The Dinosaur Feather

cleared his plate, he carried it into the kitchen so Vibe wouldn’t have to get up. In the kitchen, he drank some ice cold water from the tap and splashed some on his face. Then he went to the living room. Vibe was sitting in the corner of the sofa, looking expectantly and anxiously at him.
    ‘I’ve been dreading this moment for twenty years,’ she said.
    Søren stopped in his tracks. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
    ‘Ah,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m getting ahead of myself.’ She looked away. ‘Sit down, get it off your chest, you look so tormented.’
    It was Friday 12 October, and it was pitch black, cold and nasty outside. Søren leaned back and stared at his hands. Then he told Vibe the reason for his visit.
    Could she remember going on that course in Barcelona in December 2003? Yes, of course she could. Did she remember Søren going out with Henrik? Søren had told her about their night out when she came back, about the restaurant, about the girls at the neighbouring table they got talking to, who had come with them to a club where they had danced. Vibe remembered it well. The night he had gone home with a woman called Katrine. Vibe’s eyes hardened to begin with, but then she started to smile, wanting to know if Søren was here to confess to an old infidelity. ‘Bad boy,’ she said, wagging her finger at him, ‘but honestly,’ she went on, ‘we were together for seventeen years and I was perfectly aware that it might happen, that it might already
have
happened, there’sno need to look so guilty,’ she said. Søren shook his head. No, there was more.
    ‘I couldn’t say it,’ Søren said eventually. ‘I couldn’t make myself tell you. That I didn’t want a child with you, but that I had got another woman pregnant. I just couldn’t. It was also because of our relationship, Vibe,’ he said, as though she had protested. ‘We were like brother and sister, for God’s sake! We weren’t lovers. There was no spark. Not really. I mean, take John. Even John treats me as if I were his brother-in-law, not a hint of jealousy even though I’ve slept with his wife more times than he has.’ Vibe couldn’t help smiling. ‘Apart from the fact that I truly didn’t want to be a dad, then our relationship was enough of a reason for us not have a child together. And then Elvira and later Knud died . . . I just couldn’t tell you that Katrine was pregnant. At least, not then.’ Søren swallowed. ‘So I decided to wait a little. Until the storm had passed. Just like we decided not to tell Knud and Elvira that we had broken up.’
    ‘Did they know about the baby?’ Vibe whispered.
    ‘No, Vibe, they knew nothing. I would never have done that to you. No one knew anything. Not Henrik, not anyone. I kept everything to myself. But I couldn’t keep the secret for ever, that was obvious . . . but . . .’
    ‘You have a daughter . . .’ Vibe whispered. She shook her head in wonder as if her entire world had just been smashed.
    ‘I
had
a daughter,’ Søren said brutally. Vibe blinked.
    ‘On the eighteenth of December Bo, Katrine and Maja went to Thailand for Christmas. To Phuket. They died in the tsunami. Not Bo, but Maja and Katrine.’
    Vibe put her hands in front of her face, her eyes darting from side to side as if she was rereading old documents and everything finally made sense.
    ‘But you didn’t have your breakdown until January,’ she said, baffled. ‘After we had split up. Quite a while after Elvira’s death, and while Knud was still alive – though no one knew how long he would last. And that was after the tsunami, wasn’t it? In early January.’
    ‘We were in Sweden, remember? We had no idea what had happened until we came back and saw the papers. I wanted to tell you about Maja in Sweden, but I couldn’t. You were so relaxed. When we came home and heard what had happened in Asia, I looked for their names and I couldn’t find them. I thought they had survived, that they hadn’t called me because everything was chaos. After all, I was just a sperm donor. All I could do was wait for Katrine to get in touch. On January the fifth, in the evening, Bo called. He was crying and screaming. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I calmed him down. In a situation like that you think all sorts of crazy things. I imagined that Katrine had been hurt and was in hospital. Bo was so upset and emotional. Deep down, I couldn’t believe that they were really dead. After all, they