by Helena Halme
Seventeen
London
London was drizzly, but Kaisa was surprised by how much warmer it was by the end of April than Helsinki. She was too hot in her new thickly-lined winter coat, which her mother had bought for her at Stockmann’s after hearing about the job in London. It was camel wool, and far too warm, plus the rain made a special pattern on it, as if it was made out of leopard skin. For her mother, Kaisa had put a slightly more glamorous spin on the job offer than was the truth, and hadn’t shown her the copy of the magazine that Rose had sent. Pirjo hated communists: something to do with Kaisa’s grandparents and the Winter War when Finns fought the Russians. Kaisa didn’t want her to think she was going to be working for a left-wing publication.
The offices of Adam's Apple were on a side street a few minutes’ walk from Farringdon tube station. Kaisa spotted the office instantly, because there were piles of magazine stacked on the pavement, and people milling outside talking and smoking. She was greeted with waves and smiles when she asked for Rose, ‘She’s upstairs, third floor.’
‘Kaisa, how lovely to see you!’ Rose gave Kaisa a hug, and added, ‘I am so glad you could come.’
The first thing that hit Kaisa when she stepped inside the office was the smell of printed paper. It was a strange combination of a Finnish forest, chopped wood and glue. The inside of Adam’s Apple looked a lot more chaotic than Sonia magazine, where Rose had worked before, but the chaos seemed friendly. The business of producing the magazine seemed to take place in one large room, lined with desks. Rose had got up from her position at the back of the room, where she’d been sitting typing. Behind her was a tall bookcase crammed with books with different coloured spines.
Rose took her hand and smiled, ‘Welcome to London!’ she said.
Kaisa saw a completely different woman in front of her. Instead of the Princess Di-like, upper-class, well-spoken, carefully put together woman, she now saw a carefree, passionate Rose who was almost make-up free. She’d let her highlights grow out, and Kaisa saw her hair was greying at the roots.
Rose introduced her to the other three women in the office. Rachel was sitting on a table, scribbling something on a notepad. She was a dark-haired girl, about Kaisa’s height and build, with a long back and long legs. She had short, choppy hair, and wore a white shirt buttoned up at the neck and loose-fitting black trousers. ‘Hi’ she said to Kaisa and went back to her writing. On the other side, two women were reading. They smiled and nodded briefly when Rose introduced them as Barbara and Jenny.
Kaisa suddenly felt overdressed. Most of the other women were wearing casual jumpers and trousers, or even jeans, whereas Kaisa wore her black trouser suit under the warm camel coat. She’d have to remember to wear something more suitable for the next day.
“You might have seen Jack, our driver, and the others outside? We’ve just got delivery of this month’s issue, so it’s an exciting day for us!’ Rose immediately took one copy of the latest issue and gave it to Kaisa. On the cover it said, ‘Sex, Drugs And Rock and Roll’ in red ink over a black and white picture of a woman.
‘Looks great,’ Kaisa said.
Rose began talking about the articles, what socio-political issues were covered by the latest magazine (which was Rose’s first) and what they were planning for the next. She was so enthusiastic, her face shone.
But Kaisa was worried about money. She was excited by Rose, and about the prospect of working on a magazine in London. She couldn’t believe she’d have an opportunity to further the feminist cause, but she was concerned about how she was going to support herself in London. In her letter, or in the expensive phone calls Kaisa had made from her mother’s telephone to agree a start date, Rose hadn’t made any mention of Kaisa’s pay.
