Helle Helle: This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

Dorte was so proud of my song in The Duckling she asked for a stack to have on the counter. We sat in the kitchen at the back of the shop with a cup of coffee, her cigarette lay smouldering in the ashtray, she was too busy to smoke it. She laughed and coughed and held up the page in front of her, humming the melody and reading the words over and over again.

‘That’s lovely, that is. Too good not to be in print,’ she said.

‘I think it’s a bit odd.’

‘It is a bit. But nice, all the same.’

‘Remember your fag.’

‘Oh, I forgot.’

She took a drag, then a couple more puffs before stubbing it out with quick, efficient jabs. Then she got up and lifted the lid off a big pot and a tart smell of apples rose up.

‘Do you want some stewed apples?’ she asked.

‘No, thanks.’

‘You’ll wither away soon. Aren’t they feeding you on the farm?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Is he good to you?’

‘Very.’

‘Spoil you rotten, does he?’

‘Mostly.’

‘And you’re earning your keep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said, and went out into the shop. When she came back she had two five-hundred krone notes in her hand, she crumpled them up and pressed them into my palm.

‘Here. Get yourself a perm.’

‘Ha, ha. I can’t take this.’

‘You can and you will.’

Not long after, I started earning decent money writing lyrics for party songs. To begin with it was just for teachers in the Ringsted area, but then word got round as far as Osted. A single event sometimes meant four songs. I charged a hundred and fifty kroner a piece and could do two in a week, even though I did set myself certain rules. On principle I wouldn’t duplicate a line from any song I’d written before, and if I could avoid it I wouldn’t rhyme on a verb. I hated the narrative present. I wrote lying down on the waterbed. Ruth gave me a rhyming dictionary that helped a lot. I sang the songs through for Per before sending them off, sometimes he played along. He turned the contents of our hammock out and got in with his guitar. When he moved his hand, all the long muscles up his arm flexed, the hair stuck out from under his arms. I buried my nose in it and he squeezed me tight.

‘Now I’ve got you.’

‘Hm.’

‘Come here.’

He drew me in towards him and the guitar fell down with a twang into the heap of dirty washing. We could hardly breathe in that hammock. We lay there looking out. The sunset was different every day, just then it was a big pink stripe over the fields from south to north. We shifted our weight and the hammock started to sway. His mouth was practically inside my ear.

‘What should we do?’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘You mean now?’

‘Now, but not just now.’

‘Let’s wait a bit, then we’ll see,’ I whispered back. I hadn’t thought about it much, I kept avoiding it. I thought about my songs and how I could be of help over in the house, cooking and washing up, hoovering the sofa even if no one would ever notice, polishing the glass tabletop. I thought about the lapwing tumbling over the fallow field at that very moment, pee-wit, pee-wit, its angular wings and little quiff. It was here so early this year, just like every year, the winter was hardly over before the lapwing was back.

It was the twelfth of March, we were lying in the waterbed and couldn’t get up. It was after midday, the sun was shining and there was a racket coming from the cobbles at the front. Someone had given Hans-Jakob an old wooden parlour bench and now he was doing it up. He stood with a sander in his hand and had been at it for a while. We were naked under the duvet, looking up at the sloping wall. There were marks above my head from a foot or a hand. Then came a sound of laughter, the sander stopped and we could hear Hans-Jakob talking to someone. Per got halfway out of bed and leaned over to the window.

‘It’s my cousin. He’s back.’

‘The one who was in the States?’

‘Yeah, he’s down there with my dad.’

‘We’d better get up, then.’

‘Doesn’t matter, he won’t mind. Lars!’

He unhasped the window and the sparrows on the roof flew off as he pushed it open. His cousin shouted back from below, his voice reverberating off the outside walls:

‘Hey!’

‘When did you get back?’

‘Yesterday. The folks came and picked me up.’

‘From Cleveland?’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘Are you coming up? Come on,’ said Per and closed the window. He picked his underpants off the floor and pulled them on, hopping about on one foot. I could already hear his cousin on the stairs.

‘What about me?’ I said and pulled the duvet up under my chin, and then there he was inside the room. They shook hands and hugged. He had longish hair and blue eyes. He had an anorak on and the air around him was cool and fresh, it reached all the way over to me in the bed.

‘Bloody hell, I’m out of shape,’ he said, and patted his stomach. Per laughed.

‘Too many steaks, I bet. You’ve grown your hair.’

‘That makes two of us then,’ he said, and turned towards me.

‘I’m Lars. You must be Dorte.’

‘Yeah, that’s Dorte,’ said Per.

His handshake was firm. He moved his hand up and down a few times and mine went with it, it made waves in the waterbed. He went over and sat down in the swivel chair, Per searched for some clothes in the hammock.

‘Just lying here dossing, the two of you?’

‘You could say that,’ said Per.

‘Have you been out on the town?’

‘What town?’

‘I was supposed to be going to Pub 22,’ I said, pronouncing it all wrong. I cringed but carried on, or it would have made it worse. ‘With my aunt. But she couldn’t make it in the end.’

‘She’s got a smørrebrød shop in Ringsted. She’s quite young considering,’ said Per.

‘She’ll have had it for twenty years next year,’ I said.

‘Long time,’ said Lars.

‘Are you on your bike?’ said Per.

‘What do you think? Where’s your mum?’

‘In the house, I suppose.’

‘Should we go and see if she’s got any coffee?’

‘Yeah, let’s,’ said Per. He’d managed to get his trousers and a T-shirt on now, he came and gave me a kiss.

‘We’ll go and get some coffee on, then.’

‘I’ll be over in a bit,’ I said.

We all sat round the table in the kitchen. Ruth sat next to Lars and kept putting her hand on his arm or his shoulder.

‘He’s like a second son to me, can you tell?’ she said, and I nodded.

‘I can see that.’

‘So what are you doing now, until your course starts?’ said Hans-Jakob.

‘Earning some money at the nursery,’ said Lars.

‘Have you still got your bedsit in Haslev?’

‘Yeah, from April. What about you two?’ he said, looking at Per and me. ‘Are you going to start studying?’

‘At some point,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking about becoming a teacher.’

‘Are you?’ said Per.

‘Good idea,’ said Hans-Jakob.

‘I’d think twice if I were you,’ said Ruth with a laugh. She patted Lars on the head, he kept looking at me while she was doing it.

‘See what I have to put up with?’

He went to the teacher training college in Haslev, his main subjects were biology and physics. I understood he was doing well and got lots of As. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, he changed the subject. He told us about his younger brother who’d got an apprenticeship in a bakery in Roskilde. He’d made a cake with fourteen tiers and the top one had been decorated with a helicopter made out of boiled sugar. It was for one of his other brothers, the youngest. There were five of them all together, all boys. Lars was the eldest.