by Joel Willans
Maybe she was just warming up or maybe it was something symbolic, he thought, tracing the letter with his finger. Sanna had a Masters in Psychology and loved to fill his head with her mumbo jumbo. Freud this, Jung that. Hating her ducks was probably something to do with his messed-up childhood.
He banged the table. If they’d still been in London, he’d have at least had his piano, now sold to pay for the first month’s rent. He could have pounded away at the keys.
‘I miss the way you frown when you read,’ he said. His voice sounded like an old friend who’d started smoking. ‘I miss stroking the soft skin on the inside of your arm. I miss kissing the little pointed peaks of your ears. I miss the smell of your hair.’
He stopped. His words sounded like the lyrics to a bad song, but it was true. He really did miss those things. He held the note in his hand. The writing was beautiful. He’d always been jealous of Sanna’s ability to make the most mundane look like art. Collages of newspaper clippings, birthday cards fashioned from book covers and tinsel, painted T-shirts.
The second reason, ‘You never say you love me’, looked even more beautiful than the first, the letters were full and plump, with ornate swirls. The final ‘e’ was smudged and Oliver hoped that this was the splash of a tear as she realised what she was doing.
Had he ever told her he loved her? No, he hadn’t. Do actions speak louder than words? Yes, they do. He’d left everything he knew, everyone he loved, to come to live with her in a place where in winter time it was so cold that when you breathed your nostril hairs froze and your eyelids stuck together, where minus fifteen was nothing special and rolling naked in the snow was considered fun.
‘You’re really happy to give all this up?’ she said, after a gig at a pub in Brixton.
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘I know how much you love your music.’
‘What, can’t I play in Helsinki? You never know. I might become massive.’
She brushed a wisp of vanilla-blonde hair from her eyes and grabbed his hand. ‘You never know, you just might.’
His band members were neither as charitable nor optimistic. They told him he was an idiot, and out of order. And when that didn’t make a difference, they told him they had something good going. But gigs in pubs and vague promises of bigger venues and tours, weren’t as good as Sanna. Not even close. Actions, he thought, spoke louder than words. Clearly he was wrong.
He opened the small velvet box sitting on the table beside the note. The ring had six small diamonds, clumped together like a flower. Not flashy, but sophisticated.
Duck and love he could do. No problem. Reason three was tougher.
‘You hate the nature’.
That was an exaggeration. He remembered when they arrived. Summer days in her parents’ cottage in the forest that just went on and on and on. Sanna, her hair tied back in a bun, wearing nothing but a yellow bikini and red nail varnish as she rowed him to the fish traps. Him lying back and admiring her tanned thighs, the big sky and the ripples on the lake, the sound of the boat splashing and the birds calling.
‘This is fantastic,’ he said. ‘I could write some amazing music here.’
‘Is that before or after you kill the fish?’
‘What?’ He sat up so quick the boat rocked. ‘You know I can’t…’
She laughed and flicked water at him with her oar. ‘Oh, you’re such a delicate flower sometimes.’
But she’d taught him how to gut a perch anyway, and even though the smell stayed on his fingers and the scales stuck to his skin, he was secretly proud of himself as he fried the tiny fillets in butter. None of his friends would believe that he was living off the land.
Still it was true, he didn’t like the forest work. The chopping down of trees seemingly for the sake of it, the obsession with blueberry and mushroom picking. Sanna’s dad’s look, half frown, half sneer, when Oliver complained that carrying logs might damage his playing fingers, made him want to skulk away.
Sanna liked to walk for the sake of walking. She liked to row in the rain. She liked to swim naked in the lake in the middle of the night. She was a forest nymph. He was a city boy. He could change, though. He might never love the wilderness like her, but he could hide it better. It was a small price to pay.
Reason four was not.
‘You live like a hermit’.
This hurt him more than he’d imagined. Sanna’s English was flawless. She knew what a hermit was. Did she know though that when he pictured a hermit, he saw a dirty, stinking, bearded skeleton of a man, babbling and drooling?
