Rupture

by Ragnar Jónasson

  ‘And how much is that price?’ Anna asked.

  ‘It’ll pay for itself soon enough, just you see,’ he said, avoiding the question. ‘I’ve figured it all out. There’s so much demand for Golden Circle tours, it’ll be an absolute gold mine,’ he added with a sheepish smile.

  ‘Hadn’t we talked about taking it easy?’ Anna had asked, and the conversation dried up.

  They continued their meal in silence. But Ísrún knew that the argument must have flared up once she had gone.

  Now, two months later, Anna had gone. Not only had she sold the publishing business and moved out of the family home, she had left the country and returned to the Faroes, where she was living in a large house owned by one of her sisters. Orri was devastated. He was doing his best to make his travel business work out, but Ísrún was concerned that he had stretched himself too far. With Anna gone, he was half the man he should have been; the energy seemed to have been sucked out of him.

  It had been Ísrún’s idea to use a break between her shifts on the news desk to fly to the Faroe Islands to try and persuade her mother to return to Iceland. The idea didn’t make a lot of sense, but, these days, Ísrún was prone to making rash decisions. She was trying to focus on anything other than her inherited disease. A year and a half had passed since she had first sought medical advice about the possibility that she could be suffering from the same inherited condition that had caused her grandmother’s death many years before, a disease that could result in dangerous tumours forming. Her suspicion had been true; she had received the worrying diagnosis, but the tumour they had found was fortunately benign. The doctor had left her in no doubt, however, that the illness could progress in a more serious direction. He told her to be optimistic, though, which she had tried to be. She did her best to live life as if nothing had happened, and told nobody about her illness, not even her parents. It had crossed her mind, just for a moment, to tell her mother about it – maybe as a way of bringing her back to Iceland. But she quickly dismissed the idea, deciding it would be unfair to all concerned. On the other hand, the end of her parents’ marriage was adding to the pressure she was already under at work. The doctor had advised her to take regular exercise, to eat healthily and to avoid stress. He had effectively advised her to abandon journalism.

  ‘You may as well just kill me right away,’ she had told him carelessly, immediately regretting slipping into gallows humour.

  The truth was that she revelled in the speed and excitement of the newsroom. She had worked in television news since her student years, with some breaks in between, and loved it. She’d made some good friends among her colleagues, although there were some who seemed not to wish her well. In fact, she was certain that one of her colleagues, Ívar, was systematically plotting to get rid of her. As he was the regular desk editor, he was also her boss most days, and it was generally up to him to decide what assignments came her way. For a long time he’d not given her anything challenging, but this had all changed the previous summer. She had been given an award for her report on people-trafficking in Iceland, and had instantly become a favourite with the news editor, María, and this had given her an edge over Ívar. From that point on he had been forced to be civil to Ísrún, most likely because he always went out of his way not to antagonise María, whose job, Ísrún was certain, he was after, and which she had her own eye on. Despite all this, it was obvious to everyone that he was being pleasant to Ísrún only through gritted teeth.

  The trip to the Faroe Islands had turned out to be thoroughly unsatisfactory. Her mother was as stubborn as a whole team of mules – just as Ísrún herself could be – and was clearly determined to stay there, for the time being at least. Ísrún half regretted the cost of the flight and the time she had spent on the trip, but she knew now that she ought to spend more time on the islands. Her command of Faroese was almost non-existent, and she had given herself little time to get to know the place or its people, or to maintain contact with her relatives there, all of which was something that made her feel a deep sense of guilt.

  ‘Your father and I just don’t have anything in common any more, my love,’ Anna had said to Ísrún. ‘Not at the moment, anyway. Let’s see.’

  Then came the question Ísrún had expected: ‘Did he send you?’

  ‘No, of course not. Can’t I come and see you on my own initiative?’

  ‘I’m sorry … of course, my love,’ Anna had replied in a subdued tone.

  ‘He’s not doing well,’ Ísrún had said.

  ‘I warned him, but he’ll have to deal with it himself. We should be well off enough to retire. But this travel business nonsense of his is far too expensive.’

  ‘You’re not letting some tourists ruin a marriage that has lasted thirty years, are you?’

  ‘It’s not that simple. Every little thing was grating on my nerves, and I’m sure he felt the same about me. He had no interests other than work and those damned buses. I wanted to live a little, travel, work in the garden, go and see concerts and plays. But he had no interest in anything like that. I couldn’t even read in bed as every light had to be switched off when he wanted to go to sleep. You know, Ísrún, you can build up a lot of fatigue in the course of a relationship as long as ours. It’s not always easy. You’ll find that out for yourself one day,’ Anna had replied, making a veiled reference to Ísrún’s single status.

  Her mother was right – a few years had passed since Ísrún had last been in a serious relationship. Her illness had played a large part in this, as did the difficulty she had in coming to terms with another horrific experience she’d had a while back. It all meant she had little interest in, let alone energy for, searching out a new man.

  The flight home from the Faroe Islands went perfectly and Ísrún hurried straight from the airport to work, arriving just in time for her shift.

