by Alda Grand
“I feel the same, why don't you get a table over there and we get something to eat. I see a ticket desk over in the corner, I’ll go and get everything arranged for Vik,” Sara said. She squeezed Lana's shoulder and said, “We are going to make it.”
At the back of the bus terminal was a large cafeteria and Lana wandered around looking at what kind of things they had for sale. A row of fridges sold sandwiches of cold smoked lamb and peas, Icelandic soft drinks with an array of brightly coloured labels, and packets of something called hardfisker. It looked like dried strips of pale jerky. Lana lifted up a packet and sniffed it, her nose was filled with the pungent aroma of dried fish and the salt of the sea. A small label in english said it was Icelandic cod dried in the traditional outdoors method. At the back of the cafeteria was a counter serving hot food. Above it was a row of pictures displaying what was available, Lana scanned across them. There was the usual fare of pizza, burgers and fries, fish and then at the last picture her stomach did a little queasy flip. The last meal was the full head of a sheep slit down the middle. The tongue lolled out onto the plate and was accompanied by mashed potatoes and a scoop of something yellow that Lana wasn’t sure of.
The man behind the counter saw her lingering on the last picture and said, “Thats an Icelandic traditional dish. Sheep head with potatoes, turnips and peas. You can have it with or without the eyeball. Personally I’d recommend it with the eyes, very juicy and tasty,” he said in perfect english.
Lana’s stomach lurched again and she tried to force a smile onto her face. “I don't think I could face something like that after a long flight. Maybe another time?”
“Sure thing. Its worth a try. Are you here on holiday?” the man asked. He was tall and broadly built with short cropped hair. His eyes were slate grey and friendly.
“Yeah, I’m with a friend. We are here for a few weeks to see the sights. We are thinking of going to Vik,” She said and immediately regretted saying it that as soon as the words escaped her lips.
The young man smiled broadly and started writing something on a notebook attached by a piece of twine to the counter. He ripped off a page and handed it to her. “My parents run a guesthouse in Vik. Its very nice, mention my name and they will give you a discount. Im Gisli by the way.” He reached over the counter and Lana took his hand and shook it. “I grew up in Vik. Its a beautiful place this time of year. The birds are nesting in the cliffs behind the village, the lupin is in bloom and herds of sheep have come down from the mountains to graze. If you cant tell I love my home town,” he said as his cheeks reddened a little.
“Im looking forward to it. Do you have any other recommendations about the place?” Lana asked.
“Will you be there three weeks from now? There is a fisherman's festival on for a long weekend. There will be outdoor games, barbecues, fishing trips and on the Saturday night they will hold a ball. Everyone from the town will be there as well as people from the surrounding farms. Im going to be returning home for the festival, I never miss it.”
“Sounds pretty cool. We will have to check it out. Nice meeting you Gisli,” Lana said more abruptly than she had wanted to sound. She ordered food for herself and Gisli told her he would bring it over when ready. Lana sat at a table with her back to the wall and a clear view of the bus terminal. Groups of people with backpacks weighed down with camping gear milled about, children dodged in and out of the crowds of adults and yelped as they chased each other. A bunch of young men and women dressed in black t-shirts and combat trousers, long hair and pale faces queued at a ticket desk laughing and waving to friends on the other side of the ticket hall. Sara slid into the high backed booth beside Lana and pushed two tickets across the table to her.
“We leave in a little over an hour and get to Vik in around 4 hours,” Sara said. “The woman at the ticket desk phoned ahead and said there are rooms available at both of the guesthouses in town. I think we can relax a little now,” Sara said looking directly into Lana eyes.
“I hope so. I feel like I am going to jump out of my skin. I keep expecting Gus to pop up from some unexpected place.”
“We made it. No one knows we are here and they have no way of finding out. We can start to relax a little, I think we are overthinking Gus’s reach, he's a low life pimp and nothing more,” Sara said in her most reassuring voice. Two bright blue tray were placed on the the table by Gisli.
“Here you go ladies. Enjoy your trip and don't forget to drop my name at the guesthouse,” he said.
“Aren't you going to introduce me to your new friend,” Sara practically purred. That was something that would sometimes annoy Lana when they were out together in a group, when it came to men Sara always had to be the centre of attention. She had a fiercely competitive streak when it came to the currency of male attention and she could get bitchy if she thought a woman she deemed lesser then her was soaking up some of it. Luckily she never turned her mean side towards Lana as she would not put up with that kind needy competition.
“This is Gisli and his parents run a guesthouse in Vik,” Lana said.
Sara stood up and Gisli stuck his hand out to be shook. Lana knew straight away that Sara was about to lay her patented soft touch on him straight away. Gisli was the kind of guy that Sara usually went for, broad and well muscled. They shook hands and with her left hand she ran her fingers across the back of his hand quickly and with very little pressure. It usually left the guy with a half smile and a bewildered look on his face as his body had registered the soft stroke of her fingers but it hadn't caught up with his brain yet. The unexpected nature of it could really throw some guys. It was like a magic trick, if you see it too many times it loses its ability to wow and Lana had seen Sara employ it time and again to disarm a man. Sara definitely saw dating as a game and men as something that needed to be somehow tamed or civilised by a womans touch. Lana felt a lot differently, she guarded her heart and pulled back anytime she found herself growing close to someone. Since she had been making money on the side as an escort she had lost all interest in finding someone to love and she knew that deep down it was because she wouldn't want anyone to find out the secret life she was leading.
