Christmas at Frozen Falls

by Kiley Dunbar

  ‘I doubt it. Stellan looked positively irate with me. I’d rather avoid him, if you don’t mind.’

  Nari’s shaking her head and laughing as the door closes and I’m sealed into my cosy cabin alone.

  The evening passes without bumping into Stellan or Niilo again, and I can’t say I’m very upset about that; I’m still reeling from Stellan’s oafish rudeness.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be here? He doesn’t own Lapland as far as I’m aware,’ I say to Nari as I make short work of a tender steak in the resort restaurant. The pleasant Christmassy music tinkling over the speakers above our cosy booth feels at odds with my frayed nerves.

  The walk from our cabins out on the edge of the resort along a snow-ploughed road beneath gleaming stars did nothing to help me recover the calm and serenity of our cosy, boozy afternoon nap. Neither did having to wrestle off my snowsuit and boots in the restaurant lobby whilst the other diners calmly watched me.

  The holiday makers way up here in the remote North seem to be mainly rather sophisticated-looking couples or families with children old enough to cope with the freezing temperatures and treacherous conditions, certainly better equipped for the cold than the toddlers and primary school kids we saw back at the airport who were heading for the big family friendly resorts further south.

  The restaurant sits just off the lobby of the resort’s main hotel and the entire place has an air of rustic Scandi cool. Four snowy paths radiate out from the hotel to each point of the compass and at each one stands a little cluster of cabins among the trees.

  As we trudged along the path from our cabins towards dinner I didn’t spot a single building; no souvenir shops or ski centre, nothing. Over our meal Nari told me those can be found a few kilometres away in Saariselkä itself and that, if I want, we can take the resort bus there tomorrow for a mooch around, but somehow I’m struggling to make meaningful conversation tonight.

  ‘Earth to Sylvie Magnusson, do you read me?’

  ‘Sorry, I was…’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me. I know what you’re thinking. I’m disappointed too. From everything you told me about him, I thought your Stellan would at least be pleased to see you.’

  I shrug and set to work on the creamy potatoes and broccoli. ‘Maybe I’m misremembering him.’

  ‘You were crazy about each other once upon a time, and your face lit up every time you mentioned him, so he must have had some redeeming qualities way back when you knew him.’

  I think of the Stellan I’d written about in my diary and sigh. ‘Oh well. Let’s change the subject. He’s not glad I’m here and that’s all I need to know. Let’s try to enjoy our Christmas without arrogant, puffed-up Viking men spoiling our fun.’

  ‘Niilo didn’t seem very puffed-up to me. I wouldn’t mind bumping into him again,’ Nari says, with a grin that tells me she’s surprised even herself by saying this out loud, before she straightens her mouth and contentedly places her cutlery on an empty, sauce-streaked plate.

  ‘What about Stephen?’ I say.

  ‘What about him? What goes on above the Arctic Circle stays above the Arctic Circle. He wouldn’t mind anyway.’ This is said with a dryness I pretend not to notice, for Nari’s sake.

  And I couldn’t agree more. Let’s leave my humiliating encounter with my surly ex-boyfriend here, buried under a ton of snow.

  Even with the surprise of seeing Stellan again, dinner is good. The waiting staff are incredibly friendly and they bring us everything we want, including some particularly amazing chocolate cake and the strongest coffee I’ve ever tasted. And it is wonderful to sit by the window gazing out at the snowy world beyond, feeling warm and cosseted in our booth beneath the thick garlands of greenery and red bows that criss-cross the restaurant ceiling. But I still can’t help occasionally looking around for Stellan, wondering how he’d found his way to my cabin door.

  Is this his hotel? I know his parents ran a resort and husky centre somewhere near here back in the early noughties. Maybe our cabins are part of their business? I guess Stellan could have read my Facebook message and quickly checked the guest list. But why come out in the dark and snow looking for me only to trudge off into the night again after a few gruff words?

  I think about our encounter during the slow walk back to our cabins after dinner, the dark night penetrated only by the slim moon, the stars overhead and the flaming torches lining the road and placed at ten or so metre intervals. Nari’s busy telling me that the torches are typical of the ones used by Sámi reindeer herders on their long walks between villages, but I’m ashamed to say I’m not taking much of it in.

