Lia knew she didn’t need to say anything more. Mari understood without her saying what she meant: the Finns’ fastidious relationship to work, the atmosphere they had both grown up in – studying hard, the value of honest work, the idea that doing good in the world was an industrial production process.
They drank more cognac.
Neither missed Finland. But still the tangible imprint of their homeland remained on them. In the short space between them on that park bench were the empty byways of Finland, the swathes of sparsely inhabited land, not separating people, but rather bringing inner peace. The pace of their drinking told of the Finnish woman’s good head for liquor and appreciation for the fragility of the moment.
‘You’re thinking about Finnish women,’ Mari said.
Lia nodded.
How do you know?
‘You were surprised back there in the pub that I could guess the number of men you’ve slept with more or less correctly.’
Mari said she deduced it from two things. First was that Lia was from Finland. Second was her way of looking at men: intense, appraising, attracted.
‘That makes us sound like some sort of conscious consumers of men. But I think you know what I mean. That a woman can openly take pleasure in men.’
Lia knew.
‘And the Finnishness?’
Mari grinned.
‘How much time do we have? Because, let me tell you, I have a whole theory about Finnish women.’
Laughing, Lia said, ‘I would love to hear your theory about Finnish women.’
Mari paused for a moment and then began.
‘Most Finnish women are just the same as women everywhere else. Bred to be bland. People resigned to conventionality.’
But there was a group of Finnish women who were something else entirely.
‘They’re what you get when you raise young girls on rye bread, vodka, good films and equality.’
‘Excellent diet,’ Lia said.
‘These Finnish women are a little like musk-oxen. We are musk-oxen.’
They both laughed.
‘For us the world is cold, dark, and windy, but we’re still where we are and don’t budge,’ Mari continued. ‘We have a severe attitude towards ourselves and the world. We are harder. More independent and more powerful.’
You could already see this when they were young. Finnish girls had all the gifts and knowledge the world could offer. If you had to entrust anyone with solving the problems of the world, it would be young Finnish women, Mari said.
‘And they’re also so responsible. They know how to grieve and care for those who need it. Like it or not, we were built tough.’
In the Finnish women of today you see a strength accumulated over generations. Their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers were among the first to stop playing games with men and strike out on their own. They went to school – often more than men – participated in politics, made decisions on their own.
‘That’s why we have this innate freedom to do anything in the world. Like getting drunk in a London park.’
Lia laughed. Mari had just summarised everything she liked and disliked about herself.
I may belong more to the group living dull lives.
A person resigned to conventionality.
They were silent for a moment, and then Mari said, ‘Tell me everything. Start from the very beginning.’
Lia knew what she meant.
‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ Lia said.
London was the wrong city for her. Admitting this to herself had taken a couple of years, and afterwards she had only decided to stay for practical reasons. And also London was beautiful at times.
She left Finland when she was twenty-two, having already studied graphic design for two and a bit years.
‘I thought that if I stayed in Finland, I would just be one more of the thousands of talented women artists all competing for the same low-paid jobs. Teaching jobs or museum appointments.’
She had not chosen London for rational reasons but out of what she had available as a young twenty-something-year-old: dreams. Although this particular dream was embarrassing enough that talking about it made her feel childish.
The memory made Lia smile. When she was fourteen years old, she saw a British television series starring a man with a beautiful face. He wore a wool jumper. At night Lia dreamed about that jumper, about pressing her face against it, feeling the man’s chest underneath. Breathing with the man’s arms wrapped around her, she felt an uncommon sense of security.
‘I thought I would find that same feeling here. That woollen jumper feeling. Silly, I know. Ridiculous. But we do… all sorts of things for ridiculous reasons. I guess that’s the normal state for most people – ridiculous.’
Mari nodded and said nothing.
Speaking to anyone this honestly was strange, Lia thought. Something in Mari made her want to open up. But still Lia didn’t share all her reasons for leaving Finland. She could tell anyone about the ambitions of her youth yet only a few had ever heard the sweater story. But in Finland there had also been other things she never spoke about.
‘Here I had to compete for work in a completely different way,’ she continued.
Lia’s first year in England had been depressing. She found herself belonging to the global pariah class of the creative arts. In London there were tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people just like her. All of them had training, experience or talent, but in order to get ahead in their industries they had to earn their bread and win their spurs doing crap work. Little jobs done for nothing or for horrid clients.
As an EU citizen, she was able to stay in the country and apply for work, but her combined years of schooling and practical experience in Finland left much to be desired. Her grasp of English was reasonable but limited for what was required of a graphic designer – knowing all the songs of any number of British bands by heart was little help.
She had borrowed money from her parents and taken any design work that came her way.
She had designed advertising flyers for distribution on car windscreens on the street. The pay for that was disgraceful, but she had been able to make some contacts. Next she had found a position as a jobbing designer at a local newspaper. After that Lia had done the layout for a series of anthropology museum brochures and then the museum’s annual magazine. With that under her belt, she had managed to land a job as the unpaid graphic designer for a feminist magazine called Sheer.
