In Sawdust House, Dad was always afraid that there was water running inside the walls. Or that there was a hole in the roof, or the drains were blocked, or a water pipe would burst. So many things could go wrong in a wooden house, and Dad had to worry about all of them.
Sometimes, when it was raining hard, Dad stood next to the wardrobe and stroked the wall.
‘Do you think this is damp?’ Dad asked Mum. ‘Why is this so cold?’
Dad had this constant feeling that a problem would creep in stealthily – through the roof, through cracks in the walls, through the flue of the fireplace or the vents in the cellar. He felt he should spot it but might miss it, and then it’d all be too late and Sawdust House would be rotten. Or we would contract cancer from exposure to radon. Or a flue would catch fire. Or water would drip in through the roof, through the holes where nails had been hammered in, which had become enlarged, and the decayed roof would collapse on us. Or carbon monoxide would come in through loose tiles on the stove and poison us. And it would all be Dad’s fault.
‘Chipboard is dangerous,’ Dad explained to Mum and me. ‘It emits formaldehyde. We should tear open all these walls and go over to plasterboard. It would be safer from the fire-safety point of view; chipboard houses like these go up like torches. But it costs money to replace all the walls with new ones. While we’re at it, we’d have to dismantle all the kitchen cabinets, and the bathroom. Chipboard’s the worst possible option; God knows what kind of fungi might be breeding there…’
‘Pekka, for two years we’ve had smoke alarms waiting in the cleaning cupboard for someone to fix them to the ceiling. Let’s not get stressed about chipboard right now,’ Mum said. She stroked Dad’s neck.
When Mum stroked him like that, Dad growled for a bit like an unhappy dog, but settled down in the end.
‘The sound of the alarms is so infuriating,’ Dad muttered.
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Mum replied.
In the manor house, it doesn’t matter if it rains hard. Dad and I sit by the window and stare at the grey, rushing curtain. Just when it seems it couldn’t rain any harder, the rain falls more heavily still. I feel cosy and damp. The grey curtain rushes, the drainpipe gurgles, the roof booms and the odd drip-drip sounds from the stove as water trickles in through the chimney. There’s frost and lichen between the windowpanes, and the guttering on the roof is overflowing. Raindrops beat the ground and splatter mud, and in no time at all, a large puddle forms on the sandy road.
But Dad’s not worried. This chimney isn’t Dad’s, and Dad doesn’t say, ‘I should install chimney caps. This damp will make the whole chimney crumble, and where’s the money to repair it?’
This is not our roof. These walls are not filled with sawdust. There’s no cellar under the house for water to run into. Nothing’s mouldy. Or rather, everything’s already damp and mouldy anyway.
Dad tried to protect us, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. He thought too much about the walls and forgot the sky.
Now Dad just listens to the drip-drip-drip in the flue.