Justine (12 page)

G
randpa said that Dad was so busy playing smarty-pants at the university that he didn't have the time to take care of her, getting clever was much more important, oh so clever, and what in the world did he need all that knowledge for, his head just ballooning and getting bigger and bigger until it was no use to anyone? A complete waste of time, nothing that benefited my mother certainly, she'd needed him, that's right, she'd needed help, he'd been too busy to see it, he simply didn't get it, right there before his eyes, like that! Unfortunately, I've got some work for the department, Grandpa said in a voice that was supposed to be Dad's, sorry, I've got no damn time. So she got tired of it, he thought only of himself when she gave birth to me, how could she make him understand that becoming a mother wasn't easy?

In some way Grandpa did blame my dad, but whose fault was it really? Simply take the blame and let it wander from the one to the other, I didn't know what to believe, they said so much, all of them, Dad, Grandpa, well, there were just the two, but they did talk about it often. And what about Grandma? It was undoubtedly wrong that she just sat at home, she never went out, and did a doctor ever come visit her, did she ever go see the doctor, did anyone actually even know what was wrong with her? How should I know, I wasn't a doctor, Grandpa probably knew what he was doing, he was pretty smart, in any case, he was a good man, and that was more than you can say of so many others.

S
he stood at the train station with her hands in her pockets, was it her, was it not? Visiting her had been my idea, this lady with the skinny legs, the knees bulging beneath her pants, would she be wearing a yellow jacket, would she still have those pants on, is a mother more substantial than the lady or the woman? What's the difference really between a woman, a mother, a lady, and a person of her age? She fit the lie, they'd all lied, he wasn't trustworthy and he knew exactly what he wanted me to believe, about her, too. There she stood.

“You've gotten so tall and beautiful,” she cried, she laughed, “just think, Mommy's little girl has gotten so big.” Would she smell like that? No, she wouldn't. Or rather, yes. “Hi Mom,” I'm not a little girl, I wanted to say, but didn't say it. Would the gaping hole of her mouth be missing a tooth? Would she have wrinkles, black in the crease upon crease of her upper lip, just like the man at the pub? Her nose wasn't straight. She had curly, short gray hair, she smelled, and with that we took the bus.

A woman she wasn't. It was hard to say why exactly, she just wasn't. There was nothing feminine about her, like her very sex had vanished, had shriveled to dangling skinflaps, her breasts to hanging bags, skinny, lanky, slack. She was porous, shaky, with yellow nails and with a voice that grated unevenly, and the various cardboard wine boxes that leaked and ringed the table, red, blue, purple.

W
hen she returned home that morning, she had an entirely different odor, rather bland but nonetheless sharp, a mixture of grease and skin and hair, somehow gray, something that was dry and waxy, that flaked and caked off. The smell stuck in your nose, full of a heaviness that bored its way into your nostrils, swirled around your hair and up to your brain, swirled dismally, then down your throat into your lungs, penetrating your every cell and settling like fat around your heart, more dismal still. When one hasn't bathed in a long, long time, it smells like that.

And liquid splattered the linoleum in the kitchen through the hall and into the bathroom, on the tiles, splish and splash, and finally on the sink's porcelain, a clump here: She'd eaten something after all.

And the buttocks that were nearly gone, just two hollows, the skin almost drawn away, sunk down, hanging in strips beneath the gray, brown pimpled skin of her ass, would come off in layers, stinking of cessation that stretched to eternal suspension, time that stalled or dropped into the bowl along with the rest of the liquid and cough, cough, void, completely devoid of hours.

And still. No nasal sounds even, no snoring or mumbling or tossing, just silence and the body, quiet as a mouse beneath the covers, a quiet little mouse.

And while it lasted: My pants that almost became one with the chair, an adhesive bond that you neither would nor could, yes, SHOULD break. The silence was so still and eternal, and that was good somehow, because at least then nothing was happening.

I heard her fumble with the key in the door, now she was finally home, sneaking past the room where I lay, the yellow jacket coughed and laughed at something, the grumble of a zipper, and then the door to her room closed, silence. I saw by the clock it was four thirty. And woke again, a smell in the room, I couldn't figure out what it was, smoke crept through the crack above the door, and I sprang off the couch, we were on the eighth floor, and ran to the window, ran to the door, a voice called, took my pillow, held it before my face, opened the door was full of smoke perspiration, redolence and skin, couldn't see her, away in the smoke, small flames on her coverlet, and smoke crawling up the walls, fire creatures and trolls with pointy hats crowding under the ceiling, a blanket, ran into the kitchen, her voice that called from the eighth floor, ran back to my mother, fire, fire, fire on her clothes, pulled and heaved, out of the room my head roaring at the door firemen, masks, suits, my mother and me, carry me, carry me, and cars on the street.

My father sat at the bedside and mumbled, “oooh, ohhh, ahhh,” he said, not another sound, he looked up at me, “oooh, ahhh,” and then he wept.

Something that both ticked and dripped, she lay in another room like a lady packed in white with wild red eyes, a ghost because she'd fallen asleep, now her lashes bubbled, resembled live lava. She'd set fire to her coverlet. It was her own fault. That she'd melted.

“I'm a huge idiot,” said my father, “what have I done? What was I thinking?” nothing, “we'd be better off if she was
                 
, her life is not
                 
, it never has been, it's always been a life full of
                            
, I can't take any more, no, no more now.”

I didn't think
                 
, and the silence that dripped and bleeped with a small blip, blip was as it should be, on the brink of nothing, just the red in the white and soon to be no more dripskin in tatters with ruffles, it .

