Helle Helle: This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

‘I’m so glad you and Per have started seeing each other,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say, I couldn’t stop thinking about her hair.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and she nodded a couple of times. I hadn’t pulled my socks up properly in my boots, they bunched up under the arches of my feet.

‘Mind how you go,’ she said, and nodded again, then she went back to her marking.

The yard was covered in slippery sycamore leaves. I walked home over the fields, my boots got heavier and heavier. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Dorte came for dinner if she didn’t have a bloke on the go. The meat was always her treat.

The first night in the house I slept sitting up. I sat in the armchair with my legs up and the duvet on top of me. I hadn’t put the sheets on the bed, though Dorte had reminded me about it.

‘Remember to put your sheets on first thing. You’re always knackered after a move.’

Apart from that the bed was assembled and ready, it took up nearly the whole room. I could only just get the door open. By the time I got my head down it was almost midnight. I lay there for ages staring into the dark. There was nothing to see. Eventually I got up and went into the front room, switched on the lamp and sat down in the armchair. I sat quite still and listened. There was nothing to hear either. I reached into my canvas bag on the floor and found a packet of chewing gum, took four pieces and chewed. What a racket it made. I stopped and listened. I chewed until the flavour was gone, then after that I went into the kitchen with the lump. When I opened the bin the vacuum cleaner fell over behind me with a loud clatter. The noise was still ringing in my ears when I sat down in the chair again. I wrapped myself in the duvet and fell asleep with my head hanging down, and slept until a goods train a mile long passed through when morning came. The lamp was still on as the sun came up.

I sat at the drop-leaf table thinking about the word bleary. It was Saturday morning, I felt like I ought to be doing something. Finishing the unpacking and taking the empty boxes out into the shed, for instance, or having a bath. Fresh air would do me good as well, I could at least go over the road and walk down the little path by the flats to the supermarket, buy some vegetables and some apples for the train that coming week. I thought about my savings account. It had lasted nearly three years, but now it was almost empty. There was only about four thousand kroner left. Then I realised I was looking out at my own apple tree. I blurted something out in surprise, got up from the chair and stuck my clogs on. I picked four big green apples and put them down on the step. Around the back I discovered a clothes line strung out between the two pear trees, but there were no pears on the branches. The leaves had big brown patches on them, or else they were turning yellow and red. I remembered I needed to renew my railcard and fetched my purse from the front room.

An elderly man on a bike was posting a letter outside the station, he straddled the crossbar with one foot on the ground as he dropped it in the box. Upstairs on the first floor the windows were open, music was streaming out and a hand appeared with a duster in it. I pushed the door open and went into the ticket office. The guy behind the counter looked up from his roll with crumbs stuck to his lips.

‘Hi.’

‘I’m interrupting your breakfast.’

‘Sorry.’

He chewed and swallowed as he smiled. His hair was fair and quite long. I wondered how he’d ended up in that ticket office. There was a newspaper open on the desk, on top of it a book about Pink Floyd with a bookmark sticking out.

There was a bit of trouble with my railcard because I belonged in a different zone now, he had to do me a new one. I still had a photo left from the booth, unfortunately not my best. I put it on the counter in front of him along with the money. He stapled it in and folded the plastic wallet, then handed it over. He was smiling the whole time.

‘You can catch the next one if you hurry,’ he said as I turned to leave.

‘It’s Saturday today,’ I said. I could feel his eyes following me on my way out.

Outside, the music from upstairs now mingled with the sound of a vacuum cleaner. For some reason I hurried over to the platform. It was deserted. The train came rumbling through the trees and began to brake. I covered my ears. The doors opened in front of me and a tall guy got off with a rucksack, he was having a job with it. The guard leaned out at the front end with his whistle in his mouth and his eyes fixed on his left wrist. He looked up at me and made a big sweeping gesture towards the train. At first I shook my head, but then when he did it again and blew his whistle I got on anyway. I scampered up the two steps and stood for a moment by the open door as the train pulled slowly away, then I jumped back down onto the platform again. I landed awkwardly and twisted my knee. The train was hardly moving but it was still a fall. Nevertheless, I sprang quickly to my feet. I went back over the tracks and gave the station building a wide berth. I’d torn a hole in my jeans, the new ones. I hadn’t even shut my front door, the place was wide open. I mimicked the guard’s gesture as I cut through the garden. I don’t know what got into me.

Because the house had been left open in the short time I’d been at the station, on the platform, on the train and on the platform again, I went and looked in all the rooms. I looked behind the doors, inside the cupboards and under the bed. I looked in the shed, too, and behind the oil tank on my way back inside. I did it casually, like there was nothing the matter, as if I was looking for a lost ball or a garden tool.

Afterwards I sat down in the armchair in the front room with a needle and thread and tried to mend my jeans. I was no good at it. I put the TV on and watched a gardening programme and later on the football while I ate most of a packet of biscuits. Towards evening I fell asleep in the chair, my head kept nodding to one side. Eventually, I lay down on the floor and slept there far too long, clutching a cushion with my mouth half open. My throat was parched when I woke up in the dark several hours later, but it could have been the biscuits. Now I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep at bedtime, again. All I could do was sit and doodle and listen to late-night radio until it turned into breakfast radio and a heavy goods train came thundering by. Thirty-four wagons in all, Transwaggon, Transwaggon. I put my head on the table and closed my eyes, watching lines turn into oblongs and rectangles behind my eyelids.

From Per Finland’s waterbed you could see the road weave between fields and farms and tatty cottages. Thin coils of smoke rose up from all the houses. When we opened the window we could smell the birch wood from the chimney. Per laughed and ran a rough finger down my back. His voice was rough too, he kept clearing his throat. We had electric panel heaters at ours, we were waiting for central heating. But after she moved from Slaglille, Dorte got a wood-burning stove, she used milk cartons packed tight with newspaper. I put our own cartons aside for her. We couldn’t give her that many, but she had an arrangement with a canteen and another for old news papers. In Per’s house they kept Politiken and a sports weekly. It was Per’s job to check the letter box in the driveway. He wrapped his long arms around me in bed one Saturday afternoon. I’d been up early and had gone for a walk. We bumped into each other at the T-junction after the pond, he was out walking too. The lanes were covered in mud from the fields.

‘Let’s go home and take our clothes off,’ he said and put his hand in mine. We traipsed along the verge side by side in our wellies.