by Zena Shapter
“What about him?” I close the door.
Jón clears his throat to speak but a wet cough interrupts him.
I edge closer to Director Úlfar and get ready to make my move. I’m going to do this. I’m going to grab the gun, aim it at the bastard and pull the trigger. Bang! Blood everywhere! Pay back.
So I do.
In one swift move I pull the gun from Director Úlfar’s belt and point it at Jón’s head. “What about my brother?”
Still coughing, Jón can’t answer straight away. He shakes a palm at me. His eyes plead for me to wait until he’s regained control. His bronze Inuit skin pales as he fights for breath, his mobility limited by the intravenous drip in his hand and the bandages around his torso. He’s no picture of health after all. He is suffering, as he deserves to suffer. I allow myself to enjoy his pain.
“Okay, Jón?” Director Úlfar passes him some water, eyeing me on the way, assessing his gun as if making his own plans. “Take your time.”
Jón takes a sip, clears his throat again. This time, there’s no coughing. “It was an accident,” he says, his voice strained from exertion.
“An accident?” I laugh.
“Your brother fell against that desk. I didn’t hit him.”
“Ha!”
“It’s…I thought you’d want you to know.”
“Especially now, right?” The metal of the gun feels powerful in my hand.
“I thought it would help you feel better about your brother.”
“How nice.”
He shrugs. “You cannot live in Höfkállur and not come to believe in the Heimspeki at least a little.”
“So that’s what this is really about, the Heimspeki? He’s kidding, right?” I ask Director Úlfar. “He wants me to feel better about my brother’s death?”
Director Úlfar pulls a seat towards me. “And himself.”
“Oh, no way! You want me to listen so he can clear his conscience and be all positive again?” My raised eyebrows elicit only looks of confirmation from them both. “No!” Let his guilt torment him! “Mark was a genius and you stole him from me. He wouldn’t have said boo to a goose, hurt a fly, wish ill on his enemies—not that he had any. Yet now he’s dead. So it’s my turn to steal something from you!” I unlock what I assume is the gun’s safety.
“She’s right,” Jón says, holding up his hand to dissuade Director Úlfar from interfering. “Let her do it. Tell them I attacked her or something. I might not have hit her brother, but it was my fault he stumbled backwards. I thought I was doing the right thing. It didn’t work.”
I’m amazed by his lies. “How…how could you possibly think you were doing the right thing?”
“I was trying to scare him away. I was going to turn Ólaf in, get my promotion, prove my mother wrong.” He harrumphs as if impressing his mother were an impossibility. “That’s all I wanted.” He stifles another cough. “Being aggressive can calm people down, calm situations down. It can dissolve friction. I was born like this,” he gestures at his physique, “to a mother who thought me good for only one thing—violence. She was wrong. Anna taught me this.”
Anna. I tighten my grip on the trigger at the sound of her name. Jón didn’t kill her. She’s still dead because of what he did.
Ignoring me, Jón smiles at some memory, his weathered skin creases with the grin. “When I met her, she needed my help. She ended up helping me. She had such focus.” He fills his lungs until they quiver with the strain. “I was trying to get your brother out of Ólaf’s way.” He looks into my eyes. They’re intense again, shining with charm like Mark’s. “Ólaf’s crazy. I wanted to get you out of his way too, that’s why I threatened you on the Austurleid. If you’d both stayed away, I could have turned Ólaf in as I planned. No one would have got hurt.”
I don’t buy it. “You tried to kill Ari and me.”
“You weren’t supposed to fall in.”
“We didn’t fall in. We were swept in!”
He lowers his eyes. “Ólaf assured me you wouldn’t be. He said a couple of small ice blocks would scare you into believing the Skepnasá was dangerous, then you’d go home believing Mark fell in by accident.” He looks up at me again. “I’m sorry. I’m not from here and I believed him. When you survived the first block, I didn’t think the second would be any different.”