And the body. They bore her body out, we weren't allowed to watch, it wasn't pleasant, the dressings were bright red, wet, and one of her breasts was burnt off along with a portion of her underarm, like a muscle perhaps, an overdone roast, coal. What do you call a breast, anyway, once it's been burned? Not a word from her, and suddenly she was gone, out of bed and out of sight, away, away, away, infection, and then she was burning again.

H
ere's what filled the armoire: memory's cremated bones.

H
ere's The Factory. I'm inside. A moment ago I was outside. I took pictures in front of the container, I was a workman, a graffiti artist, an addict, I was someone who fell and busted a knee.

Trine Markhøj has relocated to the hall and has cleared a space, obviously she's starting a new project. For the moment it's just a long iron skeleton wrapped in chicken wire, a diagonal pattern in space. Four young men are helping her out, they slap clay onto the skeleton, hum, gossip about who got into the academy this year. Two of them applied, but didn't make it. Next year they'll try again, they say, and in the meantime they're working here, and here is where I am, and there's Trine Markhøj.

“Hooray!” she shouts. “Hooray! Hooray! We're finally starting.”

She dries her hands on her pants and takes out a drawing that she unfolds, a sketch of something that resembles a piece of excrement.

“A sausage,” says Trine.

“A sausage?”

“Something like that. It'll be thirteen meters long with the amount of clay we're using,” Trine says and disappears.

I disappear too, or rather: I'm right here inside the studio. The door hardly closes thanks to the enormous brown bolster expanding and dividing and creeping down the corridors, or so it seems, and the camera is out of batteries. Shit. There won't be too many pictures anyway, because my eye is itching again, though it has also left me in peace for a couple of days. I've simply got to get out of here.

I'm wearing a patch, somehow the darkness and the pressure help, fortunately the air is clear, my destination not too far, the hotel is close, but what's happening here? The small plaza is frothing with people, they're all flowing down the street in the same direction.

It's got to be Bo. He said the soup kitchen was up and running, today they're setting up the area. Come by, he said, but I declined, and now it's nearly impossible to avoid turning up, one is simply swept along to the street kitchen that's been put up on the plaza behind the hedge, boiling pots await people standing around in clusters, skinny jeans, hoodies, it looks like the whole academy has turned out, not to mention a bunch of others, bicycle wagons packed with kids mingle with old strollers, raccoon tails, uniforms, and layer upon layer of plastic bags.

There's Bo standing with a girl who introduces herself as Åsa. She's busy unpacking paper plates and towels. She holds out her hand and smiles with an open face, blonde hair and a nose ring, the clink and chatter of multiple bracelets. Bo is tending the pot on the burner, tomato sauce, Åsa laughs the entire time, she shouts in Swedish that she'll grab the bread. There's a motorcycle cop on Dybbølsgade.

I drink a beer. Here I am leaning against the wall, right on the brink, can anyone see me? I recognize every one of you this warm evening, and man, am I exhausted. You laugh and talk, I'm blue becoming violet turning dark, like the sky. Now you're headed off to Kluden, I could go with you, but don't bother.

I
grab a bottle of rum from a kiosk, and dub the bottle Haddock. The name fits the patch sitting snug against my eye hardly even irritated. We wander along the bridge and hunker down on the wharf, just Haddock and me. We look at the water. Out across the harbor. People in silhouette. We kiss, a long sloppy kiss, kiss we, it burns. Then we take a walk along the water, across the bridge, and out onto Amager Fælled, the nature park. Here everything is topsy-turvy. Out of the twilight emerge four, five large tents and a row of baby carriages, next to them sits a woman who's incapable of standing, she's totally drunk and has puked down one of her pants' legs. Beneath a tent canopy a group sits shouting around a table. A heavily bearded guy yells he couldn't fucking care less, a woman shouts that, fuck, she's there too. I step on what's left of a garden torch. I can't figure anything out, and at present Haddock isn't much help, the place reeks strongly of piss, and over there a woman is striding over a garbage sack that's burst open on the grass, she's intent on joining the others, nothing else matters, she knocks into a skinny guy who's also striding along complaining that his tent collapsed, someone sliced holes in the canvas, he shouts, they also tried to set it ablaze, and no one at the table understands a thing. The tall man performs several high knee-lifts and jogs on, “Damn, that's far out,” mumbles the lady in the grass, who's lying completely prone now. “Totally way out,” I tell Haddock and look at my feet. We've left the path, somehow or other we've wandered a ways into Amager Fælled, on the horizon I can see Ørestaden, and the path must be
around here somewhere. And indeed, there it is, right there. It was just crouching in some bushes. Now I'll just follow it back to The Factory, I'll even snap a couple of self-portraits before calling a taxi.

T
hey crowd around me, no matter where in the city I go, it's entirely unprovoked, they shove forward, trying to get a look, here comes Hans Duns, the . . . He just resigned as professor at the academy of arts, right after our Kassel trip in the spring, and now he's getting younger and younger, soon he'll start his basic training over again.

Oh, no, he's coming over, shit, shit, shit.

“What did you do to your eye?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“One of your eyes is all red, did you know that?”

“Yeah, something to that effect.”

Duns laughs and claps me on the shoulder. Clearly, he knows what I'm about.

“You've always been something special. When are you finishing up at the school?”

”Next year.”

“Tight. I was wondered if you'd like to have a peek in the gallery at some point? I have an exhibition. The whole thing's already sold beforehand.”

Hans Duns laughs and slaps my shoulder again. This can't go on, we're not comrades, or are we? How intimate does he think we are?

“We should also figure out something about a performance.”

“I don't perform anymore.”

“Really? Since when?”

“I sculpt.”

“Oh yeah, fuck, you're together with Vita Laura. She's quite accomplished, isn't she.”

“Yes.”

“What's she doing lately? Is she still working on the stuff for the opera?”