It Adds Up

Fenna first read the lines above the figure. Then the figure itself. Then the lines above it again, in case something there meant she couldn't use it as she hoped. Her laptop stood on the kitchen table. Beside it she had put the notebook where for months she had recorded ordinary expenses she preferred not to judge by instinct.

The message had arrived on Tuesday afternoon, on her way home. Naja sent the conditional outline for six months with Nordspor. She wrote that Fenna should read it at her leisure before their conversation later that day. Fenna had taken off her shoes, opened her laptop and gone straight to the bottom line.

Fourteen hundred euros a month for her living expenses, in the budget converted for her. After the organisation's own deductions. The furnished room and bills were listed separately, as were track time, coaching and the programme's normal travel. They wouldn't give her a sum from which she still had to pay for all the cycling and her room. She read that passage again and drew a thick line beside it.

There were words intended to rein in her enthusiasm. Conditional. Final allocation. To be confirmed. She didn't find them unreasonable. She just immediately wanted to turn them into names for things that were settled.

Gita rang as Fenna wrote down her first questions. Her coach had now spoken to Naja. About the work Fenna did, her strengths and weaknesses, the ordinary weeks when nobody was there to admire a result. Fenna asked if they had discussed Alkmaar too.

'Yes.'

'At length?'

'Long enough. It's not a catastrophe I have to keep out of your life story.'

Fenna looked at the figures in her notebook. Suddenly she wanted Gita opposite her at the table so they could look at the message together without explaining all of it. At the same time she wanted to read and understand it herself. This was her possible six months, not a school trip with somebody else to sign the form.

'Does it look real?' she asked.

'It's a serious proposal. Ask Naja what's still missing. I'm not her accountant.'

'Neither am I.'

'Good. You've got something in common already.'

When the call with Naja began, a window behind the Danish coach showed it was almost dark outside. They were both at tables with laptops. Fenna found that more reassuring than she had expected. In her mind Naja had been somewhere between a track and a queue of people holding important papers. Now she ran a hand through her short hair and asked if the connection was good.

They spoke English. At the first question Fenna had to search briefly for the English for an ordinary word she used at work every day without thinking. Then it grew easier. Naja wanted to know what had changed since their last conversation. Fenna described the training, what she had wanted to see in Alkmaar and hadn't made happen. Not just the result. She tried to explain what she could change at the moment.

'You're not asking for another chance because everything's going wrong now,' Naja said.

'No. It's not going wrong. It's just not going how I want yet.'

'What do you want, then?'

Fenna's first answer came too close to winning. Naja waited. Her expression didn't help Fenna make a joke to escape her own impatience. So she had to start again. She described how often she had arranged a week round the times she could train, how she had had good periods and then been unable to build on the progress for a while. She wanted to know what would happen if those weeks joined up for once. If she didn't have to sort something out every time before she got to ride.

Naja nodded. 'And if you have a bad week here too?'

'Then I'll have a bad week somewhere I can carry on the next day. I don't think the country is the problem.'

Naja smiled. Fenna was more pleased than she wanted to show. She said she didn't expect to become a new person by crossing a border. She wanted to improve at what she already did. And yes, she wanted to know what it was like to have proper room for it for six months. She was thirty-two. She didn't have to pretend it could wait years before it mattered.

They discussed the group. Four women in the funded places, all with experience of their own. Naja would coach the sprints. The programme used hired track time near Ballerup. No permanent access at any hour Fenna happened to fancy. There was a programme she would join, with other people who had just as much reason to want something from it.

Fenna asked how the decision would be made. Not by waiting to see who had the best result at the end of January, Naja said. They were gathering information now. The sponsors had to confirm their contributions, the organisation allocate the places. The overall funding should be clear before that final period of racing. Individual confirmation and practical arrangements would follow.

'I can't ask you to give up your home and job on the strength of this document,' Naja said. 'But I do want to know whether, if it becomes what it says here, you'd like to come.'

'Yes,' Fenna said.

The answer was out before she had quite taken in the question. She laughed and began asking the questions she had written down. About the room. What was and wasn't included in the travel. About the months, starting in the first week of February. About the money she would have available after the organisation had dealt with its own costs.

Naja answered without finding the questions annoying. When something still needed confirming, she said so. Sometimes Fenna asked a second time in different words. That wasn't quite like her. When discussing a race, she preferred to act as if she understood everything at once. This was about where she would live and what remained to live a life of her own. She didn't want to sound clever and discover in February she had heard something different from what was meant.

When Naja had to finish, she asked if Fenna had anything else to say. Suddenly there was a great deal: that she had already thought about which bag to take, that she had probably read the outline more often since this afternoon than Naja herself, that she was quite afraid it still might not happen. She said she would love to come and, after the call, wrote down the questions that remained.

