by Janis Mackay
Maybe the boy with the scar on his face could visit too. Riku.
Maybe.
Chapter Five
After a month at the Wild School I had leafed through loads of wildlife books, watched four films, stared at the sea, edged closer and closer, grabbed pocketfuls of soil, zoomed off in my capsule, got ten letters from my mum that I never bothered to reply to, trotted off on a few of Hannu’s island explorations – though never that close to the beach again – and watched Hannu working.
That was about it: a month in the life of Niilo, Wild School prisoner. I felt like a coiled-up spring, like I was getting ready for something, some really big adventure, but I didn’t know what. I could feel this wild hunger that Hannu talked about. It was gnawing away inside me. It was hunger for adventure, not for pizza, or chocolate, or cinnamon buns.
Sometimes Hannu came out with weird stories that I half listened to. He said how he had a vivid imagination, and how he always had his nose in a book. Said I should try reading stories too. What did he think? That I was an idiot? That I didn’t know how to read? That I just looked at the pictures?
‘Once there was a seal,’ he said one day, ‘that looked like your average common seal but not when the moon was full.’ He was placing pebbles along the border of a flower bed and I was watching him. ‘You see, moonlight can do strange things to creatures. It can bring the magic out of them. I need a really small pebble.’ I thought that was part of the story, but Hannu got up and fished a tear-shaped stone out of the bucket of pebbles. I wanted him to get on with the story, but he took his little pebble and placed it thoughtfully, like he was an artist. ‘You see, come full moon, this seal slid onto the beach and what happened was this.’ He took another pebble from the bucket. ‘The seal skin slipped off and underneath the seal was a man. He jumped up. He ran around. He looked human. All the full-moon night he stayed on the beach, then, full of longing to go back to his home in the sea, he put on his seal skin and slid back under the waves.’ Hannu stood up and examined his pebbles. ‘Looks good, eh?’
I shrugged. I was imagining a seal swimming under the sea with a human body underneath …
I did a lot of standing around, and hardly ever took my hands out of my pockets. Until the day my trousers came back from the laundry and – I’m surprised they took so long – the pockets had gone! They’d been cut out and the slits sewn together. I thought it was quite funny, but I didn’t know what to do with my hands after that. They kind of dangled, itching for fat wallets to swipe, euros to filch, cigarettes to hold, ash to flick. I stared at my hands. These were skilled hands, and they had nothing to do.
Six weeks in, and it was getting on for midsummer – early June now, with blue skies that hardly ever turned dark. Hannu’s seeds that he had planted were coming up, which was kind of magical, and I spent a lot of time just watching stuff grow. We were in our usual spot in the garden when Hannu grabbed my hand and put it up against his own.
‘I just read a story,’ he said, ‘except it’s not a story. It’s true.’ I tried to pull my hand free but it was useless – Hannu was strong. ‘It said how, on an island somewhere, they uncovered a burial ground. This burial ground was five thousand years old. That’s old, huh? And there were these two hands, skeletons of hands, kind of stuck together, like this.’ He moved our two clamped-together hands into my eyeline. ‘Imagine, they’d been buried together, and they’d been holding hands for five thousand years.’
‘So?’
‘So …’ Hannu carried on as though no earthquake had just happened. But it had! That tiny ‘so’ was a big deal – it was my first word in six weeks. But Hannu didn’t make a meal of it. ‘You’re probably thinking it’s two lifelong friends, these hands, or maybe a husband and wife, maybe a mother and son, or twins, but it wasn’t.’ Hannu kept hold of my hand and I stopped trying to pull it away. ‘It was a human and a seal. They had been buried together. Their hands were very similar, like they were related.’ Then he let my hand go. ‘Quite something, huh?’
Hannu went back to thinning his carrots or whatever he was doing and I dropped my hand by my side. It felt warm. And I couldn’t get the image of the man and the seal out of my mind. Hannu liked seals, I knew that.
‘I’d like to be that close to a wild animal,’ he was saying as he worked. Then he sat up and looked round at me. ‘Wouldn’t you like that too, Niilo?’
