Black Ice

by Colin Dunne

  4

  Shurring shurring shurring shurring shurring. Shurring shurring. Shurring shurring shurring shurring shurring shurring.

  Am I doing this properly? It seems so stupid sitting bolt upright in the office saying one word over and over again to myself. Anyway, here goes. In threes this time.

  Shurring shurring shurring. Shurring shurring shurring. Shurring shurring shurring.

  Am I meditating yet? I don't feel as though I am. On the other hand, the night I fell down three flights of stairs I didn't feel as though I was drunk. A few more. In pairs this time.

  Shurring shurring. Shurring shurring. Shurring shurring. Just keep saying the mantrap - sorry, mantra-so the teacher said at the class, and my system would sink into the resting state and my mind would be empty of thoughts. Right. Is the mind empty? Whoops, no, there's a sneaky little thought appertaining to an unpaid gas bill. And another about picking up my laundry. I chase those two off and in slips another thought about that bendy-looking blonde in the office down stairs.

  Oh, hell, shuring, shurr-bloody-ing, and my mind is wriggling like an ant hill with unauthorised thoughts. The astral plane of selflessness which lies beyond the void didn't seem to have any membership vacancies at the moment.

  Shurring shurring ... I'm not doing all that again. Then I realised. It was the phone.

  'Craven?'

  'Speaking.'

  "Ere. I like this idea you've put up for a feature piece in Iceland.'

  Suddenly I knew who it was. Batty hadn't been kidding when he said one of the pop papers. The editor didn't bother to introduce himself because he assumed everyone knew him. He was right. Throughout the newspaper business, he was known as Grimm, on account of the fact that his paper consisted almost entirely of fairy tales. He was a frenzied young northerner who'd found- that the streets of London were paved with gold, so long as you didn't mind wading through the sewers first.

  'Idea?'

  'Yeah, this memo you sent. Secrets of the Sexy Eskies. Brilliant. You're on.'

  'Good. I mean, great. Secrets of the what?'

  'Sexy Eskies. That's my headline. So you work to that, right?'

  I was relieved to hear the headline was his. Even the Foreign Office, with its fathomless resources, couldn't have counter feited such a classic as that. Even as I was listening to him, I could see the problems of actually putting this into operation.

  'So, you get your interview with this Miss Iceland lass- what she does, who with, every pant and wriggle- and we're there. Like I say, Secrets of the Sexy Eskies.'

  'Right. Terrific. Just one thing.'

  'What?' He sounded irritated. Just one thing sounded one too many for him.

  'Strictly speaking, Icelanders aren't Eskimos. Very, very strictly speaking, of course.'

  His sigh burned up a few hundred yards of telephone wire.

  'Listen. I shouldn't have to explain this to you,' he said, in the tones of one who bears a heavy burden through life. 'How it works is this. Maybe they are Eskimos. Maybe they're not Eskimos. Who can say? But if I think they're Eskimos then our readers will think they're Eskimos, and if our readers think they're Eskimos, then bloody Eskimos they are. Got it?'

  'Got it.'

  'Thank God. Tell you what,' he began, in a more generous tone, 'I've seen your stuff around. It's not all crap, you know.'

  'I'm glad to hear that.'

  'No, fair does, it's not. What I don't understand is why you haven't been on to me before.'

  'I was waiting,' I said, marvelling as I heard the unplanned words slip through my lips, 'for a really big one.'

  'Love it!' he enthused. 'That's what this business wants - commitment, heart, guts. There's big bucks in this, Craven. Get on your way. Today. Secrets of the Sexy Eskies, eh? Ring in. Ciao.'

  I sat there for a couple of minutes looking at the phone and wondering if my attempts at meditation had somehow flung this nightmare figure into my imagination. But no, I knew it wasn't. That was Grimm all right.

  It was my only experience of him first-hand, and I must say my immediate reaction was to start a new life in Paraguay

  Yonoder a false name. Still, I wasn't really working for him, was I? I don't know why I bothered dragging my conscience in foran overhaul like that. All I needed to do was to concentrate on the prospect of seeing Solrun again and I could've rationalised the Crucifixion.