  ‘Maybe he’s the one that’s disappointed, Nari?’ I blurt out, interrupting her. ‘Did he rush out to see me, hoping I’d still be a cute, perky nineteen-year-old and what he found was… well, me?’

  ‘Bollocks. It’s not that. It’s that he’s a rude Neanderthal who’s spent so long in the frozen North it’s turned him into a cold-hearted old beast. Although, he did look pretty good. From what I saw of him anyway.’

  The history teacher in me rankles – and maybe so does the Stellan’s Ex-Girlfriend in me – and I find myself pointing out to Nari that calling someone a Neanderthal isn’t much of an insult as they were actually a highly advanced species. This goes down as well with Nari as it does with my Year Nine kids, so I get off my high horse and let my shoulders slump in defeat.

  ‘Why are we doing this?’ I say as I stop at the steps of my cabin. ‘We’re in the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, it’s Christmas, we’re together, and we’re talking about another one of my dickhead exes.’

  ‘Hmm… Maybe he’s not as frosty as we first thought,’ says Nari, her eyes fixed on something over my shoulder.

  Confused, I follow her gaze to the top of my cabin steps. Beside my door stands a tall glass jar with a flickering candle inside that definitely wasn’t there before. The candlelight casts its glow over a carved wooden animal nestled in the snow. And there’s a note.

  Nari nearly knocks me off my feet in her haste to grab it. She’s terrifying in everyday life but now she’s wrapped in four inches of padded snowsuit and can actually rugby tackle me, I’m left defenceless. I stand aside and watch her struggle out of her gloves and tear into the envelope with glee. She dramatically clears her throat before reading.

  Sylvie, I apologise for earlier. I was shocked to find you here in my resort and I was very tired tonight. I’ve been guiding tourists through the wilderness with Niilo for five days. I was rude, and I am sorry. Please allow us to show you and your friend around Frozen Falls resort. It would be our pleasure. We will meet you after breakfast in the hotel lobby.

  Stellan.

  P.S. The reindeer is for your friend. It’s from Niilo

  If there were any armed yeti men hanging around the cabins with murderous intent, Nari’s delighted screams would have seen them off into the arctic wilderness. Even so, once I hug her goodnight and lock myself into my cabin alone, I don’t have it in me to brave a night by myself in the glass-box bedroom. I half consider knocking at Nari’s cabin door and asking if I can sleep with her but I know she’ll already be drawing a steaming hot bath and getting her face masks out of her case. I suppose this is technically a working holiday for her and she needs her quiet time to think about her blog.

  No, I’ll be OK, but I’m sleeping on the sofa tonight. I throw more logs onto the fire beneath the towering stone chimney in the living room, giving the embers a bit of a poke with the brass stick thing like I know what I’m doing, and make myself comfy on the deep sofa, pulling a furry blanket over me. The Christmas tree towers above my head and I notice there’s a big basket of baubles and carved wooden snowflakes waiting expectantly beside it. I thought I’d done all my Christmas admin for this year. Tree-trimming will have to wait until tomorrow. I’ve got dancing flames and glowing logs to gaze at.

  As I settle myself, listening to the crackles and sparks from the hearth, Stellan’s note still clasped in my hand, I think abo
ut how tonight must have felt for him.

  He must have been horrified to learn some old flame was staying in his resort. No wonder he raced out to find me. He must be wondering what I’m doing here, what exactly it is that I want, though I don’t actually have any answers. We were lovers long ago, yes, but time has passed. I’ve changed, even if he’s gone back to his old ways. He was as disarmingly taciturn and economical with his small talk as he was on the day we met. Maybe he was worried I’d have a blond-haired, pale-eyed fifteen-year-old in tow. God, he must have got a real fright! I should have tried harder to reach out to him before now. But, he’s thirty-six now and not a brooding twenty-one-year-old, all shy and reserved around strangers. I’m hoping he’ll have thawed a bit more by morning.

  Nari certainly didn’t think much of him, even after I’d reminded her at dinner about what she wrote in her blog: that Finnish men are sometimes more formal and less cocky than English lads. She just raised an eyebrow at that. Though Stellan’s friend Niilo didn’t exactly hold back, did he? Nari’s only been at the resort for eight hours and he’s sent her a gift. I drift off feeling hopeful for tomorrow’s sightseeing. Whatever Stellan’s like now, I’m determined to enjoy my Lapland escape.

