On A Small Island

  Copyright © 2013 by Grant Nicol

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  .epub ISBN – 978-1-909425-94-1

  .mobi ISBN – 978-1-909425-95-8

  for Simon

  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  CHAPTER 1

  The first time I realised there was more to my oldest sister’s life than the seamless facade she had led us all to believe was real, was when I found out she had been seeing a psychiatrist. Up until then, I had thought I was the only really crazy one in the family. I wasn’t sure if I appreciated the competition. She had always been better than me at most things and I doubted this would be any different.

  Elín was four years older than me, the eldest of the three of us girls and the living embodiment of an independently successful woman, or so she would have had us believe all those years she looked down her nose at us. So when I made the discovery that there was a flaw, no matter how small, in her well-defined armour I was keen to explore it whilst it remained visible. For I knew only too well that it would repair itself as soon as she realised she was treating me as an equal. A miscalculation she would not permit for long, but perhaps just long enough for me to imagine how it was going to end for us.

  When she originally told me that she wanted to meet for a drink I assumed she had some new man in her life or a recently purchased toy she wanted to brag about. I would never have guessed the real reason was that she wanted out of our lives again. This time for good.

  She chose a bar on the ground floor of a hotel at the top of Geirsgata right next to the dry docks where some of Reykjavík’s most expensive fishing vessels were getting a facelift in preparation for the forthcoming winter. Old scars and barnacles were being sanded away and replaced with fresh layers of paint to protect them against the brutal conditions they would soon have to endure.

  The hotel itself was new and classy and just out of the way enough so that the risk of her bumping into anyone she might know with her little sister in tow would be minimal. I had always been something of an embarrassment to her, a fact she had never spoken of but had never really made any effort to hide, either. It was one of her many ways of keeping me in my place.

  She had outgrown the rest of our family at a surprisingly early age and now only very occasionally had any use for us at all. When our mother passed away ten years ago, the remainder of the family began to slowly but determinedly drift apart. Our father still lived on the same piece of land just outside Hafnarfjörður where we had all been raised but us three girls had moved away, as children will tend to do.

  Elín had been the trailblazer amongst us, requiring no encouragement to leave the nest and find her own way in the world. And find her own way she had. The problem was that these days, her way involved doing things that were likely to get her killed. She just hadn’t told me about them yet.

  She stared across the table at me after giving me her ‘What are you doing with your life?’ speech for what would prove to be the very last time. She never seemed content until she had made me feel as inadequate as she possibly could, and only then would she relax and get around to what she really wanted to talk about, which was nearly always her and what was happening in her life.

  ‘So, Ylfa, I invited you here to tell you that I’ve decided to move away, to leave Iceland. My time here is finished as far as I’m concerned and I’m ready to seek pastures new and green. This is why I asked you out tonight; you’re the very first to know.’

  There was no way my face could have hidden my disbelief at her statement. I wanted to ask her why she had decided this but the words stalled in my throat. As it turned out, she didn’t need to be asked why – she had already decided to tell me. She had read the question in my face.

  ‘Because I’m done here. Because I’m sick and tired of Reykjavík. Because my love life is a fucking disaster and my doctor says that it’s time I made some changes in my life if I’m going to feel better about myself.’

  ‘You’re leaving on the advice of your doctor?’

  ‘My psychiatrist. I’ve been talking to him about when I was younger and what I need to do to confront my past if I want to move on.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Move on from what?’

  ‘I’ve been having these dreams for some time now about when I was a little girl. I’ve told the doctor all about them so there’s no reason you shouldn’t hear this too. For all I know it could have happened to you and Kristjana as well.’

  ‘What could have happened to me and Kristjana?’

  ‘I’m talking about what our father did to me when I was a little girl. When I was so young that he probably thought I’d never remember it. But I have, Ylfa. Sooner or later these things come back to haunt us, you see. You can’t hide from them forever. There’s no point in living your whole life in denial no matter how difficult or painful the results of facing up to the truth might be.’

  ‘Whatever it is you’ve been dreaming don’t you think that they might just be... you know, just dreams?’

  She shook her head slowly at me as though that was the silliest thing she’d ever heard.

  ‘I’ve been having them repeatedly for a while now and they obviously mean something, otherwise I wouldn’t be having them. Any idiot could see that. We’ve gone over them again and again in my sessions and there’s no doubt in my mind now that I was raped.’

