Glancing out of the kitchen window, she noticed a car pulling up outside their house and a woman getting out. She recognised her. It was the policewoman who had come and fetched them from the summer house. Tinna reached for her strawberry lip gloss and put it on. Then she stuck a straw in the pink smoothie and went to the door.
Tinna could tell that the policewoman sitting in the kitchen chair facing her was nervous, in spite of her smile. The red blotches on her neck gave her away.
‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nothing serious, I promise.’
Tinna didn’t return her smile. Now that her mother wasn’t here, there was no need to put on an act. She was tired of trying so hard every day, terribly tired. She would have liked to tell this woman where to go, but she knew this would be unwise and managed to restrain the urge. Over the years she had learnt to control her impetuosity, which used to make her do things without thinking.
‘That’s a pretty necklace you’re wearing,’ the woman said.
Tinna automatically reached up and stroked the H, as she always did when she was feeling insecure.
‘Where did you get it?’ the woman asked.
‘It was a present,’ Tinna said, which was almost true. At least, he hadn’t protested when she removed the chain from his neck. At first, she had hidden it in her desk, only taking it out occasionally to look at it. Her own necklace also had an H pendant, but hers was silver, while Hafliði’s was gold. Then, about a year ago, she had started wearing it instead of the one her maternal grandparents had given her as a baby, which was now too small. Anyway, why should she wear something given to her by people who couldn’t care less about her and her mother? Her mum had noticed the necklace one evening when they were sitting eating supper with Leifur. She had shot Tinna an odd look but hadn’t said anything. Since then, Tinna hadn’t taken it off.
‘Who gave it to you?’
‘My friend.’ Hafliði was her friend. Or so she had believed. When Hafliði betrayed her mother, he had betrayed Tinna, and all his promises as well.
The policewoman suddenly held out her phone and Tinna looked down to see Hafliði’s face smiling up at her. Always so happy and kind, willing to play with her and watch wildlife documentaries or sci-fi series with her. Explaining to her how physics worked and helping her with her maths homework – something her mother had never bothered to do.
‘Do you recognise this man?’
‘It’s Hafliði,’ Tinna said. She knew there was no point denying it. And she knew that it didn’t really matter what this policewoman said because she couldn’t do anything to her.
‘Did he give you the necklace?’
Tinna nodded. Yes, the story could just have well have gone like that. Hafliði had given her the chain as a parting gift on the day of his accident.
‘Do you remember his son, Stefán?’
‘Yes.’ Tinna remembered him well. She had never been able to stand the smug little prick who had wanted to keep his dad all to himself. If her mother and Hafliði hadn’t split up, she would have had to find some way of getting rid of Stefán. She smiled, remembering her ten-year-old self dreaming up all kinds of plots to get him out of the way.
‘He swears his father was wearing the necklace the morning of the day of his accident.’
‘He gave it to me at lunchtime. When I got home.’
‘So you were at home when the accident happened?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Did you see what happened?’
‘No.’
The policewoman stared at her for a while and Tinna stared back. She saw that the woman had beautiful eyes: grey, brown and green. She wondered if she should say this to her but, after considering for a moment, decided it would be better to keep the thought to herself. Her mother had taught her never to trust people. She’d said that most people who were friendly were only pretending because they wanted to persuade you to do something for them. People were always trying to deceive you or fool you. Like Hafliði did.
‘I talked to Hafliði’s mother,’ the policewoman went on. ‘Maybe you don’t remember her, but she met you once.’
Tinna had a clear memory of the plump, grey-haired little woman who had looked at her and her mother with such loathing.
The policewoman continued: ‘She rang me and told me about that necklace. About how they had searched for it everywhere. I think she’d be very grateful to have it back.’
Tinna clutched the pendant tighter, slowly shaking her head. ‘Hafliði gave it to me. It’s mine now.’
She watched as the policewoman drove away from the house, repeatedly running her finger over the H. If only Hafliði hadn’t cheated on her mother and wrecked all her plans; the whole future she had imagined, with the three of them living happily ever after. She had been so excited about finally having a proper family, about having a dad of her own. He’d been so kind and such fun, not like Leifur, who did nothing but work, and turned bright red every time he tried to have a conversation with her. If Hafliði hadn’t abandoned her and her mother, life would have been so much better. Never mind. Now at least she had Hekla, and soon her mother would be back with her again. Then everything would be perfect.
Epilogue
I
I feel as if I’ve been transported fifteen years back in time. I’m lying in bed, the papery white sheets sticking to my skin. Outside the door, the staff are keeping an eye on me. The only difference is that no one puts a child on my breast. No crying wakes me in the night. I’m alone.
I wonder what they’re saying about me now. What the stories in the media are like; the word on the street. I get the impression they’re on my side this time. I think I see it in the eyes of the prison officers. There’s no hint of condemnation there, only pity and sympathy. I have to admit that I’m quite good at playing the role of victim. I know how to appear small and vulnerable. How to lower my eyes as if I’m ashamed; how to play the caring mother. After all, I’ve had many years’ experience in that role.
