Things that Fall from the Sky

by Selja Ahava

  That evening, Pekka showed me a circular hatch on the side of the wood stove. When you open it, you find an empty tuna-fish tin in the flue. You pour a drop of lighter fuel in and leave it burning in the flue for a quarter of an hour. Then the chimney warms up and starts drawing.

  Today, as I was going through the washing, I found three pairs of bloodstained knickers in the laundry basket. The small scrunched-up bundles had been pushed right to the bottom.

  I went to the bathroom, where Pekka and the girl were brushing their teeth. I don’t know why they always do that at the same time, but that’s the habit they’ve got into. Neither of them locks the toilet door – they walk in just like that even though someone else might be in there already. Sometimes the girl comes in to brush her teeth while I’m in the middle of doing a wee. Sometimes all three of us have our morning wash at the same time. ‘Not enough room in here,’ says the girl. I’ve half a mind to say, ‘It’s not really meant to hold a crowd.’ Sometimes I lock the door but that seems to blow their minds. They’re all like rattling the handle and asking if you’re doing a poo! They can’t seem to get it into their heads that you might just want to wash your face in peace.

  ‘Have you started your periods?’ I ask.

  ‘S’pose,’ the girl answers through toothpaste.

  Pekka looks at the girl and then at me, and finally at the scrunched-up knickers in my hand. He’s got a surprised expression on his face.

  The girl spits and gargles.

  ‘Your daughter has started her periods,’ I say to Pekka. And then, all of a sudden, I feel like crying. I don’t know where that’s come from; I just carry on clutching the knickers.

  Pekka stands there with the towel against his cheek, glancing at both of us in turn. Clearly, he doesn’t know what to do.

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he asks the girl then.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answers.

  ‘Surely you could have told us,’ I say.

  I feel so sad. Doesn’t she dare talk to us? Doesn’t she like being here? Does she miss her mum? How can I breathe some life into her?

  ‘You can talk to us about anything,’ I say, and again I feel like crying. Who am I to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t talk about? I’m ashamed. I don’t even glance at Pekka. Please, someone, say that to me. Go on, tell me everything, you can tell me everything.

  ‘Get dressed and we’ll go shopping,’ I say to the girl. Then I hand Pekka the washing.

  ‘Put them to soak, will you. Do you remember what towels Hannele used?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just thought…I don’t want to intrude…’

  ‘Are you saying there’s something…hereditary about it?’

  ‘No, no,’ I answer.

  Pekka looks at the shelf. Then he shakes his head. ‘They went to the dump. It might have been a purple pack?’

  The girl and I get ready to go. She agrees to come with me and even allows me a little hug. She ties my shoelaces because I can’t reach them myself any more.

  Pekka stays behind in the bathroom to do the laundry. I look at his back as he stands in front of the washbasin.

  6

  ‘Good-bye, feet! Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can.’

  In the last few days, I’ve been thinking back to Alice in Wonderland, a book we had on the shelf when I was a child. In the story, Alice went into the Rabbit’s house to fetch his fan and white gloves, but while inside, Alice got it into her head to drink from a bottle she found on the table. Then she began to grow. In the end she grew so big that she got stuck inside the house. The Rabbit raged outside and threatened to set the house on fire.

  In the book’s black-and-white illustrations, Alice was ugly, with a big head. She wore children’s clothes but her face looked adult. And when she spoke, I felt like covering my ears or shutting my eyes because she drifted from one thing to another at random and annoyed everyone. Something about those pictures frightened me and made me feel sick, but I still kept looking at them.

  There’s one that sticks in my mind: Alice’s neck stretched like a turkey’s. She was like a plasticine creature who has been grabbed by the head and ankles and stretched out. Only, she wasn’t made of plasticine but muscle and bone. A gigantic, slithery thing with a horrified expression on her face. Her hair stood on end; the collar of her blouse was straining. Why was it so repulsive that someone’s body was different from your own? My own neck tingled and bile rose to my throat. I felt in my own spine how Alice’s vertebrae tightened and her skin stretched.

