Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.

  If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,

  A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

  Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.

  The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.

  Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.

  She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.

  While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

  Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,

  A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,

  The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.

  The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.

  The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

  I am exhausted, I am exhausted –

  Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.

  I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.

  The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.

  Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

  3 October 1962

  English pub food is sticky as beeswax, these pies, half dissolved bread bowls with their contents heated past the pain threshold, straight from the oven, served in ovenproof dishes, and before that directly from the freezer, and before that straight from the production line, for example eel and ale pie, I can make Alma moan nauseatingly just by saying it. And for dessert, a flat cake with thousands of raisins, popularly known as ‘flies’ graveyard’. Not a meal to raise your spirits – but rather to completely rid you of them, the spirit escapes the flaccid, overfed body during a hiccup. We have stopped in Lyme Regis on our way home. We have just consumed this spirit-sapping meal outdoors, with a view of the pier where the French lieutenant’s woman (in the book, in the film of the same name) stood and kept an eye out for her French sailor. Meryl Streep, dressed in black, ostracized because of this romance, every day waiting for a ship, come back come back, but did he really exist? Or had she made him up to give her dreary life a focal point. I don’t remember. In any case a child was born – and christened Lalage, which means ‘babbling brook’ and is well suited to the sounds of the early years. In front of us the fish and chips social class is wading in the bay with rolled-up trousers. One had ‘fuck’ tattooed across his back. Several have dyed their hair colourless. A couple of tables away an overweight teenager hits his dad because he is not allowed to have two courses. He holds the menu in front of his face in defence. But no more blows come. The teenager knocks over his chair and walks down to the beach, into the sea. The beach is white, the slopes black. The waiter has a jagged scar across the throat. We could also visit John Fowles’ house, he made the city famous with his French lieutenant’s woman, but we are content with staring at the pier. And the waders there, presumably force-fed on low quality from the moment they opened their eyes, seem to enjoy the water in spite of everything. A social dystopia, does it not sound like constipation? The pier where she stood wishing for something magnificent – where tragedy was better than having a tedious life with no drama.

  CHARLES REVISITED

  [Camilla]

  ‘How,’ Charles asks, ‘did you end up in the company of hippies?’

  He rarely asks about my biography, we have known each other for a long time; I get all excited in my chair by the bed. (Usually we talk about the pain. Is it dull. Or wild, raw and ferocious. Like walking across a frozen field with sleet on your face, no visibility, the heart dreary, that is what I think when he says: Today it is raw and ferocious.)

  First Charles missed out on the spring, then he missed out on the summer. He is lying on a mattress by the window and looking up at the sky. The other day when I went to go for a stroll in Østre Anlæg, he said: ‘I’m going for a walk in the heavens.’

  Now it is autumn, and he is still lying there. The crowns of the rowan trees are teeming with orange berries. And in the soft light, dust disappears, and wrinkles fade, oh yes, in part. He talks about the future, when he will be able to get out of the bed and walk around again. Then he will miss his windowsill. The windowsill is his actual view, more important than the little he can see of the sky and the rowan tree out on the street. Let me start by describing his view from the left of the windowsill, furthest out is a paradise tree, ‘that must be the Christian section,’ Charles says, there is also an orchid, so the Garden of Eden is somewhat fleshy. And goodness me if that isn’t an apple lying there today. In the middle, India is represented by Ganesh and his rat as well as a vase from Punjab, then comes Africa, the desert, a number of small windswept palms arranged in a group, as though together they could better withstand the storm.

  I was led there, to Torremolinos, which still had a rather hippy feel to it, by an Englishman I had met, his name was Tim, Tim King, but since Charles and I no longer talk about previous relationships (we got through that long ago), I say that I would rather tell him about how I made it back from there. We had a falling out, Tim and I, because I did not want to sew a patch on a pair of his jeans that practically consisted only of patches, which he was proud of. The jeans can be compared to one of these big brown adventure suitcases with corner reinforcements that used to appear on the baggage carousel at the airport, and maybe still do, plastered with stickers from various destinations, so you could not help but realize that the owner was a globetrotter, that he or she was constantly trotting across the globe; the jeans too had travelled far and wide, and it was their advanced age, everything they had gone through, in the hot south and in the far north, that he was so proud of, the trousers were an embodiment of his travels, and the frugality he exhibited in order to afford these travels, which was his way of distancing himself from his English lower class background, better to travel than to stand in a factory (though I did not understand that back then, I just thought, increasingly annoyed, that his journeys would later enable him to comment and pass sentence on cities and countries in subordinate clauses, and how painful was it when he lectured me about Christiania) and had I not on one particular occasion, at a cheap Italian restaurant in Torremolinos, infuriated him by asking him what he felt like drinking, ‘What do I feel like drinking?’ he repeated, with growing agitation, obviously we’re both having tap water, how could you think I would be part of such extravagance, he raged, while I sipped from the chalice of shame, a glass of house white. The factory. The East End. When his money dried up, he returned home to London and for a number of months worked at a factory where he sat at a machine and sewed logos onto sweatshirts in the middle of the night, for example Genesis in concert God-knows-what-year on black, blue and red sweatshirts, I had worked there too, but only for a few weeks, where my job was, using a small sharp object, to remove the tacking thread around Genesis in concert et cetera. I have never been good with my hands, I could not keep up the pace, the sweatshirts piled up around me (one time I accidentally poked a hole in one, which was diligently deducted from my wages, paid out in the morning, after a completed shift, payment in cash), though I was better rewarded than the Indian workers on the night crew, something I found impossible to accept, but there was nothing to be done about it. The Indians smiled, they were gentle and shrugged their shoulders. They wanted (obviously) to keep their jobs. Probably because I was so slow and practically a guest on the crew, I was often sent to collect food, I left a little before the break, from an Indian restaurant that was open around the clock, around three, at any rate I cut across a deserted construction site, it was January, pitch black, and with my heart in my mouth and a firm grip on my scout knife, relieved to get away from the pile of sweatshirts, and picked up vegetable curries in small foil containers that could not have been sealed properly, because when I returned, they were always greasy and yellow on the outside, and I don’t think I have ever tasted better Indian food, not even now when I have an Indian friend and have it homemade, she is
the one who contributed to the windowsill with the vase from Punjab. Maybe the odyssey across the construction site added something to the food.

