‘Well, my, my,’ Irma said several times. She shook her head and muttered to herself, ‘Good gracious me.’ At times she didn’t believe them. ‘You must be kidding!’ she would say. There were some very important things she had no memory of. ‘Who’s Mika?’ And to Siiri’s great pleasure, she laughed heartily again and again, or let out musical little screeches of delight. She most enjoyed hearing about her own fit of rage in the Group Home.
‘Did I honestly bite the nurse’s hand?’ she asked, wiping tears from her eyes with her lace handkerchief. ‘Oh my, oh my. I’m about to pee in my pants!’ That was always the climax of a good story for Irma.
Then she started to sing ‘Oh, My Darling Augustine,’ and wanted to know what her growl of rage had sounded like. Siiri tried her best to perform it, and Irma started laughing again. Anna-Liisa was surprised by this tangent. She would have preferred the story to continue in a logical order. She stood up, leaned on the bed railing, and rapped her knuckles smartly on the footboard.
‘May I have a turn to speak?’
Irma and Siiri looked at her in surprise, and then Irma clapped her hands together in rapture.
‘You have a lovely new hat!’
Anna-Liisa just knocked on the end of the bed again.
‘Listen, Irma! In January, we were at Reino’s funeral and in February Olavi Raudanheimo died. He killed himself in the hospital by refusing to eat.’
‘No we weren’t!’ For once Siiri got to correct Anna-Liisa. ‘We weren’t at Reino’s funeral. We went to the wrong funeral. You’re going to like this story, Irma.’
‘Stop! There’s one very important thing that has gone completely undiscussed!’ Anna-Liisa almost shouted, but then quickly regained her self-control. ‘I’m talking about the fire in the closed unit, which started in the incontinence-pad storage room.’
‘Right. But think about it – we went to a memorial reception for some Uncle Jaakko. And we were the only guests!’
‘Siiri, you’re impossible. Focus!’
Anna-Liisa’s brown eyes smouldered frighteningly, and Siiri had to give up the battle. Anna-Liisa sighed audibly and began an explanation in a laboured tone.
‘As you may recall, the pads were stored in a former—’
‘Tuula, would you say hello to Siiri Kettunen, and ask her to come and visit?’
Siiri froze. Irma’s eyes looked strangely empty again, like they had in the closed unit. She thought Siiri was her daughter. Perhaps Irma really was permanently senile and this had been only a temporary window of happiness, or a last swan song before the final catastrophe. But on the way home Anna-Liisa assured her that it was all completely normal. People with dementia had all kinds of different days and moments. Senility and alertness might alternate very quickly, and things like physical health and fatigue could influence mental states.
‘Irma was tired out from babbling about all sorts of trivial matters for an hour, which is why we didn’t get to tell her all the important facts.’
‘But . . . does that mean that Irma really is senile? That she isn’t going to be her old self again?’
‘Dementia is a symptom, not a diagnosis, as I have explained many times. But I’m no doctor, either. We’ll just have to take it one day at a time.’
‘It’ll never clear up, unless it does. Döden, döden, döden – oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that you don’t like it when I use Irma’s sayings.’
When they got home, Siiri was really tired. She had an empty ringing in her head and felt like she was becoming more useless as the days went by. She went to bed exhausted and fell asleep in the middle of an Eeva Joenpelto novel, which fell with a thud to the floor without her even noticing. She had an incredibly fun dream about Irma, young and pretty, dancing uproariously in the middle of a huge dance floor and trying to coax Siiri to join her, but Siiri wouldn’t dance. She just enjoyed watching Irma’s happiness.
Chapter 41
A loud clatter from Irma’s apartment interrupted Siiri’s meal of liver casserole. Fearless, she marched straight over to see what was going on. And Irma would have laughed so hard to see it!
A flock of Irma’s darlings were dividing up Irma’s possessions, just as if she were safely dead and buried. Things were packed in moving boxes, and everyone had their own bags that they were filling with any object that struck their fancy. The boxes were marked ‘flea market’, ‘summer cabin’, and ‘rubbish’. The box of rubbish was by far the fullest.
