The noise from the great hall, carrying through the closed door, sounded like a distant construction site as I sat crunching the numbers again. The budget estimates I had drawn up before my visit to the premises of Toy of Finland Ltd now felt hopelessly out of date.
I’d spent hours trying to come up with a financially viable solution to the park’s current predicament. I slid my chair slightly further from the desk, looked at the piles of papers, the calculator. The more I counted and the more I found raw facts to support my conclusions, the clearer it became that we needed the Moose Chute, and that there was no way we would survive with the potential short- and long-term costs and inevitable permanent losses that acquiring the Crocodile Canyon would entail. I’d also gone through the contract between the park and Toy of Finland one more time, scrutinising every detail and all the small print, but the contract was exceptionally clear: it wouldn’t help us one bit. After much calculation and examination, it looked as though I would either have to pay for something I didn’t want and that would ruin the park’s finances, or give in to our cut-throat competition and wait for eventual destruction, which would occur sooner or later. And given how aggressively our competitor on the other side of town was expanding their portfolio of equipment, that destruction might come very quickly indeed.
The long and the short of it was that we had to acquire the Moose Chute, just as we had to avoid the Crocodile Canyon. Sadly, my calculations alone couldn’t tell me how to do this.
I stood up and walked to the window.
Afternoon in November. Overcast, dry, a hint of dusk.
My eyes moved from the horizon to the car park and inched closer to the entrance, which was on my right. I saw a woman dragging a much shorter person, presumably one of our customers. They had left the park only seconds earlier, they walked towards me and came to a halt at a red Volvo parked right in front of my window. The smaller customer was exceptionally dirty. Her trousers and the T-shirt beneath her unzipped coat looked as though she’d been rolling in a vat of paint. Just then I saw another customer being frogmarched to a car. This one was covered in muck from head to toe and seemed to have clumps of something stuck in his hair. Halfway through the frogmarching, he stopped, doubled over and was promptly sick. At the same time, the red Volvo angrily pulled out of its parking spot, turned right in front of me and accelerated towards the exit and the intersection up ahead. I unrolled my shirt sleeves, buttoned the cuffs and straightened my tie.
I found Kristian behind the ticket desk in the foyer. Apart from him, the foyer was empty, so I got straight to the point.
‘I’ve just seen two customers leaving the park covered in paint, and one of them looked distinctly queasy,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
In recent days, Kristian had taken to staring at his computer screen and clicking his mouse ever more frantically whenever I approached him. This time, however, he didn’t do so, and the change was remarkable: he stood to attention and smiled; his row of whitened teeth sparkled, and his great, broad muscles seemed to stretch the fabric of his YouMeFun sweater even more vigorously than usual.
‘Conceptual fusion,’ he said.
I looked at Kristian, then the exit, then back at Kristian. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘A fusion is like a combination of things,’ he said. ‘You take two different things, two concepts, and kind of … put them together—’
‘Thank you, I get the general principle,’ I interrupted him, and at that moment the truth began to dawn on me. ‘And whose idea was this … conceptual fusion?’
‘Juhani’s.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘Yes.’
Kristian’s smile might have been just a fraction less self-assured, but his bodily vim and eagerness were undiluted.
‘Could you tell me where he is, please?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded, seemed to think about something, and finally answered me: ‘He’s at the Big Dipper.’
I was about to turn, then looked at Kristian again. ‘But there’s no paint at the Big Dipper,’ I said. ‘How…?’
Kristian did something quite astonishing: he managed to nod and shake his head simultaneously. He smiled too, and there was a sense of jubilant liberation in his smile.
‘I tell you, Juhani is a real business genius,’ he said. ‘He’s got so many…’
I didn’t hear how Kristian finished his sentence. Instead, I ran.
The Big Dipper was one of our most popular activities, one of the park’s classics, shall we say. It was a gleaming steel construction that comprised nine different slides, and everybody wanted to get to the top of it. Looking from the entrance, it was situated behind the Strawberry Maze.
I walked around the Strawberry Maze, passed the Doughnut, where our little customers ran in circles inside a giant plastic tube and collided with the padded walls. The Doughnut was our all-time classic; it was the very first apparatus we had ever acquired. Even now, quickly walking past it, I marvelled at the cost-effective union of kinetic energy and centrifugal force. The machine cost next to nothing to maintain; all the fun, allure and attraction was secured by the fortunate position of our planet within the Solar System and our customers’ own enthusiasm. But the fleeting sense of satisfaction was gone as soon as the Big Dipper came into view.
I could smell what I most feared.
Warm milk.
And something more pungent too.
And the Big Dipper…
…looked like a giant had used it as his own personal ice-cream tub, then left half the contents uneaten.
I stopped in my tracks.
The soft-ice-cream machine had been moved from the café and placed at the bottom of the Big Dipper. The machine appeared to be free for all our customers to use. They pulled the levers, the machine churned out three flavours of soft ice cream – chocolate, strawberry and Ye Olde Vanilla – from a total of six taps in a continuous, uninterrupted stream into punnets, cones and everywhere besides. The customers snatched their ice creams and dashed to the steps of the Big Dipper, then came careering down all nine of the slides, ice creams in hand. Every one of the slides was covered in ice cream, and so were all the little sliders. After sliding out at the bottom, the customers ran to the machine and pumped more ice cream for their cups. If the cup had disappeared somewhere inside the Big Dipper or if their cones had become soft and squashed against the walls, they simply pumped it into their hands, from which they proceeded to shovel it into their mouths and smear it all over the park. The air was filled with shrill, piercing squeals.
