The Green Bathroom
The bathroom was the colour of pond water. It had been green when my mother moved into the flat in 1987, and she had not, in thirty-eight years, seen any reason to paint it. The tiles were small and slightly iridescent, the grout between them darkened by decades of steam. The bath had feet. There was a single pale-green sink on a pedestal and above the sink an oval mirror with a crack in the lower right corner that she had always meant to get fixed, she said, when she had a moment.
I had flown up from Helsinki the evening before. My aunt Tuija had met me at the station in Kokkola and driven me to the flat in her old Volvo without saying very much, which was her kindness. She had let me into the building and up the three flights of stairs and she had stood in the doorway of the flat without entering and said, "I'll come tomorrow," and gone. The flat smelled of my mother and of a week of being closed up. I had slept on the sofa under my own coat because I could not yet face her bed.
In the morning I made coffee in my mother's coffee pot and I started in the kitchen, because the kitchen seemed the easiest, and I worked through the morning with boxes I had bought from the hardware shop at the corner, and by midday I had cleared the kitchen and the hall cupboard and two shelves of books in the living room, and I was tired in the way that has nothing to do with the body.
I went