Siiri told her she’d taken the number 3 and number 7 trams yesterday, and of course the 4, to get to and from Sunset Grove. At the stop by the Aurora Hospital a nutcase had got on again, yelling to herself, and as the buildings in that neighbourhood were so ugly, it had made for a very oppressive mood. But when the tram had reached the greener, narrower streets of Vallila, the mood had brightened up. Siiri had noticed a restaurant on the corner of Mäkelänkatu and Sturenkatu where they served breakfast in the middle of the day for three euros, which amused them both.
‘We should go there sometime, instead of always having our coffee here,’ Irma said.
‘There isn’t really a corner at the corner of Mäkelänkatu and Sturenkatu, just one of those round things like they have in Central Europe. But you probably don’t know that because you’ve never been there.’
Irma was one of those women who’d never been to the wrong side of Pitkäsilta, the bridge that separated the southern half of Helsinki from the working-class northern half. But she had been to Vallila at some point, of course, and she remembered that it had a lovely aroma of coffee.
‘Veikko told me that there are whole blocks of 1920s buildings in Vallila with courtyards that you ought to see because you look in and it’s like you’re suddenly in a lovely park.’
Veikko was Irma’s husband. He had died long ago of lung cancer after smoking two packs a day for years. Irma talked about her husband occasionally, but didn’t seem to miss him the way Siiri missed her husband, yearning for him every day.
‘It would be terrible if Veikko was still alive. I’m sure he would be very sick and I would have to take care of him. Or he’d be batty and get put in the closed unit.’
The official name of the unit for patients with severe dementia was the Group Home. It was in a low building off the common area, and its door was always locked, so they often called it ‘the closed unit’. None of the residents were allowed to go there and a mystique of secrecy hovered over the place, a combination of fear and fascination. The nurses ran in and out of the door with their keys jangling, always in a hurry, with worry lines on their foreheads.
Every so often the Hat Lady reported that someone from the apartments had been moved to the closed unit. When the fat woman from the ground floor of A wing was sent there, Irma had suggested that they go and sing to her and read her stories, but Nurse Hiukkanen had absolutely forbidden it. She said caregiving required professional skills and training. They couldn’t let just anyone drop in to play. So Siiri and Irma had never seen inside the closed unit.
‘It’s an awful bustle in there,’ Irma said. ‘They wake you up at eight every evening and give you a sleeping pill. Then they wake you up at eight in the morning and give you a pep pill. That’s no way to live. Veikko was smart to smoke cigarettes and die on time. What do you think – should we start smoking? Otherwise we’re never going to die. Döden, döden, döden.’
The doctor at the health clinic had told Siiri that she should take a sleeping pill every night at eight thirty because that was a good time for an old person to be asleep. That amused them both tremendously.
‘Eight thirty? In the middle of the news?’ Irma said, and crowed so hard that her cake went down the wrong way and she started coughing.
‘Don’t choke! I’ll get you something to drink!’
Siiri went to the kitchen and found the bottle of red wine that always stood by the sink next to the bottle of washing-up liquid. Irma had a rule that she never drank anything but red wine. She said water was for washing and milk was for growing children. She often had a couple of glasses of wine with lunch, plus the whisky her doctor prescribed in the evening. Sometimes she couldn’t remember if it was evening, or morning, or afternoon, and the wine and the whisky got mixed up.
The wine worked wonders. Irma was able to speak again after a couple of swallows.
‘It’s just that I was thinking you don’t really need a sleeping pill to fall asleep while the news is on.’
Chapter 4
A few days later, Siiri and Irma were enjoying a very peaceful, ordinary afternoon at Sunset Grove. Everyone had had their lunch and their midday rest, and around 3 p.m. they came down to the common room to play cards. The afternoon card game wasn’t one of Sunset Grove’s services; it had sprung up spontaneously when they realized how many of them liked to play.
