by Kiley Dunbar
The pair settle on the sofa, and Niilo uses his knife to work open the can of cream before pouring the sweet straw-coloured liqueur and vodka into the chilled coffee, the rhythms of their hearts steadying again.
‘I’m sorry… again. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not suspicious of you, I know you’re not here for the wrong reasons.’
Nari raises her hand and stills him, and his eyes smile. Their brief storm has blown over.
‘Geonbae,’ she says, holding her tumbler to his.
‘Kippis!’
Nari joins him in a cautious sip, her eyes widening over the rim of the cup.
‘Good grief! That’s delicious, but it’s strong. Can I have some more cream in mine?’ Nari’s voice is hoarse and she coughs hard to clear the burning sensation in her throat as Niilo dilutes her drink a little. She is careful to keep a little distance between them on the sofa, remembering how startled he had been a moment ago.
‘Tell me more about your family. They were herders?’ she asks, hoping he’ll open up.
‘Yes, going back for a few generations.’
‘Is that what you wanted to do as a kid?’
‘It was all I knew. I helped with my family herd, but I was too young to take over when my father died and so my father’s brother received the family herd, and I hear it’s much smaller and belongs to his daughter now.’
‘But you have your own herd here.’
‘Yes. For tourists. It’s not the same thing.’
‘How many do you have?’
‘It’s not very polite to ask this question, and far worse to give an answer. That’s like me asking you how much cash you have in your bank account. Although, since I’m not technically a herder, I guess I can tell you. I have only forty-eight. At one time, my family farmed thousands of animals. But my Frozen Falls reindeer are still marked with my family cut on their ears; the bear’s paw. I learned to cut the marks when I was just a child. My grandmother taught me.’
‘You said you used to go on migrations with other family’s herds, do you miss it?’
‘I do, but it was hard, dangerous work.’
‘Is that how you got this?’ She raises her index finger to his cheek hesitantly and with the lightest touch presses her fingertip to the white scar beneath his eye. Niilo follows the movement of her hand as it gets closer and holds his breath, closing his eyes as she makes contact in a sudden burst of sensation, first warmth and then the tingling pain of the scar.
‘Did that hurt?’
‘No.’ He exhales and opens his eyes. ‘No, it doesn’t hurt. I just…’ His words tail off into a frustrated shrug.
Nari looks down at her hands, now both safely clutching her cup, her shoulders rounding as she recoils.
Swallowing hard, Niilo races for words. ‘Do you think Sylvie will be all right alone at the resort?’
‘Umm,’ Nari’s brain works, trying to catch up with the sudden shift. ‘She’ll be fine, I think. She’s at the resort spa.’
‘I’ve always wondered why people pay to go there. Are those beauty treatments really so good?’
‘Yes, of course they are. Haven’t you ever had a massage?’
‘Sure; in the sauna there’s the birch branches. They get your circulation going; it’s restorative after days on the trails.’
‘I doubt Sylvie’s going to let anyone bash her about with a bundle of twigs. No, I booked her a facial, manicure, back massage, and a body wrap. She’ll be in Scandi spa heaven.’ Nari watches him sip his drink and consider her words. He doesn’t even wince as the alcohol burns its way down his throat. He seemed bemused. ‘You should try it sometime, go in for a facial or something?’
‘I’m always busy with the herd, or out with the tourists. There’s no time to lie around doing nothing while I pay someone to rub oil on my face.’ Niilo softened this with a laugh.
‘But you must get tired? And you need to stay healthy.’ She lets Niilo think this over for a moment, taking a drink.
‘I guess,’ he says.
‘And everybody needs to be touched,’ she adds quickly, looking away but aware of Niilo’s throat moving as he swallows.
He doesn’t speak but when she glances at him the curious look in his eyes emboldens her to go on. ‘Have you ever felt like it’s been ages since anyone put their hands on you? Adults don’t really touch, do they? I mean, we might hug a friend or something, but that’s always so brief – economical, even – and you queue up with people, and get squashed together in elevators, or some manspreader might press his thigh on yours on the train, but none of that is touch. What I mean is, when did anyone last make an actual concerted effort to reach out to you and just connect with you? That’s part of the spa ritual, I think. And it’s comforting. To be touched.’
