Helle Helle - This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

‘Hi.’

‘Hi, what are you doing here?’

‘I locked myself out.’

‘It’s a good thing I’m early, then.’

‘You did say four .’

‘It could just as well have been five.’

‘I’d be dead by then,’ he said with a laugh, and I looked up and saw them disappear round the corner. Just as I thought, it was the girl who’d come over that night the picnic couple had stayed, but that didn’t matter now. I stood there with my coat in the bag and the coincidence of four, five, dead. It didn’t mean a thing, but still it was so weird I couldn’t get my head round it. I once saw a programme about a woman who saw signs everywhere, she did her shopping and her workouts and slept according to what she saw. Eventually she got divorced when everything else around her started coming apart as well, chairs and tools and stitching in particular. The stitching wasn’t relevant in itself, but like she said: a person sees and hears only what they want to. I walked home with my coat. I let myself in and made some coffee. The same programme had a bit on a little Austrian man who’d had the hiccups for twenty-eight years. I’d seen him in the papers, but all of a sudden there he was hiccuping away while he talked about his condition. He could have talked about anything at all, really. It might have been better if he’d talked about something else entirely.

It rained. The parlour bench disintegrated on the cobbles. Hans-Jakob experimented with baking bread in the afternoons, trying out methods of raising and different kinds of flour. He did a very successful loaf in a pot and served it oozing with butter. Ruth asked to have her mouth taped shut after six slices. Hans-Jakob got the first-aid tin out of the Volvo and snipped off a length of sticking plaster. He ran round the whole downstairs after her, she shrieked and squealed. I’d been at work that day, Ruth had insisted on giving me a lift even though she had no lessons because of exams. On the way, she picked up two hitch-hikers. One of them had dreadlocks. They spoke fractured German and were on their way to Sweden. They sat in the back and kept thanking us, they even gave us a bag of liquorice allsorts and a miniature bottle of cognac. Ruth dropped them off at the ring road and did the shopping while I helped Niller with his homework. After I was finished I waited for her under the roof of the bike sheds. She smiled and waved behind the steamed-up windscreen when she saw me, then leaned across the seat and opened the door.

‘Come in out of the rain. How was it?’

‘It was fine.’

‘It smells like a henhouse in here,’ she said. ‘But they were very sweet.’

‘I think it was really nice of you to give them a lift,’ I said. ‘A lot of people wouldn’t.’

‘They’d be kind in other ways instead. Do you want an allsort?’

‘Yes please.’

‘Is there anything you want while we’re out? Anything you need?’

‘No, not really.’

‘I got you this, by the way,’ she said, reaching for a carrier bag on the back seat. It was a book we’d read about in the paper, short stories about the future written by young people from the Storstrøm region. It had been reviewed under the headline ‘CARDBOARD AND CACK’. We drove a different way home. Ruth had heard about a place that sold honey from a stall in Alsted. We drove round and round but couldn’t find it. When we pulled out onto the main road again she asked if I wanted to stop by my mum and dad’s to say hello, but I didn’t.

‘I’d like to thank them, if I could,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘What do you think what for?’ she said and smiled at me. I smiled back and offered her an allsort from the bag. She took two or three and drove with one hand on the wheel.

Just as Hans-Jakob caught up with her with his plaster, Ruth managed to open the patio door and ran outside into the rain in her socks. He stopped for a moment and swore, then ran out after her. We watched them from inside the house. They jigged over the cobbles, then he caught her by the barn. She squealed again. At the same moment, Lars came cycling up the drive in his waterproofs. It had been a while since we’d seen him last. He got off and wheeled the bike over and leaned it up against the wall. We could see them laughing together. Then they came back up to the house, Ruth’s hair was a wet curtain now, and their socks left puddles on the floor. Lars took his waterproofs off and dumped them in the utility room. We all stood and chatted for a bit in the kitchen, and then Ruth and Hans-Jakob said they were going to have a bath. They disappeared upstairs, we heard their footsteps above our heads, then a bit later the faint rush of water in the pipes. Per went to get a new LP he’d bought so we could listen to it on the stereo. We watched him from the kitchen window as he crossed over the cobbles in his wellies.

We went into the living room while he was gone. We looked out at the garden and the woods beyond the beech hedge. Their green was so pale it was nearly yellow. He put his hand on my shoulder, I turned towards him and then we kissed. Per came back with his LP. We sat on the sofa and listened to it a couple of times. The fire was burning in the stove. When Per went to the bathroom we kissed again. We had osso bucco for dinner, we laughed and talked and drank red wine, and I didn’t have a decent thought in my head, everything was pulling at me. We sat at the table until way past midnight. Lars stayed over and slept on the sofa, and I lay awake most of the night in the bedsit next to Per. His breath was heavy and warm. Around three I opened the window and heard a nightingale somewhere in the drizzle. It was all too much. I would never be able to share it with anyone, ever. Per stirred and whispered my name. I closed the window quietly and got back into bed.

In the evenings I could see the guy from the ticket office in the upstairs flat with his girlfriend, walking about in what must have been the living room. His girlfriend was often in the kitchen. Every now and then she’d open the window and shake out a tea towel. I thought about what reasons there might be to shake out a tea towel. Sometimes he sat smoking at the living-room window. He sat with his chin in his hand, puffing little clouds of smoke out in front of his pale face. They had a big cowboy cactus, in one of the other windows. One night I had a letter to post, I was humming to myself as I walked over to the postbox with it. It was an application for a student loan. When I was almost right underneath him, he cleared his throat and I glanced about, startled, before saying hello.

‘Are you keeping warm all right?’ he said from above.

‘Just about.’

‘It’s starting to get cold now,’ he said, and took a drag on his cigarette. His cheeks hollowed in the dim light.

‘My central heating’s oil-fired,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘What about you, is yours from the network?’

‘No, we’re on oil too. The boiler’s down there. It heats the whole place up,’ he said, and twirled a finger in the air.

I nodded. He nodded too.

‘It must be a big boiler, then,’ I said.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know to be honest. It looks fairly normal to me.’

We both laughed. He stubbed his cigarette out on the window ledge and flicked it outside into the air. It landed under the lamp post, and then the toilet flushed. The bathroom door must have been opened at the same time, the sound was that clear. He smiled down at me.

‘See you around, then.’

‘Yeah, see you.’

I was going to have meatloaf, but when I stood in the kitchen with the minced meat and the box of eggs I decided I couldn’t be bothered. I boiled the mince and had it in a pitta bread with a bit of cucumber. I’d stopped eating at the table, I couldn’t enjoy my food sitting in front of the window. I put a removal box next to the armchair and used that as a table instead. I practised eating my food slowly, it was quite hard to do on your own. Dorte had a method she used when her clothes started feeling tight, she lit a cigarette and took a drag between mouthfuls. Besides that she could say no to almost everything. The best way to lose weight was to shake your head, she said.