Last Train to Helsingør Page 13

He grasped at the panel with his fingers, tried to wedge a fingernail under the edge, to get purchase. He hammered on it with his fists, roaring at the noise to stop, to release him, to set him free.

  In desperation, he ran back to the workshop, picked up a jimmy and tried to prise the panel off, but the jimmy kept slipping, and the panel wouldn’t budge and in the end he was smashing the jimmy against the panel, and tears were running down his face at the damage he was doing, but still the knocking went on and on and on.

  He guessed it must have stopped sometime towards morning. He woke on the shop floor in broad daylight, half-dressed and chilled to the bone, his head a tender lump of meat, his throat as dry as paper.

  The tallboy loomed over him, ruined, his work the day before undone and all the pleasure from it vanished. He groaned at the thought of the woman, the dark rings under her eyes, the way she had practically run out of the shop. There had been no elderly father, no old people’s home, he saw that now.

  He got to the jumble sale with less than an hour to spare. In the boot of his car, tossed in an old dust sheet, the tallboy shone like fire.

  He saw the man coming, almost certainly a dealer, his eyes homing in on the tallboy from across the car park. He saw him feign disinterest, rummaging through cardboard boxes of bric-a-brac on the nearby stalls before sidling over with his hands in his pockets and nodding nonchalantly at the tallboy as though it was nothing.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  He told himself, Don’t rush it now, before setting aside his crossword, getting up from his folding chair and moving towards the man, gesturing disarmingly and mustering his best smile.

  ‘Just an old chest of drawers. It was my mother’s, but we had to put her into a home, so …’

  Detained

  Clarissa knew something was wrong as soon as she emerged from customs. There was no sign of a driver holding a handwritten board with ‘Miss Clarke’ on it. The vast arrivals hall was deserted but for one other traveller, drifting like a solitary skater on a frozen lake.

  Clarissa wheeled her suitcase to the exit, her high heels clacking resolutely on the tiled floor. But when the doors slid open, she felt a thousand icy pinpricks on her face. In the orange glare from the street light, the snow seemed to be falling horizontally.

  The car park was a desolate tundra, the rows of vehicles covered by a thick white blanket. No sound could be heard but the wind howling across the snowdrifts. If there had ever been any taxis, they had been snapped up by the other passengers on the flight from Amsterdam.

  As she stepped back inside, brushing snow off her coat, Clarissa felt a twist of indignation: for the world to grind to a halt because of a simple blizzard, and in Denmark of all places. Had these people never heard of snowploughs, or winter tyres?

  She wiped her face dry with her hands and got out a mirror to check her eye make-up.

  A security guard stood a little way off, looking out at the snow with his hands clasped at his back. Good, she thought, help at last. She walked over and tapped the man on the shoulder. He turned unhurriedly, and looked down at her with a mournful expression.

  She opened her bag, started rummaging around for her purse and the address of the hotel.

  ‘I want to leave,’ she said. ‘I have to be somewhere in the morning. Can you get me a taxi, please? I don’t care how much it costs.’

  Silence.

  Clarissa looked up to find the security guard staring out of the window again.

  ‘The snow,’ he said after a while. ‘It’s a bad storm. All the roads are closed, no taxis.’

  She considered tapping on his shoulder again, but something about his sloping back in the blue uniform jumper told her this would be pointless. His trousers were sagging, dragged down by a heavy set of keys clasped to one belt loop.

  The other traveller, a middle-aged businessman in a dark suit and camel overcoat, carrying a holdall and some plastic bags, passed her on his orbit. Though he was a total stranger, Clarissa felt oddly comforted by his presence. Business travellers were a tribe, she had always thought. In airport lounges, taxi queues and hotel lifts, they would exchange little nods of recognition, like bikers on the open road.

  She wondered if the man had also been on the flight from Amsterdam. She didn’t remember seeing him earlier when she was waiting an eternity for her suitcase to appear on the baggage carousel. Perhaps the two of them could put their brains together and find some way out of here? She started towards him, but the man moved off.