Rose had, though, arranged a cheap bed-sit for her in Notting Hill, in a large white-clad house on a road called Colville Terrace, a few streets away from the tube station. She’d left Kaisa some bedding, a kettle and even an ironing board and an iron, set neatly on the single bed of the large room. She had a small kitchenette arranged against one wall of the room, with a large bay window overlooking the street. But the night before, Kaisa’s first night back in England, she had slept badly. The street had been noisy around 11 o’clock, with people spilling out of the nearby pubs. It was also cold, and by the time the street had grown quiet, Kaisa had needed the loo. The carpet on the wide wooden stairs was so threadbare, that when Kaisa climbed the stairs to the bathroom on the floor above, her footsteps echoed through the house. Now, as she listened to Rose, Kaisa wondered if she’d been foolish to take a job without knowing any of the details. She’d been too keen to leave Helsinki, what with all that had happened with Matti, her mother’s constant queries on what she was going to next, and the visit from her sister’s boyfriend from Lapland looming on the horizon. Kaisa had missed his arrival by two days, something she was sure had been carefully arranged by Sirkka. Still, both her mother and sister had shed a few tears when they’d said goodbye at Helsinki airport. There was no going back to Helsinki now.
Her old bank manager in Helsinki had let her down too; he said jobs were hard to come by, even with Kaisa’s degree. The job in London was her only chance to move on, to make something of her life. Plus being in England meant she was closer to Peter, even though she knew she was a fool to think they’d patch things up again. Kaisa was still getting money from Peter, but she knew it was wrong of her to keep taking it, and besides, there were no guarantees that this would continue. Especially if he heard she was working for a publication like Adam's Apple. Kaisa didn’t even have to ask if the magazine was against the Polaris missiles – it was written all over the women’s faces.
‘Take it, and read it later.’ Rose added, ‘Listen we’re all going to the pub, you wanna come?’
‘Sure,’ Kaisa said. ‘But, I need to know about the job …’
Rose looked at her, and laughed. ‘Oh my, of course.’ She pulled out a sheet of paper which had a carbon copy behind it and handed it to Kaisa. ‘There’s a café around the corner. Go there and read this through, and if it’s all OK, come back and sign it, and we’ll be all set.’
Kaisa found the café. It was empty apart from an older woman wearing a coat tied up with a piece of string and surrounded by plastic bags, all filled to the brim. The place smelt of fried food and had heavily steamed up windows. Kaisa ordered a cup of black coffee and sat down at a table covered with a red-and-blue checked cloth. She began reading her contract.
Rose had insisted Kaisa should come to the party, which was being held in a disused warehouse near the offices of Adam’s Apple. Kaisa knew she was worried about her.
‘You spend all your time just working and sleeping. You’re a young woman, you need a sex life!’
Kaisa had blushed; even after six weeks at the magazine, where sex was talked about as if it was as normal as eating bread, she still hadn’t got used to discussing freely what people got up to in their bedrooms. Or in public toilets, or parks, or stationery cupboards, or wherever. (In London in summer, anything went). Two of the women working at the magazine were lesbians, and due to the lack of a boyfriend, she assumed, she’d been asked many times if she was one too. Kaisa always vehemently denied it, but the truth was that she really didn’t have any appetite for sex at all. With either a man or a woman.
Whenever she thought about sex, her mind wandered back to her last two meetings with Matti, and the photographs, then his death, and the awful funeral. Then she thought of Tom, and his flaccid manhood, and she wanted to cry. If she couldn’t have Peter, she didn’t want anyone, she decided. She’d been surprised by how little she’d cried since being in London. She’d got herself a little portable TV in the bedsit, and spent most evenings watching English TV, which was so much better than the programmes they showed in Finland. Only on her two wedding anniversaries had she shed a little tear. On the first one, a year after their shot-gun wedding in Portsmouth – hastily arranged after Peter failed to get a certificate in tim
e for their planned marriage in Finland a month later – Kaisa had bought herself a red rose and a bottle of white wine. She’d finished the whole bottle watching Coronation Street, followed by Brookside. It had only been a problem because the day fell on the Saturday of a Bank Holiday weekend, when she had little to do but wander around Portobello Market buying vegetables for the week ahead. On the anniversary of the ‘proper’ wedding, 2 June, a Sunday four weeks later, she’d hoped in vain Peter would remember and send her a card. For days afterwards, Kaisa had scanned the post, but nothing came. And why should it, she’d scolded herself. Her sister and mother remembered the date, and had phoned her, taking turns to speak. But it was difficult to talk in private in the hall downstairs, where the landlady and her slimy boyfriend could hear every word. Knowing how she’d felt on the anniversary in May, she had decided to go out for the day, and had walked from her bedsit in Notting Hill to Hyde Park. It had been a beautiful sunny day and she’d bought an ice cream and watched boys play football on the grass. She remembered how Peter had broken her heart in Hyde Park by telling her they should be free to see other people while Kaisa was finishing her studies and unable – and unwilling, it has to be said – to move to England to be with him.
