A Fairy Tale

by Jonas Bengtsson

  He can give it an injection; put it out of its misery, that’s all he can offer. Petra’s crying so hard she can’t speak. She keeps shaking her head.

  The secretary calls us a taxi.

  We take it to an animal hospital. Petra runs inside with the cat while I pay the driver.

  They give the cat an injection, open up its cuts and clean them. Petra squeezes my hand until I can no longer feel it. Five hours later we’re told we can take the cat home with us.

  I spend the rest of my holiday looking after the cat while Petra goes to work. I apply ointment to its cuts and force the syringe with antibiotics into its mouth. Soon my hands are just as scratched as Petra’s.

  “It’s easy and fairly safe. It’s almost legal.” Kasper puts groceries into the shopping cart. “The best time is late in the day and early in the month when the shops are busy.”

  His voice is louder than usual.

  “Visibility is part of the trick,” he says, taking a box of cornflakes from the shelf. He throws it up in the air; it floats under the ceiling before it lands in the trolley. “No one expects you to talk about shoplifting in a super­market. Just as no one expects you to try to shoplift something this big.”

  When we reach the till, Kasper takes a single bottle of beer and puts it on the belt. The girl has sleepy eyes after a long day at work. She rings up the beer. Kasper doesn’t say anything about the crate of beers under our trolley. We carry it out of the supermarket between us.

  “If you’re caught, you can always act dumb,” Kasper says, without lowering his voice. “I didn’t check the till receipt, did I? Or you say you did tell the checkout assistant. At this time in the day their memory is like a goldfish’s. How much is that? Three, four seconds?”

  We’re only a few steps down the road when Kasper sets down the crate and calmly lights a cigarette.

  “The beauty of the beer-crate trick is that you get money back when you return the empty bottles and the crate. The supermarket pays you to drink beer.”

  We haul the crate up the stairs and pass the bottles through the hatch, one by one.

  Whenever we sit on Karlsson’s roof, he does most of the talking. Kasper says he saves up his words.

  Today he talks about the school he and Kasper went to. About morning assembly. The suburb they come from was well-heeled. It’s taken real effort to sink as low as they have.

  “Or rather high, to sink as high,” Karlsson says and flings out his arms, taking in the rooftops around us, the sun which is going down and glows gold and orange on the windows.

  When the city lies in darkness and the dew has fallen, we go inside the shed.

  Karlsson lowers his voice. Even here on top of the city, alone on the roof, he fears that someone might be listening in. He’s no longer talking about himself or the art of catching a pigeon. He’s talking about bombs. How easy it is to make a bomb from items you find under your kitchen sink. He says that a bomb is only worth its target. A bomb is a sentence that doesn’t get a full stop until the next day’s newspapers.

  I glance at Kasper. He just smiles, rolls joints, and looks as though he’s heard it all before.

  Karlsson wants to bomb a lot of places: the National Bank, the stock exchange, Christiansborg Parliament, Lego.

  Especially Lego.

  “It’s all about symbols,” he says.

  Late at night we fly kites.

  I hold on to the string. Kasper stands a few metres from the edge of the roof with the kite above his head. He holds the string tight until the kite tears itself loose and takes off over the rooftops.

  Petra scrubs my nails with a coarse sponge; coloured flakes disappear down the drain.

  “You can paint me,” she says. “Naked, if you like. I promise to sit very still.”

  I’ve tried to explain to her that I don’t paint specific things like people, animals, or teapots. I just like holding a paintbrush in my hand.

  She keeps scrubbing my nails, somewhat harder now.

  Perhaps she saw the sketches I’d left lying around, the ones I made of Kot while it was ill.

  We walk along the canal.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “It’s a surprise,” Petra says.

  She promised me a surprise late last night, but refused to give anything away.

  We continue fifty metres down the street, then she opens the door to a gallery. It’s small with white walls and it’s in what was once a bicycle shop. A lady in her sixties walks around making notes on a pad. A young man sits with a laptop. His hair is artfully messy, he has a small leather string around his neck, and the sleeves of his T-shirt have been cut off so you can see his tattoos. If we have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask, then his attention goes back to the screen.

  Petra takes a catalogue for each of us.

  There are three rooms in the gallery, all with speakers playing soft electronic music.

  We walk from picture to picture. Petra decides when we move on. She tilts her head, asks me if I think they’re good; she says she likes the colours.

  The catalogue is a two-page leaflet with text in Danish and English. The artist is only a few years older than the age I tell people I am. And yet he has already exhibited in London, Vienna, and Tokyo. Even though he went to a famous art college, his style is described as wild, free, and unschooled.

  He’s brave, it says. Broad brush strokes without fear of the consequences.

  The artist says he likes exhibiting in a small gallery where you can get so close to the paintings you can smell the paint. He compares it to playing in small clubs. In brackets it says that the artist also plays guitar in a rock band.

  “Is something wrong?” Petra says when we leave the gallery.

  I shake my head.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She takes my hand. “Was it a bad idea to go to the exhibition?”

