Last Train to Helsingør Read online

  Jonas smiled. ‘I already thought of that.’

  She felt her heart leap into her throat as he gestured at the electric heater by the organ pedals.

  ‘After it happened, the vicar asked me to check every socket and every wire I could find. The plug on that heater of yours was loose, so I changed it, but I found no reason for the lights to dim. I even checked with the electricity board, but nothing out of the ordinary happened on that Sunday, there were no power cuts in any part of the city, and there haven’t been any since. It really is a true miracle.’

  He smiled, picked up his bag and left.

  When the door had clanged shut, and the church was empty and silent, except for the ever-present echoes that were like whispers behind the pillars, Lilian turned her head very slowly to look at the figure of Christ on his crucifix who, for his suffering in death, had always seemed so alive to her. But his eyes were closed, his inscrutable face resting on one shoulder.

  Lilian looked up at the east window and wondered for a while how it was possible for the sky to be so blue in February, and the light so extraordinarily bright.

  Like White Rain

  What angels look like is a matter of opinion. Not to mention whether they exist at all. To Henning, standing ten floors up on the roof of a tower block, the presence of an angel by his side made perfect sense, even a small one in a pink dress. He took the angel to be a messenger from God. Only he did not understand at first what God was saying.

  From his position on the ledge it would take him one step to die, a mere flexing of tendons and muscle. Falling into death in this way, by means of a simple command to the brain, had appealed to him before. Now, as his legs refused to budge, he understood that the body will not die so easily.

  It was snowing, and the snow was muting the roar of the nearby motorway. In the car park far below, a gang of boys reared their bicycles like hooded horsemen. They did not so much as glance at the woman with the shopping trolley shouting abuse from the street corner opposite. And none of them looked up to see Henning and the angel.

  Standing among the satellite dishes and ventilation shafts, Henning observed his world: the familiar streets looked smaller from up there, less significant. He saw the train line running into Copenhagen, the ordered grid of roads like arteries around the heart of the capital.

  What is my life for? he asked himself, as he had done so often before. That was when he became aware of a pink flutter by his side. He turned to find the angel looking up at him, a slight, winged figure perched by his side in the fading light.

  Fat flakes of snow fell slowly around the two of them as if they were figures inside a snow globe, like the one Henning kept on his sideboard, with the couple kissing on the steps of Notre Dame.

  The angel was strangely calm. For a moment Henning considered that he was already dead. He peered over the edge for a glimpse of his corpse slowly spilling its halo of blood across the snow. The angel followed his eyes to see what he was looking at. Then it spoke, and the voice was human.

  ‘Hello.’

  Henning saw now that the angel was wearing bright-red lipstick and a plastic wristwatch. Not an angel then, only a girl.

  Henning’s instinct was to take flight, to hide from people. But something made him linger. Something he couldn’t account for.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Henning thought of the crisp white envelope addressed to his nephew resting against the toaster in his apartment eight floors below. He had planned his suicide carefully and would have resented the girl for spoiling his plans had he not been so relieved.

  ‘Are you going to jump?’

  She was winding a strand of her long hair around one finger, fidgeting in the manner of a small child, but her eyes were sincere. Henning shuddered, buried his hands deeper in his heavy overcoat and let his felt hat slip down over his forehead.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’m just looking.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Henning could not help feeling a certain affinity with the girl. He sensed that she was no stranger to fear, though his was raging with full force, while hers was new.

  He decided to leave, but the girl ran after him as he strode towards the stairwell, like a small dog, and, though he didn’t want to, he stopped.

  ‘Wait. You’re the man next door. What’s your name?’ she said.

  Henning had never seen the girl before. He guessed no one notices a small girl any more than they do an old man.

  Her bare arms and legs were mottled purple with cold. She must have been playing in her fairy costume, then dashed up to the roof when she first saw the snow falling outside her bedroom window.

  Henning hesitated before answering her, sensing that doing so would be the beginning of something.

  ‘Henning,’ he said, finally.

  The girl turned her face to the sky for a while, letting the snowflakes melt on her eyelids. Then she said something sad. She said, ‘Snow is like white rain. It’s just white rain.’

  It felt strange to be back in the apartment, having left it a short while earlier for what he thought would be the last time. He left the letter by the toaster, ready for his next attempt. Nothing had changed and nothing would between now and then.

  The girl had disturbed him. From his favourite spot in the front room, by the gap in the curtain, he watched her as she came skipping along the walkway outside. She stopped for a moment, so close Henning could have touched her but for the pane of glass. Slowly, she wiped the lipstick off her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she disappeared into the apartment next door.

  Why had he never noticed her before? What was her name? How old was she?

  Standing in the dark, still in his overcoat, Henning took stock of his failure. If only he had jumped straight away, before the girl had spoken to him, before he knew she was there. If only he had been braver.

  Then he remembered what his brain had been trying to tell him. In his mind’s eye, he saw the girl again, standing in front of him, covering and uncovering her left arm with her right hand. There was something there on the skin: red marks, ringed with black, like angry eyes.

