by Helle Helle
I stayed in the shop for a couple of hours and helped her carve the roast and do the salad and oranges. She was trying out a new special as well, a kind of pastrami roll, I arranged fifteen of them on a tray. The rest she’d make as she went along. She stepped out the back with me when it was time for me to go. We stood chatting for a bit while she had a smoke, and then we gave each other a hug. She coughed over my shoulder.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ she said. ‘Are you slimming too much for some roast?’
‘I don’t suppose I am,’ I said, and she wrapped a piece of meat in greaseproof and put it in a carrier bag for me, along with two oranges, a packet of rye bread and three hundred kroner. I gave her a kiss on the cheek.
‘I haven’t even asked how you’re getting on with Hardy,’ I said.
‘Oh, fine,’ she said. So she wasn’t.
‘I’m glad,’ I said.
24.
One day when I was browsing on Larsbjørnsstræde one of the assistants from the big vintage shop was standing on the corner crying. It was the girl with the white hair and the shoes. She turned aside as I went by, but I could still hear her sobbing even though she tried to control herself. I crossed over to the other side and went into Janus. I’d seen some Mexican drinking glasses upstairs, but on closer inspection I wasn’t keen. I looked out of the window and could see she was still there. One of the other assistants came out and stood with her for a bit. Then they went back inside together. I tried on a baggy jumper and ended up buying it. It would go with a pair of leggings once I started wearing leggings. I’d been to that vintage shop lots of times, you could hardly cross the floor for lace-up boots, and their clothes were all jammed together on the racks: men’s shirts and suit jackets, and discarded pyjamas. Every time you pulled an item out, two others came with it. There was a sour, dusty smell about the place, which I liked. I bought a pair of leg warmers there once and wore them on my arms in the evenings in the front room when I was cold. The two assistants stood flicking through a notebook at the counter when I came in. I rummaged through a bin of underskirts while I waited for them to say something. I found a light blue one with white trim. Eventually, the one who’d been crying said:
‘But there were four of them.’
‘I know, that’s what I said,’ said the other. They looked down at me as I pulled the underskirt out. I looked at the size and examined the trim, then put it back.
‘It can’t ever have been five,’ said the one who’d been crying.
‘No, you’d be dead otherwise, wouldn’t you?’
I carried on browsing through the racks and bins, but unfortunately they didn’t say anything more after that. I could feel them looking at me. After a while I decided on a pair of woollen gloves and put them down on the counter. The one who’d been crying entered the amount into the till. I handed her a twenty-krone note and she said:
‘You do Danish, don’t you?’
‘Not me,’ I said.
‘Oh, I thought I’d seen you on the Amager campus.’
‘I thought so too,’ said the other one from behind a pile of shirts.
‘I recognised you from your cheeks.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and put the gloves in my bag. ‘It must have been someone else. Bye.’
‘Bye, then,’ they said.
I went down the stairs and out into the street. I walked back towards the Strøget, then went into a shop on the corner, through the shoes and upstairs to the women’s department. I took a random tweed coat off the peg and went into a fitting room. I looked at my face from all sides in the two mirrors, smiling and not smiling. After that I tried the coat on, it didn’t look bad at all. But then on the train home I decided to give it to Dorte. I’d never wear it anyway. I once heard her speak highly of tweed on a trip to Gisselfeld, a rare Sunday outing with my mum and dad to look at the old oak trees. We had coffee in a lay-by on the way back.
When I got off the train, the guy from the ticket office was sitting on the bench by the platform. The office was closed now, he was listening to his Walkman.
‘Finished for the day?’ I said as I went past. He was in his shirtsleeves, he took off his headphones and smiled.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said I see you’ve finished for the day.’
‘Oh, right. Actually, I’ve locked myself out,’ he said.
‘You haven’t? But you’re closed now, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah. I meant the flat.’
He jerked his head and pointed up at the first floor at the same time.