  ‘Stupid girl! Get out, straight away, or I’ll set the house on fire!’ the Rabbit was shouting outside his house. By now, Alice had expanded to fill the living room. A gigantic child’s arm stuck out of one downstairs window. From another there was a leg sticking out, covered by a knee-high sock. The Rabbit was throwing kindling into the house.

  Such a nasty, foolish animal. Can’t people be whatever size or shape they want to be? I thought of the doctor exam-ining the ultrasound image. What right did he have to stand there and throw kindling as if you could just undo a baby just like that? What could I do about it not being the ‘right’ size and appearance?

  Everybody was nasty to Alice the whole time. It wasn’t her fault that she had grown so fast and got stuck. She only went in because she wanted to help.

  Maybe we all end up in places where we’re too big and can’t move at some point. And not all of us will have pieces of cake in our pocket so we can shrink to the size the doctor says is OK.

  7

  ‘Look what we’ve got!’ Pekka says, still with his coat on. He starts piling parcels on to the kitchen table, different sizes, all wrapped in bloody paper. There’s a strong smell in the air.

  The girl and I move closer.

  ‘It doesn’t get fresher than this, I tell you. Can’t get this down the shop. This is ethical and organic and locally sourced and damn good.’ Pekka starts opening the parcels, all enthusiastic.

  The mutton is dark and thick and the sheep smell of it is really pungent. Bones stick out here and there. Shoulder, kneecap, ribs.

  ‘Annu’s decided to spend the spring in Scotland. Don’t ask me why. She’s had the sheep slaughtered. A friend of hers is driving around the whole province at the moment, distributing meat to people Annu knows.’

  ‘I thought we were going to have the sheep here, in our garden,’ the girl says from the doorway, to where she’s retreated, having seen the parcels.

  ‘What do you mean, here? We don’t even have a decent fence,’ Pekka replies. He doesn’t register the girl’s expression.

  ‘What have we got here?’ I ask.

  ‘A whole sheep,’ Pekka answers.

  ‘Which sheep?’ the girl asks, but Pekka doesn’t respond.

  He’s opened all the parcels and the table’s covered with meat. He puts the pieces in order: neck, ribs, shoulder, roasting meat, sirloin, tenderloin, shanks. Mince he places in the middle, as if forming a stomach. There it is: a sheep cut to pieces.

  ‘We were supposed to get Bruno!’ the girl shouts. She bursts into tears and stomps upstairs.

  ‘Well, we didn’t really…’ Pekka starts. He stops because the girl has already disappeared. ‘Oh dear.’

  Pekka fetches a carving knife and a chopping board. He marches between table and cupboards as if excited by the smell of the blood and the meat.

  ‘We should really chop them into smaller pieces before they go in the freezer,’ he declares, handing me the kitchen scissors. ‘You could take off the membranes; this one hasn’t been trimmed terribly well, from the look of it.’

  Then he pushes a lump of meat towards me. It’s still got blood in the creases. The membrane shines, rainbow-coloured.

  Pekka’s knife grinds into bone as I cut. The smell of bloody meat fi
lls the kitchen.

  I try not to think about muscles and the order all these pieces were in under the skin. I cut into the red meat and try not to think of the small, splashing creature who lacks a kidney and a rectum and God knows what else. I try not to think about how it’s been put together: what sort of lumps and the order they’re in. I think of rosemary, garlic, salt and potatoes. I think of a chicken. It’s white and slimy and doesn’t smell.

  When I was little, my favourite parts of the chicken were the cheeks. The two soft pieces of meat at the bottom of the chicken were what I called ‘cheeks’. Dad took them off for me with his fingers; they plopped out of their sockets like eyes and they were deliciously tender as they’d been simmer-ing in the juice of the meat. I don’t know what part of the chicken the cheeks actually were. They weren’t cheeks, of course, because the whole head was missing. I expect they were in the chicken’s back, near the tail or the neck; I don’t know which. Maybe they were the flight muscles.

