On A Small Island

by Grant Nicol

  ‘They screamed bloody murder at the serviceman and both he and Helga had some trouble explaining where their clothes had got to. The driver hadn’t got much of a look at me but she had no trouble identifying your father. She had got a very good look at him, although not as good as the view he’d had of her.

  ‘The police visited our houses and when they saw our mothers were trying to raise us on their own they decided they weren’t up to the job and they took us both away. With our fathers out at sea our mothers weren’t in much of a position to stand up for themselves and the next thing we knew they had taken the two of us to the old house way out in the hills.’

  ‘That house was Lönguhólar?’

  ‘Yes, we thought that it would only be for a few weeks until they had accepted that we’d come to our senses and would behave ourselves again, but how wrong we were.’

  ‘How long did you end up staying there?’

  ‘Luckily, my parents came to an arrangement with someone in a position of authority after six months and I was released but your father was there for seven years.’

  ‘Seven years?’

  ‘His father had an accident on one of the boats. He caught his arm in a winch and couldn’t fish any more. There wasn’t any other work in Höfn so they moved to Egilsstaðir where his mother found some way of making a living. Your father was just left behind to fend for himself. He was a victim of unfortunate circumstances more than anything else. Bad luck got him in there and bad luck kept him there. Although in hindsight I could have done more to help him out. I should have taken more of the blame myself but once we were in there all I wanted to do was get out.’

  ‘Did you see him, after you were let out?’

  ‘No. I was never allowed back to visit and I never saw him again. By the time he got out he would have been eighteen and was probably a very different person by then.’

  ‘What happened then? Did he find his parents again?’

  ‘To be honest with you, Ylfa, I just don’t know. I doubt it somehow. As far as I could tell at the time he just disappeared. He wasn’t seen around Höfn ever again, that’s for sure.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had accepted that things must have been tough for him but none of this matched my expectations of what he might have been through.

  ‘What was it really like at Lönguhólar?’

  ‘From the first night you arrived the other children started sizing you up. Looking you up and down as it were. Some of them were much older than we were and much bigger too. A few of them had been there for quite some time. You could tell which ones they were; they had become hardened by the walls they had built to protect themselves. It was safer not to let anyone in if you didn’t want to get hurt.

  ‘Those were the ones to watch out for, or so we thought. At the first sign of trouble we turned to the staff for help. That turned out to be a huge mistake although we wouldn’t see it straight away. There was one young man in particular who seemed quite happy to take us under his wing. He gave us the impression that if we stuck with him we would be okay. And he was right, at first. Once the other children knew we were with him they left us alone. But like so many things in life, it came at a price.

  ‘At first he would get us to run errands for him. Being eager to please, we did whatever he asked. Eventually, though, it meant spending a great deal of time with him alone. Not too long after that he began visiting us in the showers when we were by ourselves and asking us to do other things for him. He would get us to masturbate him in the showers and then pay us in cigarettes for a job well done. It made us feel ashamed and yet special at the same time. And of course, the last thing you wanted to do was tell anyone about it.

  ‘You kept it to yourself and that was just the way he wanted it. It wasn’t too long before that was no longer enough to keep him happy, though, and we were both raped repeatedly in our bedrooms. That was when I pleaded with my family to do whatever it took to get me out of there. Your father was not as lucky though. When his parents moved away he became trapped. And once it became known that he wasn’t going to be let out...

  ‘I hate to think what happened to him then. I fear that whatever it was may have changed him forever.’

  CHAPTER 30

  The first sign something was wrong was the sight of the frantic officer running back down the driveway to where he should have been sitting all nice and warm in his car. The panic in his movements suggested that the worst of all possible scenarios had already taken place. Ólafur and I looked at each other and urged the horses on with swift digs to their flanks. It didn’t take much to shift my imagination into overdrive and conjure up the horror that I thoroughly anticipated would await us inside. We had left him alone at a time when we should have been staying as close to each other as possible. My curiosity had forced me into addressing a past I knew nothing about but one I thought I needed to understand.

  But at what cost? We had left him alone and Daníel had come back to finish off his nemesis once and for all.

  I’ve often wondered how it was that we failed to hear the final thunderclap of my father’s life. Lost in conversation about his childhood, or what had passed for a childhood in the bedrooms and shower stalls of his surrogate home, we had both somehow missed it. As we raced back towards the house the noise had disappeared on the breeze. I had been so busy worrying about the demon who had been left loose in the countryside that we had forgotten about the one within.

  As I ran into the house stammering my father’s name I didn’t know what to expect. The worst, of course – it was the only thing I had left to expect. And it was what I got. The first thing I noticed as I dropped my gaze away from his face was that he had only one shoe on.

  Sitting in his favourite chair, he had curled his big toe around the trigger of his shotgun and fired it straight into his mouth. The story that he and Ólafur had started all those years ago in Höfn was finally over, really over.

