Nothing But Fear (17 page)

I read the Jennings novels and dreamt that it was me that had been sent to boarding school, but every time I came home and refused to go back, I was met with a ‘No'. Just wait and see, things would soon improve, and I was to stick it out for now and I would get whatever I wanted. What I wanted was pancakes, Coca-Cola, Donald Duck comics. When I got them, back I went again – fifth, sixth, seventh year – until one day I pushed my bike out of the playground and Mother was standing in the gateway in her ocelot. I was taken aback and asked what she was doing there. She said I should just go on home, and then she caught sight of Michael – he was one of the worst – and chased him down the road in her fur coat and high-heeled shoes. I couldn't bear to watch and biked off, knowing full well what was in store for me the next day at school – and they would be waiting with electrician's rods and hooks, Jørgen and Poul and Jesper with Michael at the head – and I might just as well stand up against the wall and wait to be shot.

T
he only thing I associated Nykøbing with was fear. I did not dare go out on the streets and usually had to make a wide detour if I wanted to go anywhere – and always arrived late. I couldn't use Grønsundsvej because that took me past the Jæger Grill, where they would be standing revving their mopeds – Puch 3-speed for the boys with Easy Rider handlebars and high seatbacks, Puch Maxis for the girls – and they wore blue denim jackets with a hairbrush stuffed in the front pocket. The girls were always brushing their hair with them, while the boys used them to hit you with – your blood welled up in the perforated patterns. I had been through it too often. I had gone in there with Father to buy half a grilled chicken with chips – that was what we did when Mother wasn't home – and Stinky John and Jesper and Sten stood by the jukebox gawping at us. They began talking in loud voices about ‘
Sauer Krauts
' and how Germans were ‘
Würst
', making sound like ‘worst' – and Sten came over to us and gave me a shove. And when Father said, ‘Steady on. What do you think you're doing?' he just laughed. We took our insulated bag with the chicken and the tray of chips and drove home. I couldn't eat anything but watched Father and hoped he would kill them.

‘Crazy Johanne's coming! Crazy Johanne's coming!'

The children shouted and screamed, word running several streets ahead of her when she came staggering through the town dragging behind her a tail of stench. She was dressed in rags and worn-out shoes and you could hardly see her for all the cloths wrapped round her head – if, that was,
you dared look in her direction. She had a sack slung over her shoulder and stared fixedly ahead saying, ‘Go 'way, go 'way, go 'way!' We were horror-struck, shrieked and fled in all directions as soon as she appeared round the corner. Her house was on Østre Allé – the windows were boarded over, and weeds and piles of rubbish spread in wild profusion behind the fence. If you threw stones and shouted ‘Crazy Johanne! Crazy Johanne!' she would come charging out with an axe above her head and scream at you, and I kept well away.

Nor could I take Bispegade and sneak past the large red buildings of the Technical School, where I risked being attacked, especially in winter when it had snowed. The snowballs were hard. They stung and ripped the blood out of your cheeks because they were packed with grit. The streets around Østre School were dangerous, and it wasn't safe to use the tunnel. That would otherwise be the quickest route going directly under the railway tracks, but they would be lying in wait down there – it was impossible to get away. And every time I had to go into town I avoided the station and went the long way round under the bridge and up Vesterskovvej.

On Frisegade there was the inn. Paul Fisker would hit anything that moved when he was drunk and on Saturdays they had a stripper – and I hurried down Slotsgade with my heart in my mouth because there was the risk that I might run into Tommy. He lived at the back of a shop with his father and cleaned typewriters. He was a young offender and drove at 75 kilometres an hour on his moped, which
was tuned and bored and stroked and re-geared. Tommy was the leader of the pack from the moment he walked into the classroom – that was in seventh year – and the girls were wild about him, drawing hearts and writing ‘Tommy' in flower-power letters on their pencil cases. He hung out with the rockers along with Gert, who stammered and had psoriasis – and rumour had it that he had gone looking for his mother on her birthday, had dragged her out of the shower and beaten her up. They had insignia on their jackets and became members of the Wizards, who had their base in a cellar on Strandgade, and that made the whole of the southern part of the harbour a no-go zone. So was Lindeskoven, where they were building new high-rise flats out of concrete – that was where the youth club was. The boys wore Slade hair. They smoked and drank beer and listened to Gasolin, while the girls wore flares and clogs and listened to the Walker Brothers – and I never crossed Gedservej.

