‘Have you finally gone mad or what?’
But Jónas does know who it is. He knows who’s lying there on the floor of Kalli’s cabin. He recognises the face from pictures of crooks in the gossip magazines. He remembers that Gothic ‘S’ tattooed on the muscular chest. He doesn’t know the lowlife’s name but he can well remember what name he’s known by in the underworld. The name is particularly disagreeable, but extremely descriptive of the man’s character.
‘Hello?’
But what is this human devil doing aboard the Per se?
‘Jónas!’
And where is Kalli. What’s going on?
‘What’s going on with you, man?’ Rúnar screams as he steps over Jón Karl, strides up to Jónas and slaps him hard on the left cheek.
‘Huh… What?’ Jónas straightens up, with a shaking hand on his reddening cheek, his lower lip trembling and unmistakable panic in his eyes.
‘Help us, you motherfucker!’ Rúnar yells in the mate’s ear and grabs his shoulder.
‘Yes, I…’ mutters Jónas and follows the bosun to the bed.
‘One, two and…’ says Rúnar once they all have a good grip on Jón Karl, who is coughing with one leg twitching. ‘Now! And give it all you’ve got, lads!’
They manage to lift Jón Karl halfway onto the bed frame and then roll him like a barrel onto the mattress, where he ends up on his back with his left shoulder squeezed against the bulkhead under the window.
‘Christ, what a hulk,’ says Rúnar as he catches his breath.
‘Definitely more than a hundred kilos,’ says Sæli, wiping sweat off his forehead.
‘Yeah,’ says Jónas, who really has no idea what to say, think or do. Should he let them know about this stranger on board? Should he phone ashore and ask about Kalli? Or should he just act as if he knows nothing and hope for the best?
What if Kalli suspects his sister is lost or dead? What if Kalli goes to the police?
‘Is he a weightlifter or what?’
Are Kalli’s absence and this stranger’s presence just a whim of fate, pure coincidence or the intervention of a higher power?
Whims of fate are an invention of the superstitious and coincidence is nothing but denial of the relationship between cause and effect in the nihilism of the Western world, which means that the hand of God has…
‘Jónas?’
‘The Lord is my shepherd…’ says Jónas mechanically, blinking in the bosun’s face.
‘The Lord shepherd what-the-fuck?’ says Rúnar, snapping his fingers in Jónas’s face.
‘Ha… what?’ says Jónas, gasping as if he’s just been pulled out of water.
‘Goddamn but you lose contact a lot, man!’ says Rúnar. ‘You’re worse than a mobile phone outside the service area.’
‘Am I?’ Jónas says, coughing a little.
‘Yeah!’ says Sæli, grinning. ‘I think there’s something seriously wrong with your head.’
‘I just need to rest a bit,’ says Jónas, sitting on the bed by Jón Karl, who is still staring out at the world with only the whites of his eyes.
Jónas contemplates this muscular replacement for his brother-in-law, sighs and silently rejoices that he won’t have to look his wife’s brother in the eye on top of everything else that’s weighing on his mind, keeping him from sleeping and hollowing out his heart as a worm hollows an apple.
‘You just rest, friend,’ says Jónas, laying a paternal but trembling hand on the deckhand’s boiling-hot forehead. ‘We’ll talk when you…’
Jónas is silenced when Jón Karl suddenly sits up in bed and, without any warning, head-butts him in the face.
‘Rúnar!’ calls Sæli. He grabs Jón Karl’s right arm, which throws him like a wet cloth onto the couch.
‘Fucking hell!’ says the bosun, and he jumps on Jón Karl, grabs his shoulders and forces him back down onto the bed.
All three of them jump on Jón Karl and manage to hold him down, until he gives in and stops struggling. Blood is pouring from the nose of the second mate, who sits snivelling on his attacker’s legs.
‘Okay,’ says Rúnar. ‘Let’s try letting go of the bugger!’ He releases the deckhand’s neck.
‘Is your nose broken?’ asks Sæli after they’ve let go of Jón Karl and moved a safe distance away from his bed. Rúnar takes the safety rail from under the bed and puts it in place, so the seaman won’t fall out of bed again.
‘I think it is,’ whines Jónas as he feels his swollen nose and snuffles up blood.
‘Come on, we’ll have a look at it down in the infirmary,’ says Rúnar, putting his arm around Jónas’s shoulder. ‘This brother-in-law of yours can stay here and rot, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘I’ll check on him later today,’ says Jónas. He looks over his shoulder at the stranger before they close the cabin door. ‘I’d better be the one to look after him.’
‘Up to you,’ says Rúnar, slamming the door behind them.
Boom, boom, boom…
The slam echoes deep inside Jón Karl’s head. He jerks around as if an electric current were running through his nerves, lets out a rattling cry and slams his right fist into the wall above his bed with all his might.
X
Jónas is empty inside. Cold and empty. Like a ghost ship that drifts, powerless, into a night that will never again turn to day.
Five years ago he had been head over heels in love with María, lost in her eyes, hypnotised by her laughter. Just seven months after he first saw her she was standing beside him at the altar, dressed in white and vowing to be his, before God, his parents and their friends. A year later their first child was born, a weepy son who adored his mother. Two years later came their daughter, the apple of her father’s eye.
Then, without understanding when life in heaven ended and hell took over, he was suddenly rushing through the ice-cold night with María’s dead body in the boot of his car. The dead body of his wife. The dead body of his children’s mother. The woman Jónas loved was dead. Murdered by the man who had pledged her lifelong loyalty, in sickness and in health. Until death did them part. And now death had parted them.
In actual fact, though, it hadn’t been death that parted them. Death is some inescapable phenomenon that works behind the scenes according to rules and regulations that no-one understands. When death takes a life it usually seems that there’s no connection between whose life is chosen and the causes and effects of our existence. But María’s death was due not to some imagined coincidence but to the single-minded will of Jónas, who – in a maelstrom of desperation, envy and jealousy – lost all control of his thoughts, words and deeds. In the dark night of his mind he forgot all the good and the beauty that had united him and María, had been totally blinded by the single evil that had taken root in their relationship. The evil that he had, at first, loved to flirt with and watch, like a little boy playing with fire. The evil that later consumed him like an evil spirit. The evil that María did, again and again. The evil he could no longer stand. The evil María didn’t want to stop. Or couldn’t stop, if you took her word for it. But it didn’t matter any more. She was dead, and the evil died with her. She could never do that evil again. Never.
It had begun with some innocent flirting at a crazy party. Men were attracted to María and that excited Jónas. As for him, well, he couldn’t bear the idea of having sex with only one woman for the rest of his life. María wasn’t very keen on the idea of an open relationship to begin with. She enjoyed flirting but didn’t consider that flirting was necessarily the start of something more. But Jónas knew what he wanted and María didn’t want to disappoint her husband.