Grasping the list, Oliver shuffled to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His T-shirt was stained with beer. He sniffed under his arms and winced. His beard was scragglier than when they lived in London. There he’d cultivated it, a trim here, a snip there. He was a composer after all, even if his most famous compositions were jingles for dog food and aftershave.
Clients expected music men to look a certain way and he did his best to accommodate. The women seemed to appreciate it, too. And before Sanna there’d been plenty of those. That sharp hipster look had gone to pot in the year he’d been in the Land of the Long Dark. What was the point of worrying about it? He didn’t see anyone because nobody wanted to see him. Now he looked more like the woodsman he so clearly wasn’t. If he hadn’t felt so bleak inside he’d have laughed at the irony. Instead, he stroked his beard.
‘You need to meet some people,’ Sanna said. ‘That’s how you’ll get work. It’s all about who you know, here. Helsinki’s such a small place.’
She was right. He got to know it quickly. It was beautiful. The sea, the trams, the parks, the cafes, the bikes everywhere. Just how a vibrant Nordic capital should be. Clean, and fresh and pure. It seemed so cosmopolitan. Then the winter came and the people changed. They stopped speaking. The silence unnerved him. When he went out with Sanna’s friends it made him squirm in his chair and stare at his beer. Made him babble more to fill the void. He imagined them afterwards saying how boring he was. The tedious Englishman who never knew when to shut up.
‘God, your paranoia knows no bounds,’ Sanna said, sitting on his back massaging his shoulders. ‘It’s not about you. Finns aren’t afraid of silence. We came from the forests. We’re used to the quiet. We enjoy it. Not like you English.’ She made her fingers into a crucifix. ‘Oh no, please not another embarrassing silence. Tell me, Oliver, what’s so embarrassing about silence?’
‘It’s just not very sociable, is it?’
‘And the constant stream of noise that pours from English people’s mouths is, is it?’
She made some sense. Still, he stopped going out as much. Stopped looking for work. Stopped risking those long, lingering pauses in life, those looks when he just couldn’t keep his mouth closed.
He splashed himself with water. It felt good. He rubbed some soap into his beard and shaved. That felt good, too. Despite the darkness under his eyes, he was surprised how much better he looked. He got undressed and had a long, long shower. Nothing like a hermit, he thought, as he threw on some clean clothes. Now it felt like he meant business. Sitting at the table, he grabbed a pen and crossed off reason number four.
Then, his gaze fell on number five and he dropped his head into his hands. It was the one that had sent him bowling to a dark bar on that first night rather than rushing through the city and bringing Sanna back to the apartment.
‘You want to fuck my sister’.
The letters were bigger, pressed so hard into the paper that the K had ripped into the pad below. There were three exclamation marks.
Seeing the sentence written like that made Oliver’s skin crawl. It implied that he was the instigator. That he was the one who’d pranced into the sauna, and made a big show of soaping his body. Yet there was no point lying to himself. Pre-Sanna, he might have tried his luck with her sister. If he was honest, once or twice she’d even invaded his dreams.
‘You dream of being the next Bowie as well,’ he said to th
e ceiling. ‘That doesn’t mean you are.’
It turned his insides to remember that evening. He’d never liked the sauna. It was dark and dry and hot. It made him think of ovens and always left him feeling as though his skin had been broiled.
‘That’s how it’s meant to feel,’ Sanna said the first time he complained. ‘It’s called getting clean.’
‘Clean.’ Oliver touched his red cheeks. ‘This isn’t clean. This is scorchio.’
Sanna laughed. ‘A hundred years ago women gave birth in places like this.’ She threw water on the stones. They hissed and sizzled, sending a cloud of stinging steam into Oliver’s face.
As time passed he learnt to cup his hands over his mouth and breathe when the steam came. He learnt it was hotter on the top bench and that the tips of your fingers burnt easiest. He learnt that when all the family visited, everyone went to sauna together.
