It was decided that Erlendur, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg would handle the Bones Mystery, as the media was calling it, by themselves. The CID couldn’t afford to put more detectives onto what was not a priority case. An extensive narcotics investigation was in full swing, using up a great deal of time and manpower, and the department could not deploy any more people on historical research, as their boss Hrolfur put it. No one was sure yet that it was even a criminal case at all.
Erlendur dropped in at the hospital early the next morning on his way to work, and sat by his daughter’s bedside for two hours. Her condition was stable. There was no sign of her mother. For a long while he sat in silence, watching his daughter’s thin, bony face, and thought back. Tried to recall the time he’d spent with his daughter when she was small. Eva Lind had just turned two when her parents separated, and he remembered her sleeping between them in their bed. Refusing to sleep in her cot, even though, because they only had a small flat with that single bedroom, a sitting room and kitchen, it was in their bedroom. She climbed out of hers, flopped into the double bed and snuggled up between them.
He remembered her standing by the door of his flat, well into her teens by then, after she had tracked down her father. Halldora flatly refused to allow him to see the children. Whenever he tried to arrange to meet them she would hurl abuse at him and he felt that every word she said was the absolute truth. Gradually he stopped calling them. He had not seen Eva Lind for all that time and then suddenly there she was, standing in his doorway. Her expression looked familiar. Her facial features were from his side of the family.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she said after he had taken a long stare at her. She was wearing a black leather jacket, tattered jeans and black lipstick. Her nails were painted black. She was smoking, exhaling through her nose.
There was still a teenage look about her face, almost pristine.
He dithered. Caught unawares. Then invited her inside.
“Mum threw a wobbler when I said I was coming to see you,” she said as she walked past him, trailing smoke, and slammed herself down in his armchair. “Called you a loser. Always says that. To me and Sindri. ‘A fucking loser, that father of yours.’ And then: ‘You’re just like him, fucking losers.’”
Eva Lind laughed. She searched for an ashtray to put out her cigarette, but he took the butt and stubbed it out for her.
“Why…” he began, but did not manage to finish the sentence.
“I just wanted to see you,” she said. “Just wanted to see what the hell you look like.”
“And what do I look like?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“Like a loser,” she said.
“So we’re not that different,” he said.
She stared at him for a long time and he thought he detected a smile.
When Erlendur arrived at the office, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli sat down with him and told him how they had learned nothing more from the present owners of Robert’s chalet. As the new owners put it, they had never noticed any crooked woman anywhere on the hill. Robert’s wife had died ten years before. They had two children. One of them, the son, died around the same time at the age of 60, and the other, a woman of 70, was waiting for Elinborg to call on her.
“And what about Robert, will we get anything more out of him?” Erlendur asked.
“Robert passed away last night,” Elinborg said with a trace of guilt in her voice. “He’d had enough of life. Seriously. I think he wanted to call it a day. A miserable old vegetable. That’s what he said. God, I’d hate to waste away in hospital like that.”
“He wrote a few words in a notebook just before he died,” Sigurdur Oli said. “She killed me.”
“Aiee, that sense of humour,” groaned Elinborg.
“You don’t need to see any more of him today,” Erlendur said, nodding in Sigurdur Oli’s direction. “I’m going to send him to Benjamin’s cellar to dig out some clues.”
“What do you expect to find there anyway?” Sigurdur Oli said, the grin on his face turning sour.
“He must have written something down if he rented out his chalet. No question of it. We need the names of the people who lived there. The National Statistics Office doesn’t seem likely to find them for us. Once we have the names we can check the missing persons register and whether any of these people are alive. And we need an analysis to determine the sex and age as soon as the skeleton is fully uncovered.”
“Robert mentioned three children,” Elinborg said. “At least one of them must still be alive.”
“Well, this is what we’ve got to go on,” Erlendur said. “And it’s not much: a family of five lived in a chalet in Grafarholt, a couple with three children, at some time before, during or after the war. They are the only people we know to have lived in the house, but others could have been there too. It doesn’t look as though they were registered as living there. So for now we can assume that one of them is buried there, or someone connected with them. And someone connected with them, the lady Robert remembered, used to go up there…”
“Often and later and was crooked,” Elinborg finished the sentence for him. “Could crooked mean she was lame?”
“Wouldn’t he have written ‘lame’ then?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“What happened to that house?” Elinborg asked. “There’s no sign of it on the hill.”
“Maybe you’ll find that out for us in Benjamin’s cellar or from his niece,” Erlendur said to Sigurdur Oli. “I clean forgot to ask.”
