Free Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo Page B

he sees something he doesn’t approve of is enough to make you think twice.
    Though the beach extends as far as the eye can see, swimming isn’t recommended here because there are very strong currents in the water. That said, I wouldn’t want to go swimming if I couldn’t have a fresh-water shower afterwards. Anyone who’s ever swum at the seaside and got dressed without a shower knows what it means to feel stickier than sticky; your hair feels as though you’ve used syrup instead of conditioner.
    It’s occurred to me here for the first time that, more often than not, people tend to eat and drink simply as a way of passing time. We have a coffee and a slice of cake because there’s nothing else to do. We sit having a beer. We go for a kebab. Out here, in these conditions, you eat to give yourself energy, and there’s absolutely nothing extra to nibble on.
    Ergo, there is nothing to do.
    Back in New Zealand I still carried a book with me. Almost every backpackers’ hostel had a bookshelf where people could leave the books they’d read and pick up something new. I chose the smallest and thinnest paperback I could find: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . I enjoy reading, but I didn’t know anything about this book. It sounded promisingly like a horror story. It wasn’t. Or rather, yes, it was.
    I read it four times. Maybe five.
    But now I have nothing to read. There’s no room for being a hero when it comes to the weight of your rucksack, or so I’ve heard. The best way to kill time is simply to march onwards, especially while the terrain is bearable. When we cross a pair of logs across Tyler’s Creek, the stream from which people collect drinking water once they get down to Osmiridium Beach, Jyrki stops to examine the water.
    The creek is shallow and the water is far browner than I’ve become used to; it’s muddy, almost dried up.
    ‘It’s a good job we didn’t go down to Osmiridium. We'd have had to filter all the water. Must be unusually dry around here at the moment,’ Jyrki comments, poking his hiking pole into the creek.
    Where did they come up with a name like that? It sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi novel.’
    ‘It’s a real word. It’s a metal related to platinum, a compound of osmium and iridium if I remember right. Maybe people have mined it around here; there’s been tin mining in Melaleuca, too.’
    ‘What can you make out of it? Rings?’
    ‘Small things that are put under hard sustained pressure.’
    ‘Such as?’
    I smile wryly at my question; I only spot the double entendre after I’ve said it. Now would be the time for a light-hearted compliment.
    Jyrki’s face lights up; you can see the light bulb switching on in his head. I wait patiently.
    ‘The nib of a fountain pen,’ he says.
Jyrki
    The location of the creek’s outlet is constantly moving. The exact spot where it decides to burst a sandbank can shift by a couple of kilometres at a time. Sometimes there are two outlets at once. The shallower one, the one that sometimes almost disappears, is one we should be able to wade across easily.
    The map gives us a choice of routes. I go for the one running adjacent to the sandbank.
    Of course, there’s no path on the sandbank, just some tufts of grass and a dune whipped up by the wind. Perhaps that row of marks, like melted dents in the ground, could be the prints from yesterday’s hiking boots.
    My feet sink into the sand, and in no time so much sand has come in through the top of my boots that I can’t move my feet inside them at all; it feels as though they’ve been set in a plaster cast. My boots are like dead weights. I can only guess at the route. I know the general direction, of course, but where exactly are we supposed to cross the shallow river outlet? I try to look for signs along the steep embankment on the other side, anything at all.
    She asks how long this is going to take. I tell her we’re nearly there.
    To the left is the ocean, to the right the