When Time Runs Out

by Elina Hirvonen

  Ever since I was a child I have struggled to be one of the crowd. I have tried to become ordinary, a person who could do their share, who could, when something bad happens, follow it from the sidelines, grieve along with the other outsiders, be useful and serve others. And then go home, always finally go home and sleep an innocent sleep beside a loved one. I have decided to be the same as other people. I have decided to be a normal woman. When I was young, I hated the word ordinary, but once I had become pregnant I understood its power. When, at the health centre, I complained of pains and the nurse said everything was perfectly normal, I wanted to hug her. Before children, everyone probably wants to be unusual, an amazing person, and to live an unusual, amazing life. But as one gets older there is nothing more soothing than normality.

  I struggled to be a normal mother. For us to be a normal family, our children normal children. A normal person has permission to take a break, permission to mingle with the crowd, permission to smile openly in the park and at parents’ evenings, permission to believe that her child will keep up at nursery and at school, find friends, hobbies and dreams they can realise. I wanted to be a mother who has permission to believe that her child will, as an adult, come to lunch and will live long after I cease to exist.

  I do not cry now, as it would feel excessive. Tears belong to people who are met with sudden injustice. They belong to people whose life is derailed by illness or accident, who have something that can be taken away. Tears are the privilege of people who expect something better. I don’t cry, because I feel that this is what I deserve. What my child is doing at this moment is a naked and merciless reflection of me. His action reveals the darkness which I have tried to hide.

  42

  He sits on the roof with his eyes closed, his legs crossed and the palms of his hands held towards the sky as if he were meditating peacefully. The pizza beside him is cold and the box wet, the cheese melted into the cardboard. The policeman below is silent. The sniper aims at him from somewhere on high. Everyone is waiting to see what he will do. He thinks of cities he has not visited before, hot and cold, dry and wet, in different parts of the world, roofs sheltering people’s homes, roofs onto which someone has now climbed, weapon in hand. He thinks about the girl with whom he planned all this, how deeply she must despise him.

  The rule was that they should survive. They would all shoot as many people as possible before they were arrested, and if the police did not shoot them, they would not kill themselves. They would face their charges proudly and steadfastly, telling the court why they acted as they did and using every opportunity to persuade others to join them. They despise martyrs, and no one among them was to attempt to be one. They were political activists, ready to defend their aims and means in front of anyone; they knew the consequences of their actions and were ready to meet them head on. The rule was that on no account, in no circumstances, were they to kill themselves.

  ‘Nothing is stupider than committing suicide,’ said Saharaflower on his screen.

  ‘Exactly. Not one of those clowns even wants to die. All they want is for someone to notice them,’ he answered, closing another conversation which he had open at the same time, in which he had for years been discussing ways to commit suicide.

  ‘It’s the need for attention that makes people weak,’ Saharaflower continued. ‘No one who is dependent on others for attention can think clearly.’

  As a child he liked to draw. He would sit quietly for hours, pencil and paper in front of him, concentrating so hard that he sometimes forgot to breathe, and when he finally exhaled the air he had held inside for a long time, Mum would crouch in front of him and stroke his head, asking anxiously if everything was OK.

  Everything was fine then. He drew a world that he was able to create from scratch. It was a superworld in another solar system; its inhabitants looked like desert foxes, with big eyes and a friendly expression. In that world no one spoke, but everyone could read each other’s thoughts. The plants, animals and desert-fox creatures, which were part human, part animal and alien, communicated with each other through tiny gestures, understanding each other without words, respecting the thoughts of others. It was a world of shared silence in which everyone had space to live freely, everyone had the right to be exactly who they were.

  In the evenings as he waited for sleep he told himself stories about that world. And in the playground, first at nursery and then at school, as he followed the activities of the others, unable to join them, he imagined plants winding their way round the climbing frames, with silent desert foxes peeping out between them. For himself he imagined big ears, eyes and a tail which he could straighten; he could reach out his paws to the sky and fly towards another solar system and an unknown planet among whose inhabitants he would be at home.

  The lives of all creatures are immeasurably valuable. That is what he wrote in his dairy on the evening when he refused to eat meatballs at Granny’s house. Granny had insisted that he sit at the table until his plate was empty; he had heard Aava flitting through the flat in her fairy wings and watched the skin forming on the brown gravy until Mum had come to take them home.

  ‘I don’t want to eat animals,’ he had explained to Mum, and Granny had looked on with a furrowed brow. Mum had helped him zip up his coat, ruffled his hair and said: ‘It would be better if no one did.’

  He cried in front of the television while watching a news item about Iraqi children whose small bodies were buried in a mass grave, and about Liberian children killed by the Ebola virus, whose bodies were covered with a blanket.

