Escape from Sunset Grove

by Minna Lindgren

  ‘And then from the back, her hair was like a rat’s nest and no one had the nerve to say anything to her about it. She would have had a heart attack if she’d known, and I mean that literally – which she eventually did, the lucky thing. She went instantly and never knew about the rat’s rear-end on the back of her head.’

  After applying a little lipstick and drenching herself in an excessive cloud of cloying perfume, Irma was ready to emerge from her chambers. They paused at the doorway, because Siiri didn’t know what to do with the letters addressed to Anna-Liisa.

  ‘Show them to her; there’s no reason not to. No one intends to take any action, which, under the circumstances, is a big relief.’

  ‘Are you referring to me?’

  Anna-Liisa was sitting, back erect, on the white couch, listening to everything; she had very sharp hearing. Margit, on the other hand, was engrossed in a Damernas Värld article about the nocturnal shenanigans of the King of Sweden and his brother-in-law and didn’t react in the least. Her hearing aid was on the coffee table next to a hairbrush and a hardened clump of chewing gum.

  ‘Two letters arrived for you, or actually for all of us, seeing as how it was all of us who sent those complaints, which is why we dared open and read them.’

  Looking guilty, Siiri handed over the unsealed correspondence, and Anna-Liisa eyed her reproachfully but said nothing. She read Director Sundström’s warm Christmas card first, grunted sourly, and then studied Yuri Ahkmatov’s enigmatic expressions with a frown.

  ‘What an atrocity! “All details your property and other questions mentioned to the letter!”’

  Siiri noted Anna-Liisa’s piquing interest in the matter with concern and regretted not having discreetly thrown the letters in the bin.

  ‘It’s robot language,’ Irma said. ‘I thought you might find it interesting.’

  ‘Irma and I were just saying that it seems both letters indicate that everything going on at Sunset Grove is normal. That’s a relief, isn’t it?’ Siiri said, trying to smile naturally.

  ‘Have you been complaining again?’ The conversation had roused Margit’s attention, as there was nothing novel about the escapades of Swedish royalty. She had popped the hearing aid onto her ear and the gum into her mouth. ‘Don’t you remember that’s a sure shortcut to being locked up in the dementia unit?’

  Irma blanched as she recalled events from a year ago. Siiri hadn’t considered that possibility at all; she continued to hold on to the belief that Director Sundström was a sincere person and that all the bad things at Sunset Grove had been the handiwork of Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen, who were now paying for their crimes. Suddenly she was overcome by an incredible longing for Mika Korhonen, her personal angel. They could certainly have used his help now.

  ‘We also reported it to the police,’ Anna-Liisa said matter-of-factly. ‘And strictly speaking, we never approached this Fix ’n’ Finish company; we addressed our complaints exclusively to the Loving Care Foundation. In addition, we informed Director Sundström and old Weasel Head about our intentions.’

  ‘Hedgehog Head.’

  ‘Yes, him. But now it turns out that our letters have been passed from one hand to the other, and the matter has been foisted off on Director Sundström and this imbecilic, illiterate contractor.’

  They were silent for a moment. In the ecstasy of relief, Siiri had forgotten the police report and everything else Anna-Liisa now stated so pointedly. Siiri was afraid they would end up in an even bigger pickle; Anna-Liisa didn’t have the slightest clue about her husband’s complicity and as a result was dedicating all the vigour of the recently healed and rehabilitated to ensuring justice was carried out. She was already casting about furiously for a pencil and sharpener in order to draft sharp replies to Sundström and the foreign robot she suspected of having a low IQ. How on earth could they extract themselves gracefully at this point? Siiri shot a helpless look at Irma, who returned her look equally helplessly. But it was Margit who came to the rescue.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, stop while you’re ahead,’ Margit said with what was perhaps an unnecessary brusqueness, laughing at Anna-Liisa’s activism. Margit thought that renovations and plumbing retrofits in particular were legally countenanced criminal activity it was pointless fighting against. ‘Especially for old people living in retirement homes who scribble out letters in pencil.’

