“Of course I worry. But”—she tilted her head in Sofie’s direction—“the only way is forward. You have to focus on the future.”
“But life was so much easier back then,” I tried.
She sighed, hands on hips, a gesture as familiar as Mom’s raspberry quark pie. “Was it really, though?”
“Yes! Just two TV channels, rock shows on the radio on Thursdays, no internet—the pace was slower.”
“Maybe life was easier for you, Peter. You were just a kid. Your job was to sit in your room playing boring video games and developing strange new smells. But don’t you think that life for the grown-ups then was just as troubling as it is for you now? Jobs and bills. Taxes and death. It’s always been the same.”
We stared at each other.
“Things change when you get older. It’s called ‘growing up.’”
“Oh, please. Who are you to say! You were off chasing gurus in India.”
Sofie looked up again, a bemused smile on her face.
“You’re so annoying,” snapped Tina. “Are you trying to pick a fight? If that’s what you want, I’ll give you a fight, and don’t think I can’t take you down anymore!”
I knew she could.
“No. Not really. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“Fighting me? Think again.”
“No, not fighting you. How things used to be.”
“Peter, have you been drinking?”
“No, I’ve been thinking.”
“You have. I can smell it on you. Don’t come around here like this again, please. Drunk and obnoxious.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“But you are obnoxious.”
“Fine, I’m going. Don’t bother making dinner for me.”
“Fine, go.”
“I will.”
“Bye.”
I grabbed my coat.
“Are you not going to say goodbye to your niece?”
It’s hard to storm out when you’re giving a kiss-cuddle-wave to a twelve-year-old.
I didn’t slam the door, but I did glare at Tina on my way out.
When I got to the end of the path, she opened the front door and called after me in a voice loud enough for half of Helsinki to hear. “Do you remember that poster you had on your wall for a few months? Cyndi Lauper, wasn’t it? And do you remember why you took it down?” My look didn’t shoot daggers; ICBMs tore across the front lawn from my eyes to hers. How did she know about that? “Yeah, they didn’t make posters tongue-proof in the 1980s, did they?”
Slam.
My sister, Tina. If anyone has ever had the last word against her, I’ve yet to hear about it.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON HAD turned into Friday evening. The sun was still out and there was a group of teenagers throwing a Frisbee in the park. I hadn’t seen a Frisbee in years.
Just as I turned the corner toward the train station, I bumped into Tim. He was obviously leaving the pub, but we both pretended that he’d been walking home from the station.
“Long day, eh?” I said.
“Yeah, busy keeping. Aren’t you dinner staying for?”
Bless Tim. He always tries to speak Finnish, and then always looks relieved when I switch to English.
“Um, no, I have to get home to fix something.”
“How are things?”
“Oh, same old same old.”
“I hope it’s a good same old?”
“Yeah,” I said flatly, not wanting to tell him that his wife was the big sister from hell.
In fairness, he probably already knew.
We stood there, silent, for what felt longer than it really was. Then Tim cleared his throat, slapped my back, and said, “Thanks for helping out with Sofie. See ya later.”
Although I certainly didn’t need them, I grabbed a couple of beers for the train home and jammed in my headphones. I turned on Elvis Costello’s Goodbye Cruel World and settled back into the eighties. I was done with the day. In fact, I felt done with the whole decade.
Chapter 4
Don’t You (Forget About Me)
WHEN I GOT HOME, the Time Machine was waiting for me. I walked (okay, stumbled) through the door and there it was on the mat. An envelope postmarked Kumpunotko with an unfamiliar return address.
Dear Peter,
I do hope that this letter arrives as a complete surprise. That was the purpose of the exercise, do you remember? Let me jog your memory. Kumpunotko High School, English class, January 1986. We were doing an assignment on current affairs, and I thought it would be fun for you all to write to your future selves. As promised, I haven’t peeked—I know it’s personal. The envelope is still sealed.
