How did I get here #2
For the most part…
I am left in the room alone.
Someone comes by briefly to make sure I am staying where I am. Reminding me to stay seated. Stay where I am.
Where is the attacker?
He is gone.
They let him go.
They let him go?
You’re to wait for the police now.
An ambulance has been called, they are coming too.
Where did he go?
I don’t know.
Stay here.
Why did they let him go?
There is no answer to this, as Thita, the Thai lady at the centre of this, walks into the room and is immediately told to wait outside but she bulls forth and even as she is being walked backwards, telling me she’ll be outside waiting for me and that -
He ran off…
Why did they let him go?
And I am alone again.
My mouth is drying and the hole in my head has started to bleed again, I keep thinking it has stopped and it keeps betraying me and I have to find some more tissue from the clumps I put in my pocket. It is that thin cheap stuff, so when I do change the tissues, I have to pick some out.
The shaking male teacher will come in, in a second, and I will have a chance at a medical kit.
That’s not me then, that’s me now, remembering, shifting out of the other memory hurriedly.
All the other cuts and punctures have begun to sting and throb and I am wondering why no one has come to check on me or even sit with me. My face, throat and eyes are hurting in a way I’ve not experienced, and I have been attacked before. Sitting. With my girlfriend. From behind. No warning. Football hooligans. Amsterdam. My mind is dancing about. As my fingers are gently rubbing around my eyes.
Why’d they let him go?
After an idyllic summer visit, I’d come to Finland to do a one to two year audiovisual project.
Things…
Things had not gone as planned and they’d got weird, but I liked it enough to stay and try and integrate…
Or, well, after things had got weird, I had nowhere to go and after a suggested trip to TE the local employment agency, I had been offered a place on a language course to learn Finnish and be paid to learn it and after that, help to find a job. So I stayed on that promise.
The class was mostly Iraqis and Syrians. There was also a lovely Bangladeshi lady, a wise Thai lady, a devout but totally gangsta Somali lady, a shell shocked Kurd, a shy Latvian lady, a wideboy Kosovan, and me, the Irish guy. There was another lady, Muslim also, from an Eastern European country I forget now, she was young, just married and often smiling.
It was disproportionately balanced. They’d later admit this was a mistake.
And many of the Iraqis and Syrians were highly educated and seemed very bored by the whole thing. They spent most of the classes talking and using their phones to answer the work.
There was a Petro-chemist, she seemed the most bored. A lawyer, softly spoken and very friendly and quite devout. A writer who huffed about in that solipsism that older writers can fall into. A frank older cop and others. For the most part, they all spoke fairly workable and in some cases, perfect English. Though they were not always quick to reveal it.
When they told me about their previous lives, I was often baffled at what they were doing in the class and questioned them about why Finland had not found use for them and their educations. It seemed like a discarded goldmine of talent and knowledge. Especially and not least, the cop and the lawyer; who, while Finland was complaining about the difficult of processing its newcomers, seemed expertly posed to help the situation and slot quickly into useful and well paying jobs.
They often found my bafflement funny and laughed it off with anecdotes about bureaucracy and things like, “Ah you see, don’t you know Mooseville99, in Finland, they like you to start from the bottom!”
Whenever I asked him where he was from he said, “Turkey, no… Iraq.”
Elsewhere he was also referred to as Turkish, though sometimes they’d correct themselves later.
Whenever I said he was Turkish, the police used to get mad at me and correct me vigorously. I would explain I had always been told he was Turkish and they would correct me again.
The first time we’d spoken he’d been curious about my tattoos but we did not share enough words to fully understand each other. I thought he was asking me where I got my tattoos, so I was trying to explain London. He came back with a DVD of Prison Break and pointed at them and then the DVD and said “London”. I laughed and tried to explain but he seemed set on the idea.
Another time, he cornered me on a stairwell and earnestly tried to sell me a pair of boots. He seemed angry when I said no and kept demanding I look into the open bag.
He was short and remarkably balding for someone they told me was the class baby in his early twenties.
He used to get up and wander around the classroom and open people’s pencil cases and just take whatever he wanted. No one would react. It became so commonplace, I did not know what to make of it.
I did not know he was somewhat the class bully until the day he attacked me.
Late to the course due to a drop out, shy and with very little Finnish, I tended to sit quietly beside the studious and try to keep to myself.
On the day it happened, class began with him finding a large bookies type umbrella which he opened and began spinning around until class was brought to a halt and he was ordered to stop.
The teacher was small, snow haired, vindictive in a soft way and dually loved and seemed ill-suited and ill-tempered for such a job.
After this, he moved to one of the skinny fifth floor windows and jammed himself through so he could furiously and theatrically take deep loud lungfuls of air. Until the class was stopped and he was ordered back to his seat.
