Disconnect

My wife calls me once she’s settled in in her hotel room and I think, not for the first time, about the awkward time difference between Helsinki and here. Two hours – not so big that conversation is impossible, but significant enough to make it jarring. She is in bed, her journey and her day almost over. And me? I’m sitting on a wall outside having stopped on my way to the pub, not long having been admiring the gorgeous, coral-coloured sunset over the side streets.

The conversation feels disconnected, too. I am always talking as she’s talking, the gaps in our sentences and the pauses and silences never quite lining up. I wonder, really, whether we are having the same experience. It’s frustrating to be in two different places, in more ways than one. Two hours – so her morning is my morning, her evening is my evening, only not quite. And the phone call, much as I miss her, has that air of “not quite”, too.

We swap stories. Her flight, her spilling her coke on the plane, the man with only one leg next to her helping her to mop it up. My awful meetings and conference calls, my skirmishes with morons, my meal for one on the sofa. I don’t tell her how big the flat feels, or how I partly went for a walk because outside seemed so much smaller, but it’s true. I think, too, about our rushed goodbye this morning on the crowded train, how unsatisfactory it was. Any long relationship sometimes feels like a ladder of hellos and goodbyes.

Her voice gets more muffled and smaller, and I know that I don’t have her for much longer. The next thing you know, it will be tomorrow for her, but it will be tonight for me for a while yet. Only two hours, but that can feel like a long time.

When we hang up I go to the pub and sit in the front room. I drink my cider, read my book and listen to the ukulele practice out the back. It’s nerdy and exuberant and I love it – men and women, all ages, enthusiastically launching into a cover of “Delilah”. I make out kazoos, wheezing away in the background. I chat to the landlord, I enjoy hearing all those voices, I soak it all up. I am in a big group of people now, and yet I’m still disconnected.

I suppose it will be like this for a while. It used to be difficult, now it’s just different.

The following morning I wake up to a breezy text from her talking about her breakfast. I can hear it in my head in her voice, and in my head it’s strong and clear, not stifled by miles and tiredness. I smile as I put on my coat, lock the door and head for the station. But, of course, she has already started work by then.

Helsinki

I touch down in Helsinki to find that summer is over. The sun still lights up the impossibly gold domes on the Russian cathedral, but the air has shifted. It’s becoming crisp: autumn isn’t far away. My hotel is next to a park named after Tove Jansson – she used to play there as a child. They held the naming ceremony a few months ago, with people dressed as Moomins. It makes me feel guilty that her memoir sat untouched in my bag throughout my flight (weeks later I read it and envy her talent, her cool, clean sentences).

Leaving the hotel, my wife and I see people selling their belongings on street corners and outside the arts centre: childhood toys, books, video cassettes. I can’t see why anyone would want to buy these things, and it seems jarring in such a prosperous country. Only when I return home and Google do I discover that it’s a twice yearly Finnish tradition, like spring cleaning. It explains the happy community feel, and the fact that nobody seems to care whether they sell anything or not. It lacks the desperation I’ve always associated with car boot sales.

The modern art gallery, a huge, beautiful edifice, is full of pieces about nothing. “The artist has provided a blank screen, and viewers are invited to superimpose their own images” in one room, “The artist tried to produce as flat an image as possible, to challenge the viewer’s opinion of art” in another. I know art expects something of the person looking at it, but I resent being asked to do so much of the work.

In another room, I find a better piece – a room filled with a million blank Finnish passports. I’m always dubious about art you can’t understand without reading the blurb, but this one’s clever: Finland is very strict on immigration, and if it had taken in as many people as other countries it would have a million extra citizens. It’s a difficult concept to process, even staring at that colossal block, made up of tiny blue-covered booklets. Each one a person, each one a life, a family, a tangle of friends. A whole network that was never allowed to exist.

Politically, everyone likes to talk about the disappeared: people who used to be here and are gone. But when I think about Helsinki, strolling along the harbour’s edge, sitting in beautiful coffee shops, all chalkboards and exposed brick, about playing cards in the bar or eating pizza in a neighbourhood restaurant, I’m struck instead by the never arrived. No black or brown faces. Almost no beggars. No charity shops and seemingly no need for them. Would those million people have changed that?

When I get home, people ask me what I thought of Helsinki. I tell them that I liked it but that I wouldn’t recommend it. “It’s very expensive”, I say. There’s more – there’s always more – but beyond that the reasons become just too difficult to explain.