The Old Church 3

Dad wanted a boy

Dad wanted a boy

† † †

YOU COULDN’T SEE A DAMN THING

HANGING FROM A DARK HOOK

DIRTY SNOUT

SHE DOESN’T EVEN WEAR DEODORANT

LIKE DOGS

EVERYTHING COMES OUT

THE KNIGHT IS CUNNING

SAVE MY NUMBER

† † †

Slate floor, maybe shale, cold. So uneven that if you’re not careful, you trip.

I don’t even know where to start explaining. The dining room is so huge, how big is this farm? From outside with all that fog you couldn’t see a damn thing, we must be at the center.

Enormous aspen trunks serve as beams for the pitched roof, but there’s more. A gigantic English oak, sawn vertically in half, stands in the middle of the room, serving as a table. The roots are to the south and what was once the crown points north, aimed at an enormous red brick fireplace.

Three plates, cutlery, glasses. Two on one side, the guest opposite. In the fire, a riveted steel cauldron hanging from a dark hook.

How long is this thing? Twenty meters? I ask the Knight who’s showing me the way: how many people fit in here?

— Quite a few. You know, we’re a fairly large community.

— Too bad the hall only fills up at Christmas now, and not even completely, the fat guy interrupts, bringing some baskets of bread to the table.

— Fortunately, you mean.

Pelle lifts his eyes from the table, and meets Riikka’s, and they stay there for a few seconds.

Urgency. Preparation.

I have time to run my fingers over the dry grain of the table.

Silence.

Strange. Wood has memory, it forgets nothing. Why won’t it talk to me?

Who are these people?

I go over to face the fireplace, the fat guy passes by on his way back to the kitchen, and I go to admire what’s boiling in the cauldron. A dark, fragrant, bubbling mass. Thyme, bay leaves and juniper berries. Above the fireplace, a ram’s head, taxidermied. Mute gaze, twisted horns.

Dirty snout.

— Meet Puka, the family ram.

— What did he do to end up up there?

— He did nothing at all. He was struck by lightning along with twenty other sheep, they all died. He was just unlucky. We put him up there as a sign of affection.

— And what happened to the other twenty? Didn’t you love them?

— In my family we tend to give importance to the males.

Riikka smells very different from her sister. Elli smelled of pleasant hair conditioner, and her body had a trace of lavender. With Riikka, fabric softener dominates, light, you can tell her body is neutral, she doesn’t even wear deodorant. I sense the shift: acrid, acidic, unsettling.

† † †

Smell of wild meat, almost a stench, but in your mouth it literally melts, it’s exquisite. Wild boar, Pelle told me, hunted by old Timo. They say the name as if it were a given, immutable, but I have no idea who he is.

On the table, a pitcher of milk, one of beer, a bottle of ice-cold colorless liquid. Water, presumably. I pour myself a glass, bring it to my lips: it’s Kossu. Riikka watches me with the firelight sparkling in her pupils, and while I hold the glass mid-air she fills hers and fills Pelle’s.

— Don’t put it down. Pohjanmaan kautta!

— What does that mean?

— Bottoms up!

I empty the glass. It’s strong and aromatic, tastes like vodka, but between this and the cheap stuff I buy at the supermarket there’s an abyss. You can tell this one won’t kill you.

I stare Pelle in the eyes. Shift in the balance of power. Why are you so clearly telling me not to say the words “So, what job did you have in mind for me?” Well, the answer is easy.

Anyway, there’s always this great red thread running through my life, which we can sum up like this: I don’t give a fuck. Besides, the evening isn’t going badly at all: where would I have ended up otherwise? At the whorehouse with Vlad? The Kossu does its job, and the demon that wrings the muscles of my back relaxes too, at some point goes out for a cigarette, and so I take the opportunity to ask the usual things: where did they meet, what do they do for work.

They grew up together. The Knight is a paramedic, specializing in resuscitation. She works in Tromsø, but her father Matti is here, working with Pelle, so she comes back often, and sometimes does some volunteer work around here too.

She tells me this anecdote: two weeks ago she’d gone to assist a high school teacher and her husband.

— They were stuck.

— What do you mean?

— They were in bed together, making love, and she had a muscle spasm. Look here.

Riikka makes the OK sign with her index finger and thumb forming a circle, then slides the index and middle finger of her other hand inside. She shows how it tightens, how she can’t pull the other two fingers out.

I burst out laughing.

— Like dogs?

— Don’t laugh! There’s nothing to laugh about, says Riikka, also laughing.

— And what did you do?

— A muscle relaxant IV in the buttocks. The problem is we had to take them to the hospital in the ambulance. You can’t imagine the looks on their faces.

— Hey, isn’t there doctor-patient confidentiality about these things?

— Yes. If it had been up to me I wouldn’t have told anyone.

— And then?

— Then someone went and told everyone, Pelle cuts in. I found out practically the next morning.

— Well, I imagine in a town this small everything comes out sooner or later.

Silence.

† † †

In the condition I’m in, reality doesn’t truly exist. Not that it truly exists for anyone, to be clear, but in my case it’s more fragile than for normal people.

One moment I was there, with those strange country folk, and now I’m here.

I find myself in the Kingdom of Truth. Zadar, rooftop of a building, there’s a battered sofa, I’m sitting on it, and the sun is red but some grey clouds are trying to cover it, to suppress it. I do what I always do: I’m in front of a switched-off television. But why am I here.

I wake up. Now I understand. Headache, brain broken, split, aching throat, every time I swallow the pain reminds me that I should ask myself, sooner or later, whether everything will fall apart.

I’m in a metal bathtub, cold, in a room I don’t know. The bathroom tiles are brown, vaguely eighties, like the soap dispenser and the glass toothbrush holder. They’ve laid out towels to make me sleep on my side, so I don’t choke on my own vomit.

The Knight is cunning. She’s not easily fooled.

I get up, sluggish, slow, aching. I’d like to die: what a novelty. There’s a small three-legged wooden stool next to the tub. On top of it my phone, a note, old car keys. The keychain is a spent rifle cartridge, red.

“Hey Didrik. I’m at work, feel free to take the Daihatsu to get back to the city.”

He hands a car to an alcoholic? Is he really that stupid?

“I saved my number on your phone. I didn’t want to ruin the evening, call me about the job.”

Hypocritical fat bastard.

Phone.

There’s a text, unknown number.

“Hi, it’s Elli. Sorry I had to leave, save my number!”

I save the number. Contacts. There is indeed a number saved under “Pelle.”

I scroll through the contacts, without thinking.

Number under name: Rikku.

I did hear them calling her that.

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