  One phone call to Icelandair did the lot. They put me on the evening flight, promised to book me a room with Hulda Gudmundsdottir - my, we were back in opera-land, weren't we? - and they also promised to notify the information office where Solrun worked that I was on my way. After that, of course, it was up to her.

  Then I rang Sally's convent school near Guildford where

  eventually I battered my way past the nuns' chorus and got to speak to my daughter. Speak? Did I say speak? Got to listen to her. In no time at all I was apprised of the facts that Natasha had quarrelled with Fiona and she and Henrietta weren't going to bother with them any more, not if they were going to have a pash on that hateful Rowena.

  Of course, it all sounded like birdsong to me.

  My ex-wife sent her to the convent because they wore boaters in the summer. I think she believed that straw had miracle properties when placed in close proximity to the brain. I made a note to buy myself a straw hat sometime.

  I thought of trying the old shurring shurring again, but decided against. It didn't seem to be taking with me. Every time I emptied my mind of the stresses and worries that were poisoning my system (so the book said), someone sneaked up with another lorry-load.

  Instead, I sauntered up to the Cheshire Cheese where - gurus please note- I reached astral planes of pure thoughtless serenity on exactly three pints of Marston's best bitter.

  5

  At first sight you might've thought the flight was a reunion for brother-and-sister twins of a mature age.

  People who fly south want to get things: like brown, drunk and laid. People who fly north want to look: they want to look at flowers and birds and scenery, and, as a rule, they stay white, sober and unlaid. They fly north in matching pairs, white haired, ruddy-faced, retired teachers, husbands and wives who have grown alike over the years.

  The flight was full of them. All wearing shirts made from that stuff Scotsmen use for kilts. If you'd asked a question about Jurassic rock formation, every hand in the place would have been raised.

  I ate what looked like a bottled brain. It was a herring which, if not actually soused, had certainly stopped off for a couple. Raw and tangy, it tasted delicious. Icelandair haven't yet mastered the art of making all their food taste like wartime soap: how they get a licence beats me.

  What with the big twins and the tasty brain, it was all getting a bit unreal and then, when I tried to doze off, I imagined I heard a coach-load of football supporters fly past singing, 'I'm Sitting On Top of the World'.

  I opened my eyes. And, would you believe it, the man next to

  me was apparently trying to steal my shoelaces.

  I didn't know what to do. So I just sat there and watched. His face was almost resting on my knee and his hand was scrabbling around by my feet somewhere. When he glanced up and saw me, he mimed, 'Sorry, won't be a sec.' With a wince across his dark impish features, he made a last dive and then surfaced with a plastic carrier bag from which, tinnily, came the music.

  Dipping one hand inside, he pulled out a roll of pink lavatory paper on a pink plastic wall mounting which was artistically rendered in the shape of a seated man with his trousers round his ankles. He pushed the man's cartoon-red nose. The singing ceased.

  'Clever, isn't it?'

  I decided he would definitely repay a little study, so I had a good look at him. Maybe forty or a bit less, thick black thatch of hair, thin features which had been handsome until someone had rearranged the nose with a baseball bat - or similar. It curved across his face banana-style. Yet despite that, all his features added up to an intelligent merry innocence.

&nb
sp; 'Look, do you see, this chap on the bog is meant to be singing the song .. .'

  'Yes, I got that far myself.'

  'Splendid, isn't it? Make me a million, this little chap will. By the way, Christopher Bell. Christopher not Chris if you don't mind - I'm not a condensed-name sort of person.'

  We managed a hunched handshake, during which he insisted that I drink a brennivin with him. Somehow he dismissed my reluctance- I can't stand the stuff- and whistled up a stewardess and ordered in Icelandic. Before I could express my surprise, a head of silver bristle popped over the seat in front of us.

  'An Englishman who speaks another language - and Ice landic of all things. We are seeing miracles.' He gave a dry whisper of a laugh and said something to Christopher Bell in a language that sounded to my ears like sprained Spanish.

  Christopher retaliated in the same, then added: 'I'm afraid my Esperanto is pretty shaky.'

