by Janis Mackay
She lowered the cake onto the table, letting a nervous smile pull at her face. I didn’t smile back. I coughed and continued to stare at her. It’s called intimidation, and I do it well. She coughed too, as if it was catching, then swung round to the drawer, tugged it open and fumbled about. The noise of metal clanging against metal rang out. I stared at her back, then watched her take up a large cake knife. She turned round and faced me, a flash of fear across her face, and I saw her eyes flit for a moment to the garden, as if she needed to know she had protection from me, her own son. She coughed again and lifted the knife in the air, letting it hover above the uncut cake.
‘Mum?’
She paused, the knife a few centimetres from a dome of cream. She smiled and this time it didn’t looked forced. When had I last called her ‘Mum’? Tears smarted her eyes. She slid the knife into the cake. ‘Yes, son?’
‘Who drowned?’
Chapter Twenty-seven
‘What?’ She didn’t look at me, but at the handle of the knife. ‘What?’
So I said it again. ‘Who drowned?’
‘What are you talking about, Niilo?’ She cut the cake. Shakily she put a large slice of cake on a plate and pushed it over towards me. Fat strawberries rolled off the top of the slice. I saw a mask sit over her. I knew that mask so well. Don’t rock the boat: that’s what it was called. ‘I don’t think anyone in the neighbourhood drowned,’ the mask said. ‘Not that I know of.’ Her voice had taken on a cold hard edge. Impatient. ‘I mean, we thought you had. I was so worried I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I hope you enjoy the cake, Niilo. I wasn’t sure whether you would get cake in your new school.’
‘I’m not talking about me. I’m not talking about the neighbourhood. I’ve got this weird feeling – like you’re hiding stuff.’ My voice was quiet and my throat hurt. Back on the bus I had pictured myself yelling and shouting and demanding the truth. Now all I felt was sadness. ‘I mean, something happened to us a long time ago. What happened? People drowned. Who?’
I saw how she turned nervously to check on her husband’s whereabouts. Earlier she had needed to know he was right next to her. This time, I guessed, she needed to know he was out of hearing. ‘What brought this on?’ She tugged at the band holding her hair up and her dyed blond hair fell down around her shoulders. It made her look wilder.
‘Maybe I’m crazy,’ I said, then the words broke like a burst dam, not shouting, but fast, feeling if I didn’t say it now I never would. ‘I have this feeling and it won’t go away. Hannu says I’ve lost my story. I need to know who drowned. Things happened to my head when I was away. Like, memories coming back to me. Drowning memories. Someone drowned. A long time ago. I have this memory, sometimes it’s a nightmare. I was in a boat a long time ago and people drowned. Maybe you think I’m mad. Maybe I am.’ I rose to my feet and I saw her flinch. ‘But it keeps coming to me. It won’t leave me alone. Who was it?’ I was scared I might scream or burst into tears. ‘Who drowned? I need to know the truth.’ I looked at her, slumped in the chair and anxiously pulling at her hair. Why doesn’t she tell me the truth?
She got to her feet and I saw her sway, like she might faint. She held the edge of the table and I heard her breathing hard. Then she pushed out across the kitchen towards the back door.
I saw the knife lying next to the cake. She clocked it too and glanced at me, like she was afraid I might grab it and fling it at the wall. But I just stared at it, knowing I wouldn’t do that again. Something had happened to me on that island – something to do with the seal, something to do with swimming, maybe something to do with Hannu and his magic stories – but I knew there were a lot of things I wouldn’t do again. I sat back in the chair. She stopped and turned round to face me, and she looked so shaken. I spoke again, slower this time. ‘I learnt some things after I learnt to swim. There was a boat, and an accident. There’s a story you never told me.’
She came towards me hesitantly, still eyeing the knife.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. She stared at me warily. ‘I’m not a monster.’ She was still breathing loudly and holding her hand to her chest. I looked at her, at her dark eyes.