  ‘Ísrún!’ Ívar yelled as she came through the door, his eyes on the clock.

  She went over to him, doing her utmost to appear decisive and confident. Ívar hadn’t won any awards; she knew it, and he knew it. And, what was more, María, the news editor, knew it as well.

  She stared at him without saying a word.

  ‘You’re on shift the next few days, aren’t you?’ he asked after a short, awkward silence.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘Can you keep track of this thing up in Siglufjördur? The killer virus? You were there last summer, weren’t you?’

  ‘No problem,’ she said, without cracking a smile.

  She went to her desk, switched on her computer and looked up the number for the Siglufjördur police. She remembered her time in the little town very well. Horrible events from her past had brought her there, but the place had in some ways inspired her to face the future head on. Now the people there had some serious dangers of their own challenging them, and she certainly hoped that she wouldn’t need to go back there while the virus remained uncontained.

  6

  Tómas arrived at seven in the morning to relieve Ari Thór. The news that the nurse’s condition had deteriorated had not long broken; she’d died before she could be taken to intensive care in Reykjavík.

  Soon after Tómas arrived for his shift, he went onto a hastily arranged conference call with the hospital managers, a specialist in infectious diseases and the Civil Defence Authority. All face-to-face meetings had, naturally, been suspended. Nobody wanted to be the next victim.

  Tómas did his best to appear unflappable during the call, trying to give the impression that duty came first and that his own health was a lower priority, although that wasn’t the way he really felt. He was petrified by the thought of this wretched infection and as far as possible wanted to avoid going anywhere.

  Tómas was given the task of producing a press release about the nurse’s death. It seemed that the whole country had its eyes on the situation in Siglufjördur, watching from a safe distance. It was as if Siglufjördur and its people had become laboratory rats – locked away securely in a glass
cage that nobody was even remotely tempted to open. The press release was a mere formality as the news had already spread rapidly and the nurse’s death had been announced on radio long before Tómas had even put pen to paper to compose his statement. In the end his purpose was more to placate the townspeople and convince the rest of the country that the infection had been contained rather than to announce the nurse’s death.

  Physically Tómas himself was in fine condition. The infection had come nowhere near him. But he was tired. He and Ari Thór were taking alternate shifts as there had to be someone on call at the station at any time, day or night. Applications had been invited for the post of Siglufjördur’s third police officer, but, under the current circumstances, the process had come to a standstill. Fortunately, there was an old camp bed at the station, so whoever was on the night shift could at least get some rest.

  On the one hand Tómas truly wished that his wife was here to help him through this. On the other, he was, of course, glad that she was in Reykjavík, studying art history, a safe distance from the virus – for the time being at least.

  Tómas had recently returned to Siglufjördur from a three-month sabbatical in the capital. His wife was living in a small apartment not far from the University of Iceland, and had seemed to have made herself comfortable there. It was at her suggestion that Tómas had moved south for a while to be with her. If he liked it, she said, they could try to sell their large house in Siglufjördur and buy an apartment in the city. He hadn’t said yes right away, but had finally agreed to spend some time there with her. He missed her badly and had become tired of microwaved dinners.

  It had been evening when he knocked at her door after the long drive south. She was expecting him, but, all the same, the place was packed with people; friends from university, she said – two men and a girl, all much younger than Tómas, sitting on a worn blue sofa in front of a coffee table that had seen better days. Tómas came in and awkwardly introduced himself. There were glasses of red wine on the table, a half-full bottle and another that had already been emptied.

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ his wife asked.

  He shook his head: ‘I need to get some sleep after the trip,’ he said.

  He expected her to send her guests away as soon as she could, but that wasn’t what happened; they sat and chatted until it was past two in the morning. Tómas lay and waited in the narrow bed in the apartment’s little bedroom, like a prisoner in a tiny cell. The bed was only just big enough for one person, and it transpired that she intended to let him have it while she slept on the sofa. They could go and buy a bed if he decided to stay longer than the agreed three months. Of course, he offered to swap, and take the sofa himself.

  It’ll take a while for both of us to adjust, he decided. Nothing changed, however. Her friends continued to call at any time of the day, and her life seemed to revolve around lectures and exams, and staying up far into the night. For his part, Tómas found it impossible to connect with her fellow students, although he had to admit that he didn’t put a great deal of effort into trying. Some evenings she spent studying in the library while he stayed on his own in the apartment. At the end of the three months, he’d completely failed to adjust to the rhythm of her lifestyle and still couldn’t understand how someone who was only a year or two younger than him could live in such a chaotic fashion.

  Returning home from his stay in Reykjavík, he’d at least been sure of one thing: she hadn’t met anyone else. Instead – and almost as bad – he’d seen that she had fallen in love with her new life. As he approached the little town between the mountains, he was forced to recognise what other people – their friends and acquaintances – had undoubtedly been aware of for a while: their relationship was close to having run its course.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse – if there was such a thing as a good time to part company from your childhood sweetheart; Tómas was still struggling to come to terms with the death of his colleague, who had taken his own life the previous summer.

