by Selja Ahava
‘Oh, where are we moving?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere.’ Mum laughed. ‘We’ll never move from here! We’ve got too many projects to finish.’
Dad laughed, though it didn’t sound like a laugh. Then he wrote Saara next to the picture Mum had drawn.
‘Oh, but aren’t you big?’ Mum sighed, looking at me and the picture in turn. ‘Are you really that big?’
‘You did draw round the edges,’ Dad said, but he sounded surprised himself.
I went to stand next to the picture, to prove the point.
Then I went to get my own felt tips and coloured in the picture’s clothes: turquoise tights and a stripy top. I also drew eyes, cheeks, a mouth and hair bobbles. I thought, this is what’s best about renovation days! Bread eaten standing up, sharp objects pushed into sockets, walls decorated with felt tips and space to dance in the living room.
Mum and Dad started on a panelling job. Dad sawed planks in the backyard and Mum carried them in through the porch door. Dad used a spirit level, a tape measure and a pencil; Mum just her eyes and a hammer. After three planks, they started on a renovation argument. Though Mum and Dad always did renovation work together, they always thought the other one did it wrong. This time Mum started it because she thought it was stupid to use a spirit level in an old wooden house where all the floors, walls and corners were all wonky anyway. Dad thought Mum didn’t do anything properly and never finished anything she started, leaving him to patch up all her unfinished jobs. The quarrel was always the same, because neither of them changed their way of doing things. This time Mum was annoyed just because Dad had recently bought a new spirit level.
Even so, we had new, light, wood-panelled walls by the evening. No one had the energy to look at them properly, though, because it was dark in the room by then and everyone was too tired. But in the morning, Mum came downstairs and saw Dad had tidied up before going to bed. Mum smiled at the new white walls, and inside the wall, in my tights and a stripy top, I smiled, too. Then Mum decided to make pancakes for the whole family.
MUM IN THE MORNINGS. In the mornings, Mum wears glasses and she walks straight to the coffee machine. She only goes for a wee once she’s pressed the button. Her thin dressing gown billows as she crosses the living room and opens the curtains. Mum opens the window, or, if it’s a warm summer morning, the porch door, and says, ‘Ah.’
That’s what Mum’s like in the mornings.
9
In fairy tales, maidens are confined, and then a birch tree grows out of the wall. Mum told me it once happened in real life.
There’s no room for maidens in the sawdust walls. Once, I found a handmade wooden boat in the sawdust in the attic, and another time, a salt cellar shaped like a girl, and I’ve pushed apple seeds into a crack in the wall, but nothing grew from them.
Having peered beyond a socket, I knew that even though nothing grew from the seeds, all sorts of other things go on inside walls. There are passages, and wires snaking from downstairs upwards, and from one room to another, a bit like veins. The wires are brown and blue, and they run between light switches, sockets and lamps, and they’re dangerous because you can pierce them with a drill. There are red and blue water pipes, too, and they can freeze even if they are red.
Apart from electrical wires, the sawdust walls contain old doorways and the ghosts of cupboards, and you can find out where they are by knocking. They’re a bit like the scars of the house. In the hall wall you can see where the house ended, once upon a time – now, the passage to the bathroom starts here. Upstairs, you can see a door-shaped panel – you used to get to a balcony that way. The wallpaper tears where the doorways are, because winter makes the chipboard sheets shift.
Once, Dad got red spots on his thighs and he thought we had brought back bedbugs from our holiday. He took all the mattresses, quilts, pillows and clothes into the sauna and turned the heat up. He sprayed large quantities of insect poison into the cracks in the bedroom walls and floor and smeared the bed legs with a thick layer of Vaseline. The mattresses baked in the sauna all that day and night, and groggy spiders crawled out of the walls, staggering along the wallpaper and dropping on to the bare bases of the beds. Mum was furious with Dad. No bedbugs were ever found.
MUM’S VOICE. When Mum’s fuming, her voice comes up from her tummy and her whole chest rings out. Once, she managed to prise fighting dogs off each other, she shouted so loud.