  'You see,' said Silver Bristle, who had steel-rimmed specs and looked a vital fifty-ish. 'Your friend does not understand.'

  'True,' I said.

  'Excuse, excuse,' he said, with that dry laugh again. 'I hear this man speaking Icelandic so I ask him if he also speaks Esperanto. And, another miracle, he does. A little, most certainly. Here.'

  He gave me his card which made him a German called Bottger who was something big in Esperanto. By this time the brennivin had arrived and Christopher had got a third for

  Bottger.

  'Do you know,' Christopher said, rotating between the two of us, 'that the recipe for this stuff is still kept secret?'

  'Thank God,' I said, as the first sip turned my face into a prune. 'Don't let it out, that's all.'

  'I say, don't you like it?' he asked, sounding very concerned.

  'Well, if you were an alcoholic it wouldn't stop you drinking, but it would certainly take the pleasure out of it.'

  That brought us nicely up to that what-brings-you-here stuff. I told Christopher about my new employer (Grimm, not Batty, of course) and the Sexy Eskies, and he put his hand on my arm and said: 'Look at it this way- someone's got to do it.'

  That made me feel like a hangman. Or an undertaker perhaps. Either way, it wasn't good..

  Bottger, a solo twin, was planning on striding about the scenery in large boots, visiting old Esperanto friends, so they could talk about the rest of us behind our backs. That brought up another volley of the stuff, which Christopher translated.

  'He says that if only people would take the trouble to learn Esperanto, we could all speak what is in our hearts.'

  'That would mean war.'

  'No, no,' Bottger chipped in, in impatient English. 'That is the point. No more wars, no misunderstandings, no troubles. We see into each other's minds.'

  . 'If that stewardess gets to see into my mind,' I said, 'there'll be plenty of troubles, I can tell you. And how about you?' I asked Christopher. 'You're an international lavatory-paper smuggler, I take it?'

  He wasn't. But only just. He'd tried a few things. Farming, publishing, salesman. He hadn't hit quite the right thing so far. He'd heard a tourist boom was coming in Iceland and he'd come north, fallen in love with the country and learned the language. So he was setting up an import-export business, with the musical paper-holder as his first move.

  'People absolutely love them. They go like hot cakes at all the seaside places, I'm told.'

  'And what are you sending back the other way?' Whatever it was, I thought it had to be better than those. Not necessarily, as it turned out. He planned to ship back shoals of stuffed puffins to an unsuspecting Britain.

  I'd seen them in the shops there. Depressed-looking creatures, poised awkwardly on a chunk of lava. I didn't say so, but frankly I wouldn't have wanted to put all my money into stuffed puffins.

  'But this,' he said, tapping the plastic bag, 'is my second million. Any chance of a free plug in that paper of yours?'

  'Not unless you can persuade a female puffin to take all her feathers off.'

  6

  That's the time to arrive in Iceland - bang in the middle of a summer night.

  Then the sun doesn't sett. It just slips off-stage for an hour or two. I gave the other two a lift into town in a Daihatsu jeep I'd hired, and we sat in silence as the narrow strip of tarmac led over the cold grey lava fields, set like forgotten porridge or boiled-over toffee. The first American astronauts practised there: they say they found the moon quite homely after that.

  Soon we saw the red and green roofs of Reykjavik and I dropped them in the town and set off for Thingvellir. If she wanted to see me, that's where she'd be.

  Out over the lava field I went. A cold blade of a wind fleeced a sheep foraging gamely among the green knobbly rocks and pinned a lone gull to the sky. A herd of ponies truffing for salt in the dust of the road parked reluctantly to let me pass.

  Thingvellir was just as I remembered it. Which wasn't all that surprising when you think it's been like that since the world was premiered.

  It's a vast plain of lava stretching for miles from the foot of an eighty-foot escarpment of rock. It's the prototype for the House of Commons. The world's first politicians, around the year nine hundred, used to stand with their backs to the cliff to use it as a sound-box while they lied about the budget. Even then they liked the sound of their own voices.

