Popular Music from Vittula (11 page)

The music started off with a clatter. By God, but we jumped around! The floor sagged and the heavy needle pattered at the defenseless vinyl like a woodpecker’s bill. Niila’s nervousness made him so stiff-legged that he kept losing his balance, crashing into the teacher’s desk, bumping against me, then staggering back into the blackboard and bending the chalk shelf. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the catastrophe, stopped miming, as the record sounded like a box of nails being shaken, and instead started yelling out in home-made English. I was bawling so frenetically that even the eraser-throwers lost the plot. I was trying simultaneously to prevent Niila jumping about so much he smashed the record player. As the needle was jumping back and forth, there was no sign of the song ever coming to an end. Niila tossed his head so violently that his shoulder strap came loose and the guitar flew into the wall map, making a deep dent close to Jyväskylä, and despite my bellowing I finally managed to hear Teacher shrieking. Niila got tangled up in the skipping rope and tumbled stiff-legged into me like a moose. We collapsed into the record player, the pickup arm fell off, and at last silence fell.

We lay there in a heap. Niila was winded and could only breathe in, not out, he was hiccuping and gasping as his lungs filled up to bursting
point. My lip tasted of blood and salt. It was so quiet, you could have heard a mouse sneeze.

Then the girls started clapping. Hesitantly but approvingly. The boys were muttering enviously, and a big lump of eraser bounced off my head.

And it dawned on me that it hadn’t been a complete disaster after all.

* * *

The next few days were hectic. Niila was given a good hiding at home when it became known what he’d done, but he said bravely that it had been worth it. I was also threatened with a fate worse than death by my big sister when she saw her ruined record. I escaped by the skin of my teeth after agreeing to a Draconian installment plan by which she would take all my pocket money for the foreseeable future.

The reaction of the girls at school was more thought-provoking. Like most lads of my age I considered myself to be ugly and shy, with straggly hair and a potato of a nose and skinny forearms. But now, Niila and I started getting looks. Shy, fleeting glances in the lunchtime cafeteria line, quick smiles from clusters of girls outside the home ec room. We were invited to join their skipping games, and shyly agreed to do so. We were called ladykillers by the envious boys. It was all most bewildering and a bit frightening.

All the time we kept on practicing in the garage, tunes I’d heard on the radio then reproduced from memory. Niila jumped around with the piece of hardboard, and I sang. It sounded less awful than before as I’d learned not to strain my throat, but to sing from deeper down in my chest. My voice became steadier, and occasionally sounded a little bit like music. Niila started smiling inwardly and giving me friendly digs. We sometimes paused in between numbers, discussed the relationship between girls and rock music, drank lemonade, and felt nervous.

Things came to a head a few weeks later when a girl who lived in Strandvägen arranged a party. After sodas and popcorn, we played Consequences. Before Niila and I could get away, we’d been kissed to
death, and I got together with a girl for four days before I put an end to it and gave her back the necklace and brass ring and the photograph of her in her lace blouse and her Mum’s lipstick.

Not long after that, it was all over. The girls found more exciting things to do, and got together with boys from the big school. Niila and I suddenly found ourselves in a backwater, and although we tried for ages to fix a follow-up to our Happy Hour performance, our teacher would have none of it. I had another go at the girl I’d turned down, but didn’t get anywhere. Life was a mystery.

In which our heroes start at the big school and, with considerable difficulty, learn fingering techniques

After three years at the Old School, most of us little brats could read and count, and it was time to proceed to the juniors at Pajala Central School, a yellow brick building looking as if it were made of Lego. The new school year started with a campaign to make us start brushing our teeth. There was a clear need for it, you might say: at my latest checkup I had ten cavities, and Niila had nine. The rest of the class fared just as badly, and the local authority had been forced to order a truckload of extra amalgam from Linköping. Now we all had to go in groups to the clinic and swallow a coloring tablet that turned the plaque an angry red, then look in a mirror and do some tooth-brushing gymnastics under the supervision of a stern-looking lady. Brush, brush, brush, at least ten times up and down in each place. I don’t know if that’s why, or if it was due to the fluoride rinse, but I didn’t have any more cavities at all for the rest of my time at school.