‘We all got together and decided to do it this way,’ a funny-looking boy said, holding one of Irma’s favourite pictures in his hand.
‘Since it looks like Grandma’s never coming back,’ another one said. Siiri assumed that these two were the beloved gay grandsons Irma always talked about. And they were handsome boys, who looked her in the eye politely when they spoke to her. It was no wonder Irma was charmed by them.
The others started to defend themselves, too. A woman with a small child wrapped around her leg explained that the apartment was much too expensive for Irma’s heirs and none of them could afford to pay for it to sit empty, and there were long waiting lists for retirement-home spaces and some old person in better health might need a home. The small child reminded Siiri of the inmates at the Group Home: a sparse-haired thing in nappies, of indeterminate sex, with just two teeth in its mouth. It was holding Irma’s television remote in its hand, sucking on it until it was slick with saliva.
‘Grandma,’ the child said, pointing at Siiri with its thick, drooly finger.
‘I’m not your grandma. Your grandma is in the hospital. But she’s doing very well and is sure to come back home soon, and when she does, she’s going to want to watch the Moomins and Poirot on television, and she won’t be able to, if you suck on the remote until it won’t work any more. Nowadays televisions won’t work without a remote. It’s so crazy, don’t you think?’
Siiri was letting out a flood of words because she was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to do. She babbled to the drooly child in nappies, who had started to cry, and cried harder the longer she spoke. The positive side to this ridiculous situation was that Siiri was able to tell the one-year-old what she wanted to tell the grown adults standing around it.
‘Yes, you can turn on a television without a remote,’ said one of Irma’s grandchildren, a boy with a long beard, as he shoved an electric mixer into his bag.
‘Oh, can you? So have you all decided who gets the television? It’s brand new. Digital.’
Irma’s darlings had strange looks on their faces. The one-year-old stopped its crying.
‘We don’t want it. Nobody watches TV any more,’ one of the grandsons said.
‘Because it’s all on the net,’ continued the other, as if they were Donald Duck’s nephews.
‘Grandma?’ the one-year-old said, tugging on Siiri’s trouser leg. The child was clearly the bravest and most intelligent of the bunch. Siiri told her new friend that they were going to give Grandma a new hip with a couple of screws in it and then Grandma was coming home and they could eat cake together again, and drink wine.
‘Grandma shouldn’t drink so much alcohol,’ the woman said knowingly, prying the child off her leg while trying to fit Irma’s jewellery box into her handbag. In her opinion eating sweets or drinking alcohol of any kind was dangerous for Irma’s health.
That’s when Siiri got angry. She got so tremendously angry that Irma would have been proud of her. She felt like the pretty, young Irma who had danced in her dream, not caring what other people thought, just sashaying around without any inhibitions, and she let this gang of young people who called themselves family know just what she thought of them and their health warnings.
‘Your grandma is as healthy as a horse and will soon be back here, needing you – and her stuff! If you take one silver spoon or TV remote out of here, I’m calling the police! And if you can’t afford to pay for your grandma’s rent at the retirement home because you’d rather travel around the world twice a year, then I’ll
pay for it out of my pension. Don’t think for a minute that Irma is senile, and that she’s turned into a vegetable! She’s coming back here and we’re going to eat as much cake as we like and drink wine and maybe Irma will smoke a couple of cigarettes while she sips her evening whisky, and then we’ll dance for the rest of the day in our nightgowns and do whatever takes our fancy, because you know what? I’m ninety-four years old and your grandma is ninety-two, and at our age there’s not very much that’s so terribly important, least of all things that might be dangerous to your health. They’re just used to frighten you all, so you won’t die of affluenza. For your information.’
It certainly did her good to have a proper yell. She felt strong and supple, she had a heady feeling of well-being, and her blood was flowing furiously, right down to her toes. At some point in her monologue she’d lifted up her gaze as if she were dancing, and she may even have taken a couple of light steps before performing what looked like a pirouette. The one-year-old clapped its hands in admiration and tried to dance with her.
‘Old people can do whatever pops into their heads, unlike you poor working folks, who don’t dare even to think, to use your own brains. Stealing old women’s mixers! You can all just drag your bones right out of here and not come back until Irma sees fit to let you come back. No ifs or buts.’
