… so terrible disappointing M thought as she panned from left to right above the lip of her wine glass and over the war zone that was her huge, rented garden at the back of her huge, rented house situated in the wealthy ‘whiskey belt’ on Copenhagen’s north coast. 

Her disappointment now tinged with a taste of blood, metaphorical, since the baking competition at the school, which she had won – by cheating. The act – desperate in one way, defiant in another – had not set her down a path but had been a waypoint. A declaration of something she hadn’t yet figured out.

Scanning the battlefield of the garden from the wooden sun lounger through letter box eyes, M imagined she was looking at the opening of a disturbing ‘foreign’ film. French, or Korean, perhaps.

She panned slowly back across the garden removing a stray peel of red hair from her eye. Half-naked Barbie dolls bent backwards, legs splayed; brightly coloured plastic golf clubs, chewed; tiny, desiccated dog shits; grapes dying in fisty, accusing clumps on the vine, a sock, brown flop-eared plants, brittle bushes, wooden pegs from some Viking game angled across the scrawny lawn. The grass-cutting robot tipped over a verge, blinking and dying in the burning sunlight, surrounded and mocked by the gently swaying fronds of yellow weeds.

It had taken her a short year to destroy the garden. Turning its prim neatness into this messy accomplice had somehow balanced the clipped regularity of the gardens either side of her where gruff, silent, aged men tended their properties with a grim efficiency that made her nauseous. 

Her rented house was referred to as a ‘villa’ here and she laughed to herself at the idea. Every-day Danish was littered with pompous sounding French words: Gateaux, creme fraiche, vernissage, atelier, apropos. Villa.

M kept her eyes laughter-slitted and the scene in front of her now looked like the end of something.

She had realised after moving here – to the homeland of her husband, after years of them both living as ex-pats in third countries – that she had lost. Her miscalculation dawned on her at some point during the endless dark of the previous winter. 

Something to do with expectation meeting the unexpected mediocrity. The turning down of the frequency here. The dull colours, lack of characters, absence of surprise. Spontaneity taken down like precious lace, turned in delicate admiring hands – put back on the shelf for a more deserving occasion.

Maybe it was her. Maybe she’d just become accustomed to places moulding themselves to her. The great English-speaking delusion. This place hadn’t budged an inch. You had to admire it, sometimes.

M took a deep glug of wine and tasted the disappointment and the realisation half-submerged in the lighter notes of citrus and apple and whatever else was written on the label: she simply did not have the strength to stay and fight for success or not failing. Did she have the will-power to leave?

As the alcohol ebbed into her bloodstream, M heard the black dogs whimper inside her head. She had first noticed the dogs as a teenager, circling, like hyenas beyond the campfire of her reason. Then closer in half-moon shapes. Sometimes she could feel them brushing against her roughly, licking spittled lips and whinnying with excited blood lust as they walked in intimate, imaginary, circles. Over the years they had come and gone and there was a time, not so long ago, when she had presumed, they had set her free. Or she them.

‘So fucking disappointing,’ she said out loud, again, changing the subject inside her head.

‘What?’ a voice asked to her left and slightly behind her.

M jumped. 

She’d forgotten H was there, silently sunning on the lounger to the left. M took her new friend in, starting at the tips. The sensuous toes, perfectly painted nails, slender feet, toned calves, skinny knees. The neat, inviting thighs, the sassy privates outlined clearly in the tight weave of her swimsuit. The flat stomach, the recently renovated breasts, pointing. The perfect Scandinavian face, with its pert, upturned nose, thin mouth, strong cheeks and innocent, sky-blue eyes.

H – was M’s new best friend. 

Her only friend.

Her neighbour from the mansion at the back, mercifully concealed by some feral trees. They had bonded over shared drop offs and collections of kids at the nearby school.

H had two children from a previous arrangement but now lived with the slightly ridiculous aristocrat who M called the ‘Count’. The mansion at the back of M’s garden was the ‘Count’s’ ancestral home.

The ‘Count’ had several grown children scattered around the world and seemed to accept H’s two without much concern.

‘Well?’ H asked.

‘Well, what?’

‘What is so disappointing?’

‘Oh, you know, everything.’

‘For real?’ H asked in the Beverley Hills 90210 accent of her generation of Danes, reared on endless early evening reruns of crap American TV. 

‘Yes. Aren’t you ever disappointed?’ M asked.

‘All the time – but small stuff.’

‘Not the big stuff?’

‘On the big stuff, I’m not disappointed at all, really. I’m married to a very rich, older man, who will probably die in time for me to enjoy a good part of his wealth. I have two beautiful kids. An almost secret lover. I am fit and healthy and ready to get myself out on to the market again, when the time comes. I live in a safe, stable place. I don’t really have much to complain about,’ H said.

She raised her heavy glass roughly to cheers her good fortune and a slop of yellow wine slid out of the condensation clouded glass running down the V of her swim suite. Her left nipple, roused in surprise, stood to attention.

