by Sjón
“A Red Indian princess, covered in war paint, with a beaver skin draped over her shoulders.” Taking a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he wiped the ink off his hands.
“A pedigree bitch after a swim.” He stood in front of her, unable to guess her age or background: a society lady in distress; the well-kept mistress of a managing director or politician; a daughter from a good home, sneaking out on the town in her mother’s fur; an officer’s bit on the side; an actress? Soaked to the skin like that, all women looked the same.
— What do you want?
The question came out more coldly than intended and he immediately regretted it. But when the woman opened her mouth to answer, her teeth were chattering so badly that she couldn’t utter a word. She tried again but her shivering got the better of her. Stepping forward, he put an arm round her shoulders and guided her into the coffee room.
This was a long, narrow space opening off the corridor between the compositors’ room and the print room. It contained a plain kitchen unit, a cupboard and a table with seating for seven. At the far end, an old cast-iron stove was blazing merrily. Having steered her towards it, he helped her out of her coat. She turned to the stove and held out her hands, alternately rubbing them and spreading out her fingers. He pulled aside the plate on top of the stove to allow the heat to rise straight up and she bowed her head, the raindrops falling from her hair on to the black metal where they evaporated with a quick hiss. Even with the flames playing over her wet face, her teeth were still chattering.
He went over to the cupboard and took out a thick towel.
— You could do with warming up. Can I offer you a coffee?
She stared for a moment at the towel he was holding out to her, before taking it. Then, after nodding in reply to his offer, she began unbuttoning the jacket of her green suit, while the typesetter went over to the kitchen counter and started making the coffee.
Now he is standing at the counter with his back to the woman, while the boiling water drips through the filter. He can hear her drying herself with the towel but resists the temptation to steal a glance. Pouring the coffee into a cup, he calls out:
— Milk and sugar?
When he receives no answer, he turns round. The towel has been spread on the floor beside the glowing stove and the woman is standing on it, stark naked. A halo of red light flickers around her, licking over every curve of her body. The cup trembles in his hand.
— What – what the hell are you doing?
Even as he stammers out the words, he feels the pull of the woman’s body. Although dazzled by the fiery halo, he can see with increasing clarity her naked beauty, the alluring lines of her figure, the darkness of her pubic hair against the milk-white skin at the top of her thighs. He feels as though a hot wave is crashing over him, as though he has been swathed in a blinding flash of light. Now she’s swaying her hips provocatively, her hands straying to the object of desire: the black triangle.
Bewitched by the woman’s irresistible charms, the typesetter is drawn ever closer. Her arms twine themselves around him. With nimble fingers she slides the braces from his shoulders and pulls his trousers down to mid-thigh. Then hauls him down on to the towel where she gets him on his back and straddles him. For an instant he sees the flames glittering on her wet labia as she opens herself and slides on to his cock with such force that he plumbs her depths.
An electric current seems to course through the typesetter’s body. He tries to tip the woman off but she grips his cock inside her, riding him harder, her hands on his chest pushing him down on the floor as the sperm spurts into her receptive womb. His rapturous moan mingles with the sound she emits:
A frustrated groan.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Taking off my jumper. This is making me hot.’
‘Sorry, that wasn’t the intention.’
‘I’m not complaining. Tell me more.’
2
‘At the time these events took place in the early hours of 1 April 1961, it was received wisdom among the psychiatric profession in Iceland, as in the world at large, that women’s sexual needs received only a limited outlet through intercourse; in fact, their sexuality was largely sublimated into household chores and caring for others. So it was a common problem that when their children grew up and their husbands became increasingly preoccupied with their jobs, women were denied a natural outlet for their desires. Behaviour, which in young women resembled the nesting instinct of a female bird and went hand in hand with a healthy desire to reproduce and make a good home for their offspring, was, when displayed by older women, regarded as a dangerous sign of sexual dissatisfaction. The symptoms of restlessness generally appeared shortly after the children had left home, at which point these women would embark on a campaign of home improvements, rearranging the furniture, buying new wall- and floor-coverings, collecting expensive ornaments and redesigning all the rooms. Unsurprisingly, this put a great strain on their husbands and the situation could not always be rectified by redirecting the wife’s energies into good works, taking her away on foreign holidays or getting the family doctor to prescribe her tranquillisers or strong sleeping pills.
