by Liz Jensen
All of which cruel psychic pain expressed itself in a single choking cry, to which some moments later Fru Schleswig (being slower on the uptake) replied with a similar cry, but deeper & less ladylike, followed by a panting & a wheezing sound, for she too had finally absorbed the painful & incontrovertible fact that we were both miraculously alive, yet still in the grip of the invisible shackles that bind us together for all eternity on this planet.
But what planet, precisely? What manner of place was this, that Fru S & I had spun to? I could see nothing at first, but gradually my eyes adapted themselves to the murk, which was odourless & with a greenish tinge, as though the walls, like a subterranean cave, were clad in a phosphorescent alga that cast an eerie light all of its own.
I cast my glance around in mental disarray, my heart beating like the clappers, but saw no trace of the contraption in the emerald glow of the hall in which we found ourselves. Had we been debouched & then abandoned by the mechanism that brought us here? Or had it simply catapulted us to this place, & remained in situ in the basement at Fru Krak’s? It certainly felt I had undergone a long & unprotected journey, for my flesh & bones ached as though I had been battered ferociously by a sea-storm, my clothes seemed chilly & wet, & when I put my fingers to my hair, I realized it too was moist, & all undone & tangled around my shoulders like a hank of seaweed, with grains of sand in it: I licked my finger then, & tasted salt. Good Lord, had Fru Schleswig & I travelled the high seas unawares? Flown through the air, got too close to the ocean, & been tossed by waves en route? If so, it was even more of a miracle that we were still alive!
Gulping back my horror, I staggered weakly to my feet, whereupon the sensation of having been shaken up & bruised hit me with shocking forcefulness. In the darkness I looked around for Fru Schleswig, & found her lying on her back some three metres away from me in a pool of water, helpless as an upturned Galapagos turtle, her new apron seemingly torn to shreds & her straggled hair all dripping & unkempt A small crab dropped from what remained of her scrazzled chignon, & scuttled away into a dark corner.
‘Come, madam, we must get out of this place & hide ourselves somewhere & then work out the lie of the land!’ I urged, hauling her to her feet, a strenuous & exhausting operation performed to the accompaniment of her nonstop grumbling, wheezing & moaning about her poor freezing swollen-up legs & her half-broken back, & punctuated by a further series of foul retorts from her nether sphincter.
‘Shh!’ I whispered. ‘Restrain yourself, madam, or we are undone!’ (You would not believe, dear one, what a mass of noise can emanate from a single humanoid figure under strain.) When she was finally in an upright position, & steadied there with one hand against the wall, we were able to take in our surroundings a little better, & see for the first time how unaccountably strange indeed they were, for it now appeared that we stood beneath a huge dark metal structure – Lord, a giant telescope, high above which – for Fanden! – hovered a dead-straight line of shimmering green light, suspended seemingly in thin air but vibrating like the wing of a frantic trapped moth. This emerald line lit up the high domed roof above itself, & did not stop at the window but shot outwards from it, & into the far distance of the night. What strange wizardry was this? A mystery enshrouded in an enigma, in turn wrapped deeply up in preposterousness & danger!
‘Oi duz notte lyke it here,’ muttered Fru Schleswig. ‘Letz go strate bakke.’ And it was then that she, too, spotted that the machine had vanished, at which she let out a loud low of anger, like a maddened bull. ‘Tiz all yor fork!’ she fumed, turning on me with red-faced rage. ‘Look wot u dun now! Herez anutha fyne mess u hav gotten us into, & it is thanques to u, u silly gurl. I did notte spankke u enuf wen u woz a babby! I shudve –’
But I straightway clapped my hand to her mouth, & then forced her tuberous arm sharply up behind her back to further restrain her, for I had heard a sound: the distant click & clack of a door opening & then closing, though where it emerged from I could not tell, such a strange echo was there in that dark place, that bejozzled everything around. Fru Schleswig was by now rolling her eyes at me, grunting & trying to say something in a repellently moist & spitty way, which I would not let her do, until finally she squirmed free of my grip & pointed with her sausagey finger in the direction of a side-hallway I had not seen, where appeared an extremely tall, dark, lanky-limbed man who was walking fast, nay almost running towards us & who, from the way he scarecrowed out his long arms, as if to grab or embrace us, & cried hoarsely, ‘Welcome!’, appeared to have been expecting us. My hand still slapped firm across Fru Schleswig’s now fighting mouth (‘Bite me & you’re mincemeat,’ I hissed in her ear), we stood rooted there as he made his gangling way towards us, & as he approached closer I saw that he was clad in the plainest & most dismal clothes imaginable, some kind of fancy dress, one might surmise, if one were to disguise oneself as a prisoner from a bygone era, or another country where they do things differently. So preoccupied was I by the bald, undecorated lines of the outfit he wore that I did not immediately take in his face. But when I did, I gasped. For there, most unmistakable, were the high temples & bulging forehead; the dark, flashing eyes: as sure as Fru Fanny Schleswig was not my mother, it was the man whose portrait hung in the hall, Professor Frederik Krak! The artist had captured his likeness, particularly the sheen on his face which I now saw to be not an effect of oil-paint so much as good old-fashioned sweat, that dampened the man’s forehead & reflected the overhead light in a streak of green luminescence which shone like a wound, as though an enraged Thor had split his head apart with a mighty hammer.
