‘I’ll look after them.’ He reached for Arna’s hand as well. ‘How long does it take to get used to it? The seasickness, I mean.’
Halli shrugged unsympathetically. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been seasick.’
Ægir choked back the urge to swear at him. ‘And you’ve never seen anyone else suffer from it?’
‘Yeah. I just don’t remember how it turned out. Anyway, you look pretty chirpy for people who are sick – you should be hanging over the rail, chucking up your insides.’
‘Please, not another word.’ Lára clamped her lips shut as soon as she had spoken. She retched as Halli headed past her on his way inside, but managed to hold it down.
‘Deep breaths, darling. He’s gone and there’s nothing but clean sea air.’ Ægir kept a firm hold on his daughters although they seemed eager to pull free now that Halli had gone. ‘You must hold my hands – you heard what he said. We don’t want you to be blown into the sea.’ Immediately the small fingers ceased their wriggling.
‘There’s something wrong with that man. It’s as if he had a grudge against us.’ Lára inhaled deeply.
‘He’s just a bit uncouth.’ Ægir practised breathing steadily and it seemed to work. The discomfort in his abdomen abated slightly and the pain in his temples dulled. ‘Try to breathe like this, girls. It’ll help.’
‘If I breathe like that I’ll have to close my eyes and I don’t want to.’ Bylgja was even paler now than when they had first come outside. ‘If I do, I’ll see that woman.’
‘What woman?’ Ægir bent down, taking care not to release Arna’s hand.
‘The woman in the picture. I dreamt about her and if I close my eyes, I’m afraid I’ll dream about her again.’
‘What picture, sweetheart?’
‘The one in the saloon. In the frame on the wall.’ Her glasses were covered with tiny droplets from the spray that splashed over them at regular intervals.
Ægir tried to think which picture Bylgja could be referring to. He had limited interest in people, unlike Lára who could spend hours poring over pictures of strangers in the tabloids. She also spent an excessive amount of time on Facebook, studying her friends’ photos, a habit he found incomprehensible. ‘What’s she talking about, Lára?’
‘The painting of Karítas. The wife of the man who used to own the yacht. It’s on the wall beside the television. You must be off-colour if you haven’t noticed it.’ She gave a ghost of a smile, which made her look a little less wan. ‘Or are you so mad about your wife that you don’t have eyes for any other woman?’
Ægir didn’t know how to reply. He was afraid of agreeing in case that would be the wrong answer. Instead, he turned back to Bylgja who was pulling at his hand. ‘The woman with the necklace, Daddy. In the painting. She was wearing it in my dream. But her face looks different somehow.’
‘The necklace, right.’ Ægir had even less interest in jewellery than in people. He squeezed Bylgja’s hand. ‘We often dream about things we’ve seen during the day. That’s why the woman turned up. It’s perfectly safe to close your eyes, darling; dreams can’t hurt you. They’re only thoughts – thoughts that are a bit muddled because we’re asleep and our guard is lowered.’ He was about to add that it was like being drunk – when common sense goes out of the window and all kinds of foolish things seem like a good idea – but he caught himself in time. It would only have confused her.
‘I had a nightmare about that woman too. I told Mummy last night.’ Arna looked up at her father, who smiled and pressed both their hands. Instead of returning his smile, she added anxiously: ‘My friend Helga says dreams are trying to give you a message. If we both have the same dream it must mean something. Perhaps the woman’s hiding on the boat.’
‘I very much doubt it. You have the same dreams because you’re twins. You think alike even when you’re asleep. It’s not the first time, is it?’ He received no reply because at that moment the door suddenly opened outwards with a crash.
Halli appeared in the gap and pinned the door back with one foot. ‘Take these. They might make you feel better.’ He held out his fist and waited for them to come over. ‘They’re seasickness tablets I found in a cabin. Thráinn says they’re all right. The plasters work better but we couldn’t find any.’
Lára took the pills. ‘Thanks.’ She examined them, before closing her fingers over them. ‘I hope they work fast.’ Halli shrugged, removed his foot and let the door swing to behind him. They heard the catch snap back. ‘Oh, great. Are we locked out now?’ Lára asked.
‘No,’ Ægir reassured her. ‘The catches inside and outside both work on the same hinge. I’ve tested them.’ He had been afraid the girls might be locked in or out; you never knew what they would get up to when they wanted attention. ‘Now, how about grabbing a few more lungfuls of air, then going inside and taking the pills? I’m sure they’ll go down better if we wash them down with a drink.’ He expanded his chest as far as he could and exhaled gustily. As he repeated this, he fixed his gaze on the heaving sea in the hope that it would help. But he couldn’t interpret the movements of the waves and brace himself for what was coming next; their behaviour was too unpredictable. One minute everything appeared calm, the surface of the sea smooth; the next, the ship was tossing about like a cork.
He wondered how deep the water was at this point but couldn’t come up with a plausible figure. They had left the continental shelf behind some time ago, so it might be several kilometres to the ocean floor. Or perhaps not that much. Again he was stymied by his lack of knowledge about the natural world. It was the sort of fact that he should probably have picked up along the way but his mind was blank; perhaps even at its deepest it was only a few hundred metres down to the sea bed. He hadn’t the faintest idea. It had probably never formed part of the school syllabus. In any case, what did the depth of the ocean matter? If you sank, you sank; you would be just as dead whether you ended up a hundred or a thousand metres down.
Such reflections were hardly designed to raise the spirits, so Ægir banished them from his mind. There was no point letting his thoughts run away with him. He knew from experience that if he gave his worries free rein they could take on extremely colourful forms. Like the time he had let himself be talked into scuba diving while on a beach holiday with some university friends, long before he met Lára. The first day’s training had consisted of a short course in the swimming pool. But that night while his friends snored away, oblivious to the danger they were about to expose themselves to (and at considerable expense), Ægir had not got a wink of sleep. Countless possible variations of death in a diving accident passed through his mind as he tossed and turned, until eventually he decided it would be best not to go on the dive. But the following morning, unwilling to lose face in front of his friends, he had agreed to go out on the boat after all.
When it came to it, he had not done badly at all, perhaps because he had already resigned himself to drowning in the clear, aquamarine water. The instructor had even singled him out for praise because he had kept his head and remained relaxed during the dive. The only time he had come close to panic was when they reached the bottom and, viewing the alien surroundings and strange life forms through his goggles, he had experienced a strong aversion to the idea of leaving his bones there. However, by concentrating on taking deep, regular breaths through his mouthpiece, he had managed to master his fear. It was not until his ascent, when he saw the approaching light above him, that he was seized by an uncontrollable urge to breathe through his nose and had to force himself to look down and wait until he had reached the surface. A further shock had come when the instructor swam with them to the place where they could see the sea bed fall away into true darkness and barren depths. It had made his flesh creep. Why was he thinking of that now?