“Why not simply tell someone what Ólaf was doing? I’m sure there are entire bureaux for dealing with this kind of thing!” I glance at Director Úlfar, both for confirmation and to check he’s not creeping up on me. Director Úlfar looks at the gun, at me, then the gun again.
“You’re right,” Jón says. “But Ólaf threatened to tell Anna that I hit Pàll. It would have been the end of us.”
“She would have found out eventually.”
“Yes, but from me, in my own time, and once I’d put Ólaf away. Anna wanted the Heimspeki to change the world. I didn’t understand at first, I didn’t care what Ólaf wanted me to do at examinations. But, watching his litagjöf, I started to care, about many things. As long as Ólaf was that machine’s senior technician, the Heimspeki had no chance at changing anything.”
“And Gunnar? I suppose he was an accident too?”
Jón shakes his head. “Ólaf hit him over the head. He was already dead when I put him in the morgue. Shooting him merely disguised the wound.”
Director Úlfar steps forward. “Doctor Emil confirmed this last night.”
Jón shrugs. “Ólaf created a scan booth record showing Gunnar entering the Litrúm-Hús with guilty intentions, then leaving with my gun. All I had to do was say I left my spare gun and silencer in the bottom drawer of my desk.”
“And of course shoot Gunnar in the head!” I scoff, readjusting my grip on the gun. It’s starting to get heavy. “What about Gunnar’s parents? If it wasn’t for Doctor Emil, they would have thought their son committed suicide.”
“I was biding my time. I would have told them. I needed to placate Ólaf a little longer, that’s all. I would have liked to apologise to Gunnar’s parents, as well as Ari. I let him down. Of course that can’t happen now.” He glances at the gun in my hand.
“Anything else you want to get off your chest?”
“Nothing. I’m ready. Do it.”
I sneer at his permission, test the trigger, and picture a bullet smashing through his face. I imagine Mark standing by my side, smirking too. This is what he wanted, revenge for his murder.
Except the Mark I imagine frowns in disappointment.
“You’re going to hell!” I tell Jón, hoping to please my brother. “Like you deserve!”
“But,” Mark whispers to me in a watery gush, twanging my brain’s synapses with his energy, “you would have put him there. Life is too precious a gift to throw away. No matter what, remember? Even a life lead as miserably as his…or yours.”
My smirk fades. My head pounds as it warms.
“Oh, and eat more, will you?” Mark adds. “Please. You’re killing yourself all over again.” Then he fizzles away.
I wait a moment to see if he’s going to reappear.
When he doesn’t I take a deep breath, then relock the gun’s safety. Begrudgingly, I hand the gun back to Director Úlfar, twisting my ribs in the wrong place as I do so. “Ow.” I double over, gripping at the hurt to make it stop.
Director Úlfar eases me into the seat, presses a green call button on the wall. “You need an x-ray,” he says.
I nod and see this moment for what it is. This is it now. All there is to Mark and Iceland.
“Sorry, Becky.” Jón says.
I glare at him in silence. I might not want to kill him anymore, but I still hate his guts.
Chapter 32
As Ari enters the coordinates for the lookout into the Eroder’s computer, he tells me about our destination, a range of hills five kilomet
res east of town. His enthusiasm for what we’re about to see is as infectious as ever and I’m glad the sky is a crisp navy, with high pressure and no clouds. He tells me this means the air outside will be bitter to the bone, but that it’s also archetypal aurora-viewing weather. I actually don’t care about the cold. It only matters that he rang Anna’s doorbell at 6.56pm and not a second later.
Soon after leaving Höfkállur, we ascend into the range. Thick white steam billows out from random hillside crevices, quickly disappearing into vapour. Their steady roar suggests origins deep in the centre of the earth and act as a reminder of the land’s volatility. Anything could happen here. Everything already has. Dark and foreboding, the rolling landscapes mirror my heart.
Ari drives around a series of hills, each plastered with huge slabs of charcoal rock. Every time I think the next hill will be our last, another appears behind it.