Several dozen of our customers looked as if they were experiencing the same sugar rush all at once. Others seemed to be beyond the point of no return. I watched two of our customers repeating what I’d already seen in the car park and expelling the vast amounts of ice cream they had eaten. One of them was coming down the longest of the Big Dipper’s slides as it happened. The bumps along the slide gave each gastric spasm some added power, and the most vigorous of the expulsions were like something straight out of a physics textbook: an optimal combination of speed, mass, density and thrust.
I forced myself into motion and headed towards the ice-cream machine, unsure of what needed to be done first. The machine stood right in the middle of an enormous brown puddle dotted with patches of pink. The short, frenzied customers were besieging it, splashing through the puddle and jostling to reach the taps. I raised my hands and readied myself to shout something, though I still didn’t know what, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Now look at that, Henri. That’s customer satisfaction for you. That’s what running an adventure park is all about.’
I turned. Juhani was beaming. He looked particularly pleased with himself. I tried to say something, but words failed me.
‘In the past, I think I was a bit too hands-off,’ he said. ‘But here on site, ideas start bubbling up like you wouldn’t believe.’
Juhani gestured at the Big Dipper and gazed at it proudly. I did another 180-degree turn.
‘You won’t get an experience like this anywhere else,’ he continued. ‘This is exactly what we need. Quick, open-minded decision-making. Conceptual fusion. Slides and ice cream. And whose idea was it to combine these two things that so obviously go together? You can thank me later. But I’ll tell you something for nothing, not a single one of those kids will ever forget this. Some memories live forever.’
I managed to take my eyes from the Big Dipper. It was hard, not least because the volume of destruction seemed to be growing exponentially.
‘Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost?’ I asked.
‘I’ve already thought about that,’ said Juhani, and he still sounded satisfied. ‘The ice cream is basically free anyway. And the Big Dipper was just standing there waiting.’
I shook my head.
‘I mean the cleaning.’
‘Cleaning?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s going to cost thousands to clean this up. Every join in the Big Dipper is filled with bucketfuls of milk, and it’ll soon start to smell. This is beyond the scope of an average evening tidy-up. What on earth were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking about the park, of course,’ said Juhani, and he looked perfectly genuine. ‘And our competitive edge, just like you are. The customers, the footfall, the atmosphere, giving people unforgettable experiences. You can see for yourself how happy they are.’
I looked at these human saplings, shrieking as they wound their milky way down the slides, coated in sugary sludge.
‘They’re not happy,’ I said and turned to face Juhani. ‘They have taken leave of their senses. And given the carnage, I can’t help thinking the same applies to you.’
Now Juhani looked as though I had offended him in a most unspeakable way.
‘Your world is so narrow,’ he said. ‘Always has been. When was the last time you laughed?’
‘I laugh whenever I think there is reason to do so and when the moment lends itself to such a course of action. What has that got to do with this catastrophe?’
‘What did you do when I came back, when I told you I wasn’t dead after all? Instead of being happy and ecstatic that your flesh and blood was still alive, you started lecturing me and trying to teach me a lesson. You told me the future looks bleak and there’ll be nothing but problems and more problems and doom and gloom until the end of time. You’re as sour as an unripe lemon and as tight as a Scotsman’s purse, and you insist that everybody else is as miserable too.’
‘That is not—’
‘And you’re jealous,’ Juhani continued. ‘You always have been. You’ve just hidden it by pretending to know everything about everything. You’re jealous now too because I saw an opportunity and I took it, and because I get along with everybody. You should have seen how the kids shouted and clapped when I told them there was free ice cream all round.’
‘That is precisely the kind of—’
‘I give people joy and happy memories,’ said Juhani. ‘And don’t you forget, I’m the one that founded this park.’
‘That’s one of the main reasons I want the park to survive in the—’
‘There you go, survive,’ he said as though he’d tasted something exceptionally foul. ‘When I was running the show, we set our sights a bit higher. Some businesses understand the importance of thinking outside the box and really making an impact.’
‘In some businesses,’ I said, ‘this sort of behaviour would be sufficient grounds to terminate your contract.’
Juhani took a breath, stood up straight, pursed his lips together so that the area around his mouth formed one crinkled, pouting, sulking whole. It all happened at once, and I’m not sure I would have noticed it if I didn’t know Juhani.
‘I think you should let me do my job the way I see fit,’ he said. ‘You’re the one that made me park manager. I assume organising the clear-up is the park manager’s responsibility. And that’s what seems to be your biggest issue here, right? The cleaning?’
I glanced at the Big Dipper, smelt the sea of milk.
‘Most acutely, yes,’ I said. ‘But—’
‘Done,’ said Juhani. ‘When you come to work tomorrow morning, the Big Dipper will be spotless. Park manager’s honour.’
I said nothing. Once again, Juhani looked and sounded utterly sincere.
Had I been too harsh on him, I wondered, or somehow unreasonable? Had I always been like this? I didn’t know where the thought had come from. It just appeared, in a flash, and suddenly it was great and bright in my mind, and it was followed by a feeling that spread right through my body. The feeling didn’t seem to dissipate as I stared first at the Big Dipper then at Juhani. And just then I realised where the root of this new feeling might reside. Juhani seemed genuinely horrified at the thought of being fired. Surely this told me how much he valued his workplace? Which suggested he might be willing to change his behaviours after all.
‘You promise to take care of it?’
Juhani nodded. ‘When duty calls, the park manager will always rise to the occasion.’
I wasn’t entirely sure what these words had to do with what we’d just been discussing, but I decided to let it go. I asked when he was planning to get around to clearing up, and he said he would do it immediately. I had a nagging feeling that there was something else I should have said, but I didn’t know what. Eventually, I forced myself to walk away. It was reasonable to say I had mixed feelings about the situation.
Maybe Juhani was right. Maybe I just needed to relax.