Chapter Nine
NINE
Louisa wakes up on her birthday in one of the strangest ways you can wake up: by noticing that her bed is moving. She blinks up at the ceiling and walls in confusion, and soon realizes that there is a fairly logical explanation for this: the bed isn’t a bed, it’s the back seat of a car. For a few moments she feels complete panic, because she finds herself thinking that the only reason for this is that she has been kidnapped. But then she sits up, and then the kidnapper, a woman of uncertain age who is happily singing along to the music on the radio, catches sight of her in the rearview mirror and lets out a shriek of terror. Only then does Louisa remember that she actually went to sleep in the car the previous evening, and that the kidnapper is perhaps not so much a kidnapper as a car owner, and that it is now probably more likely that the woman will think she is about to be kidnapped than the other way around.
The woman stomps her foot on the brake and the car stops so abruptly that Louisa hits her nose on the seat in front of her and exclaims irritably: “HELLO? Can you at least try to be CAREFUL?!”
Unfortunately, the woman isn’t listening, she’s just shrieking. Should she really be this angry, Louisa thinks, seeing as she isn’t the one who’s been woken up at half past six in the morning? What sort of lunatic drives to work this early, anyway?
“ARRWAUUARWAAAR,” the woman cries, or something like that, but to be honest it’s hard to know exactly, because suddenly Louisa isn’t listening to her at all. She’s listening to the radio, so intently that at first her heart can’t accept the words she hears.
“Wait… hush!” she tells the woman, still not entirely awake, and puts her ear closer to the speaker.
But the woman definitely doesn’t wait, and certainly isn’t delighted to be hushed by Louisa in her own car either, so in the end Louisa simply leans forward and puts her hand over the woman’s mouth. Not unlike what you would do if you were, for instance, thinking of kidnapping someone.
“… as you’ve just heard, news has reached us that the world-famous artist C. Jat …,” the voice on the radio says.
Then the voice suddenly breaks, as if even the newsreader has lost their professional monotone today and is struggling to hold back tears. A short, trembling breath is heard, followed by: “… died last night. Thirty-nine years old .”
Perhaps the newsreader has seen the artist’s painting in galleries. Perhaps in beautiful books in big houses or in cheap magazines in small waiting rooms. Perhaps on a postcard, on a fridge, in a children’s home. They have never met, but it doesn’t matter. Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.
If you thought that the woman in the car was having a complicated enough morning already, it really doesn’t get any better when the young kidnapper suddenly starts crying all over the back seat. That isn’t entirely normal behavior for a kidnapper, it really isn’t, so it ends with the woman offering the girl her handkerchief. When Louisa whispers: “Sorry I slept in your car,” the woman replies vaguely: “Sorry I… woke you?”
When Louisa gets out of the car, the woman asks if the girl would like her to “call someone?” That is kind of her, to assume Louisa has a someone.
On the car radio, and on all other news broadcasts everywhere, serious journalists talk about the death of a famous man. His death belongs to the whole world now. Louisa will never quite be able to forgive the world for that.
What happens next is both stupid and logical, much like most of life, really. Louisa spends the whole of that first day, her birthday, drifting around town, without knowing where to go with all of her grief, and she doesn’t even remember the next day, but on the next it’s as if her feet take control and start walking without her brain giving them permission. She doesn’t know where the artist’s funeral is taking place, or how she could say good-bye, so her shoes carry her back to the only place where she can still feel his presence. Soon rich people around the neighborhood will complain to some anxious politician until they send a team of very serious professionals who paint the church wall in the alley white again, but tonight everything is still there: the cockroaches, fish, hearts, and skulls. So Louisa takes out her paints and carries on where she and the artist left off, painting all night through her tears in the light of the streetlamps, getting lost in time. Early the next morning the sun rises without her noticing. She doesn’t hear the footsteps, the black-clad stranger approaches so quickly from behind that she doesn’t see him until it’s too late. So when she hears the deep voice, she turns around instantly and does the only reasonable thing: throws the can of spray paint at his face as hard as she can.
That’s how she meets Ted.