  ‘Raped? You’re saying that... Dad... you know?’

  Elín nodded slowly as if it would somehow help what she was telling me sink in.

  ‘Our father had his foul way with me a long time ago and I’ve kept those memories locked away all this time because they were just too disgusting to deal with. They were too much for me to deal with back then and they’re too much for me to deal with now. I’ve thought about this long and hard and it’s finally time to move on, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

  ‘So, that’s that then? Don’t you think Dad and Kristjana might want an explanation, or were you going to leave that to me to take care of? I’m amazed you even bothered summoning me here today to tell me. Why not just disappear without telling any of us you’re even going?’

  There was no reply forthcoming from the other side of the table. Just
a cold stare that told me she didn’t find me amusing at all. If I wasn’t next to speak then it would have continued until I had withered under its frozen weight.

  ‘So you’re not going to try to work this out, you’re just leaving?’

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I won’t tell you that until I’ve made up my mind one hundred per cent.’

  I had heard her lie to me before and that was yet another one. She had a plan of some sort up her sleeve but obviously wasn’t going to let me in on it just yet.

  ‘If you’re afraid we’ll track you down and drag you back here kicking and screaming, you know that you’ve got nothing to worry about.’

  Not amused in the slightest, Elín turned on her condescending lawyer’s face that she usually saved for the courtroom or opponents she had already written off.

  ‘There’s no need to get cute, little sister.’

  From behind those beautiful, ice blue eyes of hers I could see the very essence of what she had become. In spite of everything she had amassed around herself, her flat on Álagrandi and her expensive clothes, she was still completely joyless inside.

  ‘It’s not you I’m concerned about, Ylfa, far from it.’

  ‘What then, Dad? You’re not worried he’s going to take off after you even though he hasn’t left the house in the last ten years?’

  ‘It’s not him I’m worried about, either.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  She let out a little frustrated sigh and stared out of the window as she decided how much to tell me.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you where I’m going until I’ve got there. I’ll be going to stay with a friend for a while.’

  ‘Why all the secrecy? I don’t see what the big deal is about telling us where you’re going.’

  ‘In order to make this work, really work as a clean break, I’ve got to secure my financial independence. In other words, I want to have enough money behind me so that I never need to come back, for anything.’

  ‘Okay, but I still don’t get it.’

  ‘I’ve been having an affair with a married man for the better part of a year now and he’s going to have to help me out a little if I’m going to pull it off.’

  ‘And he’s just going to give you all this money out of the goodness of his heart?’

  ‘No, of course not. He doesn’t have one of those.’

  ‘Then what makes you think he’ll do this for you?’

  ‘I’m going to take it from him. I’m not going to bore you with the details now but rest assured he won’t be able to say no.’

  ‘Why do I need to know that? Why let me in on this part of your plan and not the rest?’

  ‘Because if anything should go wrong and somehow something should happen to me I want at least one person to know. I want you to be able to point the finger at him if I’m no longer able to.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me the name of this lucky fellow?’

  She shook her head very slowly.

  ‘I didn’t think so, Elín’.

  ‘Not yet, anyway. Eventually you’re going to have to know but even when you do you’re to keep it to yourself, understand?’

  ‘Unless something happens to you, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What makes you think something might happen to you?’

  ‘Because, when he realises what I’m doing to him, he’s definitely going to want to kill me.’

  I studied her face for any sign that she was joking. She wasn’t.

  That night I dreamt I came across my sister’s lifeless, naked body in a pool of water of some kind or other. I couldn’t tell if it was in the sea that she was lying dead; maybe it was a river she was in or possibly even a bath. I held her head gently in my hands and waited for her to tell me what had happened. Her soulless eyes looked back at me, devoid of any explanation. I asked her who had done this to her over and over again but still she refused to tell me.

  CHAPTER 2

  The next day, try as I might to figure out Elín’s motives, I just couldn’t see where this sudden desire to flee had come from. It felt like an overreaction and that was not something she was known for. She had built her career as a lawyer specialising in divorces and family law by insisting on patience and making sure that people made considered and rational decisions. Although those were not her natural instincts when it came to her private life, this seemed impulsive, even by her standards.