I close my eyes and travel back in time to when I was living in Sandgerði without a care in the world, free from kids and the responsibility they bring. In those days Sandgerði was a small fishing community, a few minutes’ drive from Keflavík Airport and the neighbouring town of Reykjanesbær. Apart from a pretty church, it had little to distinguish it. There was no landscape to speak of, just a big sky and the flat, treeless, volcanic plain at the western tip of the Reykjanes Peninsula. But you could see for miles across Faxaflói Bay when the weather was good.
In my early twenties I used to go out partying every weekend. Often both Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes during the week as well. It wasn’t just me, but most of the other kids my age and plenty of older people who hadn’t settled down yet. The type who didn’t have families and still did the same jobs as when they were eighteen. People who’d been stuck in a rut for decades. It’s all part of living in a small town where there’s not much else on offer.
There was one bar in the town. It was popular at weekends, and it had become something of a custom for us to meet up there. Most evenings at the bar were so similar that they merge together in my memory. The same people, weekend after weekend. Drinks, dancing, drunken talk and stolen kisses. Sometimes we met at one of the other kids’ houses first, when their parents were away, and occasionally at the homes of the older drinkers.
One evening at the end of August, my friend’s parents were abroad and we invited everyone round to her place. It was summer, and the day had been unusually hot. All the doors were open, and there were people inside, outside and in the hot tub. It never seemed to get dark that night. The sun briefly dipped below the horizon but continued to light up the sky, as if the evening was endless. Someone gave us pills, and we took them without asking any questions. More and more people kept arriving, and in the end the house was packed. There were party guests everywhere – people we barely knew, who were much older than us. But once the pills had kicked in, we no longer ca
red.
I don’t remember exactly what happened or how we ended up together. I just remember that there were several of us in a room. We touched, talked and smoked. Told each other things we would never otherwise have admitted. Then suddenly he was there too, this guy who was a few years older than us. He wasn’t part of the in-crowd – quite the opposite. He was obese and acne-scarred, his hair shiny with grease. He always wore thin cotton T-shirts that stuck to his sweaty back. I’d forgotten his name but remembered his B.O. from when we were at school – the odour of sweat and unwashed hair. Normally we wouldn’t have invited him to join us but that night no one commented on it.
It didn’t seem at all odd either when the two of us suddenly found ourselves alone together and he started stroking my hand. When we kissed, his lips were soft, and I didn’t object when he began to undress me. I can still remember what it felt like to touch his body and feel his weight on top of me. Remember how I stroked his sweaty back and pressed him against me. As if I couldn’t get enough. As if all I wanted was to be closer to him.
I must have fallen asleep, because all of a sudden sunlight was streaming into the room, onto my naked body. Yet I was cold. I felt as bad that morning as I had felt good the night before. This didn’t improve when I looked at the grossly fat, repulsive lump beside me. The cruel light of day revealed the white, scarred skin, the boils on his back, the shiny forehead. He didn’t stir as I pulled on my clothes. As I did so, flashbacks to the night before kept running through my mind, filling me with such revulsion that I ran to the loo and threw up. I couldn’t stop picturing what we’d done that night. It was disgusting. Revolting. I’d let him touch me, and I’d touched him back. What if somebody had seen us? What if someone knew we were in the room together?
Two weeks passed before the rumours got out. It was another weekend at the bar. A boy I hardly knew came over and asked me straight out. Of course I denied it, but I saw that he knew and then I realised that everyone did. I could tell from the way they were all looking at me with such mockery and contempt. The balance of power between us had shifted, so I did the only thing I could have done in the circumstances: I lied.
I nudged my friends and got them to go to the toilets with me, where I started crying. I threw up, then described how he had held me down and I had tried to scream, but no sound would come out. It was like telling someone else’s story, and I got a little carried away by the sympathy I received. At some point I started to believe it myself. To be honest, I didn’t remember much about the evening. Perhaps he really did rape me, I told myself. He must have done. Because normally I wouldn’t have touched someone like him with a barge pole, and everyone knew that. No one knew that better than me. One of my friends must have left the toilets and told the others, because suddenly the whole bar was talking about it.
Then everything went crazy. A group of boys we used to hang out with apparently went round to his house and beat the crap out of him. After that, all I had to do was sit back and watch.
I suppose it must have been pretty terrible for his family. I mean, they already had a pregnant fifteen-year-old daughter to contend with. After the story of the rape spread, rumours started going round the village that the baby was her brother’s. It seemed logical enough, since no one knew who the father was. One weekend, I remember someone throwing paint at their house. When a bunch of us cruised past in the morning, the white garage door was covered in splashes of red. We saw the young man’s father standing there with a sponge, desperately trying to clean it off. I’ll never forget his face when he looked in our direction. It was so blank and empty. I was sitting in the back seat of a car with tinted windows, so he couldn’t possibly have seen me, but still I felt his eyes boring into me.
