Wild Song (3 page)

After a month at the Wild School I had leafed through loads of wildlife books, watched four films, stared at the sea, edged closer and closer, grabbed pocketfuls of soil, zoomed off in my capsule, got ten letters from my mum that I never bothered to reply to, trotted off on a few of Hannu’s island explorations – though never that close to the beach again – and watched Hannu working.

That was about it: a month in the life of Niilo, Wild School prisoner. I felt like a coiled-up spring, like I was getting ready for something, some really big adventure, but I didn’t know what. I could feel this wild hunger that Hannu talked about. It was gnawing away inside me. It was hunger for adventure, not for pizza, or chocolate, or cinnamon buns.

Sometimes Hannu came out with weird stories that I half listened to. He said how he had a vivid imagination, and how he always had his nose in a book. Said I should try reading stories too. What did he think? That I was an
idiot? That I didn’t know how to read? That I just looked at the pictures?

‘Once there was a seal,’ he said one day, ‘that looked like your average common seal but not when the moon was full.’ He was placing pebbles along the border of a flower bed and I was watching him. ‘You see, moonlight can do strange things to creatures. It can bring the magic out of them. I need a really small pebble.’ I thought that was part of the story, but Hannu got up and fished a tear-shaped stone out of the bucket of pebbles. I wanted him to get on with the story, but he took his little pebble and placed it thoughtfully, like he was an artist. ‘You see, come full moon, this seal slid onto the beach and what happened was this.’ He took another pebble from the bucket. ‘The seal skin slipped off and underneath the seal was a man. He jumped up. He ran around. He looked human. All the full-moon night he stayed on the beach, then, full of longing to go back to his home in the sea, he put on his seal skin and slid back under the waves.’ Hannu stood up and examined his pebbles. ‘Looks good, eh?’

I shrugged. I was imagining a seal swimming under the sea with a human body underneath …

I did a lot of standing around, and hardly ever took my hands out of my pockets. Until the day my trousers came back from the laundry and – I’m surprised they took so long – the pockets had gone! They’d been cut out and the slits sewn together. I thought it was quite funny, but I
didn’t know what to do with my hands after that. They kind of dangled, itching for fat wallets to swipe, euros to filch, cigarettes to hold, ash to flick. I stared at my hands. These were
skilled
hands, and they had nothing to do.

Six weeks in, and it was getting on for midsummer – early June now, with blue skies that hardly ever turned dark. Hannu’s seeds that he had planted were coming up, which was kind of magical, and I spent a lot of time just watching stuff grow. We were in our usual spot in the garden when Hannu grabbed my hand and put it up against his own.

‘I just read a story,’ he said, ‘except it’s not a story. It’s true.’ I tried to pull my hand free but it was useless – Hannu was strong. ‘It said how, on an island somewhere, they uncovered a burial ground. This burial ground was five thousand years old. That’s old, huh? And there were these two hands, skeletons of hands, kind of stuck together, like this.’ He moved our two clamped-together hands into my eyeline. ‘Imagine, they’d been buried together, and they’d been holding hands for five thousand years.’

‘So?’

‘So …’ Hannu carried on as though no earthquake had just happened. But it had! That tiny ‘so’ was a big deal – it was my first word in six weeks. But Hannu didn’t make a meal of it. ‘You’re probably thinking it’s two
lifelong
friends, these hands, or maybe a husband and wife, maybe a mother and son, or twins, but it wasn’t.’ Hannu kept hold of my hand and I stopped trying to pull it away.
‘It was a human and a seal. They had been buried together. Their hands were very similar, like they were related.’ Then he let my hand go.  ‘Quite something, huh?’

Hannu went back to thinning his carrots or whatever he was doing and I dropped my hand by my side. It felt warm. And I couldn’t get the image of the man and the seal out of my mind. Hannu liked seals, I knew that.

‘I’d like to be that close to a wild animal,’ he was saying as he worked. Then he sat up and looked round at me. ‘Wouldn’t you like that too, Niilo?’

I shrugged. Hannu patted the soil around his little carrots, then stopped and looked up at me ‘What is it you really want, Niilo?’

‘Freedom,’ I muttered, my voice all raw and husky.

Hannu stared at me. Maybe he didn’t hear me. ‘What?’

