Chapter 3

Sinikka Sundström, managing director of Sunset Grove, had called an emergency meeting in the dining room, which was, for once, overflowing with residents. Director Sundström’s untamed mop was frizzy from the humidity, and although she wore nothing more than a gauzy, brightly coloured caftan with an ample neckline and loose sleeves, she appeared to be wilting in the heat. A wooden cross drew the eye to her glowing bosom, and she strained mightily to offer her residents a sunny smile. The gutting of a retirement home was not a project that she, with her degree in social services, had foreseen ever having to shoulder. Fortunately, she was able to rely on the assistance of Project Manager Jerry Siilinpää, who was responsible for managing the retrofit and who would be at hand in person today to update the seniors on the project’s progress.

‘. . . so now I’m going to need a positive attitude from each and every one of you,’ Sundström said, with a clap of her hands.

Nearly every ambulatory resident was in attendance, as Sunset Grove had suffered from drilling and banging for well over a week now. The protective plastic had not been delivered yet; water was liable to be cut off without warning; and rumours of disappearing belongings and damage to personal property were mounting by the day. The physiotherapist had shut her doors, and the activity centre displayed a distinct lack of activity.

‘Let’s reach into our positivity pouches and pull out a big fistful of good cheer, there we go, another fistful, and another! After all, we’re all in the same boat!’ Director Sundström cried, spreading her arms like Luciano Pavarotti receiving applause; the only thing missing was a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth dangling from her left hand. ‘A great big energizing hug to all of you!’

‘What’s that?’ shouted the veteran in the flat cap. He refused to sit, and flapped his arms in the doorway in his peculiar forward hunch. He couldn’t hear anything over the shrieking of the drills and could make neither head nor tail of the director’s gesticulations.

‘Grab some good cheer from your pouch and throw it around,’ Irma yelled at him, followed by a tinkling laugh. She reached into her handbag, pulled out fistful after fistful of good cheer, and flung it around. The others took inspiration from Irma’s play-acting, and before long the entire room was sprinkling good cheer, laughing heartily – everyone except Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador, that is, who sat, stunned, in the front row.

‘This place is a madhouse,’ Anna-Liisa said, fixing her baleful eyes on Director Sundström. The director was thoroughly discomfited. She hadn’t had the faintest idea that her inspirational speech would take such concrete manifestation. She wrung her perspiring hands, and when the mayhem showed no signs of abating, she started clapping rhythmically and raised her voice.

‘Eyes up here, my dears! Let’s remember that this retrofit is an opportunity we don’t want to slip through our fingers! Since the walls and the yard are going to be torn up anyway for the new pipes, we’re going to be fixing a lot of other things, too. The façade is being replastered as we speak, and when this is all over, each and every one of you will enjoy a brand-new bathroom and kitchen, complete rewiring, improved air conditioning, and the new bushes and trees which will be planted in the yard. We’re collecting funds for a garden swing, and you all have the opportunity to contribute to that, too. So if I could ask you . . .’

This speech did nothing to quell the prevailing restlessness, and Sundström’s voice stumbled here and then faded feebly into nothingness. All seemed lost. But then a young man in a tightly cut grey suit and rubber sneakers strode through the door. When she saw him, Director Sundström nearly sprouted wings of joy, and her pink cheeks burned even more brightly than before.

‘Jerry, thank God! Welcome, Jerry Siilinpää! Could everyone please . . . could you please listen to what Project Manager Jerry Siilinpää has to report on our shared adventure?’

‘Who the hell names their kid Jerry?’ asked a nearly bald woman, a new resident from C wing, from her wheelchair.

‘Siilinpää? Hedgehog Head? Do you suppose that’s a transliteration of a Swedish name?’ Siiri asked Irma.

‘What’s hedgehog in Swedish?’ Irma asked so loudly that many of the older people nearby started pondering the question. Someone suggested utter, but that was clearly the word for otter, as someone else pointed out. ‘Oh, how I wish I had my green flaptop; it would tell me in an instant.’

Igelkott,’ Anna-Liisa bellowed, to bring a stop to the babble. ‘But I rather doubt it’s a finnicized name.’ She shifted her penetrating eyes to the young man standing at Director Sundström’s side. ‘You may begin.’

