This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

4

My dad was given the tartan suitcase as a present when he finished his apprenticeship. It had been all the way to Hobro once. I borrowed it the second time I moved away from home. I’d got a job as an au pair in Vestsjælland looking after two kids and a golden retriever. I was eighteen. I was supposed to do the cleaning as well, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I only did the Monday and Wednesday then got a bus home again, the suitcase sliding around on the floor between the seats. I saw a corn field outside Havrebjerg.

After that the suitcase lived in my room. At one point it was a bedside table, the lamp threw a white cone of light on it all day long. I lay on the bed doing old crosswords with a biro. I didn’t have that many jobs to do, but I had to remember to turn my jeans inside out when I put them in the laundry bin.

In the afternoons I’d go for a walk. I walked further and further along the road before turning back. I came across Per Finland a lot, he didn’t know what to do with himself either. He spent the days driving about on his uncle’s mini loader and smoking Prince 100s. He’d joined the Young Socialists by mistake, he’d only gone to a party at someone’s house in Sandby. I started going home with him. He had a waterbed, it pitched and sloshed. His parents pottered about in the garden below. They couldn’t keep the weeds under control, they were both of them teachers. When it was time for me to go his mum would be doing her marking in the front room. One day she came out into the hall and said goodbye. Her hair parted like a pair of curtains.

‘I’m so glad you and Per have started seeing each other,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say, I couldn’t stop thinking about her hair.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and she nodded a couple of times. I hadn’t pulled my socks up properly in my boots, they bunched up under the arches of my feet.

‘Mind how you go,’ she said, and nodded again, then she went back to her marking.

The yard was covered in slippery sycamore leaves. I walked home over the fields, my boots got heavier and heavier. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Dorte came for dinner if she didn’t have a bloke on the go. The meat was always her treat.