I said it again. ‘Like the film,’ I whispered. My throat hurt. Words tasted strange.

But Hannu got it. He laughed. ‘Oh right, you mean that film we watched the day you got here? Yes, sure, I get that.’

I shrugged and looked down. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.

Hannu punched the air, just like the guy in the film. Then he brought his hand up against his chest and looked straight at me. ‘Freedom’s in here, Niilo. We think it’s something far away, but it’s not. It’s right inside us.’

It was almost a month after the first island rambling, as Hannu called our island explorations. He said we might find some early blueberries now, if we were lucky. Over by the beach.

But I knew he was lying. He thought it was time to show me the beach. He wanted me to trust the sea. ‘There’s no getting away from the sea on this island,’ he said as we wound our way through the birch wood. ‘You are brave,’ he added, pep-talking me. ‘I can see it in your cheekbones.’ We were crossing a rope bridge that hung over a small black pool when he said this. That’s when he swung round and did that look-right-into-me stare. The rope bridge wobbled. ‘We both have something Sami about us, something Laplandish. You must have noticed, surely?’

I shook my head. Sami were the folk way up north who used to run after the reindeer and they mostly had dark hair, like Hannu. I had never thought of it before, but I
was sure my parents weren’t Sami. My dad was very blond, in fact.

We were still standing on the rope bridge, with it swinging slightly.  ‘Look, Niilo,’ Hannu said, bending his head over the rope and staring down to the pool below. ‘Look at our reflections.’

I did, and I got a shock, seeing Hannu and me in the black pool, our reflections gazing up at us, as clear as a mirror. We looked like a painting, two round faces in the water. I looked okay too. I looked like somebody strong.

‘It feels like another lifetime, but that’s where I’m from. I have Sami blood,’ Hannu was saying. ‘So maybe it takes one to know one.’

We did look kind of similar. But then a fish or something ruffled the water and our reflections crinkled. Hannu carried on crossing the rope bridge. I could have stayed staring at me in the pool for ages, but I followed him. I jumped off the bridge and followed him through the wood.

‘You’re from Helsinki,’ Hannu suddenly said, ‘aren’t you?’

‘I’m from another planet,’ I said and pulled my alien face.

Hannu laughed. ‘But maybe you have an ancestor from Lapland? That can explain things.’

‘Explain what things?’ I leant against a pine tree, looking at him suspiciously.

‘Wild nature, and how normal school didn’t fit you. I
read your report. What you got up to before you came here. It was like you were a hunter in the middle of a city. It was the wolf and deer you actually wanted to hunt, not wallets. And I’ve got a name for that – I spoke about it before, do you remember? Wild hunger.’

I shrugged. Outside I kept my face expressionless but inside my mind was whirring. So they
knew
? My parents
knew
about the stealing? So this Wild School was really a kind of prison for people who are too young to go to jail? I looked across at Hannu. Or maybe he was guessing? Could this man see right inside me?

‘Sometimes, Niilo,’ he said, ‘we get lost and do one thing when in truth we want to do something else. I’m talking about substitutes.’

What did he mean? That I hunted wallets when really I wanted to hunt bears? I pictured myself with a spear in my hand, silent-footed, going after a brown bear. A pine cone fell out of the tree.

Then Hannu patted me gently on the back, all friendly-like. ‘It happens to people like us. We lose our story. The first time I saw you I knew – you need to find your story.’ Then he smiled. ‘Come on, Niilo,’ he said, ‘let’s face the fear, eh?’

So he’d guessed. Not for the first time it struck me that Hannu was a bit of a mind-reader. I followed him through the pine wood, feeling weirdly stronger after his little talk about me being a wild hunter with some distant ancestors coming from Lapland.
They
weren’t afraid of the sea. They
fished the sea. They broke the ice. If that’s what he meant by a story, then it was a story I liked.

It was there before I knew it – the sea. I stood at the edge of the small sandy beach and Hannu stood next to me. Suddenly he bent down and scooped up a stone and flung it into the sea. ‘Your turn,’ he said.

I found a big grey stone and threw it. It felt good to throw a stone into the monster sea. Then he scooped up another one. There was a white buoy bobbing around, probably to say
don’t swim past here
, or something.

‘Try and hit it,’ Hannu said.

