9

The story about the caravan might well be true. It would be the first true thing since the resurrection.

I checked the address that Kristian had given me one more time, then looked out towards the sun and the sea.

November. The most misunderstood of months.

The sun never rose very high, but when it shone from a clear blue sky, as it did right now, its light was like an endless cascade of white gold and silk. On windless days, the temperature was very pleasant, perfect for any kind of activity, be it jogging or building a house. The harshness of winter hadn’t yet pierced the air, and the dampness of autumn had finally evaporated. The leafless trees didn’t yet feel final, but simply served to clarify the view. There was a history of entrenched – and, it should be noted, mostly emotional – stereotypes about November, which severely dented its image, but in the cold light of facts and statistics, this was one of the best times of year, especially when it came to business and productivity. November was the Lasse Virén of the calendar: like the great long-distance runner, it stumbles, falls, then jumps to its feet and takes the gold.

I knew why I was thinking things like this. I was trying not to think about what had brought me to the entrance of a campsite by the seashore in eastern Helsinki.

Juhani.

Who had told me he would be working from home today. I didn’t know quite what this meant in practice, especially when it came to the park manager’s roles and responsibilities. The park manager’s job was to resolve any acute problems that arose and sort out anything that needed doing in the actual park, and he was responsible for making sure everything ran smoothly.

I noted that I both did and did not look forward to hearing Juhani’s explanation.

I walked through the gates of the campsite, leaving the reception hut behind me and turned left. The site looked like a cross between an English terraced street and a camping exhibition. While the narrow, street-like pathways were soothingly identical, you could still tell them apart both from the numbers and the different caravans and mobile homes parked along their lengths.

Row eleven. I turned right.

I smelt the proximity of the sea and a smoking sausage on a solitary, unmanned barbecue. There weren’t very many campers at this time of year, but there were a few. I clearly wasn’t the only one who had looked beyond the calendar and the sales pitches. I arrived at the end of the row; a seagull squawked above me. To my left there was woodland, and beyond that the sea. To my right was plot number 161.

The caravan wasn’t new.

It was small and beige except for a hem of faded yellow running around the edge, and in front of it on the narrow patch of garden was a charcoal grill – old, battered and spattered like the one I’d seen before – and a flimsy-looking round table with plastic folding chairs on both sides. In a curious way, everything was as small as possible, as though the owner had gone out of his way to find miniature versions of everything. The caravan had a window facing the pathway, and the curtains were open. Still, all I could see in the window was a reflection of the blue sky, and I didn’t know whether I was being watched or whether I was watching someone I couldn’t actually see.

I walked up to the door of the caravan, noted the electric cables dangling adventurously from the door and knocked, perhaps a little louder than necessary. The caravan was a lightweight fibreglass box, it wobbled and rattled when I rapped my knuckles against the door. I heard the thud of footsteps, the creak of plastic, and the door opened.

Judging by his attire, Juhani was either about to leave or had just got home. He was wearing a smart white shirt and grey tracksuit bottoms. The upper part suggested a blazer and life outside the caravan, while the tracksuit bottoms told a different story, one about what went on inside the caravan, perhaps. He’d hunched over to open the door. Juhani was just over twenty centimetres shorter than me, but even he couldn’t stand upright in his new home.

‘I’ve come to talk to you,’ I said. ‘And hopefully to make a proposal.’

‘By all means,’ he said, then beamed at me. ‘Come on in.’

He stepped back from the doorway, and I followed him inside. This required an amount of concentration, because I had to crouch down and propel myself forwards at the same time – this simply to get through the door – then, my shoulders hunched, I crept towards a microscopic bench and a table bolted to the floor, and finally folded myself in between them.

Juhani lodged himself at the other side of the table. Our feet and shins kept bashing into each other. Eventually, we found a position whereby neither of us was kicking the other. We were sitting as diagonally and as far apart as possible, and yet we were probably closer to each other than at any time since our childhood.

I felt like a giant. The table and the benches and everything in the caravan seemed to come from the same extra-small catalogue as the garden furniture, and everything looked just as worn out. The caravan smelt of coffee and the chemical toilet.

