‘We don’t have any reason to believe Mika won’t be back. Maybe he has a new girlfriend,’ Siiri said tiredly.
‘What do you need guardians for anyway, now that everything’s in order and no one is dying?’ Irma said cheerfully, then sang the praises of the oxtail stew as if she’d completely forgotten she’d made it herself.
‘Eino ought to die,’ Margit said.
‘Anneli doesn’t need a guardian any more because she has me. A husband will take precedence over such upstarts in any court,’ the Ambassador said. He had already eaten two servings and now helped himself to a third. Siiri was pleased; she hadn’t expected the dish to be such a big success.
‘But he’s not dying. What am I going to do if I die before he does?’
‘Margit! What sort of problem is that? You won’t do anything, because you’ll be dead. Or do you suppose you’ll be flying back to the RatsNest in the form of a housefly to torment him?’ Irma huffed, helping herself to more stew.
‘I’m worried, can’t you understand? Eino might end up lying there in that institution for God knows how many years without anyone knowing who he is, what his likes and dislikes are, and what he was like back . . . back when he . . . he was a person.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s a good reason for you to not die. But you’re not as old as the rest of us, are you?’
‘I’m eighty-seven,’ Margit said dejectedly.
‘So young! Think about us, we’re all well past ninety. Döden, döden, döden.’
‘Sometimes I think I’ll die from sheer depression. From not being able to see any hope for Eino. Every time I visit him, I feel guilty he’s alive. Eino always said he doesn’t want to lie around like a vegetable and be a bother to anyone, and I’m letting it happen every day. But what am I supposed to do, since this country doesn’t recognize the mercy euthanasia offers?’
They all fell silent, their chewing slowed. Swallowing was hard; the cheery ambience had evaporated. Siiri racked her brains trying to think of something positive to say, but her mind was blank. She started gathering up bowls and clearing away their lunch. Then she remembered Muhis and Metukka and how they’d been a little taken aback when they discovered where Siiri and Irma were living. Apparently, they shouldn’t be surprised if unusual characters came around knocking at their door.
‘Onni, are you sure you don’t know what this place was being used for before we moved in? I gathered from my friends that it has quite a reputation—’
That was as far as Siiri got, because the phone rang. This was a rare event. Irma had her mobile phone, as did the Ambassador, and no one ever called any of the others. Siiri’s great-granddaughter’s boyfriend Tuukka, who handled Siiri’s banking on his computer, had learned to call Irma when he needed to speak to Siiri, and that wasn’t often. Sunset Grove had tightened up its invoicing after the previous year’s events. Irma dashed over to the phone and got there first, although the Ambassador did his best to be able to take the unexpected call.
‘Hasan? Hasan again. Who is this Hasan?’ Irma asked angrily, holding the receiver away from her ear to indicate how unpleasant the person shouting at the other end was. ‘This is Irma Lännenleimu and I don’t know any Hasan. Are you the fellow with the gold rings who was at our door asking about Hasan? Please tell your friend— the impudence! He hung up on me!’
Irma was so outraged that she fetched her whisky from her room and poured a healthy splash into a milk glass. The Ambassador took a tumbler from the vitrine and a couple of ice cubes from the ice machine with a practised hand. Of the apartment’s countless appliances, it was the sole one he had mastered.
‘Onni! Are you drinking?’ Anna-Liisa asked in horror.
‘I’m just having a little digestive, dear. Would you like one too?’ the Ambassador asked, with a tender pat of his wife’s back.
‘Yes, I don’t suppose there’s any rush to get anywhere,’ Irma said. ‘Does anyone want to play cards? I have a pack here somewhere . . . I’m sure I had one . . .’ She reached into her handbag and emptied its contents onto the kitchenette counter.
Siiri wasn’t feeling well; all of this was making her woozy. This time it wasn’t only thrumming in her ears and the hammering in her heart; now her stomach had done a somersault, too, and she felt nauseous. Perhaps she’d eaten too much. She thought about her missing friend Mika Korhonen, what Muhis and Metukka had implied about the infamous flat where she and her friends were now living, the well-dressed strangers who had come around looking for Hasan, and those two lads posing as policemen who had tried to make off with Anna-Liisa’s jewellery box. Why hadn’t Anna-Liisa said any more about the roll of cash she had found? What had happened to it, or was Anna-Liisa so out of sorts that she didn’t recall the entire incident?
