Helle Helle: This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

One day we went for a long walk. We went through the woods and round the other side by the stream and further on along the winding road. It had been sunny all week, but the nights were still cold. The fields were white. We held hands, except for when a car came, then we’d step onto the verge, where the snow was hard on top and could carry our weight. We stood kissing as two cars drove by, the second one slowed down and pulled in a bit further on. It was my mum and dad. They got out and we walked towards each other. It was the third time they met Per. They shook his hand. He smiled the whole time, his long fringe kept falling down in front of his eyes. He took off a glove and tucked his hair behind his ears, it would have looked better if he’d left it alone. My dad gave me a hug, and my mum stood right up close to me. My dad asked Per if we were keeping warm under the covers. Per kept smiling and messing with his hair. A car went by going too fast, we all had to stand aside in the snow for a minute.

After they’d gone, we walked a good way without speaking, then turned back when we got to the boggy bit.

‘Haven’t you got a tissue so you can blow your nose?’ I said.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Can’t you use a leaf, then? You keep sniffing all the time.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘I wouldn’t mention it if it didn’t,’ I said and could hardly recognise my own voice, I felt like throwing myself flat in a snow drift. Any other time I would have done, and Per would have followed suit within a second. But I kept on at a brisk pace, slightly ahead of him the whole time. At the edge of the woods a buzzard took off from a fence-post right in front of us. We almost felt it in the air, it gave us a fright. That helped, and we began to laugh. A bit later Per took his hand away and left me walking along holding an empty glove. He got me every time, I never learned.

When we got home we made raspberry slices. While we waited for the pastry to chill I did the washing-up from the day before and wiped all the cupboards down with a cloth. They were yellow and blue, Per had painted them himself a few years before. He’d been allowed to choose the colours on his own and after he finished he painted a huge flower on the end wall of the stable. The flower had become a local landmark, you could see it all the way from Aversi.

We ate three slices each, the rest we put on a plate for Ruth and Hans-Jakob. Then we went for a lie-down. We didn’t wake up until late evening and couldn’t sleep again for hours.

They’d forgotten their picnic basket, it was sticking out under the shrubs in the front garden. I discovered it on the Tuesday morning when I went over to catch the train. I’d tried some new eyeshadow, it was dusty green and supposed to go all the way up, only my eyelids weren’t the right shape. It was only a couple of minutes till the train was due, so I left the basket where it was and cut through the station. The guy in the ticket office was busy with a customer.

It was sunny again, but bitterly cold. I wished I’d worn something else instead of my thin trench coat. I’d got it for fifty kroner in a charity shop, there was a business card from a barber’s in the pocket. I’d bought a beret as well, but I didn’t put it on until after Roskilde. People sat chattering all through the carriage. A school class had reserved the main compartment, the teacher and a couple of the kids were in ours. The sliding door in between kept opening.

‘Do we get off at Central, Hanne?’

‘We haven’t got homework for tomorrow, have we?’

‘Have we got time to buy something to drink?’

‘Yes, just stay in your seats,’ said the teacher, and stood up. She went next door and repeated the instruction, then came back with apologetic eyebrows beneath her school-teacher’s fringe.

‘There wasn’t enough room for us in one compartment.’

‘It’d be a bit of a squeeze. Day out in town, is it?’ said an elderly man.

‘Geological Museum,’ she said with a nod and rummaged in her bag. The two kids sent longing looks to their classmates in the other compartment.

‘Øster Voldgade,’ said the man, and she nodded again. The man looked across at me.

‘It’s on Øster Voldgade,’ he said, and I nodded as well even though I had no idea, but I knew Albertslundplanen, the housing development we clattered past. I’d been to a so-called reading group there three weeks before. It was the first meeting, there was nothing in particular we were supposed to have read. There were four of us. The girl who lived there was called Margrethe, she wore a beret too. She’d read law to begin with, but that had been a mistake, she’d only chosen the course on political grounds. We had goat’s cheese and baguette with red wine, and she made coffee in a French press and heated up the milk. She had a shelving system in untreated pine, and a proper sofa. She was two years older than me. The others were even older, their names were Benny and Hase. Benny was a woman. She had a loud and throaty laugh, smoked Look cigarettes because they were out of Cecils, and pinched off the filter. There was something odd about Hase. He was round-shouldered and the waist of his trousers was too high up. But his face was kind, he sang in the church choir in Greve Landsby. We drank three bottles of wine and decided to call ourselves the Oldies. I left with Hase when it was time to go, it took twenty-one minutes on the S-train. He asked if we could have lunch together the next day in the canteen. He bent forward and kissed me on the hand when we went our separate ways at Central Station. I took his hand without thinking about it and gave it a squeeze, it made him smile. He smiled at me all the way down the escalator to the Nykøbing train. I hadn’t been to the reading group since. Maybe there hadn’t been any meetings.

I let the school children get off before me, there was a smell of chewing gum in the air around them. I put my head through the strap of my bag and went straight to Rådhuspladsen. There was a branch of Privatbanken on the corner and I took out four hundred kroner. Then I went back and got on a number 12 to the Amager campus, I drank a cup of coffee at the far end of the canteen. I had a piece of cheesecake too, and then I went to the library and wandered round the shelves. I pulled out a guide to punctuation and sat down with it. I looked at the back cover. I looked in the index. I looked at my hands. I tried to pull myself together. I read and took nothing in.

After an hour I got the bus back into town and went round Scala. I bought a scarf and wrapped it round my neck, and stuffed it well down into the opening of my trench coat. I saw three versions of myself in a fitting room, each one stumpier than the next. Then I left the fitting room and went down the stairs and along the street to Central Station, and got on the next train just before two. I was home an hour later. The sun was low behind the supermarket, I picked two apples and put the picnic basket away in the shed.

Late in the afternoon my dad came and picked me up for fried herring, it had been arranged for ages. My mum had made stewed potatoes, she had new, faintly orange lipstick on. She put her hand on my forearm when I reached across for the dish. They’d been out at Jan and Bitte’s over the weekend in the trenches, as my dad said, he’d been helping Jan dig a ditch. They’d had fondue, but it hadn’t been up to much, all that oil. He asked how my course was going and I said fine. He said fondue might be more my kind of thing. My mum asked about the house, how I was settling in, and if there was anything I needed to borrow.

They drove me home at eight, the two of them together. I insisted on being dropped off by the church for the walk. In the night I lay and stared out into the darkness of the back garden again. It was like the whole house was creaking and groaning: doors, floors, skirting boards and panels.