‘My keys are inside. My girlfriend’s off now though, I’m just waiting till she gets in.’
‘On the train?’
‘Yeah, she works in Vordingborg.’
‘So you’re the ones who live upstairs?’
He nodded.
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, I see now. You haven’t got far to work, then. Aren’t you cold like that?’
‘It’s not too bad.’
‘You can wait at mine if you want, I only live over there,’ I said, and pointed in the direction of the house. He nodded.
‘I know. It’s okay, she’ll be here soon.’
‘All right. See you, then,’ I said, and pulled the handle of the waiting-room door. It was locked, I wasn’t thinking. I shook my head at myself and smiled at him.
‘School for the gifted,’ I said in English. He nodded and looked a bit puzzled.
When I got round the corner I remembered the coat. I went back and took it out of the bag.
‘You can borrow this while you’re waiting,’ I said.
We sat on the bench together, with him in the tweed. He lent me the headphones and I listened to one of his favourite tracks. I listened without saying anything, now and then he gave me a nod and raised his eyebrows, and I nodded back. His hands were small and rather broad. The sleeves of the coat stopped short of his wrists. When the train appeared from between the trees he stood up. We were still joined by the Walkman, so I had to stand up with him. I removed the headphones and handed them back, he took off the coat and did likewise.
‘Thanks for your help. See you, then,’ he said.
‘Yeah, see you,’ I said and remained standing by the bench as the train pulled in. I turned, then folded the coat and put it carefully back in the bag. She came up to him, I could hear them behind my back.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi, what are you doing here?’
‘I locked myself out.’
‘It’s a good thing I’m early, then.’
‘You did say four.’
‘It could just as well have been five.’
‘I’d be dead by then,’ he said with a laugh, and I looked up and saw them disappear round the corner. Just as I thought, it was the girl who’d come over that night the picnic couple had stayed, but that didn’t matter now. I stood there with my coat in the bag and the coincidence of four, five, dead. It didn’t mean a thing, but still it was so weird I couldn’t get my head round it. I once saw a programme about a woman who saw signs everywhere, she did her shopping and her workouts and slept according to what she saw. Eventually she got divorced when everything else around her started coming apart as well, chairs and tools and stitching in particular. The stitching wasn’t relevant in itself, but like she said: a person sees and hears only what they want to. I walked home with my coat. I let myself in and made some coffee. The same programme had a bit on a little Austrian man who’d had the hiccups for twenty-eight years. I’d seen him in the papers, but all of a sudden there he was hiccuping away while he talked about his condition. He could have talked about anything at all, really. It might have been better if he’d talked about something else entirely.
25.
It rained. The parlour bench disintegrated on the cobbles. Hans-Jakob experimented with baking bread in the afternoons, trying out methods of raising and different kinds of flour. He did a very successful loaf in a pot and served it oozing with butter. Ruth asked to have her mouth taped shut after six
slices. Hans-Jakob got the first-aid tin out of the Volvo and snipped off a length of sticking plaster. He ran round the whole downstairs after her, she shrieked and squealed. I’d been at work that day, Ruth had insisted on giving me a lift even though she had no lessons because of exams. On the way, she picked up two hitch-hikers. One of them had dreadlocks. They spoke fractured German and were on their way to Sweden. They sat in the back and kept thanking us, they even gave us a bag of liquorice allsorts and a miniature bottle of cognac. Ruth dropped them off at the ring road and did the shopping while I helped Niller with his homework. After I was finished I waited for her under the roof of the bike sheds. She smiled and waved behind the steamed-up windscreen when she saw me, then leaned across the seat and opened the door.
‘Come in out of the rain. How was it?’
‘It was fine.’
‘It smells like a henhouse in here,’ she said. ‘But they were very sweet.’
‘I think it was really nice of you to give them a lift,’ I said. ‘A lot of people wouldn’t.’
‘They’d be kind in other ways instead. Do you want an allsort?’
