Page 13 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

“Shut it, MacDonald. Smugness is not pretty.”

“Where do they kayak to next, do you know?”

“Kayak Bar,” Anna replies, thinking of the canal-side bar near the parliament building, where she has spent many summer evenings drinking by the water. “I believe they normally serve cups of bouillabaisse and bread rolls tonight.”

“Fancy that for dinner?” asks Jamie.

Her smile tells him she does.

* * *

The night is clear, the stars pricking the ink-black sky, so they take a circuitous route, walking over the cycle bridge then through Christianshavn, passing the houseboats which are gloriously decorated for Christmas.

Then they cross back over the harbour via Knippelsbro almost as far as B?rsen, the stock-exchange, but dropping down steps just before, to the bar which perches against the water.

They talk as they walk, Jamie explaining how he knows Mikkel from work, whose grandfather owns the boat.

He tells her about the wedding he’d been to, plus a few others, and Anna is impressed.

“You don’t seem to have any problem making friends,” she says.

“What do you mean?” he asks. “I’m a friendly guy.”

Anna snorts.

“What?” he demands, offended.

Anna rights her face. Should she poke this wasp nest? She’s leaving soon, she reasons, egged on by the gl?gg. Why not?

“Mikkel seems to like you, so OK. But my first experience of you wasn’t overly friendly.”

“I let you in,” he states.

“Before that,” she clarifies.

Jamie’s lips chew this over as they walk, his hands stuffed squarely in his pockets.

“Yesterday was … challenging,” he finally says. “The entire trip had been challenging. You caught the tail end of it. Last straws and that.”

“Difficult business meeting?”

He sighs. “Difficult parent. Five days of nonstop badgering to move back to Skye. Yesterday I just wanted to get home, to some peace.”

Well, Anna sees now that context has its place. “And being assaulted by a hot dog didn’t help?”

“Not so much.”

“If you’d hung around for the rest of my apology I would have offered to pay for some dry cleaning.”

Jamie’s eyebrow raises. “I don’t remember you offering during your other stalker moments.”

“Again, not stalking, just going the same way,” she says firmly, “and you’d been rude to me by then, so I’d retracted my offer. In my head.”

He rolls his eyes at her. Which makes her laugh. His is not a rolly-eyes face.

“I am friendly,” he says, grumpily.

“Let’s say that, then,” she says, deliberately making it sound like she’s placating him.

Mean, but he’d called her a stalker, so fair is fair.

“But Danes are a reserved people, and not always quick to let new people into their social circles,” she says, returning to the subject.

“I don’t think it’s meant to be rude, it might be more a wariness, but that’s what I’ve heard from many non-Danes who come to live here.

That said, once you’re in, you’re in – and you seem to have fast-tracked the selection process.

” Anna thinks of her first sixteen years, constantly moving, just managing to make friends before her mother uprooted her again.

She stopped bothering by her early teens, and while she might have played the education card in her case to stay with her grandparents, wanting friends was a large part of her motivation.

“I reckon you get what you put in. I’m normally friendly.”

“Even though you say you don’t always read people correctly?” She wants to know more.

He wrinkles his nose. “Sometimes I get it wrong. But I don’t want that to change me too much. I don’t want to be that person who assumes the worst of people up front. If that means I get disappointed sometimes, so be it.”

He managed to think the worst of her up front, she thinks, but bites her tongue.

Bad day and all that. Instead, “Hmm” is all she says as she considers his point.

If she’s honest, that’s how she’s come at most new people she’s met in the last year and a half.

That might explain why there’s no one she needs to phone in London to let them know she’s delayed.

Now she thinks of it, if anything happened to her – staying with a serial killer, for example – there wouldn’t be many people who would come and check on her.

Maybe her mother, when Ida eventually noticed the radio silence…

“You OK?”

“Fine,” she says with a forced smile and briskness. “Super.”

He doesn’t look fully convinced, but they’ve reached the soup station and ordering two bowls of hot fish soup with what looks like freshly baked bread rolls, is a welcome treat and subject-changer.

* * *

“It’s still my winner’s evening,” Jamie states.

The soup vanished in minutes, but then there were a few more cups of gl?gg consumed and Anna thinks he might be buzzed.

The bar serves them stronger than the street vendors.

She’s certainly feeling the effects herself, in that pleasantly tipsy way.

The happy mood in the bar is infectious.

The kayakers have made it back, to another rendition of the carol, plus further traditional songs once back on the solid ground of the bar deck.

Anna and Jamie have managed to get a table and, as well as their being warm in their bulky outwear, are wrapped in the blankets all the bars have to loan.

There are candles on every table, and strings of pastel-coloured lights the full length of the quayside bar, all of which is reflected in the harbour water, creating a nocturnal glow around them all.

Anna checks her watch to see if it’s gone midnight, but not even close. It’s only half eight. The darkness feels much darker here, thicker even, than back in London. Her concept of time is skewed. Or maybe that’s the gl?gg.

“What now?” she asks, hoping he’ll say “Home.” She’s been lucky so far. She’s seen only a single person she recognised, an old colleague, but they were on the other side of the canal and didn’t see her. Probably because she pulled her hood back over her head.

“Last stop for the night,” he says. “Tivoli.” She should say no, that she’s fulfilled her part of the bet and been out – or exposed, as she sees it – enough already, and more would be pushing her luck.

And yet. The gl?gg has done a good job; the mood in the city is bouncing and Tivoli’s Christmas lights have always been something special.

Thousands of lights in all the trees around the park in addition to all the Christmas trees they add for the season.

Christmas market stalls and the scent of hot, cinnamon-coated almonds.

And the screams and laughter from the rides – all this adds to the ambience and right now, the temptation.

“No rides,” she finds herself saying.

“Not even the Starflyer?” Just the thought of being spun in a swing round and round eighty metres above the city makes her stomach twist. “The view of all the Christmas lights across the city will be amazing from up there.”

“Not tonight, Jamie. Too much soup and gl?gg. I know my limits.” She doesn’t mind a ride, but not on a bellyful of fish soup. Barfing on tourists doesn’t feel very festive or welcoming, for that matter.

“Just the walk, then,” he concedes.

“Just the walk,” she says, and follows.