Mrs Thorsteinson was no exception. She was thirty-two years old and still hadn’t got pregnant. At first she believed the fault lay with her, that there was something wrong with her physically – an old injury resulting from an incident in her youth – or that some aspect of her daily routine, diet or habits was preventing her from conceiving. But when she finally plucked up the courage to complain to her closest friends, she realised from their reactions that the problem lay with her husband and his unusual behaviour in the marriage bed. Yet she had only told them half the story.
Her first reaction was, predictably, to redecorate the house. In no time at all the Thorsteinsons’ dignified living quarters had been transformed. Where before there had been turn-of-the-century respectability – all thick velvet and gleaming hardwood – now there was a violent clash of colours everywhere you looked: in the carpets, rugs, tablecloths, runners and curtains, in the paintings that consisted of nothing but squares, circles and triangles of varying sizes, in the curved kitchen cabinets, in the Danish furniture designed more with microscopic amoebas than comfort in mind, all of which were as much of an enigma to Mr Thorsteinson as his wife’s body. In other words, every detail of the childless couple’s sea-blue, grass-green, rose-red and sunshine-yellow home testified to the conflict that was raging in Mrs Thorsteinson’s soul and endocrine glands.
Mr Thorsteinson thanked heaven that his parents were no longer alive to witness his wife’s destructive urges. They’d had their doubts about her from the beginning. It was all very well, but who was this shop assistant their son had met over the tobacco counter in the Reykjavík and Area Coop? And, more to the point, what was he doing patronising a shop run by a cooperative that undermined the influence of Reykjavík’s business elite, the class to which he belonged? Going to meet the girl, obviously. It was easier to lower yourself than to aim high. Would she ever belong in their world? No. Would it end in disaster? Yes.
They had turned out to be right about that as well. Mr Thorsteinson, having no choice but to weather the disaster, concentrated on building up the engineering firm that he ran with his maternal uncle Andrés – who was managing director in charge of him, one trainee and the girl who answered the phone – and on taking under his wing the “fledgelings”, as he called the young bachelors who joined the Song Thrushes, offering them extra rehearsals after the official choir practice was over.
Which is where he was tonight – one hand pressed firmly against the abdomen of a young tenor, the other on his back, telling him to pant, to breathe until his abdomen expanded into the palm of his hand – at the moment when Mrs Thorsteinson realised that the redecoration of their flat was complete.
* * *
THE MYSTERY OF THE BLACK TRIANGLE, III & IV
(Friday evening to Saturday morning)
It’s past two in th
e morning. There’s not a cloud in the sky but the city’s still wet from the earlier downpour. The streets glisten; corrugated iron and windows gleam. The illuminated signs in the city centre seem brighter. Down by the harbour the moon draws a mysterious forest of shadow and light from the masts of the trawlers and fishing boats. Beyond them, the coastguard vessel Freyr is moored close to the harbour mouth where the crew can put out to sea without delay when duty calls them to defend the fishing grounds, those Solomon’s mines of the deep, alive with herring, the silver of the sea, and cod, that yellow currency that buys Icelandic trawler owners admittance to the waiting rooms of the world’s banks.
Iceland’s gunboat is larger than any of the fishing vessels moored further inside and painted entirely grey, apart from the coat of arms on the wheelhouse. There the blue, white and red colours of the flag adorn a shield mounted on a black slab of lava, while flanking the shield are the four guardian spirits of the land – the eagle, dragon, giant and bull – each picked out in a different colour. Standing in Freyr’s bows under a green canvas, its long barrel stretching the material taut, is a gun, a rare weapon in this weaponless nation.
