just as washed-out as I felt. He had, no doubt, skimmed my file with those little reading glasses of his.

  “Panic attacks?” he asked, once we’d been through the gymnastic exercises. “You’ve had episodes of this kind before?”

  I shrugged and traced a finger along one of the long, thin scars on the inside of my forearm. Something I almost always did—without thinking—when someone wanted to talk emotions. When I was a teenager, I’d had a predilection for decorating my body with razor blades. Before I was old enough to buy vodka, this had been a particularly effective way to tone down the fear. It had been years since I’d made my last cut.

  “For once, we’ve got a free bed,” he said. “You’re welcome to spend another night here. Perhaps we ought to adjust your meds. New ones come onto the market all the time, and it is, after all . . .” He paused, turned to his computer and pushed his reading glasses up his nose. “It is, after all, a whole year since you’ve last been here.”

  I fought a sudden urge to be blatantly honest. I never took the antidepressants they prescribed. The meds did not work. They just made me soft in the head and unbearably tired. The fear sat in my bones—not in my head—and when I felt an attack coming on, it was the vodka and soap operas that made me feel better. The Family on the Bridge on TV3. Gustav and Linse. Or a documentary about people with weird diseases. But I couldn’t admit this to a doctor—no matter how trustworthy he seemed. Doctors had a heightened duty to report to the authorities, and Welfare could scrap my social benefits if I refused treatment.

  The great thing about having a so-called “organic anxiety syndrome” is that the potential range of treatment is never-ending. The people at Welfare started each and every conversation with a new, optimistic prognosis. My capacity for work could, in principle, have doubled in the interim. Had the frequency of attacks diminished? Not likely. But there was certainly cause for a fresh occupational initiative, a new offer for a subsidized job—or what about a newspaper delivery route? The possibilities appeared endless from the bottom of a trash can; there was plenty of blue sky to reach for.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

  He nodded. “Is there someone we can call who could help out a little back home? You must be . . . physically exhausted.”

  He was right about that. I felt as if I’d run a marathon and my T-shirt stank of sweat. It still bore signs of my tussle in the mud with Alex and I’d had to stuff the pair of baggy underpants the hospital had given me down so they didn’t stick out of my tight denim shorts.

  “I’ll manage,” I said, trying to sound flippant. “There’s nothing wrong with my legs.”

  Self-irony suited people on the dole and psychiatric patients alike. Without it, we were not only crazy but devoid of charm, and then not even professional caregivers would touch us with a barge pole.

  The doctor smiled despondently as he picked at the grey bristles on his chin. He tried to pin me down with his eyes.

  “The particular kind of episodes you have are unusual,” he said finally. “It’s rare to see such extreme symptoms without some physical foundation. Do you have any idea what could trigger them?”

  In a split second I heard the roar of the breakers, like thunder in the dark.

  “A bad gene pool,” I said. “Did you know that if you cross a kind and docile dog, a golden retriever, say, and a bat-shit-crazy pit bull, the whole genetic system short-circuits? When my parents got together, it was like a wolf fucking a sheep.”

  “That’s not quite how it was phrased in the books on genetics I have read,” the man said in a conciliatory tone. “Have you ever heard of PTSD?”

  I shook my head, feeling an all-consuming craving for a smoke. I hadn’t had a cigarette since early that morning; I’d managed to sneak out onto the lawn in front of the main entrance and power-puffed on a smoke before a guard came over and told me to get lost.

  “They used to call it shell shock. During the First World War, a number of soldiers came back from the trenches with physical symptoms that couldn’t be linked to any physical injury. They were blind, or lame, their muscles reacted in spastic movements . . . uncontrollable shaking. Like yours. Residual stress and fear from the trenches that flipped certain neurological switches. I’m a doctor, not a psychologist, but I’m not blind to the fact that sometimes it’s a good idea to clear up a little in our past. Find out what has shaped us.”

  The breaking of waves again. The wind, the sharp smell of the ocean.

  “I can’t remember anything,” I said.

  “Unless you have a very unusual brain, that’s a lie.” His voice was laden with the authority that came from having passed judgment on idiots from behind his desk for the last thirty years. “All our experiences are stored somewhere in our brains and if the right buttons are pressed, a dark corner can be exposed to a sudden sharp light. Like the pop of a flash in a cellar. You can get help to find that button, Ella . . .”

  “Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I know exactly what I am.” I met his gaze. “The nurse said I could go now?”

  I had a hand poised on the pack of smokes in my jacket pocket and he nodded without taking his eyes off me.

  “Have you got money for a bus home?”

  He held up a twenty-kroner coin between his thumb and index finger. I took it like a schoolgirl being sent into town by her mother, all the while neurotically calculating how many smokes the coin could buy me. When you’re short of cash and have plenty of time, there’s no need to take a bus. As I said, there was nothing wrong with my legs.

