by Selja Ahava
There’s a pile of post at the bottom of the bag. Dad goes through the letters. He puts the ones for Mum on one side, only opening his own.
‘I can take care of those if you like,’ Auntie Annu says, pointing at Mum’s letters.
‘They’re just junk mail,’ Dad says, waving his hand.
‘Still, they can be notified.’
‘I suppose so.’
Auntie picks up the bundle. She doesn’t say anything else.
‘I think I’ll take a look at the woodshed door,’ Dad mutters. He puts his sunglasses on, and goes out.
‘Why do you smell of grass?’ I ask Auntie.
‘I mowed your lawn,’ Auntie replies. ‘It was a jungle, the whole garden.’
‘When are we going back home?’
‘I don’t know,’ Auntie replies. She thinks of adding something, I can tell, but decides not to.
I put on the sun hat. I think of Sawdust House, standing in the middle of a jungle, and of the living-room wall, my picture smiling under its panelling. The picture stands and waits, frozen there as it was one renovation day two years ago. It wears a stripy top and turquoise tights, and has its back against the sooty wallpaper, with the wooden panel of the living room acting as its cover. And no one’s told her we’ve left. And no one knows when we’re coming back.
I go into the sheep enclosure. Bruno runs up to me and says baa. He still follows me even though I don’t give him milk from a bottle any more. I tickle him above his tail, which makes it twitch and look really funny and silly.
Sheep always want to be as high up as possible. The lambs climb on to their mums’ backs and stand there, and the grown-up ones are always fighting over a place on the roof of Dad’s car. They’ll climb into the fountain and jump on to tree stumps and wooden blocks and the wheelbarrow.
‘Sheep are quite thick,’ Auntie Annu has to admit.
That evening, I lie in my hospital bed in the summer nightie Auntie fetched for me. When I turn over, the lowered side rails clatter. One of the wheel locks below is broken, causing the bed to move.
I look at the walls around me. I draw a line around them, and my room stays inside the line. Apart from the secret room, that is: my room is now the one with the panel that clicks to open a door into another space. I stop drawing to wonder whether the secret room belongs to my room or the one next door. Or does the secret room belong to itself ? Or doesn’t it have a line at all, because it’s secret? Are secrets precisely the sort of thing that remain outside lines? Is that the way detectives solve murder mysteries, by seeing the gaps that secrets leave in the lines?
Sometimes too many thoughts crowd into my head. That makes the grey cells boil; it’s like everything’s about to burst out of my brain. That’s when I call my favourite Belgian detective for help. He takes a chalk and draws a white outline. When my thoughts are inside the line, they settle down. He knows the number of guests has to be right – not too many and not too few. The thoughts have to fit into one room. And if some thought or object is of no use, then out it goes.
18
Dad spends the whole of June in bed wearing sunglasses. He bangs his foot against the bars of the hospital bed – bang, bang, bang – so that even my room vibrates. When I peer in from the door and ask what the matter is, Dad replies, ‘I can’t feel my toes!’
And bang, the metal clatters again.
‘What’s happening to my feet?’ Dad asks. He stares at me as if he doesn’t know I’m his little girl.
I take the quilt off Dad’s feet and have a look.
‘There’s nothing there,’ I say.
‘What? They’re not there?’ Dad’s all worked up now. He presses his hands against his face, starts rubbing: his whole forehead moves up and down, as if the skin on his face were loose.
‘Can’t you see my toes?’ he asks through the gaps between his fingers.
‘No, I mean they look normal.’
‘What?’
‘Your feet look normal.’
‘Can you pinch them?’ Dad asks.
Dad’s toes are ugly and lumpy, with hair here and there, and I don’t really want to touch them. The skin underneath is thick. It peels off in dry, white strips. The nails are yellow, especially on his big toes.
I pinch them anyway. I hold one toe at a time between my thumb and index finger and squeeze. I start with the left big toe and carry on to the smaller ones, then I do the same with the right foot. Finally, I do rain going pitter-patter on Dad’s soles and he calms down.
