This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

11

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.