Authors: Mikkel Birkegaard
It was empty.
I switched on the bedside lamp and realized that my hands hadn’t been mistaken. The bed hadn’t been slept in. A wave of relief washed over me. Perhaps there was still time for me to take a shower and wash off the smell of Linda? But my relief soon turned into worry. If they
weren
’t here, then where were they? I entered the living room and switched on the light.
Line was sitting in the armchair by the window, her arms folded across her chest and an insistent gaze directed at me. She wasn’t smiling.
‘How could you do it, Frank?’
Her eyes didn’t leave me and I felt like cowering. My palms grew sweaty and my cheeks felt hot.
‘What do you mean?’ I managed to say, but it sounded low and hollow.
Still it was a fair question. Line couldn’t possibly have known that I had been with Linda. Yes, people had entered the lavatory while we were at it, but I couldn’t have been so unlucky that it was someone who knew me and Line – that was
too
improbable. My remorse at my infidelity vanished temporarily.
I straightened up and flung out my hands. ‘What have I done?’
While I waited for her to reply, I scanned my brain to retrieve any event that might have made her angry, things I had said or done or failed to do, but I couldn’t find anything.
‘How could you have such thoughts about our daughter?’ Line said at last.
The interview! It was the interview. At that point in time, I was so full of my success that I failed to see the connection between the television interview and Line’s reaction. How could I? It seemed to me that the interview had been a triumph, and that was also the impression Linda Hvilbjerg had given me.
I took a step towards Line. The right thing would have
been
to go to her and hold her in my arms to reassure her and convince her, but the smell of sex and Linda Hvilbjerg still lingered on my body and in my clothes, so I stopped. She must have interpreted it as hesitation because she looked away and her face took on a resolute expression.
‘So it’s true,’ she said. ‘You fantasized about mutilating and murdering my daughter.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant,’ I protested. ‘Or, I mean … I would never …’
‘Don’t you think it sounds a little bit sick, Frank?’
I shook my head. ‘I would never hurt her,’ I said. ‘I love Ironika more than anything in the world.’
Line’s eyes bored into me again. They were filled with distrust.
‘I’ve read the book, Frank,’ she said slowly. ‘I can’t even begin to imagine how you can think like this and certainly not in the presence of Veronika.’
I looked around, searching for the object of the discussion, who had been here while I wrote the book and approved every line. Perhaps she could come to my rescue, deflect this row.
‘She’s with her granddad,’ Line said.
I felt torn in half. One part was consumed with the most profound guilt at having been unfaithful to Line, the other with righteous indignation at being treated unfairly. The two halves couldn’t agree and their opposite qualities cancelled out any decent course of action. The result was that I simply stood there, gawping at my wife without defending myself or apologizing to her.
Line stared at me for a while, but as I didn’t react, she got up with a sigh.
‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I need time.’
I stepped forwards, but she held up her hand to me.
‘Alone,’ she said as she walked to the door.
I retreated slightly as she passed me. The smell of Linda was still very fresh on me, but to Line it must have looked as if I was giving up on her. I still couldn’t think of anything sensible to say and she got dressed in silence and left the flat without looking at me. From the window I saw her wheel her bicycle in the direction of Amager. At the corner, she turned around and looked up at the flat.
Away from Line’s accusing eyes, the half of me that felt victimized got the upper hand. I went over the interview and replayed the exchange in my mind. I hadn’t lied, this was how
Outer Demons
had been conceived, but to think … it was precisely because I loved my daughter that I had been able to write such dreadful things. They were my worst nightmares, the most revolting things I could imagine ever happening to her.
The anger surged in me until I could no longer suppress it. I punched the sofa, kicked cushions and furniture, howled at the door through which Line had left.
I was upset and I felt betrayed. Of all people, Line ought to understand me.
When I had finished punishing the furniture, I collapsed from exhaustion.