Irma shuffled the deck and dealt everyone eleven cards. It was something she enjoyed immensely; she was a skilful shuffler and a nimble dealer. They didn’t play in teams because it only caused arguments and there wouldn’t have been a partner for everyone. The ritual they performed after the cards were dealt was always the same: Irma would show her hand and crow over the twos and jokers, which made Anna-Liisa tense, while Siiri, Reino and the Ambassador calmly and quietly arranged their hands. The Ambassador sat to Irma’s left, so that he could start the play.
‘I’m on the table,’ he said, laying down three jacks. Irma praised this achievement and Anna-Liisa coughed nervously – she had probably been hoping to collect jacks herself. Siiri drew a joker on her turn, tried not to smile, and discarded a four of diamonds.
‘Did you get something nice?’ Irma asked. ‘It’s your turn, Reino.’
But Reino didn’t draw a card. He looked like he wasn’t following the game. He was just staring straight ahead, muttering to himself and holding the cards unsorted in his hand. Everyone looked at him expectantly.
‘Olavi Raudanheimo . . . a war veteran! In a wheelchair! If he hadn’t told me himself, I wouldn’t . . . ! My God! How the hell could this happen?’
He shook his head and shouted so that the spit flew out of his mouth and his cards flew onto the floor. He waved his arms and wailed, then slumped in a lifeless heap and started to cry. He was a big man, and usually so happy, but he was crying like a child, sobbing and whimpering, his whole body shaking. It was frightening. Irma offered him her handkerchief. Siiri took his hand, leaned towards him, and asked him what the matter was. Anna-Liisa pushed her chair half a metre further from the table and watched him sniffle and sputter with a severe look on her face.
‘Speak up,’ she said. ‘Articulate. We can’t understand you.’ She was right, of course. His weeping had grown to a howl, and no one could make out a word he was saying.
Olavi Raudanheimo was Reino’s neighbour in C wing. He lived in a studio apartment and got around in a wheelchair, but they rarely saw him. Sometimes Reino took him out to the nearest park, but he didn’t participate in the Sunset Grove activities. Olavi was more of a bookish man who kept himself to himself. He enjoyed solving crossword puzzles and listening to the news on the radio. He had lost both legs in the war and lived in Sunset Grove on a state pension.
‘Is Olavi dead?’ Irma asked excitedly.
‘No, no. If only . . .’ Reino said, blowing his nose loudly into her lace handkerchief. ‘That’s something an old man could take, damn it.’
‘That’s my mother’s old handkerchief,’ Irma said, looking worriedly at the wet wad in his hand. ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she said, smiling. ‘Just an old rag.’ She always tried to keep her spirits up, whatever the situation. ‘It seems we’ll never die! Döden, döden, döden. Now what was that card . . . drat, it’s a king! Did Olavi have a fall in his apartment? Did he have a heart attack? Or is it that his children have started dying? Is it my turn? To play a card, I mean.’
‘Assaulted! Olavi was assaulted, yesterday evening, in his own home!’ Reino shouted, and everyone went quiet. Then he sniffed and started to bawl again. Irma dropped her cards into her lap and Siiri looked helplessly at Anna-Liisa and continued clutching Reino’s hand. The Ambassador stared at his cards as if nothing had happened.
Reino stood up to his full height, knocking his chair over with a clatter.
‘Olavi Raudanheimo was assaulted yesterday in the shower!’ he shouted, even louder than before. He looked dreadful bellowing like that, his face covered in tears and anger, his chin half unshaven. A large man in tracksuit b
ottoms with his dirty shirt hem flapping.
‘We heard you the first time,’ Anna-Liisa said calmly. ‘What exactly do you mean by assaulted? You must remember that assault is a way of wielding power. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with pleasure or desire, if you get my meaning. It’s an act of subjugation and humiliation.’
‘Whose turn is it?’ the Ambassador asked restlessly. He wanted the game to continue because he had a good hand.
Reino tried to pick up his chair but grew flustered when he couldn’t get it upright, and started to wail again.
‘That damned male nurse . . . that fag! He was supposed to be giving him a shower . . . Olavi told me himself, damn it all!’
‘Sit down, Reino,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘And please watch your language. Was this in the morning or the evening? Could somebody help him with his chair?’
