Wild Song

by Janis Mackay

  Later I sat gazing out of the window in the nurse’s room. I could see the branches of an oak tree, and on a branch a squirrel was feasting on an acorn. That squirrel was free to go where it liked. Sunlight spilled through the branches of the tree, lighting up its red bushy tail. If I could just concentrate on the squirrel, everything would be all right …

  Behind me, people came in and out. The door creaked open and shut. A spoon tinkled in a coffee cup. Murmured voices spoke about what to do. Hannu burst into the room. Still I didn’t turn around.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Hannu said. He was right behind me. Still I sat and stared at the squirrel. ‘I did tell you, Niilo, several times,’ he went on. ‘I got the feeling you weren’t listening. But I never made it a secret. I’m leaving, Niilo. And it doesn’t matter. This is about you, not me. And you’re doing well.’

  The squirrel turned the acorn around in its paws, gnawing away and swishing its bushy tail back and forth.

  ‘He’ll be fine in a day or two,’ the nurse at her desk piped up, sounding none too pleased with Hannu. ‘He’s had a bit of a shock. This is the Wild School. It happens. You should leave now.’

  Hannu ignored her and moved round to stand in front of me. I watched the scene like it had nothing to do with me. ‘Look at me, Niilo,’ Hannu said. ‘For God’s sake, look at me.’

  I moved my head to the side so that I could see the squirrel. It was still there. The acorn was getting smaller.

  ‘Well, if you won’t look, at least listen.’

  I put my hands over my ears. The squirrel dropped the acorn and scurried up the branch. I could still hear Hannu.

  ‘I worked hard with you. And I did that because I wanted to. Not because it was my job. And we’ve done well, Niilo. You’ve made great steps. Strokes too!’ He laughed then, but the laughter quickly faded. ‘But Saara, remember, I told you about her. We’re getting married, and Saara has a job up north. The wedding is in one month’s time. Then I’ll be gone from here. This Wild School job, it was always temporary – I told you that. I know you’re finding this hard, but it’ll work out fine. You are a good strong person, Niilo. You are going to make it.’

  ‘I am going to insist you go now, Hannu,’ the nurse said. She tapped her pen on the desk. ‘He’s very tired. And I think you are upsetting him again.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe I should go, but right now I’m sick of what I should and shouldn’t do.’ Hannu glared at the nurse. ‘Just give me more time. We know each other well.’ He swung back to face me. ‘Listen to me, Niilo. We’re getting married on the tenth of August and I want you to come to the wedding. It’s on the island of Suomenlinna. I’ve told Saara lots about you. She asked for you to be there too. Come with your family.’

  ‘Really, Hannu, I am going to ask you to leave now. Please!’ The nurse stood up and opened the door.

  I didn’t blink, didn’t show any sign of having heard a word, or even having seen Hannu. Of course I’d heard every word, but it didn’t mean anything. I went into The Capsule and turned the music up loud.

  Hannu squeezed my shoulder then drew back as I stared at my knees, my hands floppy on the chair. He walked to the door, his steps heavy and slow, stopped halfway across the room and looked back. ‘I’m here three more weeks.’ I could hear the nurse pick up the phone. ‘Goodbye then, Niilo,’ Hannu said. ‘I believe in you, remember that.’

  I heard the nurse get up and open the door. I heard Hannu’s footsteps move away, heavy and slow. Then the door closed.

  When I looked up the squirrel had gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I refused to leave my room for three days. The suicide watch kept an eye on me – not that they called it that, but that’s what it was – a boring job for the one who had to come into my room every hour and check I was fine.

  Mostly I slept. Then when I wasn’t sleeping I lay staring into space, planning my escape. I was a skilled thief. The more I thought about escaping, the more I knew I could pull it off. I knew how to move without a sound. How to dart in and out of crowds and shadowy places. I could make myself invisible. And now I had another skill. I could swim. And not just a few strokes. I knew, if I needed to, I could swim for hours. I was a born swimmer. That’s what Hannu had said, and it was true.

  The more I slept the more I dreamt. As the days became meaningless the nights became full of images and adventures. And in these dreams I was swimming. I was swimming with seals. I saw hands in my dreams, Hannu’s hands, the skeletal bones of a seal’s hands, and other hands: hands without arms, hands stretching out to me. In my dreams I reached to grasp these hands, but woke before I touched them.

