Escape from Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘Couldn’t they use this space to sell little doodads and snacks, like everyplace else? Peanuts and umbrellas?’

  ‘Yes, or liquorice ropes, or those colourful lumps that it’s impossible to tell if they’re candy or soap!’

  When they arrived at the platform, it was impossible to say which track led east and which one led downtown. They hesitated for a moment, until they heard a deep voice calling from down the platform: ‘Siiri! Siiri, my love!’

  Why, it was Muhis, waving at Siiri with both hands, the familiar colourful beehive teetering on his head.

  ‘Is that him?’ Margit asked, her voice leaden with suspicion.

  ‘Muhis! Oh you, blessed man!’ Siiri squealed and introduced her friend to Margit, who maintained her air of prejudiced reserve and stepped backwards even though Muhis was chuckling his hearty chuckle and revealing a mouthful of enviably healthy teeth.

  ‘How’s it going, Siiri? Where are you headed?’

  Siiri explained about the SquirrelsNest and Eino and their planned metro escapade, and Muhis showed them that the eastbound metros left from the right side of the platform. He was on his way to the Itäkeskus Mall himself, and promised to ride with them.

  It wasn’t long before the orange plastic metro pulled up with its unmistakable whine, and they stepped in, Siiri and Muhis side by side, Margit trailing at a safe distance and seating herself on her own bench.

  The metro ride was incredibly smooth, like gliding on air, and the combination of the peculiar smell, the whine that rose more than a sixth during acceleration and braking, and the automated announcements made Siiri feel futuristic indeed. ‘Sörnäinen, Sörnäs,’ the smiling female robot announced, first the Finnish name of the stop and then the Swedish, doing a superb job of differentiating between the Finnish and Swedish ways of pronouncing the ö. Anna-Liisa would have appreciated that. Not long after pulling out of Sörnäinen, the metro emerged from the tunnel, and then they could enjoy the autumn vistas just as if they were riding on a tram. On the Kulosaari Bridge, Siiri told Muhis and Margit about her grandmother, who had lived in the forests of Kulosaari Island in the 1800s and had rowed across to the Market Square every day to do her shopping. Muhis didn’t believe a word of it but laughed cheerfully; Margit’s eyes were glued to the window. Muhis was on his way to meet his cousin. He explained that most members of his sizable family were scattered across Europe and the United States; other than him, this cousin was the only one who lived in Finland. Their relatives couldn’t fathom how Muhis and his cousin could live in a dark country where it was always freezing. Which sounded particularly silly at the moment, since a blazing sun had been beating down on Finland for the past four months, making life difficult for the elderly.

  ‘What are you planning on cooking this week?’ Muhis asked, as always.

  Siiri told him that she had picked up some Jerusalem artichokes and was going to make a soup from them. It was a lot of work peeling the little tubers, since they were so lumpy, and Muhis told her that the French had developed a smooth variety. Siiri had a hard time believing this.

  ‘You can buy them at Hakaniemi; I’ll show you tomorrow,’ Muhis chuckled. ‘And after the soup?’

  Siiri had already thought about that, too. After the soup, she would serve globe artichokes with melted butter.

  ‘Everyone will get their own cup of butter they can dip the artichoke – for goodness’ sake, what are they? Scales? Shells? – in. It’s a messy business, which is why it’s such fun. Irma likes it, at least. And at the end, you eat the artichoke heart with a knife and fork; it’s quite the delicacy. But you need an enormous pot to cook them in. I might have to cook them in several batches.’

  ‘Let’s go and buy you a big pot tomorrow. You need the proper tools, Siiri, my love. Or should we buy you one right now, at the mall? There’s a Stockmann there, your favourite store!’

  But Siiri refused to haul some ten-litre cauldron to the SquirrelsNest, so Muhis made her swear to buy a big pot at her earliest opportunity. Those were his very words: ‘at your earliest opportunity’. He spoke excellent Finnish, much better than many consultants, luxury flat-owners, or pregnant in-home caregivers Siiri could think of.

  ‘Otherwise I’ll bring you mine. But just one; I have many. A plethora!’ And once again, he laughed so loudly that his headwear nearly toppled into Margit’s lap.

