‘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.