Eventually the road converges with a signposted dirt track that ascends with such a steep gradient Ari has to use the Eroder’s rubber spikes to stay on it. We climb up and up until, mere metres from the hill’s summit, the track levels and opens into a clearing littered with rock debris. We park beside a number of cars, then Ari helps me onto a path that leaves one side the clearing to curve around the edge of the hill. It narrows into a foot-pass so slim it prevents us from walking side-by-side and I have to hold onto the hillside to hobble instead. It’s fine until we encounter a huge slither of rock propped against the side of the pass, blocking half of it.
“It’s okay,” Ari tells me, stepping around it. “It’s always here.”
He holds out his hand and, with it, I ease my way around the slab, then look down and notice how high up we are. The road leading back to Höfkállur looks like a piece of string draped over the hills. One false step or quake in the ground, and I’d fall to my death.
“Don’t look down,” Ari says. He tugs my hand forward. “Not yet.”
So I follow him around the path to the lookout and, as we clear the pass, I see what he means. A massive ledge of mossy grass stretches out towards a breathtakingly expansive yet darkening view over the lava fields south of Höfkállur. At the back of the ledge a sloping wall of rock sprawls up to the hill’s summit. At its far side, a waterfall cascades over six or seven different rock formations, distributing its trickle from side to side until it reaches the outer rim of the ledge, where it falls to the hill’s base as fine spray.
I listen for an echo of water inside my head. There is none.
Mark?
Ari spreads a picnic blanket, some distance away from the other aurora-seekers, and we sit in silence for a while, leaning against each other as the sun sets like a fiery red bomb crashing into enemy territory. An arm appears around my shoulders and I snuggle into Ari’s chest. The peaceful sound of his breathing brings peace to my thoughts, except for the most persistent.
Mark.
In the comfortable quiet, I still can’t believe I’ll never see my brother again. Pressure builds behind my eyes as I remember the last time I was snuggled this close to a man and close to tears…
Why did I ever let Riley inside my head? I came so close to losing myself. I probably did for a time.
Never again.
“Life isn’t about avoiding the tears, Bex.” Mark told me after they resuscitated me in the ambulance. “It’s about the joy you find in between them.” He held me this close. I could hear his breathing too.
As I wonder why I’m remembering this now, the dim light descends into the bleakness of night, and the lava fields disappear into the stomach of a hungry blackness. Above us, trillions of tiny twinkling white dots remind me of holidays my family used to take up the New South Wales coast when I was a child, to Foster, and further north to Coffs Harbour. The transparency, its vastness, makes me homesick for Sydney. It is indeed time to endure that long flight home, watch movies back-to-back and stretch sitting-sore legs at the back of the plane.
It’s time to sit in my parents’ home, serenaded by a whirr of cicadas so constant you have to tell yourself to notice. It’s time to see Sydney’s big southern moon dazzle the harbour and peek in through the venetian blinds of my old bedroom until farewelled at dawn by hoot-hollering kookaburras. It’s time to take Mark home, be with my family, reconnect. At some point I’m going to have to figure out how to balance trusting my instincts against the security of facts and how to live for the life that might come after death. But first I need the world to stop spinning, just long enough so I can get off and fall into the arms of those I love.
“Come here.” Ari pulls me closer. “You’re shivering.”
His hands rub me with the vigour of a paramedic. Then he stops, taking a breath so deep I look at the sky. It’s twinkling, yet still and black. Confused, I turn to see Ari’s eyes dipped to the grass at his feet.
“This is probably the wrong time for confessions,” he lets go of his breath, “but you’ve hit me harder than anyone and didn’t even take a swing. You are the strongest woman I know, Becky, adventurous and brave. Don’t say anything. I know this is the wrong time. But, before you leave tomorrow, you have to know: I like you a lot.”
I feel the corners of my mouth rise. “It’s not the wrong time at all.” I relax into the hardness of his chest. This is a starry night, an enchanted evening—just like Mark said it would be. “Do you dive?” I ask him.
“I’m happy to learn.”