  If a country can have a soul, Iceland's is there. And it was there that Solrun and I had together whatever it was we had together. That's why she should be there.

  But I wasn't sure. As I drove I remembered what Batty had said about her dangerous friends. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that he wouldn't go to all this trouble to get me out there unless there was something going on. What was she up to? And was she okay? Tension tightened me like a banjo as I parked and climbed the steep slope up the back of the cliff-top. Either the slope had got steeper or I'd got older in the past two years because I had to stoop to climb it, and I found my face only a couple of feet away from the lava, the bare bones of the earth. At the top, I stopped and straightened. The sky was the colour of old jeans. Ten miles away, a line of mountains was a snow-stained smudge on the horizon. Below me, fingers of lava ran out into the wide bright lake.

  I'm not a scenery man myself, but if you are given to having your breath took, that's the place for it.

  I might've known where she'd be sitting. Right on the edge of the cliff, her legs dangling over the long drop, facing out into the void between earth and sky.

  'In that river down there,' she said, pointing, 'they used to tie rocks to unfaithful women and throw them in to drown.'

  'That explains it,' I answered.

  'What?'

  'Why your hair's always wet. How are you, little kiddo?'

  What does the name Solrun mean to me, Mr Batty? Well, I'll tell you. It means a girl who can't see a cliff without wanting to hang her legs over it. It means a girl who's wild and wonderful and wayward.

  You know those Scandinavian film stars like Britt Ekland?

  They left home because they were sick of being the plainest girls in town, and went to Hollywood where the competition was thinner. And in northern Europe, the Icelandic girls make all the others look sort of dowdy. Even in that aristocratic company, Solrun was something special.

  In a race where hair varies from daffodil to snowdrop, hers was about narcissus, cropped short and half-curly in a style that might have looked boyish on anyone else. On her it looked sexy. On her, bald would have looked sexy.

  She was slim, the handy, tuck-under-your-arm size, and she was composed entirely of lovely round pieces which were joined up with lovely slim pieces. What she meant to me personally was friendship and sex. It's a much-neglected combination. Without absurd hopes and false promises, like love for instance, you can keep a clear head to enjoy what's going on. It can lead to all sorts of unfashionable abstractions, like trust and respect, and they don't weather too well when love's around.

  It happened like this. I was on an official public-relations tour of t
he country for a magazine. Solrun, who was modelling then but also did some front jobs for things like this, was shepherding us around.

  Now anyone who works for a newspaper is by definition a person in whom hope outruns intelligence and this lot - thirty odd of them - were offering her everything from money to marriage by coffee-break on the first morning. She stood up to it pretty well. But by mid-afternoon, standing here on the cliff-top at Thingvellir, she was almost getting a heat rash from the non-stop battery of leers.

  'Make your decision now,' said one smoothie, 'and put the rest of us out of our misery.'

  To their surprise, she thought about it for a minute, then she agreed. 'I choose Sam.'

  She hit me with a smile that almost knocked me off the cliff, and continued: 'Now, gentlemen, perhaps I can ask you to look at Almannagja, which means All Men's Chasm, which is where the. common people used to gather in the days of the ancient assemblies .. .'

  I didn't believe her, of course. Not then. I didn't even believe her that night when she came along to my room.

  I took a bit of convincing, believe me.

  Solrun. Does it ring a bell? One or two, Mr Batty, one or two.

  Solrun was Iceland. The wild strangeness of the place burned in her. Fire and ice. Ice and fire. That's what made her what she was - ice-hot.

  7

  Next time you're young, rich and fashionable and in Iceland, get a flat in Vesturbrun. That's where all the rest of them live. So, naturally enough, that's where Solrun had her flat: six floors up in a tower block which hummed with discreet heat and silent lifts.

  In Britain we think light is simply something you switch on.

  There they play around with it. In her flat, blinds and screens and clever shades sliced up the light and kept it under control. With all that natural wood, bamboo and cane you could've staged The Mikado without changing a thing. It was low-level, which is to say that most of the social life was conducted on the floor: the cushions didn't have chairs beneath them, and the two sofas were no higher than a London pavement.