Thus commenced their Plan, in honour of which Anna-Liisa invited Siiri to her apartment for the first time. Her rooms had poor light and books everywhere, even on the floor and windowsills, tall stacks of them all over the place, and a pervasive scent of dust. Siiri hadn’t known that Anna-Liisa still read every day, too. They talked about how much fun it is when you’re old to reread all the books you liked when you were young.
‘I’m reading Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga for the fourth time now,’ Siiri said excitedly, and sneezed.
‘Yes, I like Buddenbrooks better, although I wouldn’t want to read even that four times.’
‘At least I’m getting some use out of the fact that I forget everything!’
Siiri had the key ring that Mika had left with her. She’d kept it carefully in her handbag at all times for the past few weeks so that she wouldn’t leave it somewhere where Erkki Hiukkanen could find it. She was sure that Mika meant them to spring into action and use it. And now they had realized what it was they ought to do.
First they planned to see what the corridors of Sunset Grove were like at night and map a route from their wing to the door of the Group Home. They would also use their key to get into the Group Home and investigate what went on there at night. Once they had all the information, they would carry out their Plan. Mika would certainly be proud of them, if he only knew!
‘What if I run into Virpi Hiukkanen at night?’ Siiri said, a bit frightened at the thought.
‘Don’t worry! She thinks you’re senile anyway. If you wonder aloud who you are and where you are, she’ll just order you back to your room. But you won’t give her the keys, of course, no matter how confused you are.’
‘Do you think I’m senile?’ Siiri asked, but Anna-Liisa ignored the question and asked Siiri if she would like her to read aloud from some old books. Anna-Liisa thought it sounded fun, and since Siiri’s eyes tired easily, it was an excellent idea. They decided to start this new pastime immediately. Anna-Liisa rummaged through the stacks of books for a moment, found one on top of the refrigerator, petted it as if it were a cat, put it back where she’d found it, then bent with some difficulty to look under the telephone table and found what she was looking for. It was Maria Jotuni’s novel The Tottering House, which Siiri hadn’t read in decades. Anna-Liisa wandered around for a moment more until she spotted her reading glasses on the bedside table, settled into an armchair, and turned on the floor lamp. She looked at the lamp angrily.
‘These environmentally friendly light bulbs are so slow to light up!’
Anna-Liisa waited a moment, then opened up The Tottering House with a flourish, sniffed the inside of the book, coughed a couple of times, and began to read. Siiri sat quite comfortably in a corner of the hard sofa next to a pile of books, leaning her head on a musty-smelling cushion. The room was dim, Anna-Liisa’s deep voice flowed out evenly, and the atmosphere was peculiarly homely, though Lea and Toini’s story began with a tough childhood full of alcohol and death.
‘Siiri, are you asleep?’ Anna-Liisa asked irritably, when she noticed her beginning to doze on the sofa.
Siiri napped much more often these days than she used to – uncontrollably, in fact. Last week she had even fallen asleep on the tram. The familiar driver who listened to Bruckner came to wake her at the last stop and said she’d already gone around the whole route one and a half times.
‘Have you been listening at all to what happens in this second chapter?’ Anna-Liisa asked, and Siiri had to apologize because she had no idea how far Anna-Liisa had read. Anna-Liisa’s reading style was quite monotonous and it positively lulled her to sleep.
‘Right. Pearls before swine. We’ll continue reading Jotuni some other time,’ Anna-Liisa said dourly and slammed the book shut, sending a cloud of dust flying into the air. She put the book and her reading glasses down on the stack nearest her. ‘In other words, enough amusement. Let’s get down to business. What do you think, should we start our nocturnal exploration this week? I could go first.’
‘That suits me. You’re much braver than I am. If you have your adventure this week, I’ll go at the beginning of next week. Won’t that be a good plan for starting the Plan?’
‘That’s a more leisurely timetable than I would wish, but let’s just see what I find out. First, I’ll have to acquire the necessary equipment.’
Siiri was beginning to like Anna-Liisa. It wasn’t such a bad stroke of luck that they’d been thrown together to concoct their secret Plan. When you’d lived to be as old as they were, it was a roll of the dice as to who you would have to get along with in your final years. The people you had in one way or another chosen as friends in the past were dead. In the end, all that remained were a few people your own age, and you couldn’t be picky about who they were; you just had to get along with them. The group at Sunset Grove – Anna-Liisa, the Hat Lady, the Ambassador and the Partanens – were a good example of this. They were all very different.
‘Pish,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘The place is full of new people. We just haven’t met them.’
She was right, of course. Many of the residents had only been there a short time, and they hadn’t had a chance to get to know them. People arrived at Sunset Grove in worse condition these days than they used to, even though the new residents were much younger than they were. Anna-Liisa thought it was due to politics.
‘Home care is in style now because it’s cheaper than lying in a retirement home. If an old person agrees to stay at home alone, the state will order all kinds of services for them. Even hairdressers and handymen, and someone to walk you around the block, which is something we don’t have here. People only come to the retirement home when there’s no other option.’
Anna-Liisa got worked up into a lecture about the care ratio, which was a new expression and, in her opinion, the worst possible kind. Before she could move on to the problems of language development and the ethics of neologisms, Siiri went back to the subject of the care ratio, because she knew that it didn’t mean what it sounded like. A good care ratio didn’t mean good care; it meant that there were fewer old people to be a drain on society. She and Irma had read in the paper that the worst possible care ratio was in Japan, because the population was ageing even faster than in Finland. Irma hadn’t been able to understand how they could age any faster than anyone else.
That made Anna-Liisa laugh.
‘My Lord, we really must get Irma back. We might soon forget how to laugh without her.’
And that was exactly what they planned to do. Once each of them had performed her reconnaissance mission and they had a sufficient grasp of Sunset Grove at night, they were going to steal Irma back. They were going to rescue her!