As an aside, I’ve retired now, and it’s been a lot of fun going through the class list, remembering all the names and faces. It’s also been fun tracking you all down. Some are still living in Kumpunotko. Some, like you, living in Helsinki, were easy enough to find, but some of the class are now in Dubai, Thailand, Scotland, the USA! Many have new names too, and not just the girls.
Anyway, I hope that you enjoy opening your little “Time Machine,” and I hope that you are well and enjoying life. I always had high hopes for you, Peter.
Fond regards,
Your teacher, Hanna
I must have stood in my hallway for a full five minutes, frozen in time and space, a streetlight streaming through the kitchen window and casting a long shadow into the living room/office area. All I could do was stare at the letter and marvel at how a few sentences can bring back to life a person you hadn’t thought about for decades.
Hanna . . . My first thought was that she must have been pushing eighty! My second was that I was now probably older than she had been when she’d stood at the front of the class and asked us to write the letter.
How did that happen?
And the Time Machine . . . ?
I wasn’t sure quite how to approach it. I started with the music, turning on Total 80s FM. “Happy Hour” by the Housemartins—a song that never fails to make me smile—blared out of my small, surprisingly powerful speakers. Then I slipped my shoes off, lay down on the couch, and looked at the envelope, addressed to me in my own always-sloppy handwriting. “Personal,” Hanna had called it.
Peter Eksell, c/o the Future!
Just the look of the envelope took me back to my high-school days. First of all, it was brown. Nobody used brown envelopes anymore. And nobody licked their envelopes anymore, either, and I could tell the sender had done just that. That was my spit, my three-decades-old spit, holding it shut.
I ripped the envelope open and unfolded the paper.
Dear Me!
It’s me here—the 1986 you! Remember me?
Hanna has asked us to write a letter to ourselves in thirty years’ time, as part of a book project. She chose H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes. In class we’ve been talking about how events that seem massively important can fade and be forgotten altogether, while one tiny thing can stay with us forever. And how we can’t always tell which are going to end up being which. Like, I’m sitting in this classroom now, with certain things on my mind (how cold it is, the dance next month), but by the summer they won’t be important anymore, and next January I’ll have other worries (finals, UGH), and in fifteen years I won’t remember what school was really like (as if I could forget!) and in thirty years the things that are currently current in my life will all be history, forgotten. That’s the theory anyway. I mean, I can’t imagine a day going by without Mikke’s stupid grin (he is very funny though). Or how I will make sense of life without talking the day through with Jennifer.
So anyway, I’m supposed to write about a thing that happened that’s really important to me, and then see if YOU can remember it. Mine’s the hard part—I have to write it down. All you have to do is remember it. Plus, Hanna says you won’t be tested on it! (Not by her anyway.)
So here’s the important thing that’s happened. Three weeks ago, Tina and Mom had a massive argument. Plates smashed, r
ude words, the works. And Tina stormed out of the house, slammed the front door, and shouted, “THAT’S IT, I’M LEAVING!” Again. I mean, she’s probably run away from home more times than I’ve played The Hobbit on my Spectrum. In fact, one of my/our youngest memories is of the police bringing her back after they found her asleep at the back of the coffee shop next to the Atlas. She’d have been about seven. But I’m getting sidetracked. This time when she ran away, she actually did. Being on a gap year, with nothing holding her back, she walked into Kumpunotko, caught the train to Helsinki, and went to stay with a friend she knew from high school who’d moved there. Normally when she runs away, it takes a few hours or even days for the anger to wear off, and then she and Mom come to some kind of truce, and Dad drives off to get her. Not this time. She’d applied to university and been accepted, and she’s got a new job as a waitress in Helsinki until then. And Mom and Dad are both totally fine with that. Dad drove off, but instead of bringing her back, he took a load of her stuff. He said she’s got a nice apartment.