So I did, or I tried to. It felt good to stand there, so close to this thing that had terrified me for so long, and fling stones. Then I hit the buoy.

‘Bravo, Niilo,’ Hannu shouted, and I felt so fired up I could have gone into the sea right then. I wouldn’t drown. I wanted to feel the cold water swirl about my ankles. Like my recently invented Lapland mysterious ancestors, I wanted to wade out into the ocean and hunt. Of course, I didn’t – but I knew I could have.

It was when we were tramping back to the Wild School building that Hannu suddenly blurted out, ‘I won’t be here for ever.’

I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. ‘Neither will I,’ I said. Then I hurried ahead. I was hungry. It was Thursday. We got pizza on a Thursday. If I got back too late there would be none left.

That night the nightmare came back: the huge rolling waves, towering like mountains and looming down on me, the screaming, the hands reaching and then the silence. But I didn’t wake up like I usually did, heart kicking and this horrible panicky feeling clutching round my throat like strangling hands. Because suddenly the nightmare changed. I was swimming in the sea, and I wasn’t scared. The sea was blue and shimmering, not stormy and grey. I was following a black seal, and when I looked at my hand it turned into a flipper.

When I woke I still remembered the dream, and I didn’t feel scared. In the early morning light I looked at my hand. I turned it around, stroked the back of it and shuddered – it felt like it was covered in seal skin.

In the garden I wanted Hannu to tell me the story again. He was busy turning the compost that day but all the time I wanted him to tell me the story. It took a while before I could bring myself to ask for it – I couldn’t ask him that
day, or the next, or the one after. And while I was working up to ask him, I hardly noticed that I had started to do little jobs. I held the bucket while Hannu milked the goats – the white stuff squirted out and smelled rank, and when he asked if I wanted to have a go I screwed up my face and shook my head. But I didn’t mind doing stuff like mulching old leaves and turning over smelly compost with a spade.

As the long light days of summer stretched out we moved on to picking strawberries. I liked strawberries. I ate more than I picked, but it felt good to do something. Every night my mouth was stained bright red.

It was on our lunch break, on a long berry-picking day nearly a week after the dream that I finally came out with it. ‘That seal and man story?’ I said. ‘How did it go? I forgot.’

And like before, when I had said my first word, Hannu didn’t bat an eyelid, even though this was the first time I had asked him for something. ‘Yeah, that was a good one, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like that, somehow.’ He chewed his rye bread slowly, throwing crumbs for the birds. Then Hannu told about the island where 5000 years ago a human and a seal had been buried holding hands. When he finished he stretched out his arms, indicating the size of the Wild School island. ‘I think the island I’m talking about was maybe bigger than this one.’

I was staring out to sea, thinking about seals and hands. I was definitely getting braver, I knew. I’d been working
on it – I could look at the sea now without breaking into a sweat. Maybe it was something to do with being so close to it, day and night. Apart from that one time flinging stones, I hadn’t been right down to the water’s edge, but from a distance me and the sea were doing okay. I watched the cruise ships. I watched tiny yachts on the horizon. I watched the scattered islands. I listened to the sea at night. It was always there, like a giant creature breathing, out and in, out and in. It wasn’t a monster any more, just a huge mystery. The water was choppy and white crests broke on the waves.

‘Can you swim, Niilo?’ Hannu asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. Not really. Anyway, I’d rather be tossed into a cave with a wild starving bear than swim in the sea. But of course I wasn’t going to admit to that. I had been taken to swimming lessons in the days when Mum still took me to things, and I remember being bundled up in plastic armbands and kicking about in the pool like a mad turtle. It had felt
good
– like I was at home in the water. But Mum used to sit on an orange plastic chair at the poolside with her hands over her eyes, scared. She said the place gave her a headache.

‘No problem,’ said Hannu. ‘I’ll teach you. Sunday.’ He picked a strawberry and handed it to me. ‘Something tells me you’ll swim like a fish.’

Swim like a fish?
When Hannu said that I glared at him, imagining those staring dead eyes lined up on the fish stalls in the market. Gross. Why would anybody want to swim like a fish? But he was smiling, and nodding and trying to make me feel all positive. I could hardly swim at all, never mind like a fish. All those piano lessons, skiing classes, hip hop dancing and even yoga, all in aid of the ‘let’s make Niilo normal’ project, but after three swimming lessons Mum had given up.

