But Irma wasn’t dead. Siiri had hardly had time to look at the christening announcements when she heard a frenzied knocking on the other side of the wall. It was Irma, banging with Carl the Cane, calling for help. Siiri left the paper open on the table and hurried out. Her keys were in her handbag, but her handbag wasn’t in its usual place by the door. She looked around for it randomly, starting to feel very nervous, until she spotted the handbag in the bathroom. What idiot had left it there?
Irma was still sitting in the chair, holding a rose-patterned pillow in her arms and rocking silently back and forth, humming to herself. The cane was tossed on the floor. Her eyes were glazed and something was dripping out of her mouth.
‘What’s wrong?’ Siiri shouted, frightened.
‘Thanks for coming. Are you new here? Why is everyone new here?’
Siiri didn’t know what to say. It felt wrong to lie, and somehow unpleasant to tell Irma to her face how confused she was. But this was no time for reflection. The telephone was torn off the wall and she had to get Irma a nurse right away, whether Irma knew who she was or not.
‘Can you get up?’ Siiri asked, and started to tug Irma out of the chair. It wasn’t easy. She didn’t have a nurse’s strength, or technique. After a bit of grunting and wrestling she got Irma moving and, little by little, they made their way to the lift and down towards the nurse’s station. Throughout the whole operation they didn’t say a word. Siiri didn’t dare to and Irma didn’t know how to, she just stared vacantly at her reflection in the lift mirror.
‘Ah. Irma’s confused again, is she?’ Virpi said when they arrived at the nurse’s station, as if they ran down there every day to report these little brain flukes. Virpi took Irma’s blood pressure, flipped through some papers, then wrote something down, without looking at them.
‘Can I have my medical records now?’ Irma said suddenly. ‘And while you’re at it, you can give me back the green folder, the one you pinched from me. I know you have it.’
Virpi turned to look at Irma with a peculiar expression, almost as if she were savouring some victory. She adjusted her glasses, put her chewing gum in the cup on her desk, and made a call to someone, without giving them her name.
‘Same symptoms,’ she said into the phone, her eye on Irma. ‘No, not aggressive this time, but confused and paranoid.’
‘That is enough!’ Siiri shouted before she had time to think about her ragged impulse pathways or anything else. ‘Who are you telling lies to about Mrs Lännenleimu, saying that Irma’s paranoid?’
Siiri directed all of her anger towards the head nurse – all her anxieties and growing outrage about Irma’s gradual weakening, the increased number of pills, and the suspicious disappearance of the medical records. Virpi looked at her calmly, took out a syringe, and shoved her into the hallway. Irma had sunk back into her own world and was sitting limp in the chair, unaware of what was happening around her.
‘We don’t need any unauthorized persons causing a disturbance at the nursing station,’ Virpi shrieked at Siiri as she shut the door in her face. Siiri staggered to the sofa in the common room to sit down. She felt weak and frightened. Her heart was beating too quickly, though in an even rhythm, and when she lifted her eyes from the top of the table she saw Virpi pushing Irma away in a wheelchair in a great hurry. Irma was slumped lifelessly, as if in a deep sleep. With tears in her eyes, Siiri tried to call after her, but she couldn’t get any sound to come out of her mouth.
‘Shall I deal the cards?’ the Ambassador asked.
Siiri looked exhaustedly at the perpetually tie-wearing and smoking-jacketed old man, who peered back at her pleadingly, like a puppy. She couldn’t bring herself to deny him a game of rummy. In fact, a game of cards seemed like the best idea she’d heard in a long time.
‘. . . neben, über, unter, vor, zwischen. It looks it’ll be a bleak Christmas this year. Hey, I got a pair!’
Siiri took her handkerchief out of her handbag, wiped away her tears, and wondered why she’d started crying so easily again these past few days.
Chapter 20
There wasn’t much attention paid to Christmas at the retirement home. Unit Operations Manager Erkki Hiukkanen brought a sparse-limbed spruce tree into the common room, a preschool group came to sing Christmas carols, and they tried their best to make traditional straw ornaments in the craft club. Many of the residents went to visit relatives, but there were even more who spent the holiday at Sunset Grove.