  I could hear Ólafur gasp noisily behind me as he finally entered the living room. I wanted to tell him not to follow me inside, not to come anywhere near what was left of my father but it was too late by the time the thought had fallen from my head to my useless tongue.

  ‘Oh my dear Lord,’ he said quietly as the vision of Dad’s death almost took his voice away too.

  I turned away from my father slowly and tucked my head into Ólafur’s neck. I felt a lone tear fall from his face onto my ear. He held me like that until we could hear the ambulance arriving then he led me outside so they could inspect the terrible damage Dad had done to himself first-hand. It wasn’t a job you would wish upon anybody. Their poor pale faces as they carried him out of the house made me shudder at what I knew could only be an accurate reflection of my own private horror.

  It would be a week before we could bury Dad and my sisters. Ólafur asked if he could stay for the funerals. A request I was in no position to turn down, but after that, he was going to have to be on his way. Whatever had brought him to see us all the way from Höfn had to now be considered as finished. The end of the matter.

  I had some big decisions to make and a whole new life to adjust to. There was nothing that I could have done to prepare myself for being that alone. The speed at which it had occurred had left me struggling continually to adjust from one disaster to the next.

  Now that it was over, my very soul ached from the constant swivelling and realigning that my insides had been doing. I was dizzy from the pain and sick from the loss. My sisters and my father were going into the ground but it was I who wanted to lie down and never get up again.

  Grímur came to visit the two of us. I was angry with him for being right all along but not being smart enough to know who it had been and how to stop him. I was angry with a lot of things I shouldn’t have been angry with but if you’ve ever lost someone close to you, you’ll understand why that was.

  One of the things he asked me was what I was planning to do now. Now that everything had gone. Where was I going to live was what
I think he meant. I had already decided to move into the house that was already mine and look after the horses. They meant a great deal to me and were all I had left.

  Not only that, but in what could sometimes be a rather claustrophobic city I had gained the sort of notoriety that I would never be able to lose. No matter what I went on to do with my life I was always going to be ‘that girl’. Even if people didn’t know me I was going to think they were looking at me because they had seen me on the news and felt sorry for me. I couldn’t swim through all that pity; my legs would give out and I would drown. I just knew it.

  I tried to stick it out in the flat on Vesturgata for a few nights but the only memories that were left in the place were bad ones. I finally picked up Kristjana’s cello from a storage cupboard at Harpa. The girl who found it for me didn’t ask where its owner had been all this time. She already knew. It was those silent looks that I would never be able to deal with. Even when they were gone I would still imagine them everywhere.

  It had been Kristjana’s desire to get the instrument back that had led her into accepting a lift from Daníel and cost her her life. Once I had introduced them I made it so easy for him to wait for the right moment to bump into her again and offer her another lift somewhere. I was afraid the guilt would leave me bloated and useless, unable to function or to feel.

  The painting I had done of Daníel the day they met was another brutal reminder of how openly I had embraced him. That, along with everything else I didn’t need from my flat and Kristjana’s, I simply got rid of. The painting I left on the footpath outside the backpackers’ hostel across the street with a note on it saying that anyone who wanted it could have it. Eventually, it disappeared. Who knows, maybe to this day a student somewhere is still boring friends with the story of how they found the free painting of the naked man’s rear end in Iceland.

  Everything else I gave away to a charity for families still suffering from the economic crisis. The house already had everything I needed and I didn’t want three of everything. The only thing of any real note I hung on to was my beloved coffee maker.

  The night before the funeral I decided to wait for Ólafur to go to bed and then have a drink. I’d been feeling more numb than sad and I thought getting drunk might help me get upset. I wanted to get as much of it out of my system as I could before the service and having a sore head would give me something to focus on apart from the machinations of thanking people for showing up and the banal speeches about how they had all died too soon. I wasn’t even sure if that were true in one case. There had been plenty of times since his death that I wondered how much suffering could have been avoided if my father had put that gun into his mouth years ago. I might have even pulled the trigger for him myself and that way he could have died with both shoes on.

  In the cupboard where he hid his booze I found a nearly full bottle of vodka. I was a little surprised that he hadn’t finished it off before shooting himself. It somehow betrayed his otherwise uniformly selfish principles. As I retrieved the bottle, counting my lucky stars that a trip into Hafnarfjörður wasn’t required to get alcohol I noticed a pile of envelopes stashed away in a nice, neat little bundle.

  My curiosity forced me to pull them free from their hiding place for a closer examination. One of them had my name on it in my father’s handwriting. Some of them were in near perfect condition whereas others had been torn in two or badly crumpled up. Some had been ripped apart and disfigured almost beyond recognition. I started with the one addressed to me and removed its contents with more than a little trepidation. As soon as I had, I wished I’d never touched any of them.

  It was a plain sheet of white paper. The kind that I had seen before in Elín’s office and in Kristjana’s flat. This one also had a message on it. In fact it had two of them.