  ‘I always copy out everything neatly in ink,’ Anna-Liisa said, slightly offended.

  Irma wasted no time backing her partner in crime: ‘It’s true. Anna-Liisa writes skilfully, and she has an exceptionally beautiful hand. But maybe Margit is right. I can’t be bothered to tilt against windmills. And we don’t even speak the same language as this half-Russki Fix ’n’ Finisher.’

  ‘Besides, we can always wait and see how the police react to our criminal report,’ Siiri said, sounding far too unenthusiastic, because the very thought of starting a criminal investigation made her weak. She hadn’t forgotten her previous interrogation at police headquarters in Pasila; she had fainted that time and found herself in the rear of an ambulance on her way back to Sunset Grove.

  ‘How is Onni feeling today?’ Irma asked, to brighten the mood, but she was humming the blood-chilling theme from the final act of Rigoletto, which led Siiri’s thoughts to assassins.

  According to Anna-Liisa, the Ambassador had been restless all night, but had settled down after drinking a strong cup of coffee and a glass of juice for breakfast. Now he was in a deep sleep, but unfortunately his fever hadn’t gone down.

  Siiri and Irma applied all of their arts to making the Ambassador’s flu sound trivial and asked Anna-Liisa to join them for coffee at Hakaniemi Hall. They could flip through the tabloids in the second-floor cafe and learn the identities of the tarted-up peacocks they’d seen during the televised broadcast from the president’s Independence Day ball. While they were at it, they could buy something delicious for dinner and look for Christmas ornaments. It was plain now that they would be spending Christmas at Hakaniemi, and a few straw ornaments, angels and elves would cheer them up.

  ‘But there’s no way we’re dragging a Christmas tree up here,’ Irma said, and everyone agreed.

  Chapter 35

  Much to their surprise, Eino Partanen’s burial permit arrived well before Christmas. Some blessed, hard-working doctor who had a true calling for his work had managed to drop by the city’s central freezer long enough to have a peek at Eino and verify that he was, indeed, dead.

  Margit was invigorated by the funeral preparations. She said she was a member of the Lean-to Co-operative, even though there weren’t any Lean-to stores any more, as it had merged into a larger retail chain long ago. But the Lean-to Funeral Home still existed and, wouldn’t you know it, continued to offer co-operative members a 10 per cent discount on its services, which put Margit in a particularly good mood. And since the offices of the Lean-to Funeral Home were just around the corner on Siltasaarenkatu, the plans for Eino’s funeral advanced as if it were a long-awaited party.

  ‘You’ll come with me when I go and arrange the details with the funeral home, won’t you?’ Margit asked Siiri.

  Margit had grown so entwined with her husband that she didn’t feel confident on her own. She needed someone at her side to approve her decisions and doings, even when she was acting decisively. During their stint as refugees at Hakaniemi, she had latched onto Siiri for an emotional security blanket, and Siiri had nothing against standing at Margit’s side at difficult times. But Irma was hurt she hadn’t been asked along. She was used to organizing big family celebrations and would have loved being able to pick out sandwich cakes and casket trim.

  ‘I don’t need anyone aside from Siiri. There’s no need to turn it into a town meeting,’ Margit said rudely, and left Irma sipping her morning glass of red wine on her bar stool. Since Eino’s death, Irma had developed a new habit of drinking a small glass of red wine after breakfast, as if to counterbalance the evening whisky she partook at her doctor’s ord
ers. Her morning wine set the blood circulating, and in addition she had heard it was wonderfully healthy.

  ‘It has flavonoids . . . they’re anti-aging compounds,’ she said. And before anyone could say anything to her about retarding the aging process, she laughed merrily: ‘It’s never too late to start looking after your health!’

  All was quiet, calm and grey in the funeral home, as was befitting. The staff member who served them introduced herself as the director and spoke in a low voice, practically a whisper, and made generous use of passive forms in an apparent attempt to give a polite but not overly intrusive impression. At first Margit couldn’t make anything out of the woman’s consolatory, pronoun-free sighs, but this didn’t really pose a problem, as the task at hand seemed rather straightforward. First they chose the casket. An intriguing miniature display of the selection of coffin style had been arrayed on the wall. Siiri and Margit fingered the toy caskets inquisitively as the branch manager related what she considered interesting details about the product selection.

