‘How many hundred years? How much would it take?’
Mum closed her eyes. She hesitated.
‘I’m sixteen, Mum,’ Dísa said. ‘I understand money. You can tell me.’
Mum smiled. ‘Yes, you do understand money. I wish it had been you working at the bank, not your father, then we wouldn’t be in this mess.’
Dísa fought back the sharp comment that this provoked. It was true, Dad had screwed up badly, but then so had Grandpa, from what Dísa could tell. Dad wasn’t as evil as Mum constantly made out. Nor as useless.
‘Ten million krónur to get us through next year. Probably twenty million to get rid of the mortgage and put the farm back on a commercial footing.’
‘Whoa!’
‘See what I mean about the petrol station job?’
Dísa did the sums in her head. ‘Twenty-one years,’ she said. ‘Not a hundred.’
‘We barely have twenty-one days.’
Dísa hugged her mother. ‘Is Anna Rós still outside? I’ll go and see her.’
Mum nodded. ‘OK. But remember she doesn’t know about the farm yet. The horses are bad enough for her.’
Dísa put on her boots, hat and coat and went outside. The sky had turned from pink to a deep, deep blue; blackness wasn’t far away. She trudged through the snow to where Anna was hugging Clyde’s neck in the field.
The snow on the slopes of the mountain glimmered a lighter blue in the gathering darkness. Blábrekka meant ‘blue slope’. Grandpa said that the farm had been named that after the colour of Ulf’s cheeks, or possibly his buttocks, but Dísa had always believed it referred to the colours of the hillside in the night.
A couple of hundred metres below, on the other side of the road, the river lazily wound its way down towards the sea, pausing in pools of glimmering silver.
Dísa thought of all the generations who had pulled salmon out of those waters, who had rounded up the sheep every autumn from the great mountain above her, who had looked out at the wall of fells lining the far side of the fjord.
The farm wasn’t for her, never would have been for her, but it had always been assumed by the family that Anna Rós would eventually take it over. She would do a good job — she loved animals and was willing to work hard at all hours to look after them.
Dísa opened the gate and approached her sister.
‘Oh God, Dísa! I can’t bear it! I’m going to miss Clyde so so much!’
Dísa pulled Anna Rós towards her. Even though she was probably fully grown by now, Anna Rós was fifteen centimetres shorter than Dísa’s one metre ninety.
The two sisters were very different, but despite that, or perhaps because of it, they got on well. There was no rivalry. Anna Rós was pert and blonde and loved to laugh. She had plenty of friends, and, increasingly, male admirers.
Dísa thought of herself as mousy, albeit a very tall mouse. She was quiet, academic; nobody disliked her, but she was not exactly popular. She was sensible, pretty good at volleyball, very good at maths.
‘Don’t worry, Anna,’ said Dísa. ‘I’ll sort it.’
‘How?’ said Anna Rós, her large moist eyes appealing with hope. She never underestimated her big sister. ‘How, Dísa?’
Dísa smiled. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Dísa slipped upstairs to her room and flipped up the lid of her computer. She opened up the graph she checked at least once a day. Along the x-axis lay a series of dates, starting at 1 Jan 2017 and continuing along to 28 Nov, that day’s date. Along the y-axis were a range of dollar numbers, rising from $1,000 to $10,000. A yellow, jagged line sloped inexorably upwards from the lower number towards the higher.
Bitcoin.
The price of one bitcoin at that instant was $9,815.
She switched to a simple spreadsheet. She owned 31.931 bitcoin.
Which at the current price was worth $313,403 or, and here she had to type in the current Icelandic exchange rate, thirty-three million krónur. That was up over twelve thousand dollars on the previous day.
Dísa smiled.
It looked like she wouldn’t have to work in the petrol station for twenty-one years after all.
Two
Dísa had received her original five bitcoin only eleven months before, back in January when the price was still about a thousand dollars. It had been a gift from Dad.
He had summoned her to meet him in Akureyri for lunch. A secret lunch. Dísa had argued, but Dad had insisted. Dísa seriously hated keeping secrets from her mum. It was a Saturday, and she had had to lie that she was going shopping with her friend Kata, adding a hint that there might be boys involved. That was pure manipulation of her mother; Mum was worried that she didn’t have a boyfriend yet, and had been dropping encouraging hints about how Dísa should be spending more time with boys. Mum liked Matti, Kata’s new boyfriend, and wanted her daughter to find one like him.
It was a foul January day. The remains of week-old snow slopped around the pavements. A low, heavy, grey cloud squashed the fjord and obliterated the mountains around the town, even stooping to threaten the twin spires of Akureyri’s dramatic church. Despite its northern location, Akureyri was supposed to be one of the sunniest places in Iceland. Not that day.
As Dísa walked from the bus stop to the restaurant on Skipagata where she was supposed to meet Dad, she wondered what his agenda was. Could it be that he had a plan for some kind of reconciliation?
Like so many kids of divorced parents, it was what Dísa wanted most in the world. She loved her dad, she loved Mum, memories of her early childhood of security and comfort warmed and nourished her.
She knew it was pointless to dream that dream; although she suspected Dad would have had a go, there was no way Mum was up for it. Mum was unforgiving, and there was plenty that would need to be forgiven. Dísa firmly believed that there had been a time when Mum loved Dad, and that she could remember it, but that time was long gone.
Yet, even though she knew it would never happen, Dísa consciously decided not to give up hope. It sustained her. It allowed her not to take sides, not to nod in agreement when her mother slagged off her father for the hundredth time, not to agree with her father about her mother’s hard heart.
What else might it be? Some news he wanted Dísa to break to the family in her role as family mediator? Bad news? Was he ill? Cancer? Good news? Did he want to announce a girlfriend? A marriage? A baby?
Dísa’s blood ran cold. That might be good news for him, but it would screw the chances of a reconciliation with Mum.
So it was with a touch of anxiety that she checked the restaurant for her father.
He was sitting at a table by the window, which overlooked the cloud-shrouded harbour and the fjord reaching into the murk beyond. He waved to her, and scrambled to his feet so he could give her a kiss.
A couple of years before, he had given himself a complete makeover. He had been a slim, sleek banker, with longish dark hair brushed back and gelled. Even in the two years he spent in Kvíabryggja minimum security prison he continued to look sleek. But on his release, he fell apart: the hair became longer and lanker, the chin unshaved, and a little belly appeared above his jeans.
He had found it difficult to get work during that time — the new, staid, boring banks didn’t want the old flashy bankers. Dísa knew there had been drink, and guessed there had been drugs.
But tourism was booming, and eventually Dad had reinvented himself from Ómar Baldvinsson the smooth bankster, to Óm the hip, if slightly paunchy, tour guide, who could drive you into Iceland’s rugged interior through gushing rivers and over treacherous glaciers. So he shaved his head, a tiny goatee dripped from his chin, an earring of one Viking rune dangled from his left ear, and a tattoo of another snaked up his neck.