I didn’t think I’d miss her—she drives me insane, taking my stuff without asking and screaming at me if I so much as look at her room. But it’s so quiet in our house now. Like, spooky-quiet, so I won’t mind if she comes back to visit from time to time, and I do hope she’s okay.
I don’t think any of us were ready for the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Mom keeps coming into my room to check if I’m okay. And Dad’s taken up baking bread. Baking! I just cannot understand how that one thing led to the other, but I suppose a butterfly flaps its wing in Tokyo, and all that . . .
Anyway, Jennifer said she totally understands. She said it’s the “small town blues,” and that Tina was right to get away before she exploded. I suppose she has a point. She always does. She’s smart that way, but I help her out with school stuff, so it all balances out. She says she can’t wait to get out either. She says she has no doubt I will. “You’re going places, Peter,” she said to me the other day.
I mean, of course I’ll move to the city and get a job in computing and be the big success everyone says I’m going to be. But I’m happy here in the meantime. I’m in no great hurry. I’ll get there.
Anyway, Hanna is handing out the envelopes for us to seal up our Time Machines, so I’d better sign off. Did you remember the World War III that blew the Eksell family apart? The whole thing? Parts of it? Or was Tina’s dramatic departure just another forgettable episode? (She would hate that. Personally, I’m guessing she’ll be home within a week once she realizes she can’t work the washing machine.)
Before I go: How did you do with life? Did you come up with a way-cool game or some totally crazy invention to change the world of computing? Do you have a flying car? A video Walkman? Pizza pills for lunch? Did you get the dream girl? Man, I hope so. Can’t wait to find out!
Live long and prosper!
P
I sat there for a while, blinking. I couldn’t remember the lesson itself, or the exercise, and even the explosive episode in Eksell family life had mostly faded from my mind. As far as I could remember, Tina did move out around then, but of the departure itself, her storming out . . . nothing. But I did remember one thing from that time very clearly: the way I’d felt about Jennifer Berg.
Chapter 5
Holding Back the Years
ONCE, WHEN I STILL had a job, we had a team-building event where we all had to put cinnamon in our mouths and hold our noses. It was weird, but without the smell I couldn’t taste it. I just knew I had something powdery on my tongue. When we were told to let go of our noses, all sensations came rushing in at once.
And that’s exactly what happened when all those memories came flooding back. Not just the music and the films—they still featured in my everyday life, nerd that I am—but the cafeteria smells and the little background sounds: Converse squeaking on the basketball court, my locker door rattling, the smell of paint thinner in our art class. I saw faces: Mikke copying my English homework just before class, our math teacher shaking her head at me in disbelief, in a good way, and our gym teacher shaking his head at me in disbelief, in a disappointed way. But what flooded back the most were the feelings.
Academically, there was the pressure of meeting my teachers’ expectations. And socially, there were moments when I worried that everyone else had been to some kind of special training day where they’d learned to be cool. I, too, wanted to say funny and clever things to make people like me. To make a certain person like me.
Then came other memories, rolling out in an eighties-TV-show-flashback sort of way—old scenes viewed through a soft lens. Riding my bike to school. A teacher writing on the transparent sheet of an overhead projector. Whispering Battleship coordinates to Mikke in class. Sami getting busted for stashing a copy of Playboy inside his geography textbook.
It took no more than a nanosecond (“a one-thousand-millionth of a second,” I heard our math teacher’s voice say in my head), but suddenly, I was back in school. It was totally amazing—and what struck me most, after just a few moments of reminiscing, was how rich my life had been back then.
When we’re at school, we take it for granted that, each day, we’re part of a close-knit network of friends (well, not all friends, but y’know . . . ), and that each classroom is part of a larger system, with thousands of interwoven connections. That life, from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., is a well-ordered chaos of different subjects: academic, practical, artistic, sporty.
My life had been so colourful, so wonderful, so . . . full! And that Time Machine, which blasted me right back to the eighties, was the most exhilarating thing that had happened to me in, well, longer than I cared to think about.
