Small Disturbances
Yvonne Edgren
L iv sits in the sun, on the bottom step of the back verandah. She’s been collecting snails for the blue-tongue that lives under there somewhere but now she watches as one of her captives slides over her bare foot with its waving eyes extended. Running as fast as it can, she thinks. The snail is cold and wet, but her foot and the sun are both warm so that the snotty trail it leaves behind dries straight away and shrinks, tightening on her skin. The whole effect is ticklish, and interesting. She hears the flyscreen door bang shut behind her, and turns to see her farmor, her grandmother, gazing at her.
‘Ah, you’re feeding your lizard again,’ Ebba says, looking at the ice-cream container full of snails at Liv’s side.
‘Yes, Farmor, but not this one, she’s my friend.’ Liv prods at one of the wavering eyes which immediately withdraws back into the snail’s head. Tiring of this, Liv moves her attention to her grandmother’s working jaw.
‘You haven’t got your fangs, show me!’
Both the old woman and the little girl have gaps in their mouths, some of which match. Liv’s gaps are common to everyone her age and are slowly filling with new teeth but Farmor’s gaps are uniquely connected to her own history. Liv still hopes they might grow back. Farmor calls her false teeth her ‘foreign fangs’. They live on her bedside table overnight, and she sometimes forgets to put them in, or chooses not to. Ebba obligingly opens her mouth wide, making the line that runs up from her jaw pucker a bit. Liv scrambles off the bottom step to make a closer inspection.
‘Anything?’ asks Ebba.
‘No, still just gum. How about mine?’
Liv lifts her face and opens wide so her grandmother can get a good view of her teeth. Ebba peers in at the pinkly shining gums, seeing the gaps between milk teeth where little pearly domes are breaking the surface of the flesh like newly emerging mushrooms. There is also some breakfast in there.
‘Oh yes, they’re growing very quickly! But if you want to keep them you’d better go and brush your teeth. You don’t want to end up with foreign fangs like mine, that would be fatal!’
Liv looks reproachfully at her grandmother.
She likes foreign fangs, they are so fascinating with their yellow, perfectly shaped teeth wired to a pink plastic palate in just exactly the positions where they are needed. Why must she break off the morning’s investigations and conversation for something as dull as toothbrushing? She heads off to the bathroom, but not before picking the snail off her foot and dropping it in Farmor’s apron pocket.
‘You have to mind my snail for me. And don’t let any of Bluey’s dinner escape or I’ll be very cross, and then I won’t check your teeth for you any more. Or let you play with my lizard. Or even look at it,’ she adds.
‘Oh dear, such threats! You’re being very strict with me this morning,’ says Ebba. ‘I’ll watch your snails, and if you show me that you can look after your teeth then I might be able to share the chocolate I have hidden in my room.’
‘Of course, with Hector too.’
Liv avoids eye contact as she flounces past on her way to the bathroom.
* *
Hector, younger than Liv and without her knack for language, can only speak English, so Ebba relies on Liv to interpret. He knows the Swedish word for ‘chocolate’ though, and comes barrelling around the side of the house when Ebba calls to him to come and share some. When Liv returns, Ebba breaks the chocolate into three roughly equal pieces. The children begin reaching for their slab even before she is done and in her eagerness Liv manages to snap a corner off her piece so that she has two uneven shards, one larger than the other. Hector begins stuttering in indignant outrage.
‘What does he say, Liv?’ asks Ebba, baffled.
‘He says it’s not fair because I have two pieces and he only got one. I tried to tell him mine is just the same only broken but he’s such a stupid baby!’
Liv’s voice is starting to get louder, and Hector’s lip is trembling with the hurt and injustice of the situation. Ebba suddenly feels tired, even though it is still only morning. Grimly, she snatches Hector’s piece of chocolate and breaks it in half.
‘There you go,’ she says, ‘now you have the same as your sister. Tell him, Liv.’
Hector’s scowl clears as he listens to Liv. He sits down next to Ebba, pushing his face into her shoulder while Liv sits down on Ebba’s other side.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I said now he has two chocolates and they’re both big. Look, one of mine is only little.’ Liv holds up the broken corner of her slab.
