Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  I asked Bo if he would like to read Bombi Bitt och Jag, the little white first edition that was lying on his locker. He shook his head. The big black Parkinson history lay like a sombre cliff beside Bombi Bitt. My stomach tightened when I looked at it. This was the first time in his life that Bo was unable to read. Unwilling to read. Maybe not the first time. There have been hours when he has recovered from operations, when he was emerging from anaesthetic. He could not read then. But he always recovered very quickly, in hardly any time at all, usually. And if he was awake at all, he always wanted to read.

  ‘Bo is very resilient,’ I would say, triumphantly, when people asked. And it was true.

  But now he hadn’t had an operation. He wasn’t very ill. It’s nothing serious. They’ll hydrate him, he’ll be out in a day or so.

  The drip wasn’t attached to him now. They’d disconnected it while they were pulling him about for the physiotherapy. I mentioned this to the nurse and she said she’d connect it but she didn’t, for a while.

  The atmosphere in this ward: relaxed, weary, messy.

  I hadn’t had anything to eat since about 7 a.m., so I went to check out the canteen, which has such a good reputation, the shining light of Loughlinstown. It was closed. I tried the coffee vending machine. It took my coins but no coffee emerged. I could have asked someone about coffee – the man who looked like a security man, the woman in the sweetshop – but I didn’t.

  That’s the trouble with me. I don’t ask. I don’t complain enough, directly enough, to the right people. I don’t react quickly enough. And now I didn’t know how urgent the situation was. I didn’t realise that time was running out.

  I sat with Bo. He was half-asleep, half-awake. I talked a little, he talked. His voice had become a little weaker, but it was still Bo’s voice, rich, round, warm, ironic, Swedish. I gave him drinks of water. The drip had been reattached. The alarm bell went off, when he lay on the tube, when it loosened in his hand, already bruised cruelly. The bag with the liquid seemed to be too low over the bed – it looked to me as if gravity could do more to help the flow, if it were positioned higher. How amateurish it looks! And yet I didn’t really know, couldn’t remember enough to compare it to other bags I had seen. All I could remember was the room in Vincent’s Private, its professional clean clinical look, the sense of security you had there, partly engendered by the look of the place. Of course, people are very sick, people die, in such hospitals, too, but you know that the best medicine, the best equipment, the best medical staff, are available. You feel as safe as is humanly possible. Here in Loughlinstown I felt the opposite. I sensed danger. They don’t have sodium that can be taken orally. They don’t have this and they don’t have that – later a nurse will rather crossly tell me that they don’t have containers for dentures, could I bring some in myself. And all too soon I will find out that they don’t have other crucial life-saving equipment.

  Meanwhile, a phone call.

  It’s Emma. From the radio. ‘Children of Lir’ Emma.

  I have missed a few calls from her.

  She doesn’t know how to tell me this, she says. But the computer card on which she recorded my interview was corrupt. She can’t retrieve the recording.

  The morning – the drive to Lough Derravaragh, the golden trees, the bleak choppy waters of the lake, all my good ideas about ‘The Children of Lir’ – gone. Three hours when I could have been here with Bo.

  ‘They’ve been trying but they can’t get it.’

  ‘These things happen.’

  ‘I could do it again if you can come to Lough Derravaragh again sometime this week.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t be able to do that.’

  She didn’t offer to redo the interview in the studio, which surprised me, but I didn’t suggest it. I didn’t want to.

  ‘I’ll cancel it.’

  ‘It’s okay, Emma. These things happen. Goodbye.’

  I just wanted her off the phone. I wanted to get back to Bo. Now our life was the hospital ward. The outside world was irrelevant.

  Pat came over and straightened Bo’s slippers, which were on the floor at the end of the bed. He went to the window at the end of the ward and pulled back the curtains. A nurse, small, bright, young, commended him.

  ‘You’re always helping me, Pat!’ she said.

  She came and talked to me and Bo. She’s a student nurse, a warm and kind person, a wonderful nurse. The young student nurses, the student doctors, were among the most considerate people, the most caring people, in this hospital. I told her Bo’s drip didn’t seem to be working properly. She looked at it and agreed.

