Things that Fall from the Sky

by Selja Ahava

  After Dad’s gone, I lie in bed quietly, thinking. The Lovely Baby lies there wondering why Mother – who tinkled with her bear bell, dripped river water and loved chocolate – has become a ghost. Mum, who was as soft as a woolly jumper, who rose into the heights of the apple trees, and warmed clothes in the heat of the stove.

  If only Dad would come back and tell his Lapland story again. If only he would talk about the Lovely Baby, who was born by means of an incision and almost made Dad himself faint. If only ordinary Mum would come back and invent a better ending for herself. If only she would tell stories properly and not add in too much of her own stuff. Without an ending, there’s no story, but I don’t want an ending like this.

  6

  When we lived at Extra Great Manor, I was the only girl at school with sheep and chandeliers at home. And a secret chamber, though not even my school friends knew about that. I was the Manor House Girl or the former Lovely Baby, and when the Manor House Girl had her tenth birthday, she pretended to have a ball with her friends. Auntie Annu lit the candles of the chandelier and poured juice in tall glasses for everyone. The Manor House Girl and her friends ran around upstairs, climbed into the room in the tower and stroked the sheep. Her friends said: ‘You lead a strange life – your mum’s dead and you’ve got fifteen bedrooms.’ But they were too scared to go to the toilet by themselves. The toilet in the manor house was at the end of a long corridor. Auntie Annu had painted it dark red and hung framed black-and-white photos on the walls. One frame contained nothing but glass, under which you could see all twelve layers of wallpaper that had been found on the wall.

  The Manor House Girl took her friends to the loo. They asked if she wasn’t scared because there were so many empty rooms, but the Manor House Girl told them about a ghost hunter who had checked out the place before Auntie Annu had bought it. He had said that the house had a good atmosphere; Auntie bought it only after hearing that.

  One of the girls switched off the lights in the toilet passage, and the Manor House Girl and her friends queued in the dark, in a small huddle. The ceiling creaked whenever Dad or Auntie Annu moved about upstairs. The Manor House Girl and her friends shrieked and laughed but they all did their weeing in the dark.

  Then one day, Dad decided that we were going to move back to Sawdust House. For many years, he hadn’t even glanced in the direction of the house whenever we had driven past, but all of a sudden, it was back to being an ordinary wooden house with breathing structures and the basics in order. All of a sudden, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Mum or her missing head or the hole in the veranda. Except that that, too, had been repaired. All of a sudden, Dad began talking about Mum in the past tense; all of a sudden, he was actually talking about Mum. All of a sudden, Dad began to build a patio, though earlier, he had said one wouldn’t go with the Forties style.

  No one had the sense to call a ghost hunter. ‘The basic things are in order,’ Dad assured me, and banged on his patio. How could he have known Mum had stayed on in Sawdust House, lying in wait? How could he have noticed such a thing, having talked Mum into the past tense?

  And so Krista moved into Sawdust House, bringing her white furniture and clinking things with her. The clinking things included a beaded curtain, a glass jar filled with seashells, a porcelain angel, Chinese stress balls and a collection of glass bowls for tea lights.

  Krista had only ever lived on her own, so all her things were women’s things. She had a white sofa, a white table, an armchair and lots of decorative cushions with English slogans on them. She put up small, hand-painted signs above the towels in the bathroom, saying, Hands, Guests and Bunnykins. She enjoyed doing things like laying the table really nicely, lighting a candle, serving up the food and then taking a photo of the whole thing.

  ‘Well, Saara, what does it feel like to move back into your own home?’ Krista asked on moving day.

  ‘Extra Great Manor was my home, too,’ Manor House Girl replied.

  ‘But, you know,’ Krista went on, ‘a person can have lots of different homes during the course of her life. I’ve had five as an adult. No, six, I mean.’

  ‘Why did you have a double bed if you’ve always lived by yourself ?’ I asked.

  ‘Saara,’ Dad said, looking at me sternly.

  ‘I was only asking.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it sometime later,’ Dad said, which was his standard way of dealing with things he didn’t want to talk about later.