‘Welcome, dear ladies! Welcome indeed!’ he cried, beaming twitchily. His voice sounded most familiar. Put a balaclava on him, I thought suddenly, & I would swear we have already met. ‘Another success story!’ he continued, clearly – for reasons I could not fathom – quite pleased with himself ‘I am honoured to make your acquaintance formally at last!’ But something nervous behind this hearty welcome hinted that his delight was matched by a sense of relief. God knows, I thought, what is going on inside that bulging brain. Best beware.
‘Let us free this good woman,’ he murmurs, at which he bends to forcibly unclamp my palm from Fru Schleswig’s mouth (thus unleashing a torrent of expletives on her part, all directed at me), & gives a small, formal bow, introduces himself as my humble servant, Frederik Krak, Professor of Physics, & Explorer of the Unknown, & kisses the back of my hand in the manner of a Hungarian nobleman (I had one once, who liked to tickle my fanny with a goose feather), & then he takes Fru Schleswig’s big greasy flipper & kisses it too, which renders her straightway all a-goggle because you can be sure she has never had her hand kissed before, nor any part of her I should imagine, & the surprise of it has the same effect as an entire cooking apple being stuffed in her gob, stuck-pig-wise, ie complete silence, which is a relief after the hellish hoo-ha she’s been kicking up.
The mans a charmer, I think, as I watch Fru Schleswig’s visage melt like a chunk of lard at the cheap ploy. Watch out. A charmer & a balaclava’d spy.
‘I expect you are wondering how it is that you came here all the way from Denmark, dear ladies,’ he says with a spasm of his hand, which cannot seem to sit still, & nor can any part of him indeed, for he is all a-rattle with nerves & tics & little anxious shudders.
‘Came from it to where?’
‘To London!’ he responds brightly, as though the name of that famously moribund and depraved city, full of scheming foreigners, could be anything other than a happy surprise. At which his eyes flash & flicker again with what I am now beginning to suspect is madness, pure & simple. But although the worm of anxiety shifts within me, I resolve at that moment to show the man nothing but the haughty contempt & disdain he deserves until he has explained himself.
‘But London is in England!’ I scoff, picking what appears to be a whelk from my hair & letting it fall to the floor with a clatter.
‘Astutely noted, young lady,’ he replies apologetically. ‘It is indee
d, I fear. For due to circumstances beyond my control, & indeed my ken, to do with the kinetic pull of latitude & the parallel push of longitude, & the conflict between local time & universal time, exacerbated by the volatility of exotic matter,’ (what on earth was he talking about? He was fair dizzying me with hypotheticality!) ‘we find ourselves with a direct connection between the Greenwich Meridian upon which we now stand & Østerbro, where I discovered – & indeed invented – the Krak Time-Sucker, a rare species of cosmic fault-line found only in few parts of the world, nay the universe.’
‘U did wot?’ growls Fru Schleswig darkly.
‘As you may already have learned from your various most enterprising researches in Rosenvængets Allé, Froken Charlotte, I experimented a-plenty with the mechanics of such an initiative,’ continues Professor Krak, ignoring her & concentrating on me, for he has swiftly ascertained that the simple organism of Fru Schleswig’s brain owes more to vegetable and mineral origins than the animal. ‘But alas, geographically we find ourselves limited in our time-travelling possibilities, for we are dependent on the meridian & the conjunction of this feature with a Time-Sucker phenomenon, known in modern times as a “worm-hole”.’
