Copenhagen
Awkward encounters with models, girls in the mist and smoking a J.
I went to Copenhagen last weekend.
It always takes me by surprise that I’m allowed to do things like this. Drive myself to an airport—on the motorway, no less—and board a flight on my own.
Like a real adult.
The food options in Heathrow’s Terminal 2 were unpreposessing. Overpriced disappointing burgers; overpriced disappointing sushi; overpriced disappointing dumplings.
I opted for Pret which, if perpetually disappointing, is at least cheap. This is why most people eat here: it is the least you can pay to be disappointed.
A woman with a clipboard approached. Oh wait, it’s not a clipboard, it’s an iPad. Nobody carries clipboards for market surveys anymore, come on Jill. She wanted to ask me questions about the food choices. Someone is obviously wise to the limits and delimits of the current T2 food offering.
The questions were detailed.
Who made the decision about where to eat today? [I’m sitting alone so I think this is fairly obvious.]
How would you describe the main earner in your household? [Intrusive, also complex: see Bread Jobs.]
How often do you go to McDonalds? [If I tell you the truth, will you judge me?]
Would you like a marketplace style food hall here instead? [Who says no to this?]
Extricating myself from the endless questions (“I’m sorry, but no”), I headed to the gate.
My stomach was flipping, like it always does. I always get this last ditch panic. Abort! Flee! The urge to just walk out of the airport (back through security?) and quietly drive myself home is strong. This is a drive on which I would be several million times more likely to die than on this flight, I know, but still. The need to remain earthbound grips me.
I texted my sister instructions for how to disburse my assets and take care of my son if I perish (I am nothing if not a walking melodrama).
Panic reached fever pitch as the plane taxis (this is it! Goodbye cruel world!)
As we lifted off, I consoled myself with love. Love drives me to this madness.
I’m going to Copenhagen to see my best friend. Remember her? Constantine, from Williamsburg’s wild weed adventures a year ago? Well, she’s having a baby soon and she needs me. So many times, since we were girls, she’s been there for me and now, an already-mother, it’s my turn to go be there for her. Childbirth is a bitch but she’ll be fine. She will be a mother and then, truly, she will know tiredness. I think she half expects me not to make it, to flake out again. It’s what I do: years of form for letting her down, finally delivering on a promise to visit, 25 years in the making.
My palms dry off a bit and everything is tinged with surreality. The plane swoops and eventually realigns in the right direction.
The silver curves of the Thames are misted in a horizon haze. Enfield reservoir, a shape I recognise only from Google Maps, passes starboard, then the gold and jade checkerboard of Essex. At Canvey Island, the sudden spreading V of the estuary and marshes. So shallow is the sea here that it’s a dull beige ten miles offshore. You could never tempt me to live out this way, out East. A flat horizon studded with steeples, some of them I imagine half sunk in sand. This coastline was inundated when La Manche chopped through low-lying floodplains eleven thousand years ago. The Doggerland bridge sank to silt and England became a lonely island. This coast gives the impression of enjoying only a temporary situation topside before its inevitable inundation.
Lunch choice is veal salad and new potatoes or a “pizza slice toast”. I just want a gin.
I’m going to Denmark! A new country!
Back home, Joel has everything under control. I am free to ask: what is Denmark like? Who are the Danes?
On the plane, I release control. That’s what makes a good trip.
“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguarding, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” (Steinbeck)
John knows. I’m reading Travels with Charley, a pleasure long deferred. One can do this with the certainty of joy. It increases with anticipation.
So it is with this visit to Copenhagen. It’s been a long time coming.
We have been friends since she shook my hand—“Hi I’m Constantine”—on the first day of school. Used to taciturnity and the grunts that stand in for conversation at 15, she floored me. She was so glamorous and mature. An only child of a powerful woman, she wore Chanel. This kid-girl like me wore Chanel. My mum didn’t even wear Chanel. Constantine wore it like a staple, a base layer, unbranded, so the only way you knew it was Chanel was to look at the label. All her clothes were like that: understated, casual, effortless. Plus she’s one of the earth’s more beautiful humans and is genuinely kind and unselfish and adorable and a talented artist to boot. How could 15 year-old me not fall irredeemably, hopelessly, forever in love?