When the fair came to Nykøbing it set up on a square they called The Cement. It flashed and was noisy as a toyshop – dodgems and swingboats, shooting galleries, one-armed bandits – and there was ice cream in cones and popcorn that smelt of sausages. But it was out of bounds. The one time I had dared to go in to hear Sir Henry on the open-air stage, some of the Wizards were there. Gert recognized me and got the others to hold me as he pissed on my trousers. Even by day I was afraid to go anywhere near the discotheques where they had their parties – The Scarlet Pimpernel, Ellen's Ranch – and on Fridays they would gather at the station and warm up by the pool in the park at Svanedammen. I
never went into town after dark.

The boys played in the B 1901 football team, and on Saturdays there were matches at the stadium. I didn't dare go, and Father said that football was only for idiots. I bought liquorice balls and allsorts in the kiosk and watched the girls play handball down in the Sports Hall. They wore NFH for Nykøbing Falster Handball, and I was in love with Susanne who was blonde. I hid from Stinky John, who went to wrestling. His wrestling kit was never washed and he stank like a shit-heap – his smell hit me before he did – and I almost threw up when he punched me in my guts and never went to the Sports Hall again.

The last past the post was thrown on the scrap, and when we chose teams I was always left till last. I was shoved into the water when we went swimming, and my shoes and socks were stolen from the changing rooms. I shook my head, refusing to go with the others into Skårup's garden to steal apples – there was a shed that was used as a meeting point, where they dished out punishments – and in the summer I didn't go with the others to the beach. The last time I had gone, they had prepared a trap. Susanne was coming, too, they told me – she wanted to ask me something. And we cycled out with trunks and towels on our bike racks. The road took us through Lindeskov wood, and fields and meadows spread out on either side under a blue sky as we turned to the left along the main road that wound through Tjæreby and Stovby and on to Marielyst. The sun baked down. The air shimmered over the sea-wall. We changed in a hollow and raced each other down to the water – only I
fell in a hole filled to the brim with stinging jellyfish.

They had spread sand over it to make it invisible, and they kept pushing me back, stopping me from crawling out, until they got tired of it and let me get away when they went for a swim. I fetched my things and cycled off, my skin on fire with the burns, and made a wide circuit around Kjørup's inn and Marielyst Market, where they had holiday jobs – the ice cream kiosk, the camping site, the minigolf. They overcharged and made fun of the tourists and crowed with delight every time a German was carried out to sea on a lilo and drowned – and I continued all the way out to Elkenøre, which would be empty of people.

For the school party the gym would be decorated and a bar with lemonade and Coke was set up in one of the classrooms with a cloakroom in another. In the junior classes we had marched in in procession, hand in hand, and danced ‘Oh, Boogie Woogie Woogie' in a long chain, but now we could decide for ourselves. The boys came along with beer in plastic bags – Blå Nykøbing lager – and the girls hid a bottle of red Martini in the toilets and were constantly going in and out to put on blue eye shadow and brush their hair. I had been in love with Susanne since the first year. Her father was a baker a few streets away on Solvej – the sign of the pretzel hung over the door and once in a while she would stand behind the counter. I used to call on her every Sunday, would ring the doorbell and asked if Susanne was home. You had to be quiet because her father would be asleep – he got up early – and we would watch television in the living room with her mother with the sound turned
right down. I would wait for her to say it – ‘Shall we go to my room?' – and would sit beside Susanne on the divan bed for hours not knowing how to go about it, how I was to give her a kiss. Maybe it would be best to ask? Or maybe if I put my arm around her and held her hand? Nothing ever came of it – not even when we said goodbye, for she closed the door before I managed to kiss her – and then I'd be standing there the following Sunday, ringing the bell, and the one after that, and at long last I decided to go along to the party.