I shrugged. Hannu patted the soil around his little carrots, then stopped and looked up at me ‘What is it you really want, Niilo?’
‘Freedom,’ I muttered, my voice all raw and husky.
Hannu stared at me. Maybe he didn’t hear me. ‘What?’
I said it again. ‘Like the film,’ I whispered. My throat hurt. Words tasted strange.
But Hannu got it. He laughed. ‘Oh right, you mean that film we watched the day you got here? Yes, sure, I get that.’
I shrugged and looked down. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.
Hannu punched the air, just like the guy in the film. Then he brought his hand up against his chest and looked straight at me. ‘Freedom’s in here, Niilo. We think it’s something far away, but it’s not. It’s right inside us.’
Chapter Six
It was almost a month after the first island rambling, as Hannu called our island explorations. He said we might find some early blueberries now, if we were lucky. Over by the beach.
But I knew he was lying. He thought it was time to show me the beach. He wanted me to trust the sea. ‘There’s no getting away from the sea on this island,’ he said as we wound our way through the birch wood. ‘You are brave,’ he added, pep-talking me. ‘I can see it in your cheekbones.’ We were crossing a rope bridge that hung over a small black pool when he said this. That’s when he swung round and did that look-right-into-me stare. The rope bridge wobbled. ‘We both have something Sami about us, something Laplandish. You must have noticed, surely?’
I shook my head. Sami were the folk way up north who used to run after the reindeer and they mostly had dark hair, like Hannu. I had never thought of it before, but I was sure my parents weren’t Sami. My dad was very blond, in fact.
We were still standing on the rope bridge, with it swinging slightly. ‘Look, Niilo,’ Hannu said, bending his head over the rope and staring down to the pool below. ‘Look at our reflections.’
I did, and I got a shock, seeing Hannu and me in the black pool, our reflections gazing up at us, as clear as a mirror. We looked like a painting, two round faces in the water. I looked okay too. I looked like somebody strong.
‘It feels like another lifetime, but that’s where I’m from. I have Sami blood,’ Hannu was saying. ‘So maybe it takes one to know one.’
We did look kind of similar. But then a fish or something ruffled the water and our reflections crinkled. Hannu carried on crossing the rope bridge. I could have stayed staring at me in the pool for ages, but I followed him. I jumped off the bridge and followed him through the wood.
‘You’re from Helsinki,’ Hannu suddenly said, ‘aren’t you?’
‘I’m from another planet,’ I said and pulled my alien face.
Hannu laughed. ‘But maybe you have an ancestor from Lapland? That can explain things.’
‘Explain what things?’ I leant against a pine tree, looking at him suspiciously.
‘Wild nature, and how normal school didn’t fit you. I read your report. What you got up to before you came here. It was like you were a hunter in the middle of a city. It was the wolf and deer you actually wanted to hunt, not wallets. And I’ve got a name for that – I spoke about it before, do you remember? Wild hunger.’
I shrugged. Outside I kept my face expressionless but inside my mind was whirring. So they knew? My parents knew about the stealing? So this Wild School was really a kind of prison for people who are too young to go to jail? I looked across at Hannu. Or maybe he was guessing? Could this man see right inside me?
‘Sometimes, Niilo,’ he said, ‘we get lost and do one thing when in tr
uth we want to do something else. I’m talking about substitutes.’
What did he mean? That I hunted wallets when really I wanted to hunt bears? I pictured myself with a spear in my hand, silent-footed, going after a brown bear. A pine cone fell out of the tree.
Then Hannu patted me gently on the back, all friendly-like. ‘It happens to people like us. We lose our story. The first time I saw you I knew – you need to find your story.’ Then he smiled. ‘Come on, Niilo,’ he said, ‘let’s face the fear, eh?’
So he’d guessed. Not for the first time it struck me that Hannu was a bit of a mind-reader. I followed him through the pine wood, feeling weirdly stronger after his little talk about me being a wild hunter with some distant ancestors coming from Lapland. They weren’t afraid of the sea. They fished the sea. They broke the ice. If that’s what he meant by a story, then it was a story I liked.