I think the parents both lost their jobs. They probably weren’t actually sacked, but something must have happened that meant they couldn’t face working in those places any longer. I can’t really remember. I don’t recall seeing Anton around either. He just vanished. Before, you always used to see him at the fast-food joint, ordering a big portion of chips. Several weeks passed but he was never officially charged, due to lack of evidence, and of course he denied everything. It didn’t matter, though. The town had already judged him and found him guilty.
Anton’s father came across him in the garage sometime later, hanging from a noose.
Soon after that they left town. Before they could even sell the house. One day they just upped and went. I drove past their house every morning on my way to work, and for months I was confronted by the white garage door and the traces of red paint. If everything had gone according to plan, that would have been the end of the story. Of course, I would have had to live with my guilt, but it hadn’t exactly been weighing on me up to then.
But after Anton’s suicide, people started whispering. Some of the other kids who’d been at the party reckoned I was lying. It must have been my friends who betrayed me; the girls who were in the room with us before we found ourselves alone together. Perhaps we had started making out before everyone left. No one said a word to me at first, but I sensed that their manner towards me had changed. I was no longer invited along in the evenings and people gave me accusing looks. Like it was my fault he was dead.
In a way his suicide exonerated him, and I wondered if he’d been aware of that when he did it. Whether he understood that the only way to make people believe him would be to kill himself. Whatever, it worked. All of a sudden, everyone was sure I was lying. The people I had treated badly over the years made the most noise. They were like vultures. I heard them laughing, saw in their eyes how sweet they found this revenge. Of course I stuck to my story, but no one seemed to believe it anymore, and even my parents started having doubts. In the end, they asked me straight out, and I must have reacted oddly – dropped my eyes or said the wrong thing – because they stopped believing me. I could tell.
So there I was, their little princess, a despised outcast. People whispered that I was a murderer, that it was my fault Anton was dead. I wanted to point out that it wasn’t me who put the noose round his neck. God, how I hated him for that. I wished I had put it round his neck myself and watched him jerking convulsively as it tightened round his throat. In the end, my parents couldn’t take it anymore. They had always been one of those couples who care about their position in society. You only had to look at our house, which was redecorated every year, and the garden they paid to have looked after, to realise that. Appearance was everything in their opinion. So of course they moved away. In fact, it had long been their dream to move back to Sweden, where they had both studied when they were younger. They pretended it wasn’t because of me. As if it was simply a coincidence that they had started viewing properties in Stockholm. They invited me to come with them, but I was over twenty and they were no longer legally responsible for me. I sensed that they didn’t want me, and that became even more obvious when they offered to buy me a flat in Reykjavík.
It was around about then that I began to suspect I was pregnant. I let them buy me a flat, and in a week my childhood home had been packed up, my parents were gone and I was living alone in a rented flat on the outskirts of Reykjavík while waiting for the keys to my new home. That very day I booked an appointment with a doctor. I was already beginning to show, and the doctor only had to smear some gooey stuff on my belly and run the ultrasound over it to reveal the tiny, indistinct creature on the screen above me. Its heartbeat filled the small room, and I stared at the thing, hoping it was a dream. But it wasn’t. There it was, the child that was half me, half a man I hated. I watched it moving on the black screen and hoped its little heart would stop beating so I wouldn’t be confronted with the past every day for the rest of my life.
During the pregnancy I thought everything would change when she arrived, but it turned out that I was still the same person. More miserable and bad-tempered, but still me. All that changed was that now there was this child. A little girl who neither laughed nor smiled. Who sat there silently observing the world
.
Hrafntinna was my karma, my punishment.
I turn over in bed and push off the thin duvet. The air in the room is cool, but I’m still too hot. During the last few weeks I’ve thought more about my life in Sandgerði than I have for the past fifteen years. My attempts to forget have failed. The memories were buried, not destroyed, and they reappear now as vividly as just after they had occurred.
I can replay the events of 4 May in my mind’s eye like a film.
Maríanna had aged in the five years since I had last seen her. Then, she had been standing in Hafliði’s doorway. But that spring day in May, Maríanna didn’t say anything. Instead of grinning maliciously, she asked about Hekla, and I saw the fear in her eyes. After I told her that Hekla had just left, she stood there in the doorway as if she wanted to say something else. I wish she’d left it at that. We’d have said a polite goodbye to each other and behaved as if we’d never met before. But she had to go and rake it all up.
‘Actually, I was hoping for a word with you,’ she said.
I invited her in, let her take a seat in my kitchen and gave her coffee. She sat there at the table, nursing her cup, and I could see her little brain working, wondering how to begin. At last, she looked at me.
‘Do you recognise me?’ she asked.
I thought about lying. I could say I didn’t remember her, and perhaps it would have ended there. Perhaps she would have been relieved and gone away, never to come back. But I didn’t.
Girls Who Lie Page 30
