Page 3 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
That panic? It ramps up several notches. It’s not just that she can’t leave Copenhagen, although that is the most immediate thing making her breath come in short painful pants, but beneath it, the hidden part of the iceberg, is a dread that she can’t leave full stop, that escape is impossible. And it almost brings her to her knees.
“Really?” she asks, in a pathetic whisper. Can this really be true? Nowadays and at a Nordic airport, which knows about snow, that owns twenty-six snow ploughs? “Really, really?”
A vibration on her wrist demands her attention.Flight SK642 is cancelled. Further information to follow, her watch confirms.
The official looks at her with pity. “We can’t send planes out in snowstorms. Nature decides sometimes.”
Much as she’d like to– very, very much in fact– Anna can’t argue with that.
ChapterThree
Both hotels at the airport are full. Of course they are. Huddled for warmth in the reception area of the second, Anna calls the five next nearest, with the same result.
It seems many, many planes have been cancelled, and while Anna was oblivious and chilling her bones in the snow, all the world’s passengers have raced to the hotels and bagsied the rooms, so there isn’t one for her. She’s even enquired about the sofas in the reception, but the clerk said “Nej.” Harsh. So much for people pulling together in the face of adversity. And she hopes, like in a Hallmark movie, one of the guests might offer her the pull-out in their room or, if a dish, then the other half of their just-one-bed, but none of that has been forthcoming yet. Anna is left bedless, warming her fingers at the three lit candles on the reception desk.
“Perhaps you should try back in the city?” the clerk suggests, but kindly offers her a paper cup of coffee. Anna’s hands are around it in a second, not about to pass up a direct heat source. Yes, she supposes, she could. But maaaan she doesn’t want to. She wants to stay out here, near the terminal, so she can be away as soon as the flights reopen. She doesn’t want to go back in there.
“Or maybe you know someone in Copenhagen? They might have a sofa?” Now, she gets it. He wants the vagrant lady to leave. The coffee is just to assuage his guilt about casting her out into nature’s wrath.
“Thanks,” she mutters, ignoring the hint, but savouring the warmth of the steam and the glorious smell of coffee that wraps around her slowly defrosting face.
“God Jul,” he says. Happy Christmas, indeed. She feels her hand clench into a fist at that. Really. Mocking is a poor look on hotel staff and she’ll be telling Tripadvisor as much, once she gets home. And to a charging point. Her phone is down to the last twenty per cent of juice.
She wolfs the coffee, relishing the heat as it snakes down her insides. Mmm, Danish coffee; strong, thick and not necessarily appreciated by other nationalities. Pulling her stuff together, she braces herself and with a couple of silent words of encouragement, gets up from the now damp sofa. She absolutely, one hundred per cent, does not want to put her sodden coat back on, but has little choice. Leaning her forehead against the glass of the doors, she’s not quite ready to venture out in the snow. But what are her options?
In the old days she would automatically have called Maiken when anything bad happened, but that’s not an option, now or ever again.
All the hotels she calls from the train are full. All of them. Transport plans have been banjaxed for everyone, whether the intercity trains, the motorways or the planes. People, it would seem, have simply dug in, extending their existing hotel bookings, which must please the hotels no end, as no one is arriving in the city now, either. There’s only the less salubrious hotels on the back side of the central station left… but she’s loath to think about what’s gone on on those mattresses, frankly.
Starving now as she surfaces at Kongens Nytorv, she navigates the dilemma of a hot dog from apølsevognon the street or cake in a café. Head wins over heart as the café offers her warmth. She orders a coffee and ahonninghjerte, a heart-shaped cake of honey and Christmas spices, which is pure nostalgia for Vivi’s kitchen, in cake form. Yes, she could have picked something fancier, but sometimes you just need as close to Mormor’s baking as you can get. Her tastebuds are assaulted with memories, of Christmases with Mormor and Morfar, sometimes with her mother, sometimes not, but also of Christmas afternoons with friends at Christmas markets, the spices rich in the air around the stalls, and nibbling on the hearts as they walked.
