The Story of My Face (7 page)

He beams at me across the desk, ready to go – though what I want to do more than anything is to go home, lie on Tuomas' bed, stare at the ceiling and let my mind drift, without any interruptions.

‘I need to write up my notes on today first,' I tell him, ‘sort out my papers.'

‘Of course,' he says, still beaming. ‘Let me know when you are ready –' And then, rather abruptly, Heikki looks aside, picks up the photograph on his desk and holds it out to me. A white-blonde girl in a summer dress, unmistakably his.

‘My daughter, Kirsikka,' he says. ‘I am divorced. She lives with me on the weekends,' he adds. Beneath the smile, I can tell, he is looking at me carefully, weighing everything up, habituating himself. I know, because it's only natural (though that doesn't mean I should like it), and also because I have been here before. Not often, but once or twice: men whose dark fantasies I somehow fit, or who want to see what it could posibly be like, or think I must be desperate and so I'll put up with them, or that they'll have some kind of unpleasant advantage over me.

‘You?' he asks.

‘None,' I tell him, appreciating the fact that he doesn't make any assumptions, and at the same time angry at being asked because anyone with any wit might guess.

I get to my feet, shake hands. Then there's nothing for it but to go back to Tuomas's house, put Christina and her mad letter behind me and get on with what I've come here for.

7

While Mark, Barbara and I would all say that the story begins that spring afternoon when Barbara lifted the latch on the gate to let me in, John Hern, I'm sure, would have seen it differently. He would have said that the arrival of the letter, a week or so later, was the beginning of what happened to him.

John Hern: a man quite able to argue the hind legs, bit by bit, tediously, from a donkey – but also one given to sudden ecstatic speeches about the nature of divine love or the experience of ‘being in God's moment', and then again, one prone to crying out in his sleep with nightmares. A man who sharpened his plane and chisel before putting them away. Who thought it best to err on the safe side and therefore grew a beard and knotted his tie by feel alone, and also drove dangerously, so as to avoid using mirrors – this even though Envall did not expressly prohibit them. Likewise, a man who made love to his wife with his eyes wide open so as to see only what was really there: the sag and stretch of their skins, the paleness, broken veins and other signs of their mortality. Who insisted that she do likewise, but nonetheless forgave her when at some point every time, her eyelids sank down and made her face in its way absolutely perfect, and then everything she was made of softened and gave itself over to what he was doing to her and what she was feeling, so that he could no longer be sure whether his own eyes were open or shut or where in heaven or earth he was –

John Hern: the only one of us not to survive what took place the summer after that letter came:

With respect to your recent application to renew your passports I am returning your documentation since it is incomplete. You are aware that the office has in the past, entirely at its discretion and in a small number of cases, permitted certain exceptions on religious grounds to the requirement for passports to bear a photograph. As a result of Her Majesty's Government's imminent ratification of international treaties which bear directly on this practice, no such exceptions can now be made. . . .

That same day, I make my second visit.

This time, I unhitch the blue gate for myself, walk up to the front door and ring. Barbara seems to believe me when I say that a waterpipe has burst, so we've been sent home from our school. ‘Mum's at work,' I add – the true bit.

I follow her through the hall to the tidy kitchen, where she serves me a glass of something she calls lemonade, though it has no bubbles, and a plate of biscuits, different to last time, very crisp, with a nutty flavour I don't have a name for.

‘We had bad news today. A letter –' she says, watching me eat my way through them. ‘So it's lovely to have someone to cheer me up. Bring those with you and come and sit in the garden.'

There are wooden chairs and a table in the shade of a large tree.

‘What were you doing the minute before I came?' I ask, surprising myself. Even by my own standards it's an odd question, but she doesn't seem to care.

‘I was upstairs,' she answers. ‘I was just thinking. Feeling a bit sad –' She explains about the letter, how they were expecting it, but hoping against hope. There will have to be a big discussion about what to do. The fact is that they already have to use money, which has pictures on. There's at least an arguable biblical precedent for that, but nothing, of course, about photographs, and where would you draw the line? ‘John says we must stand firm,' she says. It means that they won't be going on holiday to Finland in the caravan. ‘Actually, for myself, I don't mind so very much. It's an uncomfortable journey. But Mark will miss it, and Mr Hern,' she says, ‘he's going to be very upset. His family came from the village years ago: one of them made that dresser in the hall. But for me, it's different. It's only since we married –'

An Envallist wedding ceremony, Barbara explains, is the one that matters, though not legal on its own. Hers took place six months after the registry office affair, out of doors, in a grove of spruce trees near a lake, not far from Elojoki in Finland. Her parents wouldn't attend, but her brother Adrian did.

‘The sun shone almost until eleven-thirty at night,' she tells me. ‘Afterwards, we ate at big tables on a wooden pier built out into the lake, smooth as glass. We watched the sun slip away behind the trees. It was perfect, except for mosquitoes, great big ones that brought you out in lumps. . . .' She laughs, makes a face, scratches at an imaginary bite on her arm.

‘The best thing with bites like that is to rub them with wet crystals of sodium bicarbonate. It stings, but takes away the itch. Leaves white powder on your skin. . . .'

Has she got any more of these biscuits? I ask. It turns out that I've eaten the last one, but they don't take long to make, so we go back into the kitchen. So when Mark pushes open the front door, he smells baking and hears my voice. He comes to the kitchen, to make sure. My back is to the door, but I can tell he's there. Barbara is opposite me, her eyes settled, soft as butterflies, on my face. She doesn't see him either. She's just finished telling me about the registry office wedding, which only took ten minutes, and how after that she had to go home and tell her parents what she'd done, but they'd left her a note saying they'd decided to go to town, so she had to wait.

