This is Jón Karl Esrason, the twenty-six-year-old son of a fisherman, who deals in odd jobs and various rackets. He has an elaborate rap sheet, covering over a decade, with over thirty charges and a dozen sentences making up his curriculum vitae.
‘Lilja?’ says Jón Karl as he walks barefoot along the carpeted corridor, without really expecting or waiting for an answer. He knows Lilja is at home. And he knows that she knows that he knows she’s at home. That’s why she doesn’t answer.
Jón Karl has now dressed in black athletic pants and pulled his hair back into an elastic band.
In the bright, roomy kitchen he mixes milk and a banana and strawberry-flavoured carbohydrate-and-protein powder in a large blender. He tosses a handful of vitamins and additives into his mouth and gulps down the tasty blend.
Jón Karl turns on the hot water tap in the kitchen sink, places the blender jug under the stream and looks out the window while it fills up. At the end of the street is the local school, beside which is a fenced basketball court where tall, spotty youths shoot at the netless basket way into the dark every evening. But now it’s night and the court is without life. No movement. Just darkness. And a tiny glow by the windscreen of a parked car, as if someone inside were smoking on the driver’s side.
Jón Karl moves fast and purposefully. He turns off the hot water and the kitchen lights. His pupils expand and so do his arteries, pectoral muscles and nostrils. He leans over the sink and lets the cold windowpane touch his right cheek and the curtain his left. In this position he stares sideways out the window without moving, like a lion sticking its nose through vegetation on the edge of the savannah. Now he can see better into the cold autumn night, deeply dark beyond the streetlights. There’s a black van parked at the end of the basketball court, half up on the pavement. It might, of course, be brown, blue or dark green, but in the night it’s black. There is, however, no glow to be seen inside the van – no movement, nothing. Had he been seeing things, or had whoever it was put out their smoke when he turned off the light? Is someone watching the house? Or is Jón Karl getting paranoid?
The laughter of two teenaged girls breaks the silence outside. They prance light-footed into his line of sight from the right, glide along the footpath on the other side of the street and cause Jón Karl to tear his intense gaze from the black van and direct his bestial attention to firm buttocks, slim legs and an innocent bearing.
He knows them, these two, both the individuals and their kind. They live in the next street to Jón Karl and his family; they live in the next street in all the neighbourhoods of all the cities in the world: not quite sixteen-year-old friends who have recently discovered drugs, head jobs and their own allure, and who exist in the wonderful delusion that youth is eternal, the shopping mall is the universe, their pussy is its centre and life is nothing but a pink bubblegum cloud they can keep blowing until it pops.
‘Little cunts,’ mutters Jón Karl, his breath clouding the window as the blood starts to flow into his member, which twists about like a snake in his sports pants until it finds the right pants leg.
Jón Karl pats his left pants pocket, finds a crumpled pack of cigarettes and pulls out the last one, which he lights and draws on until the ember crackles. He blows smoke through dilated nostrils and continues to stare at the girls while wondering what the hell he’s waiting for. Instead of still standing there staring out the window like an old lady, he should be at the wheel of the Range Rover already backed into the street. Accelerate once and a hundred metres later he would pull up beside the girls.
‘Where you off to, sweethearts?’
They might hesitate a bit, since their self-confidence is nothing but a shell made of fashionable clothes and make-up. They would glance at each other, giggle and blush, but before they could properly assess the situation Jón Karl would have ordered them into the car.
‘I’ll drop you off, sweethearts. Don’t be silly!’
Maybe they wouldn’t get in a car with a stranger, but Jón Karl is familiar to them. They’ve often seen him and they think he’s pretty cool, even though he’s awfully old and all that. And they’ve heard their parents talk about him. Talk badly about him. And a man that their parents hate and are frightened of – he just has to be really awesome! Even if he is maybe a dope dealer or a debt collector or a lowlife or something. And that’s a cool car. Expensive and cool. Not like the stupid saloon cars their parents drive.
They’d head for the city centre, where Jón Karl rents a top-floor flat in the seaside tower blocks. There he would coke up the party and fuck those fillies until the cum is leaking out of their tear-filled eyes.
So why hasn’t he got going? Getting too old? Tired? Can’t be bothered any more? Grown out of it?
‘Fuck!’
They have virtually disappeared into the blackness.
Jón Karl throws his cigarette into the sink and briefly turns on the tap. Then he glances quickly out the window, as if from a presentiment or just habit, and sees that the black van is no longer at the end of the basketball court.
The well-kept hairs on the back of Jón Karl’s neck stand up and his hands go cold. It’s as if the absence of this black van bothers him more than its presence did a moment earlier. Which may seem strange, even irrational, but isn’t that at all. A woman who sees a spider in her house is uncomfortable because the spider should not be there. Then, when the spider disappears, fear comes instead of discomfort, because the woman doesn’t know where the spider is, which means it may be anywhere, and that fact raises the disturbing question of what the spider is doing where nobody can see it. The spider that existed simply as an eight-legged bug in the informed world of conscious thought has become an intelligent monster in the darkness of the subconscious.
What black van was that? Who was in it? What were they doing? And now where is it?
‘Lilja!’
Jón Karl strides back to the living room, cracking the joints of his neck and fingers. ‘Stand up, woman! Take the girl, go to Mum’s and collect the case.’
‘What’s wrong? What case?’ says Lilja, standing up from the couch.
‘Mum knows what case,’ Jón says and pushes Lilja along, almost knocking her into the corridor.
‘Our child’s asleep, Jón!’ says Lilja, with a confused look at the father of her child, who is in a state she knows he won’t be shaken out of.
‘Listen to me,’ hisses Jón Karl, pushing her against the wall and holding her trapped while he is speaking. ‘Take the girl and go to Mum’s and collect the fucking case. Then come back and get me and we’ll all go up to Skorra Valley. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, I understand,’ says Lilja, looking away from his burning stare. ‘But why do we have to go up to Borgarfjörður? What’s wrong? What case are—’
‘No questions!’ says Jon Karl, letting her go. ‘Take the car and do as I say.’
‘Yes, I—’
‘And Lilja,’ says Jón Karl, his eyes turning flinty.
‘Yes?’ Lilja whispers, her stomach lurching.
‘If anything’s not right when you come to get me… if anything – just anything – is not as it should be… then you go without me up to Borgarfjörður and stay there until you hear from me. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘No phone calls, no guests, no panic… nothing. Okay?’ Jón Karl’s voice is so cold that Lilja shudders.
‘Okay,’ she says, half sobbing, and disappears into the darkened children’s room where their two-year-old daughter is sleeping, while Jón Karl goes to their bedroom and pulls out underclothes, socks, T-shirts, shoes, a half-empty carton of Prince cigarettes and a green duffel bag from drawers and shelves in the big closet, throwing it all on the unmade bed. He puts on black socks, a black T-shirt and black army boots, which he laces right to the top. The rest of his clothes he shoves in the duffel bag. Through the window in the master bedroom he can see Lilja driving off into the night.