  ‘Hey, I bought a decoration for the door!’ Krista cried. She took a beribboned, white-wicker door decoration out of her bag, which bore the words Home Sweet Home.

  ‘I thought this might calm you down whenever you started worrying about mould or water damage.’ Krista laughed, planting a kiss on Dad’s cheek. Krista dared to laugh at Dad over all sorts of weird things.

  Grown-ups are always asking what things feel like. But what answer can you give? This feels strange. When we came to Sawdust House for the first time to clean up and Dad asked me to get a bucket from the cleaning cupboard, I didn’t even know where such a cupboard might be.

  But on the other hand, as I stood there in the hall looking for the cleaning cupboard, I suddenly remembered clearly what our home smelled like when we came back from holiday. You don’t smell home if you’re there every day. But if you’re away for a week, home acquires its own smell.

  This is what I smelled like when I was little.

  Perhaps houses and their inhabitants have that sort of connection: the house smells of its occupants and the occupants smell of their house. We exchanged smells when we moved to Extra Great Manor, and now I’ve got new, bigger clothes, and they all smell of high rooms, tile stoves and sheep’s wool.

  In the end, Dad came to get the bucket himself.

  ‘Can’t even ask for the smallest thing…’ he muttered, going through the hall into the kitchen.

  The cleaning cupboard wasn’t in the hall. It was next to the food cupboard in the kitchen. Even the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard was a different colour from the one I’m sitting on in an old photo.

  7

  I’m woken up by the ghost. It’s already sitting on the edge of my bed, pinning my hands down under the cover so they can’t move. It doesn’t look nasty or evil, just dead. Mum’s ghost is looking at me but I can tell from its expression it doesn’t recognize me.

  It bends towards me and starts moving its lips. Its dark hair flops down in a familiar way. At first I only hear hissing, then I feel its breath.

  My face is cold.

  Then words come out. As if a radio were looking for a channel, the words have started but are hard to distinguish. Finally, I make out a whisper in the hissing:

  ‘Snip! Snap! Snip!’

  And after a while, again: ‘Snip! Snap! Snip!’

  I don’t want to hear any more – I know what the words are. When I was little, Mum once borrowed Struwwelpeter from the library because she thought it was a funny book. But I was scared of Struwwelpeter and the book went back the following week. I was too frightened even to go near the H shelf, where Struwwelpeter lurked.

  ‘Snip! Snap! Snip!’ Mum whispers.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I plead softly.

  But Mum just goes on, clicking her scissors to the rhythm of the rhyme:

  ‘The door flew open, in he ran,

  The great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man.

  Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come

  And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.

  Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;

  And Conrad cries out – Oh! Oh! Oh!

  Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast,

  That both his thumbs are off at last.’

  The ghost turns to me, wielding the scissors. I hide my hands under my back and press my chin against the edge of the cover. The ghost looks for a way in under the bedclothes, its long hair swinging as it turns its head. Then it sits down on the floor by my bed, grips a corner of the cover and starts cutting a strip off the edge. The scissors cli
ck.

  Snip, snap, snip, and the edge of the blanket comes loose.

  ‘Too big,’ the ghost croaks.

  It seizes the blanket again and carries on cutting it into strips, this time along the upper edge. Snip, snap, snip, go the scissors under my chin.

  The ghost crawls across my chest. I feel Mum’s hair swipe my cheek.

  ‘Too big,’ the ghost mutters again. It turns at the corner and starts cutting a similar strip off the third edge.

  When it turns to the fourth side, I pull my knees up to prevent the scissors touching my toes. Snip, snap, snip, it cuts off the lower edge.

  Then it stops and turns towards my face. It looks at me for a moment, in the same blank way as before.

  ‘Too big,’ the ghostly voice says again.

  Then it disappears, all of a sudden.

  The chill gets in underneath the cover. I’m cold. I think of Bruno. His own mother tried to bite off his ear. I never did understand why. I don’t understand this, either.

