by Selja Ahava
I don’t switch on the light as I go into the kitchen. I’m not scared of this house.
I take butter and cheese out of the fridge, and only then do I notice Krista standing by the window. She’s looking out at the dark garden. She always looks so lost at night. As if she didn’t remember why she was here and what house this was. Now she turns to look at me.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Me, too,’ she says.
Perhaps the ghost comes downstairs, too. What do I know? Perhaps everyone’s got a ghost of their own. I look at Krista and wait to hear if she’s going to say more. But she just turns back towards the window.
The dirty carving knife lies in the sink.
I butter three slices of bread and leave Krista in the dark.
11
Mum’s things have been packed up into three large cardboard boxes and put in the attic. The first box contains official papers, two photo albums, bundles of letters tied together with yarn, a history of Auntie Brown, Auntie Marshmallow and Auntie Uncle’s home village, Grandad’s cap, Grandma’s spoons, Mum’s baby booties, a newspaper cutting about a pumpkin Auntie Brown grew, Mum’s graduation cap and some old cups. Dad said that when I’m older, I can decide what to do with Mum’s things, but until then, they can stay in the attic.
The other box contains Mum’s clothes. Mum’s party dress almost fits me now. On hangers, the clothes still looked alive, but when Dad took them down and folded them into flat piles, they died. I heard it. When Dad folded a big, grey, woolly jumper, I heard it expel its last breath before slumping.
The third box is full of shoes. Most of the shoes are still too big for me, but the mustard-coloured boots fit. They’ve got wooden heels and pointed toes, and they clatter when you walk in them. You can’t mince or sprint – you can only take steady steps. Sometimes I put them on and walk to the shop and back. I love their echoing sound.
The ghost looks less and less like Mum each time it comes. What was familiar and Mum-like decreases; the ghost gets thinner and its weight on top of me gets lighter. Then it starts going haywire. As if it were no longer properly charged, it crackles and bounces and its stories get muddled. Maybe ghosts have batteries, and if they aren’t charged, they go out in the end.
‘Once upon a time, there was a little sister who lost a key made out of a chicken bone,’ the ghost begins.
It always starts in the middle and chooses only the revolt-ing bits. I know this bone bit; I try not to think about it every time we’re eating chicken. Just as I try not to think about Bruno whenever the kitchen smells of rosemary.
‘What an idiot!’ the ghost snickers. ‘Nothing for it but snip, snap, snip. What did you lose the key for? Hands up, who’s got fingers? Ha, now it goes on, now it goes on. The little sister took a knife, cut off her little finger and opened the gate with it. And that’s the end of that.’
Auntie Annu always wanted to pull the wishbone. This involves two people gripping the bone with their little fingers and pulling till it snaps. The one who ends up with the bigger part can make a wish. I hated the snap and would have preferred not to pull. Also, Auntie had already won the lottery twice; she was hardly likely to need more wishes. If the bigger part did stay in my hand, as it sometimes did, I wished that Mum would send me a message. But she never did.
I don’t see any need for a game that involves breaking bones.
The ghost clicks its fingers. First it tugs them, one at a time, then it clasps its hands together and crunches every joint. Mum never did that. It gives me a strange feeling of strength when I realize Mum didn’t do that.
The ghost goes on with the story: ‘A shepherd came and found the bone on the shore. He used it to whittle a mouthpiece for a horn.’
‘You already said that was the end.’
The ghost stops and looks at me.
‘It’s finished already,’ I repeat.
‘Once upon a time, there was a horn,’ the ghost corrects itself, starting a new story. ‘The shepherd blew the horn, and the bone began singing: “There’s a girl inside the wall! It’s murder, it’s murder!” Her brothers heard the bone’s song and opened up the wall. A maiden’s skeleton slid out of the sawdust on to the floor. Only one bone was missing, the one that now sounded in the horn. The brothers went to their stepmother and asked, “What is the punishment for one who buries a maiden alive inside a wall?” And the stepmother replied, “Let such a villain be put inside a barrel with sharp nails hammered into it and let him be rolled down a mountainside to the water.”
‘ “You have just pronounced your own sentence,” the brothers said, and shut the stepmother up in a barrel studded with nails. Then they rolled her down a slope. Screaming horribly, the stepmother tumbled downwards before finally sinking into the water beyond the edge of the land.’
‘You’re not my mum,’ I say to the ghost.
Two X-ray images hang on the wall in golden frames. The first is of a shoulder. The second shows my teeth; that was taken when I got a brace. I asked to have the picture and demanded Dad got a golden frame for it to match the first one.
I’ve got real bones in me. The ghost’s joints click, but if a doctor took an X-ray, it might not show anything. There are teeth in me. Some of them still throb inside the gum because they haven’t got any room to grow. But they are there.
12
Then one day, when I come home from school, I hear Dad and Krista talking about Mum. I stay in the hall to listen. I want to know if they’ve seen the ghost.
‘Maybe Hannele couldn’t have died in any ordinary way,’ Dad’s voice says. ‘She was such an unreal figure. As if she’d been plucked from a film. Maybe she needed a death like that.’
It’s definitely Dad’s voice. What on earth does he mean? Where’s the bear bell, where’s the chocolate? Mum didn’t need any sort of death. What’s he on about?
Dad and Krista are silent. Maybe Dad’s now planting apologetic kisses on Krista’s head. Still, he soon goes on: ‘I have to say, it’s better Hannele can’t see the garden, given the state it’s in. It’s a jungle.’
My throat tightens. Is he really saying that it was better Mum died so she didn’t have to see the garden was a jungle? The garden would not be a jungle if Mum were alive! The jungle came about because Dad spent a year in bed and then played hide-and-seek after that, driving past Sawdust House as if it didn’t exist!