I’ve yet to climb out of it and expect never to.
I worked hard not to be jealous and didn’t always succeed. Soon we were chatting and, when we came back from our tour around the new school, our mums were chatting too. Thus was it decreed we would be friends for life.
And so we have been. Ours is a friendship that is secure, sure that even if we don’t speak for six months, a “you there?” in a moment of need won’t go unanswered. When I had an all-night meltdown once (twice, three times, still not a lady), she talked me through it into the wee hours.
When we were still in school we used to skip class and watch Jenny Jones in her sitting room, while her mum was at work. Eating turkey sandwiches and crossing the road to the gas station for boxes of biscuits.
There aren’t many people in the world I love utterly, without complexity or caveat. One is my son, another is my sister. The latest addition: Joel.
Constantine predates all of them but my sister. She is my sister, really.
So that means my niece or nephew is arriving soon and due attention must be paid. Hence why I’m on this infernal air tram.
Now we are preparing to land and I’ve had my gin, chuckling to myself at Travels with Charley, but nobody has offered me any food. How strange. The veal salad and pizza toast exist in Norse mythology only.
We descend through clouds—at an immoderate pace, to my mind—and there is a bay and spinning wind turbines and shunting freight barges and rows of gleaming cars and SAS technical services hangars.
Here is a new world, a new city dropping from the clouds, as casual as can be.
Welcome to Copenhagen where the local time is seven minutes past five.
Here I am, to try to grab a flavour of it, in a weekend.
When I get to her place (fifteen minutes airport to door, what a city), it’s an apartment of such bright, clean whites that I worry to place a sandal-smudged foot anywhere near the couch. I can hear voices on the street and close by, in the building. People live near each other in this city. It has the feel of a medieval village but without buckets of shite lobbed from windows.
After dinner, Denmark lose to Germany in the football. We sit on a dock wall in the old harbour and wonder at where we are now—in our late thirties. That liminal space where one could either, at 10:30pm on a Saturday night, go to a rooftop rave or head home to knit, quite happily in either direction.
We end up at a cocktail bar. She is not drinking (obviously: the pregnancy) but I am. She hails an impossibly handsome bartender: tall, blonde, with chiselled cheekbones and rings in both ears.
He turns out not to be a Dane but an American. She knows him: he’s married to her friend Peter’s sister.
Copenhagen gives these small town vibes of a Dublin or a Sheffield. The kind of place where you might reasonably ask someone, hey, do you know Marie, and have them respond, ah sure, yeah, Declan’s cousin, or something.
We (I) end up drinking into the night. The bartender tells us about running away from his small hometown in the Arkansas Ozarks to model in New York City when he was 17. He has tattoos up both arms and into his sleeves.
At some point, Constantine makes a joke. I can’t remember the gist of it (did I mention I was shit-canned?) but something about how old we are, at least in comparison to his exuberantly youthful 28. She says something sarcastic, like, oh, us 50 year-olds over here.
He nods seriously, unmoved. “Oh, so you’re quite a bit older than Peter.”
“Wait, no, what?” I’m the only one protesting because Constantine is laughing too hard. “No, no, we’re not 50.” I’m panicking a bit, this is not funny. “Jesus, Constantine, tell him!” She’s incoherent and correcting no one. “Stop it! He thinks we’re actually 50.”
He looked from one of us to the other with honest eyes, confused.
It became clear that we have been kidding ourselves that we are still of an age that could convincingly go either way, drunk and spinning in the club or home to bed at 9. Who are we kidding?
No one, turns out.
Constantine tells him we’re in our thirties and he looks relieved.
“Oh, that’s not even close to 50!”
“Wait, seriously? You thought we were older? How old did you think we were?”
Thus does a young male model from Arkansas learn that there is no correct way to discuss a woman’s age.
—
The next day I decide Copenhagen is less chic than Paris.
“I wasn’t expecting Danish people to be so … dorky. I thought they’d be more chic, like in Paris.”
