Betrayal

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  The devil’s friend loses his soul and brings down evil, the note read, the last few words an almost illegible scrawl. It looked like someone had decided she had made friends with the devil himself. There was nothing unusual about politicians being lambasted for entering into coalitions with people someone was unhappy with, but as she was not linked to any party, she had somehow imagined that this kind of criticism wouldn’t come her way. All the same, people ought to be used to seeing political parties working together when the parliamentary term was so far advanced, and anyway she’d simply been called in to finish the work begun by Rúnar. She screwed the note into a ball and flicked it aside, and it was lost among the mess of paper, juice cartons and sweet wrappers that filled the footwell. She reminded herself that this weekend the car would need to be cleaned as the smell was becoming overpowering. She sighed and tried to relax, to let her racing heartbeat slow. She had been aware before taking the job that she wouldn’t be popular with everyone and that she’d get to hear about it. But the note in the car had still been upsetting. Somehow it was too close to home, too personal. In future she’d leave the car in the other car park with all the others.

  As she parked outside her house, she wound the window shut – the smell in the car had forced her to drive home with it halfway open. There had to be half a sandwich turning green somewhere down there, or something in the junk in the back. She’d have to ask Nonni to clean the car. Judging by the emails waiting for her and the long jobs list, there wouldn’t be much opportunity to do it herself. This weekend would have to be spent getting herself up to speed on everything the ministry did.

  ‘Congratulations, my love!’ Nonni called out as she opened the front door. ‘You made it through day one!’

  Kátur bounced towards her, his furry body twitching with delight at seeing her again, and as usual she dropped to her knees to greet him. She held his little head in both hands, kissed the top of his head and breathed in the smell of newly bathed dog. Nonni regularly gave him a bath and used shampoo on him, even though Úrsúla had warned that it wasn’t good for dogs.

  ‘Lovely to see you, Kátur,’ she whispered into his fur as his tail wagged furiously. There was no limit to how much she loved this little dog. He had kept her sane when she had moved back home, becoming the compass that showed her the way back to love. He had helped her put aside her weapons and lower the defences she had erected around herself somewhere between the Ebola epidemic in Liberia and the refugee camps in Syria.

  The dog wriggled from her arms, ran halfway along the hall into the apartment, and then back to her. That was what he always did, scampering between her and the family, as if he were showing her the way home to them. This was guidance she certainly needed, as since moving back to Iceland she had felt at a distance from them, as if they were on the far side of some invisible barrier that she had been unable to break through.

  She took a deep breath, taking in the warmth of the household, and for a moment she was gripped by a doubt that she had done the right thing by jumping into a ministerial role. There was no getting away from the fact that it would mean less time at home, less energy to devote to the children, less time for Nonni. There would be less time for her own emotional recovery. But it was only for a year, the twelve remaining months of the parliamentary term.

  ‘Pizza!’ the children chorused the moment she stepped into the kitchen. They were busy arranging toppings on pizza bases, and she could see Nonni was preparing a seafood pizza just for the two of them. There was an open bottle of white wine on the worktop, a glass had been poured for her, and the dining table was set with candles.

  ‘You’re a dream,’ she sighed, kissing the children’s heads and wrapping her arms around Nonni. He was warm to the touch, freshly shaved and sweet-smelling, and she felt her heart soften with gratitude, blended with doubt that she genuinely deserved such a perfect man. This was how it had been for more than a year. Every time she felt a surge of warmth and affection towards him, it was accompanied by an immediate surge of bad feeling. There was guilt, regret and self-loathing. Why couldn’t she simply love him as she had loved him before?

  ‘So how’s it looking?’ he whispered and handed her a glass of wine.

  She sat on a barstool and sipped. She’d tell him tonight, when the children had taken themselves off to bed. She would tell him how the day had begun, how she had been prepared for the first interview of the day, expecting to be getting to grips with complex and demanding issues, only to be faced with such a painful and difficult personal case.

  The face of the mother who had sat opposite her that morning, rigid with anger and sorrow, remained vividly in her mind. As she watched her own daughter arrange strips of pepper to form a pattern on a pizza, she felt a stab of pain in her heart: she was only two years younger than the girl who had been raped.

  Saturday

  8

  The report was so powerful that Úrsúla couldn’t be sure if it was the sheer loudness of it or the wave of air pressure generated by the explosion that pushed her eardrums in, leaving them numb, so that she lay face down on the ground in absolute silence. In her peripheral vision she could see some movement in the distance, but it was difficult to tell through the cloud of dust, so she lay still in the sand that now seemed to fill her whole consciousness, revelling in the joy at being alive that swept through her. She wanted to stay there and make the most of this feeling for as long as she could, because before long she would have to get to her feet and face the fact that the bomb must have gone off very close to the camp, perhaps right inside it, and there would be casualties. She would feel guilt at being alive and from there it would be a short stop to the deadness inside that had plagued her ever since Liberia.