‘How can I help?’ asked Juhani.

‘I’m hoping we can have a serious conversation.’

‘Sure.’

I looked at Juhani. I knew he could say ‘sure’ to almost anything, but it didn’t necessarily mean much.

‘I’ve been talking to the staff,’ I began, ‘and it appears you have been giving them a misleading impression of how—’

Juhani raised his right hand to interrupt me. ‘Hang on a minute. Who says it’s misleading?’

I looked at him. ‘The facts,’ I said. ‘The budget, which I have calculated many times. The funds at our disposal. The number of customers at the park. The concrete, immutable facts.’

Juhani was quiet for a moment.

‘But none of the staff?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘You see?’

‘See what?’

‘What you can do when you inspire people,’ he said. ‘They start thinking positively. All I had to do was open their minds, show them some new perspectives, encourage their good ideas and suggest a few of my own. They’re great people. Incredible amounts of positive energy. All the gloom is gone, the moping is history. They can see opportunities again, Henri. They can see the future.’

I knew this was one of the challenges one often experienced talking to Juhani: long before the other party realised what was happening, Juhani had already moved the conversation as far as possible from the original point.

‘It has to stop,’ I said in an attempt to steer the conversation back on track. ‘The lying. It’s got to stop.’

Juhani’s face froze as though I’d just let a dreadful slur out of my mouth. As he had done many times before, he tilted his head ever so slightly and looked at me as if from a wholly new angle.

‘I haven’t lied to anybody about anything, ever.’

‘You’re lying now telling me you never lie.’

‘Here we go, typical Henri, splitting hairs again,’ said Juhani as though addressing an invisible audience beside him. ‘And all so he can win the argument. I guess he’ll take out a pen and paper next and draw an equation to show how I’ve always been wrong and always will be.’

‘There is truth and there is untruth,’ I said. ‘And both can be proved in mathematical terms.’

‘My own brother,’ he said quietly.

I paused for a moment.

‘I want to help you,’ I said eventually.

Juhani looked as though he had just woken up or knocked into something. He looked genuinely confused. The position of his head had corrected itself too.

‘Henri,’ he said. ‘It’s the other way around. I want to help you. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m trying to make the park a happy, open, successful place again. I want to show you the way.’

‘The way … where?’

‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve been working from home today.’

‘It had crossed my mind,’ I reply honestly.

‘Pensioner Play,’ he said. That familiar sparkle had returned to his eyes.

I said nothing and waited.

‘Kids alone aren’t going to be enough to get our customer numbers up where they need to be,’ he began. ‘And besides, there aren’t all that many kids in Finland. I don’t know a single one. What I mean is, there aren’t very many of them compared to our most abundant natural resource: the elderly. And where do we keep the elderly these days? Behind lock and key. What happens there? Happiness shrivels on the vine. We’re going to bring happiness back with a bang. We’ll invite pensioners into the park. Imagine the joy, the happiness. Not to mention the exercise, the companionship, the fun. We bus them in from the old folks’ homes, ice creams all round, and off to the slides they go. Everything I’ve read about dementia works in our favour here: people regress to the level of a child. And I’ve thought of the financial side too. Imagine this: Caper Castle full of geriatrics who will take hours to find their way out again. We get the full entrance fee, but only one apparatus has any wear and tear and needs repairing. If they’re quicker on their feet but still don’t know what day it is, that’s not a problem either. The park doors can be locked from the outside too, you know. It’ll be cost-effective, and everyone’s a winner. Just imagine it.’

I did as Juhani asked: I imagined the scenario. I saw senior citizens stumbling, panicked, bashing into one another, falling from the ladders and climbing frames. I saw broken bones, fractures, the endless stretchering of patients. I saw lawsuits.

‘I don’t think this is a particularly good idea,’ I said.

Juhani either snorted or exhaled forcefully through his nose. ‘Because it’s my idea,’ he said. ‘You treat me just like our parents. You were always trying to talk them out of things too.’