My guilt slowly returned. If I didn’t deserve to burn in hell because of the interview, then I deserved it for my disastrous mistake with Linda Hvilbjerg. The whole episode had been so grotesque that I could hardly describe it as infidelity, but of course that was what it was. I was a bastard, a terrible father and a rotten husband. My anger
with
Line had disappeared – she was right. I was a bad person who hurt the people around me. I cried, raged and beat myself up as the pathetic loser I was. I ran around the flat, slammed my palms against the walls and door frames, threw myself on the floor. At one point I drank gin straight from the bottle and my fits of rage ebbed away as my blood alcohol percentage increased. My vision blurred and the light faded until at last everything around me grew dark.
I woke up in a foetal position on the bathroom floor. It stank of vomit and urine. The stench made my nausea worse and I just managed to raise myself to the toilet bowl before the bile poured out of me. I could have saved myself the trouble. The floor was already swimming in vomit and piss.
I struggled to stand up and I looked at myself in the mirror. It was cracked from when I had headbutted it at some point during the night and I had a split eyebrow to show for it. My clothes were wet, lumps of vomit were stuck to my hair and the whites of my eyes depicted a fine, intricate river delta of blood. I stood like this for a couple of minutes, studying the wreckage in what remained of the mirror. Slowly I undressed and threw my clothes in the bath. I poured water and detergent into a bucket, found a cloth and started cleaning the floor.
It was over.
From now on, I would pull myself together.
I had to get my family back. No more alcohol or drugs, no more benders, no more parties or receptions and definitely no more Linda Hvilbjerg.
THOUGH I HAD
never been there before, I knew that Rentemestervej hadn’t changed. I have always imagined north-west Copenhagen as grey, gloomy and neglected, and it didn’t disappoint when I arrived in a taxi straight from Bjarne and Anne’s flat. Once I got Mortis’s address, I made my excuses and left. Bjarne was clearly worried. He almost certainly knew I’d go straight to Rentemestervej, but he said nothing and he didn’t try to stop me. Perhaps he believed that seeing Mortis would clear up the situation for me and finally convince me I was on the wrong track.
I started having doubts myself as I stood outside number 43. It was a yellow brick building, but over time sunlight and exhaust fumes had given it a sickly grey hue, like a chain smoker’s fingers. Cheap aluminium balconies had been screwed to the brickwork outside every flat in the three-storey building, but most of the residents used them to store rubbish or junk they had no room for inside. It was hard to imagine anyone in this block could plan or manage anything other than basic survival.
On the ground floor I studied the list of residents and
found
Morten’s name. Morten Jensen. Of course. That was the reason I had been unable to find him through Directory Enquiries. Mortis’s real name was Morten Due Jensen, but in the Scriptorium days he refused to use Jensen and called himself Morten Due. ‘Jensen is the name of the bog-standard Dane,’ he said if anyone asked. He wanted to stand out from the crowd. He wanted to be someone. It would appear he had changed his mind.
The communal light switched itself off, so I switched it back on and headed up the stairs. I hesitated once I reached Mortis’s door. I didn’t really know why I had come. Perhaps it was to check he really existed, now confirmed by the white plastic letters on the letter flap.
There was no doorbell, so I knocked on the door, three hard knocks that echoed in the stairwell. It was quiet behind the door. I waited a few seconds and knocked again, but there was still no response. Irritated, I squatted down, pushed open the letter flap and tried to peer inside. It was completely dark.
‘Morten?’ I called out, my lips close to the flap.
I refused to accept I’d come in vain. It couldn’t be a dead end. There was too much at stake.
I lifted the doormat to check if there was a key. Of course there wasn’t, but the idea wasn’t that far-fetched. Mortis had a tendency to lose things when he went out, so back in the Scriptorium days he had always kept a spare key somewhere. I got up and traced my fingers along the top of the door frame, but all I got out of it was a cushion of dust. Perhaps he had got better at looking after his keys? I pushed down the door handle, just to make sure he hadn’t given up on keys altogether, but the door was locked.