For Sanna and her family getting naked was as natural as breathing. Oliver wished he was so comfortable, but he was from a strictly non-nudist family. So instead, he averted his eyes. He had no desire to know his potential parents-in-law so intimately. He was sure Sanna’s little sister, Meri, enjoyed his discomfort and got off on teasing him with her tennis-coach body. Never crossing her legs, always sticking out her chest. Bending over to pick up the buckets of water. He lost count of the times he had to look at his nails to stop a twitching in his groin.
It didn’t help that Sanna insisted on screwing in the sauna. So much so that eventually she only had to say, ‘Shall we have a sauna?’ for him to get aroused.
‘What’s changed since King’s Cross?’ Oliver said once, after a session.
‘What do you mean?’ Sanna said.
‘You once told me how happy you were when you first saw all those neon sauna signs there. A little piece of home, you said, until you discovered they were brothels. Then when I asked what was wrong with that, you said a sauna is for having a sauna, not for screwing in.’
Sanna hugged her knees. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps London corrupted me. Or perhaps it’s always been such an innocent place that I get off on the idea of being dirty here.’ She grinned. ‘Plus, you don’t have to bother with the hassle of getting undressed.’
Remembering those words made Oliver miss her more than ever. But was it his fault the family sauna felt like a sex den? Or that he and Meri were left alone together? Or that she decided to soap herself like some porn star right in front of him? Was it his fault he had a badly hidden hard-on when Sanna walked back in with a beer?
Thinking of her expression when she saw him crouched there, gazing at Meri, made him blush again. The memory of her storming out made him want to curl up on the sofa and chug beer all night long. He hated himself and he’d never hated himself before. He took out the song he’d written for her. The song he was going to sing before he asked her to marry him. The paper was crumpled from when he’d thrown it in the bin. It was called ‘In the Sun’ and he thought it was the best thing he’d ever written.
He could like her ducks. He could tell her he loved her, because he did so much it hurt. He could try harder to be an outdoorsy type of guy. He could get out more, make a real effort to find a job and learn the language. He could, he was sure, even persuade her he didn’t want to fuck her sister. He could do all those things, yet even if he changed, he’d always know inside he was a fraud, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Looking at his song about them together, at his piano-less apartment and at the snow covering the dark world outside, he realised even if he could live with the pretence there was one thing he couldn’t live with. And that was Finland.
Every one of her reasons for leaving was a direct consequence of moving to this strange country. Even the ducks, which had never taken over their flat in London, had suddenly multiplied when they arrived. If they had stayed in London, he’d doubtless have told Sanna he loved her eventually. He’d would’ve had to, to keep her there. If they had stayed in London, he wouldn’t have to pretend to get off on forests, or adore killing fish or hacking down harmless trees. He could have carried on talking bullshit without worrying and he’d never have been caught in a sauna ogling Sanna’s little sister. He walked to the window and yanked it open. He ignored the wind and the snowflakes stinging his face, and shouted with all his being. ‘Thanks for nothing, Finland!’
A woman across the road looked in his direction for a second before trudging on, otherwise nothing changed. Finland was still the same. It would always be the same. Oliver looked at the song he still held in his hand. Snowflakes settled on the paper, smudging the ink, melting his words. Sanna would never leave here. She loved it too much.
He took the song and tossed it out the window, watching it drift down onto the street below. It settled on the pavement, in a pool of soft orange neon. He stared at it until it was covered with flakes. Then, head bowed, he walked back into their old bedroom to finish packing.
Lola’s Chair
It’s Monday afternoon and it’s raining. Another grey day in a long line of grey days that seem to have been queuing up for weeks. I’m wondering whether to sneak off to my work den for a quick cup of coffee when, outside the entrance to Victoria Flats, I see a yellow skip piled high with a mishmash of household junk. I run over, have a quick look around and get stuck in. It’s not until I’ve pushed aside some soggy books and a pair of ripped lampshades that I see a lovely burnished birchwood dining chair. It’s Edwardian with a beautiful design, delicately carved legs and workmanship that makes my hairs stand on end. I run my fingers over the varnish and smile.
‘You’re a real stunner, aren’t you,’ I whisper, picking it up and placing it on the pavement. Just as I’m thinking how to get it to the den without any of the residents spotting me, I hear footsteps.
