‘Did you know the answers to those questions in the pub because you’d been prying into my affairs?’
‘Tempting theory. That Martyn Taylor might have told me everything I knew,’ Mari said and smiled. ‘But how would Martyn have known to tell me exactly the things your colleagues asked about?’
That’s true. Not a terribly plausible idea.
Martyn had asked Mari about Finland.
‘He said he wanted to understand your background. He really respects you,’ Mari said.
‘He wanted to hear about Finland in order to understand me?’
‘That’s what he said. Apparently there’s something special about you.’
‘That’s us Finnish women.’
‘Indeed. Us Finnish women.’
Lia told Mari her theory that people from small countries adapted to large countries better than people from large countries to small because people from small countries did not expect the world to work the same everywhere as it did at home.
‘That does sound logical,’ Mari said. ‘And then there are countries where anyone would have a hard time adjusting. Like Finland.’
Lia laughed.
Neither of them said so aloud, but they were clearly sounding each other out. Lia had to have time to see whether she could take Mari’s claims about her gift seriously.
She let Mari choose where they met, and each place was chic: Foxcroft & Ginger, Le Mercury, an art museum bar.
‘Ah, my medium,’ Lia might say in greeting. ‘Whose mind have you read today?’
The world held legions of people who claimed clairvoyant powers. Why could they not do the same things Mari said she could? Lia enquired.
‘I don’t know why I can do it and other people can’t,’ Mari said calmly. ‘And this doesn’t have anything to do with the supernatural.’
Mari encouraged Lia to compare her gift to those of an artist. Everyone can draw something, and anyone can learn to do it better, but some people are especially gifted and have what it takes to become professionals.
Lia encouraged Mari to read her better: did she need such simple metaphors?
Had Mari ever been examined by a psychologist? she asked.
‘No. Of course I’ve taken hundreds of tests on my own. Just because of my education. But I’ve never felt any need to let anyone else test me.’
‘But if you have such a unique skill, why wouldn’t you want it tested? Just for the sake of science?’
‘I don’t want anyone to start thinking I’m strange; I don’t want to attract attention. There isn’t anything mysterious about any of this.’
Her brain calculated probabilities about people so quickly that she felt as if she knew what was going on inside their heads. The only unusual part was the amount and intensity of the analysis.
‘I’ve never found a name for it,’ she said. ‘I’ve chatted with cognitive scientists about it. They suggested terms like social intelligence and apperceptive observation, neither of which is exactly right.’
Some questions Mari refused to answer. She would not tell Lia where she lived, just the area: Hoxton. And she never said anything about her work.
‘I have different things going on,’ was all she would ever say.
‘You left the insurance company three years ago. Have you just been doing “different things” since then? How do you live on that?’ Lia asked.
‘I get by,’ Mari said, communicating the futility of any further questioning.
But Mari always described her gift openly and as a simple matter of fact.
‘I don’t think anything special when I do it. There isn’t any mental state I have to enter. It’s like… eating a sandwich.’
Of course it helped knowing something about the person’s background, Mari added. If she wanted to know someone’s thoughts in more detail, she looked into that person’s actions.
Gradually Lia’s resistance crumbled. She heard so many realistic details that believing Mari had just fabricated them became too difficult.
‘Last spring when I went home for a visit, I knew my brother had a secret. I saw it immediately,’ Mari said.
Secretly her brother had married a woman and adopted her children. This twenty-six-year-old man was now a father of three. He had dated a Chilean woman much older than himself for a year and a half and then thrown a rollicking wedding party in Valparaiso attended by the woman’s entire extended family without breathing a word to his own at home in Finland.
‘And I had to keep quiet about it the whole time I was there! I couldn’t let on that I knew, because he had to have the chance to announce the news himself.’
‘Do you mean your family doesn’t know about your gift?’
‘No, they don’t. They think I’m a little peculiar, but just because I live abroad. I’ve only told a few people about this.’
So why me? Lia thought, but didn’t ask out loud.
Mari didn’t say much about her relatives at home. Lia, on the other hand, confided openly about her own. She had no siblings, only her parents, and they corresponded only infrequently.
For years now, they had been important to her in her thoughts, but not from day to day. She only missed them for fleeting moments. In their high-rise flat in Espoo, her parents were waiting for retirement. Lia felt as though she were not good enough for them. They were always expecting something from her: a return to Finland, marriage, family.
No one ever said this out loud, or much else of consequence. The feeling was that they should all live with the noise turned down to a sensible volume to avoid any chance of conflict.
Lia didn’t tell Mari about the thing she had such a difficult time forgiving her parents for. Before leaving Finland, Lia had some difficulties with a young man. In the end it turned ugly, but her parents never understood.
Lia felt as though Mari might understand the situation, with all its sordid details. But she didn’t want to tell anyone about it.
Soon Lia found they were calling each other almost every day and that she looked forward to the times they met. She was having more fun than she had in ages.