‘Cool. Hey, everybody! Sinikka over there just said “adventure”, and adventure’s a great way to put it.’ The project manager’s unbuttoned collar was flopping about, and he wasn’t wearing a tie. An identification card with his name and photograph plastered to it hung around his neck. Such a thing might be useful in the locked unit, home to dementia patients who couldn’t remember their names, but for a healthy young man to be wandering about in public with a name tag looped around his neck, well, this struck Siiri and Irma as downright silly. Siilinpää’s hair looked greasy, but Irma knew this was because of the wax he’d smeared on his head.

‘My darlings tell me it’s quite typical these days for men to fuss over their hair and even use hairspray. And salts and gels are . . . how did they put it . . . “hella normal”, I think that was it.’

‘Our adventure has got off to a pretty exciting start, don’t you guys think? How’s everyone feeling here at the Sunrise Grove nursing home?’

‘Did you say Sunrise?’ Anna-Liisa asked in disbelief. Her hearing was very sharp. Margit was sitting on Anna-Liisa’s other side, but hadn’t heard a thing because she’d left her hearing aid on her nightstand again. Margit’s head nodded, and she struggled to stay awake.

‘Yup, exactly! Sunset. I said Sunset Grove,’ Siilinpää said, adjusting the tie that wasn’t there. His hands found his name tag and held it for a moment, apparently to soothe himself.

‘It’s like a pacifier, that name tag,’ Irma said.

‘He’ll be putting it in his mouth before long,’ Siiri added, and she and Irma chuckled inappropriately.

‘Sunset Grove is not a nursing home. This is a full-service retirement community,’ Anna-Liisa corrected the young Mr Siilinpää. She eyed him as if he were a student trying to fake his way through an oral report without the necessary preparation.

‘But there aren’t any services! What if this is a nursing home after all?’ shouted the veteran in the flat cap, rescuing Mr Siilinpää. He had advanced up the aisle and was now standing next to Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador.

‘Have a seat, Tauno dear,’ Director Sundström said in a low voice, giving the irate old man a pleading look. An enormous pearl of sweat ran down her forehead to the tip of her nose and hung there, refusing to drip to the floor.

‘I’m not your dear! Don’t you dear me!’ Tauno growled and he remained standing.

‘Jiminy!’ Irma squawked. Scattered titters were heard from around the room. Tauno’s arms were fanning faster than ever, but now he was standing still, like some aggressive question mark.

‘Why don’t you stop waving your arms about, dear, and sit down,’ Director Sundström said, her voice quivering. Her throat was blooming with red and white splotches, and the wooden cross at her bosom was bathed in sweat. You could hear a pin drop, until Margit let out a loud snore and started. Confused, she had no idea of where she was. The expectant silence continued.

‘I can’t,’ Tauno said finally. The room pricked up its ears; the old man’s voice was barely audible. ‘My spine is so twisted that it hurts to sit. A wound from the war. I can’t sit properly and even when I stand, it’s like this; I have to move my hands to keep my balance. So if you’ll please excuse it. The rocking.’ After a brief, effective pause he spat between his teeth in a voice so low that few heard: ‘Witch.’

At this point, Director Sundström tried to pass off responsibility to the project manager, who was still holding his name tag and couldn’t get a word out: ‘Yes, of course. Jerry, can you take over from here?’

But Tauno the twisted veteran was trembling. ‘Telling a sick man to sit down, ordering old people around like they’re children! Doesn’t even know who lives here, the bloody cow. And now she’s spoiling our final days with these war games. Goddamned bitch!’

Tauno’s arms fanned the air furiously as his croaking voice rose, and before long he was shouting such obscenities that his removal from the room proved necessary. Miisa Sievänen, the pro tem head of residents care, rushed off and returned with two fearsome-looking construction workers to escort Tauno out. They took hold of the gnarled, roaring man as if he were a length of concrete pipe and carried him off until the thunder of the demolition drowned out his raging. Jerry Siilinpää buried his face in his hands, and when finally he restarted his pep talk, it seemed to Siiri that he was holding back a smile. Or tears; it was hard to say which.

‘Yup, I see there’s lots of spirit here, that’s great.’

Siilinpää sighed deeply, took two brisk steps towards the flip chart and grabbed a fat marker. ‘OK, guys, so let’s say you have a pretty intense situation that’s gradually escalating. If we do a little survey of the challenges you’re facing here, what’s the first thing to come to mind?’

The residents of Sunset Grove stared silently at the boy with the waxed hair, who seemed to view the hellishness of their present circumstances as some semi-amusing challenge they could solve by drawing off-centred ovals on a flip chart with red and green marker pens.