It was the one thing I had thought I might be okay at. The swimming teacher said I showed promise. But Mum said she didn’t trust him. She didn’t like the smell of chlorine, and she didn’t trust the lifeguards. So we stopped. Everybody in Finland can swim, except me.

Hard enough to live in this country and steer clear of the sea, but my parents seemed to manage. On those pointless little summer trips away we always travelled inland. ‘I like trees,’ Mum would say. ‘I like all different kinds of
trees. The sea now, that’s dangerous. It’s for fish.’ She chattered away, as Dad drove, like she was terrified of silence. ‘We’ll all have fun together, won’t we? In a cabin in the forest. It’ll be so peaceful, and fun.’

Fun? Maybe I just never got ‘fun’. Maybe her fear had passed to me, but pretty soon I hadn’t liked the sea either. Or trees. And the drowning nightmare didn’t help.

So as soon as Hannu brought up the swimming question I felt jittery. I didn’t want to look like a total idiot, so I practised on the floor of my bedroom, pushing my arms out and kicking my legs back. What a nutcase. If I wasn’t so het up about the whole thing it would have been quite funny, me down on the floor wriggling about like a beached turtle! I tried to remember my three swimming lessons from when I was about five. And I tried to remember the athletes swimming on TV. So I did what they did. Without the water part. Then when we were outside I forced myself to look at the sea for ages and imagine somehow I’d float on the top of it. In my capsule I went swimming in the sea, and it was a breeze.

So, come Sunday, when I realised he meant the teensy swimming pool in the basement I felt let down. And a bit relieved. I wasn’t scared of the swimming pool – especially one not much bigger than a wallet. I took one look at it and dived in.

‘Hey! That’s what you call a belly flop!’

‘You do better then,’ I shouted, spluttering up water and shaking my wet head. I’d flung myself into the shallow
end and practically hit my head on the bottom but I didn’t let on. It was just like a bath, a big bath, and I wanted to put my training into practice, so I took off, thrashing up the pool.

Hannu ran and dived gracefully in, even though there was a sign up saying ‘no running’. The sign said no to lots of things, but Hannu seemed to ignore it. He came up beside me where I was kicking around in the water and trying to grab the rail at the side. ‘Grab these instead,’ Hannu said, flinging me a pair of armbands. I didn’t want armbands – I wanted to do it on my own – but then I started to go under so I reached out and grabbed his hands.

Hannu led me away from the side of the pool. ‘See,’ he said, ‘I knew you’d be a natural.’

‘How come?’ I yelled, kicking my legs all over the place and trying to keep my head out of the water. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘Exactly,’ said Hannu, swimming backwards and guiding me round the pool. He didn’t mention the armbands again. ‘You didn’t drown. You took one look at the water and you were in it. I was going to suggest the steps at the side of the pool, but no, you just dived right in.’

‘I thought we were going to swim in the sea. This is for babies. Like, I did this ages ago.’

‘How about you close your eyes for a moment. I’ll lead you round and you try and imagine the sound of the sea. You know, the waves lapping up against the rocks. Above
you, the gulls are screaming in the blue sky.’ As he spoke Hannu swam backwards, pulling me round the pool.

‘I don’t like gulls. They steal your food.’

‘Not these gulls, Niilo. They watch over you, making sure you’re okay. Some people say the gulls are the souls of drowned sailors.’

‘That’s rubbish.’ I kicked out my heels, splashing water up onto the poolside, but I still kept a tight grasp of Hannu’s hands. ‘Total garbage.’

Hannu laughed. ‘Might be. Might not be. And what about the mermaids? Those beauties with the long golden hair, eh? You know, Niilo, there are a lot of wonderful, magical things in the sea. I love the sea, though it scares me too. Like when it’s stormy.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Okay, so mermaids and magic and the like, they’re just stories. But remember how some stories are true? And hey, I knew it, you’re a born swimmer. The way you’re kicking your legs back? That’s brilliant – like a frog. So how about we try the story where I let you go and you push forward with your arms, in big wide strokes. Like you’re swimming free in the ocean.’

‘What if I go under?’