‘Whoa, there, sir!’ I cried. ‘One thought at a time!’ But there was no stopping his fevered science, which continued at a most egregious pace: as he spoke, one fancied one saw the man’s skull straining with the force of all the ideas it contained, & I wondered what a phrenologist might make of the various cranial bulges that came to the fore as he so energetically emphasized. Too clever for his own good, had been Gudrun Olsen’s phrase, & now I could see her meaning most starkly. ‘Although Copenhagen is not on the meridian, it is the original starting-point, & the machine is geared to the Greenwich Line, & points thereon,’ he enthused. ‘The conjunction of both meridian & Time-Sucker is to be found in only a very few locations. Now the Afric isle of Marroquinta has a species of fault-line which approximates a Krak Time-Sucker. The Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar in the Spanish city of Zaragoza is also on the Krak map. One can also visit a corner of Algeria which is either a desert, a radical mosque, or a children’s emporium known as Toys ‘R’ Us, depending on the era in which you visit it, & an uninhabited rock off Antarctica. A charming place, if sea parrots interest you. But London, I find, is the most convenient & charming of the meridianal destinations my Time Machine has to offer, which is why so many Danes from our era find themselves coming here, & assimilating most happily.’
At which my anger bursts forth, for he must stop playing around with me, & spouting all this gibberish about Afric isles and sea parrots & ‘Our Lady of Pilar’, & explain why one moment the innocent Fru Schleswig & I are staring into the barrel of Fru Krak’s blunderbuss, & the next – find ourselves whisked to a place he claims is London, quite against our will. He must account for himself properly, & forthwith! ‘I demand to be told just what you think you are planning to do with us here, sir! For we insist on being returned home without further ado, do we not, Fru Schleswig? Do we not?’ I repeat, kicking her in the leg & thus prompting a most vehement cry of agreement.
‘Ah,’ he smiles, quite unperturbed by my forcefulness. ‘Even though – from what I have just gleaned – returning there would entail getting a bullet in that youthful chest?’
I gulp & feel myself blanch. ‘A bullet? Are you sure?’
‘Most certainly I am,’ he says apologetically. ‘For knowing Fru Krak as I do, she will be loitering with that gun for some time, keen to take a further pot-shot, should you return. In my opinion it would be best to wait a while, for her delicate feminine nerves to settle. Do not forget, I made the terrible mistake of being married to the woman, & know her blind furies well.’
‘So why did we come here, & how in heaven’s name are we to return? And when?’ I accuse.
‘You shall have answers to all your questions in good time, my dear, fear not,’ he retorts soothingly. But I am not to be calmed so readily, for my brain is veritably boiling. ‘What’s more,’ he continues, ‘one of these days I will be more than happy to show you round the Observatory & explain the scientific mechanism of the meridian time phenomenon & particle anti-particle annihilation in more detail’ (O no, I thought, no more detail please or my addled head will implode with all the unlikeliness), ‘but my concern at the moment is to get you ladies out of here & into a good clean bed where you can rest after your gruelling ordeal, for having made more than fifty of such journeys myself, I am the first to recognize the physical & psychic toll they take!’
‘Wot bluddie obzervatry,’ boomed Fru Schleswig for whom, despite her brain containing no more intellectual energy than a rotted pumpkin or a sack of brick dust, the øre was finally beginning to drop, & who now, seemingly recovered from having her hand kissed by a gentleman, was turning nasty, her eyes like two mistrustful currants buried deep in pastry. ‘I do notte kno wot wun of them iz but I do notte lyke the sound of it, I kan tel u.’
‘The Greenwich Observatory,’ said the Professor with a twitching grin. ‘Established by King Charles who appointed an Astronomer Royal to apply himself with the most exact care & diligence to the rectification of the tables & motions of the heavens, & the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so-much-desired longitude of places for perfecting the art of navigation. In other words, ladies, to establish a central & crucial here from which all the theres of this planet may be measured & charted. That green line above us is a modern laser beam, marking the Meridian Line to the exactitude of a zillimetre.’
And he spread his arm indicating we should look up above us, & follow the shimmering green line, which shot, straight as time’s arrow, out of the window, & seemingly out into the heavens. I went to the window & followed the path it drew, then took in a sharp breath – for Sataan, there before me in the far distance squatted a kind of fairyland, all lit up with a million candles – a collection of huge, geometric monuments, their myriad lights flashing, winking & sparking bright, & it seemed we were on a hill, & this fairyland was down in the valley below, & beyond it I spied the glitter of water, & a faint hum whispered from it, as though it softly breathed, but I could see no sign of life but some oddly-moving rows of lights, it being darkish outside. O curious new world, what mass of glass & metal was this, that met my eyes?
‘The Tin City!’ I breathed, for such had I instantly christened it, & despite my pleas to be returned to Denmark forthwith, something in me yearned to step its streets, just once, for the adventure.