She is affronted. She is no dork. “Paris is covered in dog shit though. In Copenhagen they pick shit up.”
“Yeah, but that’s so Paris. I’m not bending down. I’m not touching shit. Not my problem, totally unconcerned. Peak chic.”
Constantine tells me about the Jante law, Jante loven, that supposedly underpins egalitarian Scandinavian societies.
It is this: don’t think you’re better than anyone else. Don’t think you’re smarter or have anything more to say or to teach than anyone else. The Jante “laws” (not real laws, they originated in satire) regard individual expression with muted hostility. It is said the Jante loven foster group homogeneity, broad social contentment.
Also: high suicide rates.
—
She drives me around—this is new, she just learned to drive—and we visit her mum and go to the Louisiana museum to see the Franz Gertsch exhibition.
I’d never heard of him, a Swiss painter who painted photographs. This sounds nuts until you see it. He painted photographs. It’s art gone full circle: the lifelike painting made redundant by the photograph; the photograph given new life when transcribed to paint.
It’s wild, I don’t know how he does it but his paintings really look like photographs, complete with the flash of light on hair and leather. From afar, the canvases look like photographs. Only as you get closer do the colours smudge to brush strokes and indistinct lines, like an impressionist painting. It’s like when you try to focus on anything too closely and lose track of the whole. The whole, I find, can only be imparted in flavours and suggestions, not absolutes.
Anyway, if you’re in Copenhagen, go see Franz Gertsch at the Louisiana.
—
We looked around at an apartment she’s interested in. It belongs to a 75 year-old female psychologist who’s away at a lesbian wedding in Mexico, according to the real estate broker.
The apartment has the airy, wooden slats, balconette’ed feel of a French country home, with just the right level of dusty chic.
The walls are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The woman living here has one of the best real-world book collections I’ve ever seen, in three languages (Danish, French, English). There is Anita Brookner and Hilary Mantel and the autobiography of Malcolm X.
This is a woman I would be friends with. I can tell from her books.
—
On the last night, Tora, the young wife of the handsome model/bartender, brought us a J. It’s kind of tradition at this stage. Constantine and I have always smoked weed together, since we were girls.
She doesn’t partake (again: the pregnancy) but (again) I do. It is mellow and soft, like the night in this city, and nothing at all like that wild day in Williamsburg a year ago.
We talked about star signs—what star sign the baby might be—and about how we used to base broad life decisions on star signs.
I told her I don’t believe any of that shit anymore (blame my logic-minded boyfriend). These days, I think star signs are a load of old bollocks.
We moved on to talking about weird Danish customs.
I’ve noticed buses full of young people blasting music and cruising around the city. I assumed it had something to do with the football but Constantine says no, it’s called “student driving”.
When students finish school, they hire an open-sided bus to drive around on a slow tour to everyone’s house. At each house, the parents give them all a drink and something to eat. The kids get smashed and blast music and vomit good-naturedly off the side and cheer and heckle cars and every single calm, unbothered, accepting person in Copenhagen just smiles and waves at them indulgently. Every year, at least one drunk student falls off the bus and injures themselves. Half-hearted public discourse ensues about how silly the whole thing is and how maybe the practice really should be stopped altogether but then the next graduating class sweeps through and the buses circulate once more.
What a funny, small-town city.
Constantine is watching me smoke the J.
“And of course, when they reach 25 and are still single, the men get tied to a tree and their friends throw cinnamon on them.”
“Sorry?” I’ve misheard. It’s the weed, surely.
“Yeah, it’s a Danish tradition. Cinnamon throwing.”
“No. You’re lying.”
She is not lying. We google it and she shows me picture after social media picture. Grown men semi-obscured in a cinnamon cloud.
“That’s, truly, one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Why?”
“I don’t know. Also, if they’re still unmarried at thirty, their friends give them an enormous pepper mill. Like ten feet high, made out of oil drums.”
—
The J is almost smoked out. We tell Tora about her husband’s transgressions last night.
“He actually thought we were 50.”
“No!” She appears suitably horrified. “No! You both look so young.” She’s just being polite, to atone for her husband, but I bask anyway. Then, to Constantine, gesturing at me. “How does she stay so young?”
