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hannahssimblr · 10 hours ago

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I am helping Gitte in the kitchen. The extractor fan roars, and everywhere there are spills, a toppled bag of sugar, a sticky puddle of redcurrant jelly, bay leaves, onion skins and needles of rosemary litter the floor underfoot. I open the oven to a billowing waft of steam. “I think the thing is ready.”

“The potatoes or the pork?”

“The pork thing. What’s it called again?”

“We can call it roast pork for you.”

“Yes, but what’s the proper name?”

Gitte chuckles and pulls an oven glove over her hand. “We say Flæskesteg, but you don’t need to.”

“Flæskesteg,” I murmur it, and Astrid’s sisters laugh. They can’t contain themselves each time I attempt something in Danish. “Oh, it’s wrong!” they’ll cry, delighted by my ineptitude. “Not like that,” and they’ll make me repeat a word, four, fives times until it is right. It feels like blind luck. My ear cannot pick up on the tiny discrepancies, and I won’t remember the right way in ten seconds, but I enjoy entertaining them. The Christmas-eve-dinner clown.

“Now say ‘rødgrød med fløde’,” says Mia, the middle sister, taking a knife to the red cabbage, and behind her comes an exasperated groan from Astrid. “God, stop bringing that up. He cannot say it. How long will it be funny to you?”

“It’s alright,” I interject swiftly. “It’s good for me to learn. If I want to really know who Astrid is, then I should know her in her native language, so… every little helps.”

“How romantic,” says Pernille, the eldest, distracted as she pries her eight-month-old’s fist from her earring. “And what have you learned so far?”

I grin, self-indulgent. “Vi snakkes ved.”

Everyone applauds, and I bow.

“That’s just something he’s heard me say on the phone,” says Astrid in this apologetic voice, as though personally responsible for my total incapacity for languages. “I’ve been teaching him more, but many of the sounds are difficult.”

“Like teaching a baby, then,” Mia says. “You go through the alphabet sound by sound.”

I smile at the infant behind her, drool all over his chin while Pernille bounces him on her hip. “We’re in this together, you and me. Right, Felix?”

He gurgles.

“Ah, my phone,” Pernille says, reaching for her pocket. The baby squirms. “Hold him, won’t you, Astrid?”

My girlfriend pales. “Oh, well–”

“Just for a moment. Take him.”

Astrid holds him at arm’s length. Her chubby, giggling nephew kicks the feet buttoned inside his bodysuit. She grimaces. “Hey.”

Mia calls after Pernille. “It’s Jacob?”

“Ha! No,” she shoulders through the door and into the hallway.

Gitte purses her lips. “Hold him correctly, Astrid. With his head supported.”

“I don’t know how,” she whines. “I’m not good with babies. They don’t like me.”

“Nonsense.”

“They don’t,” Mia snipes. “They are born with an instinct about her.”

“Oh, give him to me,” Gitte abandons her saucepan and marches to retrieve the baby. “Look, like this,” she says, holding him against her chest. “Really, Astrid, it is not difficult.”

She shrugs. “Okay, sorry. I just don’t know.” She joins me in the kitchen, muttering to herself as she washes her hands in the sink. Her movements are short and jerky, yanking open the drawer, pots and pans clanging as she pulls one free. Whack onto the stove, ignitor clicking, blue flame roaring to life, but I am happy watching her. She’s more real here, in Denmark, than she has ever seemed before. Astrid, with that pouty face, talking back to her mother. The tone of voice she uses — she never uses that around me. In Berlin, she is so cool and indifferent, keeps the world at an arm’s length, impassive, unphased, but here she is something else completely.

Yesterday, when we arrived, I zeroed in immediately on a childhood photo hung in the hallway. Little Astrid with a shock of white hair, sitting in a paddling pool in a pink swimming costume. “Oh my God, look!” I said. “Proof you used to be a child. I’ve rumbled you, Larsen. You thought you had me fooled.”

“Oh, stop,” she said. “I hate that picture. I’ll go through the house and take them all down if you can’t contain your excitement.”

I found more later anyway, in the study, among the books on shelves in the living room. Casual ones, candids of her finger painting at the kitchen table, or scowling in a photography studio at eleven, maybe twelve, that awkward age where a child becomes conscious of themselves, gap toothed with braces, shrinking away from the lens. I wanted to take a photo on my phone just to prove it was real.

“I hope you aren’t missing your family too much today,” Pernille says, at dinner, now, the table flanked on three sides by windows so coated in condensation from our cooking that they have obscured the expansive view of the fjord. At four, the sun is mostly gone, and we sit in candlelight.