‘One day I was in the office, and the editor-in-chief got a call.’
Both of Level’s graphic designers were ill, the usual stand-ins could not come in, and there were only seven hours left until the magazine was due to go to press. Lia headed off with Sheer’s other graphic designer like a child to a sweet shop: a chance to work at Level, a magazine people actually knew about!
The evening was a catastrophe. Just before going to press, they realised that they had made a serious technical error in the page layout, because in all the rush they had misunderstood a key instruction. The magazine was late going to the printers, which cost the publisher money.
Despite all that, something about Lia must have stuck in the art director’s mind, because the following summer Level hired her as a summer intern. After she finished her degree, they gave her a permanent position.
‘That was when I changed my name.’
Lia’s real name was Lea. Lea Pajala. Lia had never liked her name, which made her think of an old lady. In any case, the English always pronounced Lea as Lia anyway, so the change was minor in everyone else’s eyes. She had changed that one letter just for her own sake. And in some way she felt as though the change protected her from the things she didn’t wish to remember about Finland.
The boys at Level nicknamed her Miss Finland, which Lia found more than a little amusing. She had neither the beauty nor the radiance of a pageant queen; if anything, she was angular. The name only suited her because she was what the Brits thought a F
inn should be: cold and distant.
‘Well, I’m not really cold. But I do tend to exercise my right not to participate in pointless chatter.’
Lia joked with the editorial staff, but didn’t open up about her life. She did her job. A graphic designer’s work was mostly thinking, forming ideas. A lot of people thought that it was all drawing lines and illustrations, but that was only the part that they could see.
Given how long she spent at work, she only had enough time left for two pastimes, both of which she attacked passionately.
Her dearest love was running. She ran three nights a week, sometimes four or five. Always hard and for at least an hour and a half to get her endorphin levels high enough to reach a deep state of pleasure.
Usually she ran on the green, hilly streets and park fringes of her area in Hampstead. She had four standard routes, from which she always chose based on the weather – wind and rain were worse on the Heath, and North End was only good late in the evening when the streets were free of pedestrians.
When Lia ran, she often imagined watching herself from above, high in the air. A slender woman in a navy tracksuit, blonde hair tied in a small bun at her neck. The precise, even footfalls tapping out the route on the tree-lined path or asphalt. Lia saw the pattern in her mind from above, clear and logical.
‘Of course that comes from my graphic design background. I’ve always loved maps and visualising spaces. I always know what direction I’m going, and I never, ever get lost.’
She seemed to like things ordered, Mari pointed out. She looked at things as wholes.
‘Maybe too much. A little disorder might do me good,’ Lia said.
As Mari smiled, Lia felt as though she could tell her almost anything at all.
Lia never told anyone about her second recreational activity.
‘But you saw it just by looking at me.’
Once every month or two, Lia picked up a different man in a bar.
‘Fifty might be an understatement.’
Sex gave her the same thing that running did: physical pleasure and emotional release. Since no embarrassment or feelings of guilt or romantic fancies came into it, the feeling of relaxation came quite naturally. All that remained was pleasure for her and the other person.
‘Now when I think about it, maybe the thing that attracts me to sex isn’t just the pleasure and anticipation but the disorder. You can never be completely sure of yourself or the other person and you don’t act rationally.’
Lia had started picking up men after she moved to London, but she didn’t mention this to Mari, because it related to events in Finland. The ones she had to get away from. After spending one lonely year in London, she decided she had to make a change.
The men had to be thirty to forty years old and looking for a one night stand, just like her. No lovesick boys or men searching for a wife. And no restless husbands, because she didn’t want any trouble.
‘I don’t touch anyone at work. No one at Level even knows I go to bars.’
Sex made Lia feel strong.
There were many Lias. In the workplace she was introverted, a performer. When she went out at night to meet men, she was open and strong. She was the one who decided. Travelling, she spent her days just walking and reading, enjoying the solitude.
‘All these Lias seem very independent,’ Mari said.
‘Yes, indeed.’
And lonely.
They were quiet, sipping their cognac and looking out over London. This late at night the city divided into two parts: the sleeping neighbourhoods rolling over in the dark and the streets flowing through the spaces in between, channels of living light.
‘Now and then I’ve felt quite alone,’ Lia said.
When she turned twenty-five, she went on her second trip to Provence because she didn’t want anyone at work to notice that she was not celebrating her birthday. This was a sore point for Lia. Loneliness, family and children – those were things she didn’t allow herself to think about.
‘I have tried to change things.’
She attended cultural events, exhibitions, guided local walks and even a volunteer course for a mental health patient support association. She found a pub to call her own in Hampstead, The Magdala. Still, there were only fleeting moments when she didn’t feel alone, sometimes at work or at the pub or in the crowd at a rock club when everyone was dancing together in one sweaty, giddy mass.