As a language and literature teacher, Anna-Liisa was clearly used to handling the unruly and shepherding the restless. Irma was first to obey, picking up Reino’s chair and trying to get him to sit down. It wasn’t easy; Reino resisted, trembling and rubbing his face compulsively with his sleeve.
‘An, auf, hinter, in – I just drew a nice red ten,’ the Ambassador trilled, continuing the game by himself. He had a habit of reciting the German prepositions he’d learned in grammar school while he sorted his cards. Irma and Reino’s cards were on the floor but Siiri gripped hers in one hand until her fingers hurt.
‘I don’t know when it happened. I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter,’ Reino said, finally sitting back down, slightly calmer. He tried to take a deep breath and blew his nose again into Irma’s handkerchief, which looked smaller than before. ‘But Good God! A war veteran . . . can’t even wash himself.’
‘What are you all worked up about, Mr Reino?’
Head nurse Virpi Hiukkanen had appeared. None of them had ever seen her run before, but now she was moving so fast that her nurse’s shoes were flapping. She took hold of Reino’s shoulder with a firm grip, which only made him angrier. Now he started to really throw a fit. His walker took off on its own, the deck of cards flew into the air, and the chair fell over again, and even Virpi was frightened. A flock of startled members of staff gathered around them, all of them strangers except for Virpi, whose thin, sharp voice pierced through the general hubbub.
‘Get this patient to the dementia ward and sedate him!’
Four Russian women grabbed hold of Reino, who had suddenly changed from a resident to a patient, and gave him an injection. Reino yelled some choice obscenities and thrashed around. His voice echoed down the hall all the way to the locked ward. Irma started picking the cards up off the floor although it was hard to bend over because she was somewhat plump and very busty. The Ambassador hurried to help her, peeping down her blouse all the while.
‘I don’t think damn is such a terrible word,’ Irma puffed, putting the red stack of cards down on the table.
Then she told the story of the time her husband Veikko was screwing a bookshelf to the wall and the shelf fell with all the books on it onto the back of his neck and he shouted ‘damn it’, and Irma’s mother heard it and was horrified, because she thought a son-in-law of hers should have just said ‘hell’.
‘But I don’t think so. Hell is just as strong a word as damn,’ she said, which was how she always ended the story.
They started a new game, at the Ambassador’s request. Irma shuffled and dealt the cards. The Ambassador was upset because Reino’s outburst had cost him a good hand.
Chapter 5
After she heard about Tero’s death, Siiri stopped going to the cafeteria to eat. At her age she didn’t need much food as long as she remembered to drink something other than red wine. The supermarket was selling liver casseroles that were nearing their sell-by date for 30 per cent off. Siiri always paid for her purchases in cash because she didn’t trust the machines at the supermarket. She preferred getting cash ‘from the wall’. It was easier. She had a trick for remembering her PIN: the second number was the first number cubed, the third number was the first and second numbers multiplied and then divided by three, and the fourth number was the sum of the first two minus three.
Irma could never remember her number. ‘Should I punch in zero six six eight?’ she asked as she and Siiri brought a liver casserole up to the counter at Low Price Market on the high street and the cashier put her card into the little machine.
‘It’s asking for your PIN,’ the cashier said, but that didn’t help.
‘Is my PIN zero six six eight? Or is that my state identity number?’
‘You don’t need your state ID number,’ the young woman said, glancing at the queue forming behind them.
‘I don’t even know what my state ID number is,’ Irma said nervously. ‘Maybe I should just put in zero six six eight. I think my state identity number ends in one three two H, but this machine doesn’t have any letters on the keys, or maybe I’m just not seeing it because I—’
‘You don’t need any letters,’ the cashier interrupted.
The machine didn’t accept 0668. The people in the queue shook their heads and craned their necks, trying to see how long this was going to take. Siiri took Irma’s wallet and found a piece of paper in it with ‘7245’ written in large numbers.
‘There it is!’ Irma said, as if it were a friend she hadn’t seen in years. She remembered why it was written so large, too. ‘So I can see it without my glasses, you know. But what the heck is zero six six eight, then?’