  Chapter Ten

  At Stellan’s simple cabin out in the woods, far from Sylvie, Nari and the other tourists, Niilo pads into his friend’s kitchen and grabs a pack of beers from the fridge.

  ‘Stellan, mä meen saunaan tänään. You coming? I’ve got the beer.’

  ‘Sure, give me a minute.’ Stellan drags his eyes from his phone, which he’s been silently absorbed with for the last half hour. Standing, he lifts the loops of rope from across his body up over his head and hangs them on a hook by the door.

  ‘The dogs are fed and asleep already. Did you lock them in?’ asks Niilo.

  ‘Mm-hmm. You ready?’ Stellan brushes past his friend as he gathers up two towels from a basket by the door. He looks back at his phone on the kitchen table before throwing off his thick jacket.

  Niilo knows to give Stellan his space. All he needs is a quiet beer and a good sweat and he’ll soon be back to his usual self. Stellan always finds the wilderness trails tough but tonight he seems especially weary and in need of their daily sauna ritual.

  Niilo follows his friend out of the cabin and along the raised wooden platform to the sauna door where Stellan is struggling with the key. The building has been locked up and cold for five nights and the lock is frozen, but after blowing hot breath into its chamber, Stellan slips the key inside and the mechanism is freed.

  Stepping inside, the men shut out the night-time world and all its coldness, stripping the many layers of clothing from their tired bodies in companionable silence, something they’ve done almost every night of their friendship.

  It has been five years since Niilo arrived at Stellan’s resort looking for work, and slowly over the months and years that followed, the quiet, reticent Stellan had become his firm friend. In all that time Niilo has never seen Stellan so shaken and uncomfortable as he was tonight when the red-haired English woman and her beautiful friend flew in for Christmas.

  They take turns using the sauna’s shower. Stellan goes first. By the time Niilo has washed away the grime of the long wilderness trail his body feels lighter and his muscles are beginning to relax. As he steps up and in through the smoked glass door of the sauna room he feels the heat has already built up from the kiuas, the electric heater in the centre of the room, constructed to resemble the traditional wood burner.

  ‘It’s already cosy,’ says Stellan as he cracks open a beer can and hands it to Niilo who nods his gratitude, sitting down beside Stellan on the wooden bench.

  ‘Kippis,’ the men say in unison as they touch beer cans together before taking long slow swallows.

  After agreeing long ago that it felt inappropriate to drink alcohol while guiding the tourists on the trails because they needed to stay sharp at all times, they haven’t touched a drop in almost a week. They never know when one of their charges might turn ill or injure themselves and they need to be in control if anything did happen. So far they’ve been lucky, but Niilo, always mindful of the scar across his cheekbone, never underestimates how easily an emergency could arise. For now they are back at the resort, warm and safe.

  The cold beer slips down their thrown-back throats, refreshing and sharp, as the temperature rises. The glass door is already obscured with condensation. Stellan closes his eyes and stretches his arms out along the back of the bench, bringing his feet up to rest on the low wall edging the kiuas pit, but Niilo can tell his friend isn’t fully able to surrender himself to the warmth and relaxation as he usually does. Tonight Stellan is troubled and needing time with his thoughts, so Niilo turns the dial on the wall, feeling the surging heat, and sits back against Stellan’s forearm, breathing in the hot dry air. He has his own thoughts to process.

  ‘Stellan?’ he asks after a long silence.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Tonight I met my soulmate.’ Niilo offers this up with confident, smiling certainty.

  Stellan opens his eyes and sniffs, hunching his body forward, crossing his arms over his knees.

  ‘Sylvie’s friend? How can you know she’s your soulmate?’

  ‘I just know. I knew Nari was on her way to me before I even set eyes on her. I knew out on the trail that she was coming.’

  Stellan smiles wryly and shakes his head, perspiration beading around his temples. The thermometer on the wall has reached ninety degrees and is climbing steadily.