‘Yes please.’
‘Is there anything you want while we’re out? Anything you need?’
‘No, not really.’
‘I got you this, by the way,’ she said, reaching for a carrier bag on the back seat. It was a book we’d read about in the paper, short stories about the future written by young people from the Storstrøm region. It had been reviewed under the headline ‘CARDBOARD AND CACK’. We drove a different way home. Ruth had heard about a place that sold honey from a stall in Alsted. We drove round and round but couldn’t find it. When we pulled out onto the main road again she asked if I wanted to stop by my mum and dad’s to say hello, but I didn’t.
‘I’d like to thank them, if I could,’ she said.
‘What for?’
‘What do you think what for?’ she said and smiled at me. I smiled back and offered her an allsort from the bag. She took two or three and drove with one hand on the wheel.
Just as Hans-Jakob caught up with her with his plaster, Ruth managed to open the patio door and ran outside into the rain in her socks. He stopped for a moment and swore, then ran out after her. We watched them from inside the house. They jigged over the cobbles, then he caught her by the barn. She squealed again. At the same moment, Lars came cycling up the drive in his waterproofs. It had been a while since we’d seen him last. He got off and wheeled the bike over and leaned it up against the wall. We could see them laughing together. Then they came back up to the house, Ruth’s hair was a wet curtain now, and their socks left puddles on the floor. Lars took his waterproofs off and dumped them in the utility room. We all stood and chatted for a bit in the kitchen, and then Ruth and Hans-Jakob said they were going to have a bath. They disappeared upstairs, we heard their footsteps above our heads, then a bit later the faint rush of water in the pipes. Per went to get a new LP he’d bought so we could listen to it on the stereo. We watched him from the kitchen window as he crossed over the cobbles in his wellies.
We went into the living room while he was gone. We looked out at the garden and the woods beyond the beech hedge. Their green was so pale it was nearly yellow. He put his hand on my shoulder, I turned towards him and then we kissed. Per came back with his LP. We sat on the sofa and listened to it a couple of times. The fire was burning in the stove. When Per went to the bathroom we kissed again. We had osso bucco for dinner, we laughed and talked and drank red wine, and I didn’t have a decent thought in my head, everything was pulling at me. We sat at the table until way past midnight. Lars stayed over and slept on the sofa, and I lay awake most of the night in the bedsit next to Per. His breath was heavy and warm. Around three I opened the window and heard a nightingale somewhere in the drizzle. It was all too much. I would never be able to share it with anyone, ever. Per stirred and whispered my name. I closed the window quietly and got back into bed.
26.
In the evenings I could see the guy from the ticket office in the upstairs flat with his girlfriend, walking about in what must have been the living room. His girlfriend was often in the kitchen. Every now and then she’d open the window and shake out a tea towel. I thought about what reasons there might be to shake out a tea towel. Sometimes he sat smoking at the living-room window. He sat with his chin in his hand, puffing little clouds of smoke out in front of his pale face. They had a big cowboy cactus, in one of the other windows. One night I had a letter to post, I was humming to myself as I walked over to the postbox with it. It was an application for a student loan. When I was almost right underneath him, he cleared his throat and I glanced about, startled, before saying hello.
‘Are you keeping warm all right?’ he said from above.
‘Just about.’
‘It’s starting to get cold now,’ he said, and took a drag on his cigarette. His cheeks hollowed in the dim light.
‘My central heating’s oil-fired,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘What about you, is yours from the network?’
‘No, we’re on oil too. The boiler’s down there. It heats the whole place up,’ he said, and twirled a finger in the air.
I nodded. He nodded too.
‘It must be a big boiler, then,’ I said.
‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know to be honest. It looks fairly normal to me.’
We both laughed. He stubbed his cigarette out on the window ledge and flicked it outside into the air. It landed under the lamp post, and then the toilet flushed. The bathroom door must have been opened at the same time, the sound was that clear. He smiled down at me.