Siiri often spent Christmas with her daughter’s children, but this year they informed her well in advance that they were all going on safari in South Africa. Siiri was a bit hurt that they were all going somewhere together and she was no longer a part of the group. But even her daughter was no longer part of her own children’s Christmas, since she’d moved into a French convent. And you couldn’t have convinced Siiri to spend Christmas on the other side of the world, surrounded by who knew what kind of famine and disease, even if you’d shaken a stick at her.
So under the circumstances, and partly out of choice, Siiri had Christmas at Sunset Grove all to herself. She didn’t give or receive any gifts. She honestly didn’t need anything any more. The Hat Lady had tried to begin one of those horrible things where everyone gives a present to someone and they pass them all out in the common room with some man dressed up as Santa Claus.
What would have been the point? The gifts the Ambassador bought would have been too expensive and the ones from the Hat Lady too cheap. Director Sundström was the only one who tried to keep up the gift tradition at Sunset Grove, but this year even she had decided to let this lovely idea slip and passed out a memo well beforehand announcing that in lieu of flowers or sweets, the director would prefer a donation to her travel fund.
On Christmas Eve, Siiri slept late, brewed herself some real coffee, and read the newspaper from beginning to end. That easily took an hour. She listened to Christmas music on the radio and was glad to still have Yule Radio 1, which broadcast a proper Christmas programme, until the science programme began talking about stem-cell therapy and space satellites in honour of Christmas. She turned off the radio and looked at the clock: there were still two hours to wait until Christmas Eve dinner, celebrated on Christmas Eve in Finland, in the cafeteria downstairs. Right now they were holding a moment of devotion. After that it would be cake bingo, and she didn’t want to participate in that either.
Most of the staff were on holiday, even Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen, and, of course, the poor director, who’d had two weeks of sick leave before her official holiday, and was getting ready for a trip to India to rest her nerves, which were overtaxed by taking care of old people. There were more temporary staff than usual during the holiday season, mostly Muslim girls, who didn’t mind working on Christmas, watching over this crowd of Christians as they sang hymns, ate ham and baked gingerbread.
Siiri had bought a little pre-cooked ham at Low Price Market and planned to carve bits of it for sandwiches when needed, and she wouldn’t need anything more than that. She was halfway through Selma Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem again, for the umpteenth time. It was what she felt like reading. She had put the red Christmas tablecloth from her childhood home on the table. It was much too big for the table the retirement home provided, but she folded it double and smoothed it carefully, and it looked pretty. She put two brass candlesticks over the red wine stains and lit the candles to create a mood. What kind of mood? What did Christmas really mean to her except the passage of time and another full year about to end? Were the last few Christmases she’d had among her last?
She remembered how her little brother Toivo had designed a mathematical equation for subjective time. He had drawn several parabolas to illustrate the fact that the very same year can be significantly longer in the life of a three-year-old than in the life of a ninety-year-old. And yet a child’s life passed more quickly than an old person’s. Or was it the other way around? Maybe an old person’s time passed more quickly but was more tiresome, which sounded like
a mercy, of course. Toivo had explained his calculations but she no longer remembered the details.
Toivo was dead now, as were her other siblings. And her husband and her two sons. And her cat. She had an unpleasant, powerful feeling of missing her husband, and all the people who had died. Her little boy, playing in the garden in his ragged clothes. Having Christmas all to herself no longer felt like a good idea. But what would help? She had to think of something to do. She tried doing the crossword, but she didn’t recognize the people or things the clues were referring to: ‘rap artist and TV presenter’, ‘minister’s manfriend’. The sudoku was easier. After solving a couple of sudokus she felt a bit weak and so sliced some ham and made herself a sandwich and filled a milk tumbler with red wine.
‘Döden, döden, döden,’ she toasted to herself, and had an enjoyable cold Christmas dinner.
After all, it was lovely not to have to slave over a stove to make Christmas dinner for a large family, with no help at all. The herring, the casseroles and beetroot salad – phew! – the pies and gingerbread cakes. Even the ham had to be salted back then, and after that baked, and now she could just slice some nice ham, cooked by somebody else, onto a piece of bread.
She almost missed Irma even more than she did her own family. Siiri could no longer imagine her life without Irma’s company. But she didn’t know where Irma was. Virpi Hiukkanen had taken her somewhere in a wheelchair and she hadn’t been heard from since.
