by Grant Nicol
There had been plenty of questions in the media since my escape about how something like this could have possibly happened. Questions that would probably never be satisfactorily answered. He waved somewhat hesitantly as I approached him, looking a little nervous, I thought.
‘Hello, Ylfa.’
‘Hello, Grímur.’ I really didn’t have anything else I wanted to say to him, or just couldn’t think of anything else.
‘That was some turnout.’ He looked as uncomfortable as I felt, which somehow heartened me.
‘Did you think Daníel would be stupid enough to show himself today?’ I had to ask the question.
‘We’re going to get him sooner or later, Ylfa. There’s just not enough places for someone that injured to hide. You’ll see.’
‘I can’t help thinking that most of this could have been avoided if something had been done sooner.’
I shielded my face from the rain as best I could and stared at him. If he didn’t feel responsible for their deaths, he should have. I was cold from the loss of my family, but not cold enough to not burn with the injustice of it all.
‘Maybe if we had known where to look in the first place we might have been able to do something. Your father didn’t do any of us any favours. He must have known what was going on at some point, or had his suspicions, anyway. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what was going to happen but he was the only one who could have put a stop to it all.’
I nodded. He was right, of course. I couldn’t tell him about all the notes I had found in the kitchen now. For some reason, I couldn’t do anything that might make him feel better about himself or what had happened.
‘Of all these people here today, I’ve only ever met a handful of them before. I don’t think we’re like normal people. Elín, for all her money and toys didn’t have a single friend in the world. That was what she was really running away from. Kristjana only met her friends in the orchestra recently and I don’t have anyone left. No one. The last two guys I saw, one wound up dead and the other tried to kill me.
‘Dad had one person he knew show up to his own funeral, and he hadn’t seen him in sixty years. It’s like we’ve been unable to get close to people or we just haven’t wanted to for one reason or another. Maybe there’s a danger in getting too close to others. Maybe we knew that all along. The closer they get, the more damage they can do, right?’
The look on Grímur’s face made me smile but I’m sure it came out as more of a grimace. He seemed lost for words and I wanted to get in out of the cold and away from all those people. I had never been close to a single one of them and I desperately wanted to be alone more than ever before. I left him to think about exactly what I had been left to deal with on my own and headed back to the car. Ólafur followed me in silence as we made our way through the drizzle and back to what was left of our lives.
CHAPTER 32
After the funeral I decided to keep on drinking, once I had gotten rid of Ólafur, that is. I told him I needed to have the place back to myself and that he was to make tracks as soon as possible back to Höfn. We barely said a word to each other on the way home. He was coming back to the house only to pick up his things and change into something more comfortable for the long trip home.
As we were making our goodbyes and I was assuring him over and over again that I would be all right on my own, he finally got around to what he had obviously wanted to say all along. He held my hands and took on an earnest tone.
‘I know you must be very confused right now, Ylfa. It’s only natural. You’ve had everyone who ever mattered taken away from you and you need to make some sort of sense of what has happened. I can’t pretend to know what went on between this man and your father but you have to try to remember him the way he was with you girls when you were growing up. I knew him before whatever happened to him happened and he was a lovely boy, just like any other child of our age.
‘Whoever he became, he was still your father and he brought you up to be the woman you are today. Try to remember that. He may have been far from perfect, but from what I’ve seen, he tried to do his best for you.’
I wanted to hit him and tell him to get out of my house and out of my life. I had been trying hard to keep it together all day and up until that point, I had succeeded. As I started to cry, he held me tight and comforted me the way Dad once would have.
I wanted to do what he had told me to do more than anything in the world. I wanted to have a father to remember, not a monster. But it was so very hard. In order to achieve that I would have to forgive him, and I wasn’t sure I could do that. Not now, and probably not ever.
I pulled away slightly from Ólafur’s awkward embrace and tried to regain my composure. It was a struggle at first but what I had to say, I really had to say. I hadn’t been privy to any of the conversations between Dad and Ólafur since his unexpected arrival from the southeast but I couldn’t have him going home with the picture in his head of the children they had once been and nothing else. He had to hear what I had heard; it was time to share that weight with another.
I told him what Daníel had told me as he had been preparing to kill me. I told him about the house he had grown up in with my father and what Daníel, the child, had suffered at his hands. I told him about the suffering that Daníel’s mother, Lauga had endured.
I told him about the tortured existence that she had endured in that house somewhere near Vík and of the horrible end that she had met.
As I was letting Daníel’s story flow out of me for the first time, it struck me why he had taken the time to tell me. If he had wanted to take my life just as he had taken the lives of my sisters, there is no question that I would already have died. It struck me that maybe he had wanted nothing more than for his story to live on, and for someone to take him seriously. He had gone to great lengths to get our attention and once he had me as a captive audience, it had been imperative for him to pass on what he had been through to another soul. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I had been meant to get away from him, just for this moment.
