Somewhere Else

Chapter 13: A New Leaf (i)

My hesitance about moving in with Priscilla turns out to be unfounded. I've always been wary of moving in with acquaintances I'm not that close to – we don't know each other that well, and I usually prefer to have my own space. But Priscilla, for all of her enthusiasm, turns out to be good with boundaries.

There is only one bedroom, but she has dug out an extra mattress for me. I help her carry it in from the balcony where it's been put out for airing, and together we lay it down in the corner of the room. I cough and turn away as the dust from the mattress rises into the air when we drop it onto the floor.

"I hope it's not too dusty," Priscilla says worriedly. "I've tried to clean it as much as I could. I even beat it with a clothes hanger to get the dust out."

"It's fine," I reassure her, trying not to smile at the image of her hitting the mattress with a flimsy hanger. "That's more than enough."

"I have the bedsheets all ready for you," Priscilla informs me brightly, swinging the doors to the cupboard open. "Right... here."

I take the sheets from her, turning back to the bed to put them on. Priscilla scurries over to help me with dressing the mattress.

"Too bad the others have gone," she laments, as we struggle to pull the fabric across the mattress. That's not the hard part, though. The hard part is lifting the heavy mattress to secure the elastic band of the sheet to the bottom. "Ludo would come in handy right now."

I laugh. The others had come over after class to help with the moving, but I hadn't wanted to bother them too much. After Ludo and Zuzi had shifted most of Priscilla's furniture around to make space for me and my suitcase, I had told them we could take it from here. I hadn't taken into account the sheer weight of the mattress. "Definitely."

"Maybe he hasn't gone far," she says hopefully. "We could call him back."

I laugh again, even though I'm not sure that she's not being completely serious. That is sometimes the problem with people whose habits and speech patterns you're not used to – you can't properly judge whether their words are to be taken at face value or laughed off as a joke.

"Maybe we could run down the street after him, screaming his name."

Priscilla laughs at that. "The Finnish people would probably be horrified."

"They would think we were drunk," I say.

"Finns are real introverts, aren't they?" Priscilla says. "Sometimes I run into my neighbours in the lift and try to say hi, but they always look so horrified, they make me feel awkward."

Even before she's done speaking, I'm already nodding in agreement. I know exactly what she means, because Aksel has always done the same. More than once, he has arrived home slightly out of breath, after seeing one of our neighbours waiting for the lift and deciding to take the stairs instead of being trapped in close quarters with them.

But I don't tell this story, because I don't know if I can keep a straight face if I were to start talking about Aksel. It probably wouldn't do to start bawling my eyes out on the first night I move in with a new roommate.

Instead, I roll my eyes and let out a little snort of laughter, "Yeah. That's the Finns for you."

And then I think to myself that even I have picked up Aksel's old habit of saying 'the Finns' instead of without the article as is the norm in English for plural nouns. This reminder of Aksel sharpens my tone a little, and my words come out harsher than I mean them to.

"And Finns hate making small talk. They would cross the road to avoid their own grandmother. I don't know how they even manage to make friends at all. They probably have to get drunk to do it."