“All we need is the names of the residents and then to check them against the list of missing persons from that time, and it’s all sewn up. Isn’t that obvious?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Not necessarily,” Erlendur said.
“Why not?”
“You’re only talking about the people who were reported missing.”
“Who else that went missing should I be talking about?”
“The disappearances that go unreported. You can’t be sure that everyone tells the police when someone disappears from their lives. Someone moves to the countryside and is never seen again. Someone moves abroad and is never seen again. Someone flees the country and is slowly forgotten. And then there are travellers who freeze to death. If we have a list of people who were reported to have got lost and died in the area at that time, we ought to examine that too.”
“I think we can all agree that it’s not that sort of case,” Sigurdur Oli said in an authoritative tone that was beginning to get on Erlendur’s nerves. “It’s out of the question that this man, or whoever it is lying there, froze to death. It was a wilful act. Someone buried him.”
“That’s precisely what I mean,” said Erlendur, who was a walking encyclopaedia about ordeals in the wilderness. “Someone sets off from a farm, say. It’s the middle of winter and the weather forecast is bad. Everyone tries to dissuade him. He ignores their advice, convinced he’ll make it. The strangest thing about stories of people who freeze to death is that they never listen to advice. It’s as if death lures them. They seem to be doomed. As if they want to challenge their fate. Anyway. This man thinks he’ll succeed. Except when the storm breaks, it’s much worse than he could have imagined. He loses his bearings. Gets lost. In the end he gets covered over in a snowdrift and freezes to death. By then he’s miles off the beaten track. That’s why the body’s never found. He’s given up for lost.”
Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances, uncertain of what Erlendur was driving at.
“That’s a typical Icelandic missing person scenario and we can explain it and understand it because we live in this country and know how the weather suddenly turns bad and how the story of that man repeats itself at regular intervals without anyone questioning it. That’s Iceland, people think, and shake their heads. Of course, it was a lot more common in the old days when almost everyone travelled on foot. Whole series of books have been written about it; I’m not the only one who’s interested in the subject. Modes of travel have only really changed over the past 60 to 70 years. People used to go missing and although you could never reconcile yourself to it, you understood their fate. There were rarely grounds for treating such disappearances as police or criminal matters.”
“What do you mean?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“What was that lecture all about?” Elinborg said.
“What if some of these men or women never set off from the farm in the first place?”
“What are you getting at?” Elinborg asked.
“What if people said so-and-so had set off for the moors or for another farm or went to lay a fishing net in the lake and was never heard of again? A search is mounted, but he’s never found and is given up for lost.”
“So the whole household conspires to kill this person?” Sigurdur Oli said, sceptical about Erlendur’s hypothesis.
“Why not?”
“Then he is stabbed or beaten or shot and buried in the garden?” Elinborg added.
“Until one day Reykjavik has grown so big that he can’t rest in peace any longer,” Erlendur said.
Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg looked at each other and then back at Erlendur.
“Benjamin Knudsen had a fiancee who disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” Erlendur said. “Around the time that the chalet was being built. It was said that she threw herself into the sea and Benjamin was never the same afterwards. Seems to have had plans to revolutionise the Reykjavik retail trade, but he went to pieces when the girl disappeared and his burgeoning ambition evaporated.”
“Only she didn’t disappear at all, according to your new theory?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Oh yes, she disappeared.”
“But he murdered her.”
“Actually I find it difficult to imagine that,” Erlendur said. “I’ve read some of the letters he wrote to her and judging from them he wouldn’t have touched a hair on her head.”
“It was jealousy then,” said Elinborg, an avid reader of romances. “He killed her out of jealousy. His love for her seems to have been genuine. Buried her up there and never went back. Finito.”
“What I’m thinking is this,” Erlendur said. “Isn’t a young man overreacting a bit if he turns senile when his sweetheart dies on him? Even if she commits suicide. I gather that Benjamin was a broken man after she went missing. Could there be something more to it?”
“Could he have kept a lock of her hair?” Elinborg pondered, and Erlendur thought she still had her mind on pulp fiction. “Maybe inside a picture frame or a locket,” she added. “If he loved her that much.”
“A lock of hair?” Sigurdur Oli repeated.
“He’s so slow on the uptake,” said Erlendur, who had grasped Elinborg’s train of thought.
“What do you mean, a lock of hair?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“That would rule her out if nothing else.”
“Who?” Sigurdur Oli looked at them in turn. “Are you talking about DNA?”