Needless to say, the dentists soon noticed that they were doing fewer and fewer fillings, and started looking around for alternative sources of income. The answer was braces. Every week some poor soul was sent to
the clinic and came back with a mouth full of plastic and steel wire. As soon as a tooth was the slightest little bit
klinkku
, it had to be corrected. For me it was a canine tooth that wasn’t quite standing to attention, and by God, I was sent to the National Dental Service like greased lightning. The woman dentist had a permanent furrow in her brow, reached for the pliers, and tightened the steel wire in the brace until the whole of my skull ached. As soon as I got outside I loosened the wire with the key for my bicycle lock, bringing relief until the next visit. Sometimes the specialist traveled up, a bald fellow from Luleå. The only difference was that he tightened the wires even harder, and that his fingers tasted of cigarillo when he poked around inside my mouth.

Going to the junior school meant that puberty was getting closer. You could see what was in store every break. Various couples from class six wandering around holding hands and kissing. Girls having a smoke behind the bike sheds. Makeup getting bolder and brasher, the higher the class. It felt terrifying, we couldn’t really understand it. Would I change like that as well? Oh yes, it was there inside us all, we could feel it, a seed. It was swelling already, and before long we’d lose control.

As it was considered useful to be able to speak several languages, we started learning English, and our local Finnish dialect was heard less frequently in the schoolyard. I started writing down English pop songs by listening to Top Ten on the radio. We didn’t have a tape recorder at home then, so I had to write as quickly as I could while the program was being broadcast. I still didn’t understand the words, and had to write phonetically, learn them by heart, and then sing for Niila in the garage songs such as
Ollyu nidis lav
and
Owatter shayd ovpail
.

Niila was extremely impressed. Who had taught me English?

“I taught my self,” I said, nonchalantly.

Niila thought about that for a while. Then he made his own bold decision: He was going to learn to play the guitar.

I managed to borrow an acoustic guitar from an uncle who’d bought it while on holiday in Bulgaria. There followed a hectic period, buying
some simplified sheet music from a shop in Luleå; first attempts at the mysterious art of tuning, short and stiff boyish fingers; figures and dots that were supposed to produce notes but didn’t; more insight into the mysterious art of tuning; the culturally alien climate in Niila’s house that forced him to practice in our garage until the winter cold set in and we had to move down into our boiler room, poking cotton wool under the strings so that my parents wouldn’t hear and start telling tales; the first chord that was in fact E minor but sounded like somebody jumping up and down on a tin roof; the second that was A minor but sounded like two people jumping up and down on a tin roof, me singing to Niila’s accompaniment with such neverending pauses when he needed to change chords that I ran out of breath; his total lack of humor in circumstances like this, which more than once led to an exchange of blows; my total inability to guess, even after eight attempts, the identity of the first tune Niila taught himself, and then having to dive and rescue the guitar a split second before it smashed onto the concrete floor.

The annoying thing was that I taught myself how to play in a fraction of the time. My fingers are long and supple, it’s a family trait. My hand felt at home on the neck of the guitar, scampering up and down like a spider and spinning chords with an ease that astonished me. Before Niila had managed to produce his first clean chord, I had learned the whole of
The House of the Rising Sun
, and then succeeded by hook or by crook in getting my hands on a book about the acoustic jungle of barré-chords. Niila always left the guitar in the cellar, and as soon as he left for home I could let myself go.

Naturally, I couldn’t let Niila know how good I was. He’d have been devastated. Even at his age he was starting to show signs of his pitch-black, self-deprecating depressions. In between, he was the best there was, completely deaf to how awful he sounded, cocky and big-headed and certain of his impending fame. I pretended to have a go at the guitar occasionally, and played badly on purpose, and I’d see him sniggering so hard through his nose that snot would start dripping down.
There were times when I very nearly gave the game away, it’s true—there was a limit even to my patience. But I managed to restrain myself, hard though it was.