  I lay awake in the middle of the night. I say night, but being summer it was light almost all the time and I hardly knew what was day and what was night, but I did know by now how the Wild School operated. They let children lie in their caves – that was the expression they used. They’d give them three or four days, then they’d move in and it would be back to weeding, berry picking, chopping wood, candle dipping, cooking, wood carving, drawing and sitting in circles where I was supposed to talk about my feelings.

  It was loneliness that drove me back. The option had been given to me, after three days of solitary, and I grabbed it. Loneliness, and a vague plan. I couldn’t escape if I was lying in my room all the time. I needed to have a good look around. I needed to check out possible exit routes. And I wanted to see how Hannu was managing without me. So I shuffled along the corridor.

  ‘Good to have you with us,’ a new staff member said. ‘I’m Bernt and you and I are going to be great friends.’ I didn’t think so. ‘We’ve got circus skills this evening. Most of the boys here really enjoy circus skills.’ His voice was annoying me.

  ‘What’s that?’ I grunted. ‘Lion-taming?’

  Bernt laughed. ‘Stilts and juggling,’ he said. ‘Fun stuff like that.’ Whoopee! How old did he think I was? Five?

  It didn’t look to me that evening like most of the boys enjoyed it. Most of them were playing the fool, making stupid faces and falling off the stilts. Bernt was busy trying to get me to join in.

  ‘It’s part of it,’ he said. ‘Getting the clown inside you to come out and play.’ I was doing my usual disinterested leaning back against the wall thing. We were in the games hall and there were four corners of stuff going on: the stilts, juggling balls, tightrope walking and putting a red nose on and looking silly. It was noisy and I couldn’t believe how useless they all were. They fell off the stilts, dropped the balls and wobbled about, then jumped off the tightrope, screaming. I flashed my eyes about, looking for Hannu. ‘Have a go,’ said Bernt.

  I shook my head. Then I saw him. He was the only one not wobbling about on the tightrope. He was in charge of a group of boys and they were all gazing up at him, like he was a king – I hated them. Hannu was walking the tightrope with his arms out to the side. Sometimes he stopped. He had this serious concentration look on his face, not that he would hurt himself if he fell since the tightrope was only about one metre off the ground, and even then there was a soft landing mattress thing underneath. I willed him to lift his eyes and look at me, but he didn’t. He reached the end of the rope and the boys cheered.

  Bernt was still at my elbow. ‘Try the stilts, Niilo. You can start with a low pair. It’s easy – you just have to remember to swing your arm and leg at the same time. Left arm and left leg together. Right arm and right leg together.’

  So I did. I knew I’d be good at it and I wanted Hannu to see how good I was.

  ‘Slow down, Niilo,’ Bernt called out, worried. He had been standing beside me when I took off. After ten seconds I was halfway down the hall. ‘Niilo, come back!’

  I stilted fast. I wove through the jugglers. I snap-snapped these wooden stilts all the way to the tightrope corner.

  ‘Check him,’ one of Hannu’s boys said, whistling. ‘He’s pretty ace.’

  I did a fast twirl, like I was stilt dancing.

  ‘Showoff,’ another one said.
/>   ‘Hannu’s not working with you any more,’ somebody else chanted.

  I couldn’t see Hannu. Where was he? I heard one of the boys sneer and I broke then. I jumped off the stilts, flung one of them at Sneering Boy and swung the other one above my head, like it was a lasso. That changed their tune. Sneering Boy was screaming while I was looking for the one who had called me a showoff. They were all screaming now. Running for the door. Then I saw Hannu.

  ‘Niilo,’ he said. He stepped towards me, but stopped at the distance of the swinging stilt. His face was a map of hurt. ‘Stop it, Niilo,’ he said. ‘Put it down.’

  The stilt was whipping through the air. It whirred. I was going to hurl it, but Hannu stepped forward, shot his hand up and grabbed hold of the stilt. Then he looked straight at me. He was trying to say sorry with his eyes. I spat at his feet, let the stilt go and swung round.