‘So what did you do –?' I love the way she answers questions, any daft question at all, letting me pull the details out any way I want. She never says ‘Nosey, nosey, aren't you?' or ‘Don't ask me!' or ‘Cheek! Why would I tell you that!' No, she always does her best, searches for at least something she
can
say. . . . I turn the end of my plait slowly around my finger, and wait for her answer:

‘I just let myself in and made supper, because I hadn't eaten much all day –' And then again, whatever Barbara says, even if it's disappointing, I can always ask something else –

‘What did you make?'

She breaks into a smile: ‘Natalie! It's so long ago! I think you've got me there!'

‘Please –' I can hear my own voice now, the way Mark must have heard it: that mixture of thinness and weight in it, the way it lurches from one moment to the next between happy-go-lucky and absolutely desperate, as if, right now, it would hurt me bodily if I wasn't given my answer. That voice, I know, passed the feeling of my wants wholesale into the listener's bloodstream. No one except Sandra could ignore it.

‘Mark!' she gets up, kisses him on the forehead. I twist in my seat, frown. He pretends not to see me.

‘A good day?' she asks.

‘No –' He's reproachful – how could she forget the letter? ‘Of course not.'

‘Well, darling – there's lemonade in the fridge and Natalie and I are just waiting for some almond biscuits to cool.'

‘I don't want any,' Mark says. ‘I'm going upstairs.'

‘Mark, Mark. Mark? Mark!' I make my voice just loud enough to pass through the door. I hear the creak of floorboards as he comes over, stands just inches away. There's no lock between us.

‘Remember, you can't come in here,' he answers, not very loudly, using a dull, tight little voice; he can't be sure if I've even heard. He stands there, rock still, waiting for me to give up and go away. Instead, he hears a series of sharp intakes of breath.

‘I'm crying, Mark,' I say, loudly. I'm not, of course. I've managed, somehow, to bring a kind of dampness to my eyes, but I soon forget to carry on the breathing. ‘What are you doing, Mark?' I ask.

‘Nothing,' he says, before he can think not to. I rattle the handle. He grabs it on his side to stop me. This, he must realise, is how it'll be from now on. He doesn't want anything to do with me. I don't want much to do with him either, but he's there, in my way. I may as well.

‘You can't not do anything. No one can!' I tell him. ‘I bet you're
thinking
at least. You must be, or you'd be
dead.
' He keeps quiet. I do too. After a while, he jerks the door open, but of course, by then I'm gone, back down the stairs to Barbara.

‘Are you all right now?' Barbara asks, as we walk to the gate. She smiles back at the slow, serious nod I give her. The evenings are long now, she says. She supposes it is all right for me to walk home alone. (Of course, really she wants to walk with me, to see where I come from, but John is due home for his supper any moment now.)

‘Give my regards to your mother. And don't forget the note. I do hope she likes the biscuits.' I nod again.

‘Can I come back?'

‘Of course.'

‘When?'

‘Whenever your mother says. You're always welcome.'

‘But Mark doesn't want me here.' I'm testing her: what she's noticed, what she'll do. I lower my eyes, finger the brown bag of biscuits I'm taking home. My mouth waters.

‘He's just used to being on his own. Or maybe it's the age he's at. You come just whenever you want.'

She reaches forward to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear . . . and I know that she wants also to unroll the right-hand sleeve of my dress and fasten the buttons on the cuffs, though the left one is missing and, in any case, the sleeves are far too short and the cuffs need turning. . . . Oh, how she longs to gently straighten everything up, a touch here, a touch there – and that's what I want too – but she stops herself. These things don't seem right to do before she has met my mother, obtained permission.

‘Go on, now,' she says, ‘hurry home.'

I straighten up, turn my head slightly to one side, tilt it at the same time, close my eyes – something I've often seen Sandra do. There's pretty much no choice for Barbara but to bend down and press her lips against my offered cheek. And then it's all right, I can go.

‘God bless you,' she says, in that whispery-husky voice of hers which – even in memory – can relax my shoulders, make me fill my lungs, calm down and think that everything will, after all, be all right in the end. I leave her, standing in the front garden, with its evening scent of honeysuckle and old-fashioned roses, breathing it in and feeling lighter and braver, and at the same time tender – but also greedy for other stirring scents: the smells of a baby's head, of day-old, worked-in clothes, of wind-dried linen, sex, the ozone tang of her own blood at menstruation, at birth. Of strawberries, plums from the tree in the back garden, leaf mould, steam, windswept beaches – her own private, inimitable intimate relation to the world, the one thing that can never be taken away –

Afterwards, I imagine, she goes straight in to see Mark.

‘What is the matter with you?' she asks. Mark shifts awkwardly in his chair, pretending to read, not answering. Hair is just shadowing his chin; he probably hasn't even noticed it yet. His brows are pulled down and he's wearing one of John Hern's expressions, a kind of angry implacability. All of a sudden he seems huge.

‘I don't know why you are being like this, but the way you behaved today – looked through Natalie, didn't even speak to her, let alone whatever happened when she came up here – is not tolerable, and when I tell him your father will say exactly the same –' He's her son, but Barbara doesn't at all want to touch and tidy him. And he, sitting there so solid, so somehow other, wouldn't welcome it. . . . How did they get like this?

‘You're a good boy,' she says, more gently, as she sits down on his bed, ‘but you've always been an only one. You can't know what it's like to be any other way. Your Uncle Adrian and I were very close as children. Even now, despite the problems, I do believe I could count on him if it was something important – Mark, you know how I did always want you to have a sister –'