To do a job he never would have been able to. To somehow take his place in this world as he was about to pass on to wherever it was that people like him went.
Ólafur listened in complete silence, the look of disbelief obvious on his old, tired face. When I was finished he hugged me again and told me that it would be better if I didn’t listen to the advice of old fools any more.
‘I was in the hands of one monster but all he wanted me to know was that I had been living with another one my whole life. He was a lie, everything he built here was just so that no one would ever know who he really was.
‘We paid for this place, us girls. Elín and Kristjana paid with their lives and now I get to think about what he did every day now that they’re gone.’
Ólafur kissed me on the forehead, picked up his little travel bag and made his way out to his car. I had finally got my wish. I was alone. So very, very alone.
At first the drinking was just to get to sleep when I felt there was no other way but then after a few days it was just to have a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Not long after that I couldn’t even look myself in the mirror without a few drinks first. And even then, I didn’t much like what I saw.
The horses found the new smell coming off me slightly off-putting too. Leppatuska even threw me one afternoon when I was feeling especially the worse for wear. She had never thrown me from the saddle before in all the time I’d been riding her but something had caused her to fear her rider and I blamed the drink.
It was as I was sitting on the cold tightly packed soil of the riding trail that a couple of things came to me through my newly acquired fog. One: I was going to have to stop drinking, and soon.
Even I was having trouble recognising myself so it was no surprise that the horses didn’t know me any more. And two: I was sure that we had only ever had four horses.
As Leppatuska ignored my obvious discomfort and helped herself to a nibble of something o
r other on the side of the trail I found myself with time to think.
Since Dad’s death I’d had plenty of time to go over all the things I could remember him telling me, trying to pick the lies from the half-truths, as it were. He had managed to keep from lying to us by simply not telling us very much about himself. Whether it was our mother or us children, he had always kept himself to himself. A shroud of secrecy had hung over his past like a mist until we had all learned not to bother him any more. There was one thing he had said to me, however, that now stood out as nothing but a lie. We had only ever had four horses.
The day we buried our mare, Magga, he had told me of the existence of a fifth horse, which I now knew beyond any doubt to be a lie. It’s always the little things that eventually catch you out. When we had been digging her grave and I’d hit something with my spade it had definitely been bone. It had, however, definitely not been a horse as Dad had said at the time.
As soon as I made a move for Leppatuska she reared away from me. It was clear that she’d had enough and I was going to have to wait to win her over again. She knew her way home, as did I, so I left her grazing on moss and lichen and set off on foot back to the house. I had some digging to do.
Even though the recent heavy rain had done much to loosen the ground again it took much longer than I expected. My ordeal in Hella and my recent drinking had left me in poor shape and I had to keep stopping every few minutes to catch my breath. On top of that I simply was terrified of what I might unearth. Eventually, though, I managed to get the hole down to roughly where we had buried Magga but I veered off to the side much as I had the first time around only this time on purpose. Dad had marked the grave well with flowers and a neat outline of stones so I soon found myself once again in the right spot.
This time, though, I knew what I was looking for. Or rather who. The connection my spade finally made with something solid made me cringe all the way down to my boots and I suddenly found myself wanting a drink, badly. A quick dash back to the house to the extensive selection of bottles I had recently acquired from three different outlets of Vínbúðin across the city and I had what I wanted. I had been visiting different shops each time I went out so as to not appear like a hopeless alcoholic but at the end of the day the only person I had managed to fool was myself.
I sat at the top of the hole I had just dug sipping from a bottle of aniseed-flavoured Opal and waited for the thick sticky drink to do its job and warm me up. It didn’t take long; it never does with that stuff.
I scraped away what soil I could from the exposed piece of bone I had unearthed with the spade and then got down on my hands and knees and went about it with my hands.
Inch by inch the shape revealed itself; there could be no mistaking what it was this time around. The blackened eye sockets filled with dark volcanic soil stared up at me accusingly as though I had rudely interrupted a very private moment and that was exactly what I had done. I had to be sure it was who I thought it was so I dug further down the skeleton to where the legs had to be. As I uncovered the feet I knew I was right. One foot had been badly damaged by something that had passed right through it, snapping several bones on its way.
Once again just using my fingers, I worked my way up the leg until I found the other break. The tibia had also been fractured in what must have been a violent twisting motion. She would have been completely unable to move once her leg had been broken like that. Once again Daníel had been true to his word. Lauga had perished in exactly the fashion he had described to me. I wondered how many times she had been buried and dug up again until she’d finally come to rest where she was now.
I leaned back on the mound of dirt I’d created and took another drink. I was exhausted but I wasn’t quite done yet. I pulled myself up and made my way back to the house.