  Clarissa gave up on the security guard and the traveller and went to search for someone more cooperative. At the car-hire desks and bureaux de change, swivel chairs had been left at awkward angles. There was no one in sight. On the screens suspended from the ceiling, she noticed that the remaining arrivals of the night had been cancelled. Her flight from Amsterdam had been the last one in.

  The departure lounge was equally abandoned, and all the shops were closed. In one window there was a pair of high-heeled red shoes: Italian leather, greasy and plump like ripe fruit, like lipstick for the feet. The sort of shoes she could never wear for work. The sort of shoes she never had an occasion to wear at all.

  Clarissa sat down and tried to control her mounting panic. There was no one else in the entire airport but the unhelpful security guard and her aloof fellow traveller.

  In her handbag, she found two plastic-wrapped biscuits from the plane and washed them down with the remainder of a bottle of tepid water, swallowing back tears. She wanted to strangle Tracy, her personal assistant, for booking the sales week in Amsterdam back to back with the Danish conference. Tracy, who would be at home in London now, watching the Friday chat shows. Clarissa would have to wait till Monday to have Tracy’s head on a plate, and by then she would no longer be angry enough to enjoy it.

  She had to get to her hotel. Roger, the newly appointed CE O, wouldn’t like it if she wasn’t there by first thing tomorrow, and Clarissa hated letting people down, particularly over something as inconsequential, surely, as snow in Denmark.

  ‘Play your cards right with the Danes and you could be in line for director. You’ll be one of the big boys then,’ Roger had said.

  It would mean more travel, and Clarissa would have to be based at the Hanover office. ‘But we all have to pay our dues, Clarissa,’ Roger had said.

  Roger, who had joined the company at the same time as her and made it to the top, while she had got stuck in sales. Roger, who would be somewhere in Surrey now, making love to his beautiful young wife.

  If it was Arctic weather outside, why was it so unbearably hot inside the terminal? Clarissa took off her coat. The synthetic lining made her hair stand on end. She hadn’t closed an eye on the journey from Amsterdam and needed to sleep now, like the dead.

  The security guard filed past, casting a pitying look in her direction. She decided to find a more private spot where she would be able to get a few hours’ kip until the snow stopped and she could get a taxi. She found a couple of freestanding advertising screens that she managed to push open a little. Behind them was a carpeted area where she spread her coat on the floor and placed her suitcase and laptop in such a way that she would wake up if someone tried to take them. Then she wrapped her arms around her handbag and closed her eyes, wondering if any amount of sleep could cure the kind of tiredness she was suffering from.

  Sometime later she became aware of a loud scratching noise. She opened her eyes, blinking, and saw that there was a man looking at her.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I wake you?’ he said.

  Clarissa recognised the other traveller, the businessman she had seen in the arrivals hall. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor about two metres away from her. She sat up. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Perhaps I should be the one asking you that?’ he said in perfect English with some indefinable European accent.

  Clarissa caught a whiff of sweat from her clothes. Her body felt creased and sore, her hair flat and clingy. She needed a good, hot shower,
fresh clothes and a strong cup of tea.

  The man carried on drawing. The scratching noise came from a stick of charcoal, which he was moving furiously across a large sketchpad in his lap.

  ‘There’s a whole empty airport out there,’ she said, tucking in her shirt. ‘Why do you have to sit right here?’

  ‘This is my space. I was here long before you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be absurd. No one owns this space.’

  Clarissa noticed now that the man’s shirt was dirty around the collar. His camel coat was torn in places, there were shiny patches on the knees of his suit, and his bag was held together by a brown leather belt. The man looked at Clarissa and smiled so widely she could see all his back teeth were missing.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked throatily, her anger replaced by prickling fear.

  This was no fellow business traveller. The main thing now was to keep calm, keep him talking. ‘Where are you from?’ she said.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘You’re from the airport?’

  Clarissa laughed and the man joined in, continuing to laugh long after she had stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Clarissa sat up, clutching her handbag.

