Invisible Touch: A Scandinavian Dark Advent novel set in Greenland by Christoffer Petersen

Author:Christoffer Petersen [Petersen, Christoffer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aarluuk Press for Arctic Noir, Action Thrillers and Greenland Crime
Published: 2020-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Sapaat

Sunday, 13th December 2043

Chapter 13

The rubber paint in the bottom of the plastic margarine tub was dry. He picked at a corner, teased and pulled it, until the end came free of the tub and he pulled it away like a flap of blue rubber skin. He flopped it onto the surface of the kitchen table, right beside the mask. Mask number two, the teacher’s mask.

The year it happened was difficult to remember, as was his age, but he pictured his face – the teacher’s, remembered his pale skin, the white flakes on the man’s chapped lips, the red bite of cold weather prickling the skin in the corners of his mouth. The man was Danish, newly arrived, unused to the cold, suffering for it, but revelling in everything. He had time for all the kids, and he made even more time for those he liked. Perhaps their fathers were hunters, or they had a boat – access of some kind to the water. The teacher was in Greenland to learn to hunt. He didn’t hide the fact. Everybody knew it, and the kids who could give him access to what he wanted were the ones he liked the best.

There were lots of kaffemiks in Nuuk, and he remembered going to them as a young boy, armed with a handful of Danish kroner that he would present to the birthday boy and girl at the door. The kaffemik was always a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, there was food and plenty of it, enough to make his stomach swell for two days afterwards. But there were lots of kids too, kids from school, kids from his apartment block. They had more money, more friends, more computer games, more clothes. Just more and more besides.

They also had more to offer the teacher.

He remembered the day after the kaffemik, when the teacher took the register at the start of class. When he called out the girl’s name, the one who had just celebrated her tenth birthday – other people’s ages were easier to remember – the teacher lingered over her name, thanking her for a fun afternoon. Everybody who was there would also remember how the teacher had spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen, his loud voice rumbling around the apartment as he plagued the girl’s father with questions about calibres and distances, what sight he should buy, if he should buy a shotgun for ptarmigan, whether he would need a licence.

The Dane was a hunter trapped in a teacher’s body.

He snapped out of his thoughts, fingering the mask on the kitchen table, then adjusting the strap of the face mask he wore, tapping the filter as he remembered what the teacher had said when he found him in the bathroom.

“You should be outside,” he had said. “Playing with the other kids.”

“They don’t want to play with me.”

That’s when the hunter took over. He remembered seeing the change in the teachers’ eyes, the moment when compassion was replaced with

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