Page 43 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
“I was only supposed to be in the city for the day and got snowed in. Jamie is letting me stay.”
The old lady’s eyes light up at that. “Han er vel nok en flink ung mand,” she says, to which Anna can only agree, heisa nice young man. “Og et skår,” Anne-Grete adds with a naughty smile, sending Anna into a little coughing fit. She cannot wait to tell Jamie, the octogenarian next door thinks he’s hot.
Anne-Grete asks Anna how she is, and she tells her a little about her life in London, making it sound as shiny and exciting as she can.
“And Ida?” she asks of her mother.
“Still moving around. I added a tracker to her phone so I could know where she is,” Anna confides.
The old lady chuckles, though Anna doubts she knows what a tracker is.
“Hun har altid haft ild i rumpen,” says Anne-Grete. She’s always had fire in her bottom is a fairly apt assessment, thinks Anna. “She could never settle as a child,” Anne-Grete goes on. “Always a handful for Vivi and Mads.”
Anna’s well aware that teen-Ida was a challenge to hermormorandmorfar.
Anne-Grete looks at her with a sad expression at the mention of Vivi and Mads, clearly missing them. “They were such good people, gave her such a stable childhood, but it was like she saw it as a prison.”
“Yeah, she’s not good with permanence,” is all Anna can really say to this, unkeen to dwell on her grandparents too much, lest she should burst into tears again. The cemetery incident had really caught her by surprise. And also, because she can’t explain why Ida is as she is. She doesn’t truly understand it. Anna never saw stability as a prison. She relished living here as a teen, and also as an adult, but then, that was before she saw stability was really just an illusion; Vivi and Mads died, and Carl cheated. She’s long concluded you can’t see what’s beneath stability, what foundations are truly there, and eventually it crumbles. So, maybe Ida is right in her outlook. She shudders at that thought.
“You’re cold,” says Anne-Grete. “Go in.”
Anna bends to give her a hug, feeling how bony and frail the woman has become in the last year and a half.
“Take good care of yourself,” she says with genuine affection and a kiss to the cheek. Anne-Grete could have used this moment to delve into what happened with Carl, or harangue her for not visiting, but she hasn’t. She’s always been kind like that.
Anna, on the other hand, is not above a little gossip and bounds towards her door to tell Jamie that Anne-Grete thinks he’s a hottie. It might at least lessen the awkward politeness between them.
ChapterNineteen
There’s a note from Jamie on the table when Anna makes it inside house, saying he’ll be back before dinner. She’s touched he’s inclined to let her know, but gutted she can’t tease him immediately.
She tidies the living room and then the kitchen, filling the time. Finally, taking a leaf out of Anne-Grete’s book, she makes herself a coffee, grabs a blanket and sits outside on the bench in her front yard, enjoying the afternoon sun on her face and the sounds of the city.
The coffee aroma wends its way up around her nose and she’s grateful for it. This, the crisp Copenhagen air, coffee and a warm coat and warm feet, this is what she sees when she envisages her birth city in winter. And shehasenvisaged it. Much as she’s decided to relegate the city to her past, shun it for new, Carl-and-Maiken-free pastures, it’s impossible to always keep her mind on track. Her heart has some say, too, and every so often an image will appear in her mind’s eye of something she’s once loved. Or she’ll see something Copenhagen-based in her Instagram feed, even though she’d been on an unfollowing spree for all those accounts once she moved. Or someone will tell her they’re off to Copenhagen for a long weekend or on business and every instinct will fire to tell them where to visit and what to see, while revelling in her memories of doing exactly what she describes. Now, she has a Word document she offers to email them, to divert the conversation elsewhere.
She closes her eyes and lets the afternoon light drape her face, her chin resting on one hand. She’s not meditating, she’s never had the patience or self-discipline for that, but she is trying to calm her thoughts, to just be here, in the moment, in her front yard, alone save for a robin who is busying himself around the snow piles. Every so often she’ll sip the coffee, but it’s an automatic motion, as she focuses on the sounds around her; the chirp of the robin, the hum of a car passing at the end of the street and the scent of snowy air. It brings a light smile to her face.
Her pocket buzzes and Anna pulls out her phone to see a notification from an airline, for their incoming New Year sale. It makes her growl. They should be concentrating on their backlog, by which she means her, not teeing up customers for next year’s travel. Prompted, though, she swipes through the site and some others, now on autopilot, after several days of scouring them.
And there, on the last site she tries, is a ticket. They must have had a cancellation. For Christmas Eve. The price is eye-watering, and it is still days off, but it’s the only ticket she’s seen given the backlog. The cursor blinks impatiently at her. She could forgo food for a couple of days to afford it, she supposes. And turn her heating off, too. The thought of it makes her shudder. It wouldn’t be so bad in the summer, but over Christmas, that’s a nightmare. But she needs to get home, and she’s been checking every day for exactly this, so agreeing with herself she can spend the days huddled under her duvet, living off cheap popcorn, she’ll make the sacrifice. She fills in her credit card details and hits confirm. The dial spins in front of her. On and on, nothing happening.
She waits and eventually her patience runs out. She hits refresh and tries again. Only now the ticket is gone, and the plane is sold out.
Anna lets out a yowl of indignation and frustration at having lost out on the ticket she really couldn’t afford.
“How is this happening?!” she whines to the robin. But she knows full well. It’s Christmas. People are travelling home and back, and there’s a backlog from the cancellations and she appears simply to be at the back of the queue.
The last of her coffee has grown cold and she stretches to tip it out into an old plant pot behind her in a corner, half-filled with soil, old autumn leaves and now snow. She gives it a hard look, wondering why she’d left it like that. Searching back through her memory she has some inkling of repotting something indoors the weekend before things went sideways, perhaps Mormor’s Swiss cheese plant in the living room? The pot must be its own little biosphere by now, and a sodden mush under the layer of snow on it, save for the small brown hole from the coffee dregs.
Gazing at it, an odd feeling creeps over her, as some memories connect, something about the day things had gone shitwards, something Anna had done in the haze of it all.
The smile slips off her face as she pieces it together and hopes that it isn’t, in fact, true. A quick check of her forehead is disappointing; no fever there to be giving her hallucinations. Bugger. Reluctantly, she finds a stick and starts having a drag around in the pot and pulling it up every so often until she finds what she’s hoping she won’t.
“Fuck,” she sighs. “Anna, you idiot.”
Full-on recollections pop into her head now and she feels shame fill the rest of her body. She takes a quick squiz out towards the street and the houses that overlook the yard, in case anyone’s watching. Satisfied she’s unobserved, but feeling very shifty, she lifts the item from the end of the stick. Grubby and wet with coffee, meltwater and eighteen months of plant decay and insect excretions, it’s a long chain, attached to a large golden locket.
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