“No, I’m delighted to be here, actually.” I scoop potatoes onto my plate. “Christmas at home is always the same thing, and I get fairly tired of it. It’s pretty cool to learn about other traditions.”

“Well, your family will miss you, I’m sure,” says Gitte, and I nod. “Yes, I’m sure they will.”

At the head of the table, in his high chair, Felix gurgles with delight. His pureed food smeared on his face, on his bib and on the tray. He decides to eat it off without his hands, and Pernille tuts, “Oh, Felix,” she says, and soothes him with gentle Danish as she attacks him with a wet wipe. Gitte watches on with adoration.

“Your first Christmas with a baby in the house for quite a while,” I comment.

“Ah!” she says. “Yes. I love babies. They are wonderful to have around.”

“Lucky for us, you stopped at three,” Mia says. “This house hardly fit us as it was.”

“It fit the babies, but maybe not quite the personalities.”

I’ve got Felix’s attention now, pulling stupid faces at him. My peekaboo skills excite him so much he is bouncing around in his seat, hands waving about like he wants to applaud me but doesn’t know how yet. I add in some sound effects to up the ante, all sorts of “yoop!” noises to accompany the visual comedy. He laughs with sheer glee. Joyful little shrieks.

“See?” Astrid says, throwing an exasperated hand. “I do that for him, and he doesn’t like it. He just looks away from me, completely bored.”

“He knows you don’t mean it. And by the way, you don’t do that.” Mia circles the tines of her fork in my direction. “Definitely not so energetically.”

“Well, I’ve made faces for him. I’ve tried.”

“You’ve never made a face so expressive in your whole life. Maybe you’ve gone so far as to grant him a weak smile with your mouth closed, but that is all.”

“I have certainly smiled, Mia. I know how to smile.”

“Well, I am sure you are used to it being enough to get a man’s attention, but you might have to actually try with an infant.”

Gitte shuts her eyes and clutches her forehead as though wrestling a migraine. “Please don’t argue. Not today.”

I roll a potato around the centre of my plate. “If it makes you feel better, it’s kind of something you learn. If you haven’t been around babies that much, then I can imagine it’s hard to know what to do. To be honest, I kind of know babies, so.”

Pernille, then. “You have babies in your family?”

“No, not right now, but my sister is quite a lot younger, so I’m used to the whole baby thing. Actually, sometimes I still kind of forget she’s not a baby, like, I used to be giving her bottles and spooning pureed food into her mouth and now she’s, like, painting her nails and going to the cinema without parental supervision.”

“And what age?”

“She turned eleven in September, so there’s nine years between us.”

“She was a surprise baby?” says Mia, and I huff out a laugh. “Well, no. I was the surprise. She was the plan.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine. I’m not, like, upset about being accidental. It’s just the facts.”

“So, are your parents married?”

Astrid interrupts before I can reply. “It’s not polite to ask personal questions. Jude doesn’t want to talk about that.”

I hesitate, awkward about being spoken for, but shrug at Mia as the conversation moves swiftly on. This has become a pattern for Astrid and I, skirting around personal things, but never delving in deeply for fear of, I don’t know what. Vulnerability? Becoming too emotional about it all? I know the same level of detail about her life as she knows about mine. I know why her father isn’t here, about the acrimonious divorce, the other marriage, and the other child. There was the nameless stepfather, too, “our wicked stepfather,” come and gone within three years, leaving nothing much behind but a contempt in the sisters for American canned-laughter comedy shows and motorcycle enthusiasts. I don’t know how Astrid feels about that. Not really, but assume she doesn’t care. There are reasons, naturally, for her mutual contempt for Mia. But they are mysterious, sisterly reasons, too tedious to share. Astrid doesn’t bother to explain herself. Doesn’t need me on her side, when she already knows she’s right.

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I want to thank the amazing @sirianasims for her help during this entire arc. I knew hardly anything about Denmark, and knew I had written myself into a corner when I decided to making Astrid Danish in Lucky Girl just for the hell of it - I never predicted a visit to her home. For teaching me about Christmas traditions and recipes, common baby names, tidbits of language, and helping me to understand what it feels like to be in Denmark, this arc would not be remotely accurate without Siri's guidance <3

#lucky boy 2011 #almost 2012 though woo #remember what Evie was doing in her timeline?#fighting with her family and then attacking kelly in the pub #lmaoo mess #very excited for this arc anyway #because i think it's interesting #plenty of relationship stuff #and what is this story about but relationships

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