The Elephant Keepers' Children (6 page)

But that's not the kind of plane that's waiting for us, because this is a military Gulfstream, camouflaged, with twin engines and two pilots, and the only occasion on which an aircraft like this ever comes to Finø is when a member of the royal family is on it and wants to visit.

We climb out of the minibus and stand looking at the plane. Bodil seems to sense from our posture that we are politely curious.

“GrenÃ¥ Kommune,” she says, “will do everything in its power to provide the best of care for children and young people in difficulty.”

“I know,” I say. “But isn't this a bit over the top?”

A look of weariness spreads across Bodil's face. That's the moment Tilte chooses to borrow Bodil's mobile.

“I want to call my brother,” she explains. “Only there's no battery left on mine.” Bodil hands her the phone and I'm the
only one to notice that Tilte accesses the list of recent calls and takes a long look at it, notes something down in her phenomenal memory, and then presses a number that predictably fails to answer, whereupon Bodil's phone is returned to her and we all climb on board the plane.

Access to the runway is through an empty waiting area, and on a large noticeboard some flyers have been put up, one of which makes me stop.

It is a poster advertising a series of concerts to mark something that is surely of importance, but which I fail to notice because the picture accompanying the text reaches out and grabs me by the throat. It's Conny's face, and she's smiling at me.

Tilte touches my arm, and I return to the world.

As we take off
, my dear sister leans toward me.

“Do we know anyone called Winehappy?”

I shake my head.

“That was who Bodil called,” she whispers. “I got the number from her phone.”

Then she gives my arm a squeeze, and I feel I know you well enough now for me to be quite frank and tell you why. It's because the person I love has left me.

Now you might say so what, and perhaps add that a third of the world's population is in the same boat. Indeed, the world's population consists of one third yearning for the person who
left them, one third yearning for the person they have yet to meet, and one third who are with someone they never fully appreciate until all at once that person leaves them and they find themselves consigned to group one.

But that's not exactly how it is with Conny and me. In a way, Conny hasn't left me at all. She has been sucked away. By fame.

Two years ago, a film was being shot on Finø. It was one of those films for the whole family, and because the girl who was supposed to play the bright and irresistible younger sister fell ill, Conny was brought in and ended up stealing the show and being offered a role in another film, and then three more, and now she has been in seven films in the space of two years.

I know exactly what it is about Conny. She can condense her aura and her energy on command.

All of us are able to condense our energy. But for most people it's something of which they are unaware, and when it happens it catches them off guard, like an abrupt feeling of elation or annoyance, or the sudden awareness that the goalkeeper is off balance with his weight on the wrong foot, and if you put your entire soul into taking a long shot at the goal he won't have a chance. Normally, it's not something under your control. But with Conny it's different, and that's what she exploits on screen. In the first six of her films, she played a little girl with pigtails and a spark of vandalism in her eye. In the seventh, she played a young girl with a boyfriend. Whose name was Anton. In the film. And she spoke his name the
way she used to speak mine. The way that's so impossible to describe. But it was different from the way she spoke any other name. I used to save her phone messages and play them back just to hear the way she spoke my name.

Until that film. When I saw it and heard that she had assumed control of that way of speaking a name, I knew that I had lost her. And then I stopped listening to all those old messages.

After the second film, Conny's mother moved her off to Copenhagen. Conny and I never really knew what hit us. The first film was fun. Then came the second, and suddenly she was gone. It's been eighteen months now.

Since then I've seen her only once. It was a day I came out of school and there she was waiting for me. We walked down to the harbor. Our usual walk. There's a long jetty that extends out between the beach and the dock, and you can walk along it sheltered from the wind and stop to look back on the town. She had changed. She was carrying a shoulder bag like you only ever see in adverts, and wearing a pair of earrings you don't even see there. We walked close together, but it felt like the whole harbor was between us and no bridge could ever be built. I could feel she had to be going, and I thought I was about to die. Eventually, she took hold of my shirt with both her hands and gripped it tight. “Peter,” she said. “This is something I have to do.”

And then she was gone. I haven't seen her since. Apart from in the cinema, on the screen. And now I can't even see
her there anymore, because of that last film and the thing about Anton.

Tilte knows all this. She knows what goes on inside a person when he encounters his lost love looking at him from a poster. That's why Tilte gives my arm a squeeze. And then we're in the air.

I would like to explain
exactly where Finø is situated. Finø lies slap in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity.

If you collected all the songs that have been written about Finø, for the purpose of dumping them all in the recycling bin, a very good idea indeed, you would need to hire a truck. A semi. Many of those songs can be found in the
Danish Book of Song
, and all of them may be divided into two groups.

The first group contains all the songs in which Finø is depicted as a tiny pearl in a foaming ocean against which the brave little island battles to hold its own.

The second group takes the opposite view, that Finø is an infant child sucking its toes in the arms of its mother, and the sea is the mother.

These are songs that beg the question whether people who write patriotic songs take drugs before they put pen to paper. Because on Finø half the population makes its living fishing langoustines and turbot to sell to the tourists, or servicing the tourists' boats at the Finø Boatyard, or sailing the tourists out to the colonies of seals on the Bothersome Islets, or selling suntan lotion and beachwear and café au lait at forty kroner
a mug from the Nincompoop's decking on the beach by the harbor. And the rest of Finø's population makes a living out of doing the hair and fixing the teeth and changing the nappies and intravenous drips of the half who service the tourists.

So the sea is no longer either a threat or a mother to Finø. The sea is a tombola from which we pull out a winning ticket every day all through the summer season. And it is also a gigantic playground and a sports facility for the children and young people of Finø, except for the two in every school year who are afraid of water.

