This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

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.

She kept waking up that night and smiling at him in the dark. She lay and watched the clock turn seven and eight before getting up. She crept out to the bathroom and got herself ready. At nine she put the coffee on. At half nine she made the toast. At ten she made some more, but it was half ten by the time she heard him stir. She sat up in her chair and forced a smile.

‘Sleepyhead,’ she said when he came in.

‘Mm,’ he said and touched her shoulder. He sat down and took a piece of toast.

‘I’ve had mine,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait any longer. I waited ages. I always look forward to breakfast.’

He pulled a little corner off and put it in his mouth. She thought: I need to be broad-minded now.

‘I imagined we’d have breakfast together,’ she said.

And then a moment later:

‘A grown man lying in until half past ten.’

He paused for a second in the middle of his toast, then carried on munching. He had another cup of coffee and went to the bathroom. She sat looking out of the window at the traffic below, a pedestrian saw her and waved. She didn’t wave back. A good bit later he came in again, he had his coat and rucksack on. He lifted a couple of fingers by way of goodbye.

‘Cheers for now, then,’ he said.

Her lips were so tight she couldn’t get a word out. She sat, rigid, at the table for nearly an hour. Eventually she got the better of herself and went over to his, but there was no answer. She found a crumpled piece of paper in her bag and wrote: Did you go because you were going, or have you gone? She folded it up and put it through the letter box. She’d seen him once since, on his way in to the Kvickly supermarket. He saw her too. They both turned away. Annoyingly, he was quicker.

Anyway, her upstairs neighbours hadn’t been able to make a go of it either, and they’d been together more than eight years. Dorte could hear the woman crying at night. She’d bumped into her on the stairs too. She looked like she’d been steeped in chlorine.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘because I can see she’s having a hard time of it. I just don’t understand how it can hurt that much. I mean, she’s still young. Her future’s wide open.’

‘She must miss him,’ I said.

‘Yes, but still.’

‘Perhaps it’s like if you were never going to see me again,’ I said.

‘Do you think? I can’t imagine that at all. What a terrible thought.’

‘That’s probably what it’s like then.’

‘Oh, that’s awful. Do you know, I might just pop in on her with a little bunch of something once I’ve got a minute,’ she said.