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she cried, pressing her hands now over her cheeks. ‘I tried to, Niilo. So many times I wanted to. You didn’t want –’
‘Who drowned?’ I cut over her. ‘Just tell me. Who am I? I’m probably not even Niilo. Who am I?’ I was taking a chance, going on a dream and the thoughts that had flashed into my head when the seal upturned the boat. I half believed I really was mad. I half believed the whole drowning story was made up in my screwed-up brain. Never mind the Wild School. Next thing, I could be carted off to hospital. But the other half believed it was true. It was that half I listened to. ‘Tell me my story,’ I said. I sounded calm. I sounded strong. I remembered my face reflected in the black pool.
‘You are Niilo.’ My mother took her hands away from her face and I saw fingermarks pressed into her flushed cheeks. ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said again.
My whole body was trembling. And though my heart was pounding I was going to listen. I’d taken a risk. Nightmares. A seal. And a feeling deep in my gut. I sat back and stared at her.
She twisted the silver ring on her finger. ‘After it happened, I told you.’ She was whispering so low I could hardly hear. ‘I thought that was the right way, but whenever I mentioned them, you screamed. You clamped your hands over your ears. You couldn’t bear it and I felt so cruel.’
‘Mentioned who?’
She looked at me, her eyes wet dark pools. ‘Them,’ she whispered. ‘But … you were so young, I thought you could start again. And me. So I brought you to Helsinki. It was a long time ago, Niilo. People said how you wouldn’t remember. That it was kinder that way. Kinder to forget.’
‘Who’s them?’
‘Oh, Niilo. Don’t. When I met Kalle you clung to him. You called him Dad. We had a new family and I thought we could start again, here, in Helsinki. You and me. You cried constantly – you nearly drove me mad – and it was Kalle who calmed you down.’
I felt a jabbing pain below my chest, more painful than the emptiness. Hannu was right, I had lost my story, and here it was, after so many secrets and lies, coming back to me. I felt like houses were falling around me. Pillars crumbling. Windows smashing. Ceilings falling in. ‘He’s not my father, is he?’ I felt my throat close up. I nodded to the garden.
‘Not in the blood sense, Niilo. But in every other sense he is. Kalle took me in. He took us in. We were poor souls from up north. We had lost everything. I needed to give us another chance, Niilo. I needed help. He loved us.’
‘So my father drowned?’
She groaned, like someone was ripping that groan out of her throat. ‘Trying to save your twin brother.’
So the visions were right. The buried memories and dreams and nightmares were real. I stared at her. I imagined the seal, remembered how I felt swimming with the seal. I imagined the hands of the seal. And other hands, the ones I always dreamt of. Small hands, drenched with water.
‘You should have told me …’ I felt like I was melting. I wasn’t thirteen. I was three.
She was holding me now, holding my hands. ‘It happened when you were two years old. We don’t remember things that far back. We lived in the far north of Finland, up by the Arctic Circle. Your father often took us fishing – he was half-Sami – and you loved going fishing with him. We had a small boat. The weather was calm. The Baltic was still. You asked to hold an oar. Your father laughed and said you would grow up to be a great fisherman like your grandfather. You held an oar with me, and your brother held an oar with Papa.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Your father’s name was Nilse.’
‘And my brother? My twin? What was his name?’
‘Isku. You loved him so much, Niilo, and I thought I was the luckiest woman in the world – I had two wonderful children, my beautiful boys. By the end of that day I was the unluc
kiest.’ She was sobbing softly now, but kept speaking through the flow of tears. ‘It was a freak wave, Niilo. It came from nowhere. It came over their side of the boat, snatched at their oar. One moment Nilse and Isku were there, laughing and rowing together. The next moment they were gone.’
‘My father drowned?’
‘Yes.’
‘And my twin brother drowned?’
She nodded. I had so many questions. ‘Lapland. We … we’re Lapps?’
‘Your father had Lappish blood. I went north as a young woman to work in a hotel. That’s where I met your father. So, yes, the north is in your blood, Niilo. But listen to me – I did what was best for us. Please understand. Helsinki gave us a home.
‘You took me away. You made us different.’ I let go of her hand and took a step back. ‘Why did you not tell me? Why did you not tell me I had a twin?’
