My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

MY DIRTY LITTLE
BOOK OF
STOLEN TIME

Liz Jensen

For Matti, Raphaël and Laura

Contents

Part the First: Into the Great Beyond

Part the Second: The Tin City

Part the Third: Back from Beyond

Part the Fourth: Beyond Beyond

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Part the First: Into the Great Beyond

Last night I dreamed I went to Østerbro again, flying towards my little quadrant of Copenhagen streets just as a fairy might, or a homing bird. I floated above my beloved city in my night-garments: not the provocative sex-shop gown of scarlet viscose I once donned for my tormentor – all tiny buttons, ribbons & teasing slits – but a chaste cotton slip, such as a child might wear. White, the colour of purity. Ah, what happy memories surged through me as I beheld the vista below. Copenhagen, with its copper domes, twisted crocodile
towers, verdigris pinnacles & silver waters that glittered in the cold sunshine like an accident of spilt schnapps: Copenhagen
as it was back in the old days, before the laws of time were turned on their head: Copenhagen before battery-operated dildos,
Suicide Machines & mobile telephony entered my life, before the joyous hurricane of Love smashed in, & when the word winter
meant something! Then, just as I spied the landmarks of Østerbro – a fringe of trees, the blue-green cupola on Holsteinsgade, & Sortedams Lake flecked with swans – I awoke & took in the dawn light, the flicker of the television, the city's electric whine, & the yowl of sirens, & my Danish dream slid away fleet as a herring.

Tick, tock: a hundred thousand clocks mimic the revolutions of the planet, & time's wheel grinds earth to earth, ash to ash. My story begins in dust and shall end in it likewise. But O, the adventures in between! Reader, you will simply not believe them, for I scarcely can myself.

The chain reaction of eerie wonders & absurd mistakes that first brought me here sparked on Classensgade in Østerbro, a suburb of Copenhagen, capital city of that mighty nation, Denmark. The year was 1897. See me there that winter: a street-girl at street level. Slush level, you would call it in today's world, but back then, cold was cold, & slush was for springtime. Shocking low the temperature was that morning. The lakes had been frozen solid for five weeks, & your breath crystallized into minuscule ice-pearls; you imagined the tinkle of them shattering on the cobbles as you walked to the bakery to buy
rundstykker.
Trot, trot, innocent little not-so-innocent. Pull your fox-trimmed bonnet down & adjust your veil over that ghost-pale face & scoot along fast, don't listen to the street-boys whistle & call out whore. Although my boots were lined with fur, my chilblained feet were already giving me all kinds of grief Can you imagine the marrow-freezing chill of that Copenhagen air, dear reader, & the raucous-screeching seagulls that haunted the icy, sullen days which yawned into an eternal night-time of darkness? You may not credit this, but I assure you, we Danes used to virtually hibernate between November & April, back then. Pickle ourselves in aquavit & wait it out. Sometimes the clocks themselves would stop, their oiling frozen, & the bells seize up, so that even the most muscular bell-ringers would heave on the rigidified ropes to no avail, & end up seeking the warm joy of flesh on flesh instead. Money for nothing, for I took pleasure in it too, by the flickering brazier of that attic apartment on Classensgade.

It was a Wednesday, & I had eaten little since Sunday, Fru Schleswig & I having been well-nigh broke all winter due to the sudden absence of my two most lucrative clients – Herr Fabricius, jailed for fraud (‘a temporary hitch, I assure you,
skat:
I will be rogering you again within the twelvemonth'), & Herr Haboe, more permanently vanished, indeed now lying one metre below ground, cause of death one bad oyster. Our shortage of ready cash, exacerbated by my recent medical indisposition & Fru Schleswig's habitual schnapps-induced torpor, meant that this morning I was in a sorry state, half hallucinating from hunger, & Lord, I do believe that I had not even applied lipstick, perfume or rouge! The snow flurried around my head like cruel confetti, & a lone crow cawed in what remained of a tree, then – mid-croak – dropped suddenly dead with a candid little thud on to the cobbles. The snow was now thickening to a white whirr, so I ran the last stretch, & burst through the door of HerrMøller's bakery, panting. The bell clanged as I entered – O, yes, the sweet smell of sugar & yeast & hot buns! – & my fate was all but sealed.