  ‘But you can’t be living here, it’s not possible,’ she said, looking discreetly for her suitcase. It was safe behind her.

  ‘But I do. For the time being, at least, I do.’

  ‘You’ll get yourself arrested.’

  ‘No one notices a businessman in an airport.’

  ‘I could tell the security guard.’

  ‘Svend, you mean? He doesn’t give damn about anything. Not since his wife left him.’

  ‘But why live here?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s warm. There are toilets, showers, food. I am only staying for a while, until I decide where to go next. They say Heathrow is nice.’

  Clarissa changed position, wrapping her arms around her knees. She could feel the man continue to stare at her.

  ‘I used to sell insurance,’ he said. ‘Then, one day, I decided I didn’t want to do it any more. I disappeared. What’s the matter? You think you couldn’t do the same?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I couldn’t. People would miss me. For a start, I’m first speaker at a big conference in Aalborg tomorrow morning,’ she said, glancing at her suitcase again.

  Her presentation, A Vision for the 21st Century: Integrated Business Software, was in there on a memory stick together with her laptop and the folder with the signed contracts from Amsterdam.

  ‘So you don’t turn up – so what?’

  ‘I’m very good at my job; the company needs me.’

  ‘They’ll get someone else tomorrow.’

  ‘Not like me they won’t.’

  ‘You think you’re so important. I’ll tell you something: no one will miss you. They’ll talk about it for a few days, and then the weeks will pass, the months, the years, and they will forget.’

  Clarissa felt her cheeks glow. ‘Look mister, whoever you are,’ she said, jabbing a finger at the man. ‘You’ve no right to make assumptions. You don’t know the first thing about me.’

  ‘OK, let’s see now. I know you’re not married.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘You’re not wearing a ring.’

  ‘Lots of married people don’t wear rings.’

  ‘So I’m wrong?’

  Clarissa looked down.

  ‘And you’re tired, but you think that you can’t stop whatever it is that’s making you tired, or something terrible will happen.’

  ‘And you have it all sorted out, do you? Look at the state of you,’ she spat.

  ‘I’ll go some day. Until then, I stay here. I’m in no hurry,’ the man stared at her until she had to look away.

  He went back to his drawing and started singing quietly, retreating into some world of his own. He didn’t seem to notice when Clarissa noisily gathered up her things and left. She walked down the stairs and away to the far corner of the building.

  She didn’t often have a chance to think about her life, or maybe she didn’t want to. On Boxing Day the year before, she had left her mother’s house first thing to go into work and finish a sales pitch that had to be ready before the New Year. On the way, she had called a younger member of her team who had recently become a father, and asked him to come in and help her. He had told her to ‘get a life’ and hung up. She had sacked him the following week, but it had made her cry.

  She had worked hard to get where she was. It would be madness to give it up now, just before she was due to get the executive position that was rightfully hers. Besides, she liked her job. She couldn’t recall a time when she was happy doing anything else.

  Clarissa thought of the strange man who lived in the airport and all the people from all over the world he would be watching every day, people like her, coming and going. What had he seen? What had he been drawing? She lay back on a bench, her brain racing. Many metres above, she saw her own reflection in the ceiling, a tiny speck in a white emptiness.

  Everything felt strange all of a sudden.

  Hours later, as the world outside the terminal grew visible in the grey morning light, the airport gradually filled up with travellers anxious to make their connections. It was as if last night’s storm had never happened, yet everything felt different to Clarissa, somehow transformed.

  As she got up, something fell to the floor. It was a piece of paper torn from a sketchbook, a charcoal drawing with a furious mess of black lines. She had to hold it with her arms outstretched to make sense of it. Then she recognised herself sleeping, a deep frown creasing her forehead, her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open, with the corners turned down in despair. She was hugging her handbag as though it were an ice float and she was drowning in a vast, dark sea.

  She looked around for the man, but there were too many people in the airport now, people carrying holdalls and plastic bags, dressed in suits and brown overcoats, all looking as though they had somewhere to be urgently. The traveller could be any one of them.