I read it a second time, pacing around the apartment.
First, I read Hanna’s letter again. And then I read mine. Hanna’s. Mine. Again and again. That Hanna had written “I always had high hopes for you, Peter” put a smile on my face. She was the sweetest person. And then Jennifer saying, “You’re going places, Peter.” Those sentences were like an elixir—an intravenous shot of espresso, a reboot of all my youthful optimism.
Total 80s FM had switched gears to a more big-hair list with some great guitar songs. And as Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” reached its massive guitar riff, I pulled out my air guitar and played a solo that would have made Richie Sambora proud. My fingers were fast, my overbite mean—“Whooooooooah!”—and my head-banging fierce, even if my hair wasn’t quite what it had once been. I dropped to my knees and brought the solo to its climax just as Total 80s FM’s automated DJ-bot hopped coldly to the next song.
I took a photo of the letter so I could post it on Facebook, which is what you do when interesting things happen, right? But then I read it again and pocketed my phone. As Hanna had said, this was “personal.”
I thought about the other thing she’d written, that she’d “always had high hopes” for me.
“Peter always had high hopes for himself too . . .” I said in my movie-narrator voice, but the words trailed off as I looked around my little world.
My apartment. It was a nice one-bedroom flat in a good suburb of Helsinki, decorated in a minimalist, ascetic style (read as: I can’t be bothered with interior design). A big fifty-four-inch TV and my couch took up two-thirds of the living room, the remaining third being my office. I didn’t have curtains in the windows, but I had a rug on the floor. My CD towers were still on both sides of the TV, even though I no longer owned a stereo. Since buying the small but surprisingly powerful speaker system that streamed any song I wanted from the internet, opening a CD case seemed hopelessly archaic. And let’s not even talk about my vinyl.
The kitchen only had space for a table and four chairs, three of which may as well have still been in their flat-pack boxes. The fourth was also practically new, as I usually read my morning paper standing up at the counter by the window and had my evening meal on the couch, in front of a movie.
I gave my own letter another read, and the line about Dad’s bread baking made me chuck
le. I’d forgotten all about it, but I bet my parents had neighbours who still remembered the time the fire department came to our house twice in a week.
I read the line about flying cars and crazy inventions and I sighed. And then the line that hit me like a cold slap: “Did you get the girl?” I sat back down and flipped the music off.
Jennifer. Around the time I wrote the letter, the knowledge that I’d see her at school was what got me out of bed in the morning. She made me feel good about, well, most things. She even made me believe that my ramblings about the deeper meanings of Spandau Ballet’s lyrics were interesting. “You’re going places,” she’d said. Of course, my parents and teachers said that too—expected nothing less—but she seemed to really believe that I could do whatever I wanted in life.
I chuckled again and shook my head. The things we say and do when we’re young.
“One day, in a small town in Finland . . .” I started, but nothing followed. My mind was still on Jennifer. Thinking about it now, I realized that there had only been one thing I’d really wanted to do in life, and I had really put my mind to it—in fact, I’d thought about it endlessly. I’d wanted to cross the threshold from friendship with Jennifer to something else.
But I’d seen what Tina did to all the guys who pushed too hard, and I didn’t want to end up like them. (Some of them, I expect, are still in therapy.) So I hadn’t pushed at all. I didn’t dare. Besides, I’d always thought it was about destiny.
I NEEDED SOME air. And by “air” I mean “more beer.” I left my apartment and headed for the store on the corner.
Sitting outside was a group of hoodie-wearing teenagers—hoods up, of course—passing cans of beer to each other. I’d seen them there before, and I knew one of the kids lived in my building, so I nodded to them and smiled. I may even have winked.
“Hey, old-timer,” said one of the kids. “Wanna join us?”
I stopped in my tracks, my heart suddenly thumping. Sitting on a Friday night with a can of beer in my hand, just hanging out, chilling with the boys? I was tempted.
Someday Jennifer Page 3