‘See you around, then.’
‘Yeah, see you.’
I was going to have meatloaf, but when I stood in the kitchen with the minced meat and the box of eggs I decided I couldn’t be bothered. I boiled the mince and had it in a pitta bread with a bit of cucumber. I’d stopped eating at the table, I couldn’t enjoy my food sitting in front of the window. I put a removal box next to the armchair and used that as a table instead. I practised eating my food slowly, it was quite hard to do on your own. Dorte had a method she used when her clothes started feeling tight, she lit a cigarette and took a drag between mouthfuls. Besides that she could say no to almost everything. The best way to lose weight was to shake your head, she said.
It had turned really cold now. The floor was draughty and I traipsed about in my boots indoors. Sometimes the boiler went out and I had to fill it up with water, there was a special length of hose for the purpose. I’d filled it up quite a few times already. After a week the pressure dropped and the needle was in the red again. I didn’t know where it all went. When the boiler was going it was nice and hot in the utility room. I started drying my clothes in there, I’d hammered a couple of nails in the wall and put a clothes line up. Once, I sat and had my dinner there. I’d been sitting still so long in the front room I was frozen stiff. Afterwards I ran a bath and got in, but I couldn’t relax, I kept hearing something scratching as I lay there looking up at the ceiling. A bit of straw stuck out from a crack.
I went to bed conscientiously before midnight. I tossed and turned and kept deciding to get some exercise the next day. I counted backwards from increasingly high numbers. It did everything but send me to sleep. I’d put too much garlic in the mince, it had given me a stomach ache. I got annoyed with myself about everything: too much garlic and not enough money, my stupid prattling on about boilers to the guy from the ticket office. I got up again and stepped into my boots, put my dressing gown on over my T-shirt and went out into the front garden. I gave the apple tree a good kicking. It didn’t help, all it did was leave me out of breath. I stood there getting it back. The light from the street lamp slanted across the lawn. Then I heard a faint cough from over by the station, the ticket-office guy was having a smoke on the step. He was in his dressing gown too, a white one. Mine was pink. I didn’t think he’d seen me in the dark, but then he stepped down a
nd came over.
27.
I once asked Dorte if she felt just as besotted every time she found someone new. She gave a shrug.
‘Pretty much.’
‘What goes wrong then?’
‘I’m not sure anything actually goes wrong. Sometimes I’d rather be on my own all of a sudden. You know how awkward I can be.’
‘But do you get sick of them?’
‘I don’t know, it’s hard to explain really. Anyway, it’s not always me who ditches them. Take Henning, for instance,’ she said, and shook her head. We were sitting at her table with a sponge cake, it was raining. It might have been a bank holiday, at any rate she wasn’t going in to the shop. We’d had a long chat about her upstairs neighbours who had unexpectedly split up. Dorte was quite taken aback. She’d seen them holding hands at the cold counter only a few weeks before, they’d been looking at the salami.
‘What do you think?’ one of them said.
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ said the other.
She may well have felt like giving them both a kick up the arse, as she put it, but at the same time she couldn’t help feeling a bit envious. She thought: How come they can make a go of it when I can’t? Every time she found someone, she thought he was the one. Only then he’d turn out to have an annoying habit of droning on or putting jam on top of his cheese, or collecting bottles whenever they were out walking in the park so he could claim the deposit. Henning had done that. She couldn’t understand why he kept lagging behind. He even had a rucksack to put them in, but from the start she’d decided not to interfere. He was a journalist on the local paper, he read novels and biographies. He insisted on going home and sleeping in his own bed at night. She only went to his flat once, it was dark and untidy, but she didn’t interfere in that either. She gave him a key to her own place and wiped newspaper smudges off the door frames when he wasn’t there. After a few weeks she found herself pestering him to stay the night, it was a Saturday. He grumbled a bit at first, but after a while he gave in.