* * *

It was now in the junior school that a handful of boys in our class started to take snuff. You could see on their jeans the round marks of the lids of the tins, and during breaks there was a strong and telltale smell of tea in the air. Being unused to it, the boys became intoxicated and their pupils dilated. They’d sit around in corners shouting and yelling, then march down the corridors calling the girls whores and floozies. After PE they’d stand in the showers pulling back their foreskins for the others’ delectation. Rumors started spreading about the ones who’d had it away. Those of us boys who were later developers or just shyer would look on in horror. The change had come suddenly. The old mates of yore were suddenly turned on by snuff and hormones. A bit like junkies, cantankerous, unpredictable. Instinctively, we kept in the background.

The more snuff they took, the more disgusting the girls thought it was. Snuff caught between their teeth and stained their fingers brown, and what looked like spit-covered used teabags stuck to the walls and in the washbasins. It was forbidden to take snuff in class, but they couldn’t care less. Just squashed the wad a bit flatter when the bell rang for lessons.

On one occasion one of the snuff-takers was unexpectedly summoned to the front of the class. He was supposed to give an oral report on something he’d forgotten about. We all sat in expectation—the moment he opened his mouth he’d be found out and told off by the teacher, which was always exciting and interesting to watch. The boy was scared stiff, that was obvious. He turned white in the face, and was trembling. Then he started mumbling. The whole class stared at him, agog. He barely opened his mouth, and was exhorted by the teacher to
speak up. He did as he was told, but held a piece of paper up in front of his mouth.

“You haven’t been taking snuff, have you?” she asked.

A shake of the head.

“You know that’s forbidden!”

A quick nod.

“Let me have a look!”

He stood rooted to the spot while the teacher lifted up his lip. A few seconds passed. Then to everybody’s surprise, he was told to go and sit down. No shouting, no accusations, no threats of being reported and sent to the headmaster.

Everybody was disappointed and perplexed. When the next break came all the class gathered round the boy and asked what had happened. He was quite calm about it.

“I swallowed the snuff,” he said casually.

He was talked about for ages afterward.

* * *

As early as in class six Niila’s awkward relationship with girls started to become clear. It had nothing to do with his appearance, even if he was no beauty, with his typically Finnish potato of a nose, prominent cheekbones, and hair that was always greasy, no matter how often he washed it. He was lankier than I, and perhaps a bit jerky, fumbling in his movements. But he wasn’t repulsive. On the contrary, he radiated a sort of energy that prowled around like a caged animal, looking for a way of escape. It would be an exaggeration to call it an inner fire, perhaps; but it was something warm and vulnerable. It rankled within him and the girls could sense it. He had will power, a root forming in his backbone.

Girls are different, of course. Many look for stability, they want boys who get up early in the morning, boys who know how to handle tools and weapons, who will build a house of their own on their parents’ land
in rural Anttis or Jarhois and prepare a potato bed with Uncle’s Rotavator. That sort of pure-wool girl would be uncomfortable when she came up against Niila. I saw it happen several times over the years. He frightened them off with his silence and his restless eyes, or even worse, he gave the impression of being superior. I tried to teach him the basics of courtship—not that I knew much about it myself, but I wasn’t quite as hopeless as he was. The fundamental rule was to pick girls who liked you. Incredible as it might seem there was always somebody with just a little bit of interest. That was the type to go for. Niila always did the opposite, and was always falling in love with girls who were bad for him. Girls who wouldn’t even look at him, who made fun of him to their loudly giggling cronies, girls who were far too pretty or too cruel and who played with him like a cat with a young bird. It was painful to watch. All the time there were other girls in the background, not my type, it’s true, but there nonetheless. Girls who were adventurous. Who were willing to take risks, cling to the edge of a precipice by their fingertips, who were willing to launch themselves into the night sky. Artistic girls, thoughtful girls who wrote poems for serious girls’ magazines, who wondered about God and sado-masochism, girls who read books for adults, who sat listening in the kitchen when the men were talking politics. That was the type he needed. A mature, strong Communist from somewhere like Aareavaara.