She felt as if she’d seized up since Matti’s death, as if everything had closed up down there. With those awful pictures, and what Vappu had told her about Matti’s life after Kaisa had left him, she felt that she’d had too much sex in her life already. Thoughts of Duncan entered her mind, and she brushed his memory away. Men were bad news, all of them. This was her new life, working on a worthwhile feminist cause in London. Why was it so important to be sleeping with someone as well?
But in the end Kaisa agreed to go to Rose’s party. She knew she would need to talk to other people eventually, people other than her colleagues, all of whom were women, except for the magazine delivery boy, Jack, who appeared once a month on the doorstep of the offices in Clerkenwell. He was an overconfident young lad, who joked with the women about lesbians and ‘giving them all one’. Rose and the rest of the editorial staff put up with him, calling him a prat to his face, to which the boy laughed and said, ‘You’re gagging for it, admit it.’
The warehouse party was to celebrate someone’s birthday. It was a friend of Rose’s but Kaisa didn’t know her. She was turning 30 and had a rich daddy, who was paying for it, Rose told Kaisa. ‘Free booze, lots of good-looking men and women,’ Rose said and grinned. ‘Let your hair down for once, Kaisa.’
At home in her bedsit, which was damp and cold even in June, Kaisa spent a stupid amount of time deciding what to wear. Finally, after trying on several trousers, jeans and top combinations, she decided on a cotton dress, which she’d bought from Miss Selfridge, a heady moment after the last issue of Adam’s Apple had come out. She’d written an article on the benefits of proportional representation, and how it would help women be better represented in parliament. It was her first long piece in the magazine, and she’d felt on such a high, she’d gone to Oxford Street and bought the dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes to go with it. For weeks, the dress and the shoes had stayed unworn in the small wardrobe in her bedsit. There didn’t ever seem to be an occasion to wear them. Kaisa’s daily uniform was what Peter would have called her ‘boy clothes’, jeans and checked shirt with a jumper if it was cold. The dress, in contrast, was very feminine; it had a gypsy-style ruched skirt and an off-the-shoulder top. The summer had arrived in London and the weather was warm. She couldn’t wear a bra with the dress, but she’d lost nearly five kilos during her time in London, so that wouldn’t be a problem. She just didn’t have an appetite, and often skipped having an evening meal altogether. It wasn’t so easy to cook in her small bedsit, especially when she had to sleep in the same room, with the smells of the cooking lingering into the night. Kaisa added a narrow gold belt to the outfit, pulling it tightly across her waist. She put on some make-up, including eyeliner, and even wore lip gloss for once. When she gazed at herself in the mirror that she’d put against one wall of the bedsit, she approved of the way she looked. Perhaps it was time she trapped, she thought, and smiled at the memory of an expression Peter often used. Don’t think about him, she reproached herself, and closed the door behind her.
Eighteen
‘C’mon it’ll be fun,’ Val said and pulled Peter’s hand. They were in London, walking from Farringdon tube station towards an address that Val had written on a piece of paper. Peter had asked to see the address, so that he could plan their journey on the tube, but Val had pulled the piece of paper from his hand and laughed. ‘I live here!’ Peter had got hold of her tiny waist and tried to wrestle the paper out of her hand, but she’d not given it up. Instead, they’d ended up on her bed, making love for the second time that morning.