  To make things worse, Ari Thór had suffered a knife injury the very same evening their colleague had died. Fortunately, the sharp steak knife had not done any serious damage, although it had narrowly missed some vital organs. The incident had been investigated and everyone present had insisted that it had been an accident. That was all very well, but Tómas was certain that there had been a struggle between Ari Thór and the man who had held the knife. The case had been closed and Tómas had acted as if nothing had happened.

  Safely back in Siglufjördur, Tómas had immersed himself in work, if anything, to distract himself from the fact that his marriage was coming apart at the seams. Now, with the threat of the virus, he certainly had plenty to focus on.

  It was Tómas’s role to ensure that goods were reaching the town during the quarantine. He had been largely successful, although it had not been easy to find drivers prepared to come here; many of them seemed to imagine that the air itself was laden with killer germs, and had left their regular deliveries in stacks at the entrances to one or other of the two tunnels leading to Siglufjördur. On top of this, the townspeople were reluctant to leave their houses more often than absolutely necessary, and nobody was prepared to stand behind the counter at the local Co-op. In the end it had fallen to the Co-op’s manager to deal with orders over the phone and then to deliver purchases to people’s homes.

  Tómas sighed. There was nothing for it but to push his worries about his marriage to one side, and focus on the current crisis. With the press release out of the way, his next job was to call the Co-op manager. But just as he was about to do this, the phone buzzed.

  It was the young TV journalist, Ísrún – the one with a scar down one side of her face. She had shot to prominence the previous summer after she had been the first reporter on the scene when a man from Siglufjördur had been beaten to death in a nearby fjord.

  She was calling to ask for information about the state of things in the town, now that a second death had been announced. Tómas was too busy to talk, but he wrote down her number and promised to call back.

  He transferred the number onto a yellow post-it note and stuck it to the screen of Ari Thór’s computer. He could deal with the media’s pestering when he came in later for his evening shift.

  7

  Róbert was suddenly alert.

  Had that been a knock on the window?

  He sat up on the sofa. As far as he knew, he was alone in the apartment. He shivered as cold air ran down his back. And then he realised: he’d been lying under the open window and had fallen asleep.

  A glance at the clock on the wall told him that it was almost midday. The chilly draught made him shiver again, catching at his throat and then his nose – he must be coming down with a cold, he thought.

  Then he jumped; there was the knock again, sharp and clear, no longer part of an indistinct dream. It was far too real for that.

  Looking up, a cold sweat spread in a wave down his body. A stranger was peering in through the window. For a moment he was so scared that he could not move. He had never been a sensitive type, but the night’s events had left his nerves in shreds.

  Then he shook his head at himself, remembering that he was expecting the locksmith.

  He nodded to the man waiting outside in the rain, stood up and hurried to the hall, and let in a middle-aged man sporting a three-day beard and with hair swept back and wet with rain.

  ‘I’d already tried the doorbell,’ he said, with a note of reproach in his voice. ‘So I tried knocking on the window and looked in to see if there was anyone here. Didn’t want to be find myself on a fool’s errand after driving thirty minutes downtown.’

  ‘I’m sorry, come in,’ said Róbert. ‘The doorbell’s so quiet you can hardly hear it. I’d dropped off for a minute, didn’t hear a thing.’

  The locksmith carefully wiped his shoes but made no sign of taking them off.

  ‘What’s the problem? Stiff locks?’

  ‘Well, not exactly
. We lost a set of house keys, so I’d really like you to change the locks – here and on the back door. Best to be sure, you see.’

  The locksmith nodded and went straight to work; Róbert was sure he’d heard the same story often enough before.

  Róbert made himself some coffee, sat at the kitchen table and waited. He was hoping that the steaming drink would kill the cold dead before it could get going, but he merely managed to burn his tongue instead. He was still tired. The truth was, the uninvited visitor the night before had only aggravated the difficulty he usually had sleeping. It was more difficult than he imagined it would be to come to terms with certain events from his past.

  ‘You want security chains as well?’ he heard the locksmith call from the hallway.

  He thought, hesitated and then agreed. But not without a pang of guilt, as he admitted to himself that he was unable to guarantee his family’s safety by himself.

  The locksmith was quicker than Róbert had expected. After he left, he decided to lie down again, this time taking care to draw the curtains and slip the security chains into place on both front and back doors – not that the chains would be much help if someone was prepared to use force to get in. And anyway, Róbert still had the uncomfortable feeling of being watched as he lay down on the sofa and tried to empty his head of thoughts which was easier said than done these days.

  Half an hour later Róbert was still awake when the doorbell chimed; this time he heard it clearly.

  He didn’t hurry to the door, certain that this time it would be Breki, Sunna’s lousy ex, bringing Kjartan back. Róbert had always disliked Breki, although he had made no real effort to get to know him.

  ‘You’re alike in some ways,’ Sunna had once said.

  He knew what she meant: he wasn’t one to give up and sensed that Breki was much the same.

  He opened the door as far as the chain would let him, looked out and closed it again to unhook the chain.