Now that the plumbing retrofit wasn’t waking them up at 6 a.m., they quickly settled back into their usual rhythms. The Ambassador and Anna-Liisa lounged in bed for hours, Irma slept like a baby thanks to her pills, and Siiri generally woke at nine. But Margit was an early bird and started flitting about the flat in her tattered nightshirt well before eight. She cursed loudly as she battled with the gas burner, finally got it to light, and made herself coffee and an egg. Then she hunted for the paper, wondered why there were four identical copies, took one, lowered her bulk into the enveloping sofa, and ate her breakfast as she lazily flipped through the news. After an hour of this, she grew bored and tried to turn on the TV. A protracted struggle with the five remotes ensued, culminating in her activating the television, much to her fright: the device bellowed, and the gargantuan screen showed a music video dripping with sex and gore.
‘God save us. Help! How do I turn this off!’ Margit squawked, jabbing remote after remote in a panic. This musical interlude was more effective than any diamond-drill cacophony at rousing the entire household. Only Anna-Liisa remained in her bed as the others stumbled into the living room in horror.
‘Is that . . . why that’s a breast,’ Irma said, narrowing her eyes as she tried to make out what was happening on the wall-sized flat screen. ‘And it has a gold loop with a ruby in it!’
‘I doubt it’s genuine,’ the Ambassador said in a serious voice, as if he were an expert on piercings. ‘Just a bit of glass. And definitely not gold.’
‘This . . . this doesn’t look like the Morning Show,’ Siiri choked out. She tried to help Margit change the channel or at least mute the sound. The appalling screeching, drum-thrashing, and electric-guitar wails continued as a tiger appeared and started licking the woman. ‘Oh dear, oh dear! This is just terrible . . . don’t any of these remotes work? Do you suppose we should draw the curtains?’
They didn’t know how to work the blinds or the television. Margit couldn’t remember how she had turned it on, nor was there a power button on the device itself. The Ambassador tried to follow the power cable to tug it out of the wall, but it led into a tube along with a tangle of other wires, and it was impossible to say which one was the television cord. Irma and Siiri couldn’t find any controls from where to pull or twist the blackout curtains.
‘The curtains are on their own remote, of course,’ Siiri said, giving up. ‘But I don’t suppose anyone is spying on us, trying to figure out what we’re up to.’
‘And perhaps we’ll get used to what’s coming from the television, just like we did with the racket from the renovation!’ Irma said, going into the kitchenette to make her breakfast. She’d been too startled even to pull on a dressing gown.
‘That’s a pretty shade of toenail polish,’ the Ambassador said politely.
Siiri rushed off to fetch her slippers before Onni started commenting on her craggy old toes. She decided to have her morning shower and dress while she was at it. It didn’t feel appropriate to be traipsing about the commune half-naked, although both Margit and Irma seemed perfectly comfortable doing so. Thankfully, the Ambassador had donned ironed blue pyjamas and a stylish burgundy robe.
When Siiri stepped into their spa, the lights came on without her doing a thing. She looked at the tub, the shape of a stretched-out egg with a peculiar hollow in the middle, and decided to do her washing at the sink instead. But the tap had no visible method for releasing the flow of water. She tried pressing it, pulling it, and suddenly the water gushed out. When she moved her hand away, the water stopped.
‘Oh, for Pete’s sake,’ she muttered to herself, testing the technology. Hands under the tap, water. Hands out from under the tap, no water. Very economical and efficient, to be sure. She didn’t dare try the shower, but it appeared to work by a similar sort of mysterious logic and automatically knew when you wanted water. Suddenly Margit was standing behind her.
‘Good grief, you gave me a fright! What are you doing in here? Can’t you see I’m bathing, Margit?’ Siiri cried, equal parts alarm and annoyance.
‘I want to bathe, too,’ Margit said, stripping off her threadbare pyjamas and dropping them to the heated floor, then removing her hearing aid and slapping it down at the edge of Siiri’s sink before marching into the shower as if mysterious, mind-reading robots were nothing new. Siiri found the sight of Margit standing before her in all of her unclothed, corpulent glory disconcerting. She modestly wrapped herself in her dressing gown and snuck off.
Outside the living room, she ran into a woman she had never seen before. This stranger, an adult, had bangs that were chopped far too short, like Siiri’s children in their school photos from the 1950s, when she used to cut their hair herself. The woman had packed her thick thighs into a pair of geometrically patterned stockings and topped off the ensemble with a loosely knit sweater.
‘And here’s another one. How many of you live here?’ the woman asked, without looking at Siiri.
