by Selja Ahava
People said Auntie was crazy to live in a place like that in winter without proper heating. She should install a heating system, or at least hire a caretaker to clear the snow. But Auntie liked heating up the tiled stoves, and claimed it was handy to be able to store milk on the floor.
In spring, the manor house groaned and creaked. The warmth brought the timbers to life and got the house’s blood circulating. It sounded as if someone were walking about all the time. This didn’t scare Auntie Annu. ‘Extra Great Manor is just stretching its limbs,’ she’d say. The groaning and creaking went on till warmth spread throughout the structure. Then the house settled down and the sound of steps upstairs went away.
When a house is young, you have to look after it as if it were a child. It needs adjusting, patching up, care and main-tenance. But when a house is, say, two hundred years old, it can look after itself. Everything that’s inclined to rot has already rotted. Everything that’s inclined to sink and split has already sunk and split. You just have to live in it nicely, which means living as people have lived there before.
Extra Great Manor was slow and old. Its timbers lagged behind the seasons, a bit like the weather on the coast, which is levelled out by the sea. The summer heat was retained until November, and the July heatwaves were well on their way before a stagnant warmth fell into the rooms. Auntie Annu adapted to the rhythm of the house. She put on a woolly jumper and slowed down. She drove to the shop once a week, chatted to the sheep once a day, drank a cup of cocoa at eleven o’clock. After cocoa, she walked once through the downstairs rooms, standing for a moment in every one. Auntie Annu enjoyed the empty spaces; she didn’t miss furniture. She no longer had to flatten herself against the door of the toilet when someone came to call.
4
We were roped in to help, the day Auntie Annu became lady of Extra Great Manor. Even though no one was moving out of the property, we removed more things from it than we carried inside.
All of Auntie’s possessions fitted into one van. But we took out all the furniture that had belonged to the office, the children’s summer camp or the warehouse – and that was a lot. The only things Auntie Annu saved were the upstairs hospital beds. Every bedroom contained one or two metal beds that moved on wheels and had sides you could raise. These made Dad shudder, because he had had his appendix removed when he was nine, but Auntie Annu found them atmospheric.
The evening of moving-in day, Auntie Annu whispered to me, ‘Come, Saara, I’ve got something to show you.’
We climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. Two passages led in different directions. We went into the west passage. Auntie opened the third door we came to.
Behind the door was an unoccupied bedroom, with a bed and two old wooden chairs. Through the window, you could see the front lawn, the fountain, the van and a pile of cardboard boxes. But Auntie walked to the wall on the left-hand side.
‘Look,’ Auntie Annu said. Gripping the upper edge of the middle section of wall panelling, she gave it a yank.
‘A secret door!’ I whispered.
And indeed, the panelling slid aside soundlessly. There was a small room behind the secret door, large enough to take a person. Auntie let me try opening the door. You could feel the small pin at the top of the board with your fingers. You had to flick this to the left. Then you heard a gentle click and the panel opened.
We entered the secret room. Auntie had put two velvet cushions and a wool rug on the floor, so it was nicer to sit on. The rear wall had a small window in it. It didn’t let in much light, because it was covered by a thick creeper.
‘From the outside, you can only see the creeper,’ Auntie said.
I had never been in a real secret room before. I had never been to a manor house before, either, and now, suddenly, Auntie had moved into a fairy-tale castle.
Because the secret room seemed like a good place for talking about secret things, the sort you couldn’t mention at nursery, on the bus or at friends’ houses, I decided to ask Auntie Annu:
‘Auntie, how did you know the Double Jackpot numbers?’ To be on the safe side, I said it quite softly.
Auntie Annu nodded, thought for a moment and then looked me in the eye. ‘It was pure chance.’
‘Then why can’t you talk about it, if it was chance?’
‘That’s precisely why,’ Auntie Annu said. ‘It’s so hard to explain.’