  The silence in her head dissipated gradually and she could hear faint shouts and moans. She flexed her arms, ready to stand up. It was high time to get the people who had sought shelter in the refugee camps over the border into Jordan.

  Úrsúla was woken by the hammering of her own heartbeat. She was on the sofa at home in Reykjavík. There was a cartoon playing on the TV that had no doubt been put on for the children, who had woken ridiculously early. With a deep sigh, for a moment she wished she could be back in Syria, to the second after the explosion, when she had sensed the life force surge through her veins and felt that there was some reason for her existence. That was when she felt that she had a purpose, even a calling. She carried with her a responsibility to get living people – those who were frightened, hurt and in need – to shelter.

  Now she wasn’t sure whether she had been asleep or having a vivid daydream, as if her thoughts had sought out memories that might kick-start her dormant emotions, exercising and stretching them back into life. Kátur crawled on his belly off her feet, where he had been curled in a ball, and along the length of her body until his damp, cold nose lay at her throat and she could feel his breath on her cheek. It was as if the dog sensed her thoughts. The love he always had for her never failed to melt her heart. Her affection for him was bound up with certainty and comfort. If she could love this bundle of fur, then surely she still had the capacity to love her own offspring.

  Úrsúla sat up and shook off her own self-indulgence. Kátur watched her, waiting for a signal. If she were to get up, he would greet her as if she had just come through the door, then run to the back door – his way of telling her that he wanted to be let outside to pee. She would stand in the doorway, taking lungfuls of cold Icelandic outdoor air before brewing coffee and getting herself ready for the day ahead. She needed to go through a whole stack of documents, bring herself up to speed with the rules and regulations that applied to foreigners, and work out a job list for the coming week. It was clear that not much of her time would be her own, so she needed to make good use of the hours she had.

  9

  His expectations had created his disappointment. If he hadn’t so clearly envisaged himself doing his dream job, then he wouldn’t be so frustrated now. Although Gunnar understood the p
rinciples of Buddhism and tried to devote himself to them through meditation and the solutions that this offered, he still struggled to come to terms with the train of thought that said it would be better for him to accept right away that the bowl was cracked – that his dream job had been lost and that his life was already over.

  He sat with his legs crossed, hands limp in his lap, concentrating on inhaling and exhaling while thinking of nothing but the flow of air that he felt crossing his upper lip and entering his nostrils then slipping down into his lungs to feed his bloodstream with oxygen, before taking away the carbon dioxide and discarding it by the same route. Fragments of daydreams in which his strength and alertness protected someone important from evil found their way into his consciousness. He repeatedly had to decline these thoughts – banish them so that he could continue to concentrate on the flow of air entering and leaving his body.

  Meditation always helped, even though he never managed to maintain it for more than five minutes, and he was much calmer now, as he stood up, than he had been when he sat down, in spite of the burning disappointment. In reality he was disgruntled. It was a relief that he felt no real anger though. Anger was what he feared most, as it would herald rage. But there was only disappointment. He had been looking forward to taking on this assignment, getting to know the car and the minister, relishing the prospect of taking this task seriously and doing it better than it had ever been done in Iceland.

  The real pain lay in knowing that, regardless of all his dreams and wishes, he had everything needed to make him a first-class bodyguard. He understood the importance of the role, that it was crucial to create a feeling of security so that whoever he was looking after could do their work without fear. He also had insight. Insight, as his teacher on the personal protection course in America had said, was the most important part of the bodyguard’s armoury. Insight meant feeling rather than knowing, and sensing rather than seeing. The key to all this was being able to trust these instincts.

  He lifted both hands high above his head and bent forward to stretch his back after sitting. As he straightened up he felt a spark of hope deep inside him. Ministers come and go. In a year there would be another election, and then there would undoubtedly be a new government that would want drivers, and he could also start to look around for opportunities overseas.

  ‘Where on earth is anyone supposed to sit in this apartment?’ Íris asked as she came through the bedroom door into the living room, wearing one of his old singlets and with her hair awry. ‘Not everyone can sit on the floor all the time like you do.’

  He smiled and pointed at the sofa.

  ‘Then the floor’s better,’ she said. ‘That sofa’s not something anyone would want to sit on.’

  She was right that the sofa was neither smart nor particularly comfortable, but it was an excellent example of how to let a little suffice. This was something Íris didn’t understand, and whenever she came over or stayed the night she always complained about how sparsely furnished the place was. He got to his feet and went over to the kitchen worktop, where she stood shaking a carton of some protein drink.

  ‘Good morning, pretty lady,’ he said, a hand in her dark hair as he kissed her.

  ‘Good morning, handsome man,’ she replied.

  She was a delight when she was like this, and he felt the fluttering down in his belly that came when he hadn’t seen her for a while, or when she was sweet and loving; when she had herself under control.

  10

  Time seemed to stand still, and when Stella looked at the clock in the living room it was always seven, every time. She wasn’t sure if that was seven in the morning or the evening, though. She had been hanging on all night for everyone to make a move to somewhere they could dance, but nothing was happening; some of them had even started to dance in the living room. All of a sudden she was sick of it all and wanted to leave, but she was unsure if this was because there were no fun girls there, or because of the newsreader, who was always at her heels, trying to get her to talk, or just staring.