It was there before I knew it – the sea. I stood at the edge of the small sandy beach and Hannu stood next to me. Suddenly he bent down and scooped up a stone and flung it into the sea. ‘Your turn,’ he said.
I found a big grey stone and threw it. It felt good to throw a stone into the monster sea. Then he scooped up another one. There was a white buoy bobbing around, probably to say don’t swim past here, or something.
‘Try and hit it,’ Hannu said.
So I did, or I tried to. It felt good to stand there, so close to this thing that had terrified me for so long, and fling stones. Then I hit the buoy.
‘Bravo, Niilo,’ Hannu shouted, and I felt so fired up I could have gone into the sea right then. I wouldn’t drown. I wanted to feel the cold water swirl about my ankles. Like my recently invented Lapland mysterious ancestors, I wanted to wade out into the ocean and hunt. Of course, I didn’t – but I knew I could have.
It was when we were tramping back to the Wild School building that Hannu suddenly blurted out, ‘I won’t be here for ever.’
I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. ‘Neither will I,’ I said. Then I hurried ahead. I was hungry. It was Thursday. We got pizza on a Thursday. If I got back too late there would be none left.
Chapter Seven
That night the nightmare came back: the huge rolling waves, towering like mountains and looming down on me, the screaming, the hands reaching and then the silence. But I didn’t wake up like I usually did, heart kicking and this horrible panicky feeling clutching round my throat like strangling hands. Because suddenly the nightmare changed. I was swimming in the sea, and I wasn’t scared. The sea was blue and shimmering, not stormy and grey. I was following a black seal, and when I looked at my hand it turned into a flipper.
When I woke I still remembered the dream, and I didn’t feel scared. In the early morning light I looked at my hand. I turned it around, stroked the back of it and shuddered – it felt like it was covered in seal skin.
In the garden I wanted Hannu to tell me the story again. He was busy turning the compost that day but all the time I wanted him to tell me the story. It took a while before I could bring myself to ask for it – I couldn’t ask him that day, or the next, or the one after. And while I was working up to ask him, I hardly noticed that I had started to do little jobs. I held the bucket while Hannu milked the goats – the white stuff squirted out and smelled rank, and when he asked if I wanted to have a go I screwed up my face and shook my head. But I didn’t mind doing stuff like mulching old leaves and turning over smelly compost with a spade.
As the long light days of summer stretched out we moved on to picking strawberries. I liked strawberries. I ate more than I picked, but it felt good to do something. Every night my mouth was stained bright red.
It was on our lunch break, on a long berry-picking day nearly a week after the dream that I finally came out with it. ‘That seal and man story?’ I said. ‘How did it go? I forgot.’
And like before, when I had said my first word, Hannu didn’t bat an eyelid, even though this was the first time I had asked him for something. ‘Yeah, that was a good one, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like that, somehow.’ He chewed his rye bread slowly, throwing crumbs for the birds. Then Hannu told about the island where 5000 years ago a human and a seal had been buried holding hands. When he finished he stretched out his arms, indicating the size of the Wild School island. ‘I think the island I’m talking about was maybe bigger than this one.’
I was staring out to sea, thinking about seals and hands. I was definitely getting braver, I knew. I’d been working on it – I could look at the sea now without breaking into a sweat. Maybe it was something to do with being so close to it, day and night. Apart from that one time flinging stones, I hadn’t been right down to the water’s edge, but from a distance me and the sea were doing okay. I watched the cruise ships. I watched tiny yachts on the horizon. I watched the scattered islands. I listened to the sea at night. It was always there, like a giant creature breathing, out and in, out and in. It wasn’t a monster any more, just a huge mystery. The water was choppy and white crests broke on the waves.
‘Can you swim, Niilo?’ Hannu asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. Not really. Anyway, I’d rather be tossed into a cave with a wild starving bear than swim in the sea. But of course I wasn’t going to admit to that. I had been taken to swimming lessons in the days when Mum still took me to things, and I remember being bundled up in plastic armbands and kicking about in the pool like a mad turtle. It had felt good – like I was at home in the water. But Mum used to sit on an orange plastic chair at the poolside with her hands over her eyes, scared. She said the place gave her a headache.