“Then there’s the lady on the hill,” Elinborg said. “It would be good to track her down.”
“The green lady,” Erlendur said thoughtfully, apparently to himself.
“Erlendur,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Yes?”
“Obviously she can’t be green.”
“Sigurdur Oli.”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I’m a total idiot?”
The telephone on Erlendur’s desk rang. It was Skarphedinn, the archaeologist.
“We’re getting there,” Skarphedinn said. “We could uncover the rest of the skeleton in two days or so.”
“Two days!” Erlendur roared.
“Or thereabouts. We haven’t found anything yet that looks like a weapon. You might think we’re being a little meticulous about it, but I think it’s better to do the job properly. Do you want to come and take a look?”
“Yes, I was on my way,” Erlendur said.
“Maybe you could buy some pastries on the way,” Skarphedinn said, and in his mind’s eye Erlendur could see his yellow fangs.
“Pastries?”
“Danish pastries,” Skarphedinn said.
Erlendur slammed down the phone, asked Elinborg to join him in Grafarholt and told Sigurdur Oli to go to Benjamin’s cellar to try to find something about the chalet that the merchant built but apparently lost all interest in after his life turned to misery.
On the way to Grafarholt, Erlendur, still thinking about people who went missing and were lost in snowstorms, remembered the story about Jon Austmann. He froze to death, probably in Blondugil in 1780. His horse was discovered with its throat slit, but all that was found of Jon was one of his hands.
It was inside a blue knitted mitten.
Simon’s father was the monster in all his nightmares.
It had been that way for as long as he could remember. He feared the monster more than anything else in his life, and when it attacked his mother all that Simon could think of was coming to her defence. He imagined the inevitable battle like an adventure story in which the knight vanquishes the fire-breathing dragon, but in his dreams Simon never won.
The monster in Simon’s dreams was called Grimur. It was never his father or Dad, just Grimur.
Simon was awake when Grimur tracked them down in the fish factory dormitory in Siglufjordur, and heard when he whispered to their mother how he was going to take Mikkelina up to the mountain and kill her. He saw his mother’s terror, and he saw when she suddenly seemed to lose all control, slammed herself against the bed head and knocked herself out. Grimur slowed down then. He saw when Grimur brought her round by repeatedly slapping her face. The boy could smell Grimur’s acrid stench and he buried his face in the mattress, so afraid that he asked Jesus to take him up to heaven, there and then.
He did not hear any more of what Grimur whispered to her. Just her whimpering. Repressed, like the sound of a wounded animal, and mingling with Grimur’s curses. Through a crack in his eyes he saw Mikkelina staring through the darkness in indescribable terror.
Simon had stopped praying to his God and stopped talking to his “good brother Jesus”, even though his mother said never to lose faith in him. Although convinced otherwise, Simon had stopped talking to his mother about it because he could tell from her expression that what he said displeased her. He knew that no one, least of all God, would help his mother to overcome Grimur. For all he had been told, God was the omnipotent and omniscient creator of heaven and earth, God had created Grimur like everyone else, God kept the monster alive and God made it attack his mother, drag her across the kitchen floor by the hair and spit on her. And sometimes Grimur attacked Mikkelina, “that fucking moron”, as he called her, beating her and mocking her, and sometimes he attacked Simon and kicked him or punched him, one time with such force that the boy lost one of his upper teeth and spat blood.
“My good brother Jesus, the friend of every child…”
Grimur was wrong about Mikkelina being retarded. Simon had a feeling that she was more intelligent than the rest of them put together. But she never said a word. He was certain she could talk but did not want to. Certain she had chosen silence, from the way she was just as scared of Grimur as the others were, perhaps more so because Grimur sometimes talked about how they ought to throw her on the rubbish dump with that pushchair contraption of hers, she was useless anyway and he was fed up with watching her eat his food without doing anything around the house except be a burden. He said she made them a laughing stock, the whole family and him too, because she was a moron.
Grimur made sure that Mikkelina could hear when he talked like this, and he laughed at her mother’s feeble attempts to curtail the abuse. Mikkelina didn’t mind him ranting at her and calling her names, but she didn’t want her mother to suffer for her sake. Simon could tell that when he looked at her. Mikkelina’s relationship with him had always been close, much closer than with little Tomas, who was more of a puzzle, more of a loner.
