Things that Fall from the Sky

by Selja Ahava

  Your friend Hamish MacKay

  My dear friend Mr MacKay,

  I hope you are well. I have spent the past few weeks doing up the house. I started restoring the downstairs rooms to their original state. I hired a master carpenter for the job.

  We have discovered twelve layers of wallpaper on some of the walls and five layers of backing paper on the ceiling. I bought a chandelier for the drawing room at auction. The original drawing-room chandelier was itself sold at auction at some point, as was the bulk of the furniture. It was quite a project to transport a chandelier over a metre in length here in a van, never mind clean it one crystal at a time… Well, now it glitters there.

  Apart from the building work, everyday life continues to be a struggle. If I am honest, I only started the whole restoration business in order to achieve something. But now the workmen are doing everything, and I am only called to the scene when there is a problem or when a decision needs to be made. A couple of times I went to ask if an extra pair of hands was needed or if I could do something, but they don’t want me.

  When I go to the workshop, I just stare at the wool and stand there. I forget to go shopping, the car will not start because I forgot to have it MOT’d. Before the summer holidays began, I once forgot to pick the girl up from school. I only woke up when someone from the after-school club rang to say there was a girl there from class 3C and was someone going to collect her?

  I am fifty-four as of yesterday. I stood outside watching the fireworks bought by my brother and I couldn’t find it in myself to be happy. What will happen next year? The girl was hopping about, all enthusiastic about the fireworks, but I would have liked to go and hide indoors.

  I found another couple of new stories and decided to write to you straight away. The first is a sports item(!), the other happens at sea again.

  THE PERFECT JUMP

  When Bob Beamon took part in the men’s long jump at the 1968 summer Olympics, his personal best was 8.33 metres and so he was one of the front runners in the competition.

  The first two rounds failed to yield a result because Beamon overstepped both times. On his third attempt, he performed well and got into the final.

  In the final, Beamon executed a jump that reached the other end of the sandy area. It even overshot the field covered by the optical measuring device, so the distance had to be calculated manually.

  It turned out to be 8.9 metres.

  This improved the long jump world record by over half a metre; previous increases since 1901 had averaged 6 centimetres.

  When the announcer read out the length of the jump, Beamon himself did not understand it because he was used to imperial measurements. When a teammate translated the result for him, Beamon fell to his knees, face buried in his hands, because he was suffering a momentary cataplectic fit.

  Shortly after the jump, it began pouring down at the stadium, making the job of the other finalists more difficult. The East German who got silver jumped 8.19 metres.

  And this is the bit you will like, Mr MacKay: one sports reporter called Beamon a man who had seen lightning. Never had he jumped more than 8.33 metres before his Olympic achievement and never would he jump more than 8.22 metres after those games. Just that once he succeeded in producing the perfect jump.

  Bob Beamon’s world record remained in place for twenty- three years and is still the world’s second-best result today.

  A SEA RESCUE

  In 2014, a fibreglass boat drifted to an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The boat was all scratched up and covered with mussels and other marine creatures. The following items were discovered inside: a waterfowl chick, still alive; a dead turtle; turtle shells; remnants of fish – and a thin, bearded, long-haired man clad only in a pair of threadbare underpants.

  The man was led ashore. He appeared to know only Spanish and when, having drunk a couple of glasses of water, he began to talk, he kept repeating to himself, ‘I feel bad, very bad, I am very far away…’

  He was extremely thin and confused.

  The occupants of the atoll included a Norwegian marine scientist and some local inhabitants. At first, there was no one there who spoke Spanish. The man was taken to the mayor. He introduced himself as José Ivan and said he had set out from Mexico sixteen months earlier. But Mexico was 13,000 kilometres away.

  José Ivan drew the mayor a picture. It showed a boat, with two men inside it. Then he drew an arrow to demonstrate that one of the men had fallen from the boat into the water. He drew turtles, birds and fish. He drew his own hands. He drew rain and turtle blood. He drew a light falling from the sky and a horse running alongside water. He drew children dancing in water with turtle shells. He drew till the point of the pencil snapped.

