This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

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.