Cage

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  ‘What?’ He looked up and stared at her, his eyes blank. ‘Hear about what?’

  ‘Brown envelopes changing hands to ensure that pollution readings are always acceptable.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said, turning back to the computer, his fingers hammering the keys. ‘I had a dream about it.’

  María groaned. She stood up and went out into the corridor to go to the toilet, promising herself that today she would count how many times she needed to go. It wasn’t normal how frequently she needed to pee, and how quickly the urge to go would grow. Only a minute or so had passed since she knew she had to go, and now she was so desperate that she was afraid she might wet herself, particularly as this damned metal door wouldn’t shut behind her. She kicked it so that it settled into its frame and then squatted on the toilet with relief.

  Marteinn was a worry. If he didn’t agree to go to the mental health clinic by himself, then she would have to take him. It wouldn’t be the first time. More than once she had spent a day trying to keep him calm in the waiting room until it was his turn to see the doctor. It would be worthwhile trying to get him to go before he became even more of a mess, suspecting everyone and everything around him, her included.

  9

  ‘Oh, Agla,’ said Ewa, the prison officer with the Polish roots, when Agla appeared in the reception suite accompanied by Guðrún, who was carrying the bag of medication Agla was supposed to take.

  Guðrún handed the bag to Ewa to deal with, but Agla was still finding it difficult to speak, so she just nodded to Ewa and looked away. She was consumed by a sudden desire to apologise to Ewa, as if she owed her a debt for the friendliness she had shown her since she had started work at the prison, but she was still in too much of a daze. Ewa took her arm and led Agla – cautiously, as if she were fragile – along to the female corridor.

  ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Whatever it is. There’s nothing so big or so small that I can’t try and fix it.’

  Agla smiled weakly. Although Ewa was always ready to help, she couldn’t give her back her life, take those bad decisions back, neatly tie up the loose ends, or rewind a couple of decades. And she couldn’t assuage the pain of losing Sonja, which still only left her for a few moments at a time.

  More than four years had passed since Sonja had vanished from her life, leaving only a short text message that simply stated that she couldn’t do this any longer. Agla had sat numb on the unopened boxes in the huge house she had bought for them and replayed their every conversation over and over in her mind as she searched for an explanation. Now, all these years later, she still had no understanding of why Sonja had left her, and the rejection still seared.

  Ewa squeezed her arm gently as she left her at the entrance to the female wing. Agla went straight to her cell. The door stood open, and she was panicked by a thought: would the noose still be hanging from the radiator? But then she saw someone lying in her bed.

  ‘Hæ,’ the girl said, sitting up. ‘You’re supposed to be on suicide watch, so you’re in the security cell and I’m in here now.’

  Agla stared at her and her eyes scanned the cell. It was as if she was in a dream – reality had been shoved to one side and twisted. She recognised the place, but didn’t. There were clothes all over the floor, a suitcase was open on the desk and the girl on the bed was surrounded by scattered sweet wrappers.

  ‘Did you try and top yourself?’ she asked, putting a piece of chocolate in her mouth. ‘Sorry, I was in rehab right after I was sent home from Holland to finish my sentence here, and now I’m completely hooked on sugar.’

  Agla opened her mouth to ask who she was, but stopped. There was still no sound coming from her larynx, and it was even painful to whisper. It was no business of hers who this skinny, scruffy bitch who had stolen her cell might be. She turned in the doorway and went to the cell at the end, next to the door to the communal area, and there she found her things. One of the warders had laid out her personal stuff on the shelf in the bathroom and stacked her books on the table, but her clothes were still folded up in a cardboard box.

  Agla let herself fall back on the bed and stared up at the all-seeing eye of the security camera that glinted in its glass dome in the middle of the ceiling. There seemed to be no end to this fuck-up. For the coming days and weeks, she would have to put up with being streamed live.

  10

  Ingimar sat for a long while at Rebekka’s bedside, watching her sleep. She was lying just as she had been the night before when he had come to check on her – on her left side with her right hand under her cheek, her left hand oddly stretched out and resting on the bedside table. The wedding ring had twisted around on her finger so that the diamonds were on the palm side. This was not what he had foreseen eighteen years before, when he slipped that ring onto her finger. But that’s the problem with passion; it blinds you to what would actually be better for you. It would have been better for him to have remained unmarried.

  There would undoubtedly be several hours before she would emerge from her drugged mist, and it was just as likely that she would reach out for the box of tablets on the bedside table and go back to sleep instead of getting up. With one finger he steered a stray lock of hair from her face and let it rest behind her ear. She did not stir, but muttered something unintelligible, and a thin bead of saliva leaked from her mouth into the pillow.

  Ingimar stood up and went to his own bathroom, which had originally been a guest bathroom, until they had started to sleep separately. There had been no decision to sleep in different rooms, but he had not been able to sleep next to her when she was so heavily drugged. It seemed as if her complete immobility woke him repeatedly during the night, and every time, when he saw that she had not moved at all, he was struck by a deep discomfort. Before he could go back to sleep, he felt he had to put an ear to her mouth to be sure that she was still breathing. This feeling of unease ultimately became something he could no longer tolerate.