‘Thank you, Saara,’ Dad says, pulling his feet under the quilt.
Bang, bang, bang: the same knocking against the wall.
‘My toes! Somebody do something!’ Dad shouts in his room.
This time Dad’s sitting up. He’s curled up on the edge of the bed, knees tucked under his chin, holding his toes.
‘They’re falling off,’ Dad says. ‘Have I caught a cold or what?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘My toes are falling off,’ Dad answers.
‘Can I have a look?’
Dad shakes his head, clutching his toes more tightly. There’s nothing unusual-looking about his feet: no bleeding, at least.
‘Shall I pinch them?’ I ask, though really, I just want to go away.
Dad shakes his head.
‘I’m going,’ I say, and I head back to my own room.
Then Auntie Annu comes upstairs.
‘Come on, Pekka, now, really…’ she mutters, going into Dad’s room.
I’m in the middle of drawing something. I put my palm on a piece of paper and draw round it with a pen. I’ve got five fingers. The little finger is a bit apart from the others; the index finger is slightly crooked. I swap hands. A familiar hand. Once, at school, everyone was allowed to draw their hands on a big wall, and even though there were two hundred hands on the wall, I recognized my own straight away. That’s how familiar they were.
‘Stroke me!’ Dad shouts behind the wall, because Auntie Annu has already gone back downstairs.
I don’t really want to go. I pretend I’m the lord of the castle who has trapped a maiden inside a wall.
Once upon a time, there was a maiden who lived in a castle and who fell in love with the wrong knight. This was judged to be punishable.
I thought of a suitable punishment for the maiden.
The maiden shouts: ‘Help! Somebody stroke me!’
But the maiden was carried into the castle courtyard where a new wall was being built. The maiden was placed inside the wall. The whole time the stones were being laid, the maiden shouted and screamed, but in the end she was fully covered by the stones and her voice fell silent.
This was a familiar business to the lord of the castle. He had confined naughty maidens many times before, and he didn’t care one little bit about the maiden’s cries, or her toes.
Even the next day, moaning could be heard from inside the wall. On the third day, the moaning stopped. Three years went by, and a birch tree grew on the spot where the maiden had been buried.
In the evening, Dad comes downstairs. He sits at the table and strokes the wall, deep in thought. The bowl of fish stew Auntie Annu made sits in front of him, getting cold.
‘This sort of surface, you never know what’s inside it at the end of the day.’
‘I can tell you it’s timber,’ Auntie answers.
‘Yes, but what condition is it in? You never –’
‘Yes, yes,’ Auntie Annu says, tired of Dad’s talk.
But Dad presses on: ‘You never know. You see a wall, and it looks like a wall: it’s got wallpaper and skirting boards, and everything is as it should be. Just as it should be. Then one day, you decide to replace the wallpaper with wood panelling. So you tear off the chipboard and realize something is crumbling there at the back. You hit a log with the hammer and feel it sinking. You dig into the timber with your fingers; your whole hand goes through the wall. What was meant to last is rotten. I’ve heard these stories. Then people as
k: did you really not know? How come you didn’t notice? Didn’t you have any inkling at all?’
‘This house is a healthy old house, whatever you say,’ Auntie repeats.
Dad looks out of the window. The sheep are eating grass. The sun is shining.
‘Then you realize that the whole house stayed standing because it was propped up by the wrong things: door frames, window frames. There were no supporting structures, just brittle stuff, and the weather was calm enough for the wind not to blow the house down. An ordinary day, chipboard, a morning in the garden. Then suddenly things fall from the sky and your hand sinks into the wall.’
And having said that, Dad presses his head against the backing paper.
Mum used to stroke Dad’s back. Mum used to say what Dad was like.
‘You need a haircut,’ she would say. ‘You look tired. You look handsome. It doesn’t suit you. It suits you. Why are you asking me when you’ve clearly made up your mind! You can do it. We’re here now, now we’re here.’
Perhaps Mum always said what Dad was like, where Dad ended and the rest began, but now that Mum’s dead, Dad is brittle. His outline’s leaky, the white line’s blurred, his feet disappear.
