What My Body Remembers Read online

  I was so angry, I was close to tears, but tears weren’t an option. As Rosa said, they held it against you. I didn’t have the luxury of losing control. Breathe deeply.

  “Can’t you talk to them again?”

  She sighed.

  “Alex stays with Lisa and Tom until we’ve completed our re-evaluation.”

  By the time the call was over the telephone was burning hot in my hand. There was a shifting in my chest, but it was only once I was standing on the threshold of Tom and Lisa’s house that I realized what it was.

  Fear.

  Not the well-known snake coiled below my heart, but a new, strange animal taking shape in the dark.

  A life without Alex would be a life without me. He was the only one who saw me, and needed me. You don’t exist if nobody knows you. You’re destroyed. My breath quickened when I heard Lisa’s steps approaching the door, and then it opened. “Ella! You should have called first.”

  This was a rule, I knew it well, and the reprimand stung.

  “I just want to talk to him for a minute. We didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  “He’s in the forest with Tom collecting wood for the workshop. They won’t be home for a while yet.”

  “Well then, in that case I—I mean we—will just wait.”

  I shot a sidelong glance at Rosa, who stood leaning against the car as she glared up at the house. She was only five foot two, but her attitude and stance, arms crossed in front of her chest, made her look like a bouncer outside Crazy Daisy’s. She was mad as hell.

  Lisa hesitated.

  “Well, come on inside, then.”

  Rosa shook her head, but I followed Lisa into the worn family kitchen, where I’d only been a couple of times before. A two-year-old and two small schoolgirls were seated on bar stools at the counter. They were playing with lumps of Plasticine and stringing pearls on a waterproof tablecloth; all three of them had stretched leggings, tangled hair and shiny red cheeks. A couple of boys were play-fighting in the lounge with ninja words and strips of material wrapped round their foreheads. There was a pall of warm, wet diapers and freshly baked bread.

  “So he’ll be living here for a little while . . . perhaps even longer.” Lisa smiled, hauled the piss-reeking toddler up onto her lap and started ripping the diaper off her.

  The animal in my chest curled, digging in its claws, and I couldn’t reply.

  “He hasn’t been coping very well with your illness either, Ella. He was very distressed when he arrived here yesterday. Seeing you like that . . . He needs some peace and quiet, don’t you think? Some stability. And he gets on so well with Tom. Say, what’s the situation with his dad?”

  As if she didn’t know. I saw Amir before me on the last day at Bakkegården; the big, intense eyes, a narrow, boyish face. After Bakkegården he was transferred to a locked juvenile institution, followed by various prisons around the country. I knew this, because the welfare office regularly reminded me in writing that he was unable to pay much child support.

  “There isn’t any real contact . . . ”

  “Coffee?”

  Lisa boiled some water for a cup of instant coffee without waiting for a reply. She hadn’t washed her hands after changing the sodden diaper that was left on one of the kitchen chairs. The toddler teetered about without her pants on, flashing her sharp little milk-teeth as she went.

  I hunched over my mug and burnt my tongue on the scalding-hot coffee.

  Lisa and Tom’s home was an exotic environment to me. The wood burner and all those stuffed birds on display on the kitchen cabinets. Small antlers of roe deer mounted over the basket of chopped wood because Tom liked to hunt. Not to mention all those warm bodies intermingling in intimate formations. Lisa absently stroking the hair of a child with her right hand, gathering play-pearls on the plastic tablecloth with her left.

  “You should know that Alex is very happy here,” she said. “And in the long run, he can go to school with our very own Ask. There is plenty of room in his class. The boys have already talked about it.”

  I cleared my throat, tracing a finger along the pattern on the tablecloth. It was printed with enormous chickens of various races in a realistic scene with straw and eggs and corn.

  “Shouldn’t you wait for Welfare’s recommendation before talking about all that?”

  She looked up at me in surprise.

  “I thought we were talking voluntary placement,” she said. “Kirsten, for one, has made no mention of anything else.”