  The moment Rosa opened the door I could see from her face that something was wrong. It was more red than usual and the too thinly-plucked eyebrows were drawn together in a frown above her water-blue eyes.

  “Ella, I sent Jens to get you at Bispebjerg Hospital. At first we thought you’d been taken to Hvidovre. I called . . . ” She ran her red hands through the brown-and-platinum-blonde hair. “Well, he’ll probably come back, when he can’t find you. They’ve been here to get Alex.”

  A cold fist grabbed my guts.

  “Who . . . who came to get him?”

  “Welfare, of course; that foster mother of his from West Buttfuck Farm, followed on the heels by your social worker. They waltzed in here and gave Jens and me the beady eye, as if we were a couple of convicted pedophiles.” Rosa looked at me as if I’d been personally responsible for the insult. “They told him to fetch a couple
of his things from your place, and then they just left. Yesterday. We tried to get hold of you.”

  I cleared my throat. Picked at the smokes in my pocket.

  “How did Alex react?”

  “He was dead calm,” said Rosa. “But he wasn’t happy about it. That much was clear. He was white as a sheet, and his eyes looked all weird. They asked where you’d been taken, but I didn’t know, for fuck’s sake. And I was tired. The boy screamed all night, you know, the nightmares. I tried putting a cold cloth on his forehead. My mom used to do that . . . ”

  She trailed off. The Welfare people were her worst nightmare. They had been ever since the day they came and took her son. It was the way they looked at her, she once told me. Everything they knew. Personally, I had trouble believing that anyone at the welfare office still read Rosa’s file. She’d been awarded her pension and could, in principle, take care of herself, until she clocked into the big welfare office of eternity. But of course it was there, her file. And all sorts of awful and shameful things were written in it.

  “Okay.” I breathed deeply and tried to smile at her. “It’s probably just a misunderstanding. They probably just mixed up the weekends he’s supposed to go out there.”

  Rosa looked at me with an inscrutable gaze. Her water-blue irises jerked on their blood-shot background; a legacy from a life as an alcoholic made it difficult for her to maintain eye contact with other people.

  “Be careful what you say and do, Ella. You know what can happen once they’ve gotten wind of some crazy idea. Whatever you say is wrong. It gets used against you. They twist everything.”

  I didn’t care for the note of comradeship in her voice. As if we were sworn compatriots. This was not the same as what happened with Michael. There was no comparison.

  I spun round and went into my own apartment. I found a pair of jeans in the washing basket and grabbed a clean T-shirt. Then I packed a bag for Alex. He’d forgotten most of his things. His school books, his favorite T-shirt, and the only pair of jeans he had without holes at the knees were still lying on his bed. I had a painful lump in my throat, but Rosa came over and sat down on a chair at my kitchen table and this put a damper on my emotional outburst. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, but for once, she offered me a cigarette in a silent gesture of solidarity. Rosa never stood on ceremony and she was pretty stingy, but she wasn’t completely devoid of empathy.

  “Has Jens come home with the car?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you give me a ride?”

  She nodded again, jiggling a pair of car keys that she’d pulled out of her padded vest pocket.

  “I’m ready when you are.”

  3

  Jens and Rosa’s car reeked of smoke and the little long-haired dog they’d adopted a few years after their son was taken away. It must be at least fifteen years old and it was so decrepit that every time it took a shit, a lump of pink colon pressed out of its anus and had to be stuffed back in with a rubber-gloved finger. I had never understood that kind of love for a pet, but once in a while, I took the dog for walks when Rosa’s back was giving her trouble. It tripped round the block before ever so carefully selecting a corner by the garbage bins, where it would squat down and shit. This always took the dog the better half of eternity and I felt like a nurse at an old-age home every time my intervention with the gloved finger was required.

  Rosa screwed up the volume on the radio. “Eye of the Tiger.” Music from a carefree youth. I conjured up an image of a young, platinum-blonde Rosa with chubby cheeks and flawless skin, the ever-ready party girl, obligatory drink in hand. Perhaps she had dreamt of something other than a concrete apartment block on the outskirts of Copenhagen, but then again, maybe she didn’t have the imagination for that. As it happened, she grew up in the apartment block across the road.

