‘Mummy, it’s not allowed to smoke in—’
‘Mind your own business,’ her mother spits out as she cracks open the driver’s window a little.
In another two minutes or so they are back in Staðahverfi, where the houses all look alike as the growling car rushes past them in the dark.
When their house comes into sight, however, we recognise it right away: the concrete lions eternally on guard by the driveway and the horizontal windows flaming like the eyes of a creature neither old nor young, real nor imagined.
Lilja parks the Range Rover partly up on the footpath in front of the stairs leading to the front door, puts it into neutral and considers whether she should honk the horn. But the night is too electric, too silent. She doesn’t honk.
‘Mummy…’
‘Hush!’ says Lilja, staring at the house. She bites her lower lip and taps the ash from her cigarette out of the open window.
Then she glances at the clock in the instrument panel.
01:13
Suddenly the house goes dark. Less than fifteen seconds later three shots blast a hole in the fragile silence. The gunpowder flashes light up the house, one of the living-room windows shatters and shards of glass rain down on the driveway.
Lilja throws her cigarette out the window, shoves the car into gear and floors the accelerator. The Range Rover bounds away, roars down off the footpath and disappears into the night.
‘Mummy,’ whimpers the little girl when they are halfway to the town of Mosfellsbær. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To the summer house,’ mutters her mother as, with shaking hands, she lights another cigarette. She turns on the wipers; a few raindrops hit the windscreen.
There aren’t many cars around and the dark Westland Highway merges with the cold night.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ asks the child as she stares out the window.
‘He’s coming later,’ her mother replies, forcing a smile in the rear-view mirror. ‘Just try to sleep, my love.’
‘Yes,’ says the girl, watching the lights as the car zooms through Mosfellsbær doing well over 100 kilometres an hour.
Near the Thingvellir turn-off the Range Rover hits
something hard and swerves back and forth until Lilja regains control.
‘Mummy?’ asks the girl, waking suddenly from her nap.
‘It’s nothing,’ says her mother, her slim fingers clenched round the steering wheel.
The right headlight is broken and there’s a long crack in the windscreen, which has dark red streaks of blood running across it.
Lilja presses a button that squirts lemon-scented fluid onto the windscreen and then speeds up the wipers. They mix the blood with the rain and spread it around until it can hardly be seen any more.
‘Oh, my God,’ says Lilja under her breath as she blinks away the tears, but instead of slowing down or stopping, she accelerates, hurtling into the rainy night at almost 200 kilometres an hour.
Lilja stares ahead as if in a trance, but the only thing she sees is the face of the man she hit. Frozen in a single moment. After he appeared in the lights and just before the car hit him. An ash-grey face. Paper thin.
A death mask.
Engraved on her mind.
III
Heavy blues music, the clamour of voices and a cloud of bitter smoke are pierced by the loud peal of a bell, as if from a ship lost in fog near the shore of some strange land.
The sound creates ripples on the dark surface of the regulars’ subconscious, and a cold sweat on their backs.
Déjà vu.
‘Fifteen minutes to closing!’ the bartender shouts, letting go of the cord that hangs from the clapper of the old brass bell that once served a Dutch freighter.
On the ground floor of the bar customers are smoking and drinking at the tables; some are playing chess or whist, others talking with their neighbours and others still are sitting alone at the bar, intent on their own wretchedness and the oblivion of drink.
Like the guy in denim who looks glassy eyed at the last sip in a greasy beer glass and then at his watch, which tells him it’s fifteen minutes to one in the morning on Tuesday.
00:45
He finishes the last of his beer, puts out his half-smoked cigarette and gets down off the high bar stool. Then he weaves his way over to a circular table, where five men sit drinking. He claps the two nearest on the back, leans forward between them and smiles ingratiatingly through his untrimmed beard.
‘D’you think you could lend me a ten-coin, lads?’ he asks, clearing his throat. ‘I haven’t got any change and I have to make a call.’
‘Leave us alone, man!’ says one of the men he’s leaning on, poking an elbow in the drunk’s stomach and pushing him away from the table.
The drunk takes two steps back then stops to gain his balance, freezes in that position and stares straight ahead, as though in a trance.
It’s as if his soul has gone to sleep, as if his personality has abandoned his drunken body. His eyes go dark and sink into his head, his mouth gapes and for just a moment there is literally no sign of life in his deathly pale face, which is little more than a skin-covered skull. He is lifeless – he has turned into a ghost or a zombie – but only for that single moment.
Then it’s as if an invisible hand seizes a silver thread in a dusky dream. His lungs draw breath, his eyes swell back out of their sockets, his fingers twitch and his tongue moves in his gaping mouth.
His soul has awakened, his heart beats and a character, of sorts, flickers like candlelight behind his glassy eyes.
‘Five, five, five… ship,’ the drunken man mumbles. He regains his balance on the floorboards, then clutches the stair rail and trudges up to the second floor of the bar.
‘Do you suppose that guy realises he’s walking on dry land?’ says the one who had pushed him. His mates laugh at this. But their laughter is neither long nor loud. They happen to be discussing serious matters. And they don’t have all night.
‘Anyway, getting back to those capitalists,’ one of them says, curling his huge hand around a small shot glass of whiskey. ‘I have dependable sources inside the shipping company who say they’re about to cancel the flag-state contract on our ship.’
The speaker is the self-appointed socialist leader ‘Big’ John Pétursson, chief engineer on a large freighter that was built in China ten years ago and now belongs to a Malaysian investor, is registered in Monrovia and has been chartered by the Icelandic shipping company Polar Ships for the past five years.
‘What’s a flag-state contract?’ says Ási, the cook, as he lights a cigarette.
‘That means the chartering company pays for everything,’ answers the bosun, Rúnar Hallgrímsson.
‘Insurance, repairs, the lot?’ asks Ási.
‘I’m telling you,’ says Rúnar, who had pushed the drunk away from the table.
‘And then what?’ asks Ársæll ‘Sæli’ Egilsson.
‘They’re planning to get a new ship, those capitalist princes,’ says Big John, squinting like a sleepy bear. ‘And a new crew.’
‘Enough with the griping about capitalists!’ says Methúsalem Sigurðsson, chief mate, and the only one of this gang of five who comes from ‘upstairs’ – that is, from the bridge. ‘This matter is above politics and factions.’
‘What crew?’ asks Sæli, whose mouth is dry and head aching with the worry of everything that’s going on in his simple life.
‘The crew will come with the ship,’ says Big John calmly.
‘Some scabs with a one-year contract,’ says Methúsalem, his right hand fiddling with the heavy gold Freemason’s ring that fits loosely on the middle finger of his left hand, ‘who’ll be sent home at the end of the year and replaced by another lot of the same kind.’