Siiri had asked Virpi about Irma, but the head nurse had just snapped that the medical condition of residents was a private matter and could not be disclosed to anyone but next of kin. Which was true, of course. Siiri had tried several times to call Irma’s daughter Tuula, but she hadn’t been able to get hold of her and Siiri didn’t know Irma’s grandchildren well enough to be able to call them.
Irma had customarily spent Christmas with her family, and she always enjoyed having everyone together, and didn’t seem to get upset if Christmas dinner ended up being Vietnamese dumplings and Moroccan stew. She didn’t even complain about the fact that her darlings gave her goats, sheep and trees as Christmas gifts. They were cooperative-development donations, philanthropy. Irma never saw the gifts, but every Christmas she would laugh and tell Siiri how her herd of cows and grove of trees had grown.
‘Who would have thought that a tenth-generation city girl could become a cowherd and forest ranger in her old age?’
Siiri hoped, tried to believe, that Irma was spending Christmas somewhere with her family right now. They must be at the summer house, the one on the lake shore at Lohjanjärvi; there was room for the whole family there. Irma would be happy and she would get another Brazilian goat or African cow, and there would be nothing said about Alzheimer’s.
Chapter 21
The sparse-limbed Christmas tree in the common room had already shed its needles on the floor when Siiri finally left her apartment. The tree was where the card table usually stood, and the Ambassador was very cross about it.
‘Where am I supposed to play solitaire?’ he shouted melodramatically, but no one reacted except for Margit Partanen, who hurriedly pushed her husband out of the room before he could say something lewd.
Eino Partanen had advanced Parkinson’s, and probably also Alzheimer’s and serious dementia, but since Margit knew how horrible the Group Home was, she had appointed herself his personal caregiver. Caring for one’s husband around the clock, week after week, while also living in a retirement home seemed like a strange solution but Margit was glad to get the 150 euros a month. She was actually being paid for not wasting the Sunset Grove staff’s time in caring for her Eino. Eino sat in his wheelchair mostly confused and if he spoke he usually said something inappropriate, which embarrassed his wife tremendously. But the disease hadn’t taken away all of Eino’s powers, because the residents of A wing could still hear the couple’s regular recreational activities.
Anna-Liisa was sitting at the coffee table. For once Siiri was happy that Anna-Liisa was there because she had to talk to somebody. Anna-Liisa listened without the smallest change in expression, her hands resting on her Zimmer frame.
‘Don’t waste your sorrow,’ she said. ‘Irma’s not dead. At least not yet. Everything happens in its time.’
‘But listen, I think that Irma has been taken to the closed unit,’ Siiri said finally. She had turned the idea over in her mind for such a long time without being able to think of how to proceed. Sometimes she thought she herself was going soft in the head, or paranoid or whatever, but she was more frightened that she might be right.
Anna-Liisa was silent for a moment. She didn’t say anything, which Siiri thought was a good sign. If Anna-Liisa had immediately started a lecture, she wouldn’t have been thinking about the matter, she would have just been talking for the sake of it.
‘Yes, I’m sure she has,’ Anna-Liisa said finally, folding her napkin into ever smaller triangles where it lay on the table. She started folding the plastic bags into smaller and smaller triangles, too – she had these peculiar habits, which she was rather proud of. ‘Reino was locked in the dementia ward when he made a fuss about Olavi Raudanheimo’s terrible treatment. And Olavi would have remained in the closed unit if his son hadn’t rescued him and taken him to Meilahti Hospital. And Irma has written numerous complaints, and very well-founded ones, which is even worse. Her last complaint was about head nurse Virpi Hiukkanen, when she left you lying on the floor unconscious. This measure is probably Irma’s punishment.’
Anna-Liisa weighed every word, wrestling for precision and articulating very distinctly. Everything she said was horrifying. But Siiri was relieved to have someone say so lucidly what she had feared. Maybe she wasn’t going crazy after all.
‘I just don’t know what to think,’ she explained. ‘Virpi Hiukkanen claimed that Irma was paranoid. It’s one of the symptoms of dementia, so you could use it to label anyone who suspects you.’