I felt cold and empty even though I had the warm drink inside me. I stood in the kitchen staring at the phone and the pile of letters I’d found in the cupboard. I drank from the bottle in my hand and stared long and hard at the phone. I drank from the bottle in my hand and stared long and hard at the letters. I repeated the process over and over again until I had made up my mind.
The wind blew my hair across my eyes as I let go of the small bundle and watched the letters fall into the grave along with Magga and Lauga. Rain had begun to fall, casually at first but then hastening in its need to hit the ground. In spite of its freezing drops I took my time refilling the hole. There would be plenty of time to rest soon. For now it was enough that the cycle my father had got himself and those around him trapped in was broken.
When I was done I walked slowly back to the house with the empty bottle in my hand. It would be the last time I ever drank.
CHAPTER 33
Stefán Jón’s parents finally made their way to Reykjavík from the small town in the north of the country where he had been born. They were simple people who had never understood their son’s need to come to the big city to find his way in life. They were remarkably unsurprised at what had come to pass, having always seen the place as an ending and not, as he did, as a beginning.
The service was attended by a large number of people who they had never known and quite possibly never wanted to meet. I think they found the whole experience rather unpleasant. The harder everyone tried to make them feel as if they were among friends, the more they realised they weren’t. They were far from home and surrounded by strangers, who had made a friend of their son only to lose him in a way none of them would ever fully understand. If anyone had ever been in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was Stefán Jón Tryggvason. He had just been trying to help and it had cost him his life.
His parents insisted on taking his body back to Húsavík with them. They wanted their son to go home. They had always wanted him to go home, just not that way. At least now he would be where they had felt all along that he belonged. They told me that Reykjavík had ruined their lives and that they would never return and I couldn’t blame them.
The next day I got a letter in the post that almost made me take to the bottle again. The message inside was simple and all too familiar. The kind I had hoped I would never set eyes on ever again.
I, Daníel, was deeply troubled by my thoughts,
and my face turned pale, but I kept the matter to myself.
There was always going to be the possibility that he would come back to kill me but I truly felt that if he had wanted to and had been able to, then he would have done so already. I felt that in some strange way he hadn’t really wanted to kill me in that hut. I have no doubt that he was planning to do just that but I also feel now that he may have just been happy for the truth to leave with me that day. Then again, I might just have been incredibly lucky to get out alive and been given a second chance to start all over again.
Two days later Grímur rang and told me that Daníel’s body had been found by some children playing in an abandoned house not far from the police station. How he had made it back this far he couldn’t quite understand. Daníel had died from complications from the wound I had given him that had never been treated properly. He died propped up against a wall in a decrepit house on a cold floor with an empty belly and with tears staining his cheeks. It was probably remarkably similar to the way he had started his life and it wasn’t hard to imagine that at some point as a child, my father had found himself in a very similar state. Cold, scared and alone.
I had always thought life to be neither overly joyous nor unnecessarily cruel. Once upon a time, that was.
Mostly, it resembles a dimly lit trail down which we are all expected to struggle, together, yet each unmistakeably on their own. At first we carefully scan the rocky path ahead for its unpredictable obstacles, both imaginary and real.
Later, the distant hilltops are scoured with a mixture of great purpose and childlike fascination in the hope of catching a glimpse of that fabled happiness we had been promised but whose existence we had never fully believed in.
Further along the trail, our attention becom
es more and more frequently caught by that which we have already passed until finally we trip and then fall upon the one last stone we have failed to kick from under our feet. Our mutual destination, our most common of bonds. The beacon we had sought and then followed from the day of our birth until the end of our days, as it falls from guiding star to darkened grave.
A lot of what I’ve done with my life has been at the expense of those around me. Not deliberately, perhaps, but done in the most selfish of manners nonetheless. Those who were meant to be closest to me I have constantly pushed away and given the briefest of considerations to. Doing so has made my troubles appear easier to deal with but it has made me seem elusive, insincere and uncaring to many. Of that I am now sure. I am, after all my father’s daughter.
The truth of the matter is that it is not just an appearance of insincerity that has grown around me, it is the real thing. I have learned not to care genuinely for anyone.
It has taken the worst of times to befall me for that to change, and that is my tragedy.
And yet, it is my hope.
If there is any chance whatsoever of me finding any kind of forgiveness then it must come now in the choices I make from here on in, for they will stay with me for the rest of my days.
I am not a good person, but I can still be one.
I had known all along that what Elín once told me about our father was true. He did things to me too when I was a little girl that made me sick inside. Why I didn’t say anything to her I can’t tell you even now because I just don’t know. I could have made her feel better. I could have helped her work through it, but I didn’t. I let her suffer the same way that I had suffered for all these years and told myself that if I could hack it, then so could she.
I wouldn’t have been able to save her but I just might have made her feel better. The problem was that it would have made me feel worse and that was something I wasn’t going to allow.