The second mate, Carl Steinsson, is on watch.
At the present moment, he’s sitting down below in the cabin, immersed in The Hamster Wheel, a weird novel by his neighbour, Loftur Gudmundsson. At hourly intervals he takes a break from the peculiar antics of the fictional Gydling clan and the monotonous perpetual labour of the office staff, who are forever wielding the same rubber stamps and wrapping up the same parcels – which is exactly how he pictures life on shore. Laying down the book, he goes up on deck, scans the docks and checks that no one has been tampering with the gangplank. At weekends you always get a few drunks wandering into the harbour area. More often than not they try to come aboard; usually it’s just drunken antics but occasionally they’re after the first-aid box. He has just returned from one of these patrols, settled on the bench and re-opened his book, when he is confronted with the sentence:
“Then he sees the mouse-haired girl dance past in the fragrant artificial dusk; a shadow on the chest of another shadow, a skeleton in another skeleton’s arms…”
There’s a sudden noise from above.
Slamming the book shut, he grabs his torch.
A moment later he’s back on deck, scanning the docks. He directs his torch at the gangplank; all is as it should be. He walks clockwise round the ship, first aft, then forwards along the rail on the seaward side, heading for the bows. There’s a human figure standing in the shadow of the gun.
Carl shouts:
— Who goes there?
He tries to trap the figure in the torch-beam but it retreats, ducking out of sight behind the barrel of the gun. He grips the torch tighter, knuckles whitening, bracing himself to use it as a weapon. When he is only a few feet from the intruder’s hiding place, he barks out the command that is usually enough to persuade uninvited guests to surrender without a fight:
— Give yourself up. I’m armed …
For a minute nothing happens. Then, to his astonishment, the mate feels his breathing growing shallower, quicker – and, even more bizarrely, discovers that he’s got a hard-on. Transferring his torch to his left hand, he puts his right into his trouser pocket and adjusts himself to make it less obvious.
A woman in a fur coat steps forward into the light. Before he can react, she’s come right up to him. She reaches out her left hand, not in the least coy about letting the mate see the gleaming symbol of marriage on her ring finger, and strokes firmly down the powerful shaft of his confined penis, creating an even larger bulge in his trousers. The mate groans as the woman drops to her knees in front of him and unbuttons his flies. She moves her head towards his swollen manhood, and in the light of the torch he sees her drawing back the foreskin prior to rubbing him with her fingers. Then her head is touching him, and she’s moistening her lips with her tongue before applying them to the tip of his erect organ. She takes a quick breath, grips his penis between her lips and lowers her head until more than half of him has disappeared into her mouth. Her fingers slide simultaneously under his scrotum, gently clasping and caressing his testicles.
And so the woman teases the mate with fingers, lips and wet tongue, until his penis begins to twitch in her mouth, at which point she pinches the root so hard that the head swells against her palate. Without releasing her grip, she rises to her feet and whips open her fur, having already hitched up her green skirt and pulled her silk knickers to one side. Then, turning away, she stands, legs apart, thrusting her soft buttocks towards him, and the mate glimpses the edge of the black triangle between her legs.
— Now shoot …
The instant his penis has entered her she releases her grip and the hot sperm gushes out in powerful spurts. Then she rams herself backwards with such force that the man is slammed against the gun. The torch drops from his hand and rolls flickering in a half circle on the deck before going out.
The woman sighs bitterly. The second mate, Carl Steinsson, loses sight of her. By the time he has retrieved and switched on the torch, he’s alone again on the coastguard ship Freyr, as if she’d never been there.
(Smutty Interlude)
The door of the prison has barely closed behind the newly released inmate when a woman rounds the corner from the right. Walking straight up to him, she links her arm through his and leads him away.