It prompts her to scroll through her contacts, like the hotel receptionist had suggested. She has friends. Really, she has. Or rather she has had. All good women who had called and texted her when she’d left the city so abruptly, but who she’d sort of not responded to more than a cursory,Don’t worry I’m fine.
A sense of shame washes over her. They’ve repeatedly reached out to her, and she’s brushed them away until they finally stopped. She wants to think they’ve decided to give her space, but then perhaps they’ve given up on her. She certainly hasn’t checked in on them like a good friend would.
She wonders which of them would be most forgiving. Signe, perhaps, an old colleague from her first job. She lives in the city rather than the suburbs, which clinches it.
Anna takes a deep breath, prepares the first line of her humble pie, hits dial. There’s a long time before the dialling tone sounds and it definitely isn’t the Danish one. Anna ends the call quickly. Signe and her husband Jonas have a liking for travelling to hot places to dose up on vitamin D during the darkest month. The thought of their empty apartment in Christianshavn is almost enough to make Anna weep. Had she kept in touch with her friends, nurtured those relationships as she’d once done, had she actually let them know she was coming, she might be safely sat in Signe’s apartment in the blink of an eye, dry and feet warming up on Signe’s heated floor. If only.
Thoughts of the fun she’s had with her friends seep into her mind. The way they’d laughed and had a short-hand language, how easy things had been. Howhonest. (Or so she’d thought.) If she’d told them she was coming, if she’d arrived a couple of days early, she could have caught up with them, seen their lovely children, laughed. Instead, she’d sat alone in her London apartment, the one she is paying waaay too much for just to get a view. A new view. A replacement view.
So Signe is off the table. Katrine, then, her long-time friend and boss at the e-publishing house. They’ve kept in touch mainly via text, but she’s one of the few who knows what went down eighteen months ago. Anna calls but is met with the engaged beeps. Katrine doesn’t believe in voicemail, because writers can be needy things and it’d always be full.
Everyone else lives too far out of the city and the overground trains are suspended. Her options are looking few and bleak.
Anna weighs things up. She can go door-to-door at the questionable hotels behind the station, but it’s getting dark now and she might be mistaken for a sex worker. It would have to be the very, very last resort. Or she can chance the one place she’s been studiously trying to ignore all day. A place which technically she has a right to, but morally doesn’t. A place which would soundly rely on the kindness of a stranger.
She digs about in the secret pocket of her bag for the key, which has lain untouched there all these months. She won’t use it, that would be wrong when someone else lives there now, a paying tenant. But she can at least use it to prove she’s the landlord. And the little key which hangs on the ring with it, next to the wooden Viking key fob, will give her access past the padlock, to everything she’s left behind, including a bed and a wardrobe full of dry, weather-appropriate clothes.
Her frozen feet make the decision.
* * *
Kartoffelrækkerne are eleven streets of houses between the water of Sortedams Sø and the ramparts of Østre Anlæg park in central Copenhagen. Dubbed the “Potato Rows” for their linear formation, the triple-floored terrace houses were built around 1889. Anna’smorfarhad been born to this house, which his parents had inherited from hisfarfar. Anna had lived in it from her teenage years and been left it when Morfar died. The small streets are tight knit both physically and metaphorically, the neighbours looking out for each other in a way that is not perhaps typical for capital cities. Anna wonders briefly what her neighbours Niels-Christian and Dorte, and Anne-Grete on the other side, had made of her vanishing and a stranger moving in. There’s that twist of shame again. She should have called them, told them personally what was going on. But then they probably hadn’t missed her throwing Carl’s belongings out of the door into the front yard. That hadn’t been her finest hour.
Just as one never forgets how to ride a bike, apparently walking from Østerport station to her street is still a matter of muscle memory. Which is a good thing, given the now blizzard and her having to squint the entire way. She can barely move, she’s so cold. Her hands have cramped into fists inside her coat and while her hat is still on her head, it’s not because it’s warm, but because it’s soaked through, partially frozen, and she doesn’t want it to get anything in her bag– particularly Pølse– wet. Before she commits to entering the street, she tries to call Katrine again, barely able to hold the phone in her cramping hand and hit the buttons. Still engaged.
She takes the plunge.
