I am going to tell you a story

Once upon a time...


I met and began to date a man very desirable, who was arrested and went to prison very shortly after the relationship started. I used to visit him on Saturday and Sunday mornings, having to wake up early after a night out on the piss, the drunkenness still in me. I remember the humiliation and the reverse pride of having to leave my bag in a safe, of walking through a metal detector with my shoes in my hand, of waiting in the visitors' room with the other visitors. I remember the visits themselves, sitting opposite each other, separated by glass not all that high - we could easily have touched each other over it, but there were guards keeping an eye at every row of tables. Once, without warning, he tossed me his necklace, strung with a collection of amulettes, over the glass. I doubt it was the common direction of smuggling. Another time, when I was leaving and already walking across the prison grounds, he had made it back into his cell quickly enough to shout and wave to me from the little window. It wasn't the window in my picture, but one just like it, and I know which one it was.

I came to my senses after a few months and stopped going to see him. When he was released, he called me for a while and was once waiting for me outside my house. I kept the necklace for years, unable to throw it out or return it, but I think I finally binned it in the big clear-out before moving to the tropics. He was in for multiple rape.

The prison was in the heart of old Helsinki. Since then, it has been closed down and the building converted into a - hotel. The other day, I went and sat outside on the terrace of the hotel bar, drank a glass of white wine, and thought of the various stories of my life. They only play Elvis Presley in the bar. I had a necrophiliac love for him when I was ten and he was just dead. I know every one of his songs intimately.

I am not likely to want to comment on this

What I had envisioned for our future was the making of dandelion wine on the birthday of our younger son, and drinking the first bottle on Christmas Day, along with the new potatoes I would have grown myself, following Pete the Goat’s instructions (line a used car tyre with ripped up newspaper or straw to insulate; when the stalks of the potato plants show above the soil, add another lined car tyre and more soil; if started in August-September, by Christmas you have a stack of four or five tyres and a helping of new potatoes in each one).

What I had envisioned was my children growing up in the bedroom that had a view with a strangely high horizon, over the hill behind Tom and Eira’s house. I noticed the high horizon one beautiful evening – spring, our first spring in the house and last one together – of pink clouds and the near-fluorescent green of the Welsh countryside.

But with coffee cups hitting doorframes at my eye level, and plates with fried egg having a more accurate aim – I never could wear that knitted thing again, I washed it but for me it wouldn’t come clean – all envisionings were off.

Everybody should read Victor Erofeyev

There it is - another one of my obscure book recommendations. I don't know how much of Viktor Erofeyev's work has been translated into English - at least Life with an Idiot, which I haven't read. According to wikipedia, there's more in French, so if you have that language under your belt (or indeed, Russian, or like me, Finnish), and you enjoy a sharply satirical voice, make sure to check him out.

I have recently read his book Mushinyi, "Men", in its Finnish translation "Miehet" (as far as I can tell, a fine translation indeed, thank you Jukka Mallinen) - a collection of essays on, you'd never guess, men and on being a man - a matter of great interest to me, as it is something I can only wonder about. I have been delighted by the sharpness of his tongue, by the unrelenting way he rips into various aspects of society and human folly - but even more than that, I have loved the sudden outbursts, quite in spite of the satire and indeed, of the author's inclinations, the outbursts, in spite of himself, of his overwhelming sense of pity. Pity for mankind, pity for folly, pity for everyone on the planet.

I think that's lovely.

For good measure, I shall attempt a translation on a few wee snippets from the final essay in the collection I read - and do please note this is a translation of a translation, which will mean increased inaccuracies, as in photocopying. The essay is in praise of the physical male...again, a topic fascinating to me:

"I delight in watching a man when he walks and holds a child by the hand. A small hand in a big hand. I like this simple disproportion.
...
A man has gentle skin. It is so gentle you would like to touch it, continuously, with your hands.
...
The beauty of a sleeping man is difficult to describe in any language.
...
Have you ever seen the eyes of a masturbating man?
They are filled with dry tears."

Do you know, I think that is really lovely too.

The playground, the plaits, the policeman

There is a playground nestling in the near corner of the woods known as Keskuspuisto, the central park, although it is not really a park at all. It is woodland, and it stretches out and joins other woods and eventually becomes the taiga forest that continues until Lapland, until the latitudes where trees give up, finally leaving behind just ankle-high, twisted, die-hard brothers of the silver birch. The playground is on dry pinewood moorland, the pines are tall and straight and beautiful with their red trunks, all bathed in the faded golden of light of summers long ago.

A is very young, perhaps three years old.

As in all her memories, she is both the rememberer and the remembered, but in this one, very strongly so. She is three years old, let's say, because it is as close as needs to be. Three years old, and it is golden summer.

She is little, she knows this. She is little but as yet somehow invincible, sprung like a bow and arrow, simultaneously arching, aiming, firing, and hitting life. She knows the world was put there for her. She knows her cousin is there to look after her and be with her while her mother works on her studies - her "gradu", graduation piece, so central a word in the daily vocabulary of her world she too works on her own "gladu". Her r's don't roll yet, but as yet, she knows this doesn't matter. Her mother gives her the cardboard backing from one of her graphed notepads, and she folds it in half and writes her gladu on it in yellow crayon. She is still very little, she the rememberer knows this, because at four she began writing stories others could read too, and her gladu is just yellow zig-zag.

