Death Sentence

Whether it was Bent’s enthusiasm or Finn’s marketing that did it, I don’t know, but the novel sold well, although without ever reaching the heights of Outer Demons. It received a fair amount of press coverage. Some interpreted it as a critical response to Denmark’s participation in the first Iraqi war – completely unintentional from my side – but the association stuck and has haunted the book ever since. Because of this I received numerous letters from soldiers who had been posted to Iraq, and again later when Denmark joined in for the second half. Many of them told of physical and psychological trauma. They were surprisingly frank about excess drinking, family problems and the difficulty of readjusting after returning home.

A few letters contained direct threats against my life, either because I, in the sender’s opinion, had given a completely distorted picture of serving in Iraq, or because the sender felt that outsiders shouldn’t be allowed to write about it when they had never been there and seen comrades killed by IEDs or had snipers take pot shots at them.

I kept all these letters in a box like old family photos you haven’t got the heart to throw out. I sensed a kinship with those lost souls who now lived alone with only the bottle for company and the memory of a family who no longer wanted to know.

But at least I had something to do, something that could occupy my thoughts for several hours every day and provide me with a living. Writing became my fixed point and I adhered to my working routine with military precision.

I quickly discovered that being a writer is the world’s best excuse for being alone and I often used it as justification for getting rid of guests. Sometimes I would use it to stop people from visiting in the first place. If I pretended I would be writing all day, people respected it and didn’t disturb me.

Apart from giving me something to do, writing also became an outlet for the anger I discovered inside me. My divorce from Line took place through lawyers and it was a bitter experience to see my former life disappear like that.

As a result, I wrote Nuclear Families, a story about a group of housewives who are taken hostage by a robber in a supermarket. They overpower the robber, who dies when he is impaled on an umbrella stand, and the women discover they have something in common. Apart from being resourceful, they share a passion for morbidity and are all trapped in unhappy marriages. They start to meet in secret and strike a deal to murder the husbands while each wife has a rock-solid alibi. It quickly turns into a sport, one murder becomes more spectacular than the next, and the more the husband suffers the better. A police officer, a male chauvinist and a bragging caricature of Philip Marlowe, suspects a link between the murders. He has his own marital problems and it isn’t until he finally uncovers the group that he realizes the conspiracy is greater than he first presumed. His own wife has arranged for his female boss to kill him while she herself is at bingo. The police officer dies in a shooting accident on the last page of the book, just as his wife wins a full house.

Nuclear Families was a furious attack on all women and their sisterhood. It was my antidote to the injustice I felt when Line took my children from me. It wasn’t a very good book, nor was it terribly popular with my readers, but it did its job. The critics slated it, but I was used to that by now and it didn’t upset me. A sole critic enjoyed the stereotypical gender depiction and was of the view that it was a big fat ironic response to the wave of girl power that had started to spread. But there was no truth in that. It was simply a bad book.

Financially, Nuclear Families wasn’t a success, either. It paid for itself as far as ZeitSign was concerned, but once I had paid alimony and child maintenance, there was nothing left for me. Fortunately I still got royalties from the other books and public lending rights, but I had to cut my consumption down considerably, something that turned out to be easier than I had expected. There wasn’t much to spend money on in a holiday area, at least not during the winter, and as I didn’t mix with people, there was a limit to how much money I could spend on petrol and clothes. The biggest item in my household budget was alcohol, but I could always switch to a cheaper label. At this point, it didn’t really matter how many years my whisky was aged.

Some months after the publication of Nuclear Families I had a visit from Line.

It was a late afternoon in May, warm enough for me to sit outside, but still a little too chilly for shorts. I sat in the garden with my Scotch, a Macallan, and studied the lawn.

‘Frank?’

I heard her voice as if in a dream. It was a very long time since I had last heard it and now it didn’t sound like her at all or else I had forgotten how she spoke. That possibility frightened me. I had imagined her voice countless times, imagined what she might say in this or that situation, and sensed her approval or scepticism from her intonation when I asked her advice about something or other. Now her voice was alien to me.

‘Frank. Are you there?’

It was her, no doubt about it, and I panicked. I looked at myself. My clothes were a mess. A white T-shirt under an old fraying cardigan which – would you believe it – used to be her father’s. Then a pair of jeans with no belt, holes in the knees and on my feet I wore a pair of slippers that had been in the house when we bought it. I thought about hiding, but it sounded as if she was just around the corner and my car was in the drive, so I couldn’t see how I could avoid her.

I put the whisky bottle behind my chair and buttoned up the cardigan. It was missing a button midway.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Line said, coming into view.

‘Hello, Line,’ I said, as casually as I could. My throat felt dry and parched, but I suppressed the urge to grab my glass and swallow the rest of my whisky. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

But then I saw her and it was like a punch to the stomach. She had put up her hair so her neck was bared. A black top, a pair of tight jeans and white trainers made her look young and fresh. And then she smiled. I had fallen for that smile once and at that moment I did so again. There was no need for her to say anything, all she had to do was state her demands and I would have signed instantly in my own blood and agreed to whatever she wanted.

I got up, a little too quickly, and accidentally pushed the chair back and knocked over the bottle behind it. It didn’t smash, but the noise was unmistakable. Line’s gaze flickered and I needed no speech bubble to tell me what she was thinking. I chose to ignore the sound and walked towards her. Having wiped my hand on my trousers, I offered it to her. She took it and squeezed it.

‘Good to see you,’ she lied.

‘You too,’ I replied and meant it.

‘I apologize for turning up unannounced,’ she said and let go of my hand. ‘But you weren’t answering the telephone, so I started to worry.’

‘Telephone?’ I said, looking at the cottage. I remembered ripping out the cable in a drunken rage. It was several months ago. ‘Oh, right, it’s broken.’

Line nodded towards the garden chairs. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Of course,’ I replied quickly and dusted one of them down. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘I’m driving,’ she said. ‘But a glass of water would be great.’

I rushed inside the cottage and into the kitchen. It was overflowing with several days’ worth of washing-up and there were no clean glasses. I quickly rinsed one and wiped it with a piece of kitchen towel. While I waited for the water to turn cold, I opened the fridge and drank a mouthful of vermouth straight from the bottle. The taste made me grimace.

When I returned to the garden, Line was standing with her back to me at the far edge of the terrace, as if she was balancing. It was impossible to tell that her body had given birth to two girls. She was slim, narrow around the hips and had the same elegant posture she had always had and which I had always admired.

‘The lawn needs cutting,’ Line remarked, yanking me back to reality.

I shrugged. ‘I might be going for a natural look.’

Line laughed and took the glass I was offering her. I could kick myself for not having waited until the glass cooled down. She had definitely noticed that it was still warm after I had washed it and guessed why. I sipped my whisky while she drank her water. We sat down in our garden chairs.

‘I’m worried about you, Frank.’

I brushed it aside with a wave of my hand. ‘Nah, no need for that. Like I said, the telephone is out of order.’

‘No, that’s not it,’ Line said, looking earnestly into my eyes. ‘I’ve read the book.’

I looked away and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. ‘And?’

‘I couldn’t recognize you at all, Frank.’ She shook her head. ‘All that rage scares me.’