  ‘I’m not allowed to do anything with it,’ she said, regretfully. ‘I’ll ask the nurse.’

  But nobody came.

  I went home at about half past five, to touch base at the house, and to get something to eat. By now I had texted our sons to let them know that Bo was in hospital, and I’d texted Marja, Bo’s daughter. I telephoned my next-door neighbour, Gari, who had left two or three messages on the answering machine. I asked her for advice on how to move Bo to another hospital. She suggested that I telephone the Blackrock Clinic and ask them. I decided that I would work on this problem on Wednesday. She also thought that I should find out where the consultant Bo had been assigned to had his private practice.

  ‘They usually have clinics in Blackrock and Vincent’s as well as there.’ This seemed like a good idea.

  Back in the hospital, the drip had been inserted again and seemed to be functioning. The monitoring machine had been switched off, however, so the nurses would not know when the drip slipped out. They would no longer be annoyed by the alarm.

  Marja and Ragnar came to see Bo, and so did Olaf and Nadezhda. Bo was very glad to see them, and talked cheerfully enough, if weakly. It was a pleasant evening. Tuesday.

  DAY 60

  Copenhagen

  I was all dressed up in my off-white outfit, my favourite summer clothes: skirt, blouse, straw-coloured espadrilles. A straw basket instead of a handbag. In the basket, hairbrush, purse, passport. A few traveller’s cheques.

  I had checked in all my luggage. An enormous suitcase. My portable typewriter in its neat grey case. Portable, it nevertheless weighed six or seven kilos. The woman on the check-in desk had advised me to stow it. There seemed to be no limit to the amount of luggage you could check in.

  I chatted to a couple on the plane, on their way back from a holiday in Ireland. They told me they found the white bread people in Ireland ate unbelievable. The sliced pans. We would never eat such bread. Maybe for breakfast. It does not fill you up.

  The woman had curly fair hair, a kind of hair I would forevermore associate with Danish women. Swedes and Finns tend to have the straight flaxen styles, Danes have the curls.

  The plane left Dublin at three in the afternoon and arrived in Copenhagen at nine o’clock. In those days, the Aer Lingus flight to Copenhagen, gateway to Scandinavia, stopped over at Manchester for an hour, to let passengers on and off. The hour stretched to an hour and a half.

  Passport control. Customs.

  The luggage belt.

  Exactly the same then as now. The bags coming round and round. People waiting anxiously, hoping to spot theirs as it came through the gap. Diving on it when it passed them. It’s like the game children play in streams – setting a paper boat afloat and catching it when it comes bobbing through under the bridge.

  My big brown case didn’t come bobbing through, nor did my little typewriter case.

  I waited and waited. There were no notices then – that was a difference. You didn’t get a message saying ‘Dublin first bag, Dublin last bag’ as you do now. When everyone was gone and there were no bags left I began to panic, and to wonder what I was supposed to do next. I was not an experienced traveller. Far from it.

  Somehow I found an official; I filled in a form. My address in Copenhagen. There was a phone number to ring.

  Then I was on a bus, which brought me to Central Station. Hovedbanegå
rd. My reading of Babette meant I could figure out some of the signs. Information I could have figured anyway. I couldn’t speak a word of Danish or understand anything people were saying, but I managed to get a ticket to Albertslund. Where I would live. The Kollegium. Vognporten 14.

  It’s a twenty-minute train journey from Hovedbanegård to Albertslund. In the dark, train journeys seem much longer.

  Albertslund Station is a suburban station, still very new in 1978. At eleven o’clock at night it was almost deserted. There was nobody in the ticket office, and the shutters on the kiosk were closed. When you alighted from the train you had to go through a tunnel, which branched – of course – in two directions. I had no idea where the Kollegium was. Somehow it had not occurred to me that I was lacking this knowledge until I got out of the train. There were many questions that I should have asked, before I found myself alone on a platform in a suburb of Copenhagen in the middle of the night.

  A woman dressed in a hijab came down the tunnel steps, a small boy holding her hand. Women with children always look safe. They’re probably not going to stab you if you ask them a question.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Nej, nej,’ the woman shook her head vigorously.

