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wading by when we’re sitting here, having a good time?’
    Kimmie relaxed her gaze and her grip on the bottleneck as the man disappeared down the street. Then she stuck her fingers in her trousers, fished out a chamois-leather neck purse and opened it. The newspaper clippings were very new. On occasion she exchanged them with fresh ones so that she could stay updated on how the others looked. She unfolded the clippings and held them in front of Tine’s face.
    ‘Was this guy one of the men asking about me?’ She put her finger on the press photo. At the bottom it read: ‘Ulrik Dybbøl Jensen, director of the stock market research firm UDJ, rejects partnership with conservative think tank.’
    Ulrik had gradually become a big man, in both the physical and figurative meaning of the word.
    Tine studied the clipping through a blue-white cloud of cigarette smoke and shook her head. ‘They weren’t that fat.’
    ‘How about this one?’ It was from a women’s magazine she’d found in a rubbish bin on Øster Farimagsgade. With
his long hair and shiny skin, Torsten Florin came across as a queer, but he wasn’t. She could confirm that.
    ‘I’ve seen that one before, on TV-Denmark or something. He does something in fashion, right?’
    ‘Was it him, Tine?’
    Tine giggled as if it were a game. So it wasn’t Torsten, either.
    When she’d also rejected the Ditlev Pram clipping, Kimmie packed them all up and stuffed them back in her trousers. ‘What did the men say about me?’
    ‘They just said they were looking for you, sweetie.’
    ‘If we went down there to find them someday, would you recognize them?’
    She shrugged. ‘They’re not there every day, Kimmie.’
    Kimmie gnawed at her lip. She had to be careful now. They were getting close. ‘You tell me if you see them again, got it? Pay close attention to what they look like. Write it down so you can remember.’ She rested her hand on Tine’s knee, which protruded like the edge of a knife under her threadbare jeans. ‘If you have information, stick it under the yellow sign over there.’ She pointed at the sign that read CAR RENTAL – DISCOUNT.
    Tine coughed and nodded simultaneously.
    ‘Every time you give me solid information I’ll give you a thousand kroner for your rat. What do you say to that, Tine? You can get it a new cage. You still have it up in your bedsit, don’t you?
    She stood for five minutes by the parking sign in front of the landmark C. E. Bast Tallow Refinery until she was certain that Tine wasn’t watching her.
    No one knew where she lived, and she wanted to keep it that way.
    Crossing the street, angling towards the wrought-iron door, she felt a headache emerging along with a prickling sensation under her skin. Anger and frustration at the same time. The demons inside her hated it.
    Sitting on her narrow bed, holding the bottle of whisky and peering through the small room’s faint light, a sense of calm washed over her. This was her real world. Where she felt safe, where she could find everything she needed. The chest containing her most precious treasure lay under the bench, the poster depicting children playing tacked on the inside of the door, the photograph of the little girl, the newspapers she’d attached to the wall for insulation. The stack of clothes, the piss bucket on the floor, the pile of newspapers in the back, two battery-driven mini-fluorescent tubes and a pair of extra shoes on the shelf. She could do whatever she pleased with all this, and if she wanted something new, she had plenty of money.
    When the whisky began to take effect, she laughed and inspected the nooks behind the three loose bricks in the wall. She checked these spaces nearly every time she returned to her house, starting with the one containing her credit cards and last ATM receipts, then moving on to the one where she kept the cash.
    Each day she tallied up how much was left. For eleven years she’d lived on the street, and there were still 1,344,000