Yellow zig-zag across the pages of her gladu, line after line. She the remembered looks at her gladu and feels a dawning understanding of it being just yellow zig-zag. There is an unsettlingness in this understanding, the precursor to the desperation she will learn to experience later.

There is a golden day out in the playground by the woods. The most fascinating of the playground toys is an assortment of wooden blocks, painted in chipped and faded green, or yellow, or red, the size of bricks, stored in a big lockable playground toy box. The big boys stand them up, one after another, making winding, snakey rows of them, finally knocking the last one over and setting them all tumbling down, domino-like. A longs to play this, too, but there is no possibility of ever joining in. It is what the big boys do, and she is three years old, and a girl, with plaits long enough to sit on. A and her big cousin, fourteen years old, play and talk. A worships her cousin. She is not a grown-up, but neither is she a child, yet she plays and talks with A and doesn't laugh at what she says.

How it comes about is lost to she the rememberer, and she the remembered cannot tell. One of A's plaits comes undone - the ribbons of the late sixties come loose easily, especially from sleek, slippery hair on lively heads. There is a policeman at the playground - why, she the remembered doesn't ask, and she the rememberer doesn't know - mere coincidence, no doubt, yet it is this coincidence which creates the memory, ensuring the golden day on the playground doesn't disappear and melt into and become one with other golden days on other playgrounds. A and her cousin approach the policeman and ask him for help. The colours are faded in the beautiful manner of sixties-seventies colour photographs, when the policeman plaits A's hair in the playground by the woods. A sees his blue uniform jacket and bright buttons. She knows the world was put there for her, with policemen to plait her hair at playgrounds.

What is remembered: the young painter

In my mid-twenties, I became very sweet on, not to say fell in love with, a young painter, quite out of the blue. A friend of friends, Irish, tall, dark, handsome, soulful - let's call him Seamus. It may or may not be his real name.

I have always found some really rather peculiar things beautiful - in this instance, I mean just visually, although I am also deeply moved by other unusual oddities than those one can look at. At the time, I had never shared these thoughts with anyone at all, thinking they were so truly strange they would be met with mocking rather than understanding. I think what I really fell for in the young painter was that he, too, seemed to understand the inherent beauty in the empty stalk left over when a bunch of grapes has been eaten; or the fine network of veins, the only thing left of last year's almost-disintegrated autumn leaves; or the smooth, off-white, randomly-found tiny bones of forest creatures - mice, squirrels, what have you. The young painter painted these things - well, I'd still say - and I was sold, hook, line, and sinker.

I believe there was mutual attraction but it was impossible. My children were small and my marriage terribly unhappy. It may be the latter added weight and desperation to the feeling I developed for the young painter.

What is remembered: the walkman incident

When I was nineteen, I left Finland to go work in backpacker hostels in Athens.

The Iron Curtain divided Europe into distinct halves. The Berlin Wall was firmly up, and its crumbling demise two and a half years later was unthinkable.

I had bought myself the cheapest ticket - boat and train via The East Block. East Berlin was vast and freaky. Nobody wanted to talk to me in English, and my faltering German didn't entice a friendly response either. I know now why this was - being seen talking to a foreigner was not going to go down well with the Stasi.

Onboard the train from East Berlin to Hungary, my seat was in a compartment with a group of five or six East German students, about my age. One of the guys was chatty, the rest of them ignored me. His English was good, and he apologised for his friends - they don't like speaking English, he said. We talked about various things, this and that. He admired the Sony Walkman - second-hand, less than prime condition - someone had given me to entertain myself with during my four days' travel. I have one, he said, but I don't have it with me now. My girlfriend and I (she never looked at me once) saved for a year and a half for it. We are now saving to get one for her, he told me.

It took me about ten seconds to make the decision. Why don't you have mine, I said. No way, he said, I couldn't possibly. Yes way, I replied, or something very close to it. I got this one from a friend, and honestly, I can get another one if I really want one. I don't really care for them very much anyway. Please, I want you to have it. (Alright, he was quite nice-looking, but the real reason was I couldn't bear the difference between us, the saving for eighteen months for something I had been casually given by a random someone.)

He was over the moon. His girlfriend muttered a thank you without looking at me. He wanted to give me something in return, and searched through his stuff, mortified that he didn't really have anything to give. In the end he found a metal bottle-opener, with a naked boy á la Mannikin Piss on the handle. He was apologetic at the smallness of his gift. I kept it for years, decades, although it was hopeless for opening bottles - maybe it worked better on East European bottles, who knows. I know it turned up when I last packed up and left everything. I seriously hope I didn't ditch it, and that it is still somewhere amongst my packed-up junk.

What is remembered: a "guess he didn't actually fancy me" moment

So you're a single mum, this guy said to me once, I didn't know that. No wonder (name deleted) became so interested in you all of a sudden.

What do you mean, I asked, naively.

Because you're a single mum. Single mums put out, every time, he replied.