To Lia’s irritation, Mari seemed to guess that her mistrust had begun to fade.
‘Everything OK?’ Mari asked, looking at Lia intently.
‘Perfectly,’ Lia said, looking back.
Lia took Mari to rock concerts, which took some small persuading.
‘How old are you, thirty-two?’ Lia asked.
‘Thirty-one.’
‘Too young to live without music,’ Lia said and bought them tickets to a Keane concert.
Keane was one of the first British bands Lia had fallen in love with. Singing along to the words in her downstairs flat, Lia regularly subjected Mr Vong to their songs.
Mari was in ecstasy after the concert and, over the summer, they did the rounds of the London clubs. One of the highlights was a show by an American post punk indie band, The Gossip. The front woman was one Beth Ditto, known not only for her big voice and large stature but also for being gay. As she danced in the throng of other women, Lia realised that people might easily take her and Mari for a couple.
Mari is the best friend I have ever had. This is almost like being infatuated with someone.
Sometimes sitting in cafés they would have fun with Mari’s gift.
‘That one there,’ Lia might say. ‘What do you see about him?’
Mari looked and then started to tell what she saw.
That young man there studied history and had been doing so for quite some time. He was waiting for his girlfriend; he had something to tell her. It wasn’t good news, but he wasn’t breaking things off. Perhaps he had to move to another city or something.
That woman had a problem, related to her health, specifically something to do with her lower abdomen. She was afraid.
Upon looking at one man, Mari began, ‘He’s very focused – some part of his work demands a lot from him, intense concentration like Beth Ditto at her concert…’
‘What?’ L
ia interrupted. ‘Did you see what Beth Ditto was thinking?’
Mari looked confused.
‘Why would reading a famous person be any different? Whenever I see someone, the perceptions just pop into my head. I can’t do anything about it.’
‘Well, what was she thinking?’
‘When she came on stage, she was in a perfect, nearly fanatical state of concentration, like lots of artists get into. She was thinking of the first words of the songs, because once she got those out everything else would just flow. Then she just went to it.’
‘Wasn’t she thinking anything else? Like, damn, my panties are riding up, or wow, there sure are a lot of good-looking chicks in the audience?’
‘Maybe she was,’ Mari said, exasperated. ‘I’m not a radar, monitoring every second. I was singing along and was… part of the audience.’
‘I was just curious,’ Lia said.
‘I admit that I’m usually curious to see what I’ll find in people too,’ Mari said, and smiled. Soon they developed their own way of talking, their own vocabulary, including the occasional Finnish word that lacked any exact equivalent in English. They spoke English together since both of them had long since begun thinking in English, but at times an idea was simply easier to convey with the addition of a Finnish word.
For example the word kuuri: a time during which something is either enjoyed frequently or abstained from completely. Kuuri was much more evocative than diet, binge or fast, all of which, paradoxically, apply equally well. They observed a Philip Seymour Hoffman kuuri set off by a film they took in at the East End Film Festival. Lia got Mari on a running kuuri, but after a few evening jogs, Mari announced she was giving it up.
‘Running is your thing,’ she said.
‘Kännit,’ Lia said. ‘Let’s get kännit.’
Mari understood. They didn’t just want to get drunk, and certainly not pissed, which was the unfortunate and uncontrolled inebriation of teenagers. They were adult women and took their kännit seriously.
‘And I mean kännit in the plural, not just känni. That means drinking together, sociably,’ Lia pointed out.
They ordered vodka. Lia’s favourite was Polish Zubrówka, but Mari liked the classic Russian Stolichnaya.
Drunken Mari was less serious, pleasantly chatty, Lia found.
But Mari still didn’t breathe a word about her gift when others were around. Lia understood that she should not either.
They could talk about social issues for hours, debating and even disagreeing, but the way their intellectual worlds blended gave Lia genuine pleasure.
She especially liked Mari’s thoughts about equality.
‘It’s my personal feminism,’ Mari said. ‘I’ve recognised what things in my life make me aware as a feminist.’
This sounded simple, but a surprising number of people – women – had never considered it. Knowing your own problems gave you power to act. At the same time you also saw what you didn’t understand about others’ problems.
‘That individuality isn’t just self-interest though,’ Mari said. ‘Like demanding equality only according to my own needs. You have to have your principles. And a sense that you’re doing things for other women too.’
What Mari didn’t say was what the problems in her own life were.
But the idea helped Lia. She didn’t have to feel guilty over not sharing someone else’s version of feminism. And it helped to refine her own.
Over the summer, Lia realised that her life had become happier in a way she had thought lost to youth. Now and then with Mari she even felt younger, as if she were twenty again.
Mari is the friend I was looking for when I moved to London. Together we’re doing the things I wanted to do then.
