Cold Courage (4 page)

Usually she ran on the green, hilly streets and park fringes of her area in Hampstead. She had four standard routes, from which she always chose based on the weather – wind and rain were worse on
the Heath, and North End was only good late in the evening when the streets were free of pedestrians.

When Lia ran, she often imagined watching herself from above, high in the air. A slender woman in a navy tracksuit, blonde hair tied in a small bun at her neck. The precise, even footfalls tapping out the route on the tree-lined path or asphalt. Lia saw the pattern in her mind from above, clear and logical.

‘Of course that comes from my graphic design background. I’ve always loved maps and visualising spaces. I always know what direction I’m going, and I never, ever get lost.’

She seemed to like things ordered, Mari pointed out. She looked at things as wholes.

‘Maybe too much. A little disorder might do me good,’ Lia said.

As Mari smiled, Lia felt as though she could tell her almost anything at all.

Lia never told anyone about her second recreational activity.

‘But you saw it just by looking at me.’

Once every month or two, Lia picked up a different man in a bar.

‘Fifty might be an understatement.’

Sex gave her the same thing that running did: physical pleasure and emotional release. Since no embarrassment or feelings of guilt or romantic fancies came into it, the feeling of relaxation came quite naturally. All that remained was pleasure for her and the other person.

‘Now when I think about it, maybe the thing that attracts me to sex isn’t just the pleasure and anticipation but the disorder. You can never be completely sure of yourself or the other person and you don’t act rationally.’

Lia had started picking up men after she moved to London, but she didn’t mention this to Mari, because it related to events in Finland. The ones she had to get away from. After spending one lonely year in London, she decided she had to make a change.

The men had to be thirty to forty years old and looking for a
one night
stand, just like her. No lovesick boys or men searching for a wife. And no restless husbands, because she didn’t want any trouble.

‘I don’t touch anyone at work. No one at
Level
even knows I go to bars.’

Sex made Lia feel strong.

There were many Lias. In the workplace she was introverted, a performer. When she went out at night to meet men, she was open and strong. She was the one who decided. Travelling, she spent her days just walking and reading, enjoying the solitude.

‘All these Lias seem very independent,’ Mari said.

‘Yes, indeed.’

And lonely.

They were quiet, sipping their cognac and looking out over London. This late at night the city divided into two parts: the sleeping neighbourhoods rolling over in the dark and the streets flowing through the spaces in between, channels of living light.

‘Now and then I’ve felt quite alone,’ Lia said.

When she turned twenty-five, she went on her second trip to Provence because she didn’t want anyone at work to notice that she was not celebrating her birthday. This was a sore point for Lia. Loneliness, family and children – those were things she didn’t allow herself to think about.

‘I have tried to change things.’

She attended cultural events, exhibitions, guided local walks and even a volunteer course for a mental health patient support association. She found a pub to call her own in Hampstead, The Magdala. Still, there were only fleeting moments when she didn’t feel alone, sometimes at work or at the pub or in the crowd at a rock club when everyone was dancing together in one sweaty, giddy mass.

Her home was the tiny flat of a single person, but very important to her.

When she first came to London, she looked for cheap
accommodation
relatively close to the sights of the city centre. What she found was the Hampstead hall of residence for the venerable King’s College, where they rented rooms to non-students during the summer holidays.

In the dormitory laundry Lia met the caretaker, sixty-year-old Mr Chanthavong.

‘He’s one of those…’ Lia searched for the right word. ‘One of those Asian British gentlemen. Doubly restrained.’

Mr Chanthavong was born in Laos, but he said he had also lived in Vietnam and China, among other places, moving from country to country before coming to England. Mr Chanthavong spoke polite Oxbridge English which sounded like he had learned it on a foreign language course long ago. Now he had lived in London for twenty years. In the laundry they spoke about what British people’s deep love of animals said about the civilised nature of the land and about how learning the Tube map made you feel like you had finally arrived.

A week later Lia could no longer afford to live at King’s College. Mr Chanthavong looked pensive. During term time, only students were allowed to live in the hall of residence, but there was one
possibility
, he said. Mr Chanthavong’s caretaker flat was on the ground floor. Beneath it, in the basement, was another small apartment, actually just one room with a kitchenette in the corner and a toilet. A Bosnian couple had lodged there last, starting out in the country as tourists but then applying for asylum after arriving.

‘If this option were to interest you, I could let you this room. Initially perhaps for a period of two months, during which you could seek more commodious accommodations from the bountiful offerings of London,’ he said.

In the room were only a bed, a desk and a chair. The kitchenette included a hotplate, a small refrigerator and a narrow worktop. The shower was in the toilet, and the space was so cramped that when you were in it you had to stand right up against the bowl. But Mr Chanthavong had asked only £400 for the flat.

Lia had been living there nearly six years now. The rent had gone up, but only to five hundred.

‘No one in London lives in such a good area at that price,’ she said.

Eventually Mr Chanthavong had become simply Mr Vong. At first the name had only been in Lia’s mind – Chanthavong felt so formal – but then when she slipped and addressed him as Mr Vong once and the nickname clearly amused and delighted him, it had stuck.

Lia was not sure whether anyone else was aware of her living arrangements. She never requested a rental agreement and paid Mr
Vong in cash. She did her washing in the hall of residence laundry, and Mr Vong helped when she needed tools to repair a socket or a window frame.

‘I live like an eternal student.’

For a long time this had been fun. Whenever she saw young students in the stairway she felt as though she were one of them, living in that time of life before you become something. After landing a permanent position, she began feeling a different sort of pleasure: at least something was settled in her life. She had made her exit from the pariah class.

Her flat was small and easy to care for. From her basement window she could see a strip of an early twentieth-century church and adjacent park. The story of the statues in the park was an
eccentric
one: each had been rejected by the person who commissioned it.