Like many a man before him Gisli barely registered the slight stroke of Sara's fingers across the back of his hand and he had the kind of reaction Lana had seen before, he began to blush.
“Nice to meet you,” he said clearly disarmed.
“They don’t make men like you were I come from,” Sara said half teasingly. His face reddened even further.
Gisli laughed and said, “Hopefully I see both of you at the summer ball?” and started to walk away before either could answer.
“Oh you’ll see us again,” Sara said and turned to the burger and fries on the table in front of her, “Teasing the locals is hungry work,” she said as she stuffed a bunch of fries into her mouth.
This was the first time in what felt like forever that the old Sara was present and it made Lana happy. If Sara was relaxing a little maybe they were truly safe. Lana had meet Sara for the first time when they got assigned to the same room. Her first impressions of her were not good. Before she saw her she heard Sara's perpetually out of tune singing voice gamely trying to keep up with a cheesy ballad from the eighties blaring out from her laptop. When Lana stepped into her new dorm room it was as if a small makeup display had exploded and sent coloured shrapnel everywhere. Brushes, tubes, bags, bottles, jars, strips, and a multitude of instruments to pluck, tweeze and curl lay not only on Sara's bed but also on Lana's side of the room. They hadn't even started living together and already Lana wanted to turn around and exit stage left. Singing badly she could deal with, kinda, mess was another story and especially mess that infringed on her space.
Lana was an only child and the thought of sharing a room with someone had been making her nervous and panicky ever since she got the letter about the shared dorm room, she never for one second had thought about sharing and for some maybe hopeful reason had thought she would be in a room
on her own. Lana stood in the doorway and cleared her throat. Sara wheeled around in mid note and dropped a felt bag of lipsticks on the floor. What looked like a hundred tubes of various colours skittered and spun on the floor, some spinning out into the corridor and others flying under the dusty beds.
For a brief second Sara looked annoyed and then she smiled widely and threw her arms wide saying, “Are you my new roomy?”
Lana nodded and stood in her spot, she was usually very reserved in first meetings. Sara was having none of it and wrapped her arms around her and squealed loudly, “We are going to be best friends.”
If Lana was to believe her on the strength of her enthusiasm well then it would look like they would be true and fast friends. Like so many things with Sara she was right, and after only a few days together Lana felt like she had the sister that she never got to have. Those first few months of college passed by in such a whirl of intoxicating and heady combinations of new people, new experiences and life slowly opening up for Lana. They were inseparable and shared everything. Before she had meet Sara, Lana had thought that friendship with another girl would be hard, Sara destroyed that assumption. Everything with Sara was easy, she was a great listener, knew the coolest people, always had the low down on where the best parties were and usually had a string of outrageous stories to titillate Lana.
During high school Lana had no female friends of any substance, she was bookish and a loner, her single child upbringing didn't help her integrate with the other kids who seemed to sniff out instinctively that she was different and weird. It wasn't until her final year and when she started to blossom that people started to take notice, before she was a gawky and scrawny teen who blended into the background of any event. Almost overnight she started to develop curves and a face that was once hidden by an angular frame started to come into sharp relief. Lana and the people around noticed that she while she was not knock out beautiful she was definitely attractive. A year before the prom she would of told herself that not a single boy would of asked her out. In her final year she had eight requests and all from guys who had barely said one word to her in all the time they had spent in school together.
“He was cute,” Sara said pulling Lana out of her daydream, “These viking guys are hot. I saw a few of them up at the ticket desk, square jawed, thick arms that looked like they could fell lumber in one swing of their mighty ax. I think I’m in heaven. If the burger flipper is as hot as your new friend Gisli is imagine what the real catches are like.”
“You seem to be getting back to normal, its good to see. I feel like we have both been under a cloud for too long,” Lana said unwrapping her burger from the grease spotted paper.
“My heart feels like it has been hammering along at overdrive for a month now. I need to blow off some steam or I’ll go crazy. I think we are in the clear. Maybe its the blue skies and the smoking hot men fooling me, but I really do think we are safe now. Gus has the only copy of the video and it would be a waste of time and money for him to hunt us,” she stopped mid sentence and stared at Lana. “Please tell me he has the only copy and has no reason to come looking for us, please tell me that.”
Sara had a canny ability to tell when Lana wasn't being wholly truthful and now was one of those times. “I made copies and uploaded them to my cloud storage for safety,” Lana said without looking at Sara.
Sara slumped down in her seat and a low moan escaped from her, she pushed a few cooling fries around on her plate and avoided eye contact with Lana.
