My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen

Author:Liz Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

On my return, Fergus saw my distress & was most solicitous, but I would not tell him what had transpired, save that I had had an argument with some fellow Danes, & so the chilly splinter – already well embedded – dug itself deeper, & there was a terrible silence between us until finally he sighed deeply & said, ‘Lottie, I’ve been doing some thinking. I love you, & I want to be with you, hen. I want to marry you. But –’

‘Marry?’

‘Yes. Does that idea appeal to you, sweetheart? Do they do marriage on Venus?’ (O, reader! Hold my hand! Do you feel it tremble?) ‘But if you won’t tell me about yourself—Well, how can I give myself to a woman who won’t do the same for me? We have to at least start from a basis of equality, hen.’

O, beloved! Do you think he would still want to marry me, if he knew the truth? All at once I felt the squeeze of two insistent incompatibilities: together, they were crushing my heart.

‘I’m going to fetch Josie,’ he said. ‘So you have till I get back.’

Tick, tock.

I have learned that in English, time is a commodity that can be made, stolen, bought, wasted, trodden, marked, put off, & raced against. That things can happen from time to time, all in good time, time & time again. That from time immemorial, ‘Old Father’ Time has been considered precious, & of the essence, that there is a time to live & a time to die, a time to love & a time to hate, & a time to read ‘Useful Temporal Expressions’ in Herr Dogger’s recommended tome, Infinite English Grammar by Professor H.W. Biggs-Gusset, all the while scarcely able to hold back your tears, for you are about to take another dangerous leap into an unknown fate.

‘I was born in Jutland in 1872,’ I blurted as soon as the door opened, ‘& raised in an orphanage. In 1888 I ran away to Copenhagen but Fru Schleswig followed me.’

Fergus, still removing his jacket, looked bemused, & Josie intrigued.

‘You wanted to hear my story?’ I continued. ‘So now you listen.’

‘A story?’ asked Josie. ‘Can I hear it too, Lottie?’

‘This one is not for children, min lille skat, I said. ‘It is full of boring grown-up pølsesnak!

‘Chock-a-block with tedious twaddle, pet,’ affirmed Fergus, & ushered his daughter to the living room, where he fed a video of her beloved Spiderman into the machine & I brought her a plate of lemon biscuits I had cooked that morning, for Love had turned me into a creature quite unexpectedly fired up with domesticity. When Fergus came back he sat opposite me at the kitchen table and said, ‘OK. Let’s take this slowly. Did you say eighteen something?’

‘Eighteen hundred and seventy-two,’ I said. ‘July 4th. In Copenhagen I did a dancing show with Else, we were the Østerbro Coquettes. But then she had an accident, & fell on the skin of a pig & her father died

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