Jón “Bull” Thorgeirsson isn’t used to being pushed around – he’s the strongest man in town and makes a living from standing silently by while men cleverer than him collect their debts – and after a three-week stint inside he would have been glad of a chance to breathe in the fresh April night air undisturbed. But instead of shaking off the fur-coated woman who has so boldly helped herself to his arm, he allows her to pull him into a dark alley round the back of Hallveigarstígur. He does so because of her quick whisper in his ear as she grabbed his arm:
— Let me feel how frustrated you are after three long weeks without a fuck.
He doesn’t have time to wonder who the woman is or how she knows about his sentence, and right now he couldn’t give a damn because she’s shoved a hand inside the waistband of his trousers and is grabbing his balls. The shaft of his rock-hard member presses hot against her forearm. With her other hand she hitches up her green skirt, then guides his right hand to cup the black triangle between her legs. To his delight he discovers she’s not wearing any knickers. He runs his fingers down over her curly-haired mound of Venus, jabbing one between her soaking-wet labia. She’s ready. By the time he’s undone his flies and feels the cool night air on his hard cock, he’s ready too.
Propping the woman against the wall, he seizes her behind the knees and lifts her off her feet, simultaneously ramming his organ deep inside her, right up to the balls. Then, holding her tight as she crosses her legs behind him and drives her sharp heels into his back, the ex-con takes her body with urgent lust.
A window opens upstairs and the silhouette of a balding head pokes out.
— Clear off or I’ll call the police!
Without missing a stroke, the ex-con flings back his head and bellows at the man in the open window:
— Shut your gob, you little prick …
He has no sooner spoken than the tingling prelude to orgasm spreads through his loins. Lights explode before his eyes. He grits his teeth, feeling the sperm pumping out of his penis into the woman’s vagina as if he’s filling her up.
Deflated, he slackens his grip on the woman. Lifts her off his penis, lowering her until her feet touch the ground. She wriggles out of his grasp. He leans against the wall, staring down at the gravel, watching out of the corner of his eye as she smooths down the green skirt and wraps herself in the fur.
As she turns to walk away he hears a cold laugh at his ear.
— You haven’t changed, still can’t last a bloody minute …
It’s the laugh of a girl he once, thirteen years ago, took by force in Siglufjördur. The fo
llowing morning some kids had found her lying on the seashore below the machine shop. She had been taken to hospital in Akureyri and never returned to the village. And he had made himself scarce too, heading south to Reykjavík.
— Dísa? Dísa “herring”…?
He looks up, her name on his lips. But instead of receiving her answer, he sees standing in a half circle around him the balding man from the window, now accompanied by a police officer and the prison guard who less than half an hour ago had processed his release from jail.
It’s a short walk from the dark alley behind Hallveigarstígur down to the house at 10a Ingólfsstræti.
Mrs Thorsteinson – who we now suspect of having been Dísa “herring”, the fish-factory girl from Siglufjördur, before she moved south to the city where she did a number of odd jobs (filleting salt-fish, scrubbing floors, washing and mending, cleaning rooms and serving tables at the City Hotel) before becoming a sales assistant in the tobacco department of the Reykjavík and Area Coop where she met her future husband – returns home from her nocturnal adventure, creeps in by the back door, and this time, remembering my father asleep in the basement beneath her feet, slips off her shoes, and, without disturbing him, tiptoes upstairs in her nylon stockings to the kitchen door, which she opens and closes behind her with the same stealth as before.
Now that she is home she goes straight to her bedroom, strips off her clothes, tosses the damp fur into the corner, throws down her muddy high heels, drops the jacket and skirt of her suit on the floor at her feet, and proceeds to chuck bra, stockings, suspender belt and silk knickers on to the bed or the chair by the dressing table. Stark naked, she examines her body in the oval mirror. Turns her mouth down, tries to squeeze a few tears from the green eyes, to sniff or summon up a lump in her throat, tries to feel guilty or ashamed of her behaviour. But her only emotion is glee, a ticklish joy that she still possesses the power to pull men, to arouse their lust, feel their hot, hard penises in her hand, mouth and cunt, and their sperm spurting inside her.