Her home was the tiny flat of a single person, but very important to her.
When she first came to London, she looked for cheap accommodation relatively close to the sights of the city centre. What she found was the Hampstead hall of residence for the venerable King’s College, where they rented rooms to non-students during the summer holidays.
In the dormitory laundry Lia met the caretaker, sixty-year-old Mr Chanthavong.
‘He’s one of those…’ Lia searched for the right word. ‘One of those Asian British gentlemen. Doubly restrained.’
Mr Chanthavong was born in Laos, but he said he had also lived in Vietnam and China, among other places, moving from country to country before coming to England. Mr Chanthavong spoke polite Oxbridge English which sounded like he had learned it on a foreign language course long ago. Now he had lived in London for twenty years. In the laundry they spoke about what British people’s deep love of animals said about the civilised nature of the land and about how learning the Tube map made you feel like you had finally arrived.
A week later Lia could no longer afford to live at King’s College. Mr Chanthavong looked pensive. During term time, only students were allowed to live in the hall of residence, but there was one possibility, he said. Mr Chanthavong’s caretaker flat was on the ground floor. Beneath it, in the basement, was another small apartment, actually just one room with a kitchenette in the corner and a toilet. A Bosnian couple had lodged there last, starting out in the country as tourists but then applying for asylum after arriving.
‘If this option were to interest you, I could let you this room. Initially perhaps for a period of two months, during which you could seek more commodious accommodations from the bountiful offerings of London,’ he said.
In the room were only a bed, a desk and a chair. The kitchenette included a hotplate, a small refrigerator and a narrow worktop. The shower was in the toilet, and the space was so cramped that when you were in it you had to stand right up against the bowl. But Mr Chanthavong had asked only £400 for the flat.
Lia had been living there nearly six years now. The rent had gone up, but only to five hundred.
‘No one in London lives in such a good area at that price,’ she said.
Eventually Mr Chanthavong had become simply Mr Vong. At first the name had only been in Lia’s mind – Chanthavong felt so formal – but then when she slipped and addressed him as Mr Vong once and the nickname clearly amused and delighted him, it had stuck.
Lia was not sure whether anyone else was aware of her living arrangements. She never requested a rental agreement and paid Mr Vong in cash. She did her washing in the hall of residence laundry, and Mr Vong helped when she needed tools to repair a socket or a window frame.
‘I live like an eternal student.’
For a long time this had been fun. Whenever she saw young students in the stairway she felt as though she were one of them, living in that time of life before you become something. After landing a permanent position, she began feeling a different sort of pleasure: at least something was settled in her life. She had made her exit from the pariah class.
Her flat was small and easy to care for. From her basement window she could see a strip of an early twentieth-century church and adjacent park. The story of the statues in the park was an eccentric one: each had been rejected by the person who commissioned it.
‘The Garden of Discarded Statues. Or, more like Rescued Statue Park.’
The pastor of the neighbouring St Luke’s Church saved the first statues in the 1920s. Having heard of plans to scrap a statue of his church
’s patron saint in North London, he rushed to the scene and purchased it. The statue’s intended purchasers had found St Luke’s face insufficiently virtuous. Next the pastor saved the great Florence Nightingale. This work of art was rejected by a female religious order who found that the sculptor had made the body overly ‘carnal’ to the eye. Since tradition had it that Nightingale herself once resided in Hampstead as well, the rescue of the statue was considered fitting in all respects.
Over the decades the people and organisations of the area had accumulated a considerable collection of salvaged statuary. Lia was particularly fond of the long-eared dog which, according to the story, was purchased for the price of only one pound. No one knew who rejected it or why. Lia called the dog Poundy.
‘This will sound stupid, but sometimes I talk to the statues.’
Whenever she had important decisions to make, she told St Luke and Poundy the dog about them.
Lia emphasised that she was not religious.
‘But if I tell someone something, even if it’s just a statue, it feels like a promise.’
Sometimes Lia watched the nuns who taught at the nearby school walking into the church.
‘They look so peaceful. In films, nuns are always so severe or just one-dimensional. Pious fools.’
But these women looked as though they had found what they were looking for.
‘That woollen jumper feeling.’
In the evenings Lia would hear Mr Vong running himself a bath upstairs. Every night exactly at ten o’clock. A moment later she would hear bubbling as he broke wind under the water.
‘Of course he doesn’t know that the sound echoes from the bath through the floor. But I always get the feeling that everything is as it should be when Mr Vong farts in the bath at ten o’clock.’
Mari laughed and Lia thought, She’s going to know everything about me soon.
‘I love London. I love its size and how uncontrollable it is and that I know a big part of it,’ Mari said.
Mari described her life more briefly than Lia had.
In Finland, she studied psychology. That had gone fast, because she had always been quick at soaking up information.
Cold Courage Page 3