  On top of that, I couldn’t get my dream of the night before out of my head. I had become obsessed with the notion that she was going to wind up dead, more than likely in a body of water, and that I would be the one to find her. The only thing left for me to ponder now was whether there was anything I could do to prevent it happening, or whether I was doomed to watch her destroy herself. Once she had an idea in her head it was impossible for her to shake it loose. Her determination to follow through with whichever scheme she was presently consumed by was what had made her the successful woman she was today but it would also undoubtedly be her downfall. Even as a little girl she had never been able to differentiate between a good idea and a poor one. She just had her ideas.

  A text message arrived on my phone subtly reminding me that I was supposed to be seeing Baldvin tonight. Baldvin was my latest conquest of the male variety, ten years my senior but gorgeous. We had only just started seeing each other and I had made the all too frequent mistake of sleeping with him on the first date. Since then he had been pretty keen to see me again – no surprises there. I wish I could say I didn’t generally make a habit of sleeping with men at the very first opportunity, but I did. It was the one habit I had that I had never been able to shake. We all have them, I guess.

  If you were to compare my love life to a business, and plenty of my friends had over the years, you could say that we had a good turnover. A lot of the time I behaved like what most people would refer to as a slut but I wasn’t at all happy with the negative connotations of that word. Most of my friends were sluts. That was a lie; they all were.

  I was pretty good at telling within a very short period of time after first meeting someone whether we were going to wind up in bed together or not. If we were meant to, then I couldn’t see the point in taking part in the commonly accepted social etiquette of drinking coffee or eating dinner together first. I had always felt that getting naked with someone was a pretty good way to get to know them. It was also, unfortunately, a pretty good way of ensuring that you never saw them again.

  Either that or you would never be able to get rid of them. Generally speaking, whichever one you didn’t want to happen would. But these are the chances we all take in life. I was confident that if someone were to write a review of my methodology it would show that it made me happy much more often than it made me sad. Anything that you can say that about had to have something going for it.

  I sent Baldvin a message back saying that I hadn’t forgotten about him but that I had promised my father I would visit him and that our rendezvous would have to wait until I had returned from Hafnarfjörður. He seemed to understand, or at least he didn’t reply saying that he was going to make other arrangements for his night’s entertainment. I took his silence as tacit agreement to wait for my call and left it at that.

  The house we’d grown up in stood just outside the fishing village of Hafnarfjörður some five miles or so back from the sea in the heart of the lava fields. About a twenty-minute drive from my flat. Small trees dotted the barren landscape along with endless miles of moss-covered lava.

  In summer it would be covered in beautiful purple lupins but at this time of year it had a more foreboding look. The heavy grey clouds that hung just above the hills didn’t help that impression, either. Even though I had been living in Reykjavík for many years now I still thought of our childhood house and land as home, even if my sisters no longer did.

  They never had a bad word to say about the place but never really talked ab
out it any more, which was probably worse. They had both moved on with their lives, I guess. I was the only one of us who ever visited Dad now. It was a less than ideal situation but there was next to nothing I could do about it. No amount of bitching or guilt tripping or dropping subtle hints had ever worked so I had given up, too.

  For some reason Kristjana had never learned to drive and whenever I offered to teach her she always had something else on. As for Elín, she made no secret of the fact that she simply could not be bothered with the old man any more. Recent events in her psychiatric care seemed unlikely to change that any time soon.

  The first face I saw as I reached the top of the long driveway that led first to the stables and then our house was Jóhannes’s. He looked up from whatever it was that he was sweeping and waved.

  Even though my father thought of himself as tough and independent at the age of seventy-two he had finally succumbed to my nagging and taken on someone to help him look after the place. That someone was Jóhannes. He had chosen the 19-year-old from several candidates for reasons I had only ever been able to guess at. Jóhannes was as willing a worker as any who had applied but had never set foot on a farm before in his life.

  He had been a very fast learner when it came to doing things the way Dad demanded they be done but I had always wondered why it was that he’d been chosen over the other applicants. Some of the other boys and girls who had applied had spent their whole lives in the country and would have been much easier to work with initially but Dad had been very particular about wanting Jóhannes. The ease with which he fitted in now suggested that Dad had been right all along.

  It had only been in the last year that I had found out from Jóhannes himself what the reason behind their bond was. He had been brought up by foster parents and apparently when Dad had found that out it had sealed the deal for him. Dad had also been fostered when he was young and although he’d never elaborated much on those times it had obviously been the connection between the two of them that had made him think it would work out well. And it had.