I’d like to say: ‘Lean against the wall, Dad; I’ll draw your line.’
Then Dad could look at the picture, and colour it in with felt tips. And then he’d see what a big man he really is.
19
Sometimes, aeroplanes spring leaks, say in a water pipe or the toilet. That’s a fact. If the water that drips out is blue, it’s from the toilet; if it’s clear, it comes from somewhere else. If the aeroplane is stationary, the drops of water will just fall straight down to the ground. Up in the air, the seeping water will freeze because of the low temperature outside.
A lump of ice that forms during a long flight can be as big as a football. When the aeroplane loses altitude and the air temperature rises, the chunk of ice might detach itself from the aeroplane and drop down on to the ground. Ice is the most common thing to fall from an aeroplane. And when, underneath, there is somebody’s garden, where a person in the middle of planning a strawberry pyramid is doing jobs, that individual might be hit on the head with a lump of ice the size of a football and die. That is a fact.
Dad has started sitting in front of the computer. He looks normal again – perhaps because he has swapped the sunglasses for spectacles and put on his day clothes. Or because his toes aren’t leaking any more. But now he sits in front of the computer, reading and clicking and not listening properly. Auntie Annu tries to get him to do some work, because the sheep enclosure has got to be moved and the composting container emptied, but Dad just growls.
‘Oh, well, that’s how it is. Listen to this,’ Dad begins again.
I’d like to slip away, upstairs.
‘There’s this list here. This just beggars belief. How come it’s not talked about more? Engines. In August 2000, one of the engines of a KLM aeroplane fell out. The captain managed an emergency landing on a beach. Doors. In March 2005, a door fell off a British Airways Boeing 747 and the plane had to make an emergency landing. The door missed a couple out on a walk by just twenty metres. Tyre. In May 2001, the right-hand tyre of a Blue Panorama Airlines plane fell off. Mount. In October 1999, a tyre mount worked itself loose from a Delta Airlines plane and fell into the middle of a quiet suburb.’
Dad pauses and looks at me and Auntie Annu expect-antly. It’s good that Dad’s finally doing something and that he’s put on his day clothes, but I think he’s overdoing this computer thing.
‘And there’s more: meteorites. On 30 November 1954, Ann Elisabeth Hodges was having a nap in her living room when a four-kilo meteorite fell through her roof, bounced off the radio and hit her on the hip.’
Dad shows us an image of Hodges he’s found on the internet. Ann has a really big bruise on her hip.
‘Fish. When a warm air mass meets a cold one, this can create small tornadoes which suck fish and other sea life out of the water and transport them to dry land. Toads. In 1794, hundreds of toads with tails rained on French soldiers. Golf balls. In 1969, hundreds of golf balls rained down in Florida. Though it does say here that there are cases where the tornado theory doesn’t really work. In northern Greece, the only thing that came down was anchovies.’
‘Perhaps an aeroplane dropped its cargo,’ Auntie Annu suggests.
‘But in 1859, in Wales, it only rained sticklebacks. In those days aeroplanes didn’t even exist!’ Dad looks at us over his glasses, as if waiting for a solution. ‘Besides, the stickleback isn’t a shoal fish, so no tornado could have filtered out sticklebacks and left other fish in the water, never mind stones and clumps of seaweed. Did you know about all this?’ Dad asks Auntie Annu. ‘When you look at these dates, almost every year in some part of the world, some door or engine or whatever falls off. I mean, if a couple of stones hit some windows on houses near a building site, it makes the news and the company gets taken to court. But think about it, what if a whole jet engine falls on the roof ?’
‘I imagine that would be on the evening news,’ Auntie says.
‘Well, I never got to hear about it!’
‘Didn’t happen in Finland.’
And Dad’s list goes on.
‘Money. In 1940, it rained old rouble coins in the Soviet Union. Scientists believe that erosion had gradually exposed a treasure trove of coins. The wind had seized the treasure and rained it down.
‘In 1875, on two September evenings, large crystals of sugar came down. There was no explanation for the phe-nomenon. In addition, spiders, starlings, worms and jelly have also descended from the sky.’