‘Dementia is the symptom, not paranoia,’ Anna-Liisa corrected her, and then thought again for a moment. ‘Irma did ask to see her medical files, didn’t she? And she didn’t get them. Virpi didn’t want to give them back to her.’
This was something Siiri had worried about too. Maybe someone had falsified Irma’s records so that transferring her to the closed unit would seem like a justifiable decision.
‘I’m afraid that soon they’ll shut me up in there, because I suspect all kinds of things. What can a person do?’
Anna-Liisa didn’t speak, but this time her thoughtful pause was so long that Siiri began to lose hope. Anna-Liisa must be as helpless, as much at a loss, as she was. They sank into a deep, gloomy silence and stared into empty space. A paper angel on a stick lay on the table, they could hear the grunt and slap of the Ambassador playing solitaire in the corner behind the tree, and somewhere further off the thump of Exercise Annie’s aerobics cassette. On the television some children were having a crabwalk race.
And then an amazing thing happened. Siiri Kettunen lifted her eyes from the paper angel and saw something that she had almost forgotten about, and at that moment she knew that it was the solution to everything.
Chapter 22
A large man stood in front of Siiri and Anna-Liisa, looking at them with tender blue eyes. He held out a red poinsettia.
‘Merry Christmas,’ he said. ‘Or should I say Happy New Year’s, since Christmas is more or less over now?’
‘Mika Korhonen!’ Siiri shouted as if the Angel Gabriel himself had appeared out of the heavens. And that’s exactly how she felt, because no one but Mika could help them out of the mess they were in, a mess that had only grown more befuddling as the weeks went by.
‘Have you ever thought about what a fun word befuddling is? Almost as good as flummoxed,’ Siiri said to Mika, giving him a hug – which was totally unlike her – because at that moment a big hug from her new friend with his squeaky leather jacket and his wonderful smell was just what she needed. It made her feel safer than any childhood memory.
&nb
sp; ‘You don’t need the plural, or the possessive, in this case. It’s “Happy New Year”, not “Happy New Year’s”,’ Anna-Liisa informed him, and Siiri realized she hadn’t introduced them.
‘This is my friend, Anna-Liisa Petäjä,’ Siiri said to Mika, who extended his strong hand.
‘Master of Philosophy, language and literature teacher. Very nice to meet you, Mr Korhonen.’ Anna-Liisa squeezed Mika’s hand, obviously satisfied by his grip.
‘Right, yeah. Just Mika. And where’s the other happy lady? I have a flower for her, too.’
‘Poinsettias are poisonous,’ Anna-Liisa began, but Siiri interrupted and invited both of them to her apartment, feeling that it would be a safer place to talk. You never knew which of the people dozing around you were actually in full possession of their faculties and ready to pass on everything you said. Good gracious, she was getting paranoid!
Mika glanced around with curiosity as they went to the lift and took it to Siiri’s second-floor apartment. He sniffed the air and grimaced now and then – no doubt the retirement home had a strange smell to outsiders, a mixture of disinfectant and excretions that the residents had reluctantly grown used to. Siiri opened her apartment door and regretted that she hadn’t cleared the remains of her breakfast. She hurried to put things away and wiped the table. Anna-Liisa had never been to her apartment and so was making an eager inspection of it. She stopped her Zimmer frame in front of the bookshelf and scanned it with apparent approbation, though it only contained Siiri’s most beloved, and newest, books. She had given most of her books to the antiquarian bookstore when she moved into the retirement home. The bookstore owner had wanted to give her a few hundred for them, but she wasn’t worried about the money because she felt that second-hand book dealers were performing a public good by rescuing books and spreading the word about them.
Mika looked at the framed photos of Siiri’s husband and children on the windowsill, peeked into the bedroom, and sat down on the sofa, which looked smaller with him filling half of it. It was a rather silly sofa, low and curved, from Stockmann department store, and had followed Siiri in every move she’d made since the 1930s. Siiri put the poinsettias on the table and asked if her guests would like some coffee and nookies. She didn’t give it a thought – it was what she and Irma always said. Mika laughed in astonishment and Anna-Liisa saw it as an opportunity to launch into an explanation of why an old person from Helsinki might call cookies nookies.
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 11