‘I’ll bring you up again.’

‘What if I don’t want to do this stuff?’

‘There are plenty of logs out there needing to be stacked into piles.’

I grinned. It had happened a few times lately and the
sensation was strange – it didn’t feel like my face, twisting into this shape – but I couldn’t help it. Hannu grinned back and gently uncurled his fingers, setting me free. I kicked back with my feet and reached out with my arms, as though I was trying to grab at the water but couldn’t get hold of it.

I started sinking and I cried out. I swallowed water. Then I went right under. I grabbed onto Hannu and he lifted me to the surface, choking and spluttering, and brought me right up onto the poolside. ‘That was brilliant, Niilo,’ he said.

I spat out the water. ‘It was rubbish,’ I said. ‘And I’m not a frog. I don’t want to be a frog.’

‘Okay. You’re a seal. So, want to try again?’ He nodded towards the orange armbands at the side of the pool. ‘With a bit of plastic help?’

I looked at the water, and shrugged. ‘Okay, but if anybody else comes along I’m taking them off.’

So for half an hour, Hannu and me – unsinkable with the armbands – swam round and round and round. ‘Stupid of me to let your hands go,’ Hannu said, looking really upset. ‘You have to get used to being in the water. It’s a different world. What was I thinking? Maybe I was too full of the old stories. I was too pushy. I’m sorry, Niilo. You looked like a natural.’ He was swimming alongside me, telling me to kick and glide and stuff like that.

‘That’s okay,’ I said, and we kept going, round and round and round. Sometimes Hannu swam backwards,
coaching me. And sometimes it did feel like the sea, with the waves lapping against the rocks, and the gulls in the blue sky overhead circling and crying. And I wasn’t scared. And I knew Hannu was right. I was a natural. It
was
like my legs and arms knew about water. I knew how to swim. Okay, I had armbands, but even though I had this help, I felt strong.

‘You heard of Ahtola?’ Hannu said as we made slow circuits of the pool.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Not who. What. It is Finland’s magical land under the waves. Where mythical sea creatures live. They make the waves, they care for the tides and the fish – there’s a whole kingdom down there. All kinds of creatures live in Ahtola, like Vellamo the sea maiden, or so the stories go, but most of us don’t see them. And there’s old Vainamoinen, the father of Finland – they say his mother gave birth to him in the sea. You know, Niilo, there’s more magic around than we might think. The magic ones keep the seas clean by chanting spells. They feed the good folk of Finland.’

‘What about the bad folk?’

Hannu laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know about them. Seems to me the ones we call bad are sometimes the best, but they just don’t know it yet.’ He pulled over to the side of the pool and looked at me hard. ‘
You’re
not bad, Niilo. That’s a story you tell yourself.’

‘You’re a rubbish storyteller, Hannu,’ I said, and kicked back my heels. Hannu swam after me. We circled the pool
in silence, and somewhere, way down in my memory, I did remember that I had heard stories of Ahtola. Maybe these old stories were from way back, before I built my capsule and lived in it. Or perhaps it had been the only thing I’d listened to in school.

The teacher’s voice had droned on through the dark afternoon. ‘
Vainamoinen, old and steadfast
…’ I was listening, but pretending I wasn’t. I was looking out of the window at the sky over Helsinki, growing dark, but there was something about the rhythm of the teacher’s voice, and his tale of this father figure, with his long beard and huge muscles, born out of the air maiden in the sea, chanting magical runes and looking after the people of Finland. The teacher’s voice murmured on and it was like I was back there. ‘
Then did Vainamoinen, rising, set his feet upon the surface of a sea-encircled island, in a region bare of forest … there he dwelt while years passed over, and his dwelling he established, on the silent, voiceless island, in a barren, treeless country.’

I felt a shiver shoot up my spine as I remembered this. I liked stories. And this one told of a magical place that had nothing to do with houses and schools and cars and stuff. There was a world under the waves, and it was like my capsule – a safe and magic place. There, mermaids lived and creatures could change shape. There, a woman changed into a salmon.

I wasn’t scared of the sea of Ahtola.