  One night he had moved to the divan in the guest bedroom and had slept like a log, as if her shallow breaths in the next room were no longer any business of his. Within a few weeks the divan had been replaced by a bed. So the guest bedroom had become his bedroom, and the guest bathroom had become his personal space. Not that it mattered, as they no longer ever had guests.

  He went downstairs, switched on the coffee machine and then made cocoa for Anton, carried it upstairs and sat by his bedside until he began to stir. Since he had entered his teens the boy seemed able to sleep around the clock. Ingimar had never needed much sleep; all his life he had been a morning person, awake and active. But people are different. He reflected that at Anton’s age, he had already been a fisherman.

  Once Anton was sitting up in bed, Ingimar went to the bathroom and turned the shower on, lathering his face with shaving soap as the hot water began to run. As always, he shaved as he stood under the flow of water. The skin on his back stung under the heat of the water, so he finished with a blast of water so cold it made him gasp.

  He dressed and said goodbye to Anton, then went into the kitchen and poured coffee into a paper cup to take with him. He put on his overcoat and looped his scarf around his neck, closing the door behind him on his way out. There was something special about taking a breath of the fresh outdoor air, and for a moment he felt as if he had surfaced from a long dive underwater, lungs thirsty for oxygen. He felt a new lightness now that he was out under the open sky.

  What was so peculiar was that around the time of the financial crash, his life had also fallen apart. It hadn’t been the collapsing banks that had hurt; the opposite was the case, as there were more business opportunities than ever before, and the profits were in excess of anything he could have dreamed of. There had been a crisis of another kind. An inner one. In the wake of this turmoil, he had found himself caught up in woman trouble, having made the mistake of sleeping with the same girl several times, in the process becoming captivated by her. He had taken the decision to ask for
a divorce, but it became clear to him that there could be no such thing. He could not part with Rebekka now that she was in the state that he, admittedly indirectly, had got her into. And he couldn’t leave Anton behind. Although Anton didn’t conceal his disdain for his mother from her, Ingimar knew that if it came to the crunch, the boy would rather live with her than with him. Anton was in the same position as Ingimar, not daring to leave Rebekka on her own.

  Ingimar walked with steady strides, but slowed his pace when he heard his phone buzz in his coat pocket. He took it out, glanced at the screen, and saw that this wretched journalist woman wasn’t going to give up. Now her questions were about how high the bribes had been to ensure that the pollution readings for the smelter remained within acceptable limits. He smiled. This was a weird kind of journalism; it was as if the woman was churning out endless conspiracy theories in the hope that one day she might accidentally hit on a true one.

  11

  Anton always heard his father going downstairs in the mornings, but there was something so comforting about getting to spend a little longer in a warm bed. He lay still, pretended to be asleep, and waited for the cocoa to arrive. The routine was always the same. First he heard the clack of the letterbox as his father fetched the newspaper, then there would be the sound of running water and that would soon be followed by the muttering of the coffee machine. Once the microwave had pinged, it wouldn’t be long before there were footsteps on the stairs. Then the door would open, his father would place the mug of cocoa at his side and would perch by his feet on the bed.

  ‘Good morning, young man,’ he would say. He always said the same thing: Good morning, young man, and then he’d massage his shins. After a moment, he’d tell him the time.

  ‘Time you were on your feet,’ he would say, still with his hand on the boy’s shin, as if there was nothing to hurry for.

  Sometimes Anton greeted his father with a hæ, but if he was lazy, which was most of the time, he’d silently extend the other foot from under the duvet to be massaged as well. Then his father would quickly pat his shoulder, still wrapped in the duvet, and would go to his own room. A moment later there would be the sound of the shower running, and then he would reach for the mug of cocoa.

  It was always his father who woke him in the mornings – for as far back as he could recall, at least. He had a few fragments of memories about playing with his mother in his pyjamas back when he had been small, but her waking hours seemed to have become increasingly fewer as she had grown older. Last night she had been miserable over dinner – which had in fact just been pizza – and gave him a roasting for his bad grammar. He would certainly like to improve it, but he hadn’t understood what was wrong with what he had said. Shortly after that she had gone up to bed and was unlikely to emerge before midday. Her day had shortened to just a few hours, while the night had become longer and longer as the darkness within her grew.

  It took Anton as long to drink his cocoa as it took his father to shower, shave and dress. Just as he was stretching his tongue into the mug, trying to reach the sweet, thick residue at the bottom, his father appeared in the doorway, looking at him as he knotted his tie.

  ‘Have a good day,’ he said.

  ‘And you,’ Anton replied, swinging his legs out of bed. He knew it would be better to say ‘you too’, but he enjoyed the fact that his father never corrected his grammar. That was something only his mother ever took the trouble to do.

  He lifted his hands high above his head and stretched. Today he was going to go down to the cellar to look at the dynamite for a moment before going to school. He wanted to see if the strange feeling that had come over him the previous day would return. The feeling that he could do anything; that he alone was capable of changing the world.

