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a young tram inspector the moment they boarded. The Partanens didn’t have any tickets and there was no getting out of a fine, although Margit
tried pretending that she only spoke German. Their funeral outing turned out to be more expensive than they had planned, and Margit thought it was Siiri’s fault because she had insisted on
taking public transport.
    ‘You’ll get a free ride to your own funeral,’ Irma said to lighten the mood.
    ‘Oh, but you won’t,’ Anna-Liisa corrected her. ‘The deceased should leave some money for the funeral to their heirs. It isn’t right to let others pay for it. I have
life insurance to pay for mine.’
    ‘So do I,’ Siiri said, with a sudden look of alarm. Life insurance ought to have been a safe subject, but just then, as they turned onto Mechelininkatu, Siiri had a horrifying
thought. She remembered that her insurance would run out when she turned ninety-five. ‘That means that if I don’t die soon all my payments will be down the drain.’
    ‘You’ll just have to die, then,’ Irma said, and started to reminisce about watching the brick buildings being built in Töölö when she and the other little girls
in the neighbourhood hadn’t thought twice about women carrying heavy loads of bricks on their backs over dangerous-looking scaffolding. ‘
Döden, döden,
döden
.’
    ‘I, for one, refuse to save up for my funeral, when I’m not even going to be there,’ Margit said, continuing the already forgotten thread of conversation. ‘You can just
lay me in a cardboard box,’ she said to her husband, who was looking out of the window at the strange new apartment blocks. Half of them looked like their roofs and balconies were falling
off.
    ‘Of course you’re going to be there,’ Irma said. ‘In the cardboard box.’
    ‘You want to get laid in a cardboard box?’ Margit’s husband muttered. This unconventional suggestion didn’t particularly surprise anyone, since all of A wing had heard
Margit’s whoops every afternoon. Margit was hard of hearing and no doubt didn’t know she was making so much noise. She didn’t hear her husband’s muttering on the tram,
either, although she was wearing her hearing aid. Those things never worked. The only reason they gave old people a hearing aid in one ear was so that other people would know they couldn’t
hear. If hearing aids were meant to be of some use, they would put them in both ears, like they do for children.
    They got to the chapel on time and took off their coats in the narrow foyer, which was always crowded with people elbowing each other and opening up packages of flowers and
trying to find someplace to put the wrappers. A friendly verger with a beard recognized Irma and led the group to good seats in the sanctuary, like an old-fashioned usher. The chapel was pretty on
the inside, bright and open and just the right size. The best seats for a funeral were to the left of the coffin, near the centre, not too close and not too far away. From there you could see the
dear departed and the pastor and hear everything, although the words of remembrance that people said as they left their flowers in front were always vague and mumbled. Siiri and Irma couldn’t
understand why Finland had this custom of baring one’s soul about the deceased in front of everyone, when people otherwise never expressed their feelings, but Anna-Liisa thought it was an
important part of the grieving process. There were all kinds of silly, strange messages written on the flower-arrangement ribbons brought for Tero.
    ‘For a man who the angels wish to thank,’ a large, handsome young man read from his bouquet.
    ‘Whom,’ Anna-Liisa said, tapping her hymnal on the back of the seat in front of her.
    The large man had come to the funeral in a leather jacket. Actually there were a lot of leather jackets, all the same. Siiri looked on, mesmerized, at the man who dared to stand next to a coffin
and talk about angels. If ever there