‘Believe me, I did try and tell you – but you couldn’t bear it. So I blotted it out. I tried to start over.’
I was thumping my chest like my twin was right inside me. ‘Why?’
‘Stop it, Niilo. Do you have any idea how painful this is for me? I wanted us to start again. I thought it was for the best and maybe I was wrong. Not a day goes by when I don’t remember.’ Tears coursed down her face.
The story filled the room, like a reindeer: strong, northern. And the feeling of smashed glass inside me wasn’t there any more. In a bizarre way I felt strong. It was better to have a story, even a terrible story, than to have no story at all.
We were quiet for a while, then she reached out and touched my arm. ‘Who has been talking to you? Was it someone from the village up north? Word got around, of course, though there wasn’t even a funeral – the bodies were lost at sea. There was some bad talk. Some cruel people saying it was my fault. Saying I shouldn’t have allowed young children out in the boat. Who told you, Niilo? Who?’ Hysteria rose in her voice.
I didn’t know what to say. A seal? The sea? My dreams? Hannu’s stories? Or that empty feeling inside? I looked at my mother twisting her fingers together, sobbing silently. I could say I had found my birth certificate that she always said was locked away safely. I could, but I was done with lies. I was done with pretending. ‘A seal told me,’ I said, ‘and bad dreams.’
And she nodded, like it wasn’t completely weird, like she remembered her first husband and how he would surely say such things. He would tell her about a time when wild animals and wild dreams could tell us things. A faraway look had come into her tear-stained eyes.
‘You should have told me,’ I said. ‘When I was a bit older. I would have been proud.’
‘I thought the truth would have killed you. I fled to the south, Niilo, with you in my arms. I gave you a new story. Kalle was good and kind to us, and agreed it was for the best. He adopted you as his own, Niilo. Don’t you understand? We had a new family. And for a long while you seemed content. It was only these past two or three years when you … you …’ Her voice trailed off. She took a deep breath and then stretched her arms out towards me. ‘But you’re right, Niilo. You can be proud. Your father was a strong man. He loved you both.’ Then she hugged me and I let her.
I felt a deep wild peace flood through me. I hugged her back. I was proud.
And I had my story.
Chapter Twenty-eight
In Seponkatu 39, they moved around me differently. They didn’t avoid me. Tuomas was always gazing up at me and smiling. ‘I made this to help bring you back,’ Tuomas said, showing me the poster he had pinned up in all the local shop windows. ‘It’s a good photo of you, eh, Niilo?’
It wasn’t, but I nodded. ‘I was only about ten in that photo,’ I told him. Which was around about the age he was, I guessed. Or maybe he was nine? I looked at him, then looked at myself in the mirror.
‘We look alike,’ he said.
That wasn’t true either, though there was maybe some similarity in our jaw and noses. He was my half-brother – I knew that now, and so did he. Mum had bravely sat us all down the night before and told the whole story. About her first husband, Nilse – my father – and my twin, and the far north of Finland, and the boat. And the accident. Tuomas had come up and hugged me after that. And in a strange way, it was all okay.
I ruffled his hair, liking him, ‘You’re not as handsome as I am,’ I said, with a joking mood in my voice, which was a new thing. I always knew I had a sense of humour locked away somewhere, and these days it was beginning to come out. Tuomas laughed. Even if it wasn’t funny, he would have laughed. The truth was out, and it was like everyone could suddenly breathe. ‘We’re half-brothers, remember?’ I told him. ‘And I have Sami blood, which you don’t.’ Tuomas looked at me, wide-eyed. Since my island escape I’d got a lot of wide-eyed admiring looks. ‘Want to go out on the skateboard?’ I said to him. Of course he did. Mum bit her lip and let us. This was new. She’d never trusted me before.
Tuomas was pretty good fun. And there were loads of things I could show him. I had this amazing sense of balance. Thief training isn’t all bad. I had learnt a lot of stuff – like stillness, patience, judgement, speed, invisibility, balance. I told Tuomas all about the circus skills workshop at the Wild School. I didn’t tell him about me going mad and swinging the stilt around. I made the Wild School sound like this exclusive super-cool place for amazingly talented people. I told him I might train to be a mime artist. ‘I wish I could go to the Wild School too,’ Tuomas said.
