When he’s with the Blomroos siblings and Karri, everything feels great. And not just great, but meaningful. Time isn’t wasted on nothing, like it is in Koirakkala. In Tourula, every minute is spent in the best possible way.
The window creaks open. Aunt Anna calls them. They run into the house.
Aunt Anna is in the kitchen loading a picnic basket. Morning light is pouring through the windows, making her lemon-yellow dress glow. She is the Blomrooses’ father’s sister, a handsome, motherly woman. Olli can never stop looking at her breasts. The fabric of her dress is thin and the tips of her breasts show through, large and dark like the mint chocolates she sometimes gives them.
“Well, my faithful Five,” Aunt Anna says with a smile in her voice.
Olli is charmed by her way of speaking to them in such a friendly, mischievous tone.
“It looks like you’re all together and ready to go, as soon as that dreamy son of mine gets himself downstairs. I wonder what else I can supply for you. Here’s your lunch. I did my best. I hope it tastes good. If you run out of food just come back for a refill. Would you please carry it, Leo? You’re probably the strongest. Or have Riku and Olli been training over the winter?”
She puckers up her mouth and laughs until her breasts jiggle. The laugh infects the children, too.
The kitchen is full of wondrous aromas that wind their way through the room like the serpent in paradise. They come from the jams, cardamom buns, cakes, pies, rolls, meat pasties, marmalades, cookies and pastries that she endlessly prepares and packs into their picnic lunches.
Olli hopes and trusts that he will never forget the smell of Aunt Anna’s kitchen.
The boys thank her for the picnic basket, nodding politely. Anne is sassy. “It seems like Aunt Anna’s trying to fatten me up till I look like a pig,” she says sulkily.
But you can see in her eyes that she’s as excited about the picnic as the others. Her plaid skirt and short top show off the new shape of her body. She’s grown over the past year, and she has breasts now. Her bottom is a “tight little package”, as Riku said to Olli on the lake shore a couple of weeks ago when the others were out of earshot.
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.