Death Sentence

‘Really,’ Anne huffed, pretending to be offended.

Line set down her glass and came over to me. She looked at the flowers and then me.

Hallo, Frank,’ she greeted me quietly, snuggled up to me and hugged me. I held her tight and felt my eyes well up.

Anne coughed and reluctantly we let go of each other.

‘These are for you,’ I said, offering the flowers to Line. She smiled and held them while Anne found a vase. An awkward silence descended on the kitchen.

‘It’s a little hot in here, isn’t it?’ I said and we all laughed.

‘I think what you need is a glass of cold white wine,’ Bjarne said and poured me a glass that disappeared far too quickly.

The dinner was almost like old times, we told stories and silly jokes. Bjarne and I baited each other and the girls teased Bjarne. I spoke less than usual, but I could barely take my eyes off Line. She seemed even more beautiful than I remembered her only twelve days ago and my infatuated glances were reciprocated when she didn’t look away, blushing.

‘It’ll be fine,’ Bjarne said when we sat in the armchairs, each with a whisky while the girls washed up.

‘I don’t remember ever feeling so nervous,’ I confessed, glancing in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Don’t worry, the two of you will work it out, I just know it.’ Bjarne stuck out his big paw of a hand and patted me on the shoulder. ‘You two are made for each other.’

‘I nearly ruined everything.’

Bjarne shook his head. ‘Rubbish, what the two of you have can’t be wrecked just by an interview.’

I hadn’t told anyone about my one-night stand with Linda Hvilbjerg. As far as everyone else was concerned, the interview had been the tipping point, while I kept factoring in the episode with Linda in the lavatory. That was what I truly repented and Bjarne’s words failed to assuage my guilt.

‘I knew it right from the start,’ Bjarne continued. ‘The perfect couple.’

He had had a lot to drink, more than we normally did at this stage, and it showed.

‘The successful author.’ He pointed to me with his whisky glass, swirling the liquid around and nearly spilling it. ‘And the world’s loveliest dancer.’ He raised his glass in a toast and we drank. ‘Who have the most beautiful daughter in the universe.’

‘May we live happily ever after,’ I added and took another sip.

Bjarne leaned closer to me with a grave face.

‘It’s not a joke,’ he said. ‘I mean it. What the two of you have is special. Never forget that.’ He drank his whisky and pulled a face. ‘You have won life’s lottery, hit the jackpot, got a hole-in-one, struck gold, your ship has come in—’

‘I think I get it,’ I interrupted him, grinning.

‘I don’t think you do,’ he said, staring at his drink. ‘I envy you and I’m embarrassed by that. Your book is a success, you have a lovely wife and an even lovelier kid.’ He drank the rest of his whisky.

‘You have Anne,’ I pointed out. There was something in Bjarne’s voice I had never heard before, something melancholic inconsistent with his normally jovial manner.

He nodded. ‘I’m very fond of Anne,’ he said. ‘I think I love her. That’s why I want to give her what you can give Line. I want to give her a successful husband, but more importantly, I wish I could give her a child.’

We had never talked about Anne’s miscarriage, but I assumed it was one of those things and that they were still trying.

‘It’ll happen,’ I said, placing my hand on his. ‘Give it time.’

Bjarne shook his head and picked up the bottle.

‘It’s my sperm,’ he said, half filling his glass with whisky. ‘Something’s wrong with it. The little fellows are sick.’ He drank his whisky and topped up his glass. ‘Anne is perfectly healthy. That’s why she miscarried. Her body rejected the freak I had implanted in her.’

I reached for the bottle and, reluctantly, he let it go.

‘Surely you can find a donor? Or adopt?’

Bjarne made a face. ‘Somehow it just doesn’t feel right, eh?’

‘What doesn’t feel right?’ asked Anne, who had just entered the living room.

We straightened up in our chairs and exchanged looks.

‘That Frank and I get married and moved to Samso,’ Bjarne said.

‘Now, why on earth would you want to move to Samso?’ Line asked.

‘Precisely,’ Bjarne said, nodding. ‘Precisely.’

The conversation carried on for a couple more hours, but Bjarne grew more and more drunk and unintelligible, so in the end Line and I thanked them and left. We had also drunk quite a lot and practically stumbled down the stairs, giggling at our clumsiness. I asked if I could see her home. She would like that, she said, but only as far as the garden gate. We cycled slowly through the city. I asked about Ironika and her, all the questions I had prepared but hadn’t yet had the chance to ask. She replied that they missed me. When we reached Amager and Line’s father’s house, we ran out of things to say and we looked at each other.

I took her hand. It was cold, but she gave mine a small encouraging squeeze.

‘Won’t you come home soon, please?’ I asked.

Line looked straight into my eyes and nodded. ‘We’ll come home tomorrow.’

She leaned towards me and kissed my lips. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, she had got off her bicycle and was wheeling it up the garden path.

‘I had a lovely time,’ she said as she disappeared around the corner of the house.

‘Me too!’ I called out and my voice echoed between the buildings. I could hear her giggling. Then I stepped on the pedals and cycled home to the flat.

In the months that followed it was like our relationship had been reborn. We were together all the time. We talked about everything, laughed a lot and flirted at every opportunity. We rediscovered sex. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other and it happened more than once that we were late for appointments because there was ‘something’ we just had to take care of before we could leave the flat.

Ironika enjoyed having a father again and I realized how much I had missed her small secretive smile. Fortunately she was oblivious that she had been the subject of our crisis.

It was also during this period that I developed the idea for Join the Club, which I believed would be my next project, a ‘proper’ novel, the one I would be remembered and admired for. Line was in favour. She supported and encouraged me almost to the point of excess. I suspected that some of her enthusiasm was sheer relief that I would be writing something far removed from Outer Demons.

Join the Club would be my effort at the great contemporary novel I had always imagined I was destined to write one day. The book would capture the age and the world we inhabited, a kaleidoscope of scenes from the everyday lives of a dozen different Danes and their experiences alone, in company and with each other. The stories would unfold with clockwork precision and eventually converge with pinpoint accuracy, although the reader wouldn’t realize this until the final page. Join the Club centred on our common need to belong: the immigrant trying to access the Danish community, the workman who wants to write books, the gay man seeking acceptance from his family, the nerd who desperately wants a girlfriend, the engineer who would rather run a bar than build bridges, the disabled person who wants to be noticed, the model who wants to be admired for more than her looks, and so on. No one was mutilated or tortured to death, no one would be murdered by psychopathic killers or perverted kidnappers. It would be a book everyone could identify with, a book its readers could admit to having read; the book that would be my epitaph.

Ironika didn’t like the idea. She had been there while I worked on Outer Demons, guiding me with smiles and grunts, but she cared little for Join the Club. Every time I whispered the story to her or read her samples, she burst into tears. This worried me a little, but I brushed it aside. After all, it was very early in the creative process.

Meanwhile, the momentum of Outer Demons was unstoppable. All the Nordic countries and most European ones bought it, the film rights went to a British company at an auction, but the really big prize was when we sold the book to the US market. The advance alone enabled us to buy a house in Kartoffelr?kkerne and the subsequent royalties financed our holiday cottage in Rageleje. Property prices were much lower back then, but the houses still represented considerable investments and for the first time I sensed that my