He laughed. ‘Actually, Canary Wharf,’ he said, smiling. ‘Well, young Charlotte. You are indeed a plucky one. I have been watching your progress, & was wondering how long it would take you to come here, to the Tin City, as you call it. Though I must say you are full of surprises, for I hardly expected your mother too! She must have got in with you and activated the starting mechanism!’
But little did he know what nerve he had hit. All at once the horizon seemed to twist & uglify.
‘Fru Schleswig is not my mother!’ I expostulated, & then (I blush at the memory, & might not be recounting it to you, had I not taken a vow of honesty) burst into tears of pure, exhausted misery. I am not normally one to bawl my eyes out, dear precious darling reader (oh, and you are looking so attractive today, if I may say so!), but I confess that I was in that moment floored by the predicament in which I found myself. Here I was in a whole new world, & there on the horizon was Fairyland, & yet people I did not even know were insisting on my kinship to the hideous one! This was a far cry from what I had planned, or would have planned, had I been the architect of my own destiny!
‘There there, young lady. We are a highly-strung creature, to be sure!’ he said, putting his arm around my shoulder in what he may have hoped to be a fatherly way, but I shook him off roughly, & Fru Schleswig’s pawing hoof too, & remained in a dignified state of silence (or ‘a ryte royle sulke’, as Fru S mutteringly referred to it) as Professor Krak led the way down a wide bright-lit corridor to a cupboard-like room where he picked up a b
ag from which he pulled two enormous red blankets of a texture I had never encountered before (which might have seduced me, had I not been in such a state, for soft as the fur on the belly of a kitten they were, & as sweetly warm!), in which we wrapped ourselves before following him out, passing through an octagonal room housing brass machines in glass cases, alongside globes & telescopes, & cogged contraptions whose purpose seemed to calibrate or trap something. ‘The museum,’ murmured Professor Krak distractedly, & I spotted that he seemed hurried, & glanced nervously about him all the while, as though he were trespassing & had no right there. (Which later of course I learned was indeed the case, & he had only succeeded in gaining regular entrance through bribery, blackmail & extortion.) We exited through a back door that led to what he called the Fire Escape &, once at ground level, walked some way in the oddly warm night air through a wide, tree-filled field whose floor was littered with the bobbled seed-pods of the plane tree, as found on Strandboulevarden, which I was glad to see for at least they looked familiar in this landscape, though my fur-lined boots were drenched, & they squelched with water at each step. As we made our way across the mown grass of what seemed a sloping park, the humming, roaring noise swelled out from the bright light-strings, which Professor Krak announced with pride were ‘cars, moving carriages powered by a motor & fossil fuel. Welcome to the modern world, my dears, where the twenty-first century has dawned!’
The twenty-first century?! Lord, spare us! I thought, but said nothing, & merely pondered the Professor’s words as we tramped on in silence through the dusk or dawn or whatever this half-light was in the shadow of the Tin City, for it seemed infected & false, & clearly bore no relation to sun, moon or stars. He had knocked me down with a feather, of course, with this talk of leaping more than a century forward in time. But on the other hand – well, although it was not entirely clear to me what manner of a place this was in which we had landed up, I was beginning to surmise that we were in a world that existed invisibly, & in another sphere to our own. Not an afterlife, so much as a side-stepping of death, a kind of cosmic cheat, or parallel, or chimera which (if Professor Krak was to be believed) was taking place far into the unthinkably distant future. Well, so be it, then! A dream it was! I would wake up soon & all would be well! And I would laugh at the whole absurd story over breakfast, & perhaps even recount some of it to Fru Schleswig & make her spray the room with rundstykker crumbs as she in turn guffawed. But the dream did not end, & could not be escaped from so easily, & indeed it then most swiftly turned nightmarish, for waiting at the black wrought-iron park entrance (which we scaled with the assistance of a ladder that stood there, the gates themselves being padlocked shut) stood a shiny black carriage of iron, horseless, on four wheels, that growled like a foul-tempered hippopotamus. Professor Krak bade us enter it through a door that he swung open in its side: ‘Our means of transport, ladies,’ he said, & then, in a foreign tongue which I presumed to be English, commenced a rushed conversation with the driver of this vehicle, who was – Lord! I could scarcely believe my eyes! as black as a coal-scuttle, just like in the illustrations of man-eating cannibals I had seen in the cellar at the orphanage! But before I could scream in terror & make my escape, the machine roared to life with a smooth lurch & we sped into the pellucid gloaming which in that place seemed to pass for night