Mum coughs. That’s Mum’s voice when she’s on her own. Dad thinks Mum suffers from a dust allergy, but Mum doesn’t think so. Mum’s speech is soft and low, especially when she’s telling a story. Once, my friend got Mum on the phone and thought she was a man. Sometimes, Mum mumbles. That’s when she’s got pins in her mouth.
That’s what Mum’s voice is like.
Occasionally, some sawdust gets dislodged and falls through the gap in the ceiling on to the pillow, because there are lots of places where the gaps aren’t covered. At night, you can hear the sawdust shifting on its own, and things stirring, alive. Caterpillars tick, squirrels dig, wasps scratch at paint. In winter, frost makes the timbers tighten, and snow presses against the door of the shed, making it stick. Spring sets off tapping and popping on the roof; sometimes the noises go on for several nights before anything happens. The roof pre-pares for an attack, like an army: it moves and drips quietly. Then, finally, comes the night when the mass of ice that has formed on the roof works itself loose: it begins to move, a single sheet hundreds of kilos in weight, to slide, rumbling, down the tin roof. The chunks of ice fall past the windows on to the ground. The din is so great that, for a moment, I think the world is coming to an end.
The loosening of the ice is followed by silence. The house is full of silence; the walls rise from wintry heaviness; the shed door opens again. There are heaps of icy bodies outside. Dad goes to hack at them with a spade.
10
MUM IN THE APPLE TREE. In autumn, the three apple trees of Sawdust House fill with apples. Mum goes outside every morning with a bowl and picks up the fallen fruit. Then she asks me to stand guard while she climbs up the tree. Mum stands where a branch forks in two, and shakes. At first, she looks clumsy, but after she’s been there for a bit, shaking, she gets the knack of being in the trees again. She smiles and becomes lighter, and the branches catch her power. The grass says, bump, bump when the apples thud down. I’ve got to watch where they fall. The tree sways and rustles, and underneath Mum there’s thudding.
The kitchen smells of apple. Mum peels, slices, fills the dehy-drator, bags apple crisps, boils jam and freezes purée.
Wasps buzz in the windows; they’re big and sluggish. A sound-less cloud of fruit flies bursts out every time you lift the lid of the compost bucket.
In the evenings, when I’m in bed and Mum’s stroking my cheek, her hands smell of apple jam.
That’s what Mum’s like in the apple tree.
MUM ALIVE. Mum clears the vegetable patch. She wants to get the soil warm as soon as possible. She turns the earth over with a spade and puts covers on top of it, even though Dad thinks she could just wait another two weeks. Mum’s wearing a straw hat, and she waves as Dad and I go off to buy new summer tyres for the car. She stands there, leaning on the spade, hat a bit crooked, waving. She’s wearing muddy gardening gloves.
That’s what Mum’s like alive.
That’s what Mum was like when she was alive.
We eat ice creams as the tyres are being exchanged. The old tyres aren’t thrown away – they’re piled on to the back seat, because Mum’s going to use them to build a pyramid at the edge of the garden, then fill it with earth and plant strawberries there. Because the back seat is filled with tyres, I’m allowed to sit in the front.
We drive into the front garden.
Dad picks up two of the old tyres from the back seat and starts carrying them into the garden. I follow him. We plan to wash the tyres and then help Mum fill them with earth. Mum’s shown us a picture of a strawberry pyramid in a magazine.
There are five stone steps at the corner of the house.
‘Look, Dad. Ice,’ I say, pointing at the crushed ice on the steps.
‘Can’t be,’ Dad replies. ‘Maybe Mum’s broken a glass?’
I pick up a piece. It’s cold and wet, bluish.
Just then Dad reaches the top step, and a scream escapes from his mouth. The tyres drop and roll down the steps towards me. Dad looks at the garden and then at me. His eyes are huge and white; his mouth is open. When he shouts, I see teeth.
‘No, Saara! Don’t look!’
The first tyre hits my knee; the second rolls past me. Dad stumbles, on the tyres and me. My leg hurts, and my bottom, and my elbow.