“Nobody knows about the copies. I did it for insurance, I was scared after watching the video I didn't want to hand over the only copy to someone that wouldn't have our best interests at heart. We never should of trusted Gus, we should of went straight to the cops,” Lana said.
“Go to the cops? We would of been thrown in jail too, our names splashed all over the news that we are both high class hookers. Do you really want that getting out and hanging around you like a bad stink for the rest of your life? You should of destroyed all the copies, you might of put us in even more danger,” Sara said her voice rising in anger.
“Keep your voice down,” Lana said angrily through clenched teeth. “They have no way of knowing I made a copy, we continue with our plan and hide out for a few weeks before we make our next move. We have enough cash to keep us going for a few months,” she said reaching across the table for Sara's hand, “We need to stay strong, we only have each other now. Please forgive me, I admit it was a mistake making a copy.”
Sara took her hand and gave it a weak squeeze and said, “I’m sorry for flipping out on you. I feel like I’m going to burst out of my skin. Don't do anything rash with the copies, maybe we can use them at some point.”
“Blackmail?” Lana asked.
“I don’t know. All I do know is that the video is the only thing we currently have that might get us out of this mess. Maybe we can still leak it some how. I don't know yet whats the best thing to do for us,” She said squeezing Lana's hand in reassurance, “We will get through this together.”
Chapter 9
It took the bus less than ten minutes to clear the limits of Reykjavik city. The road wound uphill through an ancient lava field similar to the one surrounding the airport. The city sat on a wide open bay and across this shimmering deep blue expanse snow capped mountains sat. The sky above was pale blue with wisps of pulled apart cotton dotting the sky. The road snaked into a high mountain pass and in the distance the thin spidery cables of a chair lift rose from the base of the mountain to a platform high above. The winter snows were all but gone from the face of the mountain save for a few grey white patches still clinging to the underside of large boulders that never felt any direct sunlight.
Sara dozed with her head on Lana's shoulder who looked out at the changing landscape as Reykjavik faded farther and farther into the distance. Lana imagined how inhospitable this landscape must of been hundreds of years ago. The endless fields of jagged volcanic rock making any kind of progress slow and dangerous. Hardly anything grew in the thin layer of sandy volcanic soil. The only thing that seemed to be able to eke out some life were the patches of iridescent green mosses that clung to the undersides of some of the larger boulders. Lana marvelled at what life must of been like in a land shaped by the catastrophic and unstoppable power of a volcano. The landscape was unchanging as the bus accelerated up a steep hill and then they crested and the view opened up before her. The road ahead curved steeply down into a wide open area of fertile land. The grey sea banded the land on the right and high mountains stood in silent guard on the left. Houses dotted this wide open expanse and Lana could see spirals of steam rise up from the ground in several spots.
Lana gripped the arm of her chair as the bus took the tightly curved road that eventually lead to the bottom of the wide open valley below. In her mind she imagined the brakes on the bus failing and the bus careening through the barrier like it was made of paper and then falling,falling,falling to the fields below. Every time the bus banked into a turn she thought this is it, this is the end. Lana let out a relieved sigh when the road straightened out and they finally reached the bottom of the steep slope. The jagged and dangerous looking lava rocks were now replaced by wide open fields of swaying grass, bales of hay in huge cylindrical rolls drying in the sun and herds of sheep grazing near the sea. The bus passed row upon row of greenhouses which glittered in the sun like oversized jewels. Lana saw colourful flowers, tomatoes and bright red and green peppers as they sped past. The bus passed through a tiny town whose centre had a huge display of flowers arranged by the side of the road into the towns crest of arms.
The scenery began to blur as Lana's eyelids began to slowly close. The bus jerked and Lana awoke with a jump which also roused Sara. The bus driver called out, “We are at Vik, the bus will stop for ten minutes if anyone wants to get out to stretch their legs.” He pressed a lever and the side and front door of the bus slid back on hydraulic hinges. The smell of salty sea air wafted into the bus.
“Its good to be out in some fresh air,” Sara said once they got off the bus. She pointed at a small street on a tourist map she had picked up at the bus station and said, “The guesthouses are down that way.”
Directly across the road was a campsite that was half filled with tents and a few bright white camper vans. A group of men kicked a football between them as they hooted and hollered noisily. Kids swung on a set of bright orange swings and the smell of barbecuing meat was carried on the wind. The camp site was backed by rocky cliffs dotted with white from the nesting birds.
Lana and Sara headed towards the village. A single main road lead towards the tight cluster of brightly painted houses of red and blue that made up the centre. A grassy hill towered over the village and perched atop it was a wooden church painted bright white. A large black raven sat perched atop the pointed steeple of the bell tower, observing the world about it. They found the guesthouse easily enough and within a few minutes the polish man with one slightly lazy eye had checked them in and given them a room key. Their room was on the top floor in a converted attic space and was designed in the simple nordic style of exposed wooden beams, simple furniture and clean lines. The sloping roof was studded with three large windows that slid open to views across the town and out to the sea.
“Wow this place is beautiful,” Lana said sliding a window open and breathing in great lungfuls of the bracing sea air.