  In Tim’s bedsit, you had to insert coins to get the gas oven to work, ditto the water heater in the bathroom – but I never learnt how to get hot water from the water heater, all I managed to coax out of it was coughing and a loud banging, and on one occasion a proper discharge of soot. The fireplace (in the room) no longer worked, but someone (a poetic soul, perhaps him) had covered it with aluminium foil and placed a bunch of tea lights inside, and when we lit them (when we got home from the factory in the morning) the fireplace was transformed into a deep silver cave. (‘When we got home from the factory in the morning,’ had such a romantic ring to my middle-class ears – even though time dragged when I was there – and I used that very expression in a letter to Alma.) And on the mattress, in front of the candles, we came to realize, again and again, what we wanted from each other, and that we wanted it to last, preferably for ever. At times we sat up and grabbed hold of one another, our eyes filled with tears of joy, and to recover a little before we were again swept away ‘by the river of flesh’, you might say. Several times a day he toasted hash over a tea light, and after he had smoked it, he began to pluck at his guitar. Charles is the only man I have met whom I have not had to listen to play the guitar. To appreciate Tim’s guitar playing required a lot of love. And even though I did not enjoy smoking – it usually made me ill at ease, a receptacle of self-reproach – I continued until Tim was out of the picture. I thought about it the other day when Edward said: ‘Whenever I start something, I keep with it. If I killed someone, I would become a serial killer.’ I had just turned nineteen, and Tim was twenty-one. He kept his clothes in a rucksack. He had no fridge and bought only a little food at a time, but there must have been a table where the food was kept. The walls were almond-green. It seems to me now that he lived a valiant life. His notion of the future did not differ from his present, he wanted to travel for all eternity, and I imagined him (with concern) as a fifty-year-old, as a sixty-year-old, a faded man unrolling his sleeping bag on the ground; whereas I was simply taking a break between school and university, a guest in his life, and he was a guest in mine, disparaging all my education, himself a student at the school of life (when he said that, I looked down and nodded) and here, on the chair, in the living room, I truly hope that he has survived; and here, on the chair, in the living room, I think that we grabbed hold of one another so firmly, in front of the silver cave, because we knew that we would soon go our separate ways. His father had a criminal record, a small hairy man with a lot of jangling gold: chains, bracelets, rings and a sports car. His mother had been a model in her younger days and dated Tommy Steele, she was still blonde and still luscious and ran a fish and chip shop in Brighton with her new husband, who was dark and equally luscious; she made shepherd’s pie for us and told me that she could not be alone in the house, then Tim could not endure her any longer and we left. When I went with him to visit his dad, who looked like a mafioso, he (his dad) took pleasure in ordering me around and equal pleasure in my refusal to obey. Maybe I made him a cup of tea when he asked. But I did not tidy up. I did not pick up his dirty clothes. I remained stubbornly seated while he practised his cockney, sitting in his leather sofa, the coffee table in smoked glass, and lying in front of him at all times, that’s how I remember it, drawings of furniture that he had thought up (it was unlikely that he had drawn them himself), which consisted of large blocks, and since his surname was King, these furniture building blocks were called King’s Cubes, and the idea was, like Lego, that people could rebuild their furniture according to taste, I don’t know if the blocks ever went into production. One time we, Tim and I, were alone at his dad’s place and wanted to watch a film, but there was already one in the player, and instead of taking it out straight away, Tim pressed the start button, and a couple came into view, bleeding to death, all the while using their last ounce of strength (literally) to engage in blood-curdling intercourse, outdoors, in a smoky and desolate landscape. It made my stomach turn; Tim swore and decided he could not endure his father a moment longer, it was time to leave the country, again. Four months later, though he looked like an angel with his long blond hair and his perfect nose, he threw his precious jeans at my head, on a beach in southern Spain, and then the mending kit, and I got up and left, trembling with rage. I went into a café, a little later I saw Tim standing outside, he was obviously looking for me, and I ducked until he was gone. I counted my traveller’s cheques, I did not have enough for a train ticket home, so I would have to hitchhike, that was after all that we had done over the previous months, you would have thought I had learnt how to do that, at the school of life. And I wanted to set off now, straight away, the first road sign I saw was for Lisbon, so I headed in that direction. And that very evening I rode into Lisbon as a conqueror, on the back of a lorry, windswept, armed with a supply of tortillas wrapped in aluminium foil from the family in the cab; the children leaned out the window and waved at me, the sun was sinking, and driving through the suburbs, with the stench of exhaust, outside under the blood-red sky, with my foundered love behind me, I believe I felt ‘the nerve fibres of life quivering in my hands’ – in other words, that I had situated myself as near as possible to the course of events.