  ‘Danmarks Internationale Kollegium?’ I persisted.

  The woman shook her head. Then the little boy said something to her. She smiled and pointed. Since we were underground this was not as useful as it could have been, but she indicated left and then left again.

  ‘Thank you,’ I knew the word in Danish for thanks but felt too shy to say it.

  The directions were correct. I emerged on to a road that was called Vognporten. To my left, just above the railway track, was a big building belching out smoke – a factory? The heating plant for Albertslund, I found out later. A signpost pointed to DIK, Danmarks Internationale Kollegium. I could see it, at the end of the road – a collection of long low buildings, glowing with a gentle, friendly orange light, in the blackness, like ships on a calm dark sea.

  My heart lifted.

  The summer air was warm and soft on the skin and my white skirt felt light and fleet as wings, as, reinvigorated, I walked towards my destination, the glowing ships in the welcoming harbour.

  Not quite.

  An Arctic explorer would have been better prepared. Åmundson wouldn’t have reached the North Pole if he had been one tenth as careless as I was.

  Because only when I reached the first of the long white houses did I realise that I would have to get a key, get a room number.

  Check in.

  Checking in was something I had never done before in my life.

  When I went on holidays I stayed with aunties in the country. You didn’t have to check in with them – they never went anywhere; they would be at home no matter when you arrived. My holidays abroad had been working holidays: once in a small hotel on the Isle of Wight, once in a cafe on one of the Frisian islands. (Islands patterned my travelling life, by accident rather than by design.) The owners of those places were like the aunts. They were always at home. They were at home in houses that had a front door, and a knocker or a bell.

  There was nothing like that in evidence here.

  I walked along the grass by the side of one of the long buildings. There were lights in windows, and one room was a kitchen, all lit up. I peered through the big window. It looked very cosy inside, warmly coloured, orange and oak. But empty.

  It was getting later and later. Would I have to sleep on the grass, under a tree? Clad in nothing but my light cotton blouse and skirt?

  I saw a young man walking along the path towards one of the buildings. I ran up to him.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was small and thin with ragged hair like straw and a pasty complexion. But his eyes were big and soft.

  I explained the situation.

  He looked worried.

  ‘Herr Rasmussen is not here now.’ He glanced at his watch and shrugged. ‘He’ll be here tomorrow at nine o’clock.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘The man who gives out the keys.’ He showed me the building where Herr Rasmussen’s office was, close to the entrance to the harbour of residences. It was locked and dark.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  He headed off, to his room, leaving me standing there, outside the office that would open at nine o’clock in the morning.

  I watched his retreating back as if it was my last hope.

  It had not occurred to me to ask him if there was a hotel in Albertslund. It didn’t look like the kind of place where there would be an hotel, as far as I could see. In fact, at this hour, it looked as if every inhabitant of Albertslund was fast asleep in bed. It had not occurred to me to ask if there was somewhere I could sleep in the Kollegium. There was – there were sofas in the living room. But why would he allow a stranger in, to sleep there? Even a female stranger in a white cotton blouse and skirt, who looked harmless.

  I got the train back to Hovedbanegård. The trains run late, in Copenhagen.

  And at the station, an information office was still open, although it was almost midnight. A big brisk woman with the dry blond hair many older woman had gave me the names of some nearby hotels. She picked the cheapest, on Absalon Gade, which was just around the corner. Going beyond the call of duty she phoned the hotel and made a reservation.

  And still I had to find the hotel. It was small and seedy, not like a hotel at all. The lobby was a tiny hallway, the receptionist a fat middle-aged man, who didn’t look as if he had washed that day. My room was the size of a matchbox, beige coloured, grubby – this was a kind of hotel that perhaps does not exist any more, a cheap, shabby hotel by a railway station, just across from the huge five stars, the Scandic and the Radisson and the SAS. Through my window I could see the big SAS sign glowing in the night. But I was in a room; I could lock the door. Tomorrow was Saturday, but Herr Rasmussen would be in his office from nine. I would start again.

  How lucky that I had not arrived on Saturday night!