Then she stayed at the table. No grand gesture. She planted her feet on the floor and began to calculate.

In the Netherlands her job brought in about fourteen hundred and fifty a month. Her usual monthly costs were higher. Not extravagantly higher, but enough for the savings she had taken into winter to shrink slowly. Four thousand two hundred had been in the account. She knew that starting figure exactly because lately she had so often weighed it against another month's expenses.

In the Danish outline the biggest gap disappeared. Housing was separate. Regular cycling costs were separate. She listed her own ordinary expenses: food, phone, insurance, local transport. With some room for setbacks, she reached a figure that for once didn't immediately mean looking for extra shifts. There would be something left for journeys of her own too. She looked at that last part for a while. Not freedom to do everything. Enough not to have to find a reason every plan was impossible first.

She did the sum again, using a more generous estimate. It still worked. If she went, she had to speak to her landlord and finish up properly at work. She still had to ask whether she could leave her things somewhere with family. She wrote down what she wanted to find out once the opportunity became firmer.

At that thought she put down her pen. She had already given him a place among the things in her mind. Not as an expense. That was easy enough to tell herself. As somebody she wanted to be able to go to. She pictured him on his sofa, as he had sat on Saturday before they went swimming. She wanted to tell him there might be room in those new months. She had no idea yet what he would want to do with that room.

She didn't ring him straight away. She ate something, finished her message to Naja and sent it. Then she kept the laptop shut. She had heard the answers and checked the figures. Now she wanted to spend an evening with the idea without opening the outline again.

The next morning she spoke to the warehouse planner. After discussing the shift she stayed a moment to say something might change in February. The woman pushed back her chair and listened. An athlete talking about something other than work didn't surprise her; the fact that it meant months did.

'If it happens, do you want to leave?'

'Yes.'

'Tell me when you know a little more. Then we'll see how to wrap things up properly. I can't keep a place empty on the rota for six months.'

'I'm not asking you to.'

They agreed Fenna would return after the next concrete message. No leaving date had been set and no grand farewell begun. She simply went to work. Even so, she felt different as she worked through the orders that morning. A colleague asked whether she would still come bowling with the staff in January. She said, if possible, she would like to see whether everyone knew where they were going so confidently outside the warehouse too.

During their break Madelon asked why she looked like that. Fenna gave her the outline. Her friend listened, asked two practical questions and then talked about her own plans. She had had to swap a week to be free at the right time in December. The conversation turned naturally to her and Fenna liked that. This news didn't have to silence everyone else at the table for the rest of the day.

Standing outside after her shift, she took out her phone. Marten had sent a message about Saturday. Aydin and Madelon wanted to go to a quiz night. Did she fancy it too? She read it and smiled. Yes, she wrote. And was he at home, because she wanted to tell him something today.

He said he was. She drove to his without going home first. She still wore her work clothes and felt odd in them for a moment, until he opened the door and looked at her face rather than the trousers she wore every working day.

'Good news?' he asked.

'It could really happen. It adds up.'

He let her in and she began to tell him. Not the whole outline, not the costs she had already checked twice. She told him about Naja's questions, the group, the feeling that her name might come with a place that wasn't up for debate again every weekend. He listened and asked once if the money was enough simply to live on too. She nodded. Under the conditions as they stood, yes. That was what was new.

'That's quite something,' he said.

'I'm pleased about it. I want you to know.'

He smiled, came over and put his arms round her. She felt him laugh against her hair. It wasn't the same laugh as when she made a joke. She stayed against him until she wanted to look again. His hands rested on her back. She pulled him towards her and kissed him.

'I haven't got anything special in,' he said.

'Neither have I. It doesn't matter.'

'We could go and get something.'

'I want to be here for a bit.'

She looked round and saw his phone on the table. She asked if they could put some music on. He looked surprised, picked it up and found something they both knew. It took too long for her liking. She took his hand before the music began.

'Wait a minute,' he said.

'You can start any time.'

That wasn't entirely true. Before the first bar had even begun they were already laughing at their own haste. Then he found her rhythm, or she found his. She didn't know and felt no need to make a contest of it. He held her hand and drew her towards him. They turned slowly through his living room, close enough for her to imagine he understood what she couldn't quite explain yet.

She had wanted demanding things for so long that simply getting something she liked was a strange pleasure. His hand on her back. His mouth beside her temple. Somebody who heard her happiness and stayed close. Nothing was certain for February yet. She didn't have to put that uncertain sentence in front of her own enthusiasm every time.

When the music stopped they stayed standing for a while. He asked if she wanted to stay for dinner. She said yes and rested her face briefly against his neck. She would still have to go home later, get her things for the next day. For now she drew him a little closer and began softly humming the same song herself. He moved with her.