We listened to the noises coming from downstairs. Mum was washing up in the kitchen, and Dad was in the hallway, making a racket in the middle of all the piles of boxes. You heard more clatter in the manor house than in the block of flats, because Auntie let us wear shoes indoors. This was because it was moving-in day, but also because the floors were so cold and the stairs were all splintery.
‘Saara! Saara! We’ll be going in a minute!’ Mum’s voice echoed up the chimney flue and through the bedroom stove.
I looked at Auntie Annu, who nodded, meaning we ought to go back downstairs.
We stepped silently out of the secret room and shut the wall panel.
‘Can we keep this as our secret?’ I whispered to Annu. ‘Sure,’ Auntie replied.
Then we went back downstairs.
I felt good all evening, because now I had a lady of the manor for an aunt, and I was the only one who knew about the secret room in the wall.
5
MUM NAKED. You can see light through Mum’s thighs as she scoops hot water from the cauldron in the sauna. Mum has long legs, and her knees click every time she bends them. Mum doesn’t have hairs on her thighs like Auntie Annu.
Mum stews on the sauna bench, smelling of coconut. She has coconut-scented conditioner in her hair. Mum’s back is curved. One of her ankles dangles in the air, and she makes it go round and round and round. I pretend I’m a troubadour and draw my finger along the folds on Mum’s tummy as I sing the sounds: plonk plonk plonk plink!
A long scar runs across Mum’s tummy. That’s where I came out.
That’s what Mum looks like naked.
Dad went to the sauna alone in Sawdust House, because he found it easier to breathe that way. Mum talked too much in the sauna, about things that were too serious, and she also forgot to ask if it was OK before throwing more water on the stove. Mum threw three ladlefuls of water on at once and then ran into the snow. Dad couldn’t stand that sort of thing.
Sometimes, when we sat on the bench, just the two of us, I tried to touch Mum’s breasts. Then Mum would slap my hand.
‘I did it when I was a baby.’
‘That was different,’ Mum answered.
‘Just this once,’ I pleaded.
‘No.’
One of Mum’s nipples sagged because I sucked it too hard when I was a baby. The other one was normal.
6
Time passes, and Mum moves backwards. Trousers and long, straight hair: that’s all you can see of her now. A breeze lifts her hair. One hand’s holding a cigarette; the other’s supporting it. Mum smokes, and moves into the distance.
When Mum leans over the bed, her hair spills out from behind her ears and touches my face, along with her kisses. When I say Mum leans, she’s still here. When Mum leaned, she’s already going. Dad doesn’t talk about Mum, because he can’t say leaned. He can’t talk Mum into the past; every now and then, he starts a sentence with Mum’s name, but he stops halfway.
Mum stopped halfway.
Dad does talk about Mum’s belongings, because they still exist. ‘Hannele’s skis are in the cellar,’ Dad will say, in a completely normal voice. ‘The cupboards Hannele painted.’ ‘It’s there, by Hannele’s boots.’
You can draw a line round a real person, just as detectives do when there’s a corpse on the floor. It’s easier to understand death when it’s got an elbow and a knee and its own place on the floor. And when the dead body is carried away, only a white outline remains: no one left within it. A bit like a lottery win, which would be easier to grasp if it were a pile of money. But memories have no bodies.
In a film, memories appear in black and white.
A person is left standing by the roadside, the car drives off and you can see the person dwindling and disappearing altogether through the rear window. That’s the way they die in films.
But it doesn’t really look like that. Time doesn’t make Mum dwindle, nor do the colours fade. Mum just explodes into pieces and the pieces remain floating in the air. All the fragments are clear – hair, fingers, chuckle, furrows in the skin, nostrils, clicking knees, stomach rumble – but Mum herself is missing.