Irma, Anna-Liisa, the Ambassador and Margit were already deep into their canasta game and paid no attention when Siiri withdrew to her bedroom and fell asleep. She had a disturbing dream where their refugee asylum was a den of all sorts of unsavoury activity, a bit like Muhis and Metukka had insinuated. Gold rings flashed as pimps slunk about amongst the pillars, and in the middle of it all, Siiri tried to make blood pudding.
Chapter 17
‘Hel-lo? Heya . . . Is Anna-Liisa here?’ a young voice yoohooed tentatively from the round, satin-lined entryway. Siiri had never heard the voice before, but that was no surprise, because Anna-Liisa’s rehabilitators and caregivers were, for the most part, one-time visitors and she never got a chance to know them. At the beginning, she’d rushed out to shake hands with each new arrival, but she’d come to learn that the caregivers had no interest in getting to know their charges, let alone their charges’ flatmates. And so now she just carried on in the kitchenette, making broth from a pike-head she’d bought and cleaning herring. The herring required no concentration; after all, she’d cleaned mountains of the fish for her family hundreds of times, and apparently this was one of those skills that, once learned, one could do in one’s sleep, or at the age of a hundred.
‘How are we feeling?’ the shy voice called out, now from the living room, without noticing the old woman busying herself behind the counter. Siiri quickly washed her hands and wiped them on her apron. She had come across it in the bowels of the kitchenette; it was too tiny to offer much protection and read ‘Queen of Fucking’ across the front. She rushed over to the young girl, who looked lost and generally the worse for wear.
‘Oh you poor dear – is everything all right?’
‘Hi, I’m Emilia, from the City of Helsinki Western Health-Care District In-Home Care. Sorry I’m late, I don’t have a driver’s licence. I didn’t know how to get here because I’ve never been to Hakaniemi and had to take public transport. Our head nurse said you can’t find parking in Hakaniemi and all the parking money has been used up for the month. Not that it matters, because I don’t have a driver’s licence.’
‘I see. But . . . now you’re here. Would you care for something to drink? It’s rather hot out there, isn’t it?’
The girl collapsed on the sofa in a sweaty heap and panted there until Siiri handed her a glass of orange juice. She held it in two hands, like a child, and drank in big, greedy gulps.
‘Thanks a mega ton.’
Emilia looked around as if she had just dropped by for a visit, oohed over the enormous television and its numerous pointless speakers, and wondered out loud why the place seemed so familiar. Then her mobile phone howled and trembled and brought her back to the task at hand.
‘Oh yeah, I’m supposed to go for a walk with –’ She swiped feverishly through her phone, just like Irma at her tablet, looking for Anna-Liisa’s name.
‘Anna-Liisa Petäjä,’ Anna-Liisa said. She was leaning on her cane at her bedroom door, neatly dressed and looking chipper, curiously eyeing the wisp of a girl who had come to rehabilitate her.
‘Yeah, wait just a sec.’ The girl was still focused on her smartphone, apparently unable to believe that the voice behind her could belong to her next client. ‘Now I
found you, yeah, Anna-Liisa. Hi!’ She turned to look at Anna-Liisa with her weary eyes and rose unsteadily from the couch.
‘Good day,’ Anna-Liisa said stonily. Today she seemed like her old self, full of vim and vigour. Her condition swung from extreme to extreme: sometimes she would loll in bed all day and even be a little muddled, and then there were these lovely late-summer days when it seemed Anna-Liisa’s hard times were a thing of the past. ‘Master of arts and instructor of Finnish.’
The girl’s already-unfortunate posture slumped further, as if coming face-to-face with a teacher had instantly taken her back to a middle-school oral exam on the finer points of Finnish grammar. ‘Yeah, so well . . . I’m, like, Emilia, in-home caregiver.’
‘And I’m Siiri Kettunen, a perfectly healthy old woman. What I mean to say is that I don’t use in-home care, but I live here, too.’ Siiri started explaining the background of their peculiar living arrangements, and Emilia seemed to perk up a little when she heard about the shady goings-on at the Sunset Grove plumbing retrofit and the afternoon intrigues involving bespoke-suited men who came around looking for Hasan.