  “I don’t know . . . ” I looked up, and met her gaze for the first time. Standing there, her broad shoulders back, her large breasts thrust forward, she looked like a Nordic fertility goddess. “I’d prefer to keep him with me.”

  She looked at me intently, as if to satisfy herself that I meant what I said. Then she shook her head slowly.

  “I know you only want what is best for him, Ella,” she said. “You are his mother, and you love him. But it’s just not possible when you’re so unwell yourself. You can’t keep leaving him with the neighbors.”

  “He likes Jens and Rosa,” I said. This was the truth. Alex got along well with both of them, but off the cuff I couldn’t come up with a single convincing reason why. “They play solitaire,” I said. “And he takes the dog for walks, and I’m fine most of the time.”

  Lisa looked at me, her eyes shining with pity.

  This should have been my cue to leave. Of all my failures, Alex was the one that hurt most, and the hardest one to own up to. But still I did not move, I remained seated, my hands wrapped round the hand-painted ceramic coffee cup.

  The diaper-toddler had tripped over the leg of a chair and now started to howl; I fought an instinctive impulse to get up, get away from the sound. I had never been very good around crying babies, but Lisa simply strode round the table, picked up the butt-naked girl and deposited her on her hip. Her face softened somewhat. “One of my friends told me about your father.”

  I stiffened.

  “My friend comes from . . . Hanstholm, I think it is? I’m not very good at the geography of the region up there—though you surely must be. We were getting coffee, and she noticed your name on Alex’s school bag: Ella Nygaard. The name isn’t very common and then of course it had been big news in the media, she said. Her cousin was in your class.”

  Out on the lane I could see Alex walking side by side with Tom, who was pushing a wheelbarrow ahead of him. The sun shone from a beautiful, clear sky.

  “It couldn’t have been easy for you, Ella. There are so many things I understand better now. About you. About Alex.”

  The little girl was still yelling angrily, her head thrown back. I got up a little too quickly and the leg of the chair dug into the soft fir-tree floor. Lisa shot me a mildly reproving glance and came closer.

  “What’s important is that you don’t let Alex be harmed by your situation as well, Ella.”

  A thought took shape in my mind.

  “The new reports to Welfare,” I said, without looking at her. “Was it you? You’ve told them something about me and Alex, haven’t you?”

  Lisa opened a cupboard and took out a chocolate cookie for the screaming infant. The little girl grabbed it, and smiled through her tears. The two school girls had long since found refuge in a more quiet corner of the house and the two boy-soldiers were running around yelling on the lawn outside. Silence crept into the kitchen.

  “I never told Kirsten anything she didn’t know already,” said Lisa, looking at me with a dewy, sugar-sweet expression. “You don’t have the strength for this, Ella. You never have. You’re a damaged child. I know you want what’s best for Alex, but he’s not a happy boy when he’s with you. He worries too much. When he’s here, he sleeps like a log right through the night. No nightmares.”

  There are many disadvantages to growing up in foster families and juvenile institutions. Y
ou acquire a self-worth as ugly and shapeless as the clothing you get from the biannual shopping trips to Bilka Discount Store. On the other hand, you become intimately acquainted with rage. It would be fair to say that I developed an intimate relationship with mine at Bakkegården. I spat in teachers’ faces, ripped plugs out of walls, and smashed my television on the ground. I stuck a fellow pupil’s head down the girls’ toilet and flushed. It was all part of that madness that Bakkegården was; a place where we clawed our way into the real world with hoarse voices and broken nails.

  Since then I had mellowed. Everything was fine, as long as I was given some space and left in peace. Even in the presence of others, it took a lot to rile me, but Lisa was Chinese water torture; an eternity of soft, cool slaps in the face.

  “He is my child,” I said.

  “Children don’t belong to anyone. This is about what is best for Alex.”

  She smiled again in that slightly wistful manner that must be very effective with men. As if she had just said something deeply meaningful.