7
‘Everything has the air peaceful. The sun, it is shining; the sea, it is beautifully blue. But you forget, mon ami, that evil always dwells among us. And this particular individual, this cold-hearted creature, this assassin, he was especially cunning. He crept into the library after the others had gone to bed and waited behind the door till the maid had cleared the table and Monsieur Bowles returned. Et puis – he stabbed him in the back with a dagger, in cold blood! He hid the dagger inside a jacket he had left in the room earlier, and departed. Because he knew he’d be back in the morning; after all, he’d be the first to be called to the scene! Doctor – or should I use your real title, you unhappy, bitter orphan, who swore revenge while still young? – you killed Mr Bowles, you framed Mr Parker, you pretended to everyone you were a doctor. But you could not pull the wool over my eyes!’
Every Sunday, we – Dad, Mum and me – sat down to watch our favourite Belgian detective on television. Really, the programme was too scary for children, but we had fewer rules than at my friends’ houses, because as a child, Dad had lived abroad, and for Mum, the only rule had been: don’t get lost in the forest.
It was the only programme all three of us liked. Dad liked the scenery, because England was the country where he and Auntie Annu had lived as children. Mum wanted to guess who the murderer was, and she guessed wrongly on purpose, coming up with totally wild plots. I liked the final scene, when everything became clear.
In the show, the detective doesn’t run or shoot. But he still wins. He remembers the tiniest details, which pass others by. He can spread them out in his mind to form a picture, and he can combine and shift them into different positions. Finally, he fills in all the gaps. That’s how he knows the identity of the murderer at the end.
The final scene was always the same. ‘Bon, it is time to reveal the truth. Let us go, Hastings,’ he said, throwing a serious glance at his friend. And every time Hastings appeared as puzzled as the last time.
Mum cried out, ‘Parker! It’s Parker!’
Dad and I shushed her.
The guests were all summoned into a single room, usually the library or the living room. There was always a suitable number of them. Not too many, because then they wouldn’t have all fitted into one room at the same time and the final scene would have been spoiled. Not too few, because then it would have been too easy to guess who the murderer was.
The guests always had secrets, some of which were linked to the murder and some of which weren’t. And everything always happened in one place, like a manor house, a train or a small village. The detective wouldn’t have had the energy to run around a big city.
Then he started his final speech. Point by point, he revealed how everything had happened.
Sometimes the murderer tried to escape, sometimes they cried or started shouting furiously, sometimes they removed their disguise, but in the end, they were always caught.
‘Oui, bien sûr, mademoiselle. I know everything ,’ he declared, patting the young woman’s hand. ‘And now, let us drink a glass of blackcurrant juice. Mrs Parker assures me it is England’s finest.’
‘Parker would have been so much better,’ Mum said.
‘I bet this was filmed in Cornwall,’ Dad said.
I was silent, content, because, once again, everything had been resolved. The lies had been exposed; the show was over. Objects and events had their meanings, and every character their purpose. Nothing was left dangling.
MUM’S FINGERS AND TOES. Mum has long, dry fingers which smell of cigarettes. Her nails are oval, and there is a ragged wave in her thumbnail. Mum’s fingers sit inside her sleeves when she’s cold and in her hair when she’s thinking. Mum’s big toes are slanted. In summer, Mum wears open-toe sandals, and she paints her toenails blood red.
‘Look, Mum’s toes have been cut off,’ Dad says, but it’s a joke.
That’s what Mum’s fingers and toes are like.
8
We used to live at Sawdust House. It was our home. It was yellow and white with a red roof. Mum and Dad bought Sawdust House when I was a baby. It had an upstairs, a downstairs and a cellar. At first, the upstairs was cold and old, but we gradually moved up there as well, and I got a room of my own. The heat from downstairs rose upstairs, and the cold air from upstairs flowed into the downstairs hall.
Everything in Sawdust House was a work in progress. Every time someone came to visit and Mum showed them round, she would always say either what things had been like or what they would be like one day.
‘There used to be a wall and a door here,’ she explained in the hall. ‘I’ve got the wallpaper ready for here,’ she said upstairs, where the walls were covered only by raw timbers and shreds of old yellow backing paper. ‘There used to be a balcony here, before that new extension. You could make this into two rooms if you wanted to.’
