Neither Here Nor There (16 page)

I was impressed. I couldn’t help thinking of the time I was stopped by police in America, made to stand with my arms and legs spread against a wall and frisked, then taken to a police station and booked because of an unpaid parking ticket. I was about seventeen myself at the time. God knows what they would have done to me if they had found me in a drugged stupor on a city bench. I suppose I’d be getting out of jail about now. ‘Will he be in trouble for this?’ I asked.

‘With his father, I think so, yes. But not with us. We are all young and crazy sometimes, you know? Good-night. Enjoy your stay in Copenhagen.’

‘Good-night,’ I said, and with the deepest admiration watched them go.

In the morning I felt like going to some museums. Copenhagen has splendid museums, which are strangely neglected, even by the Danes. I went first to the immense National Museum, opposite Christiansborg Palace, and had it more or less to myself. National museums, especially in small countries, are often feeble affairs – department-store mannequins dressed in sixteenth-century peasant costumes and a display case containing six Roman coins found in somebody’s back garden. But the Danish National Museum is both vast and richly endowed, and I spent a morning happily wandering through its miles of echoing rooms.

Afterwards I went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Some museums have great treasures but are dull buildings and some have dull treasures but are great buildings, but the Glyptotek succeeds on both counts. It has an outstanding collection of Roman statuary and some of the finest Impressionist paintings to be seen anywhere, but the building itself is a joy – light, airy, impeccably decorated, with a warm and tranquil palm court full of gently dozing old people. (So that’s where they put them!)

But the best museum of all I saved for last – the Hirschsprung Collection in Østre Anlaeg Park. Everything about it is wonderful. It’s a pleasant and gentle stroll from the city centre and Østre Anlaeg is the best park in the city, in my experience (which is short but in this case attentive), for seeing secretaries sunning their breasts, but even without these huge and novel inducements it is worth seeking out because it is such a terrific and little-visited museum. It contains 884 paintings, assembled over forty years by one man, almost all of them from the nineteenth-century Skagen school of Danish painting, and all packed densely into twenty or so mostly small rooms. The paintings are all concerned with simple themes – summer landscapes, friends enjoying a casual dinner, a view of the sea from an open window, a woman at a sink – but the effect is simply enchanting, and you come away feeling as if you have spent the afternoon in some kind of marvellous and refreshing ionizer.

Afterwards, my spirits lifted, I had a long, happy walk through the surrounding park, moving methodically from one sunbathing blonde to another, enquiring if they needed any assistance with their suntan lotion. Actually, that’s not true. It wasn’t warm enough for sunbathing and in any case it was four in the afternoon and all the secretaries in Copenhagen were tucked away in their dark offices, their lovely breasts bagged away for at least another day, so I just walked around the park and imagined.

Early in the evening I went for a stroll along the city’s curiously uninspiring waterfront: a dull vista of fish-processing factories and industrial cranes. Far away across the still water a ship-repair yard was working late doing something shrill and drastic to a rusted freighter, which defended itself with hideous shrieks and a shower of sparks. I walked as far as the statue of the Little Mermaid perched forlornly but rather prettily on her rock at the harbour’s edge, and then strolled around a neighbouring park called Castellet, named for its star-shaped fortress guarding the harbour mouth, before finally stopping for a light and cheapish dinner at a café/bistro on Stockholmsgade.

The food was not remarkable, but the beer was good and the service was excellent since I was the only customer in the place. I had only to look up and smile hopefully and a fresh beer would be hustled to me. After a bit I didn’t even have to look up. A new bottle would magically appear as the last drop fell from the old one. This was my kind of bistro.

So I sat contentedly for two hours looking at some Danish newspapers that had been left on the table, trying to discern from the mass of unfamiliar words whether Margaret Thatcher had perchance fallen out of a moving car or World War III had started yet. But planet Earth seemed to be much as I had left it three weeks before, so instead I gazed out of the window at the passing traffic and lost myself in those aimless reveries that are the lone traveller’s equivalent of a night on the town.

