Justine (15 page)

I
really should, I hate that word, I really should have gone to the openings out in Valby, I should've. Now I ought to pull myself together and swear to do it tomorrow. I swear it. No more corpses lying around at low tide.

T
he street kitchen made the newspaper today. If I cover my bad eye with a hand, I can read all about it. That's certainly not good, but it's still better, and obviously it doesn't help that I'm sitting in this closet, so I let some light in and force my attention on the newspaper. It's mostly photos. The journalist is fascinated by the fact that garbage can be turned into food and has taken several close-ups of munching mouths.

I flip to the last page, and now it's dull again. When I uncover my eye, violet fills the space. Why can't anyone discover what's growing wild in my head? The nurse didn't even call a doctor, but what does she know about brains or whatever? Now I'm forced to ask Vita, who's not a doctor, but who nonetheless has a certain understanding of all things. I'll say to her: “It's not great, what's happening, but maybe we can still be there for each other.” And I'll say: “If we want to. And I want to.”

We can still be a lot of things for each other, we still can, only not today.

T
he days drag me along, and the office manager at The Factory stopped by and knocked because he wanted to know how long I'd be staying. He looked down at me with watery eyes. If I'm going to stay more than the month, he said, we need to draw up a sublease, even though he knows Ane is on maternity leave. Even then.

Maybe he and Ane crossed paths when he left, I don't know, at any rate she's standing in the door. Torben has taken the day off, he's watching the boy, and she wants to know how my eye is doing.

“I don't know,” I say.

“You dropped the patch? I thought you'd put out your eye or something.”

That's right, I'm sans a patch, I'm trying to get used to the fact that things are now rotten. “I've just come to check on a few things,” Ane says, glancing toward her paintings. I ask:

“Should I leave in the meantime?”

“If that's okay?”

I make four laps of The Factory, but I'm hanging by a shred, I'm thirsty, I'm splintered, get your act together, I say, you're more than just your present state, you're also a far stretch into the future.

I take myself firmly in hand and walk in and look at Ane's paintings spread out over the floor.

“My breasts are ready to explode,” she says.

She still hasn't left.

“It took longer than I thought.”

“What are you going to do with them?” I snigger.

I mean the paintings, of course. What's she going to do with them? They're lying there, she's signed them all.

She glances my way with her mighty big breasts, which are about to explode.

“I'm going to take them home. But now it looks like rain,” she says.

She rummages under the table, finds some paper, finds some old canvases, some rods, some poster rails, and finally some rolls of plastic.

“Sorry, Justine. I've got to run,” she says.

She picks a corner of the role with a nail.

“I don't think I've even told you,” she says, “what ended up happening with Torben's gallery and me. Did I tell you that? Did I? You know that Torben has given some serious thought to leaving his gallery, right? Anyway, he's not going to do it immediately. He's decided that the most reasonable thing is to stay and maybe try to make it abroad sometime. If he decides he can't take it any longer.”

Ane smiles with bristling teeth.

“He thinks my paintings are tight,” she says.

“Tight,” I repeat, the word tensing my mouth.

Ane smiles and smiles. Is that really her only grimace? She's tidy, it suits her and her situation. There's an aura of good fortune and happiness about her, it's going so well.

“We've agreed to do something together for that exhibition, the one he couldn't think of anything for. My paintings will work in some way or other. Anyway, I'll have them framed, then we'll see what we can come up with.”

“So he's going to use your works in his exhibition,” I say, smearing it on.

Ane's eyes narrow to slits.

“That's not how it is. I don't know what you're thinking, but he's got something in mind.”

She grabs the roll and starts, eyeballing it as she goes, those beautiful eyes. She finds herself a spatula, rip, rip, tears off the piece she wants to use, it's long, at least three meters, she wraps it around the paintings, slowly, until all the pictures are encased in a covering.

Then I ask a harmless question, one that's got no bite: “So who's doing the framing?”

Soon she'll be out the door, heading home, back to all she has.

“Hans's Workshop,” she says. “Torben got a job there a couple of days a week. He'll do my frames in the evening.”

Should we get together someday, just you and me? I can't ask that, or rather, I can't bring myself to ask it.

She busies herself with this, that and the other, the scent of breast milk is a cloud around her. When she bends over, her chest hangs like two udders.

“It's really annoying to have to be back so quick,” she says, turning around, “I really hope things level out soon.”

“There aren't anymore,” I say, she's standing oddly halfway out the door, as if she's forgotten something.

“See you soon,” she says.

“Maybe one more time,” I say.

“I hope I have a little more time then.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“Good luck with the exhibition.”

“We'll see each other before that.” She gives me a strange look. “It's several months away, you know.”

And now she's gone.

C
ould've been the beers. Could've been because she popped into my mind. Could've been because I was thinking about Ane and felt that Torben was an idiot. On the other hand, that's always been my opinion, and recent events have done nothing to improve the situation. And the exhibition, which I'm supposed to be having soon, I thought about that, too. Could it be because that popped into my mind? It's certainly possible.

A minor detail. Even Torben's a minor detail. Something else looms larger. And that I didn't dwell on at all. It wasn't a thought, but an urge, no, something stronger, an impetus, that's what it was. That's what the desire to sit in the armoire with my mother felt like.

S
he lived in that armoire. A Kirkeby sculpture with a large poppy on the door, itself made of stone, located in a small housing cluster. She's inside that house. It's around ten, no, twenty steps to the door. There's a crunch beneath my fire shoes. One step, two more, a braking vehicle, the ambulance, from the corner of my good eye. Two men with a stretcher dash, the door opens. At my seventh step I can no longer lift my legs, my stomach burns, my arms burn, so heavy. I need to shit. Right now. But I can't shit now where my mother . . . no, Vita . . . my throat, burning. She gasps on the floor in a puddle of nothing I can do. Not even lift my arms. My legs twitch unevenly in piss and shit, seriously, I need to crap, but I can't move, she shouts from inside the armoire everywhere.