  I lie quietly and wait. Mum doesn’t come back; there’s no clicking from the scissors. In Extra Great Manor, I could go inside a wall when I wanted to, but here, there’s no room for anything like that. This is a healthy house with breathing structures, but that doesn’t help.

  8

  I remember us eating the last jar of frozen strawberries labelled 2010 in Mum’s handwriting. Auntie Annu had just emptied out the freezer of Sawdust House.

  We ate the strawberries slowly. They were covered with a crisp layer of ice and sugar and they tasted wonderfully cold and sweet. No one talked about Mum’s vegetable patch or about crushed ice or the veranda or the strawberry pyramid, which never got built once Dad’s tyres had tumbled down the steps.

  I remembered Mum’s fingers were dyed crimson as she dropped berries into boxes. Pop, pop, went the plastic, and the sugar rasped on top. Mum licked her red fingers and ate the too-small strawberries herself. The strawberries that were too large she sliced in half with a knife. The knife was red with strawberry juice as well.

  9

  The kitchen is cold and filled with smoke. Krista’s making pancakes. It’s the morning of my birthday, and Krista has decided I am to have pancakes for breakfast. The window is open and the cooker fan is whirring away, but the whole of the downstairs is still full of smoke.

  Wearing only her nightdress, Krista’s freezing in front of the stove. That’s why she’s annoyed. As far as I’m concerned, she could stop cooking and go and get dressed, but Krista seems to think that birthday celebrations can only start once the pancakes are ready.

  Krista’s pancakes are thinner than real ones, and she only made a small amount of watery dough. She’s prepared enough for us each to have two, though, really, the whole idea of pancakes is overindulgence. I miss Auntie Annu. Everything she did in the kitchen was big and splashy. She drove to the shop once a week and bought a huge amount of food. She cooked enough stew for three days in one go, and when she made pancakes, there was enough left over for a snack the following evening.

  ‘Whipped cream on top! Otherwise it’s not a proper birthday pancake!’ Krista urges, plonking a spoonful of the stuff on to my pancake.

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Try it! You’ll see. Jam, too, and a mint leaf, and then I’ll take a photo – wait!’

  Krista fetches her phone and takes a picture of my pancake and cream. Then she writes underneath, Happy Birthday, Saara! and puts it out there.

  Dad and Krista give me a hairdryer.

  ‘This is from Annu,’ Dad says, taking a roll of fabric out of the kitchen cupboard. ‘She hid it here before she left. There should be a card inside.’

  I undo the roll; it’s a colourful rag rug.

  In the depths of the rug, I find a card with a picture of an ancient-looking mosaic wall. The pattern shows a butterfly. The card says:

  Happy Birthday, sweetie! Do you remember these: your frog hoodie, purple cords, My Little Pony T-shirt, angel pyjamas? (I expect you recognize all the rest, too.) I thought it might be nice to keep the clothes as a souvenir – a bit like shells. Hey, now you are a real butterfly and twelve years old! Hugs and kisses! RunoutofroomA.

  ‘Will Auntie Annu ever come back to live at Extra Great Manor?’ I ask.

  ‘Who knows,’ Dad mutters.

  Dad’s annoyed because after Auntie Annu disappeared, having gone out into the big wide world and started collecting stories, Extra Great Manor has become his responsibility. Winter’s coming, the Blue Room has no wallpaper, no one has ordered logs for the winter and we don’t even know what we should do with the sheep.

  I look at the rug Auntie Annu wove. She was still in her square phase at that point. The rug is slightly longer than I am, and if I were to lie down in the middle of it and wrap it round myself, I could just fit inside, like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

  The whole of my old wardrobe is in that rug, cut into even strips for the weft and slammed on the loom. The clothes I had when I moved to Extra Great Manor all that time ago. The rug has cotton stripes, denim stripes, frilly stripes and even two thin knicker stripes. It’s got pink, orange, faded blue and green in it. A red raincoat glints here and there. I was quite a colourful girl back then. Fairly frilly, too.