After which he got loud.
At lunch, for the first time, the others tried to take him to task and ask him to be silent. He flushed several shades of red and responded by turning off all the equipment in the room; from the teacher’s computer to the projector and the lights before storming out.
When we came back from lunch, it was homework time.
They were experimenting again with placement in the class so I was sitting in front of the Thai lady who had become my best friend in class.
It began with him walking over and whipping away her homework.
He then began answering every question until he was told “Very good Shemal, now let someone else have a turn.”
This was not enough though. So he began to call the Thai lady’s name.
“Thita…
Thiiiiitaaaah…
Thiiiiiittttaaaaaah
Are you okay Thita?
Are you okay? Thita?
Thiiiiittaaaa”
This went on for a while. Thita had domed her hands over her forehead and was slowly sinking her head into table with each drag of her name. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was making this sort of odd silent oh-wow-what-wow movements every time he said her name and no one was doing anything.
I waited and watched and no one was saying or doing anything and Thita had now sunk so low that her chin was all but touching the table and -
“Thiitaa
Thita!
Thiiiiittaaaa are you ooookaaaay Thiitttaaaa”
After waiting and watching no one react except Thita. From turning around to look at the teacher to the man sitting beside me, no one was acting like anything was happening. It was as if we were both in a bubble to everything.
So I got up and silently walked over to his table, picked up her homework without a word, and walked back to put it down in front of her.
He immediately lunged for my turned back.
Ari, the Kurd grabbed him by the thigh and shoved him back into his chair to stop him.
So I am told.
I didn’t see this as I was trying to do this with no interaction as I was trying to do everything as low key as possible.
The teacher did and took this time to act.
I don’t know what she was thinking, except I don’t think anyone had any proper training.
She spent the next few minutes admonishing Shemal in a mixture of Finnish and English to the class.
It began about taking homework.
“Only little boys take homework now don’t they? Vain pikku pojat vievat muiden laksyt, ha?”
“Only children take homework. Only little boys. Vain lapset kayttaytyvat niin, pienet pojat.”
And on, until the whole class was laughing with her and at Shemal. She took it on far longer than she should have and made him a laughing stock and then humiliated him further before finally changing the subject.
When he came over to me, he had something in his hand, he kept it very low, down, half-cupped so I had to dip tilt and lean my head to look.
It was quite deliberate.
Though they, the police, would later laugh at me when I would tell them he’d intended to kill me.
The top of the paper said
̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶
Then below it, in someone else’s handwriting
It’s not your paper
He started talking with the paper, shaking it, showing it to me, forcing me to lean out from my seat, pointing at it. It began in a mix of Arabic and Finnish.
All I had was “Istu” or “sit down” in Finnish and “anteeksi suomi pieni” or “sorry Finnish tiny” I followed these with English, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand, sit down…”
The mix became a furious flood and he flushed through a series of hues from red to purple and on like I had never seen another human do.
He kept the piece of paper low and kept insisting again and again that I look at it, lower and lower.
He got louder and it went on for longer than it felt these things should.
As he shouted and railed at me and kept me looking at the paper, I think in the end I said something like “Anteeksi, sorry, istu, ah fuck off.”
Thita would later say she saw him step back and snatch a metal pen from a table behind. Though she wasn’t sure whether it was the swing.
I didn’t see this.
Metal. It had to be metal. Later, I’d spend an odd amount of time slamming Biros into meat, melons, wood and bone. They all shattered fairly quickly.
He did step back a half a step, but he still held the paper and he came back in furious with the paper low demanding I look at it in one movement…
I saw something glint and ducked my head in.
The pen hit me in the same movement, catching the bone just below my eye and drove a solid line up into the corner of the socket along my nose.
He was fast and quickly peppered it across my face in a line that ran sewing machine jagged along my cheekbones as he sought to take, to burst my eyes.
He caught my temple with one and I did the only thing I could do. I stood up into the fury just as he came again. The movement was enough to soften the one meant for my throat.
It left just a circular bruise, the centre of which would show a ballpoint ink mark; that when found later would halt the argument over implement and stop them from opening up the hole in my head to look for pencil lead.
A nurse would later tell me I was lucky in a very unlucky way and that if that one, had been as hard as any of the others, especially my head, I’d have died.
She also remarked that it looked like he knew what he was doing as he had managed to get it right on the carotid. Right on, bang dead centre…really good aim…you’d have to know how, to have practice to get it that good…she accidentally over described, seemingly impressed…
As I tried to subdue him…
What followed was a frenzy. He tagged my hands, arms, face again, back. There were men in the class, but whenever they seemed to make an effort to do anything, it felt like I just got stabbed a lot more.
There was screaming and then there was the teacher screaming. A strange rabbit like keening that seemed to catch as if someone was about to stop breathing.
