Last Train to Helsingør Read online

  ‘That’s not the price you told me yesterday!’

  ‘No,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘You didn’t want it as much yesterday as you do today.’

  Erik left without thanking her and walked all the way to the office, too miserable to even get on his bicycle.

  That evening when he got home, the apartment felt even emptier than usual. He pulled up a chair and sat and stared at the round mahogany table where he had imagined putting the birdcage. It was as if it had always been there, but was now missing, leaving an empty space that could not be filled with anything.

  Lying in bed that night, he resolved to go back to the shop the next morning and pay whatever the old woman asked of him. He fell asleep relieved, his mind made up.

  When he stepped through the door to the shop, he was whistling cheerfully, stepping aside to make way for another man just leaving with a large box tied up with string.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said to the woman. ‘Whatever the price is today, I will pay it. I want that bird more than anything. I am certain of that now.’

  ‘I see,’ the shopkeeper said, smiling that incongruous smile of hers, but she didn’t move from behind the counter. ‘I am afraid I must disappoint you. I just sold it to that gentleman who left the shop as you came in.’

  Erik felt his knees give. He had to put a hand on the counter to stop himself from falling over. In his rush to get to the shop, he had not noticed the cage was missing from the window display.

  ‘How could you?’ he heard himself say. ‘That bird was mine.’

  The shopkeeper shrugged. ‘The other gentleman was willing to pay what I asked. He obviously wanted the bird more than you did.’

  Erik felt his hands bunch into fists. ‘No one wants that bird more than I do,’ he said.

  The shopkeeper watched him passively as he turned around and tore open the door, rattling the bell.

  He ran up the street, propelled by a force of anger he had never known before. He wasn’t really there, but for his feet pounding the pavement and his fists swinging like clubs from his elbows. He saw nothing but the man up ahead, carrying the birdcage away. The long years stretched out before him, empty years of cycling to and from work and never again hearing the song of the nightingale.

  He caught up with the man by the canal. He was clutching the box to his chest and shaking his head, as Erik stepped in front of him. The man’s lips were moving, but Erik could only hear his own laboured breathing and the blood rushing in his ears. He grabbed at the string and tried to pull the box away from the man, feeling the birdcage moving inside. The man bared his teeth and tried to shift his grip on the string, but as he did so the box slipped from his hands and fell onto the cobbles between them; there was a loud rattling nose and a single heart-rending tweet could be heard from inside.

  Something dark descended on Erik’s vision then. A roar filled his head and he saw his hands dart out from his body like pistons, shoving at the man’s chest. Now the man was stumbling, his arms were flailing. Then he was gone, over the edge and into the canal with a loud splash, and Erik was kneeling on the cobbles, rocking back and forth with the nightingale in his arms.

  A woman’s scream woke him. He felt strong arms pinning him to the ground, heard himself say, again and again: ‘I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know what happened.’

  By the time the police got the man out of the black canal water, he was dead. He had hit his head on the edge of a boat, fracturing his skull.

  They put Erik in handcuffs and made him sit in the back of the police car. An officer sat next to him, holding the cardboard box in his lap as the car began to edge its way through the crowd of onlookers.

  ‘That box is mine,’ Erik said. ‘Will they let me keep it in prison?’

  The officer shook his head. ‘If and when you are convicted, it will go into storage for safekeeping until you are released.’

  Good, Erik thought and he saw himself, years from now, reaching into the squashed and dented cardboard box, gently lifting out the birdcage and stroking the little bird, and he felt calmer.

  When they passed the shop window, he noticed that the birdcage had been replaced with a white rocking horse, its shiny grey mane caught in the light from a single spotlamp.

  Erik couldn’t help but admire it, and he turned his head to look out of the rear window of the police car. As he did so, he saw the shopkeeper standing behind the door, looking at him, seeing everything, and he wasn’t sure, but he thought the old woman might have been smiling.

  The Miracle in Dannersgade

  When, aged seven, Lilian decided to become an organist, she had never sat at a piano, nor yet grown legs long enough to reach the pedals, but this was how she was: once Lilian set her mind to something, it happened.

  It was autumn and twilight when, on her way home from school, she first noticed the peculiar old building in Dannersgade, squashed in between two apartment blocks covered in graffiti. There was a tree outside in a small, cobbled courtyard behind iron railings, and the foliage on the tree was flaming orange and red, like the burning bush in the Bible that her teacher had made them draw at school.

  The door was open. Inside someone was playing the organ and the sound was catastrophic, like glass shattering, or rocks tumbling down a mountainside. It gave Lilian the strangest feeling, as though she was going to cry but wanted to laugh at the same time.

  Years later, she learnt that the church had been built at the time of King Christian IV, when Dannersgade was nothing but mud and grass, but back then, as she stood by the door and listened to the music, it seemed to have come into being in that moment, especially for her.

  She went in, cautiously, and stopped just inside the door, craning her neck at the vaulted white ceiling high above. The light was golden, shining from the brass chandeliers and reflecting in the candlesticks on the altar and the smaller candleholders at the end of each pew. There was a large, three-panel oil painting behind the altar, showing the Last Supper, a gilded pulpit topped with a crown suspended from the ceiling and, on the wall, the crucified Jesus, lifelike and devastating in his crown of thorns.