  ‘What can I do?’ he asked Mum and Dad. Together, they made a donation to the Red Cross and Christian Aid and considered what he might he study to get a job where he could change the world.

  For a moment he dreamed of studying medicine and going to help children whose legs were as slim as tulip stems. He dreamed of the life that his sister now lives, helping unknown people far away from home. He thought that if he only waited long enough, something would change. He would learn to be at ease with other people, to take part in conversation and sometimes even to tell jokes. He would go to university and make the friends he didn’t have at school. He would meet a girl with a friendly smile who might like him. And one day he would have a family and children; he would stroke them out of their nightmares and back to sleep and tell them there was nothing to be afraid of.

  Gradually the exhaustion that he felt when he woke up every morning became so heavy that his whole life was dense and grey, a rag stinking of old food. The dreams he had had become someone else’s dreams, someone who had the energy to get out of bed in the morning and join the other boys in the school playground.

  ‘The lives of all creatures are immeasurably valuable.’

  The voice is clear, delicate and serious, with a slight lisp. The voice is clearly audible, even though there is no one on the roof but him. It is a child’s voice, that of a small, serious boy. A boy who believes that everything can get better.

  PART

  Five

  For love is lonely,

  lonelier than death.

  EEVA-LIISA MANNER

  Jos suru savuaisi

  (‘If grief should smoulder’)

  43

  Cities

  It is dry and hot. It is cool and dry, rainy and warm, mist and roofs covered in smog. It is completely clear. It is summer in Africa and autumn in Europe.

  There is China, biggest of all; the United States, which is afraid; India, of whose riches nothing trickles down to those who were born in the wrong place. There is Europe, which is still waiting to join in.

  There are streets swept by car headlights and streets where only stray dogs strut and a woman pale as smoke sweeps yesterday’s rubbish. There are churches and minarets, flea markets and clubs, street food, delivery bikes and rickshaws driven by men with strong shoulders, strong gazes. There is a family moving house on a moped, complete with a granny and three canisters of water; there are open-top cars, sports cars and station w
agons; there are cars with tinted windows, too big for small streets.

  There are shacks built of tin and houses whose lawns are smooth and whose gardens are planted with carefully chosen flowers, and where no one dares open the door to a surprise visit from a friend. There are tall buildings and small buildings, four-lane motorways and alleys that no one has named. There are primary schools and private schools, Steiner schools, feminist schools, music schools and forest schools, little children on story mats they have made themselves and children whom no one expects home. There is a spot on a sandy beach where footprints walking together end in a soft dip with a forgotten hair clasp; there are sleeping bags in hollows in the road, in their openings faces that could belong to a child and beside them a dog with a trusting look and bare patches in its fur, its muzzle against its owner’s hand.

  There are organic brunches and vegan brunches, Korean, Chilean and Madagascan brunches; there are children flying kites in a pub garden and Japanese men who, waking up in a tent, put on a freshly pressed suit. There are cities where you can walk in safety through the night and those in whose well-kept streets only thieves walk. There are bridges which are slept under and bridges you can stop under to kiss. There are clubs that close their doors when the sun rises and clubs that open at the same time. There are concert halls and double-bass players in the street, jazz, rock and a little punk, a solitary woman singing an aria at the entrance to the station and a postman whistling ‘What a Wonderful World’.

  There is a slim-necked girl who hears she is to be married, flees into the night and throws herself under a train before her father and brother can do it for her. There is a woman who packs her own and her children’s clothes into a tote bag, heart thumping, forgets her daughter’s shoes and goes back to get them, meets a man on the stairs and never returns. There is a man who has a mark left by a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand who sits on a train long before it is due to depart and a woman sitting opposite him who asks to borrow a pen. There is an old woman who passes a man she loved when she was young in the street, watches a seagull peck at a potato chip and decides to turn round, running to catch up with the man even though her heart will not really let her run any more. There is a woman and a man, a man and a woman, a man and a man and a woman and a woman; there are things that are not spoken about and things that are shared, things that can perhaps be written about and things that are just somehow sensed; there are pictures that only one person remembers and shared moments that leave a different trace in everyone.

  There are cities that everyone wants to visit and cities to which no one who has left them returns. There are building sites and ghost buildings, there are city blocks that have changed from desolate to comfortable and streets where the dust left by bombs still floats.

  In all the cities, those of unhappy people and happy people, lonely people and people who are surrounded by friends, there is one person who is at this moment completely alone, and yet connected to the others. There are men and women dressed in dark clothes, beautiful and ugly, popular and lonely, expelled from school and best in their class, all young and so angry that it obscures everything else. Some have bought a weapon with money they have earned themselves and some have fetched an inherited weapon from a cupboard whose key has been easy to find. Some of them have decided to die, others to stay alive. Some want to take revenge on people they consider to have mistreated them, others just want revenge for its own sake; some want to make a dramatic exit and have their faces appear on television; some want an ex-girlfriend to remember them for ever; some really believe their deeds will change the world. Their hands are sweaty and their hearts pound. All of them are thinking, Can I really do this?