Dad stops reading and looks at us again.
‘Jelly?’ Auntie Annu says.
‘Yep. Spiders, starlings, worms and jelly. There’s no proper explanation for those last few things.’
I feel like laughing. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. I imagine what Mum would have looked like if it had been jelly that fell on her. Can you die of jelly? At least it sounds softer than a lump of ice the size of a football. I feel like laughing because I think Mum herself could have invented death by jelly. Aargh-blub-blub-blub: that’s how her jelly death rattle would have sounded. Unlucky Mum, inside the jelly, would have fallen silent, but the surface of the jelly would have kept on quivering.
‘Bloody hell, this is so hard,’ Auntie Annu says, and suddenly starts giggling.
Dad glances at Auntie, surprised, but then snorts himself.
‘What else can you say?’
And that’s when Dad laughs for the first time that summer.
We laugh together: at people, dying of jelly; at sticklebacks, whirling in the sky; at couples out walking by the sea, surprised by a falling door. At angels doing Bad Things without warning.
20
Oh, I’ve seen the way Dad glances at the sky sometimes. As if he’s checking something. He goes out of the door in the direction of the car, but after a couple of steps, he looks up. Just for a short while. Then he carries on. And sometimes, when the sun is behind the clouds and the light changes, he looks up to see what’s going on in the sky. But it’s just cloud.
As if he had only just now realized that above the garden there is always an empty sky. And beyond the sky, space, and in space, spaceships that can break.
The sky is an idea I can’t draw a line round. The sky is always open. It leaks, like Dad’s toes.
21
‘Hey, Dad! Come and have a look!’ I cry.
My feet are up against the trunk of the linden tree in the garden. My head is packed with blood, but I want to stay upside down until Dad sees me.
It’s surprisingly hard to do a handstand and shout at the same time.
Dad’s beard becomes hair, his hair becomes beard, and his ears spin on the spot. The wrong way round, Dad looks lighter, as if he had risen up into the air just a tiny bit. The sunglasses become funny, black cheeks.
‘Dad, the wrinkles on your forehead are a mouth!’<
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I want to laugh. Suddenly, I collapse. I hear a crack and my shoulder hurts badly. ‘Aaaaah!’ The crack came from my shoulder.
Dad’s feet are back on the ground. He runs to me and tries to lift me up. But that really hurts!
‘What happened? Saara, what happened?’
I can’t sit up. I’ve collapsed like a clothes horse. I’ve gone crooked; I don’t know how to unfold myself. My fingers move, but otherwise I’m in a totally bizarre position.
‘Saara, Saara, Saara…’ Dad’s panting.
‘Help, Dad! It hurts!’
Dad manages to turn me round so I’m on my knees and then, slowly, so I’m in a sitting position. I didn’t know you needed a shoulder to sit up. My feet are stuck because my shoulder’s poking out.
‘How come it’s there? Why did you do that? You should never…You should have asked me to prop you up…’ Dad mutters, pressing my shoulder.
‘Aaaaah!’
The cry sounds so strange that Auntie comes outside, too. She looks at Dad first, and only then at me, a flattened clothes horse. Dad is small and helpless on his knees by my side. Once again, he failed to protect us from danger. I feel my shoulder with my right hand, and, yes, it’s poking out in a strange direction. The world swung my shoulder out of its hole, and Dad couldn’t do a thing about it.
‘Hello, Saara,’ the doctor says.
We’ve driven to the hospital, emergency lights flashing. The doctor is a hairy man. Apart from curly hair on his head, he’s got stubble and hair on his neck and hands. But he has kind eyes and even though he’s touching my shoulder, it doesn’t hurt.
‘So you were learning to do handstands,’ the hairy doctor says.
‘Yes, against a tree.’
‘How far did you count?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
Then the doctor switches on the wall-cabinet light and shows me the X-ray.
‘Here’s your shoulder,’ the doctor begins. ‘This ball should be in that hole, where it goes round. But now it’s popped out, see?’