‘Wow,’ she said. Then she fainted. Simply collapsed to the ground, like a criminal shot dead in his tracks, or a senior who’d just suffered a merciful heart attack.
‘Goodness gracious!’ Anna-Liisa cried, rapping her cane against the parquet and looking at Siiri as if she ought to do something. Siiri crouched down next to the in-home caregiver, patted her cheek, and lifted her eyelids.
‘She’s alive,’ Siiri reported, and went to get more juice from the kitchenette. By the time she returned, the girl had come to, and didn’t understand what had just happened. Margit had appeared at her side, naked, and apparently the water dripping from Margit’s hair had revived her.
‘For heaven’s sakes, Margit, don’t you have any manners?’ Anna-Liisa snapped, turning away to avoid the distastefulness of having to gaze upon her enormous white bulk.
‘I just took a shower,’ Margit said, a little hurt, as she fitted her whining hearing aid over her ear.
‘Yes, we can see that,’ Anna-Liisa said, still refusing to look at her. ‘But were you actually raised in such rude circumstances that you’ve never heard of a bathrobe?’
‘I can’t find it; I must not have brought it from Sunset Grove. But we’re all friends here. Except this child. Who is she?’
‘This is Emilia, the in-home caregiver who is here to rehabilitate me. She never gave a last name; apparently, doing so is contrary to the professional ethics of the caregiving field.’
Siiri glanced at Emilia, who blinked. She probably thought she was having a nightmare. Because the girl was in no immediate danger, Siiri decided to look after Margit first, and led her off to her bedroom to dress. But Margit didn’t want to put her clothes on. She said she liked being naked.
‘Yes, we’ve noticed!’ Anna-Liisa shouted from the living room, yet again demonstrating the acuity of her hearing.
Margit started to cry. She sobbed silently, sighed, and clenched her fists to her chest.
‘I can’t take this any more. I just can’t. I’m tired, I’m always tired, and I never want to get out of bed again.’
‘Oh, you poor dear.’ Siiri sat down next to Margit, not caring that her clean dress and borrowed apron were getting wet. ‘This is odd for all of us, and a little difficult since we’re not in our homes and conditions are what they are. But I’ve tried to think of this as an adventure. It won’t last long. The renovation at Sunset Grove will be finished by October and that’s only . . . Is that less than two months now? A little over a month, that’s not much.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about!’ Margit wailed. She buried her face in her hands and rocked her head from side to side, like a disturbed child or a tropical animal at a European zoo. Siiri had seen such scenes on television, when she still had some control over what she watched. At Hakaniemi, what came blaring out of the flat screen at any given time was a complete surprise, but typically something inappropriate in the extreme: car chases, bedroom scenes, brawling teenage girls, sports.
‘I’m talking about Eino,’ Margit eventually said, very softly. Siiri felt a rushing in her head and almost fell off the edge of the bed. Euthanasia. Now it would start again, and frantically she thought about how she could get Margit to dress and start her day so that they could skirt round the unpleasant subject.
‘Eino is very dear to you. I’m sure you had a wonderful life together,’ she began. Margit stopped rocking and marvelled, moist-eyed, at Siiri. ‘I had a lovely life with my husband, too, all the years we had together. I still think about him every day; he was such a wonderful man and so good to me. Maybe you should remember Eino the way he was not too long ago. Is there anything for you to wear in this pile of clothes? It seems it will be quite warm and sunny again, although it’s already September. Would you like to come shopping with me at Hakaniemi Hall today? Then I could come with you some day to see Eino, couldn’t I? To the SquirrelsNest.’
Margit smiled so that the unvarying white of her capped teeth gleamed prettily. She didn’t say anything; she just slowly dried herself on her towel, pulled a jar of lotion from the pandemonium on her dresser, and started greasing her vast carcass.
Anna-Liisa’s commanding voice echoed among the living-room pillars: ‘Hello! Help is required out here immediately!’