  The Itäkeskus Mall was a vast leisure complex. There were dozens of department stores, a food court, boutiques, shops and hallways leading off in every direction, with a roof over it all so the weather didn’t hamper the general loitering. Everyone seemed to be killing time; no one was in a hurry. Old people sat on benches, young people on the ground, and immigrants gathered in their own clusters. Siiri would have lost her way in this enchanted universe in a matter of seconds, but Margit trod purposefully down a convoluted path that led them out of the commercial jungle, across a few streets, and eventually to the nursing home known as the SquirrelsNest. They had left Muhis behind not long after the metro escalators had deposited them in the mall. Siiri barely had time to say goodbye to her friend, Margit was in such a rush.

  The SquirrelsNest looked like most retirement homes. Eerie doors that opened by themselves, big windows, high, echoing common rooms and a courtyard in the middle that someone had tried to turn into a garden – but since the trees were newly planted saplings, the space bore an unfortunate resemblance to what it really was, a poorly cleaned construction site. Was this what the yard at Sunset Grove would look like, too, once the renovation was complete?

  At the end of a hopelessly long corridor, they reached the dementia unit, which could only be entered by tapping a code into a box next to the door. Margit couldn’t remember the code. She rummaged around her handbag at length, searching for her notebook; it took another few minutes of scouring her notebook before she found the slip of paper where she’d jotted down a column of codes.

  ‘It’s probably this second-to-last one . . . hmm, that doesn’t seem to work. Well, maybe if I try this one at the top, yes, I think that’s it . . . hmm, that didn’t work either. Am I supposed to press that pound sign at the end, too, I wonder?’ Margit looked fearfully at Siiri, as if she believed this was another mystery Siiri had the answer to.

  ‘Press the pound sign,’ Siiri said. There was a faint squeal, and then the door clicked and slowly started to open, as if they were in a haunted house. They panicked and jumped aside, trapping themselves behind it, but they managed to circle around the stupid thing before inevitably it started closing, even though Siiri hadn’t crossed the threshold yet.

  The dementia ward had a living room that was supposed to feel cosy. You could tell because the furniture was mismatched and on the shabby side, ugly needlepoints decorated the walls, heavy, ruffled floral curtains hung at the windows, and a plastic cactus teetered on the windowsill. There weren’t any real houseplants, because a resident had been caught munching on leaves once. A tiny old woman sat on the couch, holding two stuffed animals, a dog and a unicorn. Three feet from her face stood the television, where a heavyset woman was lecturing the helpless parents of an unruly brood of ill-behaved children. A woman in a nightshirt and a pair of colossal spectacles was dozing in an armchair. The dining table was unoccupied, but a foreign-looking man was working at a computer in the glass cubicle opposite. Margit stuck her head into the office and said hello.

  ‘Do you know him?’ Siiri asked, surprised, because she couldn’t believe someone worked at a nursing home long enough to get to know the residents’ families.

  ‘Not really, but he’s here quite often, at the computer. Maybe he’s the boss.’

  Margit turned the corner and walked straight into the last room. They could hear loud singing coming from one of the other rooms, a shrill female voice belting out a lullaby with very coarse lyrics.

  ‘Go to hell, you son-of-a-bitch, a-as, rock-a-bye-baby, you goddamn son-of-a-bitch, go fu—’

  ‘I see they do a splendid job of maintaining folk traditio
ns here,’ Siiri laughed, but Margit was glum. Evidently, she had started ruminating over Eino’s suffering and loss of dignity the moment she stepped through the automatic doors.

  Like everyone in the dementia unit, Eino shared a room. There wasn’t much daylight; all you could see out the window was the concrete wall of the building next door, and it blocked nearly all the sun. The walls were grey, which was, no doubt, a practical choice in terms of cleaning, and the sole pieces of furniture were the two hospital beds and a lone plastic chair evidently intended for loved ones. Margit settled into the chair and leaned in towards Eino, as if listening to determine whether the shrunken, lifeless-looking man lying there – her husband – were still alive. Siiri stood at a respectful distance and wondered how it was possible that Margit’s and Eino’s daily sexual interludes had, so recently, been so loud as to cause general consternation at Sunset Grove. Eino’s slide into severe dementia had been surprisingly fast; here he was, a withered old man, barely recognizable. Siiri understood Margit’s depression and gloomy talk better now.