‘What do you think you’re doing, son?’
Vernon. His shirtsleeves are rolled up showing off tattoos he’s assured me were once rainbow-coloured dragons breathing the words, ‘Vernon Lives for Loving’. Now, they’re blue grey smudges on old white skin.
‘Messing around with rubbish again, are we?’ The rolled-up cigarette hanging from his mouth jigs around with his words. He nods at the chair.
I kick a stone into the gutter. ‘It’s only going to be thrown away.’
‘I don’t care if it’ll be shot into orbit. You don’t go through other people’s stuff in work time. Understand me?’
I bite my lip and feel the blushing coming on. I breathe deep to try to stop it, but the heat feels like a slap on the cheek. I think of Lola, of the day she called me her passion fruit. Said she liked it when I got so hot.
I nod and take another deep breath.
‘Thank the Lord. Now, Mrs Albright in number fifty-seven has a blocked sink. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to sort it out.’
The skip will probably be picked up at five, which gives me just over an hour to come back for the chair. I jog into the courtyard and make for Rosemary House. It’s a six-storey block of flats, not a house, but it is greenish like the herb. I once pointed out to Lola how the blue balconies that run parallel to each other look like the vertebrae on a giant’s spine. She laughed and told me I had a poet’s eye and I should write things like that down. So I did, every single observation in a pocket-sized pad I got from the Co-op. I gave it to her on our first anniversary, along with a dozen red roses and a book on antique restoration. She read the pad slowly from cover to cover, then told me how much she loved me. What I’d give to hear her say that again.
Just as I walk in the hallway the sun makes an appearance and turns the air into a cauldron of swirling dust motes. I like the sound of that, so I chant, ‘A cauldron of swirling dust motes’ as I run up the stairs. Once Lola’s back, I’ll start a new pad and I’ll make that my very first entry. Mrs Albright’s flat is on the top floor. By the time I bang on her door, my chanting has turned to gasping. I wonder if she thinks I’m some heavy breather, because it takes a while before the locks clunk open and a small face with a bi
g bush of bluey grey hair appears.
‘Took your time,’ she says. ‘All those stairs, I suppose. Thank those fine fellows at the council. Never listen. Do you know how many stairs I have to climb up?’
‘One hundred and twenty-six.’
‘You’re sharper than you look, dear. Now let’s see if you can use that brain of yours to fix my blessed sink.’
I get to work as fast as I can. The sink is blocked solid and it takes longer than normal for the plunger to do the job, but eventually the drain gurgles and spews stinky black water.
‘All done.’
‘That was quick. You’ll make someone a very good husband one day,’ Mrs Albright says looking me up and down as if measuring me for my wedding suit.
‘That’s what I thought, but Lola says I’m too intense. She says I come on too strong all the time.’
‘Nothing wrong with a bit of fire in the belly, but mind it doesn’t burn you out. Take my Frank, bless him, he couldn’t even put a bulb in, but such a passionate fool. Every Friday for thirty-six years he got me a present. Even when he got his dickie heart and Dr Wallis told him to stay in bed, off he’d trot, up and down those damn stairs. Did for him in the end. Found him dead on the fourth floor landing, holding my last present.’ She walks over to the mantelpiece and picks up a porcelain basset hound. ‘I keep him here in pride of place.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about your husband. I’m getting Lola a chair. She loves chairs. She says they are an amazing marriage of function and beauty. She is searching for the perfect form.’
‘A practical present from a practical man. She could do a lot worse. Now, let me get you a tea and a chocolate biccy as a thank you.’
‘Sorry, I haven’t got time now. I’ve got a really important job to do before five.’
‘If you want to get to my age you should learn to slow down,’ she says, giving my hand a little squeeze.
Once on the landing, I check outside. Vernon’s van is still parked beside the skip. I need to kill some time before he leaves, so I amble down the stairs thinking of Mrs Albright’s husband and trying to work out how many Fridays there are in thirty-six years. By the time I get to the ground floor, I reckon there are one thousand eight hundred and seventy two, which is a hell of a lot of presents.