But before I pull you with me into the dizzying whirlpool of events that innocent-looking moment sucked me – ignorant! innocent! – into, let me beg a shred of your time to say an important, nay crucial word on the subject of trust. Trust, which lies at the heart of the pact we shall make together, you & I, dear (& beloved already – yes!) reader, in the sharing of these tear-stained
confessions, the grubby dog-eared journal that charts the topography of my adventures. Now trust, as I discovered in what
I think of as ‘my travels', is a concept not limited to Denmark alone, though in the days of my naivete I thought it was.
Trust – being precious, & therefore open to abuse – brings rewards as well as its perils. The greatest of these are obvious:
they involve being taken for a fool, & the many humiliating forms thereof. But the rewards – ah. Such deep satisfactions you
will gain, such intimate & soulful pleasures, such profound & mind-expanding knowledge! Please remember that as I acquaint
you with my tale, for what can I tell you about my extraordinary voyages without sounding like the world's most monstrous
liar, or Baron Münchausen himself? Who but a trusting person – such as I most sincerely hope you are, or we are shipwrecked
before we embark – would believe the depravity of my upbringing & the strange twists of Fate that led me to territories hitherto
uncharted by human science or philosophy? Or indeed the cataclysm of events that was to burgeon, most inauspiciously, from
a chance encounter in a humble bakery on Classensgade?

Where, giddy from the sudden warmth of indoors, I inhaled the sweet fumes & steadied myself against the wooden counter. Spied
tebirkes
dotted with poppyseed: smelled caraway, cinnamon, honey, marzipan, & nutmeg: feasted my eyes on dainty iced buns.

‘Ah, my little Charlotte!' said Herr Moller, greeting me with a broad pastry-man smile. ‘Hell's bells, you look like death warmed up! Too much fornication on an empty stomach, I'll be bound!'

Well, he was jolly this morning.

I was the only customer in the shop, & it seemed that Herr Møller's wife was out in the back courtyard mulching yeast or breastfeeding her plethora of infants or whatever bakers' wives do, otherwise he would not have dared speak to me in such a familiar manner.

‘Illness,' I said hoarsely, ‘brought me low for a week.' I had caught an influenza through the over-frequent exposure of my naked flesh to the air of a cold attic, in the course of my professional activities – a fact which caused Herr Moller merely to shake his head in amusement. ‘Such are the wages of strumpetry, my little troll! Occupational hazard, wench!'

I did not personally consider it a joke that the intimate services I offered – of which HerrMøller's himself had oft enough partaken, out in the kitchen, in lieu of payment for the sweetmeats of which Fru Schleswig is so fond – brought with them certain pitfalls. The hypocrisy! But I buttoned my lip, because free pastries are free pastries, & there are times when you need them to raise a certain crone's morale. Humming the popular ballad we all had on the brain that winter ('Tragic Johanna', about a lass who took her broken heart to the banks of the Gudenæn: ‘deeper than Love ran that river, & deeper than Love did she drown' – O, how little Johanna could set whole tavernfuls of grown men blubbing!), HerrMøller selected a loaf for me – not quite the best, I noted, but not the worst either, & wrapped it in a page of
Berlingske Tidene.

‘Anything else, my little peach? Some of yesterday's
wienerbrød
for you & your ma? They're on the stale side, so here's two for free. Don't go getting too thin. A man likes a bit of arse. Now your ma, she's got an arse on her. There's a woman knows the value of cooked dough! How much does she weigh? If you're short of money, girl, why not display her at a fair? Set up a little stall, charge them fifty øre to “guess the weight of Ogress von Flobberschmidt" or somesuch? You'd make a stack of money!'

Now, normally I was quite capable of ignoring the man's banter. Shopkeepers all run their mouths: it's part of their trade, just as certain types of talk, of the high-class pillow variety (& here I throw in the names Galileo, Rousseau, Darwin & Kierkegaard), were mine. But the mention of Fru Schleswig couldn't help but rile me. My fever had not yet subsided, & I felt my blood hotten painfully.

