This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

16

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.