  I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, it said in large golden letters on the pulpit.

  Lilian, whose life till that day had been spent in a cramped apartment and a run-down council school, had never before seen anything as beautiful as the church. It hit her, not like a beauty you see with your eyes, but one you feel with your stomach. She dropped her schoolbag on the stone floor, and the sound echoed around the vast room.

  The organist must have heard her, for he stopped playing, turned around on his stool and looked at her with open curiosity, a thin man with unruly red hair and a red beard.

  He beckoned her over. She hesitated, as she had learnt by bitter experience in the neighbourhood to stay clear of strangers, but the man looked too fragile and breakable, with his pale, freckled skin, to constitute a threat.

  Standing by his side, the pipes towering high above them, Lilian let her eyes roam over the three manuals, the carved wooden surround and the bewildering array of buttons with tiny letters and numbers that she could make no sense of. The organist wore long, narrow shoes. A pair of brown lace-up boots stood to one side along with a worn leather satchel from which sheets of music were protruding.

  He smiled. ‘Would you like to try?’

  She climbed onto the stool and put her fingers on the keyboard. The sound she made was terrifying.

  The organist laughed. ‘You need to learn to control the beast,’ he said. ‘Think of it like taming a dragon.’

  She looked at the organist, and behind her at Christ and the glorious nave with row upon row of painted pews, and understood in an instant that playing the organ meant he could be in this wonderful room whenever he wanted.

  ‘Will you teach me?’ she said.

  He laughed again, but saw, as people soon did with Lilian, that she was deadly serious. He told her to learn the piano, and to com
e back when she was able to reach the organ pedals with her feet.

  There were no instruments at home, and no money for lessons, so she taught herself on the old upright piano in the gym hall at school, spending hours there after lessons until the janitor chased her away.

  After five years, when her legs had grown long enough, she began to take lessons with the organist, whose name was Lasse, and after seven years she could play anything he put in front of her. By then she was excellent: Lasse said that when she was playing Bach it sounded like she had four hands.

  On her nineteenth birthday, he gave her a pair of red organ shoes. He had aged by then, and his hair and beard had turned grey, but still he was showing no sign of wanting to retire.

  ‘You are ready to apply for your first position,’ he told her, passing her a newspaper in which he had a circled a couple of ads from churches in West Jutland that were looking for organists.

  Lasse understood nothing. Lilian did not want to play in any other church than Sankt Lukas Kirke. Whenever she turned on the organ and heard the pipes breathe, like a slumbering giant, she felt a surge of happiness. Sitting on the stool, her red shoes moving across the pedals by themselves, the music flowed from her fingers like water.

  She loved the way the rain on the stained-glass windows drew patterns on the ceiling, the cool, damp feel of the thick walls against her hands when they were hot from playing. She loved the smell of wood smoke and wax, the way her little finger fitted perfectly into the grove on the underside of the third pew on the right. She loved that sometimes, when she lost herself in the music, she sensed the ghosts of worshippers past flicking across the rear-view mirror mounted above the music stand.

  Above all she loved the figure of Christ, though she would not have been able to explain why. She could spend hours looking at him, waiting for him to move, to cry out or raise his head and speak to her, but he never did.

  The situation was desperate. Lilian had learnt everything there was to know about playing the organ; she no longer any reason to come to the church. But the thought of not spending every day there was unbearable.

  She knew Lasse cycled to the church from another part of Copenhagen. One day, while he was busy playing during the Sunday service, she snipped the brake cables on his bicycle with a pair of pliers that she had stolen from the basement under her apartment building.

  Lasse fell badly, breaking both his arms in several places. Lilian threw the pliers in the lake on the way to visiting him in the hospital.

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ she whispered in his ear as he lay sedated. ‘I will look after the organ now.’

  For ten years, Lilian lived a perfect life, taking the large wrought-iron key and letting herself into the church whenever she wanted.

  With the thick doors closed, no one outside could hear her play. It thrilled her that while she filled the vast room with the thousand voices of the pipes, people in the street went about their dull, everyday business, oblivious.

  The Sunday service, on the other hand, was a burden to be borne. If anyone had asked her, Lilian would have said that she did not believe much in God.

  The vicar had done nothing to persuade her otherwise. He was a disappointed man, bent over like a question mark in his black cassock and white piped collar. Whatever he had imagined during his theology studies at the University of Copenhagen that ministering to a flock of inner-city souls would be like, reality had fallen short of expectations.

  When, over the years, the worshippers dwindled in numbers and people went elsewhere to marry and christen their babies, he took his frustration out on the few blameless souls who still came.

  It got so that only a handful of deaf, elderly ladies turned up regularly for Sunday service, so it was a surprise to no one when Sankt Lukas Kirke found itself on the list of Copenhagen churches threatened with closure by the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs. If attendance did not improve, they were told, the church would be turned into a community centre.

