‘There are baths?’ Margot looks hopeful.
‘No, we mostly shower in Scandinavia,’ Inge clarifies.
‘It’s just a saying.’ Tricia tries to mollify all parties. But in truth, a shower will be almost as welcome and I can’t wait.
First, we’re roped in to helping with ‘life on the homestead’ as I believe the scriptwriters of Little House on the Prairie referred to it.
‘The pig can have scraps from the bucket under the kitchen sink,’ Inge instructs us, pushing the tank of a pram over bumpy terrain back to the house. ‘The chickens just need a scoop of grain from a barrel by the back door, the horses look after themselves—’
‘Horses too?’ Melissa looks delighted.
‘Icelandic horses,’ Inge corrects her.
Bloody hell, even the horses are Vikings round here!
‘The goats eat anything.’ Inge runs through the rest of her checklist. ‘And I’ll do the others.’
‘There are others?’ Melissa asks, thrilled to be in the company of a woman as Dr Doolittle as she is.
‘Just a couple of cats and the lamb. And the kids of course. And Magnus.’
‘Oh, right. Yes.’
What happens next could easily pass as an out-take from an all-female remake of Rocky II – because even though we’re not trying to catch the chickens, we hadn’t banked on them attempting to escape. Along with the – frankly terrifying – pig.
‘Chase it!’
‘You chase it!’ Melissa and I shout at each other to be heard above the din as Tricia laughs and Margot tries to ‘mark’ the pig as though it’s an elaborate game of netball.
The Lord of the Flies extra eventually plays ball and rolls in a patch of fresh mud instead while we round up the chickens.
‘This is hard!’ I protest, mid pounce, trying to catch a winged creature.
‘Isn’t it?’ Tricia pants. ‘Bloody good workout though.’ She gasps, taking a break from any pretence of chasing to do a few squats. ‘My bottom’s going to look better than after Ibiza boot camp at this rate. Buns. Of. Steel …’
It’s at this point that I realise Inge is watching and she looks disapproving. ‘It’s not about looking great,’ she corrects Tricia. ‘It’s about being great.’ She glances at her eldest daughter to check she’s listening – a limited grasp of English apparently no barrier to an early lesson in gender equality. ‘Your biggest assets should be in your head and your heart. Not what you sit on.’ It’s all right for her, I think, admiring Inge’s Lycra-d curves as she starts back towards the house, brood in tow. ‘The brain is the new ass!’ she shouts over her shoulder.
I get my head down and carry on chicken chasing as Tricia mutters, ‘Yeah, but what an ass! If I had a bottom like hers I think I’d wear assless chaps the whole time. Like a biker. Or Christina Aguilera …’fn1
‘Yeah!’ Melissa laughs along.
‘Are you familiar with the work of Christina Aguilera?’ I can’t help asking.
‘Shut your face,’ she tells me, with what I’m choosing to interpret as sisterly affection.
‘Then again, can you even get chaps that aren’t assless?’ Tricia ponders.
This is a good question and one we contemplate for a moment.
‘That’s the thing about a life without Google,’ says Tricia. ‘It really forces you to think …’
Back in the house we’re greeted with the beatific sight of Inge, hair swept back, now nestled in an outsized woollen jumper, cradling the lamb and feeding it milk from a baby’s bottle.
It’s like an Athena poster! I marvel.
‘We’ll start weaning next week but for now it’s the teat,’ she explains.
We nod, largely dumbfounded.
‘Can we do anything?’ Melissa asks.
‘Yes, what now?’ Margot adds, keen to sound helpful.
‘Now, I need to do some work,’ Inge says.
‘This isn’t work?’ Tricia flops in a chair. ‘I’m exhausted!’
‘There’s more coffee in the pot,’ is her response.
Coffee: always the answer.
‘But no, this isn’t work – this is just life.’
‘Oh. Right. So, what else do you do?’ Margot is intrigued.
Inge burps the lamb, sets it down to sleep in its cupboard, reaches to the top of the dresser for a white lever arch file and a laptop, then tells us, ‘I study.’ I presume she’s going to say something like ‘to be a part-time yoga teacher’ or ‘personal trainer’ (because: that arse), but what actually comes out is, ‘Psychology. At the moment I’m doing my PhD thesis.’
I hadn’t expected this.
‘As well as all—’ Melissa waves a hand at a couple of feral children whizzing past ‘– this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wow.’
‘And, what’s your thesis on?’ Margot asks, wide-eyed.
Even Margot hasn’t got a PhD …
Inge looks her squarely in the face and says, ‘The psychology of over-achievers.’
Margot swallows hard as she takes this on board, torn between curiosity and a mounting suspicion that perhaps she’s being observed as part of a scientific experiment.
At least, that’s how I’m feeling, so I’m magnifying this (because: Margot …).