‘Poor old Vainamoinen. He never did get himself a wife.’
Hannu’s words cut in on the memory and water rushed into my mouth. I spluttered and yelled. I had been imagining the blue sky was above, not the ceiling of the swimming pool. ‘Easy does it, Niilo. Hey, you’re okay,’ he said as I grabbed his arm. ‘You did well. You swallowed a bit of water. Nothing to worry about. You looked like you were out there on the ocean. Maybe someday you will be.’ Hannu guided me to the poolside. ‘That’s our time up. Let’s get dressed.’

‘Tomorrow?’ I said, climbing out of the pool, water dripping from me. I yanked off the armbands. ‘Can we do it tomorrow? Can we go to the sea tomorrow?’ I was still scared, but more in a thrilling way. It was like the fear had shifted into excitement with a hint of danger.

‘Steady on, Niilo. It takes time. You need to work up confidence in the pool first. You can’t swim yet, don’t forget that.’

‘So, okay, I’ll come here tomorrow. I’ll learn fast. And anyway, I practically can swim. I want to come again tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know,’ Hannu said. ‘We were lucky to get a free slot today.’

He must have seen the disappointment sit back over my face. That is so typical, I thought. Something goes well, then something else comes along to spoil it …

We went into the changing room and that’s when I saw the red slash mark down his back. I could see stitch marks, loads of them – Scarface was nothing compared with this.
I swallowed hard, wondering what had happened to him, but I didn’t ask. We dressed in silence. Hannu threw the damp towels into the wash basket and looked round at me, but I looked away.

‘If you would join in with the other boys you could come here every evening, you know.’

I punched at the wooden bench and ignored Hannu. ‘They do a swim hour seven till eight every night. I heard it’s lots of fun.’

I spat on the tiles.

Hannu shrugged, then checked the timetable on the wall. ‘Looks like there’s a free space on Tuesday, Niilo,’ he said. ‘I’m off on Tuesdays but  Tomi works then. He’d be happy to take you swimming.’

I scowled and shook my head.

Hannu sighed. ‘Well, if you insist on always doing things on your own, then you’ll have to wait for the same time next week.’ He sounded irritated.

I glared at him. ‘That’s stupid,’ I shouted. ‘That’s ages away. What do you have to be off for? I’m not off. You go off this prison island and I never do. You play in a band and I don’t.’ I ran for the door. ‘It’s all rubbish.’ Of course, the door was locked. I kicked it. Hannu followed me over there, but took his time. He brought the key from his pocket, opened the door and escorted me back to my room. He didn’t say a word. We walked in silence, apart from me banging my fist against the wall and stomping my feet on the wooden floorboards.

‘I play in a band because I spent ages practising the guitar.’ We were near my room when he said this. He said it slowly, like he was getting annoyed with me. ‘If we want to become good at something we need to dedicate ourselves to practising.’ Then he snatched in a deep breath.  ‘Like I said before, you have a skill in picking things. You could probably pick the strings of a guitar. You want to play guitar?’

I shrugged. I was still cut up about the swimming stuff, and the rules. I wanted to
swim
. Now he was going on about guitar. Then suddenly I had this image of me doing a drum solo in a rock band. Maybe Hannu was a mind-reader.

‘Or some other instrument maybe? Keyboards? Drums?’

‘Maybe drums,’ I muttered.

‘There’s a music studio in the school,’ he said. By this time we were at the door of my room, but I still didn’t look at him. And I couldn’t believe how bad I was feeling about the swimming thing. I’d got myself so worked up for swimming, and now he was wittering on about music. ‘I can see about getting you music lessons, if you like. Maybe we can fix that up for you.’

‘I thought we were going to swim. I want to swim. You’re confusing me.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to offer you variety. You know, bit of this, bit of that. That’s part of the philosophy – widen your horizons and all that. Give you opportunities.’

‘I don’t want bits of this and that.’ I glared at him. ‘I
want to swim in the sea.’ I couldn’t believe I was actually saying that, but when the words came out I knew it was true.
That
was what I wanted. He could stuff his guitar or his drum kit, and his dedication. I wanted to get off this island. And learning to swim in the sea would be a first step to swimming to freedom. Maybe I could make it all the way back to Helsinki, or find my own island, or sneak onto a boat? I wasn’t only skilled in picking things. I could be skilled in swimming, I knew I could.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, cutting in on my escape plans. Hannu sounded none too hopeful.