Alexander Flounderblood, the ministerial envoy to Finø, once coerced Tilte into putting up her hand in class, which is a thing Tilte has never been happy about. She finds it humiliating and believes that if a teacher wants to know if she knows the answer to a question, he or she ought simply to ask her straight out, so now they've given up asking altogether, Alexander included. Nevertheless, he tried his utmost all through his first year, and on this particular occasion he asked, “What is the sea called that surrounds Finø?” And he insisted that Tilte put up her hand so that he might ask her if she knew the answer.

“It's called the Cat's Asshole,” Tilte told him.

Alexander Flounderblood nearly fell off his chair and gave her a look that could depopulate vast areas of land, but Tilte had consulted the etymology of the Kattegat in the
Dictionary of the Danish Language
, and nothing he said could ever change it.

But then Tilte told Alexander that the Cat's Asshole was perhaps not the most suitable name and that the most appropriate would be the Sea of Opportunity.

The people of Finø have turned it into a saying now. If anyone asks where Finø is, we tell them, “Slap in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity.”

We descend now toward it from out of the clouds, its waves are trimmed with white foam, the wind is at fourteen meters per second, and our approach makes the blood run that much faster through the veins of Tilte and Basker and me, which is just as well, because now Bodil Hippopotamus says, “You'll need to put on these little blue wristbands like last time.”

There they are in her hand, three wristbands, each consisting of two nylon strips holding what looks like a watch face of blue plastic, and now the police officers, whom we have been told are called Katinka and Lars, snap the wristbands shut with a special tool that looks like a pair of tongs.

The watch face contains no watch. What it contains instead is a small, though rather powerful, radio transmitter and two tiny batteries. At Big Hill there's a large board on the wall, the same as they have at the police stations in Grenå and Århus. On the boards are tiny lamps, each with a number corresponding to a transmitter. In that way, the whereabouts of those proudly sporting blue wristbands will always be known by the social services and by the police.

So blue wristbands are given to thugs on parole who are serving four-year sentences for knocking the life out of seven
people all at once. And they give them, too, to women doing time for mistreating their husbands, and who have been told by the police to maintain a distance of one and a half kilometers from the place where their beaten husband and his new girlfriend now sit and cower.

And they give them also to those residents of Big Hill who begin to let themselves into the houses of Finø Town by means of a crowbar.

But blue wristbands are not what they give to ordinary kids accustomed to walking around at will.

Bodil knows that, and so she speaks with what I would call false levity, as one might imagine she would do if, to pluck a couple of examples from the Bible, she were telling Job that all he's got is a rash and it'll be gone in the morning, or assuring Noah that it's only a shower.

“Remember,” she says, “that we are here to look after you, no matter what.”

It's obvious that Bodil belongs to that large group of adults who feel ever confident that children will understand subtlety. I now undermine that confidence.

“This
no matter what
 …” I say. “Tilte and Basker and I are not quite sure about it. Does it mean:
Even if your parents never come back
?”

That puts the wind up her, but because she has her seat belt fastened for landing and cannot sneak away or step out onto the wing, the only thing she can do is look us straight in the eye.

“Of course they'll come back,” she says. “Of course they will.”

And then, for the first time, hard pushed, and at the very last gasp, Bodil produces an utterance straight from her hippopotamus heart.

“But we are worried,” she says.

The Big Hill rehab center
lies above Finø Town, on the slopes of the hill known as Big Hill, whose peak, at one hundred and one meters above sea level, is Finø's most elevated location.

Tourists who chuckle at the name Big Hill and who intend to do so in the vicinity of Tilte or Basker or me are advised to ensure adequate dental protection and to pay any such installments as may be outstanding on their life insurance policies. We people of Finø are tender souls and rather sensitive as to how our home is perceived by others.

But any chuckles that might be expelled soon die when you see the view from Big Hill. Once standing on the top, no one has ever been less than deeply moved. I've seen men in leather jackets bearing the insignia of motorcycle gangs, men with shaved heads and flames tattooed across their necks and throats, and with sawed-off shotguns holstered on their Harleys, who have burst into tears and wept on seeing the view from Big Hill.

What people find so moving is the vastness of it all, and vastness is always so hard to explain. But from the top of Big Hill you can take in all of Finø, all twelve kilometers from
Finø Town in the south to the lighthouse on the northern point, and surrounding it all as far as the eye can see is the Sea of Opportunity, which makes Finø look almost like it's in suspension, green in a dark blue firmament of sea. Just to give you my take on what could be included alongside those patriotic tributes in the
Danish Book of Song
.

It is this view Tilte and I now have in front of us as we stand on the patio of the rehab center called Big Hill.

And now Tilte puts her arms around me from behind.

You should always be cautious when it comes to allowing others to touch you. To name one example, touching is history for me as far as my mother is concerned. I'm fourteen now, and in eighteen months I'll be off to boarding school for a year, and when I come back I'll be leaving home altogether.

So my mother is rather mixed up when it comes to touching, and her confusion comes from her not being able to grasp that only a moment ago, in her terminology, you were her baby, and now you're fourteen and have been left by a woman and are the first team's top scorer and under suspicion of once having smoked a marijuana cigarette, though nothing was ever proved.

So Mother doesn't know if she is entitled to embrace me or whether she must send in an application, or else simply forget all about it and avoid the situation entirely, unless I take pity on her and put my arms around her like she were the child and I the adult.

It's different with Tilte; she knows inside her how much she is entitled to, which is quite a lot, and so now she puts her arms around me from behind.

“Petrus,” she says.