by Thordis Elva
‘I’ve told you, I have no intention of revealing who you are.’
‘I know.’ His eyes are glazed with anxiety. ‘Still, my fear tells me it’s just a matter of time. One fine day the secret will be out and it will sail across oceans to find me.’
I can sense his hopelessness, and for a moment it drags me down into a black pit. In a knee-jerk reaction, I say: ‘Well, beat them to it, then.’
He looks utterly lost.
‘If the world finding out about this is the worst thing that could happen, you should take matters into your own hands, Tom. Instead of waiting for someone else to break the silence, break it yourself. Don’t live in that goddamn fear all your life.’
He remains silent, his eyes on the trees dancing about in the wind.
‘When you read stories where people have regretted their actions and done their best to make up for them, do you sit there and judge them? Do you think to yourself: Man, what a shitty human being?’
‘No, that’s not what I lean towards.’
‘Exactly. On the contrary, do you think to yourself that everyone deserves a second chance if they truly regret their mistakes?’
‘Yes, I guess I do.’
‘Then be that guy.’
We let it sink in for a moment. My heart beats eagerly in my chest as I add: ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you—’ but he interrupts me.
‘Do you mind if I run inside and grab my cigarettes? I’m dying for one …’ he says apologetically.
‘No, go ahead.’ Biting my lip, I watch him run up the stairs and disappear into the building. It was probably a bad idea. Better be equipped with a clear head, not an exhausted one, when we edge into the minefield.
Moments later, I see the ember flicker through the dark. He takes a deep drag from the cigarette and resumes his seat on the lawn chair next to me.
‘So what was it you wanted to tell me?’ he wonders.
‘It’s nothing,’ I reply, trying to sound casual. ‘The moment … blew out of my hands.’
‘That’s a shame,’ he says in a disappointed voice. ‘Sorry to cut you off.’
‘We’ll get to it later,’ I say, and stretch my stiff legs. ‘Truth be told, it’s too cold and too late to be sitting here anyway.’
He invites me into the sitting room, where the night guard calls me a taxi. I’m two steps ahead of him up the stairs and realize that I’ve been two steps ahead of him all day — in and out of the mall, the gallery, the restaurant … The symbolism strikes me because, in essence, I’ve been the one to instigate and lead our way for the past decade. By the end of this week, I hope neither one of us will need any navigation, I think.
‘Please text me once you’re back at the hotel?’ Tom asks as the taxi stops in front of the villa. I’m so consumed with thoughts about today’s discoveries that I forget to ask the driver to turn the meter on. Half a kilometer later, he pulls up to the Ritz and charges me a quadruple price. I’m boiling with rage as I cross the marble floor of the Ritz lobby. If only young women like me could walk the fuck home at night like Tom has done ever since he got here. Not to mention the bloody fucking injustice when shady taxi drivers exploit this fact to further screw me over. I want to hack the patriarchal system down with a machete. Whooosh!
Despite my seething fury, patriarchy suffers no sudden setbacks when a bald guy leans casually against the bar as I buy myself a beer and yells questions at me. ‘Where are you from?’ he barks repeatedly. ‘Hey cutie, where are you from?’
‘I heard you the first time,’ I hiss with such frigidity that the room temperature drops a few degrees. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to place an order.’
The bald brute scowls as I walk past him, my head held high. Over my dead body am I letting another man mess with me today, I think as I push the elevator button and take a sip of my African beer. Kiss my Windhoek.
The air in the room is stagnant and smells vaguely of mold. Fishing my phone out of my pocket, I text Vidir good night. Before I put my phone down I notice an unread text. It says:
You OK? Dad.
My heart lights up. My father may be unhappy with his daughter’s vagrancies, but he’s far from indifferent about my wellbeing. I text him back, describing strong winds, good sushi, and pretty wedding rings. It seems we have a silent agreement not to mention Tom. A moment later, I receive a reply:
Good. Careful, precious, careful. Dad.