  Now Charles is asking if I then went to Copenhagen. I did not, I told myself that I would remain in Spain and Portugal for a time and muster the courage for the long journey home, because I was scared, each morning when I stood on the roadside, I was terrified of being cut into tiny pieces. Men. If there was more than one, I refused their offer of a ride. I remember three happy men in a car, laughing loudly, in a convertible with the top down, they continued driving next to me for some time, I walked along the side of the road, I had turned them down, they laughed more and more and licked their lips like dogs and shouted that I had probably made a wise decision, then drove off, I started to laugh as well, and I waved at them, because clearly we were all in on the brilliant joke that if I had got into their car, they would have maltreated me all the while splitting their sides with laughter. There were the restrained ones, who warned me against the unrestrained ones while placing a hand on my thigh. There were also the genuinely restrained ones, who kept their hands on the steering wheel. There were the pragmatists, who stopped and offered to drive me wherever I wanted in exchange for sex, then drove off as soon as I said no. No women stopped, which I thought displayed a lack of solidarity. Then I met up with a man who looked like Alma’s grandfather, an upright man of the old school, wearing a faded green corduroy jacket. He wanted to take me with him to Morocco, as his secretary, but I did not want to travel any further away from Copenhagen. We drove around for twelve hours, at the bottom of Spain and Portugal, we ate a number of meals at nice restaurants where he embarked on lengthy attempts to persuade me – about Morocco, about me and him. Every time we went to a restaurant, he tried to comb my hair with his black comb, like I was Granddad’s little girl. Seeing as he was so old, I considered myself to be on firm ground. I could just as well remain in his car. After all I was not headed anywhere in particular. His hair was black, so maybe he was not that old after all. Late that evening he stopped the car at a lay-by and tried to kiss me. I slapped him as hard as I could and jumped out of the car. My rucksack was in the boot. I waited for a long while. He sat with his face in his hands, finally the boot opened, and I grabbed my rucksack and left. The road was dark. I walked on the shoulder. I wished I had had a torch so the cars could see me. It was properly dark, there were cicadas singing, it was a relief to be out in the open. I thought of both the car and the man with the comb as something sticky. I must have walked a couple of kilometres when I saw light. A lot of light, like an amusement park. It was a hotel. I trudged into the reception and asked how much a room cost. Far too much. So I had to return to the dark road. I was afraid of getting run over. When I stood outside, an Englishman came over and told me that he had noticed
how disappointed I looked; he wanted to help. I could spend the night in his bungalow. He looked like Marty Feldman (1934-1982), I really liked him when I was a child. Google him, Charles, then you’ll see how he died! His death was right out of one of his comedies. I went with him. It was midnight. While I, in the bathroom, was putting on my light-blue tracksuit (cotton) that hung from my body like elephant skin, he was having an overwrought conversation with his wife. I had lost ten kilos, thanks to the school of life. (The next time we went to see Tim’s dad in the East End – Tim and I had been reunited – he said: ‘The last time I saw you, you were a fat little girl, now you’re beautiful,’ and he invited his mafia friends round to see me, finally displaying a little pride in his son, but I locked myself in the toilet until they had left.) I even put a cap on. And a pair of woollen socks. I stuck my scout knife in the waistband and hoped it would not slip down one of the trouser legs. Shrouded in that way, I stepped out. A person wrapped up like that, there was no way he would think I wanted something from him, in the double bed. Before I could allow myself to sleep, I had to thoroughly check out the bungalow, both inside and outside, where there was a natural pond with a grotto to match; he was put out by the splendour of the place and wanted me to be too. So I was. I thought he had mentioned something about wanting to order food, but nothing came of it. We climbed into bed. I moved all the way to the edge and crossed my arms over my chest.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. We slept. And in the morning we ate breakfast on the bed. He asked whether I would like to wake up in such lovely surroundings every morning – instead of sleeping on the beach. But sleeping on the beach is adventurous, I said, and then repeated all the things Tim used to say when I complained about the cold and the dank sand. He asked whether it would also be adventurous to make love, right now? That would be adventurous, I replied, but I did not fancy it. He put the tray down and cupped his hand around my breast and said: “Just the right size.”