  We get coffee in one of the cafés overlooking the canal. It’s still cold out, but the sun is shining. We sit outside with our jackets zipped right up, warming our hands on the coffee cups.

  “I’ve another surprise for you,” Petra says. “A small present, if you like.”

  She pushes a key across the table. It’s silver and it looks new.

  “It’s just a key,” she says quickly. “So you don’t have to wake me up when you come over late at night.”

  After work I walk across the bridge and lie down in Petra’s still-warm bed. I sleep until she gets back from work. She brings bread from the supermarket’s bakery. It’s stale, but she gets it for free. She holds up two croissants to her forehead and pretends to be a bull. Bull is byk in Polish.

  We go to a bar, but the smoke makes her eyes water.

  We walk back across the bridge; she catches me watching her. The whiteness of her hands and body. She practically glows in the dark.

  “I’m not an albino,” she says.

  “No.”

  “Albinos have red eyes.”

  “Just like vampires.”

  “No,” she says. “Not like vampires. But possibly werewolves.”

  I’m close to falling asleep when I hear it again; the strange sound in the room. I fumble my way to the power cord, follow it to the switch, and turn on the lamp. Petra sits on the edge of the bed with her face buried in her hands. She’s whimpering. The tears run down her arms and collect under her elbows.

  She looks at me before hiding her face in her hands again.

  “You’re going to leave me,” she says.

  I put my arm around her shoulders. She has retreated into herself.

  “No,” I say to her.

  “Maybe not right now, but soon.”

  I sink back into sleep.

  Kasper meets me in the street. He has an old radio under his arm.

  “Keep going,�
�� he says. “We’ve got something to celebrate.”

  Kasper lets us into his building; I follow him up the stairs.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Me, for Christ’s sake. It’s my birthday today.”

  It’s the first time I’ve been inside his apartment.

  “I’m not here very often, I just come here to sleep . . . I sleep here sometimes.”

  There are open cardboard boxes with clothes hanging over the sides from the hallway to the living room and into the bedroom.

  Kasper’s bed is a mattress on the floor with a sleeping bag. There are stacks of books along the walls. He starts rummaging through one of the boxes, throwing clothes on the floor in the process.

  “Please, would you get the schnapps from the kitchen?”

  At first I check the shelves, then I look inside the fridge. It’s practically empty. All I find is some liver pâté and half a cucumber.

  When I open the freezer compartment, four peas roll out and land on the floor. The bottle of schnapps lies next to the open bag.

  “Get some glasses as well, will you?” Kasper shouts from the bedroom. “Karlsson’s are gross, I think he licks them clean like a cat.”

  I look in the drawers. I find economy-sized packs of paper plates and plastic cutlery. In the last cupboard I find six small shot glasses still wrapped in clear plastic.

  I wait for Kasper in the hallway. More clothes and several books end up on the floor while he searches through another cardboard box. Then he appears with a bottle in his hand.

  “I nicked this from my dad the last time I visited my parents. I’ve had it for a couple of years now and I’ve been waiting for the right occasion. Today’s the day.”

  The liquid in the bottle is brown.

  “Whisky?”

  “Not just any old whisky.”

  He points to the label; it says 1976.

  “Single malt. Not that you Turks would understand.”

  We walk past a bakery and buy a cake with whipped cream and strawberries. In the kiosk next door we buy batteries for the radio.

  Karlsson welcomes us; he wears a checked shirt and a wide tie with a brown pattern.

  “The birthday boy,” he says, holding up his tie. “Windsor knot.”

  Karlsson has put the folding table out on the roof, cut up a black garbage bag, and made it into a tablecloth.

  First we put out the alcohol. Two bottles of cherry brandy that Karlsson has bought. Half a crate of beer from when we last performed the beer-crate trick. Whisky and schnapps. We put the cake in the shade.

  “You should always start with the good stuff,” Kasper says, twisting the top off the whisky bottle. He takes the shot glasses out of the wrapping and fills them up. “A toast to me. A toast to us. I hope my dad has discovered that the bottle is missing. I hope he has been crying his heart out. Cheers.”

  The whisky tastes of seaweed and smoke. Kasper drinks his in two gulps. I try to keep up; tears well up in my eyes.

  “How old are you?” I ask, when I regain the power of speech.

  “That’s not important.” And again he fills up my glass to the brim.

  Karlsson sips his; after a couple of nips he says he prefers cherry brandy.

  We eat the cake off paper plates, shovelling it into our mouths and laughing and getting whipped cream on our noses and chins and in our laps.

  The sun goes down and we move inside. Karlsson lights some candles.

  “Come on,” Kasper says. “It’s my birthday, drink up.”

  He opens a bottle of schnapps, fills my glass. I drink small sips of beer to quell the fire in my throat.

  “Music, I almost forgot the music.”

  Kasper uses his teeth to rip open the package of batteries and he inserts them into the radio. He twists the metal knob until he finds an acceptable channel. A local radio station playing old blues like Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim from scratchy LPs.