‘Five,’ replied the Ambassador, who appeared to know who the woman was. The television was still spewing music videos. Just now, a man with a long beard was using a chainsaw to chop a dog in two on the roof of a car, while three topless women swayed and panted English-language sentiments into their microphones.
‘I’m Siiri Kettunen, hello.’
‘Jemina Koutamo-Navaglotu from the municipality, hello. I’m the Temporary Part-Time Director for Western Health-Care District In-Home Care; the director is on job alternation leave.’
‘She’s here for Anna-Liisa. As you already know, Anneli has been ordered to receive in-home care,’ the Ambassador explained, knotting the belt of his silk bathrobe more tightly. They were still a little shell-shocked after their rude awakening, and none of them had imagined in-home care was so efficient. Why, Anna-Liisa had just been released from the hospital, and people were already showing up on their doorstep at the crack of dawn.
‘Would you care for coffee and a sandwich? I made us breakfast,’ Irma said amiably, setting out slices of bread on a plate. They were covered with thick slabs of real butter and generous sprinklings of finger-salt. ‘Or is that why you’re here, to make us breakfast?’
‘No, thank you. And no. This is an assessment visit. The idea is to evaluate the need for in-home care and support services with the client and those responsible for her well-being. Which one of you is the client, and who answers for her well-being?’
‘Oh, we’re all clients, depending on the situation,’ Irma said, pouring coffee into cups. ‘Or was it consumers? Isn’t that what you call people these days, consumers? And we’re all responsible for each other’s well-being, in a way. Do you take milk or sugar? Unfortunately, I don’t have any cream to offer you. We’ve just moved here to Hakaniemi; we’re quite the refugees since a tribe of Huns attacked our retirement home. We call them crooks because they look like they’re up to no good, and all sorts of things have happened there. Things go missing, the project manager disappeared, there are pockets of water damage here and there, the ceiling collapsed in one unit, and an enormous hole appeared in our wall, the wall I share with Siiri Kettunen here, and no one has bothered to repair it. They just taped some plastic over it. It all seems very illicit to me. Do you take sugar? Did I already ask?’
‘No, thank you. And yes, you did. I wasn’t given time to answer. Which one of you is Anna-Liisa Marjatta Petäjä?’
‘She’s sleeping in the round bed in the big bedroom. Imagine that, the bed is perfectly round, and there’s a mirror on the ceiling above it. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’
Irma was astonishingly chipper, and it no longer bothered her that rock music was blaring from the television at an unbearable volume, along with horrific images of burning houses and blood-spattered heads with pigs’ snouts and elephants’ ears.
The Ambassador marched into his bedchamber to warn Anneli about the impending inspection. But Anna-Liisa had heard everything and had dressed as they recovered from their astonishment. The Ambassador helped his wife out into the living room and introduced her as if she were the object of enormous pride: ‘This is your client. And I am the one responsible for her well-being. Her husband.’
The assessor with the complicated-sounding employment relationship at municipal In-Home Care looked Anna-Liisa up and down like an experienced judge eyeing candidates at a dog show. She flipped through her papers, tried to seat herself on a bar stool and refused yet another offer of coffee from Irma. To her horror, Irma realized she was barefoot and in a nightshirt and vanished into her mauve bedchamber in a torrent of apologies.
The representative from In-Home Care passed out colourful brochures advertising the palette of services offered by the city of Helsinki and said that the doctor had ordered Anna-Liisa a service called ‘convalescent care’. The aim was to help the client achieve normal health after an illness, and it included treating the illness, monitoring the client’s progress, and exercises that facilitated activity and mobility.
‘How awful,’ Siiri let slip. For a moment, everything was quiet. The nurse was still scanning her papers, clearly trying to get a grasp on Anna-Liisa’s illness and the minutiae of her case.
‘Can you please explain what is meant here by achieving normal health?’ Anna-Liisa asked, after browsing through the brochure. ‘Seeing as how I’m a rather worn-down, ninety-four-year-old individual: how on earth can anything be normal in my case?’
‘Yes. And no. Nothing is normal; you’re right about that. We don’t like to use that word, because it’s stigmatizing. If something is normal, that means something else isn’t, if you catch my drift.’
‘I do. Are you testing my comprehension? Am I going to have to answer another battery of questions, like what day is it?’
‘No and no. I’m not testing your state of mind, and I’m not going to conduct an MMSE on you. In this case, achieving normal health means managing everyday life without assistance, like prior to your falling ill. What sort of help did you receive at the retirement home?’