As they dragged me away from trying to subdue him again in what had become the roll of the dance, get dragged apart, he would come back and get to stab me some more… almost… as if they weren’t helping me…
I saw red and held.
I tore his coat or shirt off him with a rip and reeled him back and had him for a moment.
Until someone shoved me and we tilted and fell against tables.
They were between us again for a moment. Though he was in a frenzy.
Another hand from elsewhere as I staggered against the tables.
He tagged me just as I struggled to right against the shove that was sending me down. Hard and deliberate.
I lost my temper when it did something fuzzy and sharp to the bone in my skull and blood burst down my face.
I came down and immediately up in a staggered bounce, had a second to wipe the blood from my eyes…it can blind you know…
And the rest is a blur of anger and trying to subdue him.
People would later ask me why I didn’t kill him.
I still don’t know.
Looking back on what they put me through.
It would have been easier.
At one point we came to a place where we were hip to hip, a strange mutant Judo place where we were trying to force the throw.
It ended up with me on top of him.
Knees on his chest, arms neatly folded beneath them.
I had him and I was trying to catch my breath.
Someone…
I never found out who.
Shoved me then.
It was just enough for him to get a hand free.
The first thing he did was try to drive his fingers and thumb into my eyes. I remember turning and struggling against it and his single-male, weird, long nails dragging through the puncture marks on my face before he tried to get his thumb into my left eye, unrelenting.
I think I hit his head off the ground once, he bit me, I did it again he let go, fingers still clawing for purchase on my face. We struggled and I managed to twist his hand from my eyes to catch it by the thumb and heel in my mouth. He was still frenzying beneath me so I held and twisted, bit and pulled until it popped and he screamed and went limp.
I had him folded again and was over him with a fist raised when someone said my name…
And again…
And again…
And calm returned and I didn’t have to bring the fist down even though my face and eye sockets were now screaming from the nails.
I stood off him with contempt and he leapt up but I started at him with a growl and he scurried to the corner, haunched half his size, all Gollum, holding his hand, panting, staring at me wide-eyed and terrified.
I stood in the middle of the room panting, scooping blood out of the corners of my eyes, trying to clear the last of it, to stop it so my vision was not clear then muddy, then blurry, then clear…
I remember, I think, pointing at him for a moment…
I am not sure I said anything… before twisting it into an indifference of low contempt and turning away to walk to the door.
I could feel the blood dripping as I did so, and it began to curl and fill around my eyes again.
Sound began to become a real thing again.
There was screaming everywhere.
My only intent was the bathroom.
The bathroom.
The bathroom.
I needed water and tissue, I needed to wash the blood out of my eyes…it can blind you know…to wash my face, it was burning from the nails, I needed to see the damage. I needed water.
And as the roaring in my ears fully subsided and there was only screaming and weeping and swearing, when I got to the door of the classroom and opened it…
There was a sea of faces.
All the classes had been let out into the hallways.
Nobody had any crisis training…
I stood there looking at them. Bleeding.
They stood looking at me. Directly between me and the toilet a couple of meters away. I think I said…
“Move…”
There was no reaction and the blood was beginning to run down my face a bit faster.
“Move.”
I tried again to no avail.
I don’t know how loud it was, when it came, but it felt like a belly summoned bellow.
“Fuckin’ MOVE!”
They didn’t part, or clear away, but backed away just enough for me to walk out and door the corridor, to the coded security door which took a few half-blind bloodied attempts to get right, before I walked down two flights of stairs, and again through another coded security door, to find an empty toilet.
One of the Syrians followed me. He was clearly in shock as he had lost the ability to speak English and kept speaking in what I imagined was a soft stream of something like swearing.
I remembered he was a nice man, very friendly, always smiling. He had, had a child recently, a little girl I think and had brought boxes of chocolates in to share around the class to celebrate his joy.
He helped me wash the blood away, him swearing, me thanking him.
My phone was ringing constantly.
I tried to take a photo here and there.
When I finally answered, it was Thita telling me they wanted me to come back upstairs.
Brain empty, I complied to find them waiting to tell me to sit down there, in sit down. The police have been called. Stay seated. Stay where I am.
Where is he?
He is gone.
They let him go.
They let him go?
You let him go?
He is gone.
Where did he go?
He ran off.
Ari and Thita and one or two others are there but they were ushered away.
I remember asking for a medical kit…
And then they closed the door and left me.
And as my mouth begins to get very dry, I seem to think it would be a good idea to take photos of the - my blood.
- *****************************************************
- *****************************************************
- *****************************************************
You can support the struggle through this dangerous and unhealthy shit and the maybe asbestos poisoning and the bullshit, if you like, by buying Mooseville99 a ko fi or three or more ;)
Thank you for reading.