Eventually I rose, paid the enormous bill and tottered a trifle wobbily out into the night. It was a fair hike back to my hotel, but I sustained myself en route by stopping at any place that looked bright and friendly and dispensed beer, of which Copenhagen possesses a gratifying plenitude, and thus passed the evening sitting alone in a series of corners, drinking far too many beers, smiling inanely at strangers and dribbling ash down my shirt. Sometime around one in the morning, as I was weaving down Strøget, suppressing the urge to break into song, I encountered an Irishman reeling down the street towards me, swearing crazily at anyone who passed.

‘You fucking cunts!’ he screamed at a genteel-looking couple whose pace immediately quickened. ‘You shit-head! You great Danish turd!’ he shouted at a young man who lowered his head and hurried on.

The odd thing was that the Irishman was dressed in a dapper grey suit. He looked like a successful businessman. God knows what was going on inside his addled head. He caught sight of me, but seemed to recognize me as a fellow drunk and let me pass with a listless wave of the hand, but immediately perked up to rain abuse on a middle-aged man. ‘You’re a piece of crap for sure, you stupid old twat!’ he said, to the man’s considerable surprise, then added mysteriously: ‘And I bet you’re staying in a fucking posh hotel!’ I stood with my arms crossed and watched as the Irishman reeled off down the street, shouting abuse at the buildings now, before he lurched abruptly to the left, as if yanked on a long rope, and disappeared down a side street, taking his expletives into the night.

I awoke in the morning feeling as if I had spent the night with my head attached to one of those machines they use to test shock absorbers. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. I had intended to catch a train to Sweden at half-past, and I had yet to pack and check out. I went to the bathroom to struggle through the morning hygiene and make low death noises, then wandered around the room dealing with personal effects as I chanced upon them – a sock went onto my foot, a map was forced into the rucksack, a Big Mac box that I had no recollection of acquiring went into the wastebasket – until at last I had assembled my possessions. I needed coffee the way Dan Quayle needs help with an IQ test.

I arrived at the front desk just in time to take up a position behind twenty-seven Italian visitors who, in that interesting way of the Italians, were all trying to check out at once. This didn’t help my fragile mood any. At last the Italians departed, moving across the lobby as if surgically linked, and the last I saw of them they were all trying to go out of the revolving door together. I gave my key to the young woman and waited as the computer hummed for a minute, as if getting up steam, and then abruptly spewed out several feet of paper, which was shorn of its sprocket holes and separated into sixteen sheets, the faintest of which was presented to me for inspection.

I was surprised to see that the bill contained a charge for phone calls. The night before – it all seemed so long ago now – I had tried to phone home, but all I got was a recording in Danish which I presumed was telling me that the international lines were engaged or that I was dialling wrongly or possibly that I should just go and fuck myself. In any case, I couldn’t get anywhere with it, and after three tries gave up. So I was taken aback to see myself billed for three phone calls. I explained this to the girl.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You must pay for any phone calls you try to make, whether or not you are connected.’

‘But that’s insane.’

She shrugged, as if to say, Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

‘You’re telling me,’ I said slowly, my head feeling like the gong in a Rank movie, ‘that I have to pay for phone calls I didn’t make?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘I didn’t use the spare blanket in the cupboard. Do I have to pay you for that, too?’ She looked steadily at me, clearly unaware that she was dealing with a person who could tip over the edge into violent insanity at any moment. ‘I didn’t use the shower cap,’ I went on. ‘Shall I give you a little something for that? I didn’t use one of the bars of soap or the trouser press. This is going to cost me a fortune, isn’t it?’

The girl continued to gaze levelly at me, though with a certain noticeable diminishment of goodwill. She had obviously weathered these storms before. ‘I am sorry you find these small charges inconvenient, but it is the normal practice in Copenhagen.’

‘Well, I think it stinks!’ I barked, then caught a glimpse of a seriously demented person in the mirror – wild hair, red face, Parkinson-like shakiness – and recognized myself. I gave her my credit card, scratched a wild signature on the bill, and with a haughty turn exited, regretting only that I didn’t have a cape to sling over my shoulder and an ebony stick with which to scatter the doormen.

