Helle Helle: This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

‘Was it five past nine it was due?’ said the girl, and I nodded.

‘Yes. Have you got tickets?’

‘No, we need to get some. Have you got enough money, Lasse?’ she said, and he had, at least almost, they only needed to borrow forty kroner when we got to the station. The train was on time but crowded. We went all the way through from one end to the other, but there were only two seats free that were next to each other.

‘You take it,’ she said to me. ‘I’ll sit on his knee.’

So I sat down by the window, Lasse sat beside me with her on his lap. Their raincoats rustled every time they moved. He blew her hair away from his face. I reached into my bag for my book, opened it, then stared out at the reddening fringe of a wood and some gulls flocking in the fields. A bit later there were rooks and geese, a blue tractor left at a boundary with its door open and a man on his knees in the furrow. I saw him get up and shake his head in resignation, and then we’d gone past. After that nothing, then Ringsted’s array of rooftops.

Per Finland’s mum was called Ruth, she edited a little periodical. She’d been allowed to use her school’s copying facilities. Teachers and pupils and other people could have poems and short stories published in it. She sat at the table surrounded by sheets of paper and was in a quandary, a woodwork teacher had written a fairy tale in verse about Hans Christian Andersen. It wasn’t dreadful, but it wasn’t good enough to be included either. The periodical was even called The Duckling and she’d got the idea for it during the big flu epidemic the year before. She patted the seat of the chair next to her. I got up from the sofa and went and sat down beside her.

‘Do you write poems?’ she said.

‘No, not really.’

‘You should. Per says you’re good at writing.’

‘She is as well,’ said Per from the sofa, slouching down. His fringe had grown, it got in the way of his eyelashes every now and then.

‘You should read the song lyrics she wrote for her aunt’s birthday,’ he said.

‘How old was she?’

‘Only forty-three,’ I said.

‘Go on, then,’ she said, and so I cleared my throat and began to sing. My voice was shaky, I had to pause between two verses to clear my throat again. The way I sang made it more serious than it was meant to be. Ruth sat with her head tilted to one side, Per sat up. Just as I finished, the door of the study opened and his dad was standing there with a recorder in his mouth.

‘Not now, Hans-Jakob,’ said Ruth. She leaned back in her chair and smiled at me.

‘It’s a lovely song. I’d like to publish it.’

‘Isn’t it a bit private?’ I said.

‘No, that doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s a party song, isn’t it?’ said Hans-Jakob.

‘For her aunt,’ said Per.

‘When’s the party?’

‘A while ago. Or rather, there wasn’t one,’ I said.

‘It was just the two of them,’ said Per.

In the evening we had red wine from Spain with our stew. We sat at the table in the kitchen and talked for ages. The fire roared in the stove and we laughed at the woodwork teacher’s verse. Per stretched his legs out under the table and put mine in a scissor lock. It was almost midnight. Ruth went into the pantry and improvised a dessert out of preserved apricots and nut brittle. Hans-Jakob opened a bottle of dessert wine and the thought occurred to me: I’m an adult, I’ve been a dinner guest. I was nineteen years old and the moon was out above the stable. A couple of weeks later I moved in there with Per, into the new bedsit they’d had converted on the first floor, with its own bathroom. It was the third time I’d left home. My mum and dad gave us a pewter mug as a moving-in present, but they never got the chance to see the place.

The first time I left home I moved in with Dorte. I was in my second year at the gymnasium school, it had been a harsh winter. Every day I cycled two kilometres the back way along the lane between the fields to the bus stop. My wet hair froze into icicles. I got the bus to Næstved station, from there a city bus ran every twenty minutes. Dorte thought it was too hard on me. She’d got herself a two-bedroom flat with a balcony in the centre of Næstved.

In the mornings when I got up the coffee maker was all ready. She wrote me notes on the filter, and put my mug out on a tray along with butter and jam. I made toast and sat down in the living room, I didn’t need to get going until the last minute. Sometimes she’d get stuck with the crossword and leave it for me, her pencil lying like a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. In the evenings we played charades. Dorte’s efforts had us in stitches, we laughed so much the downstairs neighbour phoned to complain.

‘Yes, all right, you miserable old bat,’ said Dorte, almost before she’d put down the receiver, and then we reached for the blankets and laughed hysterically into the wool until it set our teeth on edge.

Dorte was convinced that she was the one who had introduced fake fur coats to mid and southern Sjælland. She’d had four at one stage, but the pink one was worn out and she’d given the long one away to a homeless person. I got the one with Mickey Mouse on it. We stood in her bedroom in front of the mirror.

‘You can have it, it suits you,’ she said. ‘If you haven’t worn it for a year get rid, that’s what I say.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Funeral outfits excepted.’

I did another twirl by the mirror, but then the doorbell rang, and it was my mum. She’d been to the ear, nose and throat specialist and now she was stopping by with a couple of books she thought I might have forgotten. She’d had her hair done, too, Dorte complimented her on it. We stood for a bit in the hall. They couldn’t find a parking space, my dad was waiting outside. I hadn’t missed the books, and my mum didn’t mention the fur coat. Dorte didn’t say anything about the car park round the back either, but she had to be getting back to the shop, she’d only popped home for an hour.

I wasn’t keen on that coat. I wore my old woollen one instead, and hung the fur outside on the balcony so it would be wet with snow when Dorte came home at six. When the front door opened a smell of fried onions filled the air. She put the food in the oven to warm and changed into her jogging pants, then drew her legs up underneath her on the sofa next to me.

‘Don’t you wear it much?’ she said.

‘Not really.’

‘Tell you what, we’ll give it to Vagn’s sister. I think it’s more her style.’

I hadn’t heard about Vagn before, but he came round that same evening. He had funny teeth, and a month later Dorte gave up the lease. I moved back home in the middle of April, the woods were starred with thimbleweed. I biked along the track behind the lane in the late afternoons with my bag on the pannier rack. Everything smelled of soil and sprouting plants, and my mum and dad waved hello from wherever they happened to be in the garden. We never mentioned Dorte all summer. I cycled out to see her in Skelby on the sly and bought new potatoes to take with me from a stall by the road. Vagn lay at her feet on the patio with a cigarette protruding from his front teeth. The potatoes made me feel stupid.

But then autumn and winter came, and before I’d left school Dorte was back in our kitchen on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my mum at the worktop with her back to us, endlessly stirring a pot with some utensil or other.

The sky over Copenhagen Central was bright blue. We went up the steps at the far end of the platform and shook hands on Tietgensgade. I clutched the collar of my leather jacket tight, there was an icy wind coming from somewhere. The girl shivered too, her eyes were watering and her hair was getting blown all over the place.