There was a new tone to his voice, perhaps a hint of bitterness. I didn’t want to discuss our parents under any circumstances, but the subject now seemed both unavoidable and inevitable. What’s more, Juhani’s monologue concerned me so much that I realised I was becoming agitated.

‘Yes, because their projects were nonsensical,’ I said. ‘They founded a puppet theatre with the aim of performing action films to huge audiences. Do you remember the premiere of Rambo? The audience consisted of one drunk, and the final scene culminated in him attacking the Rambo puppet. And before that, the firecrackers used as hand grenades set the props on fire.’

‘That’s innovation for you,’ said Juhani. ‘Open-mindedness.’

I shook my head. ‘They opened a herring farm,’ I said, ‘though at the time we lived in the driest, most land-locked forest in southwest Finland. All through the summer, the place stank so much it made your eyes water. Nothing ever made any sense.’

‘Passion, a love of life,’ said Juhani, gradually raising his voice. ‘There were no shackles, no pigeon-holes. They followed their dreams. My dreams…’

I knew I shouldn’t open my mouth; I knew I was all-too close to losing my temper.

‘Your dreams are bankrupt dreams,’ I said. ‘They always have been. You are a walking bankruptcy, one that’s always spawning new bankruptcies, that go on to create little bankruptcies of their own. The Wikipedia entry for bankruptcy has a photograph of you and no text. Whenever a company files for bankruptcy, all they have to do is mention your name and everybody knows what’s happened. If there’s ever a bankruptcy Olympics, it’ll have to be scrapped right away because you would take gold in every category. You’re the mayor of Bankruptville, King Bankrupt the First.’

We stared at each other.

‘Was this the serious conversation you came all the way out here to have?’ Juhani asked.

‘No,’ I said honestly. ‘I wanted us to consider alternative ways of going forward, of how we can take stock and—’

‘I just gave you plenty. Alternatives. Stock-taking.’

‘Juhani…’

‘Let’s continue on our respective paths. You can be the sensible one. It looks like it does you good. You seem happy and content. Relaxed.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Happiness and contentment come from being responsible.’

‘It was a joke, Henri. You’re about as relaxed as an iron bar stuck in the tundra.’

I didn’t understand what was so amusing about Juhani’s previous comment, and I didn’t see much resemblance in this metaphor either. I began to sense that the atmosphere in this small fibreglass box might not be the best, but I wanted to outline my proposals.

‘As I said when I arrived, I want to discuss—’

‘That’s what we’ve been doing,’ said Juhani.

‘I believe I have a balanced and rewarding proposal that will benefit all parties,’ I continued, ‘especially in the long term.’

Juhani shook his head again.

I looked him in the eyes and spoke. ‘I’ve been thinking that, if in a year’s time, or in two or three years’ time, once we are certain of the growth in sales and footfall, and the park’s finances are in good enough condition that we can think about considerably updating our equipment and making a number of large infrastructure investments, at that point you could take the lead and oversee the next phase, because as park manager you will have experience of the park’s day-to-day operations on a grassroots level, you will know the park from the smallest bolt right up to the financial side of things, where I can guide and help you. At that point, we can talk about some form of joint leadership. That is my proposal.’

Juhani said nothing. A full minute passed.

The fact was that I had said what I had come here to say, and there was nothing to add. The only appropriate move now was to leave, and to this end I began shuffling my shoes under the table. After an amount of fumbling, I managed to extricate myself from between the table and the bench and stood up. Still hunched over, I made my way to the door, opened it and glanced over my shoulder. This required careful coordination. Juhani was sitting on the bench facing the window, his eyes fixed somewhere distant but clearly defined.

‘Juhani,’ I said. ‘I want the park’s employees to fulfil their dreams too – to the extent that those dreams are realistic. But now is not the time. There simply isn’t any extra money. I don’t want you to give them any more unrealistic ideas. If the situation escalates any further, I don’t know what will happen or what people will be prepared to do.’

Now Juhani seemed to be listening to me. His head turned, and he looked me in the eye. His gaze was so sincere that it took me back to our childhood.

‘Those dreams are alive now,’ he said. ‘You can’t extinguish them all.’