Prologue

Isak.

The first time I saw my mother with a shotgun, it was pointed at me. I can still see her as she was, lit by a wrapper of moon, her face mashed against the stock and one eye as round as an owl’s.

She woke me by nudging the steel of the barrel against my temple. At first I stirred slowly, but feeling an absence of blankets, scrabbled upright against the headboard. By throwing off my covers, she stripped me of dignity, because at twelve years old, my dick had recently transformed from field mouse to rat, leading its own nocturnal life I’d not yet caught up with in understanding nor maturity. Shame caught in my throat, but at 3am, sleep spun and confused, I was all child.

There wasn’t a light on in the house, but I could tell from how her open eye roamed my room she saw clearly enough, where my ill-adjusted eyes kept me blind to all but mother and gun.

“Boy!”

She called me that when she was unable to unearth my name.

I snivelled, begging her to snap out of it but not daring to tug at the sleeve of her kimono. “I’m Isak, your son. What did I do?”

She chewed her cheeks and surveyed, one rain boot planted on the floor and the other on the bed so she hovered above, the length of a gun barrel away.

For a long time after, this surprising triumvirate – mother, gun, me – figured in my nightmares, ending in bizarre places, details different as they are in dreams. Once, it was Sokjoki High’s ice hockey coach in that red kimono, shotgun cocked, leaning his hairy chest over me. In another, she was two dimensional and I folded her up into an envelope and posted her to Dad, to show him how bad things had got since he left.

Boy – “Poika,” – she repeated. She severed the syllables from each other. The ‘ka’ was a breathy incantation, carrying her voice away. Whatever was going on in her head took place in chambers too deep to escape her mouth.

It was also the first time I realised how warped the drink made her mind. I’ve since learned, for drunks like her, fairy tale warnings from childhood are true: wolves, changelings and tricksters alive and well at the bottom of a bottle. When she drank, they ripped off their faces and glued them to hers. They camped in her head, leaving tufts of mangy fur and flea eggs in gashes they tore in her tissue with unclean claws. The more they came and the longer they stayed, the less of her was left behind, but when I was twelve she was still Mother most of the time. Earlier that day, she’d baked pulla bread and we’d eaten in comfortable silence, me reading comics, her watching a soap opera.

A knee jutted from where the robe parted, pinning down my towelling pyjama trousers. I hardened my stare, clenched my jaw to summon gutsiness and pissed the bed. Unarmed, it was all I had.  

The wetness that crept under her knee did what I hoped, reanimating her. I was dragged to the bathroom and made to pull on a snowsuit from the winter cupboard, though it wasn’t yet snow season. Having started puberty and being naked under my pyjamas, I leant forward so my shirt hung low and she wouldn’t see the humiliating hairs that corkscrewed out of me. The snowsuit was too tight because I’d had a growth spurt, and it sawed up my arse.

Shotgun pressed into my back like a wind-up tin soldier’s key, she marched me down the stairs. We stopped by the back door for me to put on my own boots, then exited into the grizzling night, so typical of Finnish Autumn. It was cold enough for our breaths to emerge milky, but I couldn’t stop taking long, dragging gulps of air that burned my lungs.

The neighbours’ homes were in darkness: beyond our garden, the town of Sokjoki slept. Ours was a low-income street of small plots, and the Järvinens would have seen us if only they’d opened their blinds. I couldn’t find my voice to shout for them.

“Get in with Lumi,” she said, motioning to the kennel with a jerk of the head. She found the dog’s name but not her son’s. 

Thinking she’d been summoned, Lumi trotted out of her wooden hut and started whining inside the wire pen. I removed the block that kept the latch down, opened the gate and stepped over the threshold one foot at a time. Lumi was happy, extending to upright German Shepherd height, her paws on my shoulders, her tongue on my cheek.

I crawled into the kennel, a warm, dry haven. I’d given Lumi my blankets off the littler bed from before I grew. Her dog toys were strewn around us, and they squeaked as we got comfortable. We rotated, two red Indians to my mother’s cowboy, then sunk into the bedding, entwining our limbs in a pack of two.

I imagined my mother being woken the next morning by the weak October sun, gun settled in the groove of her sternum. Coming to, perhaps she flung it aside, reeling. Checked my room, where I wasn’t to be found, praying she’d not hurt me. Searched the house, then out to the yard. I was alerted by the sound of her scrabbling, unable to open the pen fast enough, fingers slipping as she tried to remove the block. Crying and apologising, though she would have had only the vaguest idea what for. 

“What are you doing out here?’ she kept saying, holding me close and overwhelming me with confetti kisses. “What were you thinking, Isak, being out here with the dog? What a strange place for a boy to sleep.”

The one good thing to come of it all was her suggestion that Lumi slept on my bed thereafter, guarding me, keeping me safe.

And now, here we are again. She had given that gun to Arto Mustonen, but twenty years later I see she has it back, newly polished. I’d know it anywhere, the narrowness and distinct downturned angle of its butt. Don’t you remember the details of all the things your father owned, as if his ownership alone sanctified them?

Its leather sling looks all wrong on my mother’s bare shoulder beside her thin summer dress strap. She’s never been good at dressing for occasion.

With the gun and my mother reunited, the fear is back. The exact same vintage. Evergreen terpenes hang heavily around us like curtains, and I get the feeling all possible roads led here no matter what decisions were made along the way. This moment, as hideous and frightening it is, feels right.

Mother, gun, me and now Juha too, in front of the Mushroom House.

It’s Midsummer Eve and somewhere behind the packed pines, revellers laugh and lark about. Girls will be collecting meadow flowers to weave into crowns they’ll place under pillows tonight, wishing sweethearts into existence. There’ll be gatherings on lake jetties with pickled herring picnics and kegs of beer.  

Usually Juha and I would be in the mix somewhere, but instead we’re in a clearing in the thickest part of the forest, with one of us in the gun’s sight.

“Shut up,” my mother hisses. Though this is just about the worst situation the three of us could be in, I find it in me to be impressed by the lucidity of her stare. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such fixedness from her. “I’m warning you, do not say a word.”

But the words do come. Each domino clips the heel of another and once I’ve heard them all fall, I have no doubt left – the trigger will be pulled.

And that’s when there’s a sound in the bushes. The rattle of a bike, the ring of a bell. I know before I see her who it is. It’s Tam.

Shit. Why did she come?

Four in the forest with a gun.

One, done for, everyone undone.