  The neighbouring bed was occupied by a slightly younger-looking woman in incontinence pads whose hands were strapped down. Margit explained that the woman was very restless and occasionally aggressive, because she’d come out of her fog intermittently and understand where she was.

  ‘So they had to medicate her and tie her down like that. Or that’s what the nurses told me. Is it really the only alternative? I wonder. No one comes to visit her; no one fights for her rights. She might end up in the basement; that’s where they put those in the worst condition who don’t have any loved ones.’

  Siiri looked at the sedated woman and felt sick to her stomach. She remembered Irma in the same state and all the awful things that had happened at Sunset Grove a year ago. Had it only been a year? It all felt so distant. She sat at the foot of Eino’s bed and held her head in her hands to make the stabbing pain go away.

  ‘Look, Eino, Siiri came to see you today, too. Siiri is sitting on your bed, Eino.’

  Margit spoke in a tender, low voice to her husband, who opened his eyes and looked at her fearfully, recognizing nothing but her soothing tone. Margit continued chatting, talked about falling leaves and the sunshine outside, told him about the delicious meals Siiri had prepared, and this was the first time Siiri learned that Margit enjoyed the food she cooked and perhaps even appreciated the fact that everything was served to her just as at the most expensive retirement homes.

  ‘Siiri always sets the table so beautifully for us. Just yesterday we had bright green napkins in our glasses folded into cute little fans. Oh, Eino, you would have loved the moose soup Siiri made. Just think, Hakaniemi Hall is right across the street from our new home, and you can get whatever you want there. Who knows, maybe Siiri slipped in a few bulls’ balls, too.’

  Eino whimpered, and it genuinely seemed as if he were trying to laugh. Siiri glanced at Margit, and she was smiling broadly, too. For a moment they seemed oddly happy, a husband and wife who had journeyed through a long marriage together hand in hand, although one of them couldn’t remember who he was. But the idyllic scene didn’t last long: Eino’s room-mate’s eyes flashed open and she started shrieking. Her shrill, piercing wail even drowned out the foul-mouthed lullaby from the neighbouring room.

  ‘Help, help, help, help me, help me, goddammit, can’t anyone hear?’

  Siiri rose, patted the hysterical woman on the hand and tried to stroke her head, but the woman spat on Siiri’s hand and kept screaming. Eino shut his eyes and grimaced, as if in pain. Margit marched out of the room, pulling Siiri behind her.

  ‘This is what it’s like here. It’s intolerable. We have to get the man at the computer to give her another shot. Every time I come I go away feeling just as bad.’

  They found him in the nurses’ office. He didn’t look up from his computer when Margit stepped in; he just kept on working.

  ‘There’s an acute situation in room seven. The woman woke up and is being aggressive and crying for help,’ Margit said in a tired voice; apparently, she had delivered this same message dozens of times. Siiri thought about Eino, lying in the same room with the woman shrieking like a banshee, and felt weak. The male nurse calmly rose, opened the medicine cabinet, took the needle, and made for Eino’s room. He left the medicine cabinet open.

  ‘Is that where . . . they keep all the medication?’ Siiri whispered in surprise.

  Margit had wasted no time making her way over to the medicine cabinet and examining its contents. Every patient – or resident, as they were called here, to create a homey ambience – had their own plastic basket. Eino’s basket contained eight different bottles. Siiri recognized two pain prescriptions and one anti-depressant. Margit knew the others were anti-inflammatories, sleeping aids and medication for Alzheimer’s disease.

  ‘And those are morphine pills. For pain.’

  ‘Are they still giving him Alzheimer’s medication? Why on earth?’ Siiri wondered.

  ‘Force of habit. It comes with the territory here,’ Margit said, and started writing down the names from the bottles.