‘Fuck,’ H giggled looking at her herself. 

‘Luckily these new boobs are wine proof,’ she said laughing and lying back on the sun lounger,  sipping awkwardly, but more carefully, from her glass.

M thought of the Danish word for nipple, brystvorte which translated as ‘breast wart’. She shuddered and took another sip from her glass.

The black dogs had returned resolutely since she’d moved here – sensing a new weakness no doubt – and she had decided this was another reason to resent the place.

The ‘Count’ was from real, old-school wealth. He’d grown up in the mansion, the latest in a long line of aristocrats. He was the friend of queens and kings and prime ministers, faded rock stars, fat-skinny Ozempic-addled TV types and the greasy magnates who populated the neighbourhood. 

M had expected to hate him. She called him the ‘Count’ because it sounded like another c-word. However, the first time they had met—at a drink’s reception at the mansion— his gentle eyes and quiet, down-turned smile had intrigued her. 

His clipped but softly spoken BBC-English in stark contrast to the soap opera Americana.

He was ‘proper posh’ and couldn’t help it, M decided.

‘And what does the ‘Count’ get? she asked H, a little rasp of accusation in her voice.

He gets ‘the trophy wife’ M said, waving her free hand limply towards the length of her own body. 

‘He can roll this out, whenever he has to. I get to stop playing ‘the game’. The exhausting game. Unless I fancy some entertainment on the side. But that’s what the gardeners are for,’ she said.

M looked to the corner of her garden where her dog squatted in the shade of a rhododendron and shat another constipated pebble onto the burnt lawn. 

‘Are you disappointed?’ H asked.

‘Yes,’ M responded.

‘Why? You have a lovely family. A hard-working husband. Beautiful, disobedient kids. A nice house – would be even nicer, if it was cleaned. And you don’t have to work.’

‘All true and all part of the fucking problem,’ M said.

‘And,’ H continued, slurring her words slightly ‘you just won a baking competition at the school on your first try – with fucking cookies. Simple but devastating. You are my hero. Sticking it to all those bitches and their ganaches. The gluten free thing – that was genius.’

‘The cookies … are part of the problem,’ M said, tipsy now. 

‘How?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes – what about the cookies?’

‘I’ll show you.’

M stood and walked around the house, down some steps into the muggy cool of the basement and a room filled with unopened moving boxes. At the back of the room an old, battered suite case hid under a crocheted blanket that her aunt had made for her eldest child.

She lifted the heavy blanket awkwardly like a large jelly fish and placed it on a stack of boxes to her left.

She twirled the old dials on the suitcase to unlock each clasp and opened the lid.

Inside were a couple of boxes of cigarettes. Some old love letters. And ten boxes of McDowell’s organic, gluten free, ‘farmhouse’ biscuits.

M took a box out closed the lid, scrambled the locks again. 

She placed the blanket back on top.

The cheating at the baking competition had been deliberate. An act of self-preservation rather than some limp-wristed cry for help: It had calmed her wild dogs and brought them within touching – to protect or devour her, she was not sure. But the fresh meet of others seemed to satisfy them.

On her way back to the garden, she removed her large red suitcase from its shelf and dragged it to a standing position in the basement hallway, where she left it.

M retraced her steps outside. 

H was dozing in the burning sun, the wet patch over her nipple retreating in the heat.

‘Here,’ M said tossing the box underhanded towards the flat stomach.

H jumped into a half-sitting position, in reflex and shot her wine hand up and out spilling another splash, this time on her thigh. The box hit off her stomach and landed beside her on the lounger.

‘For helvede,’ she swore.

‘I didn’t actually think you were going to throw it at me,’ she said irritably.

She placed her almost empty glass on the patio and reached for the box, raising it to her face.

M noticed a dark fly landing on the surface of her neighbour’s wine. 

H lifted her sunglasses and stared intently at the box.

‘Biscuits.’ ‘Farmhouse.’ ‘Gluten free.’ ‘What the fuck?’

‘Open it,’ M said, a dull thud of pre-hangover lodging at the base of her skull.

‘I’m not sure I want to,’ H said her accent dull and local for the first time in M’s memory.

‘Open the fucking box,’ M said.

H reached clumsily for her wine glass and took a shallow sip, emptying it through gritted teeth to avoid the fly. 

She placed the glass on a shaded spot, half-under her sun lounger.

She opened the plastic packaging around the box and let it whoosh up on a draft of hot air.

The box was neat, rectangular, about the size of one of those bibles in dingy hotels. The top was neatly closed, flaps folding into each other.

H slipped a varnished pinkie inside a flaps and pulled the box open like a flower.

Inside, there was some turquoise tissue paper.

She opened the paper.

 Inside, in two neat rows, were ten large, slim cookies, standing up.

‘Take one out,’ M commanded.

H sniffed and carefully took one of the cookies out using the nails of the thumb and pointing finger of her right hand.

She held the cookie close to her face.