Never been one to let me bask unmolested, Constantine mimed biting a cheese burger.
“She drinks the blood of her young lover.”
“I … what?”
“That’s you, sucking the blood of your young lover.”
“No. No! Stop doing this to me. I’m going to leave Denmark and everyone’s going to be like, there she goes, the 50 year-old vampire. Jesus.”
“It’s ok, I don’t kink-shame.” That’s Tora, the one who doesn’t know me at all, except from what she’s heard in these last two minutes. Bless her accepting non-judgmental soul but this must be quashed.
“Ok, ha ha, but to be very clear, I don’t suck my boyfriend’s blood. That’s not my kink. I mean, I’ve been to Burning Man and there is a tent there for vampires, I’ve seen it, but I’m not into that.” Babbling. “I mean, I’m kinky,” (said the Granny) “but not like that.”
Constantine is giving me a look now like shut the fuck up, what is wrong with you.
“Jill, this is kind of giving the lady doth protest too much…”
For fuck sake.
As the night draws to a close, she hands me her phone with a picture on it of a woman who—objectively—looks nothing like me.
“You look a lot like her.”
“What? Are you serious?” I can’t see it, even when I squint. It’s not just because I’m stoned. “That’s a new one. I’ve heard Sigourney Weaver before but this is new.”
“Sigourney Weaver? Oh yeah. Gorillas in the mist.”
She’s mumbling or I’m too stoned to catch the words.
“Girls in the mist?”
“Yes. Girls in the mist.”
—
It’s impossible to draw hot takes on almost 25 years of friendship. That is a long time to know a person. We are mothers and almost-mothers today. We are also girls in the mist, in Dublin, in the mists of time.
We sat up together until 3am, even though I physically stopped being able to do this very soon after having my son. Nothing like a newborn to make you cherish your eight hours.
She will understand soon, I think.
For now, I enjoy them, these last few nights when we will sit up talking about nothing and everything and googling men covered in cinnamon and watching ten minutes of that BBC documentary about Joel’s family and wondering if we really do look fifty.
I know we don’t look fifty. I don’t care if we look fifty.
Fifty will be ok, when it comes (many, many years in the future) as long as we still have each other. Probably, we will go to bed much earlier then.
—
On the plane home, the girl next to me is willowy, with porcelain skin and a neck from here to Stockholm. She mixes some water carefully into a separate bottle and drops a tablet into it. Ever nosey, I asked what’s that. Vitamin C, she said, and the conversation never looked back.
She’s a model too, it turns out. Is everyone in Copenhagen a model, I wonder? She told me she’s from Shandong, north of Beijing, but studied fashion design in Shanghai. Now she’s a model, jetting between European cities, and Paris is her favourite and aren’t the French so chic, so elegant. They just don’t care.
Peak chic.
She told me this job in Copenhagen was a bust. She didn’t have the right visa to work and they bundled her straight back on the next flight to London, to and fro in a single day. Will they pay her? No, of course not. They’ll pay for the flights, that’s it. She showed me pictures of her hair last week, blonde and pink. She loved that hair but had to dye it back brown for this job in Copenhagen. And then they wouldn’t even let her off the plane! A waste of all that good hair.
She asked what star sign I am. I rolled my eyes internally and said, you guess.
She looked at me closely. She’s 28 but looks 20, damn her, with that finely-drawn pore-less, ageless Asian skin.
“Gemini.”
My mouth fell open. “How did you know that?”
“Because I can see you have lots of ideas in your brain and your eyes can speak and you’re so talkative.”
Sometimes, looking closely at a thing tells you nothing. You couldn’t learn its nature in a year, or ten.
Other times, you can see everything you need to know, in a moment.
—
For K, and happy anniversary Joel. ❤️
—
⬅️ READ Williamsburg, from this time last year, about another time I got stoned with Constantine.
So us parents do eventually get our solo trip time back? Reading this was like looking into the future. Joints and 50 year old vampires!?!? Take me there!!!
This entire piece was just pure perfection! Who knew 50 year old vampires could tell such brilliant stories 🧡