  Lilian imagined the pews full of mothers and screaming babies. She saw how there would be yoga classes in the chancel, hideous modern art mounted all around the walls of the apse, and small children touching her beloved organ with their sticky fingers.

  Word soon got out in the homeless shelter around the corner that Lilian bought beer for anyone willing to snooze in the pews for an hour on Sundays. For a while, the church was half full, but organists are not well paid, and soon her money ran out and the church was almost empty again.

  But Lilian wasn’t prepared to give up.

  Looking through the vicar’s files, she found the names and addresses of elderly parishioners, and began to go around an hour before Sunday service to escort the hard of walking to the church with their wheelchairs and Zimmer frames on the promise of coffee and biscuits in the church hall afterwards. While exhausting, this was a good and cheap solution until, one by one, the parishioners died off and there was no one left to bribe.

  And so the dark day came when, as she set her fingers to the first chord of the prelude, she saw in her rear-view mirror that every single pew was empty.

  When it came to the opening prayer, the verger stayed silent.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, slamming his prayer book shut. ‘It’s finished; we will have to close now.’

  ‘Give it time – some people might turn up,’ Lilian pleaded.

  But it was too late. The vicar had turned round from his kneeling prayer by the altar and discovered what was happening.

  His reaction was unexpected: he threw himself down on the floor in prostration before Jesus and the Apostles on the altarpiece and howled like a wounded animal.

  ‘God, why have you forsaken me?’ he yelled.

  Lilian and the verger looked at each other, perplexed.

  ‘Answer me!’ shouted the vicar. ‘For once, answer me.’

  At that moment the chandeliers dimmed briefly, casting the church in shadows, for it was a dark winter’s day. The vicar immediately stopped his bawling, raised himself up on his elbows and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  ‘Lord?’ he said, looking around the church. ‘Is that you?’

  Lilian looked down at the ancient electric heater she had plugged in that morning to take the worst of the cold out of the air. She was resting her freezing feet on it. Could that be what had caused the lights to dim, some loose connection in the wires?

  With a quick, guilty glance over her shoulder at the figure of Christ, she shook the heater gently with one foot. The lights dimmed again, twice, as if answering the vicar’s question.

  He was up on his knees now, a rapt expression on his face. The verger had got out his mobile phone and was filming the whole thing.

  ‘Are you punishing me, Lord? Do you want me to go from here into the wilderness?’

  Lilian moved her foot on the heater, and the lights dimmed once. She smiled.

  The vicar threw himself back down on the floor and began to sob with relief. Over and over, rattling through the words, he said the Lord’s Prayer. Lilian and the verger had to drag him off the floor in the end, and walk him to his car.

  By the end of the afternoon, the verger’s film had been watched more than 136,000 times online.

  The following Sunday, Lilian couldn’t believe her eyes when she arrived at the church. The road was blocked, the air filled with noisy car horns as people struggled for parking. The pews were full, as were the extra chairs set out at the end of each pew and most of the aisle. People were reaching up on their toes, better to see.

  When the vicar climbed the few steps to the gilded pulpit, an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Lilian reached for the heater with one foot, discreetly.

  The vicar, who looked flushed and slightly shaken, opened his Bible. He frowned for a moment as if about to launch into his usual admonishment of those who had dared to turn up, but when he opened his mouth nothing came out. He took his glasses off, closed his eyes and held up both hands.

  ‘Lord, are you there?’ he s
aid, looking as though he didn’t quite believe himself that God would be.

  Lilian shook the heater with her foot and the lights dimmed twice. A sound as of a boiling ocean went through the crowd. Some people began to cry, and man in the aisle fainted and was caught by those nearby. The vicar laughed hysterically.

  After ten Sundays on which the church had caused traffic chaos in the neighbourhood, and TV crews from all over the world had been to see God speak to the vicar in what they had dubbed the Miracle in Dannersgade, the letter finally arrived from the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs, announcing that Sankt Lukas Kirke had been released from the threat of closure.

  Lilian celebrated by staying in the church all night, lighting each and every wax candle she could find, and drinking a bottle of altar wine.

  She played Bach till she got cramp in her fingers, then lay down in the aisle and looked up at the ceiling, inhaling the wet smell of ancient stone.

  She congratulated herself on her ingenuity. The overcrowded Sunday services and stray parties of tourists who had begun to find their way to the church during the week were a small price to pay for keeping it. Whatever happened from now on, she would never have to leave, except feet first.

  Early in the morning, she heard the key turn in the lock. It was Jonas, the handyman, with his box of tools. He had come to fix a tile that had broken and come loose under the weight of the hundreds of new worshippers that attended the church service each week.

  Lilian liked Jonas. Unlike most people, he only spoke when he had something to say. She watched him in silence as he fixed the tile, smoothing the grout with a finger dipped in water, before packing up his tools and getting ready to leave.

  ‘I am glad the church is safe now,’ he said on his way out. ‘I suppose you could say that God intervened.’

  Lilian smiled and nodded. Buoyed by the good night she had had, she decided to test him a little.

  ‘And would you rule out that there could be a logical explanation behind it all?’ she said.