The windowpane quivers in the storm, much like the thoughts inside my head. Standing by the window, I rest my eyes on the shimmering cityscape. Despite having made progress, Tom and I still have a lot of work ahead of us. The hardest conversations are yet to come and the toughest questions are still unanswered.
I take a seat by the desk and start up my laptop, lost in thought. How much should I show Tom of the damage he caused me? Does forgiveness only look ahead, not over the shoulder? Would we be better off if he got to look under the carpet and see everything I’ve swept there throughout the years?
My mind goes to my late teens, when I was wading up to my knees in hate, declaring a war on this so-called ‘love’ that had turned out to be a cruel joke. I lacked the insight to see Tom’s crime against me for what it was, but there was no denying the destruction he left behind. Without understanding, I had the rage but nobody to direct it at. I felt the pain but couldn’t reason with it. I wanted nothing more than to slay the enemy, but ended up hacking away at my own shadow. Life was a senseless mockery, and I found myself dangling from the ledge of a high-rise during a thunderstorm, raging against the Almighty and daring it to make me fall. Attempting to reclaim the power that was stolen from me by faking intimacy with people I didn’t love. Couldn’t love. Mustn’t love. Numbing myself until nothing felt real and slicing myself open was the only way to experience any sensation at all. Warm and trickling. Pooling in seconds that I compulsively counted. One, two, three …
I crawl out of the memory, shuddering at the bleakness of my lost years. My fingers rest on the keyboard and I find myself double-clicking on a poem I wrote shortly after waking up on my eighteenth birthday, feeling ancient and worn down. That is when it dawned on me; the fact that my parachute hadn’t opened on my first jump over the land of love. Blood-red capital letters paint a vivid picture of my crash landing: pinned down by Tom’s weight on the asphalt that was my bed. The sheer vehemence in the poem hits me so hard that I gasp. Tears streak my cheeks and dot my lap.
Holy shit, this still hurts like hell.
Moments later, a depleted woman curls up in bed, while the wind scatters her scarred emotions and finally rocks her into a deep, dreamless sleep.
From Tom’s diary
Friday
I’ve just made myself some peppermint tea, and sniffed the fresh steam rising from my cup. I’m taking some time out on one of the cane loungers in the reading room and I’m so glad it’s quiet here.
I’ve wanted to broach it, but I still wasn’t looking forward to it — revisiting that weekend on the Westman Islands — purely because of its bleak heaviness. Even its mention mortifies me. What I remember of that weekend has always felt like tar; stuck to me and impossible to clean off. That’s why it was one of my few imagined goals this week, to talk to Thordis about that weekend, and somehow scrub myself clean of it.
Now I have a kind of chronology from the night she celebrated her birthday. She let me in on some truths and helped me add detail to some of the mysteries. Now the vodka gulping, firestick twirling, icy water and blood, tears and stitches all have their proper place. I can understand why I ran away when she screamed at me.
Such a perfect storm of emotions.
I did, however, hold back. I wonder why I didn’t come clean with the details of that weekend that I do actually recall? I asked her to remind me what happened that night, but I kind of made it sound like I have no memories of the entire weekend. It
felt like the conversation then quickly moved into her relating a story of her own drunken night. But I also went quiet. Why didn’t I speak up?
Maybe because my memories are messy, confused. Misplaced. Irrelevant, even.
These things I remember. Laughing when we were all half drunk and trying to set up the tents in howling winds. The first band playing on the main stage. Those huge purple sunglasses Thordis wore. Reminding myself that drinking spirits from a bottle was too much for me, and yet accepting the offer from the crazy girl in the orange overalls.
I also remember the next day, when I was piecing my head together and had just fallen out of my tent. Thordis asked to speak to me, and then walked ahead of me through rows of wind-damaged tents, leading us to a vacant patch of grassy hillside.
I was panicking. Shit. She seems angry with me. What the hell happened last night?