‘Excuse me, I’m having a hard time hearing what you’re saying with that horrible contraption shrieking in my ear. Can’t anyone turn it off? You’re young; perhaps you know how televisions like this work?’ Anna-Liisa said.
‘Yes. And maybe. I’ll do my best.’
‘Look, now that nun is taking off her clothes, and she’s a man! Like in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory!’ Irma squealed shrilly. She had put on her blue summer dress, brushed her hair, dabbed on a bit of lipstick, and looked very presentable – unlike the rest of them. Margit was still in the shower; the Ambassador and Siiri were in their bathrobes. In her rush, Anna-Liisa had buttoned her shirt askew and slipped on mismatching shoes.
Jemina Whatshername marched up to the television, located some magic button along the bottom edge, and killed it.
‘Ah, lovely. You’re a genius. Thank you so much!’ Siiri said in relief and seated herself on the sofa to drink her coffee. She could feel her strength ebbing, as the day had started off too quickly and she hadn’t had time to eat properly. At least she’d managed to drink her two glasses of water in the bathroom before Margit barged in.
Having achieved momentary peace in the flat, the in-home care assessor took hold of the reins. She began by quizzing Anna-Liisa on all manner of things; she had three pages’ worth of questions, and she marked the answers with a tick in a box. Siiri grew squeamish eating her breakfast as Anna-Liisa gave a detailed report of her present circumstances.
‘. . . my digestion is rather irregular, and lately I’ve suffered some bouts of constipation, which might have as much to do with the fact that I was lying in hospital for three weeks for no discernible reason as with my being the victim of an unvaried hospital diet. I don’t generally have problems with urinary incontinence – under normal circumstances, that is – although lately –’
Siiri and Irma exchanged glances, and without further ado took their sandwiches and coffee cups and moved into the recesses of the kitchenette. But there was no table there, and so they lowered their breakfasts to the marble countertop and discreetly turned their backs on Anna-Liisa, the Ambassador, and the in-home care assessor so that they could probe the particulars of Anna-Liisa’s need for assistance in privacy. A moment later, they heard a roar of horror from Anna-Liisa, and they turned round to see what had happened.
‘Which door is the one to my bedroom?’
Margit was standing in the middle of the living room, nightshirt over one arm and hearing aid in the opposite hand, the water from her undried hair dripping to the parquet. She was as naked as the day she was born, and looked even more enormous than when clothed. She hadn’t even heard Anna-Liisa’s roar, which had been as impressive as any during Anna-Liisa’s prime teaching years.
‘If multiple residents at the same address require in-home care, it’s best to coordinate visits,’ Jemina Koutamo-Navaglotu said, casting her professional eye over Margit. The Ambassador clearly found the situation amusing and ogled Margit with interest, shamelessly allowing his gaze to linger over the details. Anna-Liisa was annoyed by the interruption, and Siiri rushed over to help Margit, who didn’t appear to have a clue as to what was taking place in the living room.
‘Come on, dear, let’s go to your room so you can get dressed.’
Siiri led, or rather dragged, Margit out of view as quickly as possible. Margit’s room had a dreary exposure that received no direct sun, even on a hot August day. Siiri studied Margit’s hearing aid in order to help her friend slip it on, but found its workings as impenetrable as the flat-screen television and automatic blinds of their temporary lodgings.
‘Give it here,’ Margit said, sounding brusque because she was talking too loudly. She put on the device; it squealed unpleasantly for a moment and then everything was back to normal. She started digging into her moving boxes, looking for clothes, and getting everything wet with the water-drops from her hair.
‘This woman is here to survey Anna-Liisa’s needs for in-home care. It’s a normal process. It seems as if public in-home care is working efficiently this time,’ Siiri explained.
Margit wanted to rest for a moment. Siiri spread a towel out over her pillow and left her lying in bed. There were no curtains, just a roller blind that Siiri didn’t even try to operate, other than waving a hand half-heartedly just in case the curtain understood that she wanted it to descend. Nothing happened. Margit said she had no problem napping in daylight and it made no difference to her if someone from across the courtyard saw her in her underthings.
‘Yes, watching all those music videos we had the pleasure of waking up to must have tired you out,’ Siiri said, laughing a little so she wouldn’t sound nasty and then she returned to the living room to see how things had progressed there.
Irma was clearing up the remains of their breakfast and washing the dishes with a deafening clatter. The others had disappeared.
‘They went into Anneli and Onneli’s room to discuss the practicalities,’ she said, clearly chagrined at not having been included in the evaluation.