They would never know, unless some day they did, as Irma always said. They took the liver casserole and went back to Irma’s apartment to eat lunch and get ready for Tero’s funeral.
Irma’s plan for a large autumn outing was coming true; even the new couple in A wing had announced that they would be attending the funeral. Irma and Anna-Liisa were so nervous that they’d ordered a bag of tranquillizers from the health clinic. The newest on their ever-changing roster of ‘personal physicians’ had been a foreigner this time, with an African name that didn’t tell them whether he was a man or a woman.
‘Do you play basketball?’ Anna-Liisa asked the physician in her resonant, crisply articulated voice, but he didn’t know what she meant. Irma silenced her and hastened to explain why they had come, and Anna-Liisa continued to interrupt whenever she felt a need to correct her.
‘. . . and this boy, Pasi, has been our cook for at least ten years, so I’m sure you understand what the loss means to us—’
‘The cook’s name was Tero. And he can’t have been at Sunset Grove for ten years, Irma. Even we haven’t been there that long.’
‘You see how upset we all are?’ Irma exclaimed. The doctor, clearly keen to get rid of them, wrote out two prescriptions and asked them to come separately on their next visit.
Siiri didn’t intend to touch Irma’s and Anna-Liisa’s pills, not even at the funeral, although she was mourning Tero’s death even more than she had that of her cat, who’d died two years before. She regretted now that she hadn’t got a new cat. She had been sure at the time that she was going to die within a week, which would have been hard on a cat, although Irma had suggested that she could provide for it in her will.
There had been an article in the newspaper about a Japanese robot cat used to take care of the elderly. It saved a lot of money because they didn’t need to pay an overworked carer to do the caring. The grey, robotic-looking Japanese old people in the newspaper were sitting with the artificial cats in their laps. Siiri wondered why the cats had to be robots.
‘Surely real cats aren’t that expensive?’
But then Irma started to count up how expensive taking care of a cat could be, probably much more expensive than an old person. Finland was full of defenders of animals and other activists, so animal care was a carefully monitored activity. You had to give them a certain amount of space, sunlight, regular outings, species-appropriate stimuli, a varied diet, and other things that old people could only dream of.
�
�Even chickens are free and happy nowadays, thanks to the activists!’
‘I saw a dog-food store from the tram the other day, on Snellmaninkatu,’ Siiri said, and they laughed at the thought that there was a shop selling dog sausages in a spot where, when they were young, there had been a butcher’s that sold only bones.
‘What are you going to wear for the funeral?’ Irma asked suddenly, as if you could wear anything at all to a funeral. Siiri had worn the same black wool dress to every funeral for the past twelve years, but Irma had several to choose from and she wanted Siiri’s opinion on them.
‘I’ll give you a real fashion show!’ she said, disappearing into her bedroom, after first pouring Siiri a glass of red wine so that she wouldn’t get bored waiting. There was a jangling sound from the wardrobe and Irma appeared in a loose black dress and a pillbox hat and twirled around.
‘It’s too big. You’ve shrunk,’ Siiri said.
Irma stopped, put one foot in front of the other, and looked in the mirror over her shoulder dramatically.
‘You’re right.’
It was strange how so many old people didn’t enjoy buying new clothes, because as they got older their bodies shrank and their clothes started to hang on them. Some people didn’t pay any attention to their appearance at all once they got old. But Siiri thought it ought to be just the opposite – the older she got, the more well-groomed she wanted to be. She went to the hairdresser’s every Wednesday and got a perm twice a year. It was hard to wash and set her hair herself, and besides, going to the hairdresser’s was just the kind of little self-indulgence she loved most.
‘Yes, you even remember to pluck your chin hairs every morning,’ Irma agreed, looking at herself in the mirror.
In the retirement home you saw far too many pitiful-looking old people. People who once were senior inspectors, police officers, nurses, contractors, teachers, and here they were dragging themselves to singalongs in dirty tracksuits with bibs around their necks. Sometimes it felt like they’d lost all self-respect.
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 3