  ‘A classic casket in German oak is always popular. The very latest trend is this eco-casket, which is made without nails.’

  ‘Without nails? Won’t it fall apart?’ Siiri asked.

  ‘The eco-casket uses wooden dowels. They’re made in Nakkila from Finnish pine and are suitable for all sorts of crematoria.’

  ‘I’ll take whatever’s cheapest,’ Margit said, and Siiri remembered how they’d discussed their own funerals on a trip once and Margit had announced that she wanted a cardboard coffin. Unfortunately, the funeral home’s selection was not this extensive. The cheapest option was an apparently slightly un-ecological pine version made in Estonia of unfinished planks.

  ‘It’s a tad spare, isn’t it?’ Siiri felt compelled to remark, because without any fabric the coffin looked like a fruit crate.

  ‘Let’s throw in a black cloth to cover it. Something cheap, no draping or pointless tassels,’ Margit said. The branch manager raised an eyebrow that wasn’t an eyebrow, because she had carefully plucked out every hair from her forehead and painted brown lines in their place. Now these lines rose in bewilderment, because in Finland caskets were generally white.

  ‘Eino has to have black. He looked so handsome in a tux,’ Margit explained.

  Next they needed to decide on the lining, which Margit thought was idiotic, because by this time her husband had got used to lying in a freezer drawer and it was doubtful that he expected much in the way of comforts during his few hours in the casket.

  ‘No lining, then,’ the funeral-home director whispered. ‘What about the pillow, shall we say silk?’

  ‘A pillow? What on earth are you going on about? We’re not putting a silk pillow in there just so we can burn it.’

  The conversation staggered on. The funeral home’s agent wanted to dress Eino in his best clothes, but Margit announced that they’d been stolen ages ago from the closet at Sunset Grove. This made Siiri realize that her serviceable old funeral dress had also been swallowed up in the maw of the retrofit. She would have to buy new funeral wear, and it seemed a horrific waste, but Margit reminded her that she’d use it at least four times, since the rest of them would be following Eino and would need to be buried too.

  ‘Why would I be the last one to die?’ Siiri asked, and the branch manager cleared her throat in order to draw their attention to the glossy catalogue featuring a variety of funeral garb for the dead. She wasn’t surprised when Margit chose the cheapest one, the option that looked like a paper sheet without any extras.

  ‘The casket will be closed the whole time, won’t it? No one’s going to look inside,’ Margit said.

  For the urn, Margit wanted a grey cardboard box, even though the agent tried to explain that these were mostly used for the remains of dogs. Margit was sure her husband had wasted away so much by the time he died that he’d produce less ash than the average canine.

  ‘You see such enormous dogs in this part of town, have you noticed?’ Siiri said, as the mood was already rather tense. ‘Real ponies! Imagine how much they eat in a day! More than the five of us put together.’

  They were compelled to explain that ‘the five of us’ meant their little refugee community that was temporarily occupying an apartment in the Arena building. Siiri had already advanced rather deeply into her account, and although she didn’t go into the suspected crimes at Sunset Grove, the funeral-home director looked at her watch and started talking about the pastor, the music, the obituary, the catering and the estate inventory.

  ‘How awful, there’s so much to remember,’ Margit sighed, as the list was undeniably long.

  They accepted the stack of brochures decorated with white flowers and promised to study them as they reviewed the responsibilities of kin with respect to funerals, and the funeral-home director didn’t have all day to sit there listening to them speculate about which one of them would die last. They could no doubt decide the details themselves, seeing as how they were all experienced buriers of loved ones. Margit announced that she would be holding the funeral service at Kallio Church, in which she had never set foot.

  ‘It’s closest.’