  Breakfast: a coffee (not bad – the coffee in Denmark is always good) and a soft white roll in a plastic wrapper. One pat of butter and one plastic capsule of jam. The dining room was a tiny drab anteroom to the hall. It was also beige, everything was beige and drab – the antithesis of everything I had expected Denmark to be – or expected a hotel to be.

  The other guests seemed to be old men, who looked at me inquisitively. I was curious too. Who were they? Who stayed in a place like this?

  I had washed – there was a towel and a tiny pat of hard nasty-smelling soap in the bathroom (special tiny pats of soap must be specially made for these places … you never get them anywhere else). I had some make-up in the straw basket, but no toothpaste or deodorant or anything of that kind. Already I felt sticky and sweaty. There were dark stains under the arms of the blouse and a fine patina of dust covered all the expanse of creamy cloth, which yesterday was fresh and new.

  On Nørrebrogade, though, the sun was shining.

  I checked out, parting nervously with a lot of money – my store of kroner, acquired in the AIB bank on Grafton Street, was diminishing much too fast. Another ticket to Albertslund. The journey seemed shorter, in daylight, but I was not ready to enjoy the view of Copenhagen’s suburbs, or the exotic placenames. Dybbølsbro. Lyngby. Hvidovre. The pleasure of the foreign names would wait for another day.

  What a relief to find Herr Rasmussen in place, sitting at his desk. A white-haired man, with a narrow scholarly-looking face, glasses.

  He consulted a list.

  I worried that my name would not be on it. That my reservation would not have been received. I would always worry about this, for my entire life, checking in at airports, at hotels. I would always worry that I had made some mistake. He read down the list. A minute. At least it was still daylight. At least the sun was shining. Two minutes.

  He smiled and handed me a key.

  He walked
with me to my room, in Block Two, on the ground floor.

  He showed me around. My post box in his office area. The communal kitchen in Block Two. The television room. My own room.

  Small. Modern. Stylish. Clean as a whistle.

  As Danish as Danish could be.

  A bed, a wooden desk with a red trim, a grey armchair. Bookshelves. My own bathroom. A sliding door, a French window, opening on to the narrow lawn. A small willow tree outside.

  I lay on the bed, for a moment, relieved to have a bed, a room, a door key. My rent I had paid a month in advance. In September, my scholarship money would start coming in. The scholarship was £250 pounds a month – 2,500 kroner. The rent was £80. I didn’t know if I would have enough to live on. But in my straw basket I had enough money to live for a month.

  There was the problem of the suitcase. No clothes apart from those on my back. And – another surprise – the room contained no bed linen, no towels. No blanket. It was basically furnished, and in the communal kitchen all necessary cooking utensils and crockery and so on were provided. But I had to get a sheet and some sort of bed cover, and a towel. Or two?

  In Albertslund Centrum was an Irma supermarket, a bakery, a hardware store, and a drapery of kinds. Also a library and a cinema. I bought a thin duvet, a sheet and a towel in the drapery. Shopped for food in the Irma.

  The food thrilled me. It was quite different from what I was used to. Rye bread. Liver pâté. Marinated herrings. Real coffee. Going around the supermarket was an adventure.

  The first days in a new place are the most memorable. In the case of Copenhagen, they were memorable because they were difficult, a hassle. Never again would I arrive in a new country so unprepared, so ignorant of how things worked. Nobody – my parents, Bo, Oliver – had asked the question: where will you go when you land in Copenhagen at nine o’clock on Friday night? My parents had no clue about foreign countries. They never travelled abroad. Denmark might as well be the moon as far as they were concerned. Bo I had not seen for some weeks prior to my departure. He had gone to Kerry, as he always did, around the start of July, and he wasn’t even aware of the details of my travel plans – otherwise the question might have been asked. Oliver had recent experience of travelling as a student. But on his first arrival in Ireland he had stayed with a family. Families are like aunties; always at home, early or late, when they’re expecting a guest. On his subsequent arrivals, he had friends to fall back on – me and my family in the first instance. So maybe it hadn’t occurred to him to ask the question: what happens when you arrive?