‘Yeah, I bet you do. We do woodwork, and nature stuff, and they take you out to study the stars and the planets, and you get to milk the goats, and climb trees and go on assault courses. You work outside, and make things. It’s cool.’ I couldn’t believe it, but I was looking forward to going back.
I had been three days at home. I hadn’t smashed anything. Mum and Dad and me had this serious talk about the stealing. ‘Would I be able to return the money to where it came from?’ they asked me. I shook my head – the tourists would be far away by now – so we sent the money to charities and it felt like a huge relief.
I hadn’t slunk out into the town centre to follow my old pursuits, and I promised I never would – the drive I used to have for that was gone. Mostly I did skateboarding with Tuomas, or showed Mum how to make strawberry jam. I think she did know how to make it, but she made out like she didn’t. ‘That’s great, Niilo,’ she said, licking the spoon and saying how it was the best strawberry jam she had ever tasted. Sometimes I just sat around the kitchen in a daze, eating and getting used to this new sensation. It was as if the aching emptiness was no longer there. Sometimes I caught myself humming an old tune, or smiling for no reason. Mum too seemed younger, like a weight had been lifted off her. We went to the bookshop in town and brought back books on the Sami people. We looked at pictures. I felt a strange shifting inside. It made me restless, but not in the old way.
At night I leafed through these books. At the Wild School I had got used to thumbing through books, and I liked it. Just gazing at these snowy northern landscapes took me to a different place. Sometimes my fingers trembled so much I could hardly turn the pages. I pored over the pictures of the Sami people with their high cheekbones – a bit like mine – their dark hair, also just like mine. Okay, I wasn’t full-blood Sami, but you could see a similarity. Hannu had noticed it.
The Sami lived in the snow. They lived with reindeer. They wore colourful embroidered clothes. And they sang. It was that that kept me awake till dawn. Yoiking, it was called. Hannu had first told me about the yoik – the wild song that was a part of you, a deep part. It was the song that knew you, even when you had forgotten who you were. I read that you are given your yoik by someone who knows you well, somebody who understands the yoik. And every yoik is unique, as every person, plant and animal is unique. Even the sea, apparently, has its yoik – its wild song. But so many people have forgotten the songs.
The Sami people live closely with nature. They know it in the way modern man knows his car. They understand how all creatures of the
world are linked together, and when those links are broken the world suffers. People suffer. Loads of what I read was in the past, though. The old traditional Sami way of life has mostly gone. The quad bike has replaced the sleigh, and modern music and television have replaced the yoik. And I felt sad. Because I know what it’s like to lose something that really matters.
The old custom of yoiking is still practised, I read, but nothing like as much as it used to be. The Sami would have a yoik to heal the reindeer, the tree, the elk, the ocean. ‘When you yoik a person they remember who they are. When you yoik the sea,’ a Sami elder said in my book, ‘the sea remembers its origin.’ Reading about the wild song stirred something deep inside me and I felt ancient. Older than the mountains. Older than the lakes. ‘And when you yoik a person they remember who they are.’
I lay on my bed with the Sami book open on my chest. A shiver crept over me and I saw long roads and deep snow. I saw forests and iced-over lakes. I saw stalagmites in yawning caves. I saw myself on a long journey, in search of the forgotten wild songs. The vision faded and I saw the lead singer from CrashMetal stare down at me in the dawn light as the book slipped off my chest and fell onto the floor.
I let it fall. I didn’t need books any more. I had always known I was different. But up until then I had always felt it in an awkward lonely way. Now I felt it in a strong proud way. Things had changed. I had changed. Sure, I would go back to the Wild School soon. Maybe I would be there till I was sixteen. This urge to take off into the wide world soon as I hit fourteen had left me, or at least changed. The Wild School was the wide world. And as far as schools go it is kind of funky. Mum says I can come home every weekend. She says the Wild School isn’t a prison – it’s an alternative kind of education – and I don’t have to go if I don’t want to.