  12

  ‘I knew I was a kind of decoy, y’know. But I didn’t dare disobey the Boss. In this business you just do what you’re told. I had a little less than a hundred grams of some cut gear taped up in my crotch. Nothing much at all. I reckon I was supposed to be pulled. There must’ve been another mule on the same flight with a kilo or more that was properly hidden, and in all the fuss they were making when they pulled me, he walked straight through.’

  The girl sat and talked while the other women sat in a daze, listening to her chatter. Agla squeezed past the table to the cupboards to fetch herself a cup for her morning coffee. She liked it black. She didn’t bother eating breakfast, even though her fellow prisoners and the warders constantly reminded her how unhealthy that was.

  ‘I could have ditched the package at the airport in Panama and tried to disappear there, but that didn’t have a hope of working out.’

  As the girl continued to talk, Agla sat at the far end of the table with her coffee and tried to concentrate on the book she had brought with her.

  ‘I heard about one guy who tried to make a run for it like that,’ the girl said, ‘but he came to a bad end. A stretch in prison’s better than being chopped up for dog food!’

  The other women muttered their agreement, and two of them stood up, saying that they were going to the laundry to work. There were no cars to be polished today, so the bookkeeper from up north, who for some reason preferred washing cars to doing laundry, stayed where she was. Normally there was at least one car a day to be washed, but now that spring was coming and there was no salt on the roads, people found it easier to give their car a wash themselves. For much of April the prison officers had taken turns bringing in their own cars to be washed and polished, so that there was some activity, but now that well had run dry. It would have been ridiculous for the staff to bring in cars so clean they sparkled and have them washed again.

  The new girl, who so far still hadn’t seen a reason to apply a brush to her mop of hair, stood up, then planted herself in a chair next to Agla; she was uncomfortably close.

  ‘What do you want?’ Agla whispered without looking up.

  ‘I want to sit next to someone who smells nice,’ the girl whispered back, as if whispering was some kind of game and not a necessity for someone with a damaged larynx. ‘You smell nice. The bookkeeper’s Chanel stink was suffocating me. What year is it? Nineteen sixty-five? There are more modern fragrances, y’know.’

  The girl giggled to herself. Agla sipped her coffee. This person’s over-familiar attitude was seriously starting to irritate her. She inched her chair closer to Agla all the time. Agla shifted her chair in the opposite direction, a signal that enough was enough. But the girl apparently failed to notice.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asked, as if that was a perfectly normal question to ask in a prison.

  Agla had used her computer time to search for the other women on the internet, trying to find out about their backgrounds, but none of them had actually asked her anything. Maybe that was because they all knew who she was. The fact that this girl knew nothing about her told its own tale; she couldn’t have read any newspapers or followed the news.

  ‘Nothing,’ Agla hissed.

  ‘Sure,’ the girl giggled. ‘Just like everyone else in here.’

  She’d taken her impertinence a step too far.

  ‘I worked in finance, like plenty of other people,’ Agla snapped, louder than her sore vocal cords could manage, so that she had to gulp, then dissolved into a bout of coughing.

  ‘And I smuggled dope, just like loads of other people,’ the girl said with a broad smile.

  Agla quickly got to her feet and left the kitchen. She had no intention of allowing herself to be compared to a drug smuggler. Coffee could wait until later.

  She had only just entered her cell when the girl appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to piss you off. I just wanted to talk. I’m still so happy to have people to talk to in Icelandic. Dutch just sounds so weird.’

  The smile had disappeared from the girl’s face, and now she stared at Agla with her eyes wide open, her expression apparently sincere.

  ‘Hmm,’ Agla grunted, not knowing what to say. Her anger
had now left her, and she stood awkwardly and stared at the girl.

  She wasn’t as young as she had first appeared; she had to be somewhere close to thirty. Her hair was no less of a mess than it had been when she got up that morning.

  ‘Have you never seen a comb?’ Agla said in a lame attempt at an insult.

  The girl simply laughed.

  ‘It’s supposed to look like that,’ she said. ‘It’s a style. By the way, my name’s Elísa.’

  ‘Agla,’ she muttered in return.

  She was struggling to come up with something else to say to this odd person when one of the prison officers appeared, reminding her that she had a visit booked.

  13

  ‘Yes, I know him,’ Agla had said two weeks ago, and she had signed the visit request, even though she had never heard of this man before. Her curiosity had been sparked by the email in which he requested a visit. He had stated that there was an important business matter they should meet to discuss. She had forgotten about it until now.

  Although she was in no mood for a visit, she grabbed the opportunity to escape from the girl, who still stood and stared at her with such irritating curiosity.

  When the man she had never heard of appeared behind the glass screen in the visiting room, she hoped he wasn’t yet another journalist who had sneaked in under a false flag. So far only journalists had shown any interest in visiting her.

  ‘George Beck,’ he said in introduction. He was a middle-aged man – an American, going by his accent – in a black suit and with a bundle of papers under one arm. ‘I apologise for being late,’ he added. ‘But they found it necessary to search me twice, even though I don’t have anything but paperwork with me and I’m behind this glass screen.’

  He smiled and Agla returned it, knowing that a visit to Hólmsheiði was always an experience. First the weapons search, then the X-ray, occasionally the sniffer dog and finally the glass cage.