Niilo locks eyes with his guest, a look of incredulity on his face which broadens into a smile. ‘I have thought the same thing many times. Nari, I must explain. I think so often about the people living in the south, crowded in the cities and packed into houses with friends and family and loved ones of all sorts, and I can’t imagine what it must be like to be close to people like that.’
Nari looks into his eyes, wordlessly tipping her head by way of encouragement to keep him talking.
‘Out on the trails some mornings, its minus thirty degrees and the snow feels like pinpricks on your bare hands, and the air’s so cold your lungs are shocked by it, even if you’ve experienced it every winter morning on every trail you’ve ever done. It sends adrenalin rushing to your brain, telling you to run, to find warmth. You build a fire for the tourists with silver birch and the bark’s so smooth, like satin, and the embers spark out and burn your skin. And there’s just you and your fire and your puukko knife keeping everyone alive out there. You have to sharpen your knife every day on a stone and check with your thumb that it’s sharp enough to use.’
At this, Nari reaches for Niilo’s free hand and, holding it in her own, she soothes the rough, weathered skin with her fingertips in soft, slow circles. A rush of breath escapes Niilo’s lips before he speaks again, this time with more difficulty.
‘On mornings like that, out in the wilderness, it feels like every sensation is more intense. Heat burns hotter, the cold has to be colder than any other place on earth, and the stars are more piercing in the darkest sky.’ With this he returns Nari’s caress, letting his fingers tentatively trace slow lines over the back of her hand. ‘Everywhere there’s these intense sensations, and they’re overwhelming sometimes, but what I was always waiting for was—’
‘Someone to touch you.’
‘Yes. And not just anyone.’ Niilo raises his arm, placing it along the back of the sofa, leaving a space for Nari to slide inside.
With a smile she leans into him, resting her head on his chest.
For a long while they hold each other and watch the flames in the hearth.
Chapter Twenty-One
I’ve visited a lot of spas in my life – thanks to Nari – from high end luxury in towering glass city hotels to a decidedly dodgy place over a suburban takeaway with dead pot plants in the grubby windows, but this place is off the charts, jaw-dropping, simple Scandinavian chic and tasteful opulence.
I know I’m onto a winner as soon as I arrive at the spa: a futuristic snowy dome in the forest of baby pine trees in a secluded spot behind the hotel. Another one of Stellan’s recent improvements to the resort, I imagine.
I’m welcomed into the reception area, white, warm and tranquil, by a blonde woman who ushers me in near silence to one of the little rooms leading off from it, each, I assume, like this one – a smaller pod with a rounded ceiling and a spa bed at its centre.
Where’s the tootling whale music and panpipes, scented candles and the glassy-eyed beauty therapist saying, ‘you can just pop your things on the chair’? This is soundless, pristine, Lappish luxury like I could never have imagined.
The woman leaves me to slip into a white cotton robe and I sink onto the heated bed. There’s something resembling a big sh
iny pebble on the shelf over there making clouds of white steam and I’m so warm and, frankly, shattered, I’m feeling sleepy already. Nari will be kicking herself that she didn’t come, though I doubt she’s regretting her choices right this second.
The therapist returns, wheeling a little cart loaded with products in elegant packaging, and for the next two hours I’m wrapped up, smoothed, scrubbed and soothed, and it is wonderful. And I almost drift off entirely in an aromatherapy-induced haze except I find I can’t switch off that last little bit of my brain, the bit where Stellan lives rent free, an emotional squatter, sending out constant reminders of how things were yesterday when we were together.
I’m trying to shut out the memories of the sweet, familiar feeling of sinking into Stellan’s kiss and the safe, secure warmth of his arms around me and the sense that maybe we actually were meant to be reunited here at his Lapland home, and maybe we do have something as elemental and irresistible as the magnetic pole pulling us back together.
But, I remind myself, he isn’t here. He’s somewhere nearby, sure, but he’s not with me. And it’s Christmas day.