  The girl was the first thing on his mind when he woke up the next morning. He decided it didn’t matter if he were to postpone his death for a day.

  He went out looking for her, scanning the streets for a flash of pink. He had nearly given up and was walking back towards the block when he saw her. She was on the other side of the street, lagging behind the redheaded woman from next door, and struggling to keep up. She could be no more than eight.

  As she passed, she looked straight at him and waved without her mother noticing. No one had ever looked at Henning that way before, as if they could really see him.

  He tried but failed to erase the girl from his thoughts. Every day he woke up with a feeling that something exciting was happening. Every day he decided his suicide could wait.

  He spent hours standing motionless by the gap in the curtain, watching the girl coming and going. There was a man, too: a skinny, energetic man in a baseball cap and steel-rimmed glasses.

  Every evening when going out, the man would stop to light his cigarette outside Henning’s window, reappearing in the car park in front of the building a few seconds later. He had a white car, which he drove off furiously, exhaust roaring.

  Cigarettes. What had the girl done, Henning wondered, to have them stubbed out on her arm?

  One evening after the man had left, and shortly afterwards the woman, there was a knock on Henning’s door. It was the girl. Henning felt his heart beat hard in his throat, but he could not resist opening to her.

  ‘Do your mother and father know where you are?”

  ‘Kenneth is not my dad.’

  ‘Who is he, then?’

  ‘Mum’s boyfriend. Can I come in?’

  ‘Well, have you told your mother and Kenneth that you’re here?’

  ‘They’re out. Can
I come in?”

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not a good time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I really think you should go home now.’

  ‘Why?’

  Henning tried to close the door, but then she did that thing again, covering and uncovering her left arm with her right hand.

  ‘Those marks on your arm. How did you …?’

  The girl looked away, down along the walkway as if hearing someone coming up the stairs, then looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Why were you going to jump?’

  It was useless fighting it. Their friendship, however unlikely, had begun. They always met in his apartment. Henning liked to watch her eat: slice after slice of thick white bread, glasses of chocolate milk, apples. The girl liked to look at his snow globe, shaking it vigorously, then pressing her nose against the glass.

  One day when she had curled up on his sofa like a cat and fallen asleep, with a small frown pinching the skin above her nose, Henning sat down beside her. He looked at her face, tracing with his eyes the veins that ran like rivers beneath the white parchment of her skin. She stirred, stretched and made herself more comfortable against the cushions and, as she did so, her top slipped a little from her back, revealing an inch of bruised flesh.

  Henning gasped, but said nothing about it when she woke up. He and the girl had an unspoken agreement: he did not mention the strange designs on her skin and, in return, she would not bring up his attempt to jump off the roof.

  ‘Are these people your family?’ she would say instead, pointing to the photos on his wall.

  ‘Yes, but they are all dead. Well, all except my nephew. He lives in the city.’

  ‘Does he have a nice house?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Henning. ‘I have never been invited to his house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  And so it would go on. The girl would ask the same questions over and over again, and the answers would leave Henning empty.

  It was the middle of the night when he first heard the sounds coming from next door. He must have heard them before but blocked them out. The girl’s bruises and burns had not made themselves.

  The man was shouting drunkenly, and Henning could hear the woman, too, though he could not tell if she was laughing or crying. And then the girl’s screams, penetrating the walls and boring into his skull.

  He leapt out of bed with an urge to run, to get away, before collapsing in a heap against his front door, pulling the telephone off the hall table.

  ‘Is that the police?’

  ‘Can I have your name?’

  ‘There’s a little girl next door, she’s screaming. They are hurting her.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Caller? I need your name and location? Hello?’

  He dropped the receiver back in its cradle. He would be made to sign a statement. They would not understand or believe him. They would ask: How can an old man be friends with a little girl?

  He thought someone else would call the police, but the flashing blue lights never came. Then there was silence. Someone slammed the front door. It was him, Kenneth. As always, he lit up before striding off towards the stairs. After a moment, he could be heard driving off.

  It happened again, and again.

  Somebody had to do something. He wrote to the council, a long letter, setting out the facts as he knew them, but perhaps the letter never reached them, for nothing happened.

  The girl grew tired and withdrawn. Several days would pass between her visits, and she became shifty, spending most of her time standing by the window, looking down at the car park and watching out for Kenneth and his white car.

  ‘Mum found out I come in here,’ she said to Henning one day. ‘She says Kenneth would kill me if he knew – and you.’

  Henning hated himself, but he hated Kenneth even more and, in that moment, for the first time, everything made sense: now he knew what God had been trying to tell him on the roof.

  The night of the fire it was cold again, cold enough for snow. The booming flash tore an orange strip out of the black sky only moments after Henning watched Kenneth leave the flat next door, stopping briefly to cup his hands around lighter and cigarette. The colours were amazing as the white car went up in flames with Kenneth inside it.

  No one notices an old man, any more than they do a little girl. But then Henning had been very careful as he doused the car with petrol, setting it afloat in a rainbow sea. Flicking his cigarette butt out of the window, as was his habit, Kenneth had lit his own funeral pyre.