  Typed in black on it were the words:

  You have been weighed on the scales

  and found wanting.

  And in my father’s handwriting underneath it simply said:

  Ylfa, I have become too soiled for you to take back.

  Try as I might over the years to become someone good, someone better than I had once been, I failed.

  I am what I always was and could never be anything more.

  Always remember we can only be judged by the decisions we make. I have made many and nearly all of them have been bad. Some of them terrible.

  I truly wish I could have been someone else.

  As I opened the other envelopes I knew what their contents would all say but I opened them anyway. They were all there, all five of them I had seen before.

  The one Inga Björk had shown me the day I had gone to help my father not knowing that it was about to cost me everything:

  I had a dream that made me afraid.

  As I was lying in my bed,

  the images and visions that passed

  through my mind terrified me.

  The one I had found written in Jóhannes’s flat:

  Let him be drenched with the dew of heaven,

  and let him live with the animals.

  The one from Elín’s office wall:

  Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared

  and wrote on the plaster of the wall.

  And Kristjana’s flat:

  His face turned pale

  and he was so frightened

  that his knees knocked together

  and his legs gave way.

  And the one I’d read thinking that they might just be the last words I was ever meant to see:

  God has numbered the days of your reign

  and brought it to an end.

  I opened the bottle of vodka and drank from it until I thought I would throw up, and then I drank some more. As I sat on the floor crying like I had many times as a little girl and I’d hurt my knees playing outside, I was finally able to let go. His betrayal of us was complete. He had known what was going on the whole time. Daníel had been telling the truth.

  My father had not only known what was coming, he had even received prior notice of it in the mail. The letters I had witnessed him throwing across the living room in anger at Jóhannes had contained the blueprint to our downfall and he had just sat there and kept it all to himself. He had let it happen. All I wanted to do was bury him. And the next day, that was just what we did.

  CHAPTER 31

  We buried my father and both my sisters next to my mother in the plots Dad had reserved for us years ago in the Gufuneskirkjugarður Cemetery in Grafarvogur, just to the east of the city centre. The service was held at our local church in Hafnarfjörður, the Hafnarfjarðarkirkja. Despite the persistent and annoying rain, a lot more people than I had ever anticipated showed up to farewell my sisters. Everyone from Elín’s work came. Bjarki and Elias had closed their legal practice for the day so that even the receptionist could attend along with several others, who I assumed were clients. It was oddly comforting listening to their commiserations and sympathetic comments. Bjarki and Elias seemed to feel responsible for letting Daníel, or Baldvin as they had also known him by, into her life and thereby ending it. Somehow the guilt they felt helped me deal with my own. It was possible that it was simply too heavy a burden to carry all alone. I tried to explain to them that he would have got to her one way or another even if he hadn’t been taken on at their firm. I assured them that he had done a very good job of fooling everybody, me most of all.

  Kristjana’s friends from the orchestra showed up as well. Every single person she had performed with at Harpa, in fact, all fifty-six of them. She had only rehearsed with them for a relatively short time but had obviously made an impression. One by one they all came to see me and hugged me or told me how sorry they were for my loss. For someone who was supposed to be the most unsociable of the three of us she had somehow wound up knowing the most people. It heartened me to think that she had finally found her own little niche, even if it had been too late to have changed the outcome of her life. A handful of them were as socially awkward as she had been. Ma
ybe if she had lived she would have met someone of her own to settle down with and surprised us all even more.

  I knew the minister’s face from the day we buried our mother. It had been a very long time since any of us children had been to his church but he had once known both my parents very well. He looked truly appalled to be presiding over the burial of the rest of the family. I guess he couldn’t quite believe what had happened, either.

  The only unpleasant surprise of the day was the appearance of Grímur. When I first saw him, I found I was still very angry with him for not having taken me seriously when Elín first went missing and for threatening to arrest me for sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong. It was a feeling that I should have got over after everything I had been through, especially since I had been wrong about who had been responsible, but I hadn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t arrest Aron Steingrímsson on the spot when I had demanded that he do so, it was that he just hadn’t taken me seriously enough.

  I had known in my heart that something was really wrong and I had suffered the ignominy of being ignored for whatever reason. Maybe I had been acting a little irrationally, maybe I had just been too young for the old detective to take seriously, but I had been right. And that was still eating away at me. I remembered telling him when Elín first disappeared that I would never forgive him if anything ever happened to her, and I guess I hadn’t.

  I tried to put those feelings to one side as I made my way over to him once everyone else had begun to find their way out of the cemetery to the shelter of their cars. I wondered why he had bothered showing up at all.

  The fact that Daníel still hadn’t been captured wasn’t lost on me and I couldn’t help thinking that Grímur was probably just keeping an eye on anywhere he might show himself again. For him it would always be about the job and he probably felt as if he had failed somewhat on this case. The killer was still on the loose and that had to reflect poorly on him.