I’ve always said that if someone wants to be with you, they will be with you, and nothing will keep them away. Like when you bump into someone in the street you haven’t seen for years and you both say, ‘We really must meet for that drink’, secure in the mutually acknowledged, but never voiced, understanding that, thank goodness, it’s never actually going to happen.
Was Stellan’s hurried cry of, ‘I must go, I’ll see you again,’ as he rushed from my cabin yesterday, how this was always going to end? A repeat of the first time he disappeared out of my life without a trace? I could have sworn yesterday as we kissed in the kitchen that he’d be staying the night and that we’d be together today; that he wouldn’t let anything come between us, especially when I’m only here for another, what, twenty hours?
I thought all of this over last night after he left, when I didn’t get to sleep until gone four and I’d cried like a teenager and used up all my tissues. I’d stared up at the snow on the glass roof above my big empty bed and it had struck me; maybe I am guilty of getting over invested in things, of being infuriatingly intense. I know Nari said this morning she thinks it’s Stellan and his commitment issues and not my over-enthusiastic investment in him that’s the problem, but I’m unconvinced.
I went through it all last night, thinking about my long history of liking things passionately to the exclusion of all other interests, and how each new obsession fades in time and I move on.
There was that twelve-month period after I met Cole where, inspired by a sunny week in Madrid together, I’d shelled out for Spanish lessons and a weekend at a Flamenco dancing residential school in London, and just as I’d mastered the art of making oversized dishes of seafood paella, I totally lost interest in all things Spanish and switched my obsession to gardening our little plot at the back of the Love Shack.
It had come as a huge surprise to me to discover I had green fingers and could grow my own spuds in a bucket and train tomato plants up canes by the back door, and I’d listen to Gardener’s Question Time every Sunday whilst deadheading hanging baskets of stripy petunias and sipping tea from a National Trust gift shop mug that told everyone I was the ‘Head Gardener’. I let the whole thing go to seed after a few seasons when I realised Cole never joined me out there in what was supposed to be our own little Eden.
And, yes, there was a time in my adolescence when I balanced twin loves for the myths and legends of Scandinavia and a powerful interest in the back catalogue of Kate Bush, to the extent that I bought a pair of replica Viking amulets off eBay and, in imitation of my new musical idol, I wore a black fringed caftan and no shoes for the entire summer of 1998 to complement my Wuthering Heights feathered hair and general whimsical demeanour.
And then there was my Zumba phase, quickly passed over for the more intense PowerZumbaBlast: those lasted a good three months each.
Granted, some of my obsessions haven’t been quite so healthy, since we’re on the subject. There was the winter after Stellan left where I lived off snack boxes of raisins and hot chocolate (a whole jar of cocoa powder a day at its peak – the kettle was forever boiling), and then there was this past autumn after losing Cole, and Barney, where I watched nothing but Norwegian thrillers and true crime documentaries back to back and it all got a bit noir. And we already know about my recent shopping channel exploits. Some of those packages are still lying unopened in the bottom of my wardrobe. I haven’t a clue what’s in most of them.
But I never once followed this pattern of obsessive love through to exhaustion and disinterest with actual human beings. I won’t ever dump you. I mean, sure, if I’m in your inner sanctum of friends, I’ve got your back no matter what, and if I’m your girlfriend you’ll get my passionate, all-or-nothing commitment, but that’s because I’m nice, not nuts. At least, that’s what I thought until this week. Stellan’s got me reassessing everything, and it kept me awake all last night as the sickening realisation dawned.
Looking back to 2004 and the few short weeks we were together that autumn, I saw that I really hadn’t thought of anything but Stellan and what time his lectures would be done for the day, and what we’d be doing that night, and how long we’d have together before he went to class or to see his friends. And I did neglect my uni pals and flunk my exams and forget to call my parents for two months solid. It all seemed kind of normal back then, and I bet I wasn’t the only girl doing it. But it’s no surprise I scared Stellan off.
You can put it on my gravestone: Sylvie Magnusson: Didn’t do things (she liked) by halves.