  And you, I thought. This is also about what is best for you, Lisa. I had come across her kind before. Not in Bakkegården—heaven forbid. Girls like Lisa would never set foot in Bakkegården. No, from school. Lisa had been one of those solid, diligent girls whose charitable spirit was showered with the teacher’s praise. Little-Lisa was sweet and clever, she comforted snot-nosed Peter and poor Rikke with her hopeless hearing aid; she was a trouper, swimming in healthy attention.

  Alex and all the other humpbacked kids were big-Lisa’s new social projects. Unhappy children she could nurse back to life while the social workers looked on, clapping their plump hands.

  My pulse was throbbing in my neck. Had this been Bakkegården, she’d get her ass kicked till that self-satisfied smile was wiped off her face. All that quiet calm could be beaten out of her in less than ten minutes; it did something to people, being made a victim.

  I lunged forward and grabbed hold of Lisa’s long plait, pulling her head back so far that her neck bowed into a rigid arch. She lashed out at me, but her swings were weak and unfocused, most of her energy concentrated on keeping her balance. I reached for the sodden diaper and stuffed it into her pretty face and mouth. I let go just as swiftly, giving her a light shove, and she hit the floor, elbows first.

  Everything happened so quickly. No time for concrete thought; the rage just exploded in my body. I turned on my heel and ran out the door to the yard.

  “Alex!”

  He and Tom were at the stables by now and the wheelbarrow was parked in the gravel, surrounded by howling ninja warriors. He looked up, smiled, and came running once he’d spotted us.

  “We’re leaving now.”

  I hurried over to the car and motioned to Rosa to get in.

  “But I hadn’t had my cocoa and cookies yet,” said Alex, hesitating. “What are we doing?”

  “We’re just taking a drive. There’re a couple of things we need to buy,” I said, waving to Tom and giving him the broadest smile I could muster.

  Alex could see it in my face, I think. The panic. He knew me. If he still had some doubts, he hid it well. He opened the door and got in the car.

  “Drive,” I said, but Rosa already had her foot on the gas, the wheels spun, eating into the gravel, and the car sprung forward. As we were driving back down the lane, Lisa appeared in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, a furious expression on her face.

  “Fuck,” said Rosa.

  As usual, I couldn’t have agreed more.

  4

  “You’re crazy. You do know that, don’t you?”

  Rosa was looking at me. She had a disturbing habit of trying to catch my eye when she wanted to say something important. Even if she was driving.

  “You can’t get rid of them, no matter where you go. They’ll just send your file after you. That’s how the system works. And now they’ve got it in for you.”

  I looked out of the window and didn’t reply. I sincerely wished that Rosa would stop talking to me and concentrate on her driving. Granted, the cars were few and far between out here. But still. There were trees and stones and bends in the road, and only half an hour ago, she’d had to slam on the brakes for a herd of cows to cross the road with their ungainly, dangling udders and sad brown eyes. The June sun shone above, glittering in the blue sky, and Alex had fallen asleep on the back seat. It was piping hot. The air-conditioning had failed by the time we reached Roskilde Fjord, so now all four windows were rolled down, and the wind howled as soon as we drove any faster than fifty miles an hour.

  Rosa lit a smoke and stole a glance in my direction, her bleached hair waving wildly.

  “And what about all your shit in the apartment? What are you going to do with it?”

  “You can take whatever you need,” I said. “Welfare is welcome to the rest.”

  “But you don’t have anything that anybody wants.”

  I shrugged. Tried to think about something else. Anything at all. The names of rapidly changing climate zones, the impact of the Gulf Stream on the dispersion of heat throughout the oceans of the world. The rate of rotation of the earth and its location in the solar system, the Coriolis effect that deflected eddies of current clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.

  “And why the hell does it absolutely have to be on the North Sea coast of Jutland?” Rosa went on. “I mean, it’s fine living there in the summertime, but in winter, we’re talking the ass-end of Denmark, with a capital A. Then there won’t be a soul for miles—just wind and the stench of fish.”