  I slammed right into Bernt.

  I couldn’t get the image of Hannu’s hurt eyes out of my mind as Bernt escorted me back to my room. ‘So you lasted thirty-five minutes out of this room,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘We’ll talk this through in the morning, when you’ve calmed down. And you’ll apologise to Tore. We don’t tolerate violence, Niilo.’ He folded his arms and leant against the door, watching while I sunk onto my bed and kicked my trainers off. ‘Like I said, Niilo, you don’t know what you’re missing. There’s good stuff goes on at this school. If I was you I’d shape up and get involved. Think about it, okay?’ I heard the key turn in the lock, heard the staff member’s footsteps stride off, growing fainter and fainter. Then it grew awfully quiet in the corridor.

  I kicked at the door till my toes ached. I pressed my forehead up against the door and stood like that for a long time. The sounds from outside grew quiet until I guessed it was lights out. No footsteps went by in the hallway. From along the hallway another boy yelled. A door slammed. Then it was quiet. I felt a cold prickle of fear and banged at my door.

  ‘Hannu!’ I shouted. ‘Hannuuuuu!’ I heard my voice fade into nothing. Again and again I shouted, till my throat hurt. It was only when I banged the door hard with both hands, like I was drumming round some primal camp fire, that I heard footsteps approach. I stopped hitting the door. A river of sweat ran down my spine and my heart jolted. ‘Hannu?’ Whoever was outside had stopped at my door. ‘Is that you, Hannu?’

  ‘It’s bedtime, Niilo,’ came a voice that wasn’t Hannu’s, from the other side of the door. It wasn’t Bernt either. Maybe it was the janitor, or the night-watchman?

  ‘Get Hannu,’ I said, pressing my face against the locked door. ‘Tell him he’s got to come.’

  ‘He’s not coming, Niilo. Now get some sleep. It’s late.’

  But whoever it was didn’t move away, and it felt comforting somehow to have somebody, some anonymous somebody, talk to me from the other side of the door. I slumped to the floor, exhausted. The man at the other side of the door was still there, unless he had slipped off his boots and slunk off in his socks? The thought hit me with a cold panic. I knocked at the door.

  ‘You still there?’

  ‘I’m still here, Niilo.’

  ‘Don’t go … will … you.’ My voice was breaking. I didn’t care. I was past cool. Past tough. Past bad.

  ‘I can’t stay here all night,’ the man said, his voice hushed though it was loud enough to be heard through the closed door. ‘Go on, get some sleep. I’ll wait here ten minutes if that’s going to help you.’

  My face was pressed up against the door. ‘You could sing me a lullaby,’ I said, then laughed. I couldn’t believe I had said that. What a baby! ‘Just joking.’

  ‘Trust me, you don’t want to hear that,’ the man said, then laughed too. A couple of minutes passed. He coughed. Then he said, ‘You in bed yet?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I lied, still slumped down behind the door. ‘Just sinking into dreamland …’

  ‘Good, because I gotta go.’ This time he really walked away. I heard his footsteps snap, snap down the corridor, fading into nothing.

  Maybe I did dream, there on the cold floor. Because when I woke, stiff and freezing in the middle of the night, I knew what I had to do. I had to be ‘good’. If I could hold it together and show that I was, as they liked to say, worthy of trust, I would find a way to escape. They were always droning on about trust in the Wild School. ‘Trust us and we trust you’ was one of the mottos. Okay, I would be so good they’d trust me with knives and matches.

  Hiking on the island and practising what the staff called ‘survival skills’ was popular. I climbed into bed and felt a glimmer of hope for the first time in days. Here was a plan that could work. It might take one or two weeks, so I would need to be patient, but all I needed to do was to play it their way, or pretend to. Then, acting like the model pupil, I would slip away undetected, wade into the sea and swim for freedom.

  The Baltic was littered with islands. I wouldn’t have to swim far, an hour, maybe two. I could do that, no bother, I was a natural. Then I’d have my pick of islands. It suddenly seemed so easy. I lay my head down on the pillow that felt like cotton wool after the wooden floor, and worked it all out. I’d seen the film Castaway. And Hannu had told me about Robinson Crusoe who had lived on a deserted island. I felt my pulse race. I would disappear, being Mr Good Guy, and swim to freedom. I would have my own island. Other people had done it. So could I. And there were plenty of empty summerhouses I could break into. I’d be my own person, with no one telling me what to do and what not to do. Once I was free my life would fall into place. Things would work out. It wouldn’t always be like this. I wouldn’t always feel so useless. So rubbish.