  The researchers doubted José Ivan’s story. It transpired that José Ivan was a made-up name (the man appeared to have been living in Mexico illegally). It also seemed impossible for him to have drifted 13,000 kilometres in his small boat.

  I found a photo of José Ivan on the internet. It had been taken two weeks after his landing. The man’s hair is short again and his beard has been shaved off. His skin is blotchy and seems to have peeled off in places. The expression in his eyes is joyless. And, Mr MacKay, guess what José Ivan says, according to the caption? ‘I just want to be left in peace.’

  Wishing you a good winter.

  Annu

  Dear Mrs Heiskanen,

  I laughed a lot, reading José Ivan’s story. The man drifts at sea for almost a year and a half, on his own, mostly, not knowing if he’ll ever make it ashore alive, and when he’s finally rescued, he says, ‘I just want to be left in peace’!

  As for everyday life, only you can do it. You and I, we know it’s all make-believe. But it’s still not worth giving up on altogether. That’s what I think. Every day I go to my boat, though I know it’s not really important. Then again, what else have I got? If I weren’t fishing, what else would there be?

  Best wishes,

  Hamish M.

  My friend Mr MacKay,

  Thank you for your latest letter; it was a great help to me. The very next morning I went to my workshop, tidied up and set to work. I started simply: pot holders! They are nicely rectangular, clear in every way. (Find one enclosed within.) A rectangle is a pleasant shape, isn’t it? Anything you can contain within four corners is clear. A little like the frame of a painting. In fact, all the things I make – carpets, wall hangings, pictures, pot holders – are rectangular. Now that I think of it, the rectangle is my favourite shape of all time.

  My niece plays at murder mysteries. She appears to be obsessed with the business of bodies. Lately she has been asking me to draw a line round her. She lies down on the floor, sprawls there as if she has just been stabbed in the back and demands I draw round her with chalk. It is really important to her that the line is unbroken and reflects her actual size. Then she stands up, examines the figure, walks to the other end of the room and dies again. Our library upstairs is currently littered with bodies.

  Annu

  PS the story I am sending this time is from a newspaper. You might think it is not relevant but I could not get it out of my mind. Not so much what happened, but why.

  A WRESTLING MATCH

  Jürgen fell out with his school friends. The boys started wrestling, and Jürgen lost. He was annoyed but went with his friends to a bar. Then he decided to leave, and ran home. He grabbed his father’s guns and returned to the town centre on his scooter.

  Jürgen climbed on to a shop roof and sat down. He listened to some music on his phone, and when the track ended, he looked at the street below through the sight of a small-bore rifle. ‘After watching for a while, I began shooting,’ Jürgen explained to the judge.

  Jürgen fired twenty shots with the small-bore rifle but when no one seemed to take any notice, he swapped it for a hunting rifle. He only stopped when he saw two men fall to the ground.

  ‘Then I ran off. I suddenly got the feeling I wanted to go to sleep,’ Jürgen says. He sle
pt in the woods for a while and then walked home. When he saw the police in front of his house, he went to sit down by the side of the road. That’s where the police found him.

  In court, Jürgen was asked why he began shooting.

  ‘Well, ’cause I lost the wrestling match,’ he answered. ‘That’s all I can say.’

  My friend Hamish MacKay,

  Greetings from Kyoto; I decided to go on a little trip.

  The building works seemed to be getting on fine without me, and I was beginning to get fed up with the pot holders. My brother, who was ill all summer, is feeling a bit better now and is back at work. My niece goes to school by bus now, on her own, so I thought it safe to go away for a while.

  The card shows a park I visited yesterday. The tea I had to drink there was over a hundred years old. Can you imagine!

  I hope you are well. Perhaps you have written during my absence and a letter awaits me at home.