The gym was in semi-darkness. There were Danish flags and paper chains, the disco lights were flashing, and there was the smell of sweat and rancid towels and plimsolls. The boys were propped against the wall bars on one side of the hall, the girls sat on benches on the other side, and the music played to an empty floor – Bay City Rollers for the girls, Nazareth and Status Quo for the boys – and everyone was waiting for things to get going. And they did with ‘Hey, We're Going to Barbados!' The flight captain was greeting the passengers – ‘Captain Tobias Wilcox welcoming passengers aboard Coconut Airways Flight 372 to Bridgetown!' – and the girls got up and began to dance cautiously with each other in a huddle. Before the song was over, the first boys were dancing, too, and the rest joined them to ‘New York Groove' with Hello, and then it was ‘Sugar Baby Love' with The Rubettes and ‘Magic' with Pilot, and then came Mud and Showaddywaddy, and the dance drew towards its close and the time for the highpoint of the evening – the slow shuffle.

I had promised myself that I would do it and looked round for Susanne. They were playing ‘If You Think You Know How To Love Me' with Smokey, and that was the sign. And then over by the door to the gym I saw that Tommy and Michael had pitched up with some of the others from the youth club. The rest of them remained standing by the door as Tommy strolled over to the girls. Then he took Susanne out onto the floor for the slow shuffle. During the next number – ‘I'm Not in Love' by 10cc – they started snogging, and so it went on and on, but I couldn't get away because I had to get past the others standing in the doorway, and Michael had caught sight of me. There was no way out of it, and none of it mattered anyway – Susanne had her hand inside Tommy's trousers. And now it was Gilbert O'Sullivan with ‘Alone Again, Naturally' – and I just wanted to die and get it over with once and for all, and I grabbed a bottle and rushed headlong for the exit.

F
or as long as I can remember I have been looking for a way out of Nykøbing and out of the house where I grew up. I couldn't go anywhere, and I was always on my guard, trying to squeeze into the tightest space – it was like walking a tightrope – and the street was the width of my footstep and went from our garage to school and back again. It all gathered and hardened into a stone in my pocket – it was an eaglestone and rattled and Father said that it came from the chalk sea, but no one knew how one stone came
to be inside another one – and I added it to the collection in my drawer.

Here I kept conch shells and fossilized sea urchins and old ham sandwiches wrapped in foil and the fragments of grenade Uncle Helmut had given me alongside all the other stuff I squirrelled away and kept to myself. I collected everything. It had to be there somewhere. I'd find it all right – happiness waiting just round the corner. It was just like at Easter. All you had to do was follow your nose – you were warmer or colder and now burning hot – and there it was, one egg in the bookcase, one under the lamp and another in the centrepiece on the dining table. When we went for a woodland walk with Grandmother in Hamborgskoven you'd see things glinting in the long grass and find eggs left by the Easter bunny wrapped in yellow and red and blue silver paper.

‘Der Osterhase war da,'
she would say, pointing to the trail – and I would almost believe it.

It was one long drawn-out treasure-hunt, and I followed the clues – they were everywhere – looking for four-leafed clover in the garden, for coins in the street that usually turned out to be flattened blobs of chewing gum, but you never knew, sifting through piles of gravel looking for fulgurites – they came from lightning strikes, and you got a shock when you found one – and in the evenings I looked for shooting stars. I cycled out to Falkerslev in gumboots and looked for flint axes and arrowheads when the fields had been ploughed, and I went down to the harbour and lay on the quay wall looking down into the water. It smelt of
tar and rotting seaweed, and I counted the minnows swimming round in shoals and fished for crabs with a flounder's head tied to a string.

There were hazelnuts in our neighbours' garden – Herr and Fru Hansen. He worked at the foundry and coughed all the time. And I collected chestnuts from the bishop's garden, the shells of edible snails, rings used for marking hens, marbles. Uncle Helmut gave me lumps of quartz and a fossil – a petrified octopus called an ammonite – and they all joined the other pieces in my exhibition on the shelf.

For me there was nothing better than stamps. They swarmed in cardboard boxes like butterflies – and the afternoons rolled into one when I sat sorting them in the dining-room. They were windows into a world that was larger and richer than anyone could imagine. It was full of crowned heads and foreign countries like Helvetia, Suomi and – most beautiful of all – Formosa, which was out there somewhere, waiting with its parrots and orchids and pink clouds. I tried to find it, travelling round the world, seeing the pyramids and travelling on trains – and then
par avion
to Thule and onward by frigate to Italy. I was at the Olympics in Mexico, greeted King Frederik IX dressed in red and only realized how late it was when the special Christmas stamps twinkled at the bottom and I came back to earth, put the lid on the box and was already looking forward to tomorrow.