Cold Courage (3 page)

‘Be that as it may,’ Timothy said, ‘it’s also the most natural thing in the world. Mari’s probably right though that getting the exact number would just be chance.’

So he rephrased the question: Was the number closer to one, five, ten, fifty or one hundred?

Among the men the question received boisterous approval, but Lia shook her head. Not only did the inane voyeurism bother her but she also disliked the idea of defining someone by the number of men she had slept with.

‘It’s all right, Lia,’ Mari said. ‘Gentlemen, this question is beneath you. But it is within the rules, and obviously interesting to someone on a personal level. Although in a rather lowbrow way. Lia, if you agree, I’ll try to answer.’

Lia nodded reluctantly.

She knows. But I don’t know if I want her to say it out loud.

‘I think it’s clear that, like most young women, Lia has a prolific sex life. The closest number is fifty.’

The boys went wild, clapping and hooting so loudly that the entire pub turned to look.

‘Fifty men! Fifty men!’

Lia pulled a face at them. Stupid drunks.

‘Is that right?’

‘Well of course,’ Lia said.

Wolf-whistling, the men demanded to know the basis for Mari’s guess.

‘How can you tell? Was it her neckline?’

Mari looked at Lia and said: ‘You can’t tell from anything directly. I just have an intuition about these things. And she has the look of an independent person.’

‘Shit, you guys are such children,’ Lia said.

Leaving the men to their snickering, Lia went to the bar. Sam asked Mari what she wanted to drink after winning the bet, but Mari was not listening. She followed Lia.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mari said. ‘That was in poor taste.’

‘It isn’t your fault. When they drink, things always get dirty before too long.’

The bartender looked at them expectantly. Mari shook her head and pulled on her coat.

‘You are really good at guessing things,’ Lia said.

‘Thanks. And thank you for including me in your birthday party.’

An odd feeling came over Lia as she looked at Mari, who was preparing to leave. As though their evening ought not to be ending quite yet.

‘Are we leaving something unfinished here?’ she asked.

Mari smiled.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘You want to go somewhere else?’

The night was clear, with a sense of impending cold. A faint wind brushed over Lia’s and Mari’s faces.

Mari hailed a taxi, which took them to Greenwich Park.

A high brick wall surrounded the park, and the gates were already locked for the night, but Mari was not headed for the park. Instead, she began walking along the wall, up the hill.

At the top, Lia had to stop and look. The view was unreal. A magic city.

She had never seen the city she lived in from this angle. Below
glittered
the meandering Thames, behind it the old Isle of Dogs harbour area, then Mile End, Whitechapel, Wapping. The high towers of the City. Behind them the classical districts of Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, Marylebone, Mayfair.

Even if London felt too big for her, it was beautiful for a large metropolis: instead of disturbing the ambience created by the older buildings, the skyscrapers blended with it perfectly. And somewhere there in the darkness was Hampstead, the streets she now called home.

She wiped her eyes, which were watering from the wind.

Mari continued on. Next to the wall was a small building that looked like a groundsman’s shed. There the chilly wind dropped.

Along the wall of the shed was a bench. Mari sat down. From here they could see the dark silhouette of the city and lights, so many lights.

Mari took a small bottle of cognac and two glasses out of her bag.

‘Just the essentials, I see. Do you always carry those in your handbag?’ Lia asked in amusement.

‘Only when I need them,’ Mari said.

She poured the cognac and extended one of the glasses to Lia. The silence was almost complete as they watched the city at night.

‘OK, now this is starting to feel like a birthday again,’ Lia said.

Mari motioned towards the green swathe of Greenwich and talked about the park, an area Lia didn’t know well. Behind the trees, out of view, was a famous vantage point, the Royal
Observatory
. Mari commented on how quiet it was in this spot in the
evening and at night. There were none of the people who wander the ungated parks, the drugs and sex trade. Many of the buildings nearby were valuable national treasures, and the police carefully patrolled these streets.

The conversation turned to the thing that connected them. Finland.

‘A serious country,’ Mari said.

‘A very serious country,’ Lia agreed, and they toasted Finland. The warmth of the cognac reignited Lia’s pleasant buzz, which had begun to peter out during the taxi ride.

Quickly she recognised that Mari had the same complicated
relationship
with their homeland as she did. Some things they loved, some things they hated, and nowadays their lives were disconnected from it for the most part, and with indifference came a feeling of relief.

Perhaps that was a typical feeling for people who have left their homelands of their own volition.

