Copenhagen Noir (11 page)
Right?
All right. But if I’m Keith, it seems so right to murder you tonight—not you, your ethereal remains, but you with the fat gut and the runny eyes who ruined my life with a sentence. Short and sweet. For we are both full of violence, separately and together. You may not know that I kicked a Glasgow bully in the head with the pointed toe of my boot. That I nearly strangled Ronnie Wood with my bare hands. Hammered my fist repeatedly into Stigwood. And why? Because he kept getting up. And for you I have a real buffet: blue and yellow and dead. In that order.
(But I’m still nice, given the chance. “I am a lover.”)
Ah, I see you stare at the park grating. Kongens Have beckons? Go! I’ll retreat. Tiptoe away. Ever so quietly. Cut diagonally across the street to where the shadows are even blacker. Hide in the crowd, blend into the façades, disappear. But the crowds have gone to sleep, the city is nearly empty. One couple walks by, like tears. Wrapped around each other, and her coat grazes me as they and their conversation slowly pass by,
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girl, you’re a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girl, pretty, pretty, such a pretty, pretty, pretty girl, come on, baby, please, please, please, I love you, are you cold?
—yes, please! I’ll have some of that, thank you.
For here or to go?
No matter, just need to file off the rough edges.
Now you cut across the street, dear towering steaming rage, and catch up with me on the corner where I thought I’d faded into the bricks so you couldn’t see me. You glower at me, I can’t miss it:
Go on, go on.
All right then, let’s. Side by side we walk down Gothersgade, I paint you black so I can’t see you, step up the pace so to avoid your presence, and keep a steady rhythm without looking back. My feet move beneath me furiously, but I make no progress on this deserted street, and I sense you behind me, a thousand arms, a thousand legs twitching pointlessly, hear you grunt like a frenzied pig, grind your long, loose teeth and lose them,
plink-plonk,
on the sidewalk. Maybe this
is
a dream. No drunks in sight, it isn’t right. No drunks, no scum, and no slime. So wrong for this time of night. And no intense poetic airheads who write ART, who write
sitting in the leftovers. World’s silence. All are drunk on ether hope. Also that will pass away. Violently. Suddenly. And now;
no lame
come on, baby, please please please;
no T&A with metal heels; no old gals with teased, sprayed hair; not even the odd lost specimens who only want to find a head they can hop up and down on until all that’s left is cauliflower.
Don’t you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up, to live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!
Naw, we have the street all to ourselves, you and I, and I’m getting nowhere. And it’s as if you’re growing. And the more you grow, the more nowhere I get, the more I want to headbutt you, both of you.
You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer?
Have you ever heard a mouse roar? If you don’t get lost, your face ends up like mine: Fuckface with Beckett-like furrows. So take a long walk on a short pier, and if you don’t drown right away I’ll be at your service in no time flat. I have something in my pocket, it’s sharp, it can scratch and prick, deeply if need be, or just sever and slice, and I want to do so, badly, besides which I have leather gloves in my pocket that I’ll put on so I don’t hurt myself. My face has to go to work tomorrow, you see, and I hate to get blood on my clothes.
I cross the street toward the hot dog stand and order a grilled one while staring straight at Andy’s Bar opposite. They’re all in there. I don’t care how crowded it is. I can cut you up, rip your black heart out in full public view, and stomp on your head until it’s cauliflower, as is the custom nowadays. Surrounded by people, I can carry out my hideous but necessary project without unwelcome interruptions. No one will react. Not in McDonald’s, not in Nab-a-kebab, not in Andy’s—especially not in there.
The grilled dog arrives, but my towering rage runs around and around the hot dog stand, faster and faster, unnerves me. I fix my stare on Andy’s cheery colors, the cozy lights, silhouettes of rollicking, sloshy binges. If you’re not over there, in there, it’s death by rage for the World’s Most Elegantly Wasted Human Being, me:
So, my friend, where have you hidden tonight? Couldn’t find you yesterday, either. I’ve been looking for you for over a week, in the city streets, after streetlights came on, in front of dour houses with windows so black they ate the white curtains, the white sills, and what else, the occasional cactus? I’ve looked for you in the courtyards, on deserted stretches, out by the warehouses on Amager where they bet on dogs and girlz wrestling in mud, along the canals, the slopes, in noise and darkness, and in the still of artificial lights. I always think it’s your back I see framed in cold neon, always your boots tromping up the stairs, opening the door with a bang, your hands passing me things from inside.
Fuck, it was just the bitch who sold the tickets.
Andy’s is open. That means I’m drunk. If I wasn’t, Andy’s would be closed. So it is. Keith Richards with acne and/or wrinkles and heroin-assisted constipation in wonderland, where he eats a grilled dog with everything on it in front of the bewitched tavern that must have you aboard by now, you and your likeminded and their mass of wrong words, though the right ones exist, like
Beautiful Delilah, sweet as apple pie, always gets a second look from fellas passin’ by … The better don’t allow me fool around with you, you are so tantalizing you just can’t be true,
sounds so much better than
You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer? If you’d just smile a little …
I won’t! I smile only for money. Your heartless sentiment has been eating away at me for eight days, and I don’t even play the guitar.
I chew the last bite, swallow it with a dry throat while you run around and around, and I want to cry because you’ve ruined my dream about
Come, let us go then, you and I.
Come, let us go out and watch the evening stretch out under the sky like an ethereal figure longing for the light, let us go then, through half-empty streets, still cringing from the ringing sounds and echoes of the days, the smell of cheap restaurants, the agony of long menus; one street after another goes by like boring arguments that distract you from overwhelming questions: What does your skin taste like? Where can my tongue go, everywhere or nowhere—where precisely? And don’t ask who I am, and what I do, no more questions like,
What is it?
