This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

18

I was named after Dorte because she couldn’t have children of her own. They’d given her the diagnosis when she was twenty and already married. It might have been the reason they split up. At any rate, her ex had four kids in no time by a seamstress in Tornemark. They bought a detached that turned out to be built on contaminated land. It cost them a fortune and they were stuck with the place. Dorte’s voice grew hollow when she talked about it, she was upset for them regardless. They didn’t have a penny to their name, they spent their summer holidays in camping chairs on the patio. Her ex had even done his back in, he fell off a carport. He was nearly fifty now and the only prospect he had left was the knacker’s yard, as Dorte put it.

She didn’t like talking about that diagnosis. Mostly because it had been so awful the day they told her. She’d cycled all the way to Køge to be examined. The doctor peered between her legs and shook his head.

‘Barren,’ he said.

She hadn’t grasped what he meant. Afterwards she stood for a long time in the waiting room with her coat in her hands, a bomber jacket in blue satin. Eventually she went up and asked the secretary, and the secretary fetched the doctor. He was in the middle of seeing his next patient and came and stood in the doorway with his gynaecologist’s headlamp on and his arms at his sides.

‘I said you can’t have children,’ he said, spelling it out, and Dorte stared back at him, she even smiled and thanked him for his time.

That was almost the worst bit. Then when she came out her bike had been stolen, she had to walk nineteen kilometres from Køge to Borup. It was a gorgeous evening in August. There were some young people on tandem bikes in the dwindling light, and couples lying in the wheat fields watching for shooting stars. It was the first time in her life she didn’t want to go on living. The bomber jacket was nearly see-through from tears by the time she got home. She stayed in bed for three days, my mum and dad came with cabbage soup. She was small and pale and hugged my mother like a child, burying her face in her apron. But on the fourth day she got up, she had a large brandy and went to the shop for a women’s magazine and turned down the corner of every page with nice clothes on it. Not long after that, she got divorced, moved to Roskilde and took her diploma, then lived in Jersie and even Copenhagen, three months in a butcher’s shop in Østerbro, before buying the business in Ringsted. It was her anchor all the time she kept moving.

The times I lived with her she always had a laugh sticking a note up next to her name on the door so it said Dorte Hansen x 2. Once, the postman rang the bell and asked what it was supposed to mean.

‘Exactly what it says,’ she told him.