  “I know someone up there,” I said, reaching into my pocket. The letter was still there: a folded A-5 sheet of paper with checkered lines. Sent from a nursing home in Thisted almost two years ago; clearly my grandmother was not given to pathos.

  “Like who?” grunted Rosa. “Nobody is dumb enough to live out there year-round. Is it that guy from Blockbuster Video? Niels? Has he gotten himself a job pimping porn to fishermen?”

  “Shhh.”

  I shot a glance over my shoulder. Alex was on the backseat. He’d taken off his T-shirt and this had fortunately spared it from the twin red streaks of melted popsicle on his chest. Rosa had bought the popsicle for him at the gas station in Thisted. She’d also bought some supplies: cigarettes, coffee, soup, pasta, breakfast cereal, and preserves, and she’d withdrawn whatever cash she had left in her bank account. 752 kroner, to be exact.

  The trees on the boundaries of the fields were gnarly and frail, bent towards the east. I closed my eyes and inhaled my new environment; the dusty cornfields, something tart and spicy, a wind borne over thousands of miles of sea. You couldn’t smell the sea just yet, but the air already had a hint of something wild.

  “It’s a poor municipal district,” I said. “It will take a long time before we pop up on someone’s screen at Thisted social services. Their resources are limited.”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea? Are you sure you’ll manage? You’ll be all on your own, for Christ’s sake. What if you have another fit? In the good ol’ days, folk moved out to the country when their nerves were shot. Now it’s the other way round.”

  I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn’t open mine. Didn’t answer. I needed to concentrate on keeping calm as my childhood filtered through. One picture in particular pressed to the fore. Or rather a strip of a picture, like one of those tattered film clips without sound, a little jerky with dark scratches on a red-gold background. Me, my body, a belly in a bathing suit, bare feet. I am running over the dunes; sand and cockleshells, bits of Styrofoam, crab’s claws, seaweed, and that prickly lyme grass that leaves red itchy stripes on your feet and ankles. My mother’s voice carried by the thundering, wild, wild wind. The sky above is white, bigger than the entire world.

  I recognized the house at once, even though it was smaller, greyer than I had remembered. I woul
d not have been able to recall its exact shape before, but once I was there, right in front of it, the image merged with a memory from the mire in my mind.

  The springtime rains had cut deep furrows into the gravel path leading to the house and the dunes had filtered through the grey—not white—picket fence and hip rose bushes, but apart from that, everything was exactly the same as before.

  Rosa bumped the Volvo over the sand, braking sharply in front of the low steps leading up to the house.

  “Are you sure this is it?” she asked, looking skeptically at me. The GPS had long since given up.

  “Positive,” I said, opening the car door. I could hear the sea like a hushed rumble behind the grey-green dunes. I remembered not only the house, but all of it. The sky, the light, the smell, the sounds.

  Alex shifted on the back seat, not quite awake yet. I stepped out of the car and walked over to the minuscule shed. The door was sagging on its hinges, the paint stripped down to the raw, weather-beaten planks. In the near darkness of the shed I felt my way along the wall till my fingertips found the baby dolls’ chest. I opened the top drawer. The key still lay there, as it always had. It felt cold and rusty in the palm of my hand.

  “The ass-end of the world,” said Rosa, as she hauled our bags and bedding out of the trunk. “The owner has taken you for a ride. No one has lived here in years.”

  She had a point.

  The house was a small, squat construction, its white-washed walls making it look like an animal that would gratefully sink to its knees had it not been held upright by force. The edge of the roof was only a few inches above my head and its outer dimensions were barely more than that of a doll’s house. It had low walls with timbered windows and was built over an area that covered less floor space than my apartment in Hvidovre. The northern wall abutted an old stable that was literally hanging on its hinges. Someone had tried to reinforce it with a couple of thick rafters from the outside, but the masonry still gaped in several places.