‘This here is our project, exactly,’ Jerry Siilinpää said, scribbling a P in the middle of the big circle. ‘If you guys could just take a look up here at the flip chart, please. Let’s map these problems out together first, and then we’ll look for action items and paint in the desired landscape. So some of you already have the asbestos removal thing going on in your apartments. Did any critical interfaces emerge during that?’

‘Will you look at that; Anna-Liisa isn’t commenting on his language,’ Siiri said, and was rewarded with an irate glance from the front rows.

‘Why on earth is that easel called a flip chart?’ Irma asked.

‘Right. Excellent question. It comes from English. Flip because the paper flips over and chart because . . . umm, well. In any case. This is your, I mean our project, and you see these arrows here, these red ones, these are the critical risk clusters. Noise is probably the first one here. I’ll put a letter N here.’

Panicked cries echoed from around the room: ‘What? How’s that? What did you say?’ No one understood what the man at the flip chart was talking about.

‘Noise! I’m thinking it’s a buffer risk during the kick-off phase! But no prob, I can promise you that as the project continues, you’ll get used it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Another – shall we say – critical challenge is dust. It’s being taken care of. I’ll put a D here. There we go. The moving boxes will arrive tomorrow and then you just pack your things in them and keep them safe and sound so they aren’t damaged by the dust, right? Of course it would always be better if the apartments were completely empty, but hey, come on, you guys have to live somewhere, right? So let’s just pack up what we can so it’s not in the way. This second arrow here is an action item. Let’s put A1 on the roadmap, and this box here under the arrow is a box, a moving box. It’s an action item. Another action item is plastic, transparent plastic and masking tape. Together these action items form a point, an action point. You guys wrap that plastic around your television and any other electronics you may have. And then tape it so tightly that the dust can’t get in and play dirty tricks on your devices. Pretty simple, right? Let’s just take it one step at a time, nice and easy, right?’

Jerry Siilinpää jabbed red dots around the arrow to represent dust that wasn’t getting into the box.

‘Who’s going to pack our stuff?’ shouted a woman in a purple tracksuit whom Siiri had never seen before.

‘Why moving boxes? Where are we moving to?’ asked the ancient woman from A wing who was strapped to her wheelchair.

‘I’m not packing anything myself, no way,’ said the tattooed woman sitting next to her, a recent retiree whom Irma had met over lunchtime porridge a couple of weeks earlier.

‘She’s perfectly healthy and only sixty-seven years old. Apparently, she’s a doctor. She could be my daughter!’ Irma whispered to Siiri, and the tattooed woman glared at them. ‘Just imagine if Tuula showed up at Sunset Grove, that would be something, wouldn’t it!’

‘Umm, well . . . the retirement centre is responsible for this task, the packing, so if you take it from here, Sinikka, and tell us what time and resources you have allocated for this,’ Jerry Siilinpää mumbled, gazing at his work of abstract art. He wrote SUNRISE GROVE PLUMBING RETROFIT in capital letters at the top of the flip chart.

The meeting was of absolutely no use, but Irma and Siiri found it a rather pleasant way to pass the morning and a refreshing change from the usual attempts to activate them. One woman with tangled hair thought she was at bingo and kept complaining that she couldn’t hear the numbers. Margit’s snoring was growing louder and louder, despite Anna-Liisa’s elbowing her in the ribs. But the Ambassador had little to say, which was peculiar, since he was typically alert and active on such occasions.

‘Maybe he doesn’t dare open his mouth, now that Anna-Liisa’s got him under her thumb,’ Irma suggested.

The young doctor with the tattoos demanded services every chance she got, such as a ride to her summer cottage, where the garden demanded regular attention, and there was no way she could travel alone, because she had kidney trouble that demanded heavy doses of daily medication. As she spoke, she threw in a smattering of medical jargon that no one understood but that made her garden and her kidneys sound like a matter of life and death. Gradually, the seniors lost interest, since neither Project Manager Siilinpää nor Director Sundström had the answers to the simplest of questions. No one even had any idea how long the retrofit would take and how long they would have to manage without water.

‘No one’s going to die of thirst,’ Director Sundström consoled her audience, with an unpleasant emphasis on the word ‘thirst’. ‘The plastic water jugs in the hallways will be filled as often as necessary, and meal service has been outsourced. Meals will be delivered directly to the apartments of those who want them. The service is subject to a supplementary fee, and you’ll find the price list in the folder in the common room, on the bulletin board outside my office, and online. You can sign up for the service in Pro Tem Head Sievänen’s office.’ The director smiled happily, as if this expensive temporary arrangement were emergency aid being provided free of charge by the Finnish Red Cross.