The communal light switched itself off and the light from the moon shone on me from a window between the floors. I walked up a few steps to the window and opened it. My heart started racing. Mortis’s balcony was only two or three metres from the window and I could see that the balcony door was ajar. The balcony itself was only a couple of metres square; I could see that it was littered with empty bottles, leaving a small area clear around the door.
My eyes sought out the building across the road. It was only eleven o’clock, so there was still light coming from most of the flats. Televisions glowed in some of them, others had candlesticks on the windowsills or tea lights in saucers. But there were no people to be seen, no one who would notice an intruder on the balcony.
I rested my forehead against the window frame and closed my eyes. How badly did I want to do this? If I fell from the second floor, I could break both arms and legs, and if I was very unlucky, I might end up dead. The image of Verner in the hotel bed surfaced in my mind. Mortis was my only real clue. Admittedly only in the form of a pseudonym from one of my own novels in which room 102 had been booked, but nevertheless it was a clue, it was a name.
I opened my eyes and pushed up the window. The sill outside was fairly wide. The pigeons had discovered this too and it was covered in pigeon shit. I held on tight to the window frame, climbed up and out on to the sill. I knelt down, like a runner on a starting block, and concentrated on the balcony diagonally below. The blood was pumping around my body as if I was preparing for a
parachute
jump rather than a leap of a couple of metres. The hand that was gripping the window frame was starting to get sweaty.
I checked the building opposite and I set off.
My feet slipped in bird poo, my arms reached out, my eyes focused on the balcony. I felt the wind against my face as I moved through the air. It wasn’t elegant or graceful, more like a diver jumping from the three-metre board and suffering a heart attack halfway. The balcony rushed closer and my chest banged into the railing followed by the rest of my body. It sounded very loud to my ears and all I could think about was getting inside the balcony and out of sight. I climbed over the railing and slid down on a sea of empty bottles. The clinking sound rang out between the blocks.
The impact had knocked the air out of me and I inhaled greedily until a sharp pain in my left side made me stop. I tried to breathe more calmly, but it still hurt. Had I been able to swear or scream I would have done so, but all I was capable of was gasping. Carefully I lifted a hand and touched my ribs. My body contracted as my fingers explored the left side of my chest. More bottles on the balcony toppled. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.
It took me a couple of minutes to get my breathing under control. I heard someone call out and a door nearby being closed; apart from that, it was quiet. The bottles underneath me felt like a pile of stones, but I didn’t dare move even though my body ached all over. The crash might have woken up the whole block, but I prayed that no one had seen me and that the noise had echoed around
the
walls so its origins couldn’t be identified. I lay there for another five minutes to make absolutely sure.
The door to the balcony couldn’t be opened immediately. The bottles had rolled everywhere and in order to make room for the door, I had to move several of them while remaining unseen. My ribs hurt with every movement and I was forced to pause to catch my breath. At last I had cleared enough space to open the door and sneak inside.
When I could lie down on my back on the living-room floor, I allowed myself to moan loudly. I examined my ribs again, but could find no sign of fracture.
The flat was quiet. All I could hear was my own laboured breathing. The place smelled stuffy and close. The balcony door might have been ajar, but not enough to air the room. I was lying on a parquet floor and a short distance away from me was a dark leather sofa, an armchair and a coffee table. Empty bottles and cups of cold coffee and cigarette butts were scattered across the table. What appeared to be big frames of some sort were lined up against the walls and it wasn’t until I had closed the blinds and switched on the light that I realized the frames were bookcases, empty bookcases.
I was taken aback. Mortis loved books and a home without books would be anathema to him. The TV stand was also empty. A black square in the dust revealed that a television had sat there until very recently.
In the hall lay a huge pile of newspapers and post, mainly bills. They had been pushed to one side behind the door so you could just about open it. I found what I was looking for: Mortis’s spare key hanging from an elastic
band
right next to the letter flap so you could pull it out with a finger, if you knew where it was. My ribs protested and I cursed loudly.
I found the most recent newspaper and checked the date. It was over a month old. Had Mortis moved, done a runner or was he just too lazy to sort his post?