Mum didn’t even realize what the house really looked like. Sometimes, when we looked at photos that showed, say, windows with no flashings, electricity cables dangling like Christmas wreaths, old wallpaper half torn off the wall, or other unfinished things, Mum would exclaim: ‘How awful, just look at that wall! When will that get done? I do have new wallpaper ready and waiting…’
Our home was called Sawdust House because its walls were filled with sawdust. Every time Dad did some work, he was showered with sawdust. When you slammed the cellar door, out scattered a handful; when a doorway was widened, out spilled a sackful. Sawdust rested on top of the ceiling lights and on the attic floor. It even buzzed around in the cooker fan.
All the sawdust was collected. It was shovelled into sacks and poured on to the attic floor. Dad said that the attic was the woolly hat of the house and the sawdust kept us warm.
Every now and then we had renovation days. Then Mum and Dad ate their breakfast standing up and no one could spare the time to be with me. Often no one even remembered to make cocoa. On a renovation day, it was cold inside because both downstairs doors were open, and Mum and Dad walked in and out with pieces of bread in their hands.
Once, all the things in the living room were carried into the kitchen. The whole of the downstairs had suddenly shrunk and two rooms had been squeezed into one: dining table, sofa, cheese plant, fridge, armchairs, dresser and TV had all been sucked into one room, where you barely had space to walk.
By contrast, the living room had grown. It was so big it echoed. I wanted to dance, but Mum and Dad said no. Mum said I should watch TV, but the remote control had gone missing and the TV was stuck on channel five, so I was allowed to dance a bit before work started.
Only the bookcase stood in its plastic wrapping in the middle of the living-room f loor. The bookcase had always leaned against the same wall, and now it seemed as if a piece of the wall itself had been moved to the centre of the room and packaged in white plastic, making it ghostlike. Behind the bookcase, yellow wall was revealed. Elsewhere in the room, the walls were pale brown, but you could see patches of yellow where shelves, pictures and the dresser had been unscrewed and taken away, leaving sharp shadows. The shadow of a shelf, the shadow of a dresser, the shadows of three pictures. I stared in amazement: I had never realized there was so much wall behind the furniture!
Dad stroked the wall with his hand and twisted nails out of it with a hammer. The shelf screws had left big holes, as had the curtain rails and windowsills.
Then Dad unscrewed the wall sockets.
‘Dad, you’re going to die!’ I shouted, because
you’re not allowed to touch electrical things, especially not with anything sharp.
‘It’s OK,’ Dad said.
He beckoned me over. We looked together at the socket cover as it came off.
You could see inside the wall underneath, where there was a secret passage for electric wires. A brown and a blue lead ran there. The socket contained a metal plate, small screws and other metal parts.
‘That’s a bit like the socket’s skeleton,’ Dad said.
I know about skeletons because I’ve read a skeleton book. An earthworm hasn’t got a skeleton, but a snake has. But an earthworm does have a ladder. And I thought, the wires are the house’s veins, because they run inside the walls, from one room to another.
Mum stroked the wall, found another nail and twisted it out with the hammer. Then she said, ‘Saara, come and stand against this wall.’
And I went and stood where the dresser had stood before. Mum took a thick felt-tip pen out of her pocket and drew a line just above my head. Next to the line, she wrote: 12.5.2007.
‘Stay there,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t move.’
She started drawing a line round me. She started next to my shoulder, drew down along my arm, tickling me in the gaps between my fingers, then curved into the armpit and down the side as far as the floor. Then up along the other side. The pen smelled; it had spirits in it. Children aren’t allowed to touch them because they won’t ever come off. Or child. I’m an only child. Finally, Mum drew round my hair. Two plaits and bobbles. When the felt tip came back to my shoulder, Mum said, ‘That’s it, now you can jump out.’
And I jumped out and looked at my picture in the middle of the living-room wall. It was like Peter Pan’s cut-out shadow in the film. Feet planted slightly apart, shirt tails swinging.
‘If someone moves in here after us and they do the house up, they’ll find this and see what kind of girl used to live here.’