‘Don’t look, Saara, don’t look, don’t look, Saara, nonono…’
His eyes are scaring me. I cry, but Dad doesn’t comfort me, Dad roars, Dad calls for help, we fall on the steps and I’m in pain. Dad yanks me by the wrist, away, away, away, though I’m not on my feet and my arm feels like it’s being ripped off.
‘You mustn’t look!’ Dad screams. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but Dad screams the same thing again and again, tearing at my hand all the time.
We run, I don’t know where, it goes on all day and night and the whole of the following week. ‘No no no!’ Dad’s still shouting when the police come, people come. I don’t know where we are, why Dad keeps screaming. Someone shakes him, so hard that in the end he throws up.
11
At school, we were told about Lot’s family. The angels said to them, ‘Go, but don’t look back. We’ll do a Bad Thing to these people. We’ll rescue you, but you mustn’t see what happens.’ And then Lot’s family started running away, but Lot’s wife didn’t believe the angels and looked back. And she saw the terrible Bad Thing the angels were doing to the people, and she turned into a pillar of salt. Lot’s wife turned into a pillar because she couldn’t bear what she saw. The teacher said the transformation was magic performed by angels, but I know now that you can freeze into a pillar without magic. It’s enough that you see something you can’t bear.
There are things that don’t go away with time. They don’t dim, soften or fade into memories. They stay as hard and as big as ever. They stand like a pillar in a person’s stomach and chest and boom there. They may be forgotten, but when they come back to your mind, they are always now, and always equally big, as if they were happening right now.
The angels do Bad Things. Sometimes they give advance warning, sometimes they don’t.
That day, Dad’s mind received such a bad image that it will never be deleted. That image got in through Dad’s eyes to his brain and destroyed a spot there. Every time something reminds him of that morning, the morning is here again. I didn’t get the image because Dad pushed me away just in time. Dad said sorry for hurting my leg and bottom and elbow. Bruises heal, but images that reach the brain don’t. Dad got a lump of salt inside him, and broke.
I never saw Mum again.
A week after Mum’s death, I was allowed to go and see the garden with Auntie Annu and a policeman. There was a hole in the porch. Mum’s garden spade had been taken away. There was a large stain on the ground, a bit like a snow angel, and a line in the soil traced by heels. It was Mum’s place: the last trace of Mum, like the print of a wet bottom on a sauna bench before it evaporates.
‘Well, then, how about…?’ the policeman said, drawing me away. He was large and sweaty, and seemed uncomfortable.
There was no ice left. The garden looked as it did before. The ice had gone through the porch and Mum, then melted away.
Inside, in the kitchen, there were more police officers. No one said anything. None of them wanted me to ask anything.
Auntie Annu held my hand. She was carrying a bag in the other hand, with clothes for Dad and me in it. She squeezed my hand with her own, which was roughened by wool and water, and said, ‘We’ll be off, then.’
‘We’ll be in touch if there’s anything else…’ said the large, sweaty policeman. He had no intention of gathering us all together in the living room and revealing the truth. He wouldn’t stay behind for blackcurrant juice. He didn’t want to explain. He wanted to go.
The officers walked out of the front door in a line.
Auntie locked up Sawdust House.
12
The morning after Mum’s death, Auntie Annu came to see us. We were in hospital, because Dad had been put under sedation there. A bed had been made up for me next to him.
That morning, the door opened and Auntie Annu walked in. She looked us straight in the eye, walked across the room and gave us each a long hug. She was the first person to look me in the eye after Mum’s death. Her eyes were like two holes you could see in through, but she still didn’t look past me.
‘You’re coming to the manor house,’ Auntie Annu said. She started collecting our things. ‘You’ll stay until next week, at least.’
Dad didn’t answer. He did get up and put on his shoes, though.
I started jumping, because it felt so good that someone had come to get us and had looked us in the eye.
Dad slumped back on to the bed and took me in his arms. I would have liked to comfort Dad and say something, but I couldn’t. I made a tortoise out of Dad’s fingers. You leave the ring finger at the bottom and bend all the other fingers over it. Then, finally, you push the thumb inside the shell. After I had folded the fingers of both hands, Auntie put our bag on her shoulder and said quietly, ‘Let’s go.’