Anyway, I’d got up this morning with crusty, tired eyes from crying and a headache from dredging up all the old memories and analysing them until I couldn’t think straight, and I’d made a promise not to spoil Nari’s Christmas morning by letting her see that I was actually really bloody miserable and not at all festive.
It was me who insisted we come to this resort, after all. We could have taken Stephen’s other option, but oh no, I was dead set on a chance encounter with the ex I once obsessed over, and who, if I’m honest, I never really got over. Now here I am, thirty-four years old and stuck in a tragic teenage love story time warp, while Stellan’s in the real world, sensible, serious and successful. No wonder he’s avoiding me, laying low until I leave his resort tomorrow.
Can this therapist see there are tears trickling out the corners of my closed eyes? I try hard to relax and clear my mind and not let last night’s crushing realisation that I am in fact a lifelong boiler of bunnies and overly obsessive fangirl spoil my spa experience. But the more I try to clear my mind, the more I hear it: Stellan’s voice saying, ‘I was bad for you. I was the reason you were failing uni, I was a distraction.’
He wasn’t a distraction, he wasn’t ever bad for me. I’m the bad one. I’m the obsessive. I’m the reason we can’t have nice things.
I try to channel all of this horrible energy into putting on a convincing performance of looking peaceful and thoroughly enjoying myself, solely for the benefit of the therapist’s feelings. Finally, she gives my shoulders one last smooth over, turns the lights even lower and cocoons me in warm blankets. I hear the door close as she leaves me alone to inhale the perfumed steam in the air, and ah, there’s the whale music! Last night’s sleeplessness catches up with me and I begin to sink into a strange, cosy slumber, spoiled only by my awareness of a frosty loneliness inside me that won’t thaw, no matter how faultless and appreciated my Christmas Day singleton spa gift is.
* * *
‘Hello tiny one, I’ve got a little something here, just for you,’ I tell the tumbling, clambering puppy.
The moment I unlocked the door to the dog sheds Toivo had wriggled his way out from beneath the pile of sleeping siblings and padded over to the edge of his little enclosure, whipping his tail from side to side. I like to think he recognised me.
I’d called out a polite, if awkward and quintessential
ly English, ‘Yoo-hoo? Anyone home? It’s only me,’ in case Stellan’s staff or some other tourists were here, but no one replied, even though the lights were on and the big door at the back of the shed was open with dogs running around in all directions, coming and going as they pleased.
‘I’ll only stay a minute, anyway,’ I told myself as I settled beside Toivo on the floor of the shed. ‘Have you grown since yesterday?’
I feed him the croissant scraps and a piece of buttery toast that I sneaked from the buffet for him and he chews greedily as though he’s never been fed in his life. When he’s done eating, I lift him onto my knee and ruffle his furry neck.
‘Merry Christmas, little guy. I don’t suppose you’re all that bothered about Christmas, are you?’
I cast a glance around me, just in case someone’s come in and mistaken me for an easily distracted dognapper who’s taken leave of her senses. Still nobody here, so I kiss Toivo’s pink nose and tell him he’s got the best schnozz in all of Lapland, and he seems pleased with that.
‘So what did Father Christmas bring you, then?’ I ask him, as I look into his little enclosure, spotting a handful of chew toys that weren’t there on my last visit.
I reach for the closest thing to me, a toy monkey, and show it to Toivo who immediately goes into overdrive, wanting me to tug it around while he clings to it with his needle-sharp puppy teeth.
Those baby gnashers always seem so tiny and delicate looking, and I worry they’ll be yanked clean out of his mouth if I’m too rough. This had unnerved me in those first few weeks of getting to know Barney too. I know those teeth aren’t going anywhere, but still, I try to calm Toivo, throwing the monkey a few feet away.
To my amazement he tumbles after his toy and retrieves it, laying it by my hand again and leaning in close to me for a congratulatory pat on the head. Either he’s super smart or someone’s started his puppy training early. Or maybe he just wants to please me?
I seem to remember reading somewhere about huskies having a strong prey drive which they redirect into their work as sled dogs; all they want is the attention and approval of the head of the pack, who I’m guessing in Toivo’s case is Stellan.