  “You look thirsty,” he says, and fills my glass to the brim again.

  The wind pulls and shakes the little wooden shed; Kasper keeps filling up my glass. I’ve nearly fallen asleep when I feel a pair of hands grab me by the collar. Kasper pulls me to my feet. We walk across the roof. Karlsson waves to us. I try to walk in a straight line; the whole time I’m only one metre from the edge. We walk down the stairs, several times I nearly fall.

  Kasper hails a cab in the street.

  “I’m quite drunk,” I tell him.

  We sit in the back. I lean against the door for support.

  “Of course you are.”

  “Am I going home now?”

  “No.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “That’s for the birthday boy to decide.”

  I’m woken up by the sound of a car horn. I don’t know how long I’ve been out. We drive across Rådhuspladsen, across one of the bridges. The taxi pulls over. I look out the window and see a bar. Kasper props me up as we walk through the door. He helps me sit on a barstool and orders for both of us. On the wall behind the bar is a mirror with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Kasper talks to me; I can only make out the odd word.

  The bartender puts a beer and a bitters in front of each of us.

  I didn’t think I could drink any more, but the alcohol wakes me up.

  A man comes over to us. I recognize him from somewhere.

  “There you are,” he says to Kasper.

  They hug each other.

  “Christ, it’s been a long time. Are you still working at the post office?”

  Kasper nods and they toast. I try to join in, but their glasses are too far away. And that’s when I recognize the man in front of us. His messy hair, the leather string around his neck. I know that I’m very drunk, but I’m absolutely sure he’s the man from the gallery.

  The light falls through the window. I’ve slept in yesterday’s clothes. I’ve got the taste of vomit in my mouth and small splashes of it on my shoes.

  The pain continues beyond my hairline and dyes the room orange. It takes me several attempts to stand up. On the small table under the window I find a packet of tablets and a note.

  Take two, it says. No more than two or you might die. The pills are from Holland, prescribed to someone whose name I don’t recognize.

  I go to the bathroom and swallow three tablets with water from the tap. I lie back down on the bed and close my eyes. I wish I could go to sleep, but I can’t. Slowly the pills begin to take effect; they take away the pain, but also my ability to feel my legs.

  While I lie on my back reminding myself to keep breathing, it grows darker outside.

  I get dressed. I put my feet on the sidewalk with great care; the distance from my head to my legs is great.

  I find my place at the pigeonholes without having spoken to anyone. Kasper stands behind me, singing along softly to the music in his headphones. I lean against the cold metal of the pigeonholes for support, scared that I might pass out on the concrete floor.

  The first crate rolls down the conveyor belt. I pick it up and stagger back to the pigeonholes with it.

  “You got me drunk yesterday,” I say.

  At first I don’t think Kasper has heard me, then he takes off his headphones.

  “Of course I did.”

  “But thanks for the pills.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He holds out the headphones, ready to put them over my ears. “Ramones?”

  I groan and return to the pigeonholes, hoping that my hands and eyes will soon take over, do the work for me, and take away the pounding in my head.

  On my way up the metal staircase I nearly trip over. I feel Kasper’s hand on my back.

  “I didn’t know you got so angry when you were drunk,” he says, pouring coffee for me. “Everyone in the bar stopped talking when you went off. You screamed
something about a scared little boy who was frightened of the middle of the canvas.”

  I start to remember fragments from the night. I remember spilling beer down myself, I remember shouting, Brave, he’s not fucking brave. I think I was referring to the painter exhibiting at the gallery.

  “And you jabbed your finger,” Kasper says. “You did a lot of jabbing.”

  I take a sip of coffee, I blow on it and drink some more. I empty the cup before the break is over.

  We’re back in front of the pigeonholes, the letters keep coming.

  “Why didn’t they throw me out?”

  “They did, eventually. But I think they liked you.”

  “Liked me?”

  “You were entertaining. The crazy, ranting artist. It got to be too much in the end, of course. But you got a lot off your chest.”

  I put on the headphones and turn up the music.

  A couple hundred letters later I go to the washroom. I try to be sick, but I fail. I drink water from the tap and go back to my booth.

  The supervisor walks by. “You feeling all right?” he asks.

  Kasper mimes raising a bottle to his lips. The supervisor laughs and walks on.

  “It wasn’t your birthday yesterday, was it?” I say to Kasper.

  “Yesterday? No, of course it wasn’t my birthday yesterday.”

  “You bastard.”

  “If I’d told you I wanted you to meet a guy I went to school with, a guy who runs a gallery, what would you have said? Would you have said yes?”

  “No, I wouldn’t have.”

  “You’re mumbling. We’re not speaking Turkish now, you know.”

  I put on the headphones. I don’t want to talk any more. Yellow crates. Letters. The buzzing of the conveyor belt.

  “You haven’t forgotten what you promised him, have you?”

  I make no reply. I continue to stare at the letters in front of me.

  “You promised him. No, more than that, you shouted that you would bring a couple of your paintings to the gallery.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Seeing that you’re so much fucking better than everybody else.”