They talked about Finland, because that allowed them to sound each other out.

‘Finland’s problem is its need for self-aggrandisement,’ Mari said. Like so many other small nations, Finland had taken a few historical events and forged them into an illusion that it had a great past and culture too.

‘But the real value of Finland isn’t in its uniqueness but in the stability of its society, which makes its citizens good people.’

‘Bloody well said.’

‘That just came to me once. Whenever anyone asks what kind of country Finland is, that’s what I always say.’

Mari spoke about her family in Pori on the western coast and inland in Häme. Lia noticed how Mari spoke of everything with exactness, as though her thoughts were never half-formed.

Mari’s second name was Rautee. Two things united the family: leftist politics and a conservative lifestyle.

‘You might imagine a conflict there, but they actually combine quite well.’

The family’s leftist leanings had faded somewhat, but basically everyone assumed everyone else voted red. At the same time, they always worked to amass more wealth.

‘My family are social democrats with big houses.’

Mari seemed to be up to date with current events in Finland. Lia herself didn’t follow the Finnish news. Of course she’d read the few stories that passed the test of newsworthiness in Britain. They were usually depressing or idiotic – major disasters, political sex scandals or strange village festivals.

Lia spoke about her family, who had moved to Helsinki from Kajaani in the north when she was small. She didn’t remember anything about living in the Kainuu area, an economically depressed region just south of Lapland, other than the winters, which were proper, cold ones, not the months of drizzle Helsinki usually had.

When she had to wake up for school on winter mornings, the world was always pitch black. Lia always went straight from her bed to the window. She pressed against the radiator and dressed herself. The radiator was too hot to stay next to, but the room was too cold. She would try to find somewhere between the two to stand and look outside.

‘In the dark all I could see were the tiny, red beacons on the factory chimneys looming in the distance. On the street, little dots moved. Human dots plodding towards the points of light at the factories.’

Lia knew she didn’t need to say anything more. Mari understood without her saying what she meant: the Finns’ fastidious
relationship
to work, the atmosphere they had both grown up in – studying hard, the value of honest work, the idea that doing good in the world was an industrial production process.

They drank more cognac.

Neither missed Finland. But still the tangible imprint of their homeland remained on them. In the short space between them on that park bench were the empty byways of Finland, the swathes of sparsely inhabited land, not separating people, but rather bringing inner peace. The pace of their drinking told of the Finnish woman’s good head for liquor and appreciation for the fragility of the moment.

‘You’re thinking about Finnish women,’ Mari said.

Lia nodded.

How do you know?

‘You were surprised back there in the pub that I could guess the number of men you’ve slept with more or less correctly.’

Mari said she deduced it from two things. First was that Lia was from Finland. Second was her way of looking at men: intense, appraising, attracted.

‘That makes us sound like some sort of conscious consumers of men. But I think you know what I mean. That a woman can openly take pleasure in men.’

Lia knew.

‘And the Finnishness?’

Mari grinned.

‘How much time do we have? Because, let me tell you, I have a whole theory about Finnish women.’

Laughing, Lia said, ‘I would love to hear your theory about Finnish women.’

Mari paused for a moment and then began.

‘Most Finnish women are just the same as women everywhere else. Bred to be bland. People resigned to conventionality.’

But there was a group of Finnish women who were something else entirely.

‘They’re what you get when you raise young girls on rye bread, vodka, good films and equality.’

‘Excellent diet,’ Lia said.

‘These Finnish women are a little like musk-oxen. We are
musk-oxen.’

They both laughed.

‘For us the world is cold, dark, and windy, but we’re still where we are and don’t budge,’ Mari continued. ‘We have a severe attitude towards ourselves and the world. We are harder. More independent and more powerful.’

You could already see this when they were young. Finnish girls had all the gifts and knowledge the world could offer. If you had to entrust anyone with solving the problems of the world, it would be young Finnish women, Mari said.

‘And they’re also so responsible. They know how to grieve and care for those who need it. Like it or not, we were built tough.’

In the Finnish women of today you see a strength accumulated over generations. Their mothers and grandmothers and
great grandmothers
were among the first to stop playing games with men and strike out on their own. They went to school – often more than men – participated in politics, made decisions on their own.

‘That’s why we have this innate freedom to do anything in the world. Like getting drunk in a London park.’

Lia laughed. Mari had just summarised everything she liked and disliked about herself.

I may belong more to the group living dull lives.

