Mslexia

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There is an area of old Copenhagen close to the harbour and Queen Margrethe’s castle where the population thins dramatically at night. Families used to live there, but the buildings now mostly house businesses of various kinds. When the shop assistants and office workers stream out to the suburbs the place falls silent. This was what Jens loved most about his new flat: the fact that all the other people had left by the time he arrived home from the office, the footsteps of his shiny brogues echoing between the tall, empty houses. Looking up at the windows of the castle he would imagine the Queen in there on her own with the lights off, seated by the desk at which she gave her new year’s speech to TV and 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 and comfort of the indoors. Crossing the courtyard to his building he’d start running, bounding up the steps to the third floor in twos and threes. Inside the flat, stroking Mortensen, his tabby cat, he’d imagine himself a rich merchant returning home from a voyage, counting his brass doorknobs and locks and pegs like pieces of gold. The smell of the flat – hints of boot polish, cedar wood and coffee – was so evocative of the past, of important dinner parties and secret, political 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 probably assumed he lived in the suburbs like them. No one knew the truth, not even his parents back home in their bungalow across the sea on the other side of Denmark, but they didn’t know anything anyway. As far as they were concerned, he was working in Greenland on a remote research station.

All day, as he computed people’s taxes and entered figures into columns, Jens savoured his secret knowledge that he lived in a palace with tall ceilings and more rooms than he could ever afford to furnish.

The flat itself hadn’t come without costs, of course. The mortgage far exceeded Jens’ modest earnings, and historic dwellings such as this one, which had belonged to an old lady, rarely became available. But the first time he saw the flat he felt it embrace him and he knew he had to get it, whatever it took, whatever he would have to do.

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

‘You must be joking. I’ve got seven buyers interested,’ said the man, 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 flat in a yellow-brick seventies block south of the city.

‘You’re not supposed to phone the vendor directly,’ the agent said.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Jens replied.

It wasn’t hard to get the number. He and Mrs Ingrid Andersen talked a great deal, well, Mrs Andersen did anyway. She chatted about her move back to the countryside of her birth and Jens knew he wasn’t required to do much more than listen and wait. Mrs Andersen went on to talk about Mr Andersen, who had passed away suddenly after 47 years of marriage. Apparently, she never saw the man’s feet naked before he lay dead on the mortuary slab – even in their intimate moments, he would keep on a pair of socks.

Mrs Andersen returned to this fact again and again, her voice choked with bitterness and grief. Jens stayed silent, all the while picturing himself walking through her majestic rooms.

‘I like your flat,’ he told her after a while. ‘It feels so, I don’t know, so homely. But the thing is Mrs Andersen…

‘Ingrid.’

‘Ingrid. The thing is since my parents both passed away in the accident, I’ve had so much debt to settle and the proceeds from the house barely covers it and this money is all I’ve got left. But I really need a place to live and I like your flat so much only I can’t afford it, and…’
‘Slow down, dear. Your parents were killed, you said?’

A few days later the estate agent called to inform Jens in a clipped voice that it would appear Mrs Ingrid Andersen had chosen to accept his offer for the flat though it was far below market value and by no means the highest on the table.

On the day Jens moved in he couldn’t stop laughing. He danced across the naked floorboards and when he’d finished unpacking his few belongings he sat for a long time in one of the windowsills and watched the sun go down behind the roofs across the street.

Two months later, when demolishing the first of the flat’s beautiful, antique wall panels, the memory of that day and that happiness felt to Jens like a physical pain. He thought back through the series of events that had led him to this act of destruction. It had all started with the crying.

Such an irrelevance it had seemed when he first heard it. So small and no harder to dismiss than an unwanted memory from the past. It was in the middle of the night and the crying, a persistent, distant wail, weaved its way into his dreams. He wouldn’t have remembered it the next day had it not been for the way Mortensen reacted. Normally, as soon as Jens got up Mortensen would come and nudge his legs, eager for breakfast. But this particular morning the cat wouldn’t come out from under Jens’s bed.

Then on another night it happened again: this time an indignant, full-lung bawl of the kind that urges you to rush in and do something. It was late and Jens was in the kitchen, frying an egg on the solitary gas ring. He walked through the whole flat trying to locate the sound. It appeared to come from one of the bedrooms at the bottom of the long corridor that ran through the flat like the backbone of a great whale. Later he found Mortensen hiding under his bed again.

The crying came from an infant. The sound was the same as in old films, when a sudden, heart-wrenching bawl from upstairs announced a successful birth. It was a woollen sound of crying behind a wall or in a box or under a pillow and always stopped when Jens felt he was getting near to locating it. He searched his mind for clues. On the ground floor and first floor was a solicitor’s office, Poulsen, Ebbegaard & Wegner. On the second floor was Miss Gerda Vagn, an old lady who had owned her flat for a number of years. He lived on the third floor and the flat above, the last one in the property, was empty. Its owners, a retired banker and his wife, lived most of the year in Geneva, which meant that at night when the solicitors had left, there was only Miss Vagn and himself in the whole building.