Peter had weekend leave and had come up to London to stay with Val in the house she shared with five other people in Earl’s Court. It was a massive Victorian townhouse with the bedrooms arranged over four floors. Val’s bedroom was on the top floor, in a former attic space, which had been turned into a room with two dormer windows overlooking the rooftops of West London. Val said she knew the girl whose party it was, and she insisted on going. Peter didn’t like parties anymore, not since the court martial. There was just too much to explain when people asked him what he did. When they found out he was in the Navy, they wanted to know all about his career to date. He hadn’t learned to lie properly yet, and often left a silence in the air, revealing that there was more to his past than he was saying.
Peter now felt almost equally uncomfortable walking along the London streets, not knowing where he was, or where they were going. He wasn’t sure if Val deliberately put him in situations where he felt uneasy. Earlier that day, when he’d arrived on her doorstep, Val had introduced him to two of her fellow housemates as ‘My bit on the side — or, no sorry, I’m his bit on the side!’ When Peter had shaken hands with a lanky boy with long blond Duran Duran-style hair, and what Peter could have sworn was make-up around his eyes, she’d added, ‘And he’s in the Navy.’ The inevitable questions had followed, which Peter had tried to put a stop to by saying he was a submariner, based in Plymouth.
‘So you’re not firing nukes as your job then,’ the boy, who’d introduced himself as Josh, had said, giving Peter a hard stare. ‘One of them,’ Peter had thought and decided he needed to be careful about what he said.
The second person sitting at a long pine table in the dark kitchen accessed through a long corridor on the ground floor of the house, was a girl with spiky, mousey-coloured hair. She wore trousers that were too large, bunched up around the waist. Her oversized T-shirt was tucked into the trousers, making her look a bit like a clown. She was wearing no make-up, apart from very red lipstick. ‘I’m Jenny, she said and shook Peter’s hand, holding onto it for a bit longer than was comfortable. Peter thought the girl was a little older than Val or Josh, and it turned out she was the owner of the place, and occupied the entire first floor. ‘I’m a nurse,’ she informed Peter. Later, up in her room, Val told Peter Jenny had inherited the house from her parents, who’d been killed in a car accident a few years back. She was their only child and didn’t know what to do with herself now she was on her own, so she put an ad in the paper to share her house with students.
Peter could hear the loud music of the party a few streets away before he saw the disused warehouse. The open windows on the second floor were flung open to the warm June evening, and the flickering lights of a disco ball gave the street below an unreal feel.
Nineteen
The party was packed with people, all talking, laughing and dancing. Waiters carrying trays of drinks and canapés moved through the large space, which doubled as the dance floor, although many people swayed along to the music in small groups wherever they stood. There were fairy lights and pink balloons emblazoned with the number 30, and Kaisa wondered which one of the many women in expensive-looking satin dresses was the birthday girl.
Kaisa sought out Rose
, who stood next to an older man with a huge moustache.
‘You look lovely,’ Rose said into Kaisa’s ear. Smiling, she added, ‘This is Roger.’
Roger took Kaisa by surprise by kissing her quickly on the mouth. The brittle blond hairs on his upper lip tickled Kaisa, and she laughed to hide her embarrassment.
The music was so loud, even at the far end of the room that you couldn’t talk normally. Frankie Goes to Hollywood was playing, and Kaisa noticed how the space looked exactly like the one in the Two Tribes video. All that was needed was a boxing ring and sawdust on the floor. They were joined by staff from Adam’s Apple, and Rose began a shouted-out conversation with them about the next issue. They were in disagreement about the cover, a discussion that had started in the office on Friday afternoon. Kaisa didn’t want to take part, because she saw both sides of the argument. Besides, she was the newest member of the team, and didn’t feel she had enough experience to know what would be best – a commercial cover that might pull in more readers, or a punchier one, conveying the message of feminism to readers and non-readers alike. On Friday, there’d been a lot of heated talk about what Adam’s Apple really stood for versus concerns about the falling readership. Rose was in the latter camp; she’d been brought in to revive the magazine, Kaisa had learned, and wanted a more mainstream feel. Some of the older members of the editorial team felt she was going too far. Kaisa knew Rose would be looking for her support, but late on Friday afternoon Kaisa hadn’t been able to decide which course was best. She’d said nothing and kept her head down, preparing her latest article.