‘I have a three!’ Irma tittered, and at that moment a horrendous bang came from the direction of C wing. The card table shook, Margit squawked, one old woman outside the dining room fell to the ground, Siiri’s head thrummed nastily, Anna-Liisa went white as a sheet, and over in the magazine nook, the doctor with the tattoos started cursing. She stood up and announced that she was heading out to the local pub, the Ukko-Munkki, for a pint.
‘Care to join me?’ the doctor asked, but none of their little circle of card players was in the habit of drinking beer in bars. They had only been to the Ukko-Munkki once, on the occasion of the Hat Lady’s funeral, when the pastor played the saw and the wine was flowing. But generally speaking, they didn’t feel such watering holes were appropriate places for old people. Especially at an hour like this – why, it was barely noon.
‘Jesus Christ, what a bunch,’ the doctor said. The old woman was still lying on the floor outside the dining room, and the doctor winced at the sight as she rushed past them and out the door. A couple of construction workers were entering the building at the same time and politely made way for the doctor by stepping over the old woman.
‘What is she doing here?’ Siiri asked as she watched the doctor leave. For the life of her she couldn’t understand why a sixty-seven-year-old would pay through the nose to live at Sunset Grove when she could have lived anywhere she wanted, like a normal person.
‘And why is she a doctor?’ Irma asked, and she started to laugh.
They went over to help the old woman up, because there was no sign of any personnel. Since the dismissal of Head Nurse Virpi Hiukkanen, the revolving doors of Sunset Grove staffing had spun faster than ever. Miisa Sievänen had been named pro tem head of residents care, and there was no more need for a head nurse. Ms Sievänen wasn’t a nurse by training; she was some sort of theoretical expert in the caregiving sciences. She had explained that no one in their right mind would come and work at a retirement home where there was a major construction project underway, which the residents had no trouble understanding.
And which was why, without asking for assistance, they lifted up the old woman and helped her onto one of the benches in the lobby. Irma was so rotund she had a hard time bending over, but Margit, as her husband’s caregiver, had learned the proper holds, and she gave the Ambassador, Siiri and Anna-Liisa clear commands in this demanding operation. After much ordering about and huffing, the old woman was sitting upright. She was disoriented, and blood was dripping from her forehead.
‘Oh how awful, how terrible!’ a voice shouted behind them. Pro Tem Head Sievänen stood there, covering her mouth. She didn’t cope well with blood. Irma dabbed at the cut with her lace handkerchief while Miisa Sievänen swiped at her phone, trying to order an ambulance.
‘There’s no need for an ambulance,’ Siiri assured her. ‘One doesn’t go to hospital for a little cut. Look for yourself, it’s not even bleeding any more, now that Irma wiped away the blood.’
But the pro tem head couldn’t bear looking at the old woman’s cut, which was precisely why she had chosen the theoretical track in the caregiving sciences programme at vocational school. She’d been instructed that any senior exhibiting abnormal symptoms needed to be immediately collected by ambulance and removed from retirement-home premises, and a cut, if anything, was an abnormal symptom. Otherwise someone might sue the retirement home for neglect, and no retirement-home owner could afford to take on such a burden. Ms Sievänen trembled nervously and screeched into her phone: ‘We need an ambulance right away – yes, a head wound, fallen, an elderly woman, yes, very old.’
‘What was that horrific explosion? That was why this woman fell, because of that horrendous bang. What was it?’ Siiri asked the director pro tem after the call ended. Ms Sievänen didn’t know anything about any explosions; she hadn’t heard anything of the sort and looked at Siiri and her friends as if they had made up the entire retrofit.
‘There’s no point getting yourselfs worked up over nothing,’ she said before wandering off.
‘Over nothing!’ Anna-Liisa barked unusually shrilly. ‘I’ve spent my entire life weeding incorrect plural forms out of young people’s mouths and this is the result!’
They looked at Anna-Liisa in astonishment. Generally, she didn’t behave in this manner, no matter how much of a stickler she was for grammar. But Miisa Sievänen, who hadn’t grasped that she was the object of Anna-Liisa’s indignation, had already disappeared from view.