  ‘And it was designed by Lars Sonck, like the Tampere Cathedral and our very own Arena building. It might be quite lovely from the pews,’ Siiri exclaimed, as she had never been inside the Kallio Church either. Its tower formed the central element of the city’s horizon north of the Pitkäsilta, and you had a handsome view of it down Unioninkatu all the way to Kaivopuisto.

  ‘Right. So what day were you thinking?’ the brow-less woman asked, flipping through her desk calendar as if Margit ought to be happy if she could clear out thirty minutes for Margit’s husband’s final journey.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, just fit me in somewhere. My calendar is wide open,’ Margit said. Nor did she care which pastor led Eino’s funeral service, because she didn’t know any and didn’t much care for their sermonizing anyway. ‘As long as they can stand there and speak intelligibly.’

  ‘Do you mean soberly?’ Siiri clarified.

  ‘That, too, preferably.’

  The funeral-home director swallowed a deep yawn and said the funeral home would pass on Margit’s wishes to the parish.

  ‘They’ll be in touch. What was the phone number?’

  This was a ticklish question. Margit didn’t own a mobile phone, because she was hard of hearing and had never learned her way around them anyway. Siiri didn’t have one, either. There was the landline at the Hakaniemi apartment, oddly shaped and electric blue, and it had taken them a couple of weeks before they realized that it was a phone, but they didn’t remember the number, nor did they know in whose name the line was registered. They would be able to find Irma’s number from information, because there couldn’t be more than one Irma Lännenleimu in this world, but Margit didn’t want random pastors calling Irma about her private affairs.

  ‘That’s just going to get messy. Could the pastor pay us a visit at home?’ she suggested, and that was just fine.

  ‘Unfortunately, our time here has ended,’ the funeral-home director suddenly whispered, and true to her word, she drove them out of her office, even though they had only been sitting there for a little over an hour, and half the decisions had yet to be made. The stingy woman hadn’t even offered them coffee; in quality funeral homes they always did. Siiri and Margit exited, a little offended, and had to turn right back around, as Siiri’s walking stick had fallen behind the sofa and she had forgotten it there. The funeral-home director didn’t lift a finger to help Siiri fish the cane out of the awkward spot, just picked at her cuticles, looking concerned.

  ‘Pleasure meeting you, see you soon!’ Margit waved at the woman, who stood waiting at the door to close it the second they stepped out, even though it was only two in the afternoon. The silly thing; in her line of business, they were the clientele she should have been after.

  Back at home on the sofa, they related their adventures to the others and distributed the funeral home’s broch
ures. Anna-Liisa delved into a pamphlet that said you could turn a loved one’s ashes into a diamond. The brochure was illustrated with images of smiling people wearing brilliant-cut blue stones in necklaces, bracelets, rings.

  ‘This is macabre,’ Anna-Liisa muttered.

  ‘I think it’s a rather fun idea,’ Irma exclaimed. ‘I’m wearing my husband on this finger and my mother on that one, and over here on my other hand I have my father, that’s the biggest diamond because he was a very heavy man, and this little one here on my bosom is . . . let’s say my cat!’ Then she started missing her dear old Veikko again, but once the catering brochure was in her hands she forgot her husband just as quickly as she had remembered him. ‘Oh, what delicious-looking cakesies, they’re making my mouth water. Let’s order lots just to be sure; I want some of this caramel cake at least, and Sachertorte. How big is your family, Margit?’

  None of them knew anything about Eino and Margit’s immediate family, let alone extended relations. It turned out that Eino’s family was actually quite large, but Margit didn’t care for their company. She claimed it was an ‘in-bred mutual admiration society’, and it didn’t take much to deduce that Margit felt like she wasn’t good enough for them. Her own siblings were dead, and she hadn’t stayed in touch with their children.

  ‘What about . . . Do you two have any children?’ Siiri asked tentatively. After all, this was a matter that required clarification as well.

  ‘Eino does,’ Margit said. A long silence followed. Anna-Liisa read the estate inventory advertisement, Siiri poured more coffee for all of them, and Irma racked her brains trying to think of a polite way to proceed in this matter, which was growing more interesting by the minute.

  She finally settled on: ‘Are Eino’s children bastards?’