‘You’re a clever girl, Liv,’ Ebba murmurs, as Liv pushes closer so that she, too, can rest her head on Ebba’s shoulder and softly stroke the scar on her cheek. The three of them sit like that for a while, enjoying their chocolate shards in companionable silence, while the forgotten snails in the ice-cream container make a slow break for freedom.
* *
Ebba hears a series of chimes, like a clock but irregular. She peers out the window. As usual the sun is shining high in the wrong part of the sky. It is all indecipherable, the seasons as well as the hours, and she has felt herself held in suspension ever since she arrived in this temporally incoherent country to visit her son and his family. Time, for her, is a singularly Finnish phenomenon, measured in the festival songs of her minority language, in the growth and colour of things, their taste. Time is consumed. It is manifested and then devoured in the form of food appropriate to the season. Boiled young peas are eaten with melted butter and salt, while the Midsummer bonfire showers pagan sparks into the twilight and the fluorescent sun circumnavigates the sky, skimming the horizon like a skipped stone at its lowest, south-western point. In winter the sun struggles to heft itself to the treeline by lunchtime, which, if this is Thursday, consists of pea soup green as a fen. Here, time is dismembered, and now this absurd mis-chime reminds Ebba of how it has been left to flail.
‘What are you doing, Farmor? Are you playing patience?’ Liv interrupts Ebba’s thoughts, leaning on the door frame, knowing not to enter Ebba’s room without an invitation.
‘I’m listening to the clock, can you hear it?’ Ebba replies.
Liv looks puzzled and pokes her finger into her nose thoughtfully.
‘Use your hanky, darling,’ chides Ebba.
Liv tries to locate her pocket but the skirt she is wearing has twisted sideways and the pocket is under her belly button where she can’t find it. She stops her fumbling when the irregular chimes begin again. Without waiting for the invitation, she pushes past Ebba to get to the window.
‘That’s a rosella, Farmor! Did you think it was a clock?’ She laughs, a bit derisively, Ebba thinks. How does the child know so much? This unkempt luck-child and her affinity with all the creatures crawling and perching in the garden, her endlessly poking fingers and peering eyes, her happy, easy fluency and ability to ask prying questions in two languages! Afraid of nothing, where has she come from? Ebba raises her hand to stroke the tousled head looking out the window but is brushed aside.
‘Wouldn’t you like me to replait your hair?’
Ebba imagines fondling Liv’s long hair, yellow as wheat, while the child sits placidly accepting her ministrations.
‘You can read to me instead. The one where she hangs their enemies up in a tree. I’ll get the book.’
Liv reaches into the bookcase to retrieve the volume and then pulls the cane chair next to the bed, where she flops in happy anticipation.
‘Here’s your chair, you better find your glasses.’
It’s a ritual. Ebba pretends not to know her glasses are hanging around her neck. Liv allows her to search for a while and then the glasses are discovered in a moment of shared hilarity. Recognising the ritual, Hector has sidled up to the door and is watching them. Ebba waves him in, reaching over the bed to grab a cushion and drop it on the floor beside her.
‘Tell him his picture book is on the dresser, Liv.’
Hector curls up on his nest at Ebba’s feet. While Ebba reads one book aloud in Swedish, Hector rifles through the pages of the other book, interrupting her occasionally with questions or observations that Liv translates for him.
‘He likes the picture where they’ve been sucked up into the vacuum cleaner.’
‘Yes,’ responds Ebba, ‘he always looks at that one for a long time.’
She smiles down at him, and he grins back at her. He loves this book but doesn’t ever ask to take knowing it won’t be brushed away.
it to his own room. She places her hand on his head,
‘Is it time we had something to eat?’
Liv leaps to the window,
‘Let’s ask the rosella!’ she shouts, full of glee at her own wit.
Ebba feels ashamed of herself. There is no derision in the child, there is only delight— delight with herself, with the world and with the moment. She gazes at Liv caught there on the bed in an amber shaft of sunlight, revelling in her untrammelled childhood and in the absurdity of meals determined by bird-time.
* *
The constant traffic along the highway at the front of the house sounds as a rumble of white noise. It could just as easily be a waterfall or the wind soughing through trees, except for the occasional clang of a truck’s metal doors, or the shriek and sigh of hydraulic brakes.
‘Battle sounds,’ thinks Hector.