Margit nodded at Siiri, giving her permission to go. Out in the living room, Anna-Liisa had settled into the sofa to read the latest issue of Language Matters. Emilia the in-home caregiver was still on the floor, this time face down. ‘She fell when she tried to get up. Hit her head on the corner of the coffee table,’ Anna-Liisa reported without so much as a glance at Siiri.
‘Goodness!’ Siiri exclaimed. ‘Where’s Irma? And what about the Ambass— Onni? Is he off taking care of business again?’
Anna-Liisa lowered her magazine to her lap, irritated at having to pull herself away from her fascinating article on morphophonological apophony.
‘Onni’s meeting with his lawyer. I’m not certain about Irma; but my understanding is that she’s off at water aerobics somewhere. Do they offer it at the Allergy Institute? It’s a horribly long way from here.’
‘It’s incredible that some people can make time for hobbies,’ Siiri muttered to herself as she examined the cut that had appeared in the caregiver’s forehead. It didn’t look bad, but the girl was petrified with fear, since a tiny drop of blood had dripped to the floor. Siiri went into the spa and retrieved a bandage from her toiletries, pasted it to the caregiver’s forehead, helped her onto the couch, and forced her to drink an entire glass of orange juice.
‘How is it you’re in such delicate condition?’ she asked, when the girl finally appeared to have pulled herself together.
‘I dunno. Maybe I’m pregnant, I dunno.’
‘Pregnant?’ Siiri cried, her voice rising until it was as shrill as Irma’s, no matter that she had never taken voice lessons in her youth. She had always imagined that Irma’s shrieks and screeches were the result of her operatic schooling and vocal training. ‘How is it possible you don’t know for sure, you silly thing? Isn’t it a simple thing these days, a pregnancy test?’
‘Yeah, I haven’t had time. All I’ve got time to do is work and sleep.’
Anna-Liisa’s eyebrows rose furiously, and she tried to sink even more deeply into her article elucidating the causes of inflected-form root variation. The caregiver told Siiri that she’d missed two menstrual cycles, but because she’d been working double shifts to gather enough money for a hiking trip she was planning in Peru and Bolivia, she hadn’t had time to really think about the whole thing. She’d been feeling a little nauseous lately and had lost consciousness a few times. She had no idea who the father of the child could be. She related all this as nonchalantly but amiably as everything else she said.
‘There’s a pharmacy right nearby,’ Siiri said. ‘I’m going to go and buy you a pregnancy test; I suppose I can bu
y them without a prescription. In the meantime, you rest. Maybe you and Anna-Liisa can talk about what you should have been doing during rehabilitation today. It doesn’t look like you’ll have time to actually do it.’
Emilia suddenly remembered that she was an in-home caregiver. She jumped up, went white as a sheet, and toppled back to the couch, afraid she would faint.
‘I’ve got to submit a report . . . I’m supposed to be in Pajamäki . . . oh no, what time is it . . . can you do my report for me?’
‘Could you please submit,’ Anna-Liisa said emphatically. ‘How does one draft this report?’
‘With my mobile phone, it’s a simple app. Here. I gotta sign out on all my visits.’
‘Register; I need to register. Seriously, it would be better to say register.’
The girl looked at Anna-Liisa, drained, and handed over her smartphone with what appeared to be her last ounce of strength. Anna-Liisa fiddled with it, a tremor of disgust playing across her face. Siiri didn’t wait around to observe how this budding relationship between an in-home caregiver and an elderly client in need of rehabilitation would develop; she scurried off to the pharmacy.
She had to ask the pharmacy assistant for help, since she wasn’t able to find the pregnancy tests herself. The woman gaped at her and repeated, ‘Pregnancy test? You said pregnancy test?’ to ensure she had heard correctly. Siiri patiently explained that the test wasn’t for her but for an in-home caregiver who was lying half-stunned in their temporary asylum centre in the Arena Building. She remembered that one of Irma’s cousins had been forced to fill out an insurance reimbursement form for diabetes treatment, where the first question was whether the ninety-two-year-old client was pregnant. Irma’s cousin had answered: ‘Not to my knowledge.’ The pharmacy assistant asked no more questions after this, just obediently sold Siiri three pregnancy tests in case administering the test was tricky and they needed to practise.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 14