Should I do it in my pants, what's the most important thing here?

I topple to the side in the grass, a mighty big intestine in a teensy tiny worm that worms its way around the house and unseals the hole, explodes onto the grass, lies in the grass, stinks in the grass, until someone happens by and says: You're me, so get the hell up! I have arms and legs, so I push myself up, peer through the window at a TV, and she's sitting in front of that TV in an armchair, “Mama,” I shout and race to the door. They're bearing the body out, it's there beneath the sheet turning chalk whitey white with an oxygen mask is dissolving to dust, smothering, and smoke is pouring now from the door, from the gaping windows, too. I look again: She's sitting in the armchair, studying the canvas, she turns her head fuming, glances toward the window, lifts a hand, rosy-colored cheeks and that particular hairdo from back then, so beautiful she's a delta of melted skin become a single brown smudge on the way out of this world again.

O
ut here is utterly deserted, the house has never seemed colder and harder, strutting its single level won't ever collapse, now there's no more key, no way inside.

Yet in that part of the yard that's invisible from the road since it's behind the house, they're sitting together, snuggling in the torchlight that flickers and flickers, and the shadows dance on their faces and in their eyes, which don't see me, they're consumed by each other, they kiss, they lean close, their garden chairs give beneath their weight as they lean over to rub noses, the short-haired woman and Vita.

The pitchfork stands leisurely in the flowerbed, only the shaft is visible when the light flickers that direction, but the teeth are hidden by the soil.

The women suddenly glance up, peer into the dark, appear transfigured and embrace each other, tilt to the side, and the short-haired one grimaces, puts out her hand and lands softly in the grass, flump, with Vita on top of her on her full breasts, they spread out in the grass like an island of flesh in green.

They peer into each other, they don't see me standing over them with the pitchfork in one hand.

Now I wrap both hands around the shaft and heft the tool, which actually weighs a bit, above their body, up above us the sky is black, and I want to lift the pitchfork even higher, as high as it can go and higher still, before I allow it whizz through the air and pierce their heart.

The pitchfork's teeth pierce the clothes and the skin and bore into the double body which doesn't flinch at all; no reaction; sedate as a jellyfish is slow.

Now it's like Grandpa, like the house, like . . .

I excavate the ground with the pitchfork that's not meant for this, its teeth simply part the earth between them, an endless task, I place it beside the body and walk over to Launis's tool shed, there has to be a shovel or something else fit for digging, no one will discover anything, it's smack dab in the middle of the night, fortunately.

I pass my firesite, something has happened, the area has been blocked off by red and white plastic tape, suspicious things are going on, not that I know what they might be, my vision isn't the best, but it has to be the police, and what's that about?

There's also a tent that wasn't there the last time, now I've got two things to think about, it's just too much to cope with for a person with her hands full of too much of everything, I simply can't take it anymore.

All is quiet in Vita's yard, the grass glints green in the light of the flickering torch, but nowhere is there a body, while the pitchfork, which has landed among the potatoes, lies there uselessly, the shadows are also gone, and all the chairs, it's just that one torch and Launis's shovel, which turns out to be a spade.

In reality, the body is nowhere, not even in the house, which is locked like a bunker.

I putter in the dirt, the spade's handle is made of metal that easily enters the bedroom window after I wrap it in my shirt, no one needs to come here and see this, there's nothing to see anyway, the whole scandal has been scrubbed.

“A
m I okay? I don't think so.”

A large and mournful and rather gratifying cassette salad is heaped on the floor in streams of images and sound. No point in trying to fix anything.

“Are you okay?”

It's Bo. I didn't close the door and he simply walked in.

“You must be really down,” he says.

“Can you tell?” I ask. “Can you tell how it's all connected?”

I can't help it, but start crying all over again, mostly because of the ruined tapes. I actually could've used some of those recordings for my exhibit. That's what I should've done. It would've been easier.

“But why in the world . . . why did you destroy them?”

“I don't know.”

“You're not too bright.”

“No.”

“Were you drunk?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that explains something.”

“No.”

B
o has suggested that I borrow his computer, he's so great, so I can look at my photographs. His workshop is the same size as Ane's, but packed with things from floor to ceiling. In the midst of it all are two desks set across from each other and piled with paper. Bo sits down at one desk and puts his legs up, he's about to tell me something, but then there's a knock on the door, and in comes Åsa with another guy.

“How's everything going?” the guy asks. “Did you get ahold of the cans?”

He's tall and skinny with oversized pants, everything about him is too large, except for his head, which perches atop his skinny neck and seems way too small, though his nose, on the other hand, is enormous.

“They're over there.”

Bo indicates some boxes.

“Five boxes of peeled tomatoes. It's just the paper that's rotten.”

“Super.”

The skinny guy offers a bony hand in greeting, since hey, I'm here, too.

“My name's Heroine,” I say.

His name is Olaf.

“We're running the kitchen again this Saturday,” Bo says, “in the courtyard at Amalienborg Palace.”

“That's a nice place,” I say.

It's like I'm a part of the conversation.

“It's not really the kind of place they like to see bag ladies, eh?” Bo asks.

He turns around and closes his computer program.

“Well,” he says, “you can just have at it.”

I'm alone in a strange space, but luckily all the workshops are similar. I connect the camera, a moment passes in which I'm excited, and at the same time completely apathetic, the two feelings are on parallel tracks, it's impossible to tell when I'm riding the one and when I'm riding the other.