Jens considered for a few days the possibility that the sound was being carried over on the wind from one of the neighbouring properties. One weekend, he went out in the rain and searched the entire street and its back yards for signs of prams, tricycles or anything that might belong to a young family, but he wasn’t surprised when this yielded nothing. The area wasn’t the sort of place you found children. The only time Jens saw kids, with their brightly-coloured raincoats and loud, irrational manners, was when school excursions walked by his flat on their way to the Queen’s castle. Occasionally women passed by pushing prams, but never at night, never when the crying happened.

Eventually, the crying burrowed under Jens’ skin till he could no longer function. All night he would lay awake waiting for it to begin. In the morning he would arrive at the tax office, looking haggard, spending most of the day asleep at his desk or thinking about the crying. It affected his work, till one day his supervisor, a woman in her fifties whose only son had recently left home to go to university, came over and bent down low by his work station. She was so close, Jens could see the finger marks on her slim oval glasses.

‘Are you all right, Jens? You look very pale,’ she said in a barely audible voice.

‘Just a little tired, Tove,’ said Jens. His supervisor, all bouncing bosom under her knitted jumper, liked being called by her first name.

‘In fact, if you must know, they think I might have cancer,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘My God. What sort?’ said Tove, placing one hand on his shoulder. It felt heavy and damp through the fabric of his shirt.

‘They don’t know, yet. I’m having some tests, but it doesn’t look good,’ said Jens, shaking his head a little and looking at the pot plant on Tove’s desk. He’d often felt like biting into its glossy, swollen leaves.

Tove wouldn’t hear of him staying at work. She ordered him to go home and take it easy, which he tried his best to do. However, he rested even less than before as there was now no respite from the perpetual listening and waiting for the crying to begin. The wailing became an instrument of torture, drilling its way into Jens’ brain and lodging itself in there so that he could hear it, even when he wasn’t sure it was actually there. He wanted nothing else than to stop it.

Throughout the ordeal, Mortensen had stayed aloof and absent, keeping himself, so it seemed increasingly to Jens, deliberately scarce in the few days after each incident of the crying. Come to think of it, Jens had never seen Mortensen when the crying had actually occurred. This thought occupied him a great deal and as the days went by Jens started looking suspiciously at Mortensen and took to bringing him to bed at night, holding the cat tightly to his chest.
‘You stay right here,’ he’d say, ‘and you and I will be just fine.’

But Mortensen would look away with his beautiful yellow-green eyes, as though he were embarrassed on Jens’ behalf. He’d always been a particularly arrogant cat, only just tolerating Jens’ awkward affection. This, which had only made Jens love Mortensen all the more, now drove him to a crazed distraction.

His attempt to keep the cat in sight at all times was unsuccessful. In the early hours Jens would drift off to sleep and by the time the crying started the cat had long since slunk away from his loosened grip.

One night, as Jens was woken up by the crying, the thought came to his delirious mind that the crying was no infant at all, but the mating call of a cat, a cat not unlike Mortensen, whom Jens had never been able to bring himself to neuter. In fact, was this not the cry of the Mortensen himself? Jens felt relief at this thought. He got up calmly and walked through the flat, quickly finding Mortensen in the corner of one of the rooms. The cat had his back up over something, baring his teeth in a blood-chilling tiger growl that he now directed at Jens. He grabbed the cat hard around the neck with both hands. It was surprisingly effortless, like squeezing a wet sock, but it came with no satisfaction at all. When Mortensen’s body went limp, Jens knew, if only with one corner of his fevered mind, that there was no way the crying had come from the cat.
That same night the crying happened again.

When Jens woke up the next day he wrapped Mortensen’s body in old newspapers and a plastic bag and walked down to the basement to place it in one of the dustbins. He took a shower, shaved off three week’s growth of beard and put on a fresh shirt. Then he walked down one flight of stairs, hesitating with his finger on the ivory bell. There was a sign on the door with a picture of a black Labrador and the words ‘Beware of the dog’.

