TH03 - To Steal Her Love (26 page)

The weekend had seemed to crawl past. They had spent most of the time indoors and hadn’t really spoken to one another, which was in itself quite out of the ordinary. Tweety had imagined things differently; he imagined they’d be laughing and singing, dancing across the yard and hugging each other with joy. But they didn’t.

In an almost subdued mood, they had seen the Chancellor through. They collected up the tools and equipment they’d used, even their clothes – Reino had insisted; he’d learned this in jail – and now he and Lasse were at the dump destroying everything. Bamse was out in town with Mother Gold and Ritu and the kids, which had given them a moment to catch their breath.

‘You know what, Tweety?’ said Sisko with a note of astonishment. ‘We did it…’

Tweety didn’t say anything; he knew Sisko wasn’t expecting an answer. She was just thinking out loud, trying to accept the fact that she too was now a criminal. She’d decided to join them so suddenly. Still, she’d known about the Chancellor for a long time and had come to accept what they were doing. It was a good job she was there, too, and the best of it was that, as they were leaving, she’d taken a mop and a bucket from the
cleaning
cupboard and scrubbed the floor cleaner than it had ever been before. Only the vault door stood open, smirking right in the middle.

Sisko picked up a piece of hay from the ground and started chewing it. They were lying on the grass in front of the cottage. Tweety turned so he could see her better. They looked at one another and smiled. It was as
though a hatch had been opened somewhere, letting laughter pour in, and though it felt good it startled them and they averted their eyes.

Tweety stared at the ground, a clover leaf, an ant, and thought of Wheatlocks. He was in her arms, he could fly, and he thought of how she caressed his hand in her sleep, how she held her pillow and dreamt of him, how tidy she kept her flat. If she didn’t want to please him, the place would have been a mess. He thought of how beautifully she dressed every day, and he knew that she did it all for him.

He had talked to Sisko about Wheatlocks and told her that there was somebody he loved, and he was glad he’d done so. As soon as he’d mentioned her, Wheatlocks had ceased to be a forbidden secret and his feelings towards her had ceased to seem so bad. Sisko hadn’t said anything, she’d just looked at him, but he could tell from her eyes that she’d
understood
. It had felt so good. It still did.

Because of this he’d felt much better in general. He wasn’t so afraid anymore, and the world only seemed to creak whenever he saw Mother Gold or heard her voice, even when he remembered that she existed and lived close to him. Of course, he was relieved that the Chancellor was finally over and done with, and though the thought of punishment popped into his mind every now and then, somewhere deep down he had faith that they wouldn’t get caught. It helped that they were all in it together, that there was someone to look out for him.

Sisko stood up and Tweety remained lying on the grass. He lay with his face towards the smell of the earth and inhaled deeply, and he felt as though a curtain were lifting inside him. It was made of heavy, green velvet and was infinitely high, and a soft, beautiful light flooded out from behind it, glittering in thousands of colours, then a symphony orchestra began to play and a choir started to sing. He didn’t recognise the music, but it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard.

‘I love that woman so much,’ he said, or maybe he only thought it. ‘And I’m going to tell her. Today. I’ll ask Reino for some money and I’ll buy myself some new clothes, some roses and chocolates. And I’ll get a haircut, then I’ll walk right up to her and tell her.’

He felt suddenly impatient. He wanted to run, to hurry to her. He wanted to be in the city centre, he wanted to sit in the barber’s chair, watching what he looked like in the mirror. He rose to his knees, then Sisko shouted somewhere in the distance: ‘Tweety! They’re here!’

The van rumbled into view from behind the hedgerow and turned into the drive. Now it looked the same as it had before; Reino had reattached the original number plates first thing on Saturday morning, and Lasse had removed the stickers and washed off any remaining glue with petrol. Everything seemed fine: Reino waved his hand at them cheerfully and Lasse was laughing heartily. Tweety followed Sisko as she left the workshop and went to meet them.