He’d be good at it too. “In that case, I’ll be coming back to Iceland very soon.”
“I will miss you until you do.”
“No, you won’t,” I tease. “A couple of days, max.”
“Longer.”
“You might find someone you like more, I’d never know.”
“I never cheat on women.” Ari grins until the bruises Ólaf gave him make him wince. “Life is stressful enough as it is—why complicate it more?”
“If only every man saw it that way.”
He shrugs. “Do you need every man to see it that way, or just one?”
“Mark used to say the same thing.”
He grins again, softer this time. “That’s the first time you’ve spoken about your brother without sadness in your voice.”
It was always going to be a long journey. “I’ve been cheated—”
“It will not help to think that way for long. I know, with Mum. You will celebrate what your brother did, já, and not dwell on what he didn’t?”
“I will try.”
He squeezes me tight. When he lets go, I breathe in the spicy aroma of his aftershave. It’s a classic scent, one that I can’t help but liken to the cologne gentlemen in black and white films might once have worn.
You were right Mark, you were right.
As we settle again into a relaxed embrace, a feeling of unrivalled intimacy burgeons between us, a feeling that makes me want to believe we were meant to find each other in that Höfkállur bus depot, in that Litrúm-Hús Dómstóll, inside that mountain, and on this blanket high above the lava plains. I should have come to Iceland sooner. Holding each other here, the tenderness of the moment feels invincible, and the rest of the world simply slips away.
So it’s only when we hear distant murmurings of people gasping ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ that we look up into the star-lit sky.
Above us, a long curtain of glowing green light is waving through the night sky, a thin red trim at its base. It glitters so bright it makes the surrounding stars seem dull. It moves with such delicacy it’s like fine green fairy dust glittering through the sky, only atmosphere resisting its fall, as water resists drifting sands with its rippling currents. The fluorescent red trim at its base stretches towards the black lava plains beneath us, which reflect its warm glow, while its green extremities reach up seemingly infinite in height.
The sight takes my breath away and, for a long time, I hardly speak. I do not want to disturb what the night has
come to be: perfect.
Instead, a soft crackling accompanies the sparkling lights as they dance, like the fizzle of a firework’s whirling explosions. Alternate sections of the wispy curtain glow the strongest, until it looks like there’s a stream of power throbbing along its width. The colours hum with electricity and, after a while, I feel a warm glow in my face, as if I’m staring into a bonfire. The warmth tingles in my cheeks and throbs under my hair with a now familiar feeling that makes my smile broaden. Turning to Ari, I notice he has the same contented beam. There’s a soft gleam all about him. Yet, when he senses my gaze upon him and turns to me, I realise the gleam is not just around him—it’s around us both.
An image comes to my mind of Mark. He’s smiling, warm and dry. No water. No roaring noises. He hasn’t been stolen from the world—his visit this time has simply been cut short.
Before I know it, the gleam around us begins to dull and the warmth I felt dissipates. The top of my head grows cold, as if my hair is freezing into stiff clumps. The moisture in my battered nose, and in my rib-bruised lungs, becomes hypersensitive to the chilly air. Ari and I edge even closer together, wrapping our limbs around each other to rekindle what heat we can.
Then, sensing something pulling at my attention, something instinctive, I break my gaze with Ari to look up. A gleaming ball of translucent white-hot light is floating up from between us like a cloud. It has a warm sparkle that reminds me of the white ball I saw yesterday in the Dómstólls. It can only be one thing.
“Mark?” I whisper, my hand going to my chest. I’m filled with numinous wonder.
Ari follows my gaze but as soon as his eyes meet the sky, the whiteness shoots towards the aurora, disappearing into it like a shy animal escaping into undergrowth. All Ari sees is the sudden intensity that flickers along the aurora’s fluorescent green lights. Before returning to its previous steadiness, the aurora’s undulating glow shines sun-bright for a few moments, leaving Ari wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “This is the most magnificent aurora I have ever seen,” he tells me.