‘It’s correct, Linda, that my books have a unique style and that the tension builds up according to a pattern, but that’s also my strength. The reader recognizes a Føns thriller when they read it, just like you recognize a song by Depeche Mode, even if you haven’t heard it before.’ I shrugged. ‘All my books are about murders and the detection of them, so in that sense they’re identical. However, if you look closer, you’ll see that it’s not entirely true.’
Linda nodded. ‘So you’re saying that if I read a passage from one of your books, you’ll be able to tell me which one it is?’ She pulled out a piece of paper and the audience greeted the challenge with scattered laughter.
I held her eyes for a second. She smiled at me with a cheeky expression around her lips. I wasn’t entirely clear what she was up to, but it was too late to back down. My day was already ruined: how much worse could it get?
‘OK,’ I replied. ‘Any children present?’
The audience tittered, but Linda peered across them, temporarily wrong-footed. Nevertheless, she must have decided that it was acceptable to carry on and coughed before she started reading:
The girl squeezed her eyelids together as hard as she could. Her face was bathed in sweat and tears and the gaffer tape had started to peel off her cheek. She whimpered.
‘Look!’ he ordered her. ‘Look, or the eyelids will be next!’
Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. They were filled with tears and terror. He held up the severed nipple in front of her. She tried to scream and she fought against the cable ties pinning her to the chair, but they only dug themselves deeper into her flesh.
He moved the nipple to his lips and sucked it as if he were a nursing infant. The woman thrashed her head from side to side spraying sweat, tears and snot around.
He laughed and lifted the shears to her other breast. She froze at his touch and he smiled while he fondled the breast with the cold metal. Slowly, the nipple hardened.
‘Look, she likes it,’ he exclaimed and leered again.
With his thumb and index fingers he pinched the nipple, rubbed it a little and pulled it. He opened the shears and placed the steel jaws around the nipple.
The flesh quivered …
Linda stopped reading. The audience had fallen silent, completely silent.
She was good at reading aloud; I had to give her that. Her stresses were accurate, the pauses precisely measured and the characters brought to life despite the brevity of the passage. Personally, I didn’t like reading my own books aloud. There was something revealing about reading to others. It was proof of what I had written, an open declaration that I stood by it. Consequently I carefully selected the sections I read aloud, unless I could avoid it altogether. The choice itself would expose me. How would it reflect on the author if I read the most bestial passages? After all, the mood should ideally remain pleasant and, for that reason, I typically chose the more subdued chapters, preferably those with a little humour that wouldn’t offend anyone and which had no direct link to me.
However, it wasn’t Linda Hvilbjerg’s plan to let me get away with that.
‘Inner Demons,’ I replied. ‘Not exactly a bedtime story.’
The audience laughed with relief bordering on gratitude.
‘Correct,’ Linda declared. Some members of the audience applauded. ‘What this passage doesn’t mention is that the woman is heavily pregnant – otherwise we would have made it far too easy for you.’
She smiled and I laughed briefly.
‘Inner Demons was the follow-up to your breakthrough novel, Outer Demons,’ she explained to the audience. She turned her gaze back on me.
‘Is it true that you wrote it while your then wife was expecting your second child?’
17
‘THAT WENT GREAT,’ Linda Hvilbjerg said, having checked that the microphones had been switched off. The interview was over, but I didn’t have the energy to get up from the armchair. She had grilled me for forty-five minutes, pursuing her ‘theme’ of fiction mirroring reality by bringing up examples from my earlier books and linking them to events in my private life. From Nuclear Families she had drawn parallels to my divorce from Line; she viewed You Don’t Have To Call Me Dad as a book that criminalized decent step-parents and which, as Linda pointed out, had been written after Line moved in with Bjørn and their shared children, including mine.
I hadn’t tried very hard to defend myself. All I could do was refuse to discuss my private life and argue that the best stories take as their starting point experiences that are familiar to us all or which we can easily imagine. In order to describe the horror that had made me famous, I had to explore every detail of it, no matter how revolting it might be. If it meant using my own experiences and feelings as a springboard, then that’s what I did. It improved my motivation, the book and, ultimately, the reader’s reaction.
All in all, I was quite pleased with my performance. After the shock start with the Gilleleje murder, I had quickly spotted in which direction the interview was heading and, though alcohol coursed around my body, I felt more sober than I had for a long time. Not once did I lose my temper or reply in anger, even though it required enormous restraint not to react emotionally. I knew that was what she wanted, an outburst that would reveal the monster who produced what she could never bring herself to refer to as literature. If she was disappointed at her failure, she didn’t show it. Perhaps muddling up fiction and reality and presenting it as her ‘evidence’ had been enough for her?
‘You failed to mention Media Whore,’ I sniped. ‘That would have proved your point.’
Linda Hvilbjerg shrugged. ‘That’s water under the bridge, Frank. Let’s call it quits?’
‘Quits? So this was payback?’
‘Payback?’ Linda exclaimed, smiling. ‘Not at all. I’ve just given you forty-five minutes of free publicity. Your books will carry on selling, don’t you worry.’
I snorted. ‘Possibly, but you also made sure that no one will ever speak to me again because they think I’ll end up killing them in a book.’
She gathered her papers and stood up. ‘Can you blame them, Frank?’
I shot up and was about to inform her just how little importance I attached to her opinion, but the words never came out of my mouth.
‘Take care,’ Linda Hvilbjerg said and hugged me as if nothing had happened. ‘Good luck with the book.’
I had no time to reply before she had turned around and stepped down from the stage. She attracted a fair amount of attention; the crowds moved out of her way and let her glide through as if an invisible force was parting them for her. Behind her, the crowd filled the vacuum and, after a few seconds, I could no longer see her.
‘What a bitch!’
Finn Gelf was standing in front of the stage, holding out his hand to me. I took it and stepped down to him.
‘I saw most of it,’ he said sympathetically. ‘She really managed to open up old wounds, eh?’
I nodded.
‘But don’t worry about it,’ Finn said, patting my shoulder. ‘It can only boost sales. Including the back catalogue.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘People will read the books she mentioned to gain an insight into your writing process.’
‘And my private life,’ I added.
‘That too,’ Finn Gelf admitted. ‘But then again, you don’t give many interviews, so where else can they look?’ His face took on an animated expression. ‘People want to know how the famous and mysterious Frank Føns is put together, what makes him tick. It’s perfect. It couldn’t have happened at a better time.’