‘So now, I’m going to take myself off for an hour,’ Inge declares. My sister looks bowel-looseningly alarmed at the prospect of being left in charge of three children for the second time in a single afternoon. Fun Aunt Melissa’s duties don’t normally extend beyond an initial wrestle and then doling out chocolate until the kids are suitably hyper, before handing them back after ten minutes with an air of, ‘not my circus, not my monkeys …’.
And there are only two of mine! Maybe my sister really doesn’t want a family, I think. Interesting.
Inge hasn’t asked if any of us have children. Or indeed have a clue what to do with the three mini Vikings currently weaving in and out of the table legs.
‘Will you be OK?’ she adds as an afterthought, preparing to leave the room.
‘They’ll be fine,’ I say, hoping to reassure her that I’m a capable childcare provider – the kind of woman with four bags-for-life in her car.
‘I meant you lot … ?’
‘Oh.’ Well, this is embarrassing. ‘Yes. Thanks.’ I nod.
‘Well, help yourself to showers – towels are on your beds.’ And with that she is gone.
Despite having been assured that the children – even the toddler – are self-sufficient, all three now look at us expectantly. That or challenging us. I can’t be sure.
‘And there’s no TV?’ Tricia checks, sounding concerned. ‘T-V?’ she asks again, louder this time and with raised eyebrows in the universal code for, ‘I don’t speak your language because I’m bloody British but I’m asking A Question now. Loudly.’
Fortunately, it seems ‘TV’ is the same in Viking as all the children catch her drift and shake their heads in response.
‘No iPads?’ I try, but heads cock to one side like a pack of confused terriers.
‘I think that’s a “no”,’ says Margot.
‘Right then, time to get Poppins on their ass.’ Melissa slaps her hands on her knees and pushes herself up to standing.
‘I don’t think Mary Poppins is a realistic role model for the current situation—’ I start, but Melissa cuts me off, holding up a hand as though I’ve overstepped a line.
‘What?’
‘You mess with Poppins you mess with me.’
‘Oh, come on!’
‘Or Maria Von Trap.’ She explains to Tricia: ‘Another of my idols.’
‘Do you feel this way about all Julie Andrews characters?’ Tricia asks, curious.
Melissa shrugs. ‘I can take or leave Victor Victoria.’
‘What about the one she plays in The Princess Diaries?’ Margot chimes in.
‘What?’
I’m forced to explain that Melissa stopped watching anything made after 1997 as a one-woman protest at So
ldier Soldier being axed from ITV.
As it happens, we do not ‘Poppins it’. After a few minutes of rectal clenching, Melissa observes that the children seem to be ‘totally nailing fly-a-kite era Jane and Michael’. Taking Inge’s recommendation of healthy neglect to heart, she straddles a chair backwards and announces that we should all ‘just relax’ instead. And so, after hiding the knives, at my insistence, we do. We drink coffee, chat, have showers in turns and eat more buns and feel ridiculously decadent (on my part, anyway) for lounging around at 4pm on a Thursday, merely observing as a child occasionally streaks past. Sometimes with an animal in tow, sometimes clutching the hair of a sibling, sometimes not. And no one dies. Or complains. An in loco parentis ‘win’.
I haven’t sat still and done nothing … ever … I must have once, mustn’t I? I frown, trying to remember. Maybe some time in the late 1980s when I had pneumonia one half-term … Or the time I broke my leg. Either way, this feels … nice. I run my hands over the surface of the wooden table top, tracing the worn patterns of rings from the tree. It feels lived-in and loved – quite unlike the permanently disinfected grey granite slab back in my own kitchen.
This, I think, is like the table we had growing up.
I look over at Melissa, positioned on the other side of it, just as she used to be across the family kitchen table. There was hot competition for who got to sit at the end by the drawer filled with placemats. She never knew why I wanted to sit there but the fact that I did made this seat infinitely more desirable than any of the others. I would watch her eating dumplings, or toad-in-the-hole, or suet pudding from Portmeirion plates – holding her knife like a pen and speaking through mouthfuls of home-cooked, stodgy fare with pure, unalloyed pleasure; at least she did in the days before the Obesity Clinic and before Mum halved her carbohydrate quota. We would have competitions to see who could mash the most mayonnaise into their jacket potato or who could load the most butter on their toast. Then, if I had the drawer seat, I would carefully convey my food into the drawer to be disposed of later, when no one else was around.