  Regards from your friend Annu

  Dear Mr MacKay,

  These are the boats they use to fish with in Okinawa! I ate lobster yesterday, and when I saw this card on a stand, I decided to send it to you. I wonder if your letter has got lost in the post; my brother said on the phone that no letter has arrived.

  Warm wishes,

  Annu

  My dear friend,

  The first snow has fallen in Finland. It is equally magi-cal every time. Now everything is clean and white, the evenings don’t feel dark and all the unfinished jobs in the garden have been mercifully covered by snow. We shall have to see how long the snow will stay. They have forecast milder weather for next week, which here in the south means a return to slush and darkness. I never got round to tidying the edges of the sand path before the end of autumn, damn it. It takes several days to straighten them with a spade. But what can you do? A lawnmower is no good for that job.

  In The New York Times they gave out on the aeroplane I found the story of Tom Sanders. I was going to send you the whole cutting but I may have accidentally made a compost bag out of it. I record the story here as I remember it.

  THE EARTH SWALLOWED UP A SLEEPING MAN

  28.2.2013, Florida (if I remember rightly). Tom Sanders went to bed at night, as usual. His wife was working the night shift and the children were asleep in their rooms, upstairs from their parents’. At 2.14 a.m., the ground under Tom Sanders’s house unexpectedly gave way. A ten-metre chasm opened up, drawing in the bedroom floor, along with the room’s sleeping occupant, Tom Sanders.

  The children ran downstairs and saw that half of the bottom floor of the house was missing. The neighbours alerted the authorities, who managed to rescue the children from the stairs. The search for Tom Sanders, who had been swallowed up by the ground, began immediately. The family hoped he was caught in a kind of air pocket.

  Twenty-four hours later, the search had to be discontinued because the whole house was in danger of collapsing. The man was never found. The depth of the subsidence was estimated at around ten metres but could not be assessed with any certainty.

  So if the sky and the sea are not reliable, then neither, always, is the ground! Lumps of ice fall, lightning strikes, waves surge, and sometimes the ground quite simply tears itself open.

  I hope you are well and looking after yourself.

  Regards,

  Annu Heiskanen

  My friend Mr MacKay,

  I wish you a merry Christmas. I trust you have not changed address?

  I forgot to tell you in my previous letter about a woman who was sitting next to me on the plane, a retiree. Mrs Judith said that sometimes, what’s most miraculous is when nothing happens. She told me about how, in 1999, she was almost the victim of a bomb attack.

  She was standing at a supermarket checkout when there was a bang by the shop entrance. The security guard standing in the doorway was hit by a cluster of nails and lost both of his eyes. Many others were injured, too. But Mrs Judith was bagging her shopping, ten seconds away from the door.

  I said it was lucky that nothing happened to her.

  So everyone said, she replied. Nothing happened. That’s true. But for years she kept asking herself:

  Why was I in that particular place?

  Why wasn’t I in the other place?

  If the bus hadn’t been late, I wouldn’t have been in that shop then.

  If I had picked another checkout to queue at, I would have been quicker.

  Why was the bus late?

  Why am I where I am at any given moment?

  Why did nothing happen? Why did something nearly happen?

  And she told me she had got stuck. There were no answers. The questions just kept going round in her head, for ages, even after two more bombs had exploded and the right-wing extremist who had planted them had been imprisoned, and the premiere of a play that had been written about him had been performed.

  Annu

  Dear Mrs Heiskanen,

  I’m writing to let you know that my husband Hamish MacKay died on 23 October. In the end it was fate that won this strange, stupid game.

  That stubborn, headstrong man would never put on a life jacket, for all they campaigned here to make us do it. He knew full well how it would end. What he was trying to prove and to whom, God only knows.

  I know Hamish liked getting your letters. He was a literary man. I don’t know where he got that spark, given his parents were what they were. I suppose that’s why he agreed to do the BBC programme – he got to know people who were a bit different. He liked associating with those grand types. I saw it all right.