  ‘Come on, sugar. Give this one a chance,’ Anna A said in the tone of maternal concern the Annas always used when speaking to her, and she stroked Stella’s cheek. Stella could feel from her touch that Anna was as high as a kite, and it didn’t look like the party was going to shift to a nightspot anywhere. This was going to continue all the way through to Sunday morning.

  ‘Want another smartie?’ asked Anna.

  Stella shook her head, sipped from the glass of water Anna handed her and sauntered back to the living room. Some of the girls were dancing and others were sitting on the sofa, including the newsreader, who seemed to have finally struck lucky. So at least she wouldn’t be following her from one room to another. The double doors stood open and Stella went outside onto the deck, taking breaths of outdoor air. Three girls were singing in the hot tub, their efforts undoubtedly sounding better to them than they did in reality. She could jump into the pot and join in the singing, or go into the living room and dance, but she had done all this before. And somehow in this dead time between seven and seven she felt faint and so overheated her head seemed about to burst. She went back inside, took her coat from the hall, opened the front door and stepped out into the cool silence.

  The newsreader was standing on the steps, her scarf covering half her face as if she wanted to disguise herself, probably already feeling the regret that was inevitable after stepping through these doors.

  ‘Always the same crap,’ she said through her scarf. ‘I don’t know why I keep coming back. I don’t even like pills, or any other dope, for that matter.’

  ‘Don’t you come mainly to stare at me?’ Stella said, buttoning her coat, aware of how soft the buttons were. She stood still and stroked them with the tip of her index finger. They were ordinary plastic buttons, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed before just how smooth they were.

  ‘You can dream here,’ the newsreader said. ‘But that’s pretty much all I get to do.’

  ‘I saw you chatting to someone on the sofa just now; that looked promising,’ Stella said, still stroking the buttons of her coat. They really were so smooth under her fingers.

  ‘That only lasted until something better came along,’ the newsreader said, placing her feet tentatively on the slippery steps, the bitterness plain in her voice. ‘Bye,’ she said, walking away without looking back.

  Stella watched her go, wearing a thick coat and her scarf over her head, but in open-toed shoes so that she walked awkwardly and her feet had to be wet from the snow underfoot. There was something about the shoes that triggered a stab of sympathy in Stella. The newsreader had obviously come to the party in heels to look good, or at least to try and look her best, with her hair stiff and immaculate, as if she were in front of the cameras, apparently unaware that the style made her look twenty years older.

  ‘Hey!’ she called after her. ‘Do you want to get something to eat?’

  The newsreader stopped in her tracks and turned.

  ‘Where?’ she asked and Stella shrugged.

  ‘Anywhere. I don’t know if it’s morning or evening, or what’s open. Sushi or Hlölli, or whatever’s around. I’m just starving all of a sudden.’

  The newsreader checked her watch and coughed.

  ‘It’s seven in the evening. Saturday evening.’

  ‘Wow. These parties always confuse me. I could have sworn it was Saturday morning.’

  The newsreader smiled.

  ‘How about we go to my place. The fridge is full of stuff and I can throw something together quickly. I live there.’

  She pointed to the grey tower that overshadowed the whole district, and Stella stared at it. She hadn’t noticed before what a handsome building it was. There was something about the stone of the walls with its shades of grey that reminded her of velvet or silk, or anything other than grey stone. She wanted to say something about the contrast of soft and hard, silk and stone, but the words evaded her.

  ‘I’m not going to sleep
with you,’ she said instead, and the newsreader laughed in embarrassment.

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m only offering fried eggs and a chat.’

  Sunday

  11

  ‘Hell … I was going to ask you to clean the car out for me, and I forgot all about it,’ Úrsúla said as Nonni appeared, handing her a bowl of skyr as she sat at the computer.

  ‘I can’t be bothered to do it today,’ he said, massaging her shoulders. ‘Why don’t you take my car tomorrow?’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll survive one more day. There’s something in the back that’s gone off, so it smells like a rubbish tip. Could you do it tomorrow evening?’

  ‘I promise,’ Nonni said as he kissed her temple.

  She leaned against him, wishing the moment could stretch out so she could make the most of his lips against her skin. He stood up straight and the bad vibe grew inside her again, the feeling that he was too good for her, even if he wasn’t able to see it for himself.

  ‘You’ve been working all weekend,’ he said. ‘Won’t you come for a Sunday-afternoon drive with us. I promised the kids that we’d go for a swim and an ice cream.’

  She sighed. There were still emails to go through and work to be done to familiarise herself with the new South Coast Highway project, and then there was the new adviser.

  ‘I’m waiting for a call from Eva Aðalbjörns. She’s up for the job.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Nonni said. ‘You’ll have someone whose fashion sense is as sharp as her political antenna.’