The Ambassador took his wife by the arm and gave her a tender smile: ‘All right, Anneli, that’s enough.’
‘Don’t you patronize me with your petting!’ Anna-Liisa snapped, wrenching free of the Ambassador’s grasp. This was rather worrisome. Siiri desperately tried to think of a new topic of conversation that would calm Anna-Liisa down, but her friend was off and running. She had moved on from irregular plural forms and was giving a detailed account of a plumbing retrofit she’d been subjected to in the 1970s. At the time, the whole building association had been provided with one pickle jar in the bicycle storage as a shared toilet, and Anna-Liisa had no intention of remaining at Sunset Grove to witness the resulting urinary free-for-all when the residents rolled down to the basement with their walkers to do their business in a pickle jar.
‘Maybe they’ll give us free diapers?’ Irma suggested constructively, but Anna-Liisa paid no attention, and instead took her vexation out on the Ambassador.
‘What about meals? What have you been planning on eating when there’s no water? Dried goods? Spelt straight from the jar?’ Anna-Liisa shouted threateningly. She concluded her diatribe by stomping her healthier foot and shrieking hysterically, virtually in tears: ‘Why don’t you do something, Onni Rinta-Paakku?’
‘I’ll take you out to eat,’ the Ambassador said soothingly, and he offered his wife his arm. The thus-mollified Anna-Liisa fixed her bun and straightened the hem of her blouse.
‘What I’m trying to say is, we cannot live here during the plumbing retrofit,’ she said, confining her rage to a quiet quiver in her otherwise melodic voice. Flames of fury no longer burned in her eyes, replaced by a fearful panic, and she clutched her husband’s arm as if she were lost at sea and it were a life preserver. They started walking towards the canteen, which was nothing like a restaurant, but an unpleasant, brightly lit institutional room. There the residents sat at long, birch-veneer tables without saying a word, spooning porridge like children back when Finnish schools offered free breakfasts to all. At Sunset Grove, porridge was served for breakfast, lunch and bedtime snack, but rarely for dinner. At one point it had been accompanied by jam, but the jam had run out in April, and not even sugar had appeared in its stead. Director Sundström had taken the opportunity to enlighten her dissatisfied clients that sugar was unhealthy, one of the most common causes of death. And besides, the discretionary funds weren’t sufficient to cover jam and other luxuries.
The old woman who had fallen was propped up in one of the lobby chairs, still confused, but they didn’t wait around to see if an ambulance would deign to accept her as a passenger. Margit hurried off to her felting class, and Irma noted that the time had flown and she was already supposed to be at her cousin’s for book club. Siiri was desperate for fresh air, and she tried to look busy even though no one was expecting her anywhere. She fetched her coat from her apartment because she didn’t remember it was hot outside, and walked to the stop on Munkkiniemi Allée to wait for the number 4 tram. Wrapped in plastic, Sunset Grove gleamed in the sun and looked like a work of American art, quite handsome, actually. But the clank of the approaching tram drew her thoughts away from Sunset Grove and all of the unpleasantness, at least for a moment.
Chapter 4
‘What’s that? Gone off to the villa and left you here alone?’
Siiri couldn’t believe her ears. Anna-Liisa seemed oddly unperturbed as she related this recent twist in her life, although she looked pale and grave. She must have been struggling to maintain a brave face.
‘There are so many of his former wives and children there that I can’t go. They’ll look after Onni at the villa, and I’m sure he’ll be much more comfortable there than here.’
Irma was burning with curiosity: ‘How many of these former wives are there?’
But Anna-Liisa wasn’t in the mood to answer. She simply snorted to indicate that the Ambassador’s holiday was not an appealing topic of conversation and Irma might as well accept it.
Luckily, the card table was still in its place. The wall next to it was covered in plastic with a handy-looking zipper running down it. There was a hole in the wall, and the demolition crew kept stomping in and out through the zipper, forever interrupting Siiri’s, Irma’s, Anna-Liisa’s and Margit’s game. The big television in the common room was wrapped in plastic, the magazine racks and books had been taken away, and the residents had an impossible time finding any space for themselves in this madhouse. They were required to keep the doors to their apartments open, and the construction workers marched in and out, ripping out kitchen cabinets one day, measuring the placement of electricity outlets the next. Sometimes they simply spun around in the middle of the room, grumbled something that sounded like Eugene Onegin, and left.