A person resigned to conventionality.

They were silent for a moment, and then Mari said, ‘Tell me everything. Start from the very beginning.’

Lia knew what she meant.

‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ Lia said.

London was the wrong city for her. Admitting this to herself had taken a couple of years, and afterwards she had only decided to stay for practical reasons. And also London was beautiful at times.

She left Finland when she was twenty-two, having already studied graphic design for two and a bit years.

‘I thought that if I stayed in Finland, I would just be one more of the thousands of talented women artists all competing for the same low-paid jobs. Teaching jobs or museum appointments.’

She had not chosen London for rational reasons but out of what she had available as a young twenty-something-year-old: dreams. Although this particular dream was embarrassing enough that talking about it made her feel childish.

The memory made Lia smile. When she was fourteen years old, she saw a British television series starring a man with a beautiful face. He wore a wool jumper. At night Lia dreamed about that jumper, about pressing her face against it, feeling the man’s chest underneath. Breathing with the man’s arms wrapped around her, she felt an uncommon sense of security.

‘I thought I would find that same feeling here. That woollen jumper feeling. Silly, I know. Ridiculous. But we do… all sorts of things for ridiculous reasons. I guess that’s the normal state for most people – ridiculous.’

Mari nodded and said nothing.

Speaking to anyone this honestly was strange, Lia thought. Something in Mari made her want to open up. But still Lia didn’t share all her reasons for leaving Finland. She could tell anyone about the ambitions of her youth yet only a few had ever heard the sweater story. But in Finland there had also been other things she never spoke about.

‘Here I had to compete for work in a completely different way,’ she continued.

Lia’s first year in England had been depressing. She found herself belonging to the global pariah class of the creative arts. In London there were tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people just like her. All of them had training, experience or talent, but in order to get ahead in their industries they had to earn their bread and win their spurs doing crap work. Little jobs done for nothing or for horrid clients.

As an EU citizen, she was able to stay in the country and apply for work, but her combined years of schooling and practical experience in Finland left much to be desired. Her grasp of English was
reasonable
but limited for what was required of a graphic designer – knowing all the songs of any number of British bands by heart was little help.

She had borrowed money from her parents and taken any design work that came her way.

She had designed advertising flyers for distribution on car
windscreens
on the street. The pay for that was disgraceful, but she had been able to make some contacts. Next she had found a position as a jobbing designer at a local newspaper. After that Lia had done the layout for a series of anthropology museum brochures and then the museum’s annual magazine. With that under her belt, she had managed to land a job as the unpaid graphic designer for a feminist magazine called
Sheer
.

‘One day I was in the office, and the editor-in-chief got a call.’

Both of
Level’s
graphic designers were ill, the usual stand-ins could not come in, and there were only seven hours left until the magazine was due to go to press. Lia headed off with
Sheer
’s other graphic designer like a child to a sweet shop: a chance to work
at
Level
, a magazine people actually knew about!

The evening was a catastrophe. Just before going to press, they realised that they had made a serious technical error in the page layout, because in all the rush they had misunderstood a key instruction. The magazine was late going to the printers, which cost the publisher money.

Despite all that, something about Lia must have stuck in the art director’s mind, because the following summer
Level
hired her as a summer intern. After she finished her degree, they gave her a permanent position.

‘That was when I changed my name.’

Lia’s real name was Lea. Lea Pajala. Lia had never liked her name, which made her think of an old lady. In any case, the English always pronounced Lea as Lia anyway, so the change was minor in everyone else’s eyes. She had changed that one letter just for her own sake. And in some way she felt as though the change protected her from the things she didn’t wish to remember about Finland.

The boys at
Level
nicknamed her Miss Finland, which Lia found more than a little amusing. She had neither the beauty nor the
radiance
of a pageant queen; if anything, she was angular. The name only suited her because she was what the Brits thought a Finn should be: cold and distant.

‘Well, I’m not really cold. But I do tend to exercise my right not to participate in pointless chatter.’

Lia joked with the editorial staff, but didn’t open up about her life. She did her job. A graphic designer’s work was mostly thinking, forming ideas. A lot of people thought that it was all drawing lines and illustrations, but that was only the part that they could see.

Given how long she spent at work, she only had enough time left for two pastimes, both of which she attacked passionately.

Her dearest love was running. She ran three nights a week,
sometimes
four or five. Always hard and for at least an hour and a half to get her endorphin levels high enough to reach a deep state of pleasure.