Although they rarely talked about their homeland any more, Lia found herself remembering things about Finland she had forgotten. The silence of an early Saturday evening falling over the city, even one as large as Helsinki. The comforting feeling that no matter whom you spoke to, you knew you were an equal.
She had not thought about those things in years. For the first time she had begun to think of her homeland with warmth.
Finnish girls in the bars of London. A generation bearing the accumulated power of independent women.
8
Lia also told Mari about what had happened in the spring.
‘That crazy murder is still running through my head.’
‘Has any new information come to light?’
‘No, not really. It feels strange.’
After ending her life in such a grotesque way, the killer or killers then brought the woman to the centre of the City and dumped her. You would have expected the police to have identified the woman or someone might have seen the car stopping on the pavement.
‘What bothers you so much about this?’
Lia didn’t know how to explain why she felt so much empathy with the murdered Latvian woman.
‘Oh, I think it’s perfectly understandable,’ Mari said.
She remembered reading that, at some point in their lives, some kind of crisis stopped most adults in their tracks. Suddenly a disaster or a war in some far-flung country just caught their interest.
‘Maybe that need to learn everything about one specific crisis comes from usually ignoring them. You realise you don’t think about your own life much either and decide there should be something you understand. And then you start looking at yourself too. The whole thing becomes an opportunity to recreate yourself.’
‘Sometimes that degree in psychology really shows,’ Lia said.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to lecture. But haven’t you ever thought about it like that?’
Lia admitted she had indeed.
Mari had had a similar experience when she was young.
‘Have you ever heard of Bhopal?’
‘It’s somewhere in India, right? And there was an accident there,’ Lia said.
In 1984, when Mari was still a little girl.
‘It became important to me later, as a teenager, when I read in the newspaper how poorly the company and the government treated the people there.’
The Indian city of Bhopal was virtually unknown to the rest of the world until one of the largest industrial catastrophes of all time occurred there. In the early hours of morning on 3rd December 1984 city residents woke up with difficulty breathing. Their lungs were on fire.
The Union Carbide pesticide plant had released a large cloud of poisonous gas. According to official estimates, the victims numbered some 3,700, but other evaluations claimed many more. As many as 25,000 people may have died of complications resulting from exposure to the gas.
Some city residents began a legal battle, which dragged on for decades. They did receive compensation but complained that it was disproportionately small compared to their loss, and that the investigation into the disaster had been feeble at best. Not only in India but across the world the name Bhopal became synonymous with gross injustice.
‘I’ve been there twice,’ Mari said.
‘Why?’ Lia asked, surprised.
‘I know it sounds strange. Disaster tourism. But I wanted to see for myself the marks the accident left.’
Bhopal was dirty white, red, turquoise and grey. The air was thick with dust. Most buildings housed little shops at street level. Motorcycles and powered rickshaws cut through the mass of people and stray dogs. The only unusual thing about the city was that once a large group of people had been annihilated, serious diseases had plagued the remaining populace and the bitterness aroused by the tragedy had been left untreated.
To the locals, Mari had just been one of the hundreds of foreigners who had walked their streets asking questions, another of the reporters, researchers, policemen and government officials. The people of Bhopal told her the same thing they told everyone else. The stories of their families’ troubles, the mother who died or the uncle now paralyzed.
‘They were telling the truth, but they were also leaving something out.’
On her second trip four years later, Mari already knew what she would hear and what she was supposed to ask afterwards. Some remembered her.
Everyone in the city had known people who had died. Not only had families lost breadwinners but also much of the wisdom and warmth that had once enriched their homes. The accident had become a way to measure time: there was the time before and the time after. It was also a way to measure humanity and justice. As long as the residents of Bhopal had not received real compensation, speaking to them of justice was meaningless.
Perhaps the most fitting word to describe their experience was hopelessness. They were getting over their losses, gradually. However, the loss of their human dignity had not diminished, and they felt that this theft would continue in perpetuity.
The Bhopal scandal was a lesson for Mari in the logic and behaviour of big money.
‘And yes, feel free to analyse me,’ she added. ‘The daughter of a leftist family and the evils of the world.’
Lia smiled at the irony.
It’s sad we have to joke about the best parts of us.
She turned the conversation back to the Holborn Circus murder.
‘Can you say anything about the perpetrator based on what he did? Can you see what kind of a person would do something like that?’ Lia asked.
‘If you’re thinking that I could guess what the killer is like based only on the news, then no. My gift isn’t that strong.’
‘I didn’t mean exactly that.’
Lia told Mari about the criminologist in the newspaper who had talked about the case as an example of the increasing role of spectacle in violent crime.
‘You really have studied this,’ Mari said.
‘Yes, I have. But do you see anything… more in the murder?’
‘This is a subject I don’t know particularly well. But let’s think about it.’
Mari sighed and thought.
‘The killer crushed her with a bloody steamroller and then left her to be found in the middle of London. That has to be a message to someone.’
Cold Courage Page 5