‘Like doctors!’ Irma realized. ‘The only difference being that these men walk in and out, while you have to crawl to the doctor’s office yourself, no matter how old and sick you are. Why don’t doctors here in Finland make house calls the way they do in France, where my cousin lives? Or like on British TV?’
More than once, lunch had been cancelled with less than two hours’ notice. A note had simply appeared next to the elevators and in the corridors that read: Lunch canselled today, do too the retro fit. Anna-Liisa had found temporary stimulation in these announcements, and, to Siiri’s pleasure, held brief lectures on the appropriate use of commas and quotation marks, the confusion caused by misspellings, and the historical development of compound words. More often than not, these notes reached their intended recipients too late, after Sunset Grove’s hunger-prodded residents had already shuffled down to the lobby to wonder where their food was. Sometimes Director Sinikka Sundström would make a personal appearance to apologize for the situation, but more often than not this thankless task fell to Pro Tem Head of Residents Care Miisa Sievänen. She would inform them that lunch would be served as soon as the water was turned back on, in all likelihood 4 p.m., to which the hunch-backed veteran Tauno replied that only an idiot ate lunch an hour before his supper, especially when all that was being served was porridge. The pro tem head of residents care would pass out flyers for restaurants in the neighbourhood and the price lists for Helping Handz, a private home-care delivery service. While everyone understood that Director Sundström and Pro Tem Head Sievänen were not to blame for the unexpected water cuts, it was difficult to pull much good cheer out of one’s positivity pouch, as the director had advised.
‘So there I was in my birthday suit, with my hair lathered, when I realized there was no water coming out of the shower-head,’ Margit told the others. Now that it was over, she was able to laugh at her tragedy, which had climaxed in two men in suits from the construction company marching into her apartment to measure the placement of the ventilation ducts. Margit had asked them to bring her water, but they had run off in terror.
‘I must have looked frightful!’ Margit howled, shaking her head. She’d had to sit and wait for two hours with the shampoo drying on her head before the shower started working again.
‘And what do you think of these dry doo-doo boxes that our Jerry was advertising yesterday?’ Irma asked.
‘You cheated,’ Anna-Liisa growled. She clearly saw Irma slip a card under her bottom.
‘Aren’t we playing cheat? We should play that one of these days, too; it’s such a fun game. I always played it with my darlings when they were young. Oh, those were lovely times! Look, what an idiotic card I got. What would you have done with an ugly old king like this, if you had picked it up?’
‘It fits your own canasta, Irma,’ Anna-Liisa said tiredly. She was somehow listless and downcast, and it was no wonder. Siiri was so disturbed by the Ambassador’s stunt, abandoning Anna-Liisa in the middle of the retrofit, that she had a hard time concentrating. What if things were steaming up between Onni and one of his ex-wives?
‘They have running water and a toilet, too, beautiful tiles and everything,’ Anna-Liisa sighed glumly. These were luxuries that residents of Sunset Grove could only wistfully long for.
‘Are you ladies planning on taking the poop jars Irma was just talking about?’ Siiri asked, to shift the conversation away from the Ambassador’s villa. She hadn’t been completely convinced by Jerry Siilinpää’s animated presentation last Tuesday. Waxed locks quivering, the young man had introduced them to composting toilets meant for temporary use in urban settings, which he claimed were easy to use and didn’t smell bad. Even emptying them was a ‘piece of cake’, which was why the residents would be privileged to take care of this operation themselves. Compared to the campground latrine Siilinpää was offering, the outhouse at any summer cabin sounded like the height of luxury.
‘I don’t suppose we have any choice? Or are you planning on allowing yourself to become constipated?’ Irma asked and told them about her cousin, who had gone ten days without defecating and was then taken to hospital for a rather laborious evacuation. ‘So yes, I’d rather have a cat box in the corner. Isn’t that one better than that pickle jar you had in the basement during the 1970s, Anna-Liisa? Anna-Liisa?’