I should have gone immediately to a café and had two cups of coffee and caught a later train. That would have been the sensible thing to do. Instead, still steaming, I proceeded towards the station at a pace that did my body no good at all, stopping en route at a bank on Strøget to cash a traveller’s cheque. It was for only $50 – a snippet in Scandinavia, mere pocket money until I reached Sweden in the evening and would require some serious cash – but for this I was charged the whopping sum of thirty-five kroner, well over ten per cent of the total. I suddenly realized why the Irishman from the night before was swearing at everyone. He had paid one Danish bill too many. ‘That’s an outrage,’ I said, clutching the bank receipt like bad news from a doctor. ‘I don’t know why I don’t just pin money to my jacket and let you people pick it off me!’ I shrilled, leaving a row of clerks and customers looking at each other as if to say, What’s his problem? Not enough coffee?

And it was in this dim and unfortunate frame of mind that I boarded the morning express to Gothenburg, abused a hapless young conductor for giving me the unwelcome news that it had no buffet car, and sat morosely in a corner, watching the garden-like suburbs of Copenhagen slip past, every nerve ending in my body tingling for caffeine.

On the ferry across the Öresund between Denmark and Sweden, I drank a cup of coffee and began to feel human again. I passed the time staring out at the slate-grey sea and studying my Kümmerly and Frey ‘Sudskandinavien’ map. Denmark looks like a plate that has been dropped onto a hard floor: it is fractured into a thousand pieces, forming deep bays and scorpion-tail peninsulas and seas within seas. The villages and towns sounded inviting – Aerösköbing, Skaerbaek, Holstenbro, the intriguingly specific Middlefart – and from dozens of them dotted red lines led out to cosily forlorn islands like Anholt and Endelave and above all Bornholm, adrift in the Baltic; closer to Poland than to Denmark. It was my sudden earnest wish to visit them all. There would never be enough time. There never is in life. There wasn’t even time for another cup of coffee.

A reddish-brown train was waiting at Helsingborg to take us on to Gothenburg, 152 miles to the north along the west coast. We travelled through a landscape of low hills, red barns, small towns with mustard-coloured town halls, impenetrable pine forests, scattered lakes dotted with clapboard holiday cottages, jetties, upturned rowing boats. Occasionally the train would swing near the coast and give a glimpse through the trees of a cold sea. After a while rain began to streak the window.

I shared a compartment with a tanned young man, blond as only a Swede can be, in wire-rimmed glasses and a pony tail, who was returning to Gothenburg from Marrakech, where he had been visiting a girlfriend, as he put it. Actually she was a former girlfriend and he hadn’t exactly visited her because upon arriving he discovered she was living with a Moroccan rug merchant – she had somehow neglected to mention this in her postcards – who had pulled out a scimitar and threatened to send the Swede home with his goolies in a sandwich bag if he didn’t clear off instantly. Considering that he had just made a pointless journey of a couple of thousand miles, the young man seemed remarkably equable and spent almost the entire journey sitting cross-legged spooning purple yoghurt into his mouth from an enormous jar and reading a novel by Thomas Mann.

At Ängelholm we were joined by two more people, a grim-looking older woman all in black who looked as if she hadn’t smiled since 1937 and who spent the entire journey watching me as if she had seen my face on a wanted poster, and by a fastidious older man who I guessed to be a recently retired schoolmaster and to whom I took an instant dislike.

The young Swede was sitting in the schoolmaster’s reserved seat. Not only did the schoolmaster make him move, but instructed him to transfer all his personal effects from the luggage rack above the seat to the rack on the other side, which takes a particular kind of pettiness, don’t you think? The schoolmaster then spent an endless period fussily sorting out his things – extracting a folded newspaper and a small bag of plums from his case, arranging the case on the rack, examining the seat minutely for anything unpleasant and giving it a brush with the back of his hand, folding his jacket and his jumper with ritualistic care, adjusting the window in consultation with the lady but without reference to me or the young Swede, getting his case down again for some forgotten item, checking his hankie, readjusting the window. Every time he bent over, his ass bobbed in my face. How I longed for a Smith & Wesson. And every time I looked round there would be that old crone watching me like the Daughter of Death.