‘No problem,’ said Hannu. ‘I’ll teach you. Sunday.’ He picked a strawberry and handed it to me. ‘Something tells me you’ll swim like a fish.’
Chapter Eight
Swim like a fish? When Hannu said that I glared at him, imagining those staring dead eyes lined up on the fish stalls in the market. Gross. Why would anybody want to swim like a fish? But he was smiling, and nodding and trying to make me feel all positive. I could hardly swim at all, never mind like a fish. All those piano lessons, skiing classes, hip hop dancing and even yoga, all in aid of the ‘let’s make Niilo normal’ project, but after three swimming lessons Mum had given up.
It was the one thing I had thought I might be okay at. The swimming teacher said I showed promise. But Mum said she didn’t trust him. She didn’t like the smell of chlorine, and she didn’t trust the lifeguards. So we stopped. Everybody in Finland can swim, except me.
Hard enough to live in this country and steer clear of the sea, but my parents seemed to manage. On those pointless little summer trips away we always travelled inland. ‘I like trees,’ Mum would say. ‘I like all different kinds of trees. The sea now, that’s dangerous. It’s for fish.’ She chattered away, as Dad drove, like she was terrified of silence. ‘We’ll all have fun together, won’t we? In a cabin in the forest. It’ll be so peaceful, and fun.’
Fun? Maybe I just never got ‘fun’. Maybe her fear had passed to me, but pretty soon I hadn’t liked the sea either. Or trees. And the drowning nightmare didn’t help.
So as soon as Hannu brought up the swimming question I felt jittery. I didn’t want to look like a total idiot, so I practised on the floor of my bedroom, pushing my arms out and kicking my legs back. What a nutcase. If I wasn’t so het up about the whole thing it would have been quite funny, me down on the floor wriggling about like a beached turtle! I tried to remember my three swimming lessons from when I was about five. And I tried to remember the athletes swimming on TV. So I did what they did. Without the water part. Then when we were outside I forced myself to look at the sea for ages and imagine somehow I’d float on the top of it. In my capsule I went swimming in the sea, and it was a breeze.
So, come Sunday, when I realised he meant the teensy swimming pool in the basement I felt let down. And a bit relieved. I wasn’t scared of the swimming pool – especially one not much bigger than a wallet. I took one look at it and dived in.
‘You do better then,’ I shouted, spluttering up water and shaking my wet head. I’d flung myself into the shallow end and practically hit my head on the bottom but I didn’t let on. It was just like a bath, a big bath, and I wanted to put my training into practice, so I took off, thrashing up the pool.
Hannu ran and dived gracefully in, even though there was a sign up saying ‘no running’. The sign said no to lots of things, but Hannu seemed to ignore it. He came up beside me where I was kicking around in the water and trying to grab the rail at the side. ‘Grab these instead,’ Hannu said, flinging me a pair of armbands. I didn’t want armbands – I wanted to do it on my own – but then I started to go under so I reached out and grabbed his hands.
Hannu led me away from the side of the pool. ‘See,’ he said, ‘I knew you’d be a natural.’
‘How come?’ I yelled, kicking my legs all over the place and trying to keep my head out of the water. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Exactly,’ said Hannu, swimming backwards and guiding me round the pool. He didn’t mention the armbands again. ‘You didn’t drown. You took one look at the water and you were in it. I was going to suggest the steps at the side of the pool, but no, you just dived right in.’
‘I thought we were going to swim in the sea. This is for babies. Like, I did this ages ago.’
‘How about you close your eyes for a moment. I’ll lead you round and you try and imagine the sound of the sea. You know, the waves lapping up against the rocks. Above you, the gulls are screaming in the blue sky.’ As he spoke Hannu swam backwards, pulling me round the pool.
‘I don’t like gulls. They steal your food.’
‘Not these gulls, Niilo. They watch over you, making sure you’re okay. Some people say the gulls are the souls of drowned sailors.’