  The dementia unit was uncannily calm, although it wasn’t quiet. The old lady with the big glasses was still sleeping in the armchair, and the tiny zookeeper was nodding off at the flat-screen TV. The programme had changed: now viewers could observe how a group of young people locked up in a room together would react when served too much alcohol. A bit like watching the surveillance cameras in a dementia unit, although here they poured drugs down throats instead of booze. The lewd lullaby echoed in the distance, and Eino’s room-mate was still crying for help. The nurse must still have been administering the shot to her.

  Suddenly, Margit took fistfuls of pills from three of the bottles, dumped them into her handbag, and put the bottles back in the cabinet. She eyed Siiri steadily to make sure her friend wouldn’t do anything stupid.

  ‘Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do here,’ Margit said dejectedly. And in that instant, Siiri remembered that today was her ninety-sixth birthday, but she didn’t say a word.

  Chapter 20

  The evening-shift caregiver was washing Anna-Liisa in the spa, and Margit was solving her crossword on the sofa – pondering the answers volubly, as always. She readily took up the substantial space her ample presence required. At first Siiri had found Margit’s habit of talking to herself irritating, but she didn’t let it bother her any more – nor the fact that Margit never cleaned up after herself, wandered around in various states of undress, suffered from flatulence, and forgot barely chewed wads of gum on the coffee table. But Siiri still couldn’t get over the way Margit used any old toothbrush she happened to come across in the bathroom. Siiri had started keeping hers in her bedroom closet, which induced Irma to accuse her of being paranoid, in other words, practically senile. Irma hadn’t noticed that Margit had ever used her toothbrush.

  The Ambassador had escaped for an evening walk well before the caregiver’s arrival. Before leaving, he had sung the praises of Siiri’s blood pudding, which had taken him back to the 1970s and his suspenseful years as a diplomat during the Cold War. The compliment irked Irma, who had been skipping out on kitchen duty to an inexcusable extent, and Anna-Liisa, who had often cooked for her husband during their time in Sunset Grove without receiving any particular thanks.

  ‘Stop scrubbing me with that potato brush! My skin is very dry; you’re going to tear it!’

  It was Anna-Liisa’s voice. The amount of noise coming from the bathroom tonight was altogether peculiar. Anna-Liisa had already told the caregiver to close the window, because otherwise she’d catch pneumonia and die. The sound of the running shower was accompanied by a hissing and rasping and the occasional loud bang, along with groans from Anna-Liisa. Irma and Siiri were sitting on the sofa; Siiri was reading Buddenbrooks and Irma was playing Sudoku on her green flaptop. They glanced at each other, unsure if the situation were dire enough to call for intervention. Margit appeared to have forgotten her hearing aid on her n
ightstand. She paid no attention to the racket coming from the bathroom, just wondered out loud, coughing and clearing her throat, whether Jari Litmanen was a soccer star and if the answer for ‘Eeva and Jari’ might be ‘Litmanens’.

  ‘I HAVE THE RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION!’

  The shout cut through the living room’s diversions like the crack of a whip. Even Margit stopped talking for a moment. Anna-Liisa’s voice was tremendously defiant, furious. What on earth was going on in the bathroom?

  ‘It’s spelled out in the European Union Convention on Human Rights, haven’t you ever heard of that? I get to decide what anyone does to me! You cannot force me to do this! An elderly person needs to be treated with as much respect as anyone else!’

  Anna-Liisa’s voice slid into despair. Siiri set aside her family of bourgeois Lübeckers and ran to the bathroom door, but it was locked. She knocked powerfully, and felt calm and confident.

  ‘Anna-Liisa, it’s Siiri. Can you open the door?’

  Another knock, firm and clear, like one of Anna-Liisa’s. Siiri heard murmuring inside, a couple of bangs, and then the door was opened by a brawny woman, not a skinny young thing like the majority of the caregivers. They were usually either students doing their practical training or children who had just received their diplomas, too timid to open a stranger’s door and look you in the eye. But this one had been scrubbing seniors for decades. She stood there in the blue homemade housecoat that, apparently, was her uniform and a pair of rubber boots, stumpy legs spread angrily. ‘What’s this, another old lady who needs a good scrub-down? Or are you about to poop in your pants?’