It was identical to the cookies M had served at the baking competition.

Almost identical: there was no flour dusted over that cookie and no burnt edges.

‘For helvede’, H swore again.

‘Eat it,’ M said.

‘Don’t want to eat it,’ H said, her head cocked like a finch.

‘Eat the fucking cookie.’

H took a small bite, then a bigger one.

‘All of it.’

H stuffed the whole cookie into her small mouth, almost choking on it. She reached for her wine glass. Realising it was empty she grabbed M’s glass and took a lubricating gulp that turned the cookie to a mush she had to roll around her mouth. It reminded her of the rented cement mixer in front of her house last Spring. She took another gulp from the glass emptying it. She set the glass sideways onto the empty sun lounger that M had occupied.

H closed her eyes.

She chewed and chewed and swallowed and chewed until the cookie was gone.

She placed a finger in her mouth and dislodged a final piece, which she gobbed to her left.

‘I’m leaving,’ H said dropping the box of cookies onto the other sun lounger.

The plastic cookie wrapper took off caught in another gust of wind. It landed further out and tumbled until it was snarked in the spikey Monkey Puzzle tree in the corner that backed onto the ‘Count’s’ property.

H stood unsteadily. 

She slotted her feet into her deep brown, Italian sandals taking several goes to get her right foot wedged properly with the slim thong of leather between her first two toes.

Half-wrapped in her brightly patterned sarong H walked past M towards the house and was swallowed by the shadows.

She stopped. Turned, her new breasts pointing.

‘Why did you cheat? Why did it matter to win so much?’

M didn’t say anything. She didn’t explain that she’d had enough of the stupid fucking game herself. The jostling and positioning. The mediocrity. The belonging and not belonging games. The whole fucking shebang. 

H left, followed at a distance by a pack of black dogs uncertain but intent on her moving form.

M watched them go – pleased to have directed her dogs once more at someone outside herself and her immediate family. For now.

She reached down and took hold of the cookie box.

‘They’re actually ‘biscuits,’ she said towards the mansion.

M turned and walked back to her kitchen.

She turned the oven on to 200 degrees.

She took a baking tray out.

She reached into the top drawer beside the window and removed a roll of baking parchment.

She placed the nine remaining cookies on the baking paper, as randomly as she could.

There was something deeply satisfying in the number of it.

She opened the bottom drawer, bent over unsteadily and found an open box of gluten free flour.

She stood again and squeezed the sides of the box to force it open in a white cloud.

She tilted her upper body slightly into the cloud and dusted her bikinied breasts and her bare neck in a delicate spray. Like perfume.

She dipped her pointing finger into the box of flour and smudged one sunburnt cheek.

She poured a small amount of flour into her right hand.

She put the box down on the counter and lightly dusted the cookies, first on one side and then on the other. 

The oven dinged.

She opened the door and placed the baking tray on the middle rung

She closed the oven door.

She set the timer for ten minutes – enough to heat them but not burn them.

She would leave two biscuits in a bit longer to brown them too much.

She gathered the cardboard box and walked towards the front door.

She opened the door, walked down the slippery steps to the side where six plastic bins stood like yeoman. 

She opened the one for cardboard.  

It smelt like yeast.  

She flattened the empty box and tossed it in.

She breathed deeply, a hand on each side of the moulded gaping mouth of the bin.

It drove her fucking crazy that she had to sort all of this waste, even though it would all be sorted again by machine at the waste centre. She’d heard that on the radio.

Some self-satisfied man from the local government explaining that it was good for people to be confronted by their waste through having to sort it.

‘Judgemental moron,’ M said letting the huge plastic bin lid drop closed with a swooshing thump. It raised a rushing cloud of stale air that smelt like yesterday or the day before that. 

She looked to her right into the car port and saw her husband’s golf bag stuffed with expensive, newly purchased clubs shiny in the sunlight. One of them was protected by a large teddy bear cover – a Christmas gift from their children.  Her breath caught in her upper chest like an inverted cough. 

M walked back to the kitchen, opened the fridge and took a rectangular glass container out. 

She placed it on the kitchen counter, opened the lid. Inside was a mess of small cubes of raw meat – dog food. The smell of the raw flesh ripe and sharp in her face. 

She let a few cubes of meet spill into the dog bowl and placed it on the floor beside the large potted that had come with the house She had no idea where her dog was and she imagined she was feeding the plant. 

M walked to the sink,  washed her hands, scooped a new wine glass, which she filled.  She walked back to the far end of the counter and she stared at the neat cubes of animal flesh in the container. She took a small sip of wine and with two fingers she picked a bloody cube up and popped it into her mouth. The taste was devastating in its rawness: metallic, pungent, chewy. She imagined licking a butchers knife. She chewed with closed eyes and swallowed, quickly rinsing her mouth with a big gulp of wine. She placed the glass back on the counter, placed her hands either side of it and watched a carmine bloom of blood swirl slowly downwards through the piss yellow wine.