Their mother knew that Mikkelina was not retarded. She did regular exercises with her, but only when Grimur was not there to see it. Helped her to limber up her legs. Lifted her withered arm, which was twisted inwards and stiff, and rubbed her paralysed side with an ointment that she made from wild herbs from the hill. She even thought that Mikkelina would be able to walk one day. She put her arm around her and tottered with her back and forth across the floor, urging her on and encouraging her.
She always spoke to Mikkelina like any other normal, healthy child, and told Simon and Tomas to do the same. She included her in everything they did together when Grimur was not at home. The mother and daughter understood each other. And her brothers understood her too. Every movement, every expression on her face. Words were superfluous, even if Mikkelina knew the words but never used them. Her mother had taught her to read and the one thing she enjoyed more than being carried out to lie in the sun was reading, or being read to.
And then one day the words started to come out, the summer after the world went to war and the British army set up camp on the hill. When Simon was carrying Mikkelina back indoors out of the sun. She had been exceptionally lively during the day, wiggling her ears and opening her mouth and poking out her tongue. Simon was about to put her back on the divan in the kitchen, because evening was falling and the weather was cooling, when Mikkelina suddenly made a noise that startled her mother into dropping a plate into the washing-up bowl, where it broke. Forgetting for an instant the terror that would usually fill her after such clumsiness, she spun round and stared at Mikkelina.
“EMAAEMAAA,” Mikkelina repeated.
“Mikkelina!” their mother gasped.
“EMAAEMAAA,” Mikkelina shouted, rolling her head around in wild rejoicing at her achievement.
Their mother walked slowly towards her as if unable to believe her own ears, then looked, open mouthed, at her daughter, and Simon thought he could see tears filling her eyes.
“Maammmmaa,” Mikkelina said, and her mother took her out of Simon’s arms and laid her slowly and gently onto her bed, stroking her head. Simon had never seen their mother cry before. No matter what Grimur did to her, she never cried. She shrieked in pain, called for help, pleaded with him to stop or otherwise suffered his blows in silence, but Simon had never seen her cry. Thinking that she must be upset, he put his arm around her, but she told him not to worry. This was the best thing that could ever have happened in her life. He could tell that she was crying not only about Mikkelina’s condition, but about her achievement as well, which had made her happier than she had ever before allowed herself to feel.
That was two years ago, and Mikkelina had steadily added to her vocabulary since then and could now say whole sentences, her face like a beetroot from the strain, poking out her tongue and dangling her head back and forth in such furious spasms from the effort that they thought it would drop off her withered body. Grimur did not know that she could talk. Mikkelina refused to say anything within his hearing and their mother concealed it from him, because she never tried to draw his attention to the girl, not even such triumphs. They pretended that nothing had happened or changed. A few times Simon heard his mother very guardedly mention to Grimur whether they ought to try to find help for Mikkelina. That she could become more mobile and stronger with age, and seemed to be able to learn. She could read and was learning to write with her good hand.
“She’s a moron,” Grimur said. “Don’t ever think she’s anything more than a moron. And stop talking to me about her.”
So she stopped, because she obeyed Grimur’s every word; the only help that Mikkelina ever received was from their mother, and what Simon and Tomas did for her by carrying her out into the sunshine and playing with her.
Simon avoided his father as far as possible, but from time to time he was forced to go out with him. When Simon grew up he proved more useful to Grimur, who took him to Reykjavik and made him carry provisions back to the hill. The trip to town took two hours, down to Grafarvogur, crossing the bridge over Ellidaar and skirting the Sund and Laugarnes districts. Sometimes they took the route up the slope to Haaleiti and across Sogamyri. Simon kept four or five of his little steps behind Grimur, who never spoke to him or paid him any attention until he loaded him with supplies and ordered him to carry them home. The return journey could take three or four hours, depending upon how much Simon had to carry. Sometimes Grimur would stay in town and not return to the hill for days.
When that happened, a certain joy reigned in the household.
On his trips to Reykjavik, Simon discovered an aspect of Grimur that he took a while to assimilate and never wholly understood. At home, Grimur was surly and violent. Hated being spoken to. Foul-mouthed if he did speak, and coarse in the way he belittled his children and their mother; he made them serve his every need and woe betide any shirker. But in dealing with everyone else, the monster seemed to shed its skin and become almost human. On Simon’s first trips to town he expected Grimur to act the way he always behaved at home, snarling abuse or swinging punches. He feared this, but it never happened. On the contrary. All of a sudden Grimur wanted to please everyone. He chattered away merrily to the merchant and bowed and scraped to people who entered the shop. He addressed them formally, even smiled. Shook their hands. Sometimes when Grimur bumped into people he knew he would break into guffaws — not the strange, dry and raucous laugh that he occasionally let out when he was vilifying his wife. When people pointed to Simon, Grimur put his hand on the boy’s head and said yes, he was his son, grown so big. Simon ducked at first as if expecting a blow, and Grimur joked about it.