‘Greetings from the big wide world!’ Reino cried as he jumped out of the van. He was holding a half-empty bottle of whisky and a copy of one of the tabloids, and he was brimming with excitement, just like Lasse. Their movements seemed somehow exaggerated, as if their arms and legs were laughing too. Reino let out a series of unashamed yells and Lasse shook his carrier bags so that their contents made a full, heavy jingling sound.

‘Have a drink, you’ve earned it!’ said Reino, thrusting the bottle at Sisko and waving his newspaper. ‘It was a bloody good thing we didn’t have the police radio after all. We’d never have gone through with it. The city was swarming with patrols out on a vandalism operation. And there we were right in the middle of it all…’

‘It felt damned good getting out of here for a while,’ said Lasse. ‘It reminds you that the world’s still going round just like it did before. You should go into town instead of sitting here waiting for…’

‘Is there anything in the paper about the Chancellor?’

‘Oh yes,’ Reino laughed. ‘But they’re talking about a bloke called the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Does anyone know his name? Hah! But we still don’t know anything about a chancellor that lives on Museokatu, got it?’

Sisko handed the bottle to Tweety. He closed his eyes and drank; the whisky tasted bitter and warmed his throat and chest, and he took another swig. He wanted to share in their carefree spirit; he wanted to be able to laugh. He wanted to be able to join them. Reino’s good cheer was like permission to the others to laugh, to celebrate the Chancellor and the fact that they had succeeded.

‘We did it… just like that…’

‘Maybe we’re not just a bunch of idiots after all.’

‘And Sisko too, I’ll be damned! Mopping the floors and everything. I half expected her to clean the toilet bowl too.’

‘But now we’ve got to be careful. And keep our mouths shut. This happened all the time when I was inside; the blokes there were always
bragging about what they’d done… and somebody always blows the whistle. We can brag to each other, as much as we like…’

‘And we don’t go flashing our money around either.’

‘No. We’ll gradually start moving out of this place. But I want to give Mother Gold that one ring, the one with the enormous red stone in it. Just to show her. She’s always moaning about how we’re a bunch of
good-for-nothings
and how back when Dad was alive he…’

They slowly walked back towards the cottage, noisily sipping from the bottle of whisky. Everybody had something to say, it was as though someone had taken a cork out of a bottle, and they were all laughing, though nobody had said anything especially funny.

It seemed to Tweety that they’d been there for hours, sitting and
lounging
on the grass eating ready-roast chicken and other small delicacies. He’d been drinking with the rest of them, more than he’d drunk in a long time, and by now he was fairly drunk; the ground occasionally swung beneath him, and he imagined he was drunk with thoughts of Wheatlocks. He was nervous about visiting her again, even though he loved her. Perhaps that was the reason.

‘But Christ I was scared when the blowtorch wouldn’t light,’ Reino exclaimed. He was drunk too; they all were. ‘For a moment I was convinced I’d packed the empty cylinders.’

‘But it didn’t half light up when you turned the blinking tap on!’

‘I was just so bloody nervous.’

‘But everybody pulled their weight. Even Asko, sore arse and all…’

‘You mark my words, Asko: that Lampinen’s got it coming to him. And once we’re finished with him, he won’t be able to walk for a fortnight.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid, eh?’ said Sisko. ‘What goes around comes around. He’ll just beat somebody else up, then somebody else…’

‘But he’s not getting away with it.’

‘We have to think of another way of getting him, try and make him take the rap for what he did to Tweety. Something to get him kicked out of the police, so he won’t be able to treat people however he pleases.’

‘No… I’m not pressing charges against him. How would we prove anything? It’s just our word against his. And there’s two of them…’

‘What if we could get him to do something else…?’

‘Listen to yourselves, for Christ’s sake,’ Lasse snapped, lowered his voice and started explaining something, but Tweety couldn’t be bothered
listening
. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to forget about all the beatings, everything. Even the grass seemed to pull him away; he lay down and decided he would propose to Wheatlocks tomorrow. He’d been given a week off work and he decided he’d pop into the shop, too, just to show Weckman he wasn’t pulling a sickie.