Miss Gerda Vagn opened up immediately, almost tripping over the threshold, like she had been waiting just inside, hovering and hoping with one eye pressed against the spy hole. Jens had worked out that she had to be fairly old, from the tarnished and ancient looking brass plate with her name on down by the front door and the fact that she always had her television on too loud. But the woman who opened the door did not adequately fit the description ‘old’. She had put so much effort into reversing the ageing process that she had ended up looking ageless, not in the sense of looking young, but rather of belonging to a new subgroup of human being to which no number of years could safely be attached. Eyes, grotesquely distorted by thick glasses peered out at Jens sideways. Her hair, most likely a wig judging by its faint synthetic sheen, was black, her face a pasty, pastry beige on which her none-too-accurately painted lips floated like a glob of strawberry jam. Jens knew straight away that she was going to like him; women like Gerda always liked him.

‘Jens Bruun,’ he said. ‘I live upstairs.’

‘Yes?’ She continued to stare but didn’t appear to suspect anything untoward. Ingrid must have told her about him buying the flat.

‘The thing is, Miss Vagn. There’s this sound I’ve been hearing at night. A crying sound, from a baby, and I wondered if it… I wondered if you might know something about it?’

‘A baby.’ Miss Vagn shook her head. ‘There’s no baby here. I don’t know anyone who has a baby.’ Her voice was a little too loud.

‘Are you sure?’

She seemed to think about this for a while, then looked at him again and shook her head.
‘I am sorry.’

On seeing him dejected, Miss Vagn appeared to soften a little, opening the door wider. Inside the flat, an old clock struck the quarter hour.

‘Would you to come in and have a glass of port?’ she said.

‘What about the…’ said Jens, gesturing at the sign with the picture of the Labrador.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Dead. 1982’

Jens was glad about that. Dogs, like small children, upset him with their overwhelming behaviour. Inside Miss Vagn’s flat, as she retired to the kitchen, the first thing he noticed was that it was identical to his own, which ought not to have surprised him but did. Furthermore, it was a good deal more impressive, as Miss Vagn had no shortage of beautiful things. There had been life here, people coming and going. It was obvious, though it must have been a good few years ago, when Miss Vagn still had her own hair. Impatience rose in Jens’ throat, as the old lady returned bowlegged with a bottle and two small glasses on a tray. She beckoned him to take a seat on the sofa.

‘Skål,’ she said simply, lifting her glass and knocking the contents back in one go. Jens noticed how the empty glass shook in her hand.

Strong and sweet, the port gave Jens the sort of nausea that spreads like an ache from the top of the head, but Miss Vagn filled his glass again before he could stop her, leaning over towards him from her armchair next to the sofa, so close he could smell her perfume and the sickly brown powder that caked her face like dough. Her lips were parted a little, revealing her yellow teeth. Jens shuddered. They might have been sitting like that for ages or merely a few seconds. Lack of sleep had turned Jens’ awareness into a naked, flickering light bulb, intermittently illuminating Miss Vagn’s bottle-end glasses. Across the gap in their years he heard her loneliness and physical longing, like a calling out – like a crying – and the madness overtook him once again. As he reached out for her throat she didn’t struggle; it was as if she welcomed his hands there, as if any touch was better than none, which infuriated him even more.

Strangling Miss Vagn was no harder than strangling Mortensen, but neither did it bring any more relief. Jens considered her body for a while then decided to leave it. The flat was the least likely of all places that it would be found, considering no visitors ever called anywhere on the upper floors. As he walked back up the stairs to his flat he thought, ‘I have killed a cat and a human being for no reason at all.’

That night, when the crying started up again, Jens himself cried with the bitterness of someone who can have no solace and no satisfaction. Into the crying he rolled all the unfairness of his life and he and the ghostly baby wailed in unison till he did not know which sound came from the infant and which from himself.

It was the next day that he started on the wall panels in the smallest bedroom at the end of the corridor.

That morning Jens had woken with a new resolve. First he rang work, telling Tove that he’d been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer. He was flying to the US for treatment that same afternoon and she should not expect him back at work for some considerable time. Then he walked down to the basement and picked up an old wood axe from the boiler room. The crying began at twilight and Jens walked calmly through all the rooms, following the sound, which came – he was nearly certain of it now – from behind the walls in the little room overlooking the back yard. As he cleaved and tore off the panels one by one until only the skeletal timbers remained, how good it felt finally to be doing something useful. And when he found there was nothing to see in the little room, he started on the next room and the one after that, growing more determined with each strike of the axe not to finish, till everything had been torn down and exposed, if necessary to move through the whole building, never stopping till he had silenced the crying.

HEIDI AMSINCK, 37, was born in Denmark and is a London correspondent on Britain for Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Mslexia is her first publication, although one of her short stories was shortlisted for the 2003 VS Pritchett Prize and an extract from her novel features in Birkbeck magazine, The Mechanics (she is half-way through the MA at Birkbeck). She has two young sons, but stresses that no one and nothing can stop her writing – she writes more than ever now that work, family and studies leave her hardly any time! Favourite authors include Rose Tremain, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver and Karen Blixen.

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