  Auntie Annu has sewn buttons and decorations braided from zips of different colours on the edges of the rug. The colours blending into one other make me think of water stirred in with oil. Everything is mixed up but I can still see each garment separately.

  But the really amazing thing about the rug is the fact that it’s so solid and compact, so even. Somehow Auntie Annu has managed to weave a clear-cut rectangle out of something that was so loose and flowing, so shrill and unreal. Both ends have been finished off, and the colours have been matched. There. It starts here and ends there. And that’s the end of that.

  I go upstairs. My new room has a blue-grey wooden floor. I can see the Wendy house and the veranda steps out of the window. Perhaps Dad doesn’t want to sleep here because the window faces the garden steps. Mum’s vegetable patch lies behind the steps, and Mum used to look out of this window first thing in the morning to see from the sky what kind of weather lay ahead.

  I’ve got new curtains: blue butterflies on a white background.

  I spread the birthday rug from Auntie Annu on the floor; it fits well there, almost as if she had guessed that one day the big upstairs bedroom would be mine. Almost as if my old clothes had known that one day they would be cut into strips and the floor would be blue-grey. Dad didn’t even ask what room I wanted. He said I’d have my own space this way, and a bit of privacy, and put me upstairs. I didn’t know I wanted my own space, a bit of privacy. The manor house had fifteen bedrooms; that was more than enough space.

  I lie down on the new rug. I touch the green glimpse of the frog hoodie with my finger, and it answers greenly: croak. Good to see you.

  10

  The next time the ghost comes, it’s carrying a carving knife. It sits down on the edge of my bed, as Mum used to do, and begins a story.

  ‘Once upon a time, there were two sisters who wanted to get married,’ the ghost rasps. ‘The Prince came to test the shoe on them because he had decided that whomever the shoe fitted would marry him. The sisters wanted to have a go.’

  The ghost’s knife smells of sheep. Dad must have left it in the sink unwashed. I’ve spent the whole evening lying in my room, trying to block out the smell of roasting mutton that is oozing up the stairs. I can’t believe they’ve killed Bruno.

  ‘ “Give the shoe here – I’ll have a go!” said the first stepsister. She sat down to try it on.

  ‘But her toes were too big. “Cut off the toe, cut off the toe,” said the stepmother, and handed over a knife. “When you’re Queen, you won’t need to walk anyway.”

  ‘And the stepsister took the knife and cut off her big toe. She shoved her foot into the shoe and said, “It fits!” ’

  Apparently the knife is just a prop and the ghost doesn’t plan on
chopping anything off this time. It does choose to emphasize the ‘It fits!’ by raising the knife in the air, though.

  ‘The Prince puzzled over the blood spurting out of the shoe and asked to have the shoe back.

  ‘Then the other stepsister said, “Give the shoe here – I’ll have a go!” And so she in turn sat down to try it on.

  ‘This stepsister’s heel was too big. Again, the stepmother handed over the knife and said, “Cut off the heel. When you’re Queen, you won’t need to walk anyway.”

  ‘And the other stepsister cut off her heel, shoved her foot into the shoe and said, “It fits!”

  ‘But again the Prince puzzled over the blood spurting out of the shoe and asked to have the shoe back.

  ‘ “Give the shoe here!” said the first sister and cut off her foot. She shoved her leg stump into the shoe and said, “It fits!”

  ‘ “Give the shoe here!” said the second sister then, and cut off her own foot. She shoved her leg stump into the shoe and said, “It fits!”

  ‘ “Give the shoe here!” said the first sister then, and cut off her leg. She shoved her knee into the shoe and said, “It fits!”

  ‘ “Give the shoe here!” said the second sister then…

  ‘When the sisters didn’t have any legs left, the Prince took the blood-drenched shoe and left for the next house to look for the next girl. The sisters didn’t get to marry. The end.’

  The ghost waits for a moment, knife raised, pleased with itself. When I open my eyes, realizing the story has ended, it evaporates. I’m starving. I haven’t eaten anything since coming home from school, because the kitchen table was strewn with blood-covered parcels of meat, but now my stomach hurts. I get up silently and creep downstairs.