A moment later and he was dreaming. He had a nest made of twigs and he was a bird with the body of a human. His fledglings weren’t real; they were bottles corks with glass-headed pins stuck into them for feathers. Still, they were alive and he fed them with milk which they suckled from his fingertips. Somewhere down on the ground he could hear human voices; Bamse said something and Lasse’s daughters giggled, then Ritu started nagging him for drinking in the middle of the day, then Reino and Sisko started talking. All of a sudden Mother Gold was there too.

‘What’s going on here?’ she snapped. ‘How could you? You’re just as bad as your father…’

Sisko said something, then Lasse replied, both of them trying to worm their way out of trouble, and Reino laughed. Tweety laid his hands around his nest; he didn’t want Mother Gold to know that he had fledglings up there – she might kill them, stuff them into the tops of juice bottles as stoppers. But despite this he suddenly felt safe; his nest was so high up in the trees, and Mother Gold couldn’t fly. She couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t harm him ever again.

‘And what about Asko? Good God, he’s drunk so much he’s passed out!’

‘Go on inside with Bamse. Put on some coffee and come and drink it out here. Have some cognac. Think of it as heart medicine.’

‘Oh, oh, my stomach’s churning,’ groaned Mother Gold. Bamse said something to her, then their footsteps began fading into the distance. Mother Gold muttered all the way indoors, nothing but a hissing through her nostrils. Tweety was afraid of that sound; it always meant something bad. When she made that sound, she was planning something. She used to hiss like that every time she went to fetch the leash.

He carried on feeding his fledglings, but he’d only managed to give milk to the first two before a door was flung wide open with a crash, and Mother Gold squawked anxiously: ‘A rat! On the steps upstairs. A rat! But look, I clocked it one!’

‘He’s on annual leave, I’m afraid. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, I think. Can I take a message?’

‘No,’ said Wheatlocks. ‘Thanks anyway. I’ll call back later.’

She replaced the receiver in disappointment. Only then did she realise that she’d forgotten to ask when Jani would be back from his holiday and her mind was suddenly filled with a faint sense of annoyance. She flicked her flowing locks of hair and quickly walked towards the bedroom. At least she’d called him, never mind that she’d been putting it off and it was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon. She’d been putting it off because she was worried that, after so many years, Jani might find her request strange, some kind of excuse.

She stopped beside her bed, bent down and opened the top drawer of the dressing table. The drawer contained her knickers, but that wasn’t what she was looking for. She moved the undergarments to one side to reveal Marko’s gun, dark and silent amidst everything so delicate and frilly, and its barrel was loaded with six lead bullets. The gun was the reason she’d wanted to contact Jani in the first place; she’d been thinking about him constantly for days. They’d dated before she had met Simo. Back then she’d thought of Jani as some sort of gun freak. Perhaps she’d even been ever so slightly afraid of him, and that might have been why the
relationship
ended.

She picked up the revolver, turned so that she was holding it above the bed, clicked open the barrel and pressed the sprung lever. The round of bullets dropped silently on to the white lace bedspread. She held up the
gun and looked at it against the light. The barrel really was empty and she clicked it shut again. Now she saw Jani’s enthusiasm for guns in a different light. It wasn’t necessarily a latent desire to kill masked as an acceptable hobby or a need to see through the war games he’d played as a child. That’s what she’d thought at first. It had clearly been a way for Jani to accept himself, to stop being afraid of himself, his power, his masculinity.

Wheatlocks wound a curl of hair behind her ear. As strange as it sounded, she had found that power in herself too. Rather, she sensed that she was on the verge of finding it, that it existed within her, that it slumbered somewhere deep down like a dark mass that, subconsciously, she knew frightened her. Still, she realised that there were no grounds for her fear. The mass was nothing but fuel, her very own gasoline. All she had to do was find the courage to use it.

Until then she had only been using a motor that had chugged along whenever she remembered to give it a little helping hand, but it never really got started. And perhaps this was why she had been happy living life the way she had: she’d been happy watching her life flow past, as though she were sitting on a shelf, standing to one side or behind the shop counter, as was normally the case. She was happy being beautiful. But she’d left her studies unfinished, and after Simo died she’d left practically everything else too. Now she felt that she was finally waking up again.

