Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

Anne’s navel is showing. The skin of her belly makes Olli swallow. It’s like white chocolate.

Then Anne makes a motion, turns her head and snaps Olli’s gaze out of the air with the precision of a raptor.

Olli quavers. Anne’s eyes narrow. A sly smile spreads over her lips. She is a beautiful, captivating girl. But she has a mean streak—Olli learnt that last summer. He arrived one morning at Aunt Anna’s house with Timi. The door was locked. When Olli rang the bell, Anne came to open the door. She let Timi in, and then slammed the door shut in Olli’s face.

Olli stood there confused for a second, then rang the bell again several times, and finally pounded on the door until the windows rattled. When the upstairs window opened, Olli backed off the porch onto the lawn. Anne had her hands wrapped tightly around Timi’s throat. The dog was whining and struggling to get free. He couldn’t breathe.

“Why didn’t you let me in?” Olli asked.

Anne sighed. “Sorry, but we decided democratically that we didn’t want to see you today. And Aunt Anna told us not to bang on the door because she has a headache. Come back tomorrow. Timi can spend the night here. We still like him. And he likes us. Don’t you, Timi?”

The dog looked fearfully at the girl.

Olli’s stomach clenched. “OK, I’ll go. But let Timi come out first. He’s my dog.”

Anne thought for a moment. “Yeah, you can have him back. On one condition. Do you have any money?”

Olli searched his pockets. “I have five marks. Why?”

“Good,” Anne said. “Go to the store and get us a Lola bar, a bag of liquorice drops and a bottle of Jaffa. We’ll swap Timi for them. But hurry up. If we get tired of waiting for you the dog might fall out of the window.”

The fixed smile on her face shocked him. She seemed to be completely serious. Olli felt sick to think that his best friends had turned against him and even Aunt Anna didn’t care enough to defend him.

The dog yelped in Anne’s tight grip.

Olli was just turning to go to the shop when the car pulled into the driveway. Aunt Anna, Karri, Leo and Riku got out carrying groceries and said hello to Olli.

“Have you still got a headache, Anne?” Aunt Anna asked when she saw the girl in the window.

Karri, Leo and Riku brought the bags up to the door.

“We bought you some aspirin, if you still need it,” Aunt Anna said.

Anne smiled at Olli and fluffed Timi’s fur as if nothing had happened.

Olli was relieved that he didn’t have to wait to find out how long she would have kept teasing him that way. He wanted to believe that she wouldn’t have really sent him running to the store, let alone done something to hurt Timi.

They were friends, weren’t they?

Timi wasn’t so trusting. He started avoiding Anne, though he was happy to wander Jyväskylä with the Famous Five. Then Timi disappeared into the secret passages, and never came back.

Sadness flickers through Olli’s mind again.

He glances shyly at Anne, then meets Leo’s eyes.

Leo winks at him and smiles. He knows that Olli has a crush on Anne. It’s probably easy to see. Two summers ago he brought the subject up. “Don’t worry, Olli. I won’t say anything to the others. And I can understand it. Sis is pretty. She has a lot of admirers at home in Espoo. They fight over her. She’s our sister so of course we love her, but… Well, I could tell you a couple of things sometime.”

Olli wonders again what kinds of things he might have meant.

There’s a creak in the hallway. Karri is standing on the stairs. He’s wearing a large hooded sweatshirt that Aunt Anna has been trying to get in the laundry for a long time. You can’t quite see his eyes under the hood. Karri has always been a watcher, a partial outsider even in his own gang of friends.

A shy boy, that’s how Aunt Anna puts it. But lately Karri has started to seem odder than before, even hostile. Olli is worried that Karri might not want them to come and visit in the summer any more. The Blomrooses are his cousins, at least, but Olli is just a stranger they met in the park and invited for a visit. In fact Karri has never even invited him here; it was the Blomrooses, who often act as if this is their home instead of Karri’s.

And what if Olli couldn’t come here any more?

He has noticed Karri staring at him sometimes, as if he were about to say something unpleasant. Or wanted to hurt him. Olli hardly dares look him in the eye any more, for fear of annoying him.

The leader of the Tourula Five is Leo. Leo has muscles, smarts and authority. He’s good-looking, and he knows what to do in all kinds of situations; even adults treat him as an equal.

But Leo has also said that when it comes down to it Karri is the one who actually leads them—a quiet boy who seemed silly to Olli at first, and is scary to him now. One time Riku started calling Karri an oddball behind his back, and Leo grabbed him by the back of the neck and reminded him that without Karri there would be no Tourula Five, just three bored Blomrooses spending summers with Olli and his grandparents at the rifle factory.

But it’s time for the picnic now. Olli, Anne, Leo, Riku and Karri leave the house and walk through Tourula.

Tourula is made up of gardens, narrow dirt roads and alleys, cute little quietly decaying houses, woodsheds, privies and other outbuildings, shops, garages, service stations. A short distance to the north is the Jyväskylä bakery, and in the right weather the smell of its biscuits drifts on the wind.

Now and then they toss each other smiles of glee as they walk, happy in each other’s company. Olli remembers how Timi used to run up to each one of them in turn and look into their eyes to make sure everything was all right.

Then Anne captures Olli’s attention. He can’t keep his eyes off her new body. She notices him watching her and apparently decides to allow it, because she smiles at him.

But at the same time, she looks back at Karri to make sure that he’s noticed their little game. She’s trying to make Karri jealous, Olli thinks.

Karri doesn’t seem to care. Anne looks upset. Olli is amused.

The world is bathed in bright colours. Their steps are buoyed, carefree. Anything is possible, because everything exists just for them. Olli would like to run with the wind, climb trees, and shout his joy out loud. He controls himself, though, because he doesn’t want to seem childish.

But nothing lasts forever. They’ve started talking in the dim of the evenings about how adulthood will eventually take hold of even them, and they’ll become businessmen, doctors, engineers, fathers and mothers, boring grown-ups with rules and responsibilities. But the inevitable can still be put off. You just have to keep moving. Not stay too close to adults for too long, or pretty soon you’ll start to think like them.

Aunt Anna once said, “Listen kids, once you’re grown up, the days and the summers fly away from you, and there’s not a single thing you can do about it.” They know that, of course. Schoolchildren have summer holidays, but the shift workers at the paper mill and the plywood plant, just like the ones at the rifle factory, are always either at work or at home asleep, and they don’t have time to do anything else.

There are railway workers here, too. One of them rides past them on a bicycle. His clothes are covered in dust. They know him as a gruff man who refuses to acknowledge anyone in Tourula except for other railway men.

To the Famous Five, the old man raises a hand and waves. They return the greeting politely.

Last summer at the Esso station they caught a robber who had stolen the railwayman’s bike. As a reward the old man gave them his eternal gratitude and as proof of it arranged a tour of his workplace for them. They got to go in the train engine, where he gave them pear soda and Carnival biscuits.