  ‘What is it?’ says Niilo, knowing his friend is brooding over an objection. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’d just be careful with that one, OK? She’s exactly the kind of woman you usually steer clear of.’

  ‘And what kind of woman is she, Stellan?’ Niilo asks, amused.

  ‘I found her blog, and she’s just more… worldly than you.’

  ‘You’re already stalking Sylvie and her friends online?’ Niilo laughs and runs his fingers through his choppy dark hair, which is glistening with sweat in the low sauna light.

  ‘I was just getting up to speed. It’s a long time since I’ve seen Sylvie and I don’t remember her talking about Nari, so I guess I just… looked her up too.’

  ‘And what did you find? A string of convictions for man-eating?’ Niilo laughs.

  ‘No, I just looked at her blog. Granted, it seemed kind of old, but she talks a lot about dating men from different countries and compares them and, you know, that kind of thing?’

  ‘I don’t, actually. So she travels a lot. She meets a lot of people. She finds people interesting. So do I.’

  ‘Yeah, but when did you last go on a date with anybody?’

  Niilo shrugs. ‘I didn’t meet my soulmate until tonight. Why would I waste my time dating lots of different people? Besides, when was the blog you read published?’

  ‘I don’t know, 2010 or something like that. I didn’t have time to look for more recent ones. I can only imagine they get worse as they go on,’ Stellan says gruffly, closing his eyes once more.

  Niilo falls silent, thinking about his friend’s warning and how one of the American tourists back at the resort had propositioned him only the weekend before, asking him to show her the aurora with a meaningful glint in her eyes. She’d smelled of oily perfume and hairspray, and her thick black lashes seemed to have been attached with something cloying and sticky.

  He’d made sure to let her down gently but firmly. There was no way he’d be baited and reeled in, yanked out of his elemental arctic home, not by one of the tourists set on a holiday romance with a pretty, exotic, spiritual stranger. He knew that was how they all saw him. No, he’d long ago resolved that he belonged here in the peace and silence where he was safe and unburdened. The fleeting tourists from the resort, with their return tickets and their penchant for Sámi men, were not for him.

  Stellan interrupts Niilo’s pensiveness. ‘Niilo, you slept with that tourist from Sweden, didn’t you? The one
that wanted to see your cabin in the woods?’

  Niilo simply smiles. He doesn’t talk about the rare exceptions to his rules. Only he knows about the few people he’s made love to and the memory of each one is sewn up in the quietest quarters of his heart. Apart from the fleeting lovers of his youth who he met during Southern migrations following his herds, the rest – all tourists – had got on planes and flown home to their real lives soon afterwards. He had learned his lesson with those few strangers. They don’t really want to know who he is, and they never stay long enough to find out anyway. But Nari is different. She’s the one he’s been waiting for.

  Niilo veers away from the subject and back to Stellan’s reservations. ‘An online blog is not a person. She must be much more than the public persona she portrays. Once I know her, I’ll read her blog. Anyway, who are you to judge? At least I’m open to life’s possibilities.’

  Stellan huffs out an exasperated breath, but Niilo talks on. ‘Aren’t you glad I talked you into apologising to Sylvie? Doesn’t it feel better now you’ve written down the words, told her how you feel?’

  ‘You don’t understand. Sylvie and me… it’s more complicated than you think. Look, I’m not like you. You suddenly seem to have a lot of faith that this kind of thing will come right for you. You hide away, and you abstain, and you wait for a sign from some snow fairies or whatever—’

  Niilo interrupts with a gentle laugh and a dig of his elbow in Stellan’s ribs.

  ‘You do! You say you’ve seen a sign and now you’re mated forever with some woman you’ve said five words to.’

  Niilo nods and pulls a face that says there may be some truth in what his friend is saying, but he doesn’t regret telling Stellan out on the trail about the bear and how he’d seen it again.

  The creature had ambled out of the darkness towards him, stood up on its hind legs, revealing its grizzled chest matted with icicles, and lifted his head, turning his black eyes to the sky. That was when Niilo saw the plane, the first that had passed overhead in four days out on the trail. He knew it was coming in to land at the airstrip fifty kilometres to the south, and he’d understood then. He’d closed his eyes and filled his lungs with arctic morning air, and the bear had disappeared, its message delivered.