And when she thought of her power, she had the astonishing
realisation
that men and women were fundamentally the same, that perhaps both were made of the same elements, the same powers, but that both were forced to suppress the other half of themselves and to live up to others’ expectations and examples in order to become accepted, even if it meant paralysing yourself in the process.

After thinking about this for a while, she’d noticed one of Simo’s old jumpers and a couple of his pairs of jeans. She used to wear them all the time simply because she felt more comfortable in them, and gradually they had become her favourite clothes. But whenever anyone had commented on this, she’d started wondering whether there was something wrong with her, that perhaps she wanted to be a man or that she was a lesbian, but thinking like this was pointless. These clothes had simply represented her strength, something which only men are allowed to show on the outside. To her, Simo’s clothes were like guns to Jani.

She lowered the barrel of the gun towards the floor, walked with silent, bare feet into the living room and stopped at the spot where she had the best view of the hallway. She wanted to see the clothesmen hanging in the hall cupboard, the front door and the shining security chain. She took hold of the gun with both hands, cocked it with her thumb, held her arms straight out in front of her, squinted and calmly squeezed her fist – and click! The first clothesman would have slumped to the floor. She cocked the gun again – and click! The second would be on the ground, and again – click! The third would have fallen.

She took a deep breath. She hadn’t noticed that she was using the words ‘slumped’ and ‘fallen’, but not ‘dead’. She couldn’t imagine herself actually killing anybody. Once, when she’d run over a hare but it hadn’t quite died, she couldn’t bring herself to put it out of its misery, but had to stop another car, whose driver calmly reversed over the animal’s head.

Despite this she still wanted a chance to shoot for real, and that’s why she’d tried to contact Jani. She knew he would have taught her and explained all the various details and tricks. For now she’d have to make do with the books she’d borrowed from the library. The problem with these was that she often didn’t understand them, or rather she didn’t understand the terminology that enthusiasts took for granted. But at least it was a start.

She tried some more instinct shooting – that was one term she had learned. She suddenly flung her hands up in front of her, crouched down slightly, looked towards the lock on the door without aiming and pulled the trigger three times in quick succession without fully cocking the gun: click, click, click! She let the hand with the gun slump to her side and walked back into the bedroom. She had performed this ritual every night, usually just before going to bed and after checking that the chain was securely fastened, and though at first it had frightened her, now it felt relaxing. It was like playing with water as a child, splashing about in the shower was a ritual that had calmed her down before going to sleep.

And because of the revolver, or rather because of her understanding of her ‘forbidden’ strength, she wasn’t so afraid any more. Things didn’t seem quite as senseless; she hadn’t once had to leave her evening chores and she’d stopped listening out for the lift. She still hadn’t given up on the combination of wine and Diapams, and she was ashamed of that, but she felt certain that she would be able to give them up soon. Maybe she was expecting too much of herself, imagining that she’d recover from
everything
all at once, as if it were simply a matter of flicking a switch when it was in fact a long and slow process. She knew that. And though it might take her years, at least she’d taken the first steps.

She stopped beside the bed, opened the barrel of the revolver and picked up the bullets lying on the bedspread. They felt pleasant to the touch, so smooth and innocent, and one by one she put them back in their place. By now she was sure that, if someone really was visiting her at night, it wasn’t Simo; she’d come to accept this. That was merely superstition on her part. More and more she wondered whether she’d just imagined the whole thing, just like her therapist had said. Accepting this no longer seemed out of the question. But imaginary or not, she now had a gun and that helped her. And if necessary, she knew how to defend herself.

She opened the top drawer again, put the revolver back in its place and covered it with her white, lace knickers as if she were putting a doll to sleep, then she pushed the drawer firmly shut.

Perhaps she viewed the gun too much as a purely metaphorical power. The possibility hadn’t occurred to her that that power might turn her into a killer.