It took Simon a long time to grasp this incomprehensible duplicity on Grimur’s part. His father’s new countenance was unrecognisable. He could not understand how Grimur could be one person at home and a completely different man the moment he left the house. Simon could not fathom how he could be sycophantic and subservient and bow politely, when at home he ruled as the ultimate dispenser of life and death. When Simon discussed this with his mother she shook her head wearily and told him, as always, to be wary of Grimur. Be wary of provoking him. No matter whether it was Simon, Tomas or Mikkelina who sparked him off, or whether it was something that had happened when Grimur was away and which threw him into a rage, he almost invariably attacked their mother.
Months would sometimes pass between assaults, even a whole year, but they never stopped altogether and were sometimes quite frequent. A matter of weeks. The intensity of his fury varied. Sometimes a single punch out of the blue, sometimes he would fly into an uncontrollable rage, knock their mother to the ground and kick her mercilessly.
And it was not only physical violence that weighed down upon the family and home. The language he used was like a lash across the face. Denigrating remarks about Mikkelina, that crippled moron. The sarcastic tirade that Tomas suffered for not being able to stop wetting the bed at night. When Simon acted like a lazy bastard. And all that their mother was forced to hear and they tried to close their ears to.
Grimur didn’t care if his children saw him beating up their mother or humiliating her with words that stabbed like stilettos.
The rest of the time, he paid them virtually no attention. Normally acted as though they did not exist. Very occasionally he played cards with the boys and even allowed Tomas to win. Sometimes, on Sundays, they all walked to Reykjavik and he would buy sweets for the boys. Very seldom Mikkelina was allowed to go with them and Grimur arranged a ride in the coal lorry so they did not need to carry her down from the hill. On these trips — which were few and far between — Simon felt his father was almost human. Almost like a father.
On the rare occasions when Simon saw his father as something other than a tyrant, he was mysterious and unfathomable. He sat at the kitchen table once, drinking coffee and watching Tomas playing on the floor, and he stroked the surface of the table with the flat of his hand and asked Simon, who was about to sneak out through the kitchen, to bring him another cup. And while Simon poured the coffee for him, he said:
“It makes me furious thinking about it.”
Simon stopped, holding the coffee jug in both hands, and stood still beside him.
“Makes me furious,” he said, still stroking the surface of the table.
Simon backed slowly away and put the jug down on the stove plate.
Looking at Tomas playing on the floor, Grimur said: “It makes me furious to think I couldn’t have been much older than him.”
Simon had never imagined his father as ever being any younger than he was then, or that he had ever been different. Now, suddenly, he became a child like Tomas, and a completely new side to his father’s character was revealed.
“You and Tomas are friends, aren’t you?”
Simon nodded.
“Aren’t you?” he repeated, and Simon said yes.
His father went on stroking the table.
“We were friends too.”
Then he fell silent.
“That woman,” Grimur said eventually. “I was sent there. The same age as Tomas. Spent years there.”
He fell silent again.
“And her husband.”
He stopped rubbing the table with his hand and clenched his fist.
“That fucking bastard. That bloody fucking bastard.”
Simon slowly retreated. Then his father seemed to regain his calm.
“I don’t understand it myself,” he said. “And I can’t control it.”
He finished his coffee, stood up, went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. On his way, he picked up Tomas from the floor and took him with him.
Simon sensed a change in his mother as the years went by and as he grew up, matured and acquired a sense of responsibility. It was not as fast a change as when Grimur was suddenly transformed and became almost human; on the contrary, his mother changed gradually and subtly, over a long period, many years, and he realised the meaning behind it, with a sensitivity denied to most. He had a growing sense that this change in her was dangerous, no less dangerous than Grimur, and that inexplicably it would be his responsibility to intervene before it was too late. Mikkelina was too weak and Tomas was too small. He alone could help her.
Simon had trouble understanding this change or what it meant, but he became more intensely aware of it than ever around the time that Mikkelina shouted out her first word. Mikkelina’s progress pleased her mother immeasurably. For a moment it was as if her gloom had been swept away, she smiled and hugged the girl and the two boys, and for the next weeks and months she helped Mikkelina to learn to talk, delighting in her slightest advances.
