Helle Helle - This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

It had turned really cold now. The floor was draughty and I traipsed about in my boots indoors. Sometimes the boiler went out and I had to fill it up with water, there was a special length of hose for the purpose. I’d filled it up quite a few times already. After a week the pressure dropped and the needle was in the red again. I didn’t know where it all went. When the boiler was going it was nice and hot in the utility room. I started drying my clothes in there, I’d hammered a couple of nails in the wall and put a clothes line up. Once, I sat and had my dinner there. I’d been sitting still so long in the front room I was frozen stiff. Afterwards I ran a bath and got in, but I couldn’t relax, I kept hearing something scratching as I lay there looking up at the ceiling. A bit of straw stuck out from a crack.

I went to bed conscientiously before midnight. I tossed and turned and kept deciding to get some exercise the next day. I counted backwards from increasingly high numbers. It did everything but send me to sleep. I’d put too much garlic in the mince, it had given me a stomach ache. I got annoyed with myself about everything: too much garlic and not enough money, my stupid prattling on about boilers to the guy from the ticket office. I got up again and stepped into my boots, put my dressing gown on over my T-shirt and went out into the front garden. I gave the apple tree a good kicking. It didn’t help, all it did was leave me out of breath. I stood there getting it back. The light from the street lamp slanted across the lawn. Then I heard a faint cough from over by the station, the ticket-office guy was having a smoke on the step. He was in his dressing gown too, a white one. Mine was pink. I didn’t think he’d seen me in the dark, but then he stepped down and came over.

I once asked Dorte if she felt just as besotted every time she found someone new. She gave a shrug.

‘Pretty much.’

‘What goes wrong then?’

‘I’m not sure anything actually goes wrong. Sometimes I’d rather be on my own all of a sudden. You know how awkward I can be.’

‘But do you get sick of them?’

‘I don’t know, it’s hard to explain really. Anyway, it’s not always me who ditches them. Take Henning, for instance,’ she said, and shook her head. We were sitting at her table with a sponge cake, it was raining. It might have been a bank holiday, at any rate she wasn’t going in to the shop. We’d had a long chat about her upstairs neighbours who had unexpectedly split up. Dorte was quite taken aback. She’d seen them holding hands at the cold counter only a few weeks before, they’d been looking at the salami.

‘What do you think?’ one of them said.

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ said the other.

She may well have felt like giving them both a kick up the arse, as she put it, but at the same time she couldn’t help feeling a bit envious. She thought: How come they can make a go of it when I can’t? Every time she found someone, she thought he was the one. Only then he’d turn out to have an annoying habit of droning on or putting jam on top of his cheese, or collecting bottles whenever they were out walking in the park so he could claim the deposit. Henning had done that. She couldn’t understand why he kept lagging behind. He even had a rucksack to put them in, but from the start she’d decided not to interfere. He was a journalist on the local paper, he read novels and biographies. He insisted on going home and sleeping in his own bed at night. She only went to his flat once, it was dark and untidy, but she didn’t interfere in that either. She gave him a key to her own place and wiped newspaper smudges off the door frames when he wasn’t there. After a few weeks she found herself pestering him to stay the night, it was a Saturday. He grumbled a bit at first, but after a while he gave in.

She kept waking up that night and smiling at him in the dark. She lay and watched the clock turn seven and eight before getting up. She crept out to the bathroom and got herself ready. At nine she put the coffee on. At half nine she made the toast. At ten she made some more, but it was half ten by the time she heard him stir. She sat up in her chair and forced a smile.

‘Sleepyhead,’ she said when he came in.

‘Mm,’ he said and touched her shoulder. He sat down and took a piece of toast.

‘I’ve had mine,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait any longer. I waited ages. I always look forward to breakfast.’

He pulled a little corner off and put it in his mouth. She thought: I need to be broad-minded now.

‘I imagined we’d have breakfast together,’ she said.

And then a moment later:

‘A grown man lying in until half past ten.’

He paused for a second in the middle of his toast, then carried on munching. He had another cup of coffee and went to the bathroom. She sat looking out of the window at the traffic below, a pedestrian saw her and waved. She didn’t wave back. A good bit later he came in again, he had his coat and rucksack on. He lifted a couple of fingers by way of goodbye.

‘Cheers for now, then,’ he said.

Her lips were so tight she couldn’t get a word out. She sat, rigid, at the table for nearly an hour. Eventually she got the better of herself and went over to his, but there was no answer. She found a crumpled piece of paper in her bag and wrote: Did you go because you were going, or have you gone? She folded it up and put it through the letter box. She’d seen him once since, on his way in to the Kvickly supermarket. He saw her too. They both turned away. Annoyingly, he was quicker.

Anyway, her upstairs neighbours hadn’t been able to make a go of it either, and they’d been together more than eight years. Dorte could hear the woman crying at night. She’d bumped into her on the stairs too. She looked like she’d been steeped in chlorine.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘because I can see she’s having a hard time of it. I just don’t understand how it can hurt that much. I mean, she’s still young. Her future’s wide open.’

‘She must miss him,’ I said.

‘Yes, but still.’

‘Perhaps it’s like if you were never going to see me again,’ I said.

‘Do you think? I can’t imagine that at all. What a terrible thought.’

‘That’s probably what it’s like then.’

‘Oh, that’s awful. Do you know, I might just pop in on her with a little bunch of something once I’ve got a minute,’ she said.

Per and Ruth and Hans-Jakob invited me with them to Sweden for the Whitsun holiday, three days at a hotel by a lake in Småland. We drove up in the Volvo, Per and me in the back with a pillow each. We held hands across the seat, Per rubbed my palm with his thumb. I took my hand away and propped the pillow up between my cheek and the window and stared out at the vast pine forests. Ruth did the driving, Hans-Jakob sat with the map and a bar of Marabou chocolate. He broke pieces off and handed them back to us. They’d booked us into two rooms. There was a dinner included, in a banqueting room. We were going to have coffee in a summer house in the garden then go down to the freezing cold lake for an evening swim. Per had his checked shorts on, his thighs were long and firm. He took hold of my hand again, then leaned across and put his lips to my ear.

‘Are you tired, darling?’

‘A bit.’

‘You’re not carsick, are you?’

‘No.’

‘How about stopping at the next lay-by?’ he said to Ruth, and she nodded.

‘Good idea. I’ll have a piece of that too, Hans-Jakob.’

We ambled back and forth in the lay-by. Per swung our arms. He shoved me into a little ditch and pulled me up again. Ruth and Hans-Jakob sat on the bench and studied the map. Hans-Jakob waved to us.