There isn’t anything, so let us do everything I have dreamed about.
For all this time. That I have dreamed about, for
all
this time. But come along before the yellow fog arrives to turn your thoughts to things that aren’t going to work, to what you can’t do, what you may not do, like eyes in drafty windowsills, scanning the street with disgust and fear.
Love is strong and you’re so sweet, and some day, babe, we got to meet, just anywhere out in the park, out on the street and in the dark.
Where shall we eat, you and I? Alone. Together. At Pastis? They already took the trash out.
I lick your lips and mine at the thought.
First thing in the morning, last thing before I go to sleep.
Leaves go, leaves come.
Wind rises. Summer’s over.
So follow me now, share a bottle of wine. With me and make my heart boil.
Look at me.
Across the rickety table.
Warm for a September evening, don’t you think?
But why not simply smash your face in? Trailer trash for an evening, no problem. Red necks, white trash, black & blue girls, I’m all that.
I toss the paper in the trash can, wipe my mouth,
good dog!,
and tremble when you jump in through my stomach and we become one flesh, one concentrated killing machine, bad company in every possible way. We cross the road blindly, walk up the steps, and I open the door with these luminous black eyes I always get when someone crosses me, and there it is: laughter, loneliness, and sex and sex and sex,
fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it taste just right,
look at me, I’m finished, I’m totalled,
Look at me! I’m in tatters,
and well suited for the absolute armpit of the city, the final cockroach left alive in the debris, and I notice that I sway while I search the place for you, and fumble in my pocket for my scrap of metal.
Almost no women, almost only men, but then again: there’s pussy at the bottom of every single beer glass, it’s just a matter of getting down in there. The poets sit over in the corner, shitting words without wiping their mouths afterward. I know them, some of them step on stage once in a while to speak words, as they call it, and they don’t know it’s just
chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter ’bout shmat, shmat, shmat.
The rest are old and dying, dried-up organisms, rustling folds of skin and toofull beards, and there you are, walking past the kidney-shaped table,
here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here comes my nineteenth nervous breakdown,
my body stiffens, and only my hand has the good grace to close around the sharp edge of the ragged metal in my pocket.
You see me, you smile, my mouth falls open: confusion. You approach me. Smiling, sparkling eyes. What? Is it the sight of my elegantly wasted face that makes you so happy? And then you say it:
Beautiful Delilah, sweet as apple pie, always gets a second look from fellas passin’ by … The better don’t allow me fool around with you, you are so tantalizing you just can’t be true,
and you put your arm around me and kiss me, and you have no gut, no runny eyes, why? Was my memory that hazy? It really was very dark, black as night, black as coal, very dark in my head, and maybe I had visions or hallucinations, heard ghosts, I really imagined that you said I looked like Keith Richards, and I know I do, but honestly, I’m just a girl, and you shouldn’t say things like that. But all right then, come on, come, let us go out and watch the evening stretch out under the sky like an ethereal creature longing for light; let us go then, through half-empty streets, still cringing from ringing sounds and echoes of the day.
Raise your glass to the good and the evil, let’s drink to the salt of the earth.
E
very evening after work I wanted that French hot dog so damn badly. I took the last metro train home; the grill was wedged in under the viaduct. Until then I had controlled myself. I wore a green uniform with padded shoulders and a belt at the waist. I was the thinnest I’d been since Jørgen left. He was a vegetarian, we were into butterbeans. Then he found someone else, a red-haired singer; I threw his duvet out the window. Afterward I lay on the floor for over a day, this had been toward the end of March. When that one and only you want inside you is no longer there.
It was raining. I cut across the square. The sliding door stuck, I stood there tugging at it. The girl inside came over and picked up a clump of wet napkins in front of the door. Then she opened it for me, walked back to the counter.
“A French hot dog, regular dressing,” I said.
“On the way.”
She put the hot dog bun in the machine. Picked a cigarette up out of the ashtray and sucked on it. I had the exact amount ready. Her hand was pale and delicate, hair in a thin ponytail pinned up on her head. She might have been nineteen or twenty, her smile revealed a slightly crooked set of teeth: “Can you believe it, it’s the first French hot dog all evening.”
“Is that right?”
She nodded: “Mmm. Strange, with this weather. Usually people come in and stand around.”
We both gazed outside, she sucked on the cigarette again.
I wanted a cigarette too; I fished around in my net bag. The floor was covered with napkins. I found the pack and shook one out, she shoved her lighter across the counter.
“Those are really pretty earrings,” she said.
“Thanks. I like them too.”
“I have nickel allergy, I can’t handle anything at all,” she said. She blew smoke in the air, I did the same. By coincidence we had both held back a mouthful for a smoke ring; we blew one at each other simultaneously, the rings met over the counter. We broke out laughing, her laughter was what you would call sparkling, it trilled out of her. Smoke caught in her throat and she began to cough. The bun fell out of the machine, she kept coughing while she filled it with dressing. She smiled while she coughed and shook her head at herself. She held the back of her hand over her mouth, the hand holding the hot dog bun.
The ponytail wobbled on top of her head.
Then the telephone rang. She pounded her chest with the flat of her hand and lifted the receiver. The hot dog bun lay on the counter, some dressing ran out of it.
“This is Christina,” she said, her voice unsteady after the fit of coughing. “Sorry, but I can’t, I didn’t bring them with me. They’re over at Vibse’s. No.” Someone spoke to her. She cleared her throat, she pounded her chest again. “We don’t close until one-thirty. And Mathias is with me, I can’t go anywhere,” she said, and a moment later: “Can’t I bring them over tomorrow morning? Hello?”
She stood a bit longer with the phone in her hand, then she hung up. Turned around for the tongs, hovered over the hot dogs without picking one up.