‘The Garden of Discarded Statues. Or, more like Rescued Statue Park.’

The pastor of the neighbouring St Luke’s Church saved the first statues in the 1920s. Having heard of plans to scrap a statue of his church’s patron saint in North London, he rushed to the scene and purchased it. The statue’s intended purchasers had found St Luke’s face insufficiently virtuous. Next the pastor saved the great Florence Nightingale. This work of art was rejected by a female religious order who found that the sculptor had made the body overly ‘carnal’ to the eye. Since tradition had it that Nightingale herself once resided in Hampstead as well, the rescue of the statue was
considered
fitting in all respects.

Over the decades the people and organisations of the area had accumulated a considerable collection of salvaged statuary. Lia was particularly fond of the long-eared dog which, according to the story, was purchased for the price of only one pound. No one knew who rejected it or why. Lia called the dog Poundy.

‘This will sound stupid, but sometimes I talk to the statues.’

Whenever she had important decisions to make, she told St Luke and Poundy the dog about them.

Lia emphasised that she was not religious.

‘But if I tell someone something, even if it’s just a statue, it feels like a promise.’

Sometimes Lia watched the nuns who taught at the nearby school walking into the church.

‘They look so peaceful. In films, nuns are always so severe or just one-dimensional. Pious fools.’

But these women looked as though they had found what they were looking for.

‘That woollen jumper feeling.’

In the evenings Lia would hear Mr Vong running himself a bath upstairs. Every night exactly at ten o’clock. A moment later she would hear bubbling as he broke wind under the water.

‘Of course he doesn’t know that the sound echoes from the bath through the floor. But I always get the feeling that everything is as it should be when Mr Vong farts in the bath at ten o’clock.’

Mari laughed and Lia thought,
She’s going to know everything about me soon.

‘I love London. I love its size and how uncontrollable it is and that I know a big part of it,’ Mari said.

Mari described her life more briefly than Lia had.

In Finland, she studied psychology. That had gone fast, because she had always been quick at soaking up information.

‘I would have graduated in less than two years, but I had to complete my internship.’

Mari also lived alone.

‘I have men from time to time, but I don’t quite match your pace.’

She had circulated through various countries, finally moving to London because Britain seemed to offer the most opportunities. In addition to her degree in psychology, she had studied sociology at the London School of Economics. For three years she worked as a personnel manager at Mend Ltd, a large insurance company. She had got the job based on a recommendation from a headhunter.

‘I left there three years ago.’

Mari fell silent.

Lia stared at the city sparkling before them. She wondered what was wrong. At the pub Mari had seemed self-confident and alluring in a strange way.

‘One thing has influenced my life more than anything else,’ Mari continued.

OK, here we go,
thought Lia.
She’s a closet lesbian who hits on women in pubs. Or a Jehovah’s Witness who proselytises people in public parks.

‘I have an unusual gift,’ Mari said, looking at Lia seriously. ‘I have a sort of gift for seeing more in people than other people do. I discovered it when I was a child, and that’s why I’ve lived such an unusual life.’

Lia stared at Mari, not knowing what to say.

‘Do you know how people notice really tiny things about others, often without realising it?’ Mari asked. ‘Like when someone glances at a door or fidgets nervously, you conclude that they’re anxious to get out of the room or waiting for someone to come through the door. You might call those sorts of deductions semi-conscious or intuitive perception. For me the skill of noticing and analysing things just grew a lot stronger than in everyone else.’

The strongest manifestations related to her sense of sight. When she looked at people, she could see what they were thinking and what they would be likely to do.

‘Mind-reading?’ Lia said in disbelief.

‘No, no. If you think of a number, I can’t guess what it is. It doesn’t work like that. But I can say what you think of me. And I know what you’re probably planning to do this weekend.’

‘This weekend I’m planning to sleep off my hangover,’ Lia said. ‘Guessing that doesn’t take any special powers.’

Mari laughed.

‘What if I told you how this all started?’

When Mari was eight years old, her great-grandparents held a Rautee family reunion at Vanajanlinna Estate near Hämeenlinna in south-central Finland.

In the elegant old hunting manor were arches, beautiful halls, antique furnishings and a prohibition-era themed bar located behind a secret door in the cellar billiards room. The history of the manor was complicated. Even the Soviet Union had once controlled it for a while, and at the time of the family gathering it functioned as a leftist youth academy.

‘Our great-grandparents were such conscientious, ideologically pure supporters of the working class that the director of the school
allowed them to rent the entire place for the reunion. It was the poshest leftist party you can imagine.’

Sixty relatives attended, the furthest-flung coming all the way from America. Mari had never met most of them. They were complete strangers, but still very warm people with familiar
characteristics
.

At the end of the reunion, everyone gathered in the courtyard for a family portrait. Arranging sixty people took time. The
great grandparents
and other elderly people sat in the front row. The men wore the dark suits which they only dusted off for weddings and funerals. The women were in their finest gowns with their hair
carefully
done up. The mothers attempted to clean smudges from the children’s clothing using handkerchiefs and spit.

‘Then I realised that something strange was happening.’

Looking at the group, Mari knew what many of them were thinking.

She knew that her cousin had just got a new, special drug from an American relative. She knew that Uncle Perttu had just cheated on his wife and wanted to do it again.

‘I also knew that my big sister Marja had just decided what she would be when she grew up. She wanted to be a teacher. And a
relative
she had met there had influenced her decision.’

No one was saying these things out loud, but still Mari knew them all the same.

‘Do you know how… crazy that sounds?’ Lia asked.

‘Yes.’

The group photograph taken at the reunion came in the post a month later.

‘Looking at the picture, I noticed more things, and everything I could see in those people made me very sad.’