  In Rio de Janeiro a young woman decides she can’t, hides her weapon and buys a doughnut from a street stall. In London a young man decides he can’t, hides his weapon and throws himself under a Tube train.

  In other cities they proceed quietly, doubtfully, obstinately urging themselves to go to the place they have agreed on together. They hide, load their weapons, aim and begin to shoot.

  44

  Is everything OK?’ asks the policeman on the phone. The phone is still on, and the police officer has the voice of an old singer; he wants to give in and let it reassure him, the soft, gentle cadence.

  ‘In this situation that’s a slightly odd question.’

  ‘It looks as if you’re not doing very well.’

  ‘Me? But I’m part of the well-off elite.’

  ‘You’ve certainly kept your sense of humour.’

  He would like to say something else, but the pressure in his belly intensifies so that he has to curl up in foetal position on the roof. The roof is cold and wet against his cheek; there is a ringing in his ears and his clothes are wet through. He breathes quietly but deeply, trying to get the pressure to ease so that his voice will be clear, so that he can say one sentence clearly and brightly. He is terribly tired and heavy, so tired that he can hardly move a limb. He closes his eyes and thinks about the desert foxes he drew as a child, the distant land where all life is valuable, where everyone has space to be quiet.

  When he can breathe again, he sits up, squeezes the phone in his hand and says: ‘Listen.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was good to talk.’

  ‘Me too. What if we continued the conversation down here?’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how to come down.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please would you tell my parents and my sister something?’

  ‘What have they got to do with it?’

  ‘Will you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Tell them that nothing I have done has anything to do with them.’

  45

  Laura

  When the police have gone, I call Aava. Uncharacteristically, she answers right away.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Sweetie.’

  ‘I already know.’

  For a long time we say nothing. I lean against the wall, close my eyes and listen to my daughter’s breathing on the other side of the world.

  When Aava and Aslak were children, I often woke in the night in terror that something had happened to one of them. I crept into their room, switched on the fairy and aeroplane night lights and looked at the sleeping children’s smooth faces in their glow. I sat for a long time on the floor beside their beds. I stroked their cheeks, which were warm and soft as a rose petal, listening to their breathing and praying, I who have never believed in God, praying that nothing bad would ever happen to them.

  ‘Have people . . . died?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘How could . . . how could . . .?’

  ‘Yes, sweetie.’

  ‘Did you and Dad . . . did you have any idea?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think about it now all the time. Did we have any idea?’

  ‘As soon as I heard that there was someone, I . . .’

  Aava’s voice breaks.

  ‘Sweetie?’

  ‘If people have died, it’s our fault. We all had an idea.’

  I lean against the wall. My hand is carved from ice, cold and motionless.

  ‘Darling, nothing is your fault. You are not responsible for your brother. Dad and I . . . we are guilty.’ The face reflected in the window is at the same time my face and someone else’s. For the first time in speaking to Aava I feel myself to be completely adult, capable of bearing responsibility.

  ‘Mum.’ Aava’s voice is gentle. She would be a good mother. She would be much better than me. ‘What’s going to happen next?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you and Dad doing?’

  ‘Eerik is still on his way home.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Waiting for Eerik. Breathing.’

  �
��Do you want me to come back?’

  The question surprises me. Since she left home, Aava has wanted to stay as far as possible from us. Even now I expected her to hang up the phone or shout at me, to tell me that she never wants to see us again.

  For the first time in years it feels as if we are not fighting, but are on the same side, as close as it is possible for the two of us to be.

  ‘What do you want, yourself?’

  ‘Maybe I want to be here. To do the job I’ve agreed to do. It feels . . . it feels as if it’s the only thing . . . I can do now.’

  Aava gets her voice under control. I can almost see her straining to keep her posture straight and her face calm in order to be able to talk about this as she would about anything else, things that just happen.

  ‘Then that is what you will do.’

  I say it without bitterness. Too often, the envy I feel for Aava has crept in behind my words and twisted them to be different from what I intend. I have tried to be a loving mother and have ended up a bitter woman full of blame and controlled aggression.

  Now the envy is gone. In its place is shame, a guilt the size of the whole of the rest of my life about each of my choices, each of my moments of incompetence and uncertainty, everything I have been as a mother. The guilt is so massive and dense that it is difficult to see anything through it. At the same time I feel a momentary relief. I wish Aava well so sincerely, so profoundly, that it seems as if a limb that has been in the wrong position has finally clicked into place.