She sat down and was looking straight ahead. I was waiting for her eyes to meet mine as I approached, but they didn’t. I sat next to her, crossed my arms over my knees, and turned towards her. She slowly turned towards me and finally looked me in the eye. I remember being surprised by her expression.
Determined and calmly furious.
She said that she’d never hated anyone before.
‘But right now, Tom, I hate you’.
I felt her disgust and sat there solemn faced. Questions were squealing in my head.
What did I do?
I drew blanks. Nothing. But I knew that I must have done something heinous, and whatever strange connection we’d had was now gone.
Run … I just want to run.
And I did.
I waited until Thordis and the others passed out that afternoon. When they were asleep in the tent, I stuffed clothes into my backpack and ran off into the grassy hills. I made my way to the islands’ airport and got the fuck out of there. I think it was days and not weeks before I booked my flight and left the country altogether.
I remember the months after getting home. I couldn’t sit still, chased distraction, drunken parties, and far-away jobs. I did my utmost to not remember. It was a time of an even more masterful rejection. Before going back to Iceland in 2000 I had ‘redesigned’ the past. I’d engineered it so that I didn’t have to remember what I did to Thordis, and I didn’t have to admit to myself that I had caused so much hurt. Such understandings and words were completely outlawed in my mind. Even when I was on that plane back to Iceland in 2000, I didn’t see myself as going back there to address a crime.
On that trip, when I added a drunken night of unknown consequences, my policing of my thoughts had to be even more stringent. I had to also keep those events mysterious and forbidden, lest I actually think them through.
My system of avoidance, for the most part, held up. Of course it did. I don’t think anyone has a vested interest in obsessing over shame, and besides, I was working hard, camping, surfing, drinking, young, and so frustrated with what I was learning about the world.
It was only when I was reminded of her, or Iceland, or the Westman Islands, or when something insignificant sparked a significant memory. That’s when that festival weekend would crawl through me, because I did give myself some license to store those vague drunken memories.
What kind of weight do I put on the selectiveness of my memory? A part of me understands it as involuntary self-preservation, but another part argues that it’s a wicked convenience that doesn’t deserve a defense.
Where would I be if I’d been honest with myself?
When she sent me that email in 2005, explicitly naming what I had done to her, my deceitful trickery eroded like a sandcastle does when the tide comes in. The truth washed in with that email, and I recall frantically wondering how deep I would be standing in it.
That’s where it really began … for me.
And that’s why any minor blanks in my memory have felt like they are weak structures, just waiting to be filled in with inevitable truths.
Urgh. Such leaden feelings. My cup feels heavy in my hands just sitting here.
At least, now these feelings have a place. They’re not clunking around in a locked box, after she helped me give an order to things. Now that I really know what happened that night on the island, the cringing has been disarmed … just a bit.
DAY FOUR
30 March 2013
I fall through a black divide and land in my body. The smell is unfamiliar, the mattress beneath me harder than I’m used to. Raising my head and peering through one eye, it hits me. Africa. Tom.
Oh shit.
I forgot to text that I’d gotten home safely last night. I reach for my phone and discover that I have three unread texts, two of which are from a worried Tom.
Sorry, I totally forgot to let you know! I’m a dork. All is good.
My phone beeps a minute later.
Phew! Thank you. See you shortly.
I refrain from dwelling on the irony of partaking in this ritual imposed on women to let their safety be known, especially when the biggest threat to women’s safety is men who betray their trust. My heart expands in my chest as the third text turns out to be from Vidir.
Hi love. We just saw the most magnificent northern lights I’ve seen in years. I’m putting Julia to bed, everyone stayed up a bit late tonight. Can we talk tomorrow? I think the internet reception here is pretty bad, but we can give it a shot. Hope you and Tom did well today. What the two of you are doing together is beautiful and important. Thinking of you.