At first I just skipped breakfast. No one minded that. It was one less thing to worry about in the morning and Mum used to thank me for taking care of Melissa and cleaning up after the rest of the family’s soft boiled eggs. After she left us, ‘mealtimes’ stopped meaning much. We ate in ever more divergent ways – so that no one blinked if Melissa sat down with a whole rotisserie chicken at 3pm, or Dad had cereal for dinner. And no one noticed what I ate. Or didn’t. Melissa’s healthy appetite was celebrated once Mum was gone. Bye bye, Hay Diet; hello, all manner of sweet treats and goodies brought around by well-meaning neighbours and relatives keen to do all they could for the ‘poor widower’. It made them feel better somehow – dropping off a lasagne on the doorstep then legging it for fear that they would have to say something if we caught them in the act. And no one ever knew what to say. So the anonymous food parcels kept coming. We had so many lasagnes one month, I seem to recall now, that Melissa drew up a chart to rank them, scoring them out of ten. Dad joined in, and it made him feel better, too, somehow. Everyone desperately needed someone to nurture and feed, so Melissa stepped up to the plate. More than once, I think, looking back now. I remember feeling pleased when someone described my legs as looking like ‘snowdrop stems’, extending out of my shorts one summer. And so it continued.
I once read that meerkat sisters use food as a form of competition, with the ‘alpha’ sister eating more and attempting to gain weight to reinforce her position. For us, it worked the other way around. But there was still something there. Something basic. As I got thinner, I was ‘winning’. As I got thinner, I was in control.
I left home as soon as the ink was dry on my A-Levels, before my eighteenth birthday, even. And I haven’t been back since.fn2
I could tell that my sister was unhappy, just as I was, but I couldn’t reach out to her – or rather I didn’t dare. Lest I’d get dragged back down there into a pit of sadness with Dad and Melissa, never to emerge.
‘Another bun?’ Tricia extends a plate in my direction, hair wrapped up in a towel turban now, post-shower, so that she looks a little like a classic Hollywood film star snapped in St Tropez.
‘No thanks, I’m fine,’ I respond – but not, I note with interest, out of any fear about what it will do to my thighs (i.e. un-Margot them). I decline because the aromas from the stew simmering gently on the stove are making my mouth water in anticipation of what’s to come. ‘You have mine,’ I tell Tricia, and she doesn’t refuse.
My muscles ache, as though I’ve used them well and as nature intended. I feel like a new woman after a good wash and then Inge returns and announces that her studying time is up and asks if we’d all like a beer before supper.
Normally, I don’t drink beer (at 200 calories and up to eighteen grams of carbohydrates a go? Hardly …), but this evening, I think, Fuck it.
Melissa opens the bottles with her teeth, just to annoy me (‘I wish you wouldn’t do that! It’s the worst thing you could possibly be doing! Even worse than the impact on your enamel of tearing Sellotape!’ You can see how scintillating my small talk is. It’s no wonder I seldom bother …). But from the first taste, I forget my irritation, because it is sublime.
Mmm … beer … If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Effervescing with a cold, slightly bitter note, it makes me feel a little loose and loopy from the first mouthful before sitting heavily on my stomach, like a large, beery man-hug. Another large beery man-hug appears shortly after this with further supplies of local brew and baked goods.
‘Otto! Beer and cake? You’re really spoiling us!’ Tricia coos.
‘All right, Ambassador,’ I quip, and she laughs. Margot looks mystified.
Otto probably doesn’t look anything like the ambassadors she usually meet …
‘We just thought you might like a good feed.’ Otto grins amiably, oblivious to any 1980s Ferrero Rocher references.
‘There’s a saying in the Hávamál saga,’ Inge goes on, giving the stew a final stir before setting it on the table. ‘If guests are coming, you have to prepare. So that’s what we do. It’s how we are.’
The only saga I have ever read was the Sweet Valley High series (The Wakefield Legacy, FYI) – a tome found wanting in the way of deep and meaningful moral coda or life lessons. Other than ‘always wear ChapStick’, I think, touching my dry, cracked lips now. That one was pretty smart …
‘The Sagas are a set of stories that Vikings lived by,’ Inge clarifies as she sets the table.
‘Like the Nine Noble Virtues?’ Margot asks, standing up and trying to look useful.
‘No,’ says Inge. ‘They were made up by Americans who wanted a shortcut and couldn’t be bothered to read the Sagas—’
‘Americans and Magnus?’ Otto jokes, opening a beer with the back of his hand against the roughly hewn table, much to Melissa’s admiration.
Inge ignores this, going on to explain. ‘But I’m more about Ásatrú, anyway – the ancient Norse faith. I’m a Völva.’
She pronounces the word as though it rhymes with the first two syllables of ‘pulverise’. As though she’s referring to the outer part of the female genitalia – or Tricia’s semi-successful handicraft project. I can only presume that this is another example of Scandinavian empowerment and their famously liberal approach to sex and the body.
Is this what fourth-wave feminism looks like now? Is this the Nordic version of Pussy Power?
I worry that I am horribly out of touch as Tricia seeks further clarification.
‘You’re a