  Everything’s all mixed up, topsy-turvy. I bump into door frames, I shove kindling into the wrong holes and even my own shoelaces disappear from view. I looked up images of embryos on the internet. The worst were like chickens. There was nothing identifiable about them, whichever way you looked at them, from the top or bottom.

  The girl doesn’t come down to eat in the evening. She sulks in her room, refusing to answer when Pekka goes to the door to talk to her.

  8

  The girl was at school and Pekka at work. I started watching the execution of American aid workers on the internet. On the news, they only show the initial image and then say the rest has been cut. I suppose I just wanted to see what it looked like.

  Of course, I should have realized that when a clip lasts for three minutes and sixteen seconds, it’s not going to be instant. They call it ‘beheading’ so I was thinking of those films where the axe swings once and the head falls. I went on clicking and clicking and just couldn’t stop. The clips had captions in Arabic and also Spanish because some of the material belonged to Mexican drug gangs. There were knives, swords and chainsaws. There were orange overalls and heads dangling by the hair. There were family men and black flags. There were bones, tendons and T-shirts. God help us, there was music.

  Luckily Pekka is the first to come home.

  The baby splashes about, kicking vigorously; maybe the videos upset it, too.

  Pekka: ‘What’s going on here?’

  Me: ‘A man’s head was being cut off.’

  Pekka: ‘Where? What with?’

  Me: ‘On the computer. With a knife.’

  Pekka: ‘What is this about, Krista…?’

  Me: ‘It wasn’t a quick job, either. And another man was on his knees next to him, waiting for his turn.’

  Pekka: ‘What made you go and watch something like that?’

  Me: ‘Three minutes sixteen seconds.’

  Pekka: ‘Come on, darling…’

  I’ve got to go to the toilet and throw up. When I come back to the kitchen, Pekka has switched off the computer. He looks at me from the other side of the room. He looks me in the eye. He takes hold of my face and looks. I struggle to make my eyes stop moving. My head swings as if it couldn’t stay still. Stop, I tell my head, don’t disappear. Don’t roll down, head.

  ‘It’s so terrible…’ I begin.

  ‘Hush,’ Pekka says.

  ‘Why did I go and watch something like that?’

  ‘Hush.’

  In bed, I lie in Pekka’s arms for a bit. We do that every night. Pekka fiddles with my hair and my hand rests on his chest.

  ‘We once had a visit from a policeman at the manor,’ Pekka says softly. ‘He came in civilian clothing but he showed me his identity card when he introduced himself. He was one of the ones who were here when Hannele died. He said he was very sorry, and he’d leave straight away if I wanted him to. He asked to see a photo of Hannele.’

  Pekka sighs.

  ‘He was having nightmares. And he thought he might feel better if he knew what Hannele had looked like when she was alive. There we sat on the sofa, the constable and me, looking at photos. I showed him the album with the pictures of our summer in Lapland and some photos taken at home here. Renovation stuff, things like that. The constable lived in a similar sort of place, so we had a long chat about loft insulation and the best way to divide the upstairs into three rooms. He had an interesting idea about it and he drew me a plan in a notebook. Then finally he said thank you, stood up and went. And he never came back, so perhaps the photos did help.’

  Pekka stares up at the ceiling. He’s got an intense look of concentration on his face. As if a big plaster were being removed from a hairy spot.

  During the night, I’m woken up by a distant shout. This time, it doesn’t come from upstairs, but from inside my head. The voice shouts, ‘Off with her head! Off with her head! I’ll behead each one of you!’

  And then someone swings a flamingo whose beak has been taped shut. The bird’s skull knocks against a croquet ball.

  ‘How can you cut off a head when the body’s missing?’ asks the Cheshire Cat, whose head floats down on to the croquet field.

  ‘Of course you can. You have a neck! And if you have a neck, it can be cut!’ the Queen shouts. ‘Execute that cat and if my command is not obeyed immediately, I sentence everyone present to headlessness!’