  A few days later, Henning was back on the roof, standing once more on the ledge where death was just a step away. He hadn’t seen the girl since it happened. He supposed she was with her mother; it no longer mattered.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the suicide note addressed to his nephew. He smiled as he imagined his dead sister’s son, who never visited him, never phoned and never invited him, not even for Christmas, tearing it open and wondering how much money he had been left.

  Then, slowly, Henning ripped the letter. He scattered the pieces and they fell like rain, like white rain onto the people below, who did not notice them and who would never think to look up and see where they were coming from.

  The Climbing Rose

  Brian riffled through his bag, smiling when he saw the envelope addressed to Mrs Hoffmann. He always made a point of being friendly to the rich old ladies on his round.

  He dusted down his red jacket, tucked his hair behind his ears and began to push his bike up the long driveway to the house, whistling as he went.

  It had been a while since Mrs Hoffmann last had a proper letter. Usually there were only bills. Brian wondered idly who could have sent it. She had never mentioned any relatives or friends. Sometimes there was post for Mr Hoffmann, but Brian had never seen the man and supposed he must be dead.

  Mrs Hoffmann’s dog launched into a half-hearted bark up ahead but quickly stopped. Brian guessed it had recognised him by his whistle.

  As he got further up the drive, the street noise faded into silence. Klampenborg was like this: big, empty villas surrounded by gardens and hedges reaching up over your head. As soon as you stepped away from the road, you might as well be in another world.

  No wonder the old ladies got lonely with no one to talk to for days on end. Brian had only recently started working on this route, but he had soon discovered that he had a talent for listening. He had one of those faces that rich old people trusted.

  It was surprisingly easy to gain their confidence. All you had to do was to remember a few things about them: their children’s names, their favourite TV programme, the little hobbies they had.

  Now and again they would ask him to do things for them. Lift a piece of furniture, change the batteries in the remote control, unscrew the lid from a jam jar. If, afterwards, they slipped him something as a thank you, he couldn’t see why that should be anybody’s business. It wasn’t as if they needed the money where they were going.

  Once, one of the old ladies had thrust a 1,000-kroner note into his pocket. Another had given him a pair of gold cufflinks that he had sold on for 1,500. In the past two months, he had almost managed to save enough for a holiday.

  Brian stopped to wipe the sweat off his brow. The morning was close and pale, as if a plastic lid had been fitted over Copenhagen. A humming noise grew out of the silence. Even before Mrs Hoffmann’s climbing rose came into view, you could hear them: thousands, perhaps millions, of bees feasting on its sweetness.

  The rose was all Mrs Hoffmann ever talked about. She had to be nearly eighty, but she was always out in the front garden, snipping away with her secateurs and carrying watering cans to and fro. He had even caught her mumbling to it a couple of times. You would think it was human, the way she fussed over that thing.

  Brian would never say as much to Mrs Hoffmann, but he found the rose a little creepy. There was something unsavoury about its size.
The trunk was gnarled and fat, with heavy branches spreading outwards on either side, giving it the look of a giant pair of lungs. With the bees hovering, it seemed almost to be breathing, its flowers gently lifting and falling.

  Brian had no idea roses could grow so big. He had once asked Mrs Hoffmann what sort of fertiliser she was using, but she had only tapped her nose and said that a good gardener never gave away her secrets.

  The rose had been photographed for the newspapers, apparently, and come first in several gardening competitions. No one had ever seen anything quite like it. Brian reckoned that were it not for the rose, Mrs Hoffmann would lie down and die.

  He parked his bike by the front door, trying not to look up at the house. It was enough to smell the rose. Like old ladies’ perfume, its candy sweetness not quite cancelling out the underlying notes of decay. The flowers were vivid in the corner of his vision, as bright red as his uniform, and the size of fists.

  In the flower bed by the trunk, Mrs Hoffmann’s white terrier was digging frantically, its paws and muzzle soiled. Mrs Hoffmann was bent over next to the dog, her heavy legs sticking out below the old-fashioned housecoat that she always wore for her gardening.

  She stood up and smiled at Brian. The climbing rose towered above her, a cascade of red almost completely obscuring the white render of the facade. It could have been his imagination, but Brian thought it had grown at least a few feet since he last saw it. Soon it would climb up over the roof and down the other side.

  ‘Ah, Mr Postman, we have been waiting for you,’ said Mrs Hoffmann.

  Like most of the old ladies of Klampenborg, she spoke like the Queen, using the second person formal pronoun, which had almost disappeared out of the Danish language.

  ‘You must be telepathic,’ he said, putting on his most cheerful voice. ‘I have a letter for you. I said to myself, “Mrs Hoffmann is going to be pleased to receive this nice, personal letter.”’

  She took the envelope from his outstretched hand and, to his astonishment, tucked it away in her pocket without so much as looking at it. Behind her, the dog kept digging, spraying earth in a wide arc onto the lawn.