  It felt right when she walked to the nearest toilet and opened her suitcase, took out the memory stick with the presentation for the Aalborg conference and placed it in the sanitary bin. She tore up and flushed the Amsterdam sales contracts down the loo one by one, then pushed each of her vast collection of business cards through a drain cover in the floor. She drowned her mobile phone in the cistern and watched page by page of her diary getting sucked into a ventilation shaft.

  After that it seemed like no big deal to walk across the busy airport floor and buy a pair of red shoes, shiny like waxed apples. She put them on straight away, dropped her practical heels in a rubbish bin, and strode towards the exit, imagining a room full of Danish executives looking at their watches and the empty space on the podium with the card marked Miss Clarissa Clarke, United Kingdom.

  When she stepped outside, her red-shod feet like blood in the snow, the light was blinding.

  The Crying

  There is an area of old Copenhagen, close to the harbour and the royal castle, where the population thins dramatically at night. Where once there were families and servants, now there are lawyers and bankers. In the evenings, when they leave for the suburbs, the place falls almost silent.

  This was what Jens loved most about his new apartment: that he had the neighbourhood to himself when he returned from the office, the footsteps of his brogues echoing between the tall, empty mansions.

  Looking up at the windows of Amalienborg Palace, he would imagine Queen Margrethe, seated in the dark by the desk at which she gave her New Year’s address to the nation, gazing out at the city.

  Jens particularly loved the autumn, when Copenhagen turned grey and gold and the streets closed in, hurrying you towards the light and warmth of the indoors. Crossing the cobbled courtyard to his building, he would start running, then bound two steps at a time to the third floor. Inside the apartment, stroking Mortensen, his tabby cat, he became a wealthy merchant, counting hi
s doorknobs and keys like pieces of silver.

  The rooms smelled of boot polish, cedar and coffee, evoking in him images of important dinner parties and secret affairs. If he sat very still, Jens could hear the groaning of the 300-year-old timbers and he thought of the building, not as dead with its sloping floors, bowing windows and cracked walls, but as a living, breathing thing.

  His colleagues thought he lived in the suburbs like them. No one knew the truth, not even his parents in their bungalow across the sea on the other side of Denmark, but then they knew nothing. As far as they were concerned, he was working in Greenland on a remote research station.

  All day, as he entered figures into columns, Jens savoured his secret that he owned a palace with tall ceilings and more rooms than he could ever afford to furnish.

  The apartment itself had not come free, of course. Such places rarely became available, and the asking price had far exceeded his modest means. But the first time he saw it, he knew he had to have it, whatever it took, whatever he would have to do.

  The apartment belonged to an old widow who had lived there for more than sixty years.

  ‘Will she take an offer?’ he asked the estate agent.

  ‘You must be joking. I have a dozen buyers interested,’ said the agent, his torso so inflated that his chin appeared to be resting on his chest.

  ‘We’ll see what she has to say about that,’ said Jens.

  The agent looked directly at him for the first time then, his eyes narrowing behind his half-moon glasses. Jens knew what those eyes saw: someone unworthy of prime Copenhagen, someone more suited for a yellow-brick block south of the city.

  ‘You can’t call the vendor directly, you know,’ the agent said.

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Jens replied.

  It wasn’t hard to get the telephone number. Seated on her best sofa, sipping perfumed tea from a china cup, Mrs Andersen talked a great deal about her move to the care home in the countryside. Jens knew that all he had to do was to listen and wait.

  As the grandfather clock in the corner struck the second hour, Mrs Andersen went on to talk about her late husband. Apparently, she had never seen his feet naked before he lay dead on the mortuary slab. Even in their most intimate moments, he would not remove his socks. Again and again, Mrs Andersen returned to this absurd fact, as though it had shocked her more profoundly than the man keeling over at breakfast some twenty years ago. Jens stayed silent, all the while picturing himself walking through Mrs Andersen’s majestic rooms.