Beloved Vidir. My best friend and the only man on earth that I trust not to freak out when his fiancée goes across the planet on a strange and unpredictable mission. I text him back that I’m looking forward to chatting with him later today.
The bald brute is having breakfast when I enter the dining room, and we practice the art of ignoring one another. It’s half past nine when Tom walks through the doors of the Ritz on this windy Saturday morning. Standing by the rail overlooking the lobby, I wave to him. He looks up and meets my eye.
‘Sleep well?’
Given that I fell asleep in a fetal position with a head full of muddy darkness, I decide to shrug off the question. ‘Can’t complain. You?’
‘Well, thanks. I woke up to someone singing. It turned out to be the delivery boy. We’re not talking about a quiet hum here, this guy was belting it out,’ he says with a genuine smile. ‘I keep seeing people singing their heart out here. It lifts you … it’s something special about this place.’
‘Have you been in touch with your family since you got here?’
‘I’ve texted my parents and just given them an update on how things are going,’ he replies. ‘Have you heard from Vidir?’
‘They’re out in the countryside, enjoying the northern lights. Vidir wishes us good luck. He thinks what we’re doing is beautiful and important.’
Tom’s eyes grow larger. ‘He said that?’
‘Yes. I told you he supports us wholeheartedly.’
‘Still. That’s quite huge of him.’
‘Yet another reason why I love him. That, and how unimpressed he is by me.’
‘Unimpressed?’
‘It’s … hard to explain. He loves me in this down-to-earth way that is … unfazed by outside influences, somehow. Since our relationship began I’ve won a few awards and gotten media attention for some of my projects. He’s happy for me but also somehow … unaffected. He’s as much of a loving rock for me to lean on whether I’m off winning victories or having a bad day.’
Tom nods. ‘He sounds like someone who knows himself well, who’s comfortable in his own skin.’
‘Indeed. I had been through a tough separation eight months before I met him. He got to know me in all my broken, reeling, spend-all-day-in-my-sweatpants type of glory. The fact that he had two children from a prior marriage terrified me, so letting go of that fear took a while. Today, my
son and stepdaughters are the foundation of my wealth.’ I open a silver locket around my neck and show a picture of Vidir and the children to Tom.
‘Good-looking bunch,’ he says with an approving look. ‘I’ve always been in awe of those who choose the path of parenthood.’
I close the locket. ‘Nothing makes you laugh as sweetly nor cry as bitterly.’
Nigel, who is as smooth and tidy as before, reserves a ticket for us to Robben Island on Monday, two days from now. According to him, the cheapest way to travel around Cape Town is by buying a day pass to a sightseeing bus. ‘The price is just a fraction of what repeated taxi rides would cost,’ he says, all smiles and good service.
Grateful for a chance to save some money, we take his advice and decide to catch the next sightseeing bus, enjoying the view of the city while we continue our talk. The wind greets us heartily as we step outside. A double-decker tourist bus drives past us a couple of hundred meters down the road, next to the ocean. We take it as a sign to start walking in that direction.
‘Mind if we stop by the beach again?’ Tom asks.
‘Not at all.’
I follow him down the steps leading to the beach. We’re met by the pungent smell of sun-dried seaweed just as another sightseeing bus drives by. Watching it disappear into the distance, Tom shrugs. ‘At least we know they come every few minutes.’ Both of his hands are already full of trash. I attempt to pick up a few cans and plastic cups but stop when I realize that doing so doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m passionate about many causes, the environment being one, but I don’t feel the need to prove it here and now just to impress Tom.
I’m sitting in the sand, resting my eyes on clouds that look like ragged cotton candy, when he takes a seat next to me. As a result of his daily ritual, his face is wet from the ocean.
‘Do you want to see my tattoo?’ he asks.
‘You mean my tattoo?’ I reply with a smirk.
He cocks his head. ‘Ha ha. You’re funny.’ Pulling up his pant leg, he reveals a red and yellow rune with a black outline. I recognize it as the letter Thurisaz.