‘Do not speak of that excruciating creature to me, HerrMøller!' I said. ‘Have I not told you a thousand times, sir, that Fru Schleswig is
not my mother?
Fru Schleswig is merely a decrepit old crone whom I am generous enough to support, & were it not for the kindness of my heart she would be back in the gutter, where she came from! These are hard times, HerrMøller, & if all your suggestions about making ends meet concern weighing machines & fairgrounds, then –'

But suddenly the doorbell clanged again so despite my speech being now in full flood, I bottled it pronto, & in walked Fate. Fate, in the form of a tall, swollen-faced, accusatory-looking woman in a pompous green-tinted fur coat & matching hat, whom Herr Møller addressed most obsequiously as ‘my dear Fru Krak', quite forgetting, in that instant, about the change he owed me for my
rundstykker.
The woman, who ignored my presence entirely, due to her own self-importance & sense of ladyship, then set about ordering an elaborate cake with icing & marzipan features for the delectation of Pastor Dahlberg, who was returning from a funeral in Aalborg this afternoon, she said, & needed to be greeted with something sweet. Her fancy accent grated on my ear: I recognized vowels that were born within spitting distance of the gutter, but honed & squeezed to ring aristocratic. (I had la-di-da'd myself likewise on occasion, to please those clients who harboured fantasies about lewd countesses.) But I caught a sense of genuine cash – not just ready kroner but deep, vault-&-coffer money – on the woman, & took a small step closer: close enough indeed to spot the thinness of her hair, & the dull, greying roots that belied the outer blonde.

‘Ah the joys of love!' said Herr Møller as if a lecherous pastrycook like him should know anything about it. ‘So marvellous that you are finally to be wed again, Fru Krak, in your middle years, & surely at the height of your powers, after all these many sad months, nay years, of widowhood!' Then he caught sight of me pouting at being so rudely cast into the margin, & suddenly remembered my change which he handed me with a flourish.

‘Upon which subject,' she said, still ignoring me completely, ‘you said, Herr Møller, that you would make some enquiries for me in the neighbourhood. As you know, sadly my home is in need of attention, for grief leads to all kinds of neglect, no matter how hard one tries. And now, with my marriage to the dear Pastor on the horizon, I am in need of some reliable domestic help.'

Aha! On hearing this, I make a signal to Herr Møller: having caught his eye, I quickly sketch the vast figure of Fru Schleswig beside me in the air, then point to Lady Muck. Following my meaning at once, the baker turns to me, his face squeezed into artificial kindness.

‘Well, might your ma not be a candidate, my dear Charlotte? She could do with the work, I'm sure. I imagine her to be quite
a scrubber!'

At which Fru Krak wheeled round to stare at me, & I gave a curtsy, while saying quickly, lest there be misunderstanding, ‘As I mentioned to you a moment ago, Herr Møller, Fru Schleswig is not my mother.' (Why would people persist in this misconception about my relationship with the embarrassing Fru Schleswig? It was a daily ordeal I endured. I should perhaps inform you at this point that my real mother was a minor princess, who was forced to abandon me as a baby.) ‘But I do indeed share lodgings with the poor creature,' I continued, ‘& I can certainly ask her. If it's of interest to this fine lady here.'

The ‘fine lady' was now looking at me in an appraising, supercilious manner.

‘You are a harlot, I take it?' she said, narrowing her eyes, one of which seemed disconcertingly smaller & lower-set than the other, giving her a lopsided air. If she'd once possessed a decent physiognomy, then only the sad ruins of it remained: I could discern no jaw-line, & her puffy chin & throat were conjoined into a single feature, like the tragic thyroid of a force-fed bird.

‘Yes, I do indeed walk the streets, for my sins,' I answered humbly, lowering my eyes. It could do no harm to act modest & repentant, especially if she was one of those sycophants who are keen to impress the Church. Which she would need to be if engaged to a pastor. Careful footwork would be required with this woman, if I was to profit from her. Indeed, I must out-sly her.

‘So this mother of yours. Is she a harlot too?' she queried harshly.

‘No, dear Fru Schleswig is a cleaner born & bred,' I lied. ‘A floor-mopper & cleaner of water-closets to the very core of
her being. Though she is not actually my mother.'