But it was not long before their mother was back in her old routine, as if the gloom that had lifted from her returned with greater intensity than ever. Sometimes she sat on the side of the bed, staring into space for hours, after cleaning every speck of dust from the little house. Glared in silent misery with half-closed eyes, her expression so infinitely sad, alone in the world. Once, when Grimur had punched her in the face and stormed out, Simon found her holding the carving knife, with the palm of her hand turned up, stroking the blade slowly across her wrist. When she noticed him she gave a wry smile and put the knife back in the drawer.
“What are you doing with that knife?” Simon asked.
“Checking that it’s sharp. He likes the knives to be kept sharp.”
“He’s completely different in town,” Simon said. “He’s not nasty then.”
“I know.”
“He’s happy then, and he smiles.”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t he like that at home? To us?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t feel well.”
“I wish he was different. I wish he was dead.”
His mother looked at him.
“None of that. Don’t talk like him. You mustn’t think like that. You’re not like him and you never will be. Neither you nor Tomas. Never. Do you hear? I forbid you to think like that. You mustn’t.”
Simon looked at his mother.
“Tell me about Mikkelina’s dad,” he said. Simon had sometimes heard her talking about him to Mikkelina and tried to imagine what her world would have been like had he not died and left her. Imagined himself as that man’s son in a family where his father was not a monster but a friend and companion who loved his children.
“He died,” his mother said with a hint of accusation in her voice. “And that’s that.”
“But he was different,” Simon said. “You would be different.”
“If he hadn’t died? If Mikkelina hadn’t fallen ill? If I hadn’t met your father? What’s the point of thinking like that?”
“Why is he so nasty?”
He asked her this repeatedly and sometimes she answered, sometimes she just said nothing as if she herself had searched for the answer to that question for years without getting any closer to it. She just stared past Simon, alone in the world, and talked to herself sadly and remotely, as if nothing she said or did mattered any more.
“I don’t know. I only know that we’re not to blame. It’s not our fault. It’s something inside him. I blamed myself at first. Tried to find something I was doing wrong that made him angry, and I tried to change it. But I never knew what it was and nothing I did made any difference. I stopped blaming myself long ago and I don’t want you or Tomas or Mikkelina to think the way he acts is your fault. Even when he curses and abuses you. It’s not your fault.”
She looked at Simon.
“The little power that he has in this world, he has over us, and he doesn’t intend to let go of it. He’ll never let go of it.”
Simon looked at the drawer where the carving knives were kept.
“Is there nothing we can do?”
“No.”
“What were you going to do with the knife?”
“I told you. I was checking how sharp it was. He likes the knives kept sharp.”
Simon forgave his mother for lying because he knew she was trying, as always, to protect him, safeguard him, ensure that their terrible life as a family would have the least effect on his.
When Grimur got home that evening, filthy black from shovelling coal, he was in exceptionally good spirits and started talking to their mother about something he had heard in Reykjavik. He sat down on a kitchen stool, told her to bring him some coffee and said her name had cropped up at work. He didn’t know why, but the coalmen had been talking about her and claimed she was one of them. One of the doomsday kids who were conceived in the Gasworks.
She kept her back turned to Grimur and didn’t say a word. Simon sat at the table. Tomas and Mikkelina were outside.
“At the Gasworks!?”
Then Grimur laughed an ugly, gurgling laugh. Sometimes he coughed black phlegm from the coal dust and was black around the eyes, mouth and ears.
“In the doomsday orgy in the fucking gas tank!” he shouted.
“That’s not true,” she said softly, and Simon was surprised because he had seldom heard her contest anything Grimur said. He stared at his mother and a shiver ran down his spine.
“They fucked and boozed all night because they thought the end of the world was nigh and that’s where you came from, you twat.”
“It’s a lie,” she said, more firmly than before, but still without looking up from what she was doing at the sink. Her back remained turned to Grimur and her head dropped lower onto her chest and her petite shoulders arched up as if she wanted to hide between them.
Grimur had stopped laughing.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“No,” she said, “but it’s not true. It’s a misunderstanding.”
Grimur got to his feet.
“Is it a misunderstanding,” he mimicked her voice.
“I know when the gas tank was built. I was born before then.”
“That’s not what I heard. I heard your mother was a whore and your father was a tramp and they threw you in the dustbin when you were born.”
The drawer was open and she stared down into it and Simon saw her glaring at the big carving knife. She looked at Simon then back down at the knife and for the first time he believed that she was capable of using it.