The Story of My Face (32 page)

We've come to Savo, where the trees are far taller and stretch up to a peerless pale-blue sky. We have eaten our picnic of bread, cheese and cucumber; we have drunk the first two of our small green bottles of beer, and now we walk on, sometimes separate, sometimes hand in hand, along a path that we believe or hope will lead us to one of many lakes, still as glass, ice-cold, bottomless, teeming with fish and mysteries: a destination which gives shape and pretext to the journey. Heikki, wearing his pale-blue tee-shirt and track-pants, carrying the bag of provisions, sweats heavily. Half of me can't sweat any more so I am hotter still. I dab at my inner arms with a wetted cloth, and every hour I re-coat my face and neck and left arm and hand with sun-block. Even in the shade here, I can feel how the ultraviolet wants to burn me. But I know how to protect myself. I've bought yet another pair of sunglasses, the wrap-around kind designed for cyclists. And although the sun is fierce, there is plenty of shade. Everything is dappled. The air is the cleanest I have ever breathed.

‘You'll like the winters here,' Heikki tells me. ‘December, you could miss the light entirely. . . .'

‘I can smell water,' he tells me, smiling. ‘I think we will see the lake quite soon –' We leave the path and begin threading our way through the last of the trees, pushing branches aside, clambering over fallen trunks. Soon I too can smell the water and I'm thinking to myself:
Look how far I have come! I am in a
new story now. And yet, at the same time, must I still be sitting on
my bed in Billericay?
I'm thinking of that particular grey and windy morning when I had, following Caroline's instructions, put on my best turquoise blouse. Caroline was to one side of me, Sandra, who I now called
Mum
, was on the other; the mirror, pink plastic handle and back, oddly foreign in its domesticity, lay face down on my skinny lap. I'd been in the hospital about fourteen weeks, endured daily the agony of having my dressings changed. I'd had half a dozen operations to my face, neck and chest and ahead of me was a potentially infinite number of further procedures.

And now it was time for me to see for myself what had happened to my face, rather than catch mere glimpses of it in other people's eyes and expressions. It was hard for me to see how this knowledge would improve my life. It was the third time we'd tried.

Through the mattress, I could feel Sandra shake.

‘Not if you're not ready, Natty –' she said.

‘Just for a short moment,' Caroline encouraged, softly, from the other side. ‘You're a very brave girl,' she added, shameless. ‘I'll count to ten –'

The lake, a huge blue rent in the inky green of the forest, spills itself ahead of us.

‘There. I told you,' Heikki says, dropping the bag, which has left a dark print of itself on the pale blue of his tee-shirt.

‘Here, then,' I say, and hand him the camera, my little semiautomatic. There's a pause, long enough, I'd say, for him to appreciate the nature of the request, and its probable consequences. I watch him weigh the camera in his hand, check to see that there is film inside, what kind, where the shutter is.

‘Sure,' he says, looking up, bright and eager. ‘What about the boulder there?' It seems as good a place as any. I climb up, undo the top buttons of my shirt, sit cross-legged, hippie-style, one hand on each knee. Heikki gathers his bulk around the tiny silver machine and then, at the last minute, I remember to remove my glasses. Because I do, thanks to Mr Arthur Boyes, have perfectly good, albeit lashless, eyelids, and because I do want Heikki to be able to record those along with everything else that is me: the many different textures and thicknesses of skin that make up my remade face, most notably the anomalously uniform swathe of soft skin, freckled, as all of me once used to be, over my chin, jaw and neck. It comes from my back and was grafted as a skin-flap, still joined to its source between my shoulder blades, in a process lasting several months. This loosened up the scarring under my chin so that I could stop looking at my feet. Beneath the smooth patch, the skin on my neck and chest is of a far rougher texture, thickly ridged and dipped. Well below where they should be are the nipples I allowed them to replace,
just in case
. . . . That was my last operation, because after it I decided
I'd rather not.
They've moved again since, and don't line up. The picture will show the finely done seams around the big planes of my cheeks, the messy patch above my right eye, which for almost a year wouldn't heal and then for another year pulled my face entirely out of even the loosest notion of symmetry: Heikki, it is all there: my nose, perfectly functional, though with a somewhat rough-hewn look to it; my two ears, not matching; my mouth with its proper pink lips, not rosebud, not bee-stung, not even entirely horizontal, but sensitive all the same; my eyes, different in shape to the originals and to each other, but still green; my hair, which, as luck would have it, grows as thick and bright as ever. Here is my skin, my face, which is nothing like what it was or would have grown to be, but nonetheless, is mine:

‘Are you ready? –' Heikki says.

The lens is a door. I hear the wheeze of the zoom, blink at the click of the shutter's fall, and find I have passed through.

EPILOGUE

My name is Natalie Seppä. I made this story, and it made me. Now I live in a new country, vote in its elections, speak, write and even dream in its languages. I look at my face each morning in the mirror, curious as to how age will take a skin like mine; vain, still, about the colour of my hair.

But although I move further and further away from my past, and the thread between then and now grows thinner and thinner as it lengthens, it is still strong. It will always be there.

I know some things about what happened afterwards. I know that John Hern was charged, but got off when things came to court. Then, not long after, he was run over, wandering the lanes near the Thorns' farmhouse at night: it served him right, Mum said, when she read of it.

I know that Mark turned out all right, because – it's the strangest thing – I've seen him several times on television. He's grown into a big man, slightly overweight, but comfortable with it, articulate, easy in his movements. He's done two series on modern art, several books. It says on the back of the one on Jackson Pollock that he went to Winchester Art School. I expect he's married and so on, by now. Does he remember me as I was then? Does he remember the sweat and toffee smell and the wild, first-time excitement? Has he ever turned, terrified, from the question of what I've become in all the years since, what I might be like now? Or has he buried me completely away? I don't know.

I know that charges against Barbara were dropped. I know, of course, that she made sure some of the money left from the sale of the house plot and sawmill was put in trust for me. I expect she and Mark went to stay with Adrian and Rose while the aftermath of the fire took its tedious, painful course. I hope that somehow it came out all right, but I've no idea how. Of course, it's Barbara that I think of most. How many grandchildren might she have? Does she still keep the photograph of her lost baby?

Would she like one of me?

Heikki thinks that I should leave well alone. And of course, I don't want to upset my mother. But I know Barbara is still alive. I know where she lives: 193 King Street, something Christina found out for me quite easily via Jean McAllister. And look – there are so many pictures to chose from now: for example, this one of us outside the wooden house we've built ourselves. Or this one, which my mother took, of us on a family holiday in the Åland Islands – Heikki and I holding hands in front of the summer cottage, Kirsi dripping wet from her swim. Surely she would like to see that? I want her to know that she was, after all, right; I would like to show her how very glad I am that she unlatched the blue-painted gate and let me in.

My thanks to the many people who helped me
while I was writing this book. It would be
impossible to name them all but I hope they
will know who they are.