Dad has wrapped Mum in a parcel. Time has healed Dad and the fairy-tale characters are dead. Dad, who wept and wailed and filled the stove with why why, sits there now and is all like, oh yes, because it fitted in with the story.
Dad has put an end to Mum. He hasn’t seen the ghost; he’s been working on a patio and has decided that a lump of ice was a fitting end to Mum. He doesn’t miss the bear bell because he’s got Krista now, tinkling with her glass beads. If only the ghost would come with its scissors and cut his toes off.
At that very moment, a bang rings out from the living room. The whole house trembles and a pinch of sawdust sprays on to the floor. Without thinking, I open the kitchen door and go in. Inside the wall, something’s rushing down.
Only then does my head fill with thoughts. Maybe a bird flew against the window. Maybe an elk bumped into the wall. Maybe the ghost toppled the bookcase over. Maybe something fell down from the sky again.
On the back wall of the living room, a half panel has blown open. There is a split in the wall; planks stick out in all directions and a big heap of sawdust has cascaded on to the floor. The trickling sawdust explains the rushing noise I heard in the hall. I stand there staring.
An apple tree is growing out of the split in the panel.
An apple tree.
Its slender stem pokes out of the panel. The trunk sup-ports three branches with a few pale leaves on them. The seedling must have been growing inside the panel for a long time and gradually pressed itself against the top batten until finally it sprang like a bow and made the wall explode. The tree sticks up, greedily s
tretching towards the window.
I hear Dad moving in the bedroom; he appears at the kitchen door.
‘Did you hear something, too?’ Dad asks, before he sees the living-room wall. He stops in the doorway and stares.
‘It’s an apple tree,’ I say.
Krista appears in the kitchen. Her belly is bare; she’s rolled her trousers down and her top up. She covers her yawn with her hand.
Dad’s still not saying a word. He scratches his head, taking deep breaths.
‘How do you know it’s an apple tree?’ Krista asks.
‘What does it matter whether it’s an apple tree or not?’ Dad shouts – more at himself than Krista.
‘I don’t know,’ Krista answers, ‘but…it’s growing out of the wall.’
‘From the leaves,’ I reply. ‘Apple trees have leaves like that.’
‘But how can it be growing out of the wall?’ Krista asks insistently.
I walk over to the tree. Sawdust sticks to my soles. I dodge the splinters shed by the planks and peer inside the panel. Tree roots slither behind the chipboard. They disappear into the depths of the floor. The sawdust is dark and damp, and an earthy smell drifts in.
The apple tree looks strong, though it’s pale. I stroke its light stem. It must have grown from one of the seeds I pushed into the walls or the cracks in the floor as a little girl. It’s been growing all these years.
I look at the wall. I remember the dirty wallpaper under the panel, with its pale shadows left behind by the furniture. This is the spot where Mum drew me one renovation day many years ago. Turquoise tights, pigtails and bobbles. I’m pretty sure this is the same spot.
Splinters, smashed planks, twisted nails. Perhaps Dad’s right: growing up hurts.
Dad turns round and goes to make coffee. A short while after, the coffee machine starts bubbling, and he walks back into the living room, picks a loose piece of batten up off the floor and bends to inspect the wall. He pushes his hand inside, squeezes the sawdust he’s grabbed and smells. He grabs another handful. This time, he’s holding a handful of black, crumbling timber. He gasps for air and gulps; he glances at the edge of the ceiling, the window frame, the corner of the room.
‘Phew. What now? I always…somehow I always.’
Dad squeezes the black crumbs of wood in his hand. He grips a plank visible through the hole and tugs; the rotten timber cracks like crispbread.
‘Rainwater must have got in here. This is wet – the whole wall is wet. Wet and rotten…’
‘What do we do now?’ Krista asks.
‘You mean with this wall?’
‘And in general.’
‘I don’t know,’ Dad answers. ‘I really don’t know.’
Then suddenly we hear a sob. Dad and I turn and see Krista standing in the middle of the floor. She stands there, helplessly far from any furniture, shivering.
‘Help. Help me.’ Krista’s crying. She’s pressing her hand against her mouth, looking as if she needed a chair or Dad or some other support.
‘Rushing,’ she sputters from behind her hand.
Dad goes to Krista, and just as he manages to put his arm around her, there’s a splash inside Krista.
13
Sometimes, the end of the world comes. Sometimes, Paradise blasts out. Sometimes, someone dies so imperceptibly that there’s no time to take it in. Perhaps a person like that will try to come back as a ghost to continue her interrupted stories. Though you should really just make your exit. You should stop by the roadside and let the car go. You should become black and white. You should shrink and change your tense.
Perhaps our family’s endings are always bad. Perhaps that’s why we liked watching the Belgian detective at work. He would have been sure to complete the renovations, finish all the bedtime stories, visit Auntie Marshmallow and explain each death properly. His plots had nothing superfluous about them, and his clothes fitted perfectly – no room to grow there. He would have written a letter and left it in a suitably obvious place.
He was always elegant and tip-top. He had one question and one answer. His shoulders stayed in their sockets and his toes didn’t go missing.
But we just stand here. We watch and we wait. Krista leaks seawater; Dad claws at the rotten wall; the coffee machine hums. Will someone call us into the library? Will someone put all this into a gold frame? Or is it enough that the doctor gives a yank and fingers move again?
The world goes on. Nothing becomes clear, but time heals and people forget. The ghost’s batteries run out. Things happen. Overlapping, at the wrong time, at different times, in the wrong places. The angels aren’t in control. Because there’s always bound to be someone who forgets to listen to the news, looks even though they shouldn’t, or stands in the wrong place.
And that’s the end of that.
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