‘Our time window’s closing!’ shouted Jerry Siilinpää, pointing at his wrist where there was no watch. ‘Shall we say one last question and then on to bigger and better things?’

‘When and where is bingo being held?’ asked the woman with the tangled hair.

‘I can’t open the door to my balcony. Can someone come and open it?’ shouted the nearly bald woman.

‘There’s a hole the size of a grown man in the wall between our apartments, and no one seems to want to fix it. Who should we complain to?’ crowed Irma in a penetrating voice that rose above the din.

‘Is listening to the radio forbidden?’ asked someone from the back row. Then it was quiet.

‘Right, right,’ Jerry Siilinpää said, looking thoughtful. ‘Excellent food for thought, yup, yup. Thanks. Until next time!’

He ripped his explanatory illustration from the flip chart, threw it in the bin, grabbed the laptop he hadn’t opened once during the meeting and slipped it under his arm, then stalked from the room in long, tennis-shoe strides. Director Sundström fingered the damp wooden cross at her throat and tried to start a round of applause for Mr Siilinpää. The tattooed doctor and the bald woman clapped so furiously that Margit woke up and asked Anna-Liisa in a loud voice when the plumbing retrofit was supposed to begin. Then Siiri noticed a pause in the rumbling and drilling. Apparently, the demolition men were taking a lunch break; it was the only peaceful moment of the day. For a little while, life felt heavenly and no one had any aches or pains. In honour of this sliver of paradise, they decided to enjoy a peaceful game of canasta for the first time in ages. Only Anna-Liisa looked fatigued, and the Ambassador nearly had to force her to the baize-covered table. Irma shuffled the cards and dealt nimbly; she was very skilled.

‘I have a three!’ Irma tittered, and at that moment a horrendous bang came from the direction of C wing. The card table shook, Margit squawked, one old woman outside the dining room fell to the ground, Siiri’s head thrummed nastily, Anna-Liisa went white as a sheet, and over in the magazine nook, the doctor with the tattoos started cursing. She stood up and announced that she was heading out to the local pub, the Ukko-Munkki, for a pint.

‘Care to join me?’ the doctor asked, but none of their little circle of card players was in the habit of drinking beer in bars. They had only been to the Ukko-Munkki once, on the occasion of the Hat Lady’s funeral, when the pastor played the saw and the wine was flowing. But generally speaking, they didn’t feel such watering holes were appropriate places for old people. Especially at an hour like this – why, it was barely noon.

‘Jesus Christ, what a bunch,’ the doctor said. The old woman was still lying on the floor outside the dining room, and the doctor winced at the sight as she rushed past them and out the door. A couple of construction workers were entering the building at the same time and politely made way for the doctor by stepping over the old woman.

‘What is she doing here?’ Siiri asked as she watched the doctor leave. For the life of her she couldn’t understand why a sixty-seven-year-old would pay through the nose to live at Sunset Grove when she could have lived anywhere she wanted, like a normal person.

‘And why is she a doctor?’ Irma asked, and she started to laugh.

They went over to help the old woman up, because there was no sign of any personnel. Since the dismissal of Head Nurse Virpi Hiukkanen, the revolving doors of Sunset Grove staffing had spun faster than ever. Miisa Sievänen had been named pro tem head of residents care, and there was no more need for a head nurse. Ms Sievänen wasn’t a nurse by training; she was some sort of theoretical expert in the caregiving sciences. She had explained that no one in their right mind would come and work at a retirement home where there was a major construction project underway, which the residents had no trouble understanding.

And which was why, without asking for assistance, they lifted up the old woman and helped her onto one of the benches in the lobby. Irma was so rotund she had a hard time bending over, but Margit, as her husband’s caregiver, had learned the proper holds, and she gave the Ambassador, Siiri and Anna-Liisa clear commands in this demanding operation. After much ordering about and huffing, the old woman was sitting upright. She was disoriented, and blood was dripping from her forehead.

‘Oh how awful, how terrible!’ a voice shouted behind them. Pro Tem Head Sievänen stood there, covering her mouth. She didn’t cope well with blood. Irma dabbed at the cut with her lace handkerchief while Miisa Sievänen swiped at her phone, trying to order an ambulance.

‘There’s no need for an ambulance,’ Siiri assured her. ‘One doesn’t go to hospital for a little cut. Look for yourself, it’s not even bleeding any more, now that Irma wiped away the blood.’