  Suddenly, lying there in the dim summer’s night, I had this image of myself strong and happy. But happy wasn’t going to happen in a locked room. Happy wasn’t going to happen on this island with its rules and rye bread, and Hannu gone. Happy would happen when I was free.

  I would need to be super-fit. I would need to work up stamina. And take books out of the library about foraging in the wild. And I would need to keep my cool. I would master those breathing exercises. And all that relaxation, feel-great-about-yourself stuff they went on about in the Wild School. I would do it all. I would even do that meditation stuff. I would be the master of cool control.

  I sat up straight. I started right away. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, then I repeated the words, I am strong. I am peaceful. I repeated them ten times. Then I opened my eyes. My training had begun!

  The next morning, early, I turned up in the canteen for breakfast. The boys drew back and looked at me. Their chatter died and an uneasy silence ran round the room, till Bernt jumped to his feet and pulled back a chair for me. I felt like a celebrity rock star, returning after a world tour. ‘Good morning, Niilo,’ he said. ‘Porridge?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, even though I hate the stuff. Then I added, after a short pause and a strained smile, ‘Thanks.’

  It was pretty boring being good. I had to apologise to Sneering Boy, who had a sore leg. I had to fix up one of the stilts that I had broken. I kept having to remind myself that I was good. Every time somebody asked me to do something, everything in me wanted to say no, but I forced myself to say yes. They kept praising me like I was some baby who had just learnt to walk. Every little thing I did they went all gaga.

  I peeled potatoes and they patted me on the back.

  I pulled up lettuces and they kept telling me what a great guy I was.

  I sat quiet in the library while some hippy told us a story. It wasn’t about Ahtola. It was about some mouse that was greedy then got caught in a trap. Another mouse helped him out and after that the greedy mouse started sharing everything with the one that helped him. The stories were so obvious it made me want to spew up. But I didn’t. I sat there with a glazed expression on my face. So great that you’re joining in, the storyteller said, beaming at me.

  Sometimes I caught Riku staring at me, like he was wondering if I’d joined the other side. I didn’t know if I should t
ell him my plan. What if he blew it? We were on the same team setting tables in the canteen one morning when he came up to me. ‘I got some,’ he said, banging down a plate.

  I put the knife and fork beside it. ‘Some what?’

  ‘Grease.’ Then he scanned the room, saw nobody was watching us, whipped out a jar that he had stuffed down his top and pushed it towards me. I grabbed it and stuffed it down my hoodie. ‘You got to cover yourself with it. It’ll save you.’

  I wanted to ask him why he didn’t escape too. I wanted to ask him why he was helping me. But some teachers came into the room and started sorting chairs. ‘Nice table setting,’ one of the teachers said. They were praising me for everything. I plastered on that false smile, twirled a fork in the air and said, ‘Hey, thanks.’

  I never saw Hannu. I kept looking for him, but maybe he had already gone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘It’s really great to have you join in, Niilo,’ Aleksi, the team leader said. I was part of a team now. We were called ‘the Eagles’, and we were berry picking. Aleksi wasn’t the real team leader – he was filling in while the usual team leader was on holiday – and he wasn’t as trained up as the other staff. I could tell that. ‘Hannu was right about you. He said how he believed in you, how you just needed time, and care.’ Aleksi laughed and nudged me with his elbow. Staff weren’t supposed to nudge you with their elbows. I knew that. Staff weren’t supposed to talk about other staff either. I knew that too. ‘That’s the way men who are getting married talk, eh, Niilo? They go all soft-hearted.’

  Aleksi was seriously annoying me. ‘I filled my basket with berries,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

  ‘Wow, Niilo, slow down. You’ll leave none for the other boys. They’re not as fast as you. I think you should just relax in the sun for a bit, then you could help Kari with his picking. You’ve been working so hard lately. Take a break.’