  A flamingo is pushed into my arms. I try to take hold of its body but its legs are sticking out all over the place, its feathers are flying about and its neck is all limp. I don’t want to hit the ball. The bird, silenced by the tape, stares at me upside down.

  ‘Are you going to hit it, or shall I?’ the Queen shouts. And without waiting for an answer, she hits.

  Pekka is asleep.

  I wish I could go somewhere, ring someone’s doorbell, ask to look at photos.

  9

  I go for a walk after the check-up. The health centre is next to a forest with a running track. At this time of day, I can waddle in peace: the track is empty of joggers, or dogs, or ponies from the riding stables.

  I went to the antenatal group three times. We talked about our expectations of giving birth, compared baby equipment, discussed breastfeeding. All the women were nice, and we all had bumps of about the same size.

  I don’t know why I had to tell them. I hadn’t even plucked up the courage to tell Pekka at that point, although I knew I should have. But as everyone shared their own feelings about pregnancy and motherhood, it suddenly seemed possible. As if something in me had waited for a moment when it was all right to say it, and then it came.

  And so on the third occasion I said that our baby’s limbs had grown together like a tail and it wasn’t certain how long it would live. I listed the body parts and organs it lacked.

  The other mothers asked how I dared to give birth to a child like that. The mothers asked if we hadn’t had a nuchal translucency scan performed. They said I was really strong and they probably wouldn’t be able to do what I was doing. But I realized they pitied me. Suddenly, the other mothers didn’t want to hear about what kind of baby carrier I was thinking of getting and what I thought of co-sleeping. Suddenly, they were all at pains to make clear that their sit-uations and their babies were totally different from mine. Their babies were normal and ours wasn’t. One woman started crying because she thought the death of a baby was such a terrible thing. Really, you shouldn’t even talk about it, in case you catch the bad luck.

  ‘Our baby isn’t dead,’ I would have liked to say. ‘It hasn’t been born yet. And not all of them die.’ I didn’t say how many didn’t, but they didn’t ask, either. No one wanted to look at the ultrasound picture and admire the button-nosed sweetie. And when it was time to choose a partner for neck massage, the woman who had said you mustn’t talk about the death of a baby suddenly turned away, as if death could spread from my neck to her hands.

  Late autumn is so quiet. The birds, the flies and the leaves have gone. There’s not a sound. Over there I can see a ch
anterelle poking out, but I leave it – I can’t be bothered to stuff it into my handbag.

  Is there no one here?

  The ancient Greeks used to lower the gods on to the stage when the plot of a play got into a knot and the characters weren’t able to work it out themselves. Gods in white clothing in their little box, descending creakily to the middle of the stage with the help of a rope. There they could declare judgement. It wasn’t thought to be quite as skilful an ending as one where the characters solved their problems themselves, but it was better than nothing.

  I walk a kilometre. Then, without warning, a rushing begins. A wave rising, rising in the middle of this silent forest, and suddenly I’m invaded by the feeling that everything is crumbling. I won’t stay in one piece; I’ll trickle into this shrubbery and all that will remain is a wet patch. Now I make a sound; I pant in the forest. What does that sound like? I find it hard to grasp. How come I’m here, all alone? Help. Help me. I stand there – no, here – in the middle of a sawdust path, and I can’t even take hold of a pine trunk. I stand here – it is here, I’m so totally here – and I don’t know what will happen now. I’m totally here, because there may not be anything else.

  Everything is crumbling.

  I hold so much water, an entire ocean. The sharp rocks on the shore stab my sides. Sometimes a whole cliff will crumble into the ocean and people will come rushing with their buckets to dig for fossils.

  I’m so totally here; everything else has gone.

  How can one baby need so many litres? Salt water pushes through my skin and rises to my lungs in waves. A sea creature kicks inside me. The rushing is so loud. Lower the gods! I try to carry on walking but the water rises up from my stomach. I stop by the exercise equipment to gasp for oxygen. Maybe my womb has torn and the water has flowed into my whole body. I press my hand against my mouth to prevent the ocean from coming out.

  The baby must have water.

  Water’s good.