But the pro tem head couldn’t bear looking at the old woman’s cut, which was precisely why she had chosen the theoretical track in the caregiving sciences programme at vocational school. She’d been instructed that any senior exhibiting abnormal symptoms needed to be immediately collected by ambulance and removed from retirement-home premises, and a cut, if anything, was an abnormal symptom. Otherwise someone might sue the retirement home for neglect, and no retirement-home owner could afford to take on such a burden. Ms Sievänen trembled nervously and screeched into her phone: ‘We need an ambulance right away – yes, a head wound, fallen, an elderly woman, yes, very old.’

‘What was that horrific explosion? That was why this woman fell, because of that horrendous bang. What was it?’ Siiri asked the director pro tem after the call ended. Ms Sievänen didn’t know anything about any explosions; she hadn’t heard anything of the sort and looked at Siiri and her friends as if they had made up the entire retrofit.

‘There’s no point getting yourselfs worked up over nothing,’ she said before wandering off.

‘Over nothing!’ Anna-Liisa barked unusually shrilly. ‘I’ve spent my entire life weeding incorrect plural forms out of young people’s mouths and this is the result!’

They looked at Anna-Liisa in astonishment. Generally, she didn’t behave in this manner, no matter how much of a stickler she was for grammar. But Miisa Sievänen, who hadn’t grasped that she was the object of Anna-Liisa’s indignation, had already disappeared from view.

The Ambassador took his wife by the arm and gave her a tender smile: ‘All right, Anneli, that’s enough.’

‘Don’t you patronize me with your petting!’ Anna-Liisa snapped, wrenching free of the Ambassador’s grasp. This was rather worrisome. Siiri desperately tried to think of a new topic of conversation that would calm Anna-Liisa down, but her friend was off and running. She had moved on from irregular plural forms and was giving a detailed account of a plumbing retrofit she’d been subjected to in the 1970s. At the time, the whole building association had been provided with one pickle jar in the bicycle storage as a shared toilet, and Anna-Liisa had no intention of remaining at Sunset Grove to witness the resulting urinary free-for-all when the residents rolled down to the basement with their walkers to do their business in a pickle jar.

‘Maybe they’ll give us free diapers?’ Irma suggested constructively, but Anna-Liisa paid no attention, and instead took her vexation out on the Ambassador.

‘What about meals? What have you been planning on eating when there’s no water? Dried goods? Spelt straight from the jar?’ Anna-Liisa shouted threateningly. She concluded her diatribe by stomping her healthier foot and shrieking hysterically, virtually in tears: ‘Why don’t you do something, Onni Rinta-Paakku?’

‘I’ll take you out to eat,’ the Ambassador said soothingly, and he offered his wife his arm. The thus-mollified Anna-Liisa fixed her bun and straightened the hem of her blouse.

‘What I’m trying to say is, we cannot live here during the plumbing retrofit,’ she said, confining her rage to a quiet quiver in her otherwise melodic voice. Flames of fury no longer burned in her eyes, replaced by a fearful panic, and she clutched her husband’s arm as if she were lost at sea and it were a life preserver. They started walking towards the canteen, which was nothing like a restaurant, but an unpleasant, brightly lit institutional room. There the residents sat at long, birch-veneer tables without saying a word, spooning porridge like children back when Finnish schools offered free breakfasts to all. At Sunset Grove, porridge was served for breakfast, lunch and bedtime snack, but rarely for dinner. At one point it had been accompanied by jam, but the jam had run out in April, and not even sugar had appeared in its stead. Director Sundström had taken the opportunity to enlighten her dissatisfied clients that sugar was unhealthy, one of the most common causes of death. And besides, the discretionary funds weren’t sufficient to cover jam and other luxuries.

The old woman who had fallen was propped up in one of the lobby chairs, still confused, but they didn’t wait around to see if an ambulance would deign to accept her as a passenger. Margit hurried off to her felting class, and Irma noted that the time had flown and she was already supposed to be at her cousin’s for book club. Siiri was desperate for fresh air, and she tried to look busy even though no one was expecting her anywhere. She fetched her coat from her apartment because she didn’t remember it was hot outside, and walked to the stop on Munkkiniemi Allée to wait for the number 4 tram. Wrapped in plastic, Sunset Grove gleamed in the sun and looked like a work of American art, quite handsome, actually. But the clank of the approaching tram drew her thoughts away from Sunset Grove and all of the unpleasantness, at least for a moment.