‘Butts!’ screeched the one in a nappy, twirling around crazily, excited about the new dance and this new grandma. The child’s antics piqued the interest of its older brother, who had been hiding behind the sofa.
‘You’re a butt!’ the big brother said quietly, giving Siiri a murderous look, which caused her to burst out laughing. The adults tried to laugh a little too, but then Siiri straightened up and ordered them all to leave.
‘La commedia è finita,’ she said in a deep voice, and nobody understood that she was quoting Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, which ends with that line. Irma’s darlings were baffled and troubled. One of them put a picture back on the bookshelf, but the jewellery box remained in the know-it-all’s handbag.
‘We thought Grandma was out of the game . . .’
‘We were trying to be helpful.’
They looked so sad that Siiri had to explain why Irma’s recent recovery was good news. She assured them that they shouldn’t worry, that one, happy day, Irma would die, and her grandchildren could then divvy up all her things among them and bake a cake with her old mixer. So Irma’s darlings gathered up their bags and left.
The box of things labelled ‘rubbish’ was left in the middle of the living room: sheaves of photographs, knick-knacks, tablecloths and silk long johns. Siiri slumped into the flowered armchair to rest for a moment. It smelled like Irma’s perfume, strong and too sweet, but it was Irma’s scent, and Siiri breathed it in until it went to her head and she again felt the light, floating feeling she’d had in her dream.
Chapter 42
Anna-Liisa and Siiri had got into the habit of going into town together to perk themselves up. They had read all of The Tottering House and had started Juhani Aho’s Panu. Anna-Liisa was a pleasant travel companion because she knew to sometimes be quiet, unlike Irma. Siiri had learned all kinds of other things about Anna-Liisa over the months that Irma had been away. She’d come out of her shell and proved to be a warm, fun person, quite brave and sometimes even boisterous. It was amazing and interesting to Siiri to make a new friend at the age of ninety-four.
‘I think I’ve grown twenty years younger this winter,’ Anna-Liisa said as they rode the 3B and admired the new university library. ‘And it’s all down to you and the Lavender Ladies Detective Agency.’ The library had scads of little square-shaped windows that were rather amusing, although Siiri suspected that it might not be so fun to sit inside and look out at the world through such small windows.
Siiri unfortunately could not claim to have grown younger over the winter. Quite the opposite; her age had never weighed so heavily as it had this past year, with events flooding over her uncontrollably. It felt like people over ninety lived on their own deserted island, completely separate from the rest of the world. The banks wouldn’t take cash, the retirement home was a nest of criminals, and they were just supposed to drag themselves from aerobics to memory games all day long. Even on the tram they looked out at real life scurrying by from a distance, as if it were a TV show with no remote. There was just one taxi driver who’d taken an interest in their affairs, and even he seemed to be doing it for partly criminal reasons.
‘I don’t mistrust Mika any more at all,’ Anna-Liisa said, and looked more radiant than she had in ages. Siiri praised her red hat and her rosy springtime cheeks, and Anna-Liisa smiled with satisfaction. ‘Not only have I got to know you, I’ve had other experiences to shake my life up a bit. Wasn’t that place designed by Lars Sonck? I think it’s always been called the Arena Building, although that’s not its original name, of course. Or maybe it is? What do you think – when was that place built? Did you know that Lars Sonck’s offices were on the corner of Esplanadi and Unioninkatu and he had a habit of taking a bath in the Havis Amanda fountain?’
Anna-Liisa had read about it in a book that the Ambassador had given her as a gift. The book was called A Skin-disease Doctor Remembers. She explained that this was a euphemism, because in the old days everybody understood that a skin-disease doctor was a venereal-disease doctor. She’d learned from the memoir that a diagnosis of syphilis could be made by examining the eyebrows of the other passengers on public transport.
‘They called it omnibus diagnosis.’