Siiri helped Irma finish the washing-up. This was tricky, as they only had a tiny sink and a rag, no scrubbing brush. Luckily, there weren’t many dishes. They moved over to the couch to browse through the brochures describing the palette of in-home services and only then remembered the existence of the dishwasher.
‘I don’t suppose it did us any harm to get a little exercise,’ Irma sighed in her defence, before concentrating on the brochure. ‘Now this is interesting!’
She started picking out services as if in-home care were some sort of spa. Why, they would even help you go to the sauna! All sorts of mundane pleasures were on offer: cleaning, lotioning, shaving, putting in hair curlers, laundry service.
‘I wouldn’t say no to some of these!’ Irma laughed.
‘Yes, you do have those long hairs sprouting from your chin. I bet the cleaning isn’t of professional quality. This calls it tidying up, and only mentions vacuuming and dusting.’
‘Humph, tidying indeed. But so-called cleaners never clean properly these days, as we know from Sunset Grove. I wonder how things are going there? Should we pop by and conduct a little assessment of our own?’
‘Not yet, Irma. Do you suppose Anna-Liisa’s condition is poor enough to warrant grocery shopping service for the household?’
‘I doubt it. But maybe this automatic meal dispenser. It’s called a menumat.’
The menumat was a combination freezer and oven, a real convection oven, according to the brochure. Eighteen meals were delivered to the dispenser at a time, which the client then had to heat up in the oven.
‘Should we request one of these?’
‘I doubt the food is edible.’
Then Irma found a list of equipment one could request free of charge: a turning board with standing support, a wooden walking sledge, a portable electric suction device, a motion aid, and a sock-puller. They didn’t have a clue what you would use them for, but they made superb word games.
‘Did you use to play Words in a Word with your children? Where you’re supposed to think of as many words as possible from one word? We could start, say, with antipharmaceutically. What do you say? It has twenty letters.’
Siiri agreed. Irma dug a dog-eared slip of paper from her handbag and they started thinking of words they could make from antipharmaceutically. Meanwhile, they couldn’t help hearing the conversation taking place in Anna-Liisa and Onni’s room.
Apparently, Anna-Liisa and Onni had decided on a relatively light repertoire: help with washing and dressing morning and night, as well as a rehabilitation programme and an exercise plan, but no meal service, cleaning service, or other comforts that would have lightened Siiri and Irma’s load.
‘How many words do you have?’ Irma asked, when she was too tired to think of any more.
‘Eleven. Wait, I have one more. Do you want to read yours?’
‘Ace, pace, ache, achy, acne, acme, accent, air, airy, pair, care, thrill, trill – do you see how rhythmic this is, like a poem, and then some random ones: rye, tamale, captain, rectum –’
Irma hadn’t made it to the end of her list before the door to Anna-Liisa’s room opened and the entire committee emerged: Jemina striding out briskly at the vanguard, then Anna-Liisa, wan and unsteady, supported by Onni, who brought up the rear. Anna-Liisa looked dejected. The municipality’s temporary part-time substitute in-home caregiver stopped in front of Irma.
‘Did you say Captain Rectum?’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t, first captain and then rectum. Two separate words. This is just a little game of ours.’
Jemina asked no further questions, but she wanted to see the bathroom before she left. The Ambassador showed her all of its finest features, from the dimming lights to the massaging whirlpool tub. In the meantime, Anna-Liisa studied Irma and Siiri’s word-game lists as eagerly as during her healthy days.
‘I can think of a few more: allium, yeti and plateau.’
‘Your apartment is not suitable for elderly residents,’ the in-home caregiver said, rather curtly, after continuing on to the kitchenette. ‘We will monitor the patient’s progress, and if there are any problems, the need for assistance will be reassessed.’
‘Could we have foot rubs and help putting curlers in our hair?’ Irma asked from the couch, from which, despite her best attempts, she found it impossible to rise. ‘Or a hand with the household chores? And perhaps you could help me up?’
‘No. And yes. There you go.’
Jemina Koutamo-Navaglotu hoisted Irma up from the sofa with a practised hand. She drily explained that in-home care was a doctor-prescribed service that, despite being public, was not cost free. It was not a spa treatment. The first in-home care specialist would be there that very evening and one would appear three times a day from then on, until further notice.
‘Thank you and goodbye.’
She pulled out her smartphone, reported that her visit had come to its conclusion, shook hands with Anna-Liisa and the Ambassador, and made her exit with a rustle of her geometrically patterned stockings.