He is watching Liv play with their matryoshka dolls. She has unpacked all nine layers and has them lined up on the circular dining table, like the spoke of a wheel, with the largest on the outside and the little peanut-sized one at the centre of the table. There was once a tenth, an even tinier baby that fitted inside the peanut but it was lost long ago. Liv is leaning down, with one eye closed, peering along the line of dolls as if sighting a rifle.
‘They are all the same size,’ she announces.
‘They only look little because they’re further away. The grandmother is the furthest!’
She is pleased with this conceit. It confuses the idea of nesting generations, who it is that holds whom, throwing open the question of which position she herself might occupy. Hector doesn’t understand what she is talking about though, and stands impatiently waiting for her to shoot the dolls, wondering how far they will scatter.
* *
Standing in the doorway of Ebba’s room, just to look, Liv can see motes of dust flickering and sparkling in the golden light from the window.
‘Look there,’ she points, to show Hector. ‘You can see the air!’
The children pass their arms rapidly through the beam of light, causing the dust to eddy and swirl. Part of the game is to flap arms without stepping over the threshold and entering the forbidden room. There are things here that are old and fragile, and not to be played with. The children stop their jostling to look. The room is full of objects that predate them, relics of lives their grandmother had before this one. The cane chair has a long tapestry draped over it that their grandmother has made herself, embroidering with wool made from dog hair that she has spun and dyed. It is faded, because the colours are made from onion skins, beetroot, rusty nails and other witchy ingredients that can’t survive in bright foreign sunshine or modern times. The now muted browns, yellows and mauves are blended in a stylised design of flowers and coiling leaves on a striped ground. When she is allowed, Liv likes to trace the pattern with her finger, feeling the coarse hair so much rougher than wool, while Hector is curious about the dog but unsure how to frame his questions.
On the shelf above the bed, sits a one-eyed teddy bear, its fur worn off. He’s an old gentleman teddy, in a three-piece suit and tie. He has some elastic braces to hold his pants up but they have perished and aren’t able to support even themselves let alone a pair of trousers. Farmor has made the suit out of a real gaberdine one, cut up, and the shirt from a real dress shirt. Farfar’s suit was worn out, beyond repair so she made clothes for the teddy so as not to waste the remaining fabric. It’s one of two things they know about their farfar: he had a worn-out suit; and twice he went away to be a soldier, first as a boy and then again when he was a grown man. The teddy is very old and mustn’t be played with because he is fragile. Liv knows he was played with a lot at one time, because of the worn fur and the eye, and because Farmor bothered to make a suit for him so he could be a gentleman rather than just a naked bear.
Another favourite thing is the bookcase. Sometimes the children are allowed to sit on the floor and look through the books. They are mostly very old, some have missing pages, or have lost their covers. There are picture books about mushroom families and flower people living in mossy forests full of fir trees. Some of the pictures are scary, lichen-covered boulders turn into trolls, or little gnomes with glowing eyes and red hats creep around farm houses on snowy nights while the occupants are asleep. There are also books with fewer pictures and more text, that tell strange, unsettling and sometimes wonderful stories that Farmor reads aloud. There is one about toys who are alive like real children, and have to be evacuated to Sweden by plane because they are too hungry. The one who is made of cloth and stuffed with toilet paper is so light that she is blown out of the plane by a puff of wind and is lost. For Liv, the toilet paper is the compelling detail in this narrative.
On Farmor’s dressing table are some toy soldiers, arranged in a line. They have round helmets and are wearing white. Two soldiers are operating a machine gun, one doing the shooting while the other one supports a string of bullets. A third soldier is lying on his stomach in the snow aiming his rifle at an unseen enemy. The cold must be seeping into his torso, stretched out as he is over the frozen ground. The fourth and last soldier is on one knee, with his rifle dangling by his side. He is looking behind him and gesturing with his other arm as if to say, ‘Come on!’
But there is no-one there. Perhaps he has friends, a blue-tongue with glowing eyes creeping around under the farm house steps, or trolls hiding behind mossy fir trees in the forest. Farfar will come, with his gun, and blast the enemy into shards of bone and shattered teeth, leaving their blood steaming like hot breath in the snow. The children are not allowed to touch the soldiers at all because they are made of lead and are poisonous. If one were to go in a mouth it could be fatal, Farmor has told them. Even Hector is old enough not to go around sucking things but Liv is afraid she would not be able to resist putting the poison toy in her mouth, just for the terror of it.