‘Really? So, do I have syphilis?’ Siiri asked, and Anna-Liisa let out a musical laugh like a young girl and said Siiri’s eyebrows were very healthy. For a moment they looked at the other passengers’ eyebrows, but Anna-Liisa thought they all looked syphilis-free. Although there was one woman who had plucked her eyebrows off and drawn a black line in their place, so she might be a carrier, but the diagnosis was uncertain.
‘Sparse eyebrows indicate syphilis,’ Anna-Liisa explained.
‘Well, then the Ambassador certainly doesn’t have it,’ Siiri said, and Anna-Liisa’s face flashed a secret smile. Siiri wondered what the Ambassador’s first name was, but Anna-Liisa was still focused on venereal diseases.
‘Maybe syphilis doesn’t exist any more. There’s probably more AIDS nowadays, although even HIV is not as virulent as it was in the last century. Did you know that the Hat Lady died the other day? And she was supposed to live for ten more years with her stent.’
The 3B was like a rollercoaster on any day, but with Anna-Liisa with her it seemed even more thrilling than usual. Siiri hadn’t yet recovered from the syphilis conversation and yet Anna-Liisa had already moved on to the Hat Lady’s death. It was remarkable that Siiri didn’t know any more about it than she did about the Ambassador’s name. The Hat Lady had been part of their group of friends. Siiri had thought she was mostly troublesome. But now Sunset Grove’s itinerant preacher had gone and died, and wouldn’t come begging for sweet rolls any more, and in spite of everything it felt sad.
‘She wasn’t begging, she just wanted company and she used the sweet roll defence to get it,’ Anna-Liisa said, ‘if you know what I mean. I probably wouldn’t have approved of one of my pupils using an expression like “sweet roll defence”, but I can’t think of a better way to put it at the moment.’
‘The sweet roll con?’ Siiri suggested, and Anna-Liisa laughed happily again. Lately, she laughed a lot, brightly, in a way that gave her ordinarily gloomy voice a bit of sunshine.
‘She died of old age. A poor, unfortunate insomniac who finally fell asleep,’ Anna-Liisa said carelessly.
Just six months ago she would have given a lengthy lecture on how in Finland you’re required to die of pneumonia, a heart malfunction, or some other invented pathology. And on how much money was spent on cutting a body open just to find out how a ninety-two-year-old woman died in her own home. Finland certainly was a wealthy country, there was no way around it.
But now she just sa
t quietly, not even enthused about autopsies. Instead she said: ‘His name is Onni.’
Siiri didn’t have a chance to ask whose name was Onni. She was looking out of the window at the stop next to Brahe sports field, and there stood the Sunset Grove caretaker Erkki Hiukkanen in his overalls and cap, plain as day. He got on the tram through the centre door and Siiri hoped from the bottom of her heart that he wouldn’t notice them. He glanced around and looked important somehow, as if he were on a top-secret mission. Why in the world was he wandering around Kallio in his work clothes at this time of day? Siiri tried to warn Anna-Liisa, but she was in her own happy world.
‘Did you know that Onni can recite all the old Finnish market towns? Alavus, Anjalankoski, Espoo, Forssa, Grankulla, Haaga and so on.’
So Onni was the Ambassador’s name. Siiri was sure that she’d never heard anyone address him by his first name. She turned warily to look at the back of the tram and saw Hiukkanen sitting far away from them in the disabled seat with a blank expression on his face. There was no danger of him noticing them, even though Anna-Liisa let her voice echo through the tram in all her happiness.
‘That kind of brain aerobics is good for you – and fun, too. I’ve already learned quite a few myself. The end goes like this: Vantaa, Varkaus, Virrat, Ulivieska, Äänekoski,’ she recited, tapping her hand on her thigh. Siiri thought the red gloves she was wearing were new. Stylish, expensive-looking leather.
‘You have to recite it clearly so that you get the meaning and remember it better. Want to try?’
Siiri smiled and started learning the names of the old market towns to please Anna-Liisa. Life certainly was full of surprises.
Chapter 43
The Hat Lady’s real name had been Aino Marjatta Elin Nieminen. There was a pleasantly large crowd at her funeral, some relatives and a surprising number of old workmates from public radio, where she’d had a forty-year career from errand girl to editor.
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 20