In The Wake Read Online Free PDF Page A

made any sense to me. I was ten years old and after four years at Sunday school, as innocent as a nun. I kneeled down and put my cheek to the floor and looked under my father’s bed.
    “It’s crammed in here.”
    “With bottles?”
    “No, with shoes.”
    “Get them out. Make it snappy,” my brother said. He opened the window, he took the first pair andthrew them on to the lawn. I heard them land and a shiver ran down my spine. I crawled further in and lay flat under the bed and pulled the shoes out, one pair after another, and some of them were old and some were brand new and had never been used. There was a strong smell of leather under the mattress there, and I recognised that smell from when I was small, on my way down the dimly lit stairsto the cellar where he stood at his workbench with rough leather in his rough hands and shiny tacks in his mouth, the yellow light and eerie shadows, and I do not know
what
we were up to, my brother and I, but I could not stop. My chest was bubbling, I felt like singing. I lay on my side and chucked the shoes as hard as I could along the floor, and my brother fielded them and hurled them on outof the window. At last there was nothing left under the bed. There had been twenty-five pairs in all, I had counted them, and every one was welted. He would never wear anything else. He hated cheap shoes. I backed away from the bed, stood up and went to the window and looked out. They lay on the lawn in a heap looking like something in a picture from Auschwitz.
    “Did you find anything?” my brotherasked. I blinked in despair and stared at him, and then I realised he meant the liquor. I had forgotten about that. I lay down again and looked. All the way in beside one leg lay a full bottle of Famous Grouse. I grabbed it by the neck and crawled out with my behind in the air, proudly holding up the bottle.
    “Yess. I knew it,” he said.
    But of course it was
I
who had known, and for a second Ifelt completely without hope and did not understand why we were there just then, that I should not drink, it was the wrong moment, but I wanted a drink so badly. We went into the living room and I put the bottle on the table. He fetched glasses from the cupboard over the worktop and what was left in a litre bottle of Farris water we had bought at Svinesund on the border with Sweden. The fridge wasstill on, there were ice cubs in the freezer and a lonely Toblerone on the bottom shelf. He poured two stiff shots, then filled up with ice and a drop of mineral water.
    “Skål,” my brother said, raising his glass. I gripped mine and took a big gulp, staring at the oilcloth thinking I wanted an end to this, I couldn’t take it any longer. I did not want to think about it any more.
    But that’s whatI am doing now. I rise from the table with the cup of coffee in my hand, walk over to the window and look out into the dark. I have been far out of this world, I do not know where, and now I am back, and I can’t stop thinking. I remember my thirty-fourth birthday in that very room, in the cabin where my brother and I sat drinking, in the far north of Denmark. It was four years earlier and darkerthen at the end of July, the bottles were on the table, and the lamps shone on the windowpanes. It was warm even though the door and several windows were open. I sat rocking on a chair in only a T-shirt, with my back to the kitchen counter. My mother and father had been there for several weeks, my brothers had come with their wives and children and sleeping bags and lilos. Not because it was mybirthday but because it was summertime, and it was no longer a secret that a writer was what I wanted to be. My first story had been published in a magazine no-one had heard of before, but they had all read it anyway and were a little confused and uneasy because it was about my father. No-one was divorced yet, no-one had died, we went by boat as we had always done and slept through a familiar night.Lanterns and lighthouses lit our