Dad carried me into the car and sat next to me on the back seat. The tortoises fell apart. Dad held on to his head as if he were afraid it would come loose and fall off. The whole time, Dad kept saying, ‘It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense.’
Auntie gave him a pill from a bottle the nurse had pre-scribed, and after a bit, Dad’s words slowed down and he leaned his head against the window.
That’s how we moved into the manor house. Auntie made some spicy soup and said we had to eat a little bit every day. After the first night, she drove to Sawdust House, packed a bag with clean clothes and toys she found in a cupboard, and wellies that were too small. She brought a board game, too, but no one wanted to play.
Auntie Annu is Dad’s big sister, and she looks after Dad, even though she teased him as a child. When she was little, she cheated Dad out of chocolates and once left him on his own in the park. But she looked us in the eye and brought us home.
At school, the teacher told the class that my mother had died. Then my classmates were allowed to ask questions. I don’t know what they asked, because I wasn’t there. I had already heard enough questions, from the police, the nurse and Dad.
Then my classmates were allowed to draw. I saw the drawings at the spring fete. The teacher passed round handicrafts and drawings for pupils to take home, but Mum’s death pictures stayed in a separate pile on her desk. They showed aeroplanes breaking into pieces in the sky, or crashing against a wall, or dropping a bomb. Someone had drawn a woman being hit on the head by a box. She had two crosses for eyes and her tongue was sticking out.
These drawings were not handed out or taken home. What could you do with drawings like that? Even my teacher couldn’t find a use for them. That’s why they stayed there on the desk.
Time stopped. I couldn’t think forwards or backwards. Someone drew a thick white line round our thoughts, and the thoughts stopped, and we got stuck there.
Every day was its own separate day that didn’t lead to anything. And every day was like the previous one. Auntie woke us up in the morning, forced us to eat three times a day and put us to bed at night. I can’t remember what the food was, but it stuck in my throat and was hard to chew. My chin was tired and I chewed so hard my last milk tooth started wiggling. Dad cried into his coffee. His tears dripped on to the surface of the black liquid. Otherwise, nothing happened.
A silence fell around Dad and me. The shopkeeper lady and the PE teacher, who was on summer holiday, hugged me on a shop
ping trip, but no one said anything. I remember the shop lady felt soft, and she squeezed me harder than I had expected. The PE teacher looked soft, too, because she was on summer holiday and she was wearing a dress and had flowers for her balcony in her shopping basket. Well, well, the grown-ups said again, all you can do is, what can you say, yes. Let’s hope time will heal. But time-heals was a pile of shit, and it was useless, anyway, because time wasn’t moving, and we were stuck.
Then words ran out. All that remained were sweaty policemen and classmates clutching coloured pencils.
13
Mum often read fairy tales. She had a whole row of fairy-tale books on the shelf.
But the stories remained unfinished in the evening. The next day we started a new one because we had lost the book-mark or forgotten which story we were reading.
It didn’t bother Mum; she wasn’t interested in endings.
‘The endings are always the same,’ Mum said. ‘The prince and princess get married and the murderer goes to prison. The interesting stuff happens before that.’
Mum also added her own elements. Sometimes she skipped over the dull bits; sometimes she went off on inven-tive tangents. I never spotted the exact point at which Mum moved off the page of the book – it was only afterwards I’d realize: no way is this the actual story.
‘One day, a prince rode to the scene. He saw the dead maiden in the glass coffin, and his heart was filled with love for this unknown girl. The prince asked the dwarfs to open the coffin lid. “She’s started to smell,” the dwarfs warned him –’
‘Mum! It doesn’t say that.’
‘The prince bent over to kiss Snow White, and indeed, the maiden’s breath smelled quite foul, and the prince hesitated –’
‘Mum!’
‘ “Shame I didn’t bring a toothbrush and mouthwash for her to gargle,” the prince mused.’