  I flicked the butt of my cigarette out the window. The corn was still green, a silken gloss over the fields, and on any other day I might have enjoyed the ride. It was a thirty-two-mile drive out to Lisa and Tom’s. The purpose of their farm was to let the children breathe plenty of fresh air, shovel rabbit shit, and go for rides on Icelandic ponies. Apparently there was broad consensus among social workers and pedagogic experts alike that the presence of farm animals had a therapeutic affect on the children of people on the dole. Clucking hens and fat-bellied pigs were the abracadabra that unlocked the volt of public funds, and organic soap-scrubbed Lisa and arch-fatherly Tom delivered the goods. Not to mention the convenient coincidence that the farm was located so far from anywhere that it was impossible to reach without a car, and this presumably suited both the Welfare authorities and the foster parents just fine. Ghosts like me didn’t have the money for private transportation; as a rule, they didn’t have the cash for a bus ticket either. I existed in the concrete block, I existed in my apartment and the social office, but on any other kind of turf I was a wandering spirit without body or voice.

  I called up Kirsten.

  “Ella!” Her voice was usually softened with maternal kindness, but now it had a sharp edge to it, I noted. “I’m glad you called. We tried calling you at the hospital, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “Why have you taken him?”

  “Ella, take it easy. He’s with Tom and Lisa, of course. And he’s doing just fine.”

  “But he was only supposed to go there next weekend . . . ” I tried to keep my voice calm, but this was bad. Something was wrong. The social authorities didn’t mix up dates. As a matter of course, a stay at the farm had to be arranged with Tom and Lisa in advance. They had been Alex’s substitute family for a few years now in order to provide a measure of relief, but it wasn’t clear who was to be relieved of whom.

  After the Bakkegården Institute, I was allergic to pedagogic institutions, but Kirsten had made it very clear that the arrangement with Tom and Lisa was one of the many attractive programs the Welfare office had to offer that I couldn’t refuse.

  “Ella.” Kirsten was breathing loudly on the other end of the line. “How are you feeling? You were hospitalized the day before yesterday. You must be tired. Don’t you think it would be best for Alexander to stay with Tom and Lisa for a couple of days?”

  I could see her before me. How she sat there, in her office, with her arms resting on the table in front of her and the heavy breasts pressed together into formidable cleavage in her flower-print summer dress.

  Kirsten was the closest thing I had to a mother. She’d been my caseworker ever since I was released from Bakkegården on seventeen-year-old Bambi-legs, already five months gone in my pregnancy. It was her I turned to when I needed money for children’s shoes and summer clothing. Kirsten was also the first and only visitor I had on the maternity ward after Alex was born. I remembered the scent of her hair in particular, because she bent down and kissed us both on the cheek. Lavender. It was always lavender.

  “I’m sorry, Ella,” she said. “But the flower farm called and asked us to tell you they’re not interested. Too many days off sick.”

  I had been on a three-month apprenticeship on a flower farm in spring and the Welfare office had subsequently made a request that they consider permanent employment; urgently, if I knew Kirsten well. Three months bathed in the scent of flowers and potting soil. The names of the flowers still stuck: marigold, begonia, dahlia, and pansies. Asters and lilies. I had a flair for flowers; I could remember them all. They seemed to flutter into place in my head of their own accord, as I walked up and down the long rows, plucking wayward shoots and dead leaves. And I drank coffee with the others in a shed between the greenhouses. The men clutched their mugs with their broad, wrinkled fingers and laughed along softly when the women told stories about their children and grandchildren. It was a nice place.

  “Ella?”

  “Yes.”

  “The other thing I need to talk to you about is more serious.” She waited for an answer. Probably for pedagogic reaso
ns, but I didn’t say anything. Let her hang in midair.

  “We have decided to reevaluate your competence as a parent. You’ve been hospitalized in Psychiatric once again and your network is a little frayed at the edges.”

  “Do you mean Jens and Rosa?”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, a little too loudly. “It’s not as if I’m hearing voices, or painting the walls in my own excrement. I’m completely normal. And I know that Alex misses me when—”

  “In your application for early retirement the psychologist describes you as aggressive with a potential personality disorder. He believes that you are a victim of abuse. It can be hard to function as a parent when you have such serious problems yourself.”

  “I haven’t been abused. The man is obsessed with sex.”

  “Ella . . . You know just as well as I do that I have to take these reports seriously.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Kirsten. All he wanted to talk about was that blotch of ink. The Rorschach test. I said it looked like a dick with ears and he actually wrote it down. How can you take him seriously?”

  “He’s the psychologist we always use. He’s reliable. And new reports have been filed.”

  “By whom?”

  “You know perfectly well I’m not at liberty to say.”

  I swore under my breath. In our apartment complex everyone sold each other out. In an environment where everybody was living off social benefits, it was common practice to stab each other in the back if someone had blocked the machines on your washing day, or pissed against your front door. There was gossip about work on the black market, overnight visitors, violence against children, drug deals in the hallways. If Welfare didn’t know something about you, it wasn’t worth knowing.

  “Kirsten . . . about those reports. I probably dropped a cigarette butt into somebody’s balcony pot plant. You fucking know how it is.”