Anna-Liisa’s head had drooped, and her cards had slid to her lap. The other ladies panicked because Anna-Liisa looked sick, not sleepy. Siiri stood up and took hold of Anna-Liisa’s wrist: a strong, rather rapid pulse. Siiri was relieved.
‘She’s not dead.’
‘Is that supposed to be good news?’ Margit asked, continuing to play, since it was her turn. ‘I’ve been thinking quite a lot about euthanasia lately. What do you ladies think, should people be allowed to decide about their own death?’
‘Heavenly days, you do ponder difficult questions in the middle of this chaos! Why would anyone bother doing retrofits if we all started killing each other during them? Or ourselves? Anna-Liisa, wake up before they shovel you into an ambulance and cart you off to the hospital!’
Irma had stood, and she and Siiri were able to shake Anna-Liisa enough to rouse her. She was still pale, and her eyes wandered for a moment, but then her usual stern gaze sparked in them again. At that instant, the zipper in the plastic wall opened and three angry-looking men marched past, carrying moving boxes.
Anna-Liisa was instantly on high alert. ‘Who was that? They weren’t wearing neon vests or coveralls. Those were not construction workers!’
Complete strangers had been tramping in and out of Sunset Grove with increasing frequency lately. It was impossible to say who was there to work and who was there to make off with the residents’ belongings. Or medication. They had learned through the death of that sweet boy from the kitchen that their daily pills were valuable drugs.
‘That Weasel Tail claimed that every employee would have a tag around his neck with his name on it. All their names should also be on some bulletin board,’ Anna-Liisa griped. ‘I’ve never laid eyes on any bulletin boards in this mess; we’re drowning in packing plastic and tape here. It’s like we’re some . . . some . . . I don’t know what. I don’t suppose even chickens are stored vacuum-packed for months on end at a temperature of eighty degrees, are they?’
‘His name is Siilinpää: Hedgehog Head, not Weasel Tail,’ Siiri said. Having a chance to correct Anna-Liisa was a rare pleasure.
‘Maybe broilers? Or chicks, in those incubators?’ Irma suggested cheerfully. ‘With the Ambassador vacationing at his luxury villa and all the other men dead, Sunset Grove has turned into quite the hen house. Cluck cluck!’ Irma did a rather skilful chicken imitation, although crowing like a rooster was her bravura.
‘A distinctly unproductive incubator, I’d say,
’ Anna-Liisa remarked leadenly, gathering up the cards that had fallen into her lap. Irma shouldn’t have mentioned the Ambassador and his summer villa just when the sight of the suspicious visitors had perked Anna-Liisa up.
‘Did you think those gentlemen with the boxes were thieves?’ Siiri asked, to smooth things over.
‘How should I know? They certainly didn’t look like construction workers. Perhaps they were someone’s relatives, although that seems far-fetched. No family members ever set foot in this place.’
‘Not all the men are dead. Eino is alive,’ Margit said abruptly. She had stopped playing and absent-mindedly slipped the cards she was holding into her handbag.
‘Margit, those are my cards!’ Siiri cried.
‘Eino is in a dementia ward somewhere in eastern Helsinki. All residents of the Sunset Grove nursing unit were moved there. If anyone’s in storage, it’s him, not us. I don’t remember the name of the place, it was some sort of home too, or even a nest . . . wait, the SquirrelsNest, all one word, capital S, capital N.’
Anna-Liisa shrieked in horror.
‘I’ve only been to visit Eino once, and that time I went by taxi. But I can’t be taking a taxi back and forth to Itäkeskus every week. Maybe it’s best I don’t go, it’s so sad . . . Oh dear, here I go, crying again . . . I’m sorry . . . it’s such an awful thing to see, when the love of your life is unrecognizable and helpless . . . Dirty, too, and smells foul; I have a hard time bringing myself to get close, and I don’t know what to do with myself while I’m sitting there at his bedside, but I have a bad conscience all the time since I haven’t been to see him . . .’
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 4