  I wish you luck in your life. Not too much luck, mind.

  Hamish was buried in Crossbost churchyard.

  Regards,

  Mary MacKay

  A MERMAID SPLASHING

  1

  The screaming wakes me up. What’s the matter with that girl? Why’s she making that noise? She’s quite normal in the day, but it’s like she’s possessed at night.

  Luckily, Pekka gets up. The bed grows cold when he goes upstairs, though.

  If I were here by myself, I wouldn’t go and see her, no way. I’d stay safe inside in my own bed and wait for it to end. It would have to end at some point. What a racket.

  The stairwell’s so cold at night. You’re best off not moving until the heat pump comes on again. At night it’s like the whole house belongs to someone else: definitely not me, anyway.

  There are too many outside doors in this house: one to the front garden and one to the back garden. The cellar and the woodshed have their own doors, too. And you can get in and out through all of them. I want my own way out, a hidey-hole just for me.

  It’s hard to get a grip on the place. The walls and doors have different tenses – something was there, something isn’t there any more, something could be installed there. I hadn’t got the hang of those four outside doors until I was awake one night and I started imagining a fire again.

  Ever since I was a child, I’ve imagined fires when I can’t get to sleep. I make a mental list of the things I’ll take with me and I plan which way I’ll run and wonder if the door handles will be too hot to touch by now. The houses, doors and things have changed over the years, but the fire stays the same. My old flat was on the fourth floor and there I often thought of jumping off the balcony. Should I jump, or should I burn? It’s hard to know until you’re actually in the situation.

  Towards the end of September, the nights started getting colder. I asked Pekka to put a proper latch on the cellar door. I had the feeling something was trying to creep in. Chill or damp or a field mouse. I don’t want anything to come in through that door apart from home-made apple jam.

  And then there are the windows. Once, in summer, I was woken up by a bat flying over the bed! It flew round and round and round, bumping against the lamp every now and then. God! I buried myself under the quilt, head and toes covered, and started shouting. I was yelling in Swedish without even realizing. Pekka took the quilt off me and started massaging my calf, thinking I ha
d cramp again. At last I managed to switch back to Finnish. I’m like, ‘Baaaat!’ at the top of my voice. Pekka only realized then that there was something fluttering above his head. He got up and the bat came down. I squeezed myself against the bed as flat as I could. I think I screamed.

  Pekka swiped at the bat with a scarf and managed to get it to drop down on to the floor. It was hissing and snapping inside the material. It even tried to bite him. In the end Pekka lifted the bundle up towards the window and threw it out.

  ‘Poor thing, it must have been terrified,’ Pekka said as he closed the window.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. He felt sorry for the bat. Somehow, I had behaved childishly, but the poor bat was terrified, landing in this strange place.

  The girl’s so quiet in the day. I don’t know what goes on in her head, and she’s not telling. She stares ahead, alone with her thoughts, and just snorts when I try to ask her anything. Nothing really gets a rise out of her.

  Sometimes it’s sort of creepy, how calmly they sit together. I remember the cleaning day, before the move, when they were shoving things into rubbish bags. Not a word, no crying, either: nothing. They just stuffed the old things into black sacks. They worked in silent agreement. But it made me shiver. The girl was chucking away all the board games, all the soft toys, all the cartoons on DVD, all the old clothes. I tried to say we could take the stuff to the recycling centre but they just wanted to get rid of it all, so we drove to the dump.

  I hadn’t even been to a dump before. You can’t get to one if you don’t have a car. I didn’t know a dump was like the top of the world. The road winds up a slope. We followed other cars, each carrying a loaded trailer. And at the top, the sky opens. The scenery stretches out in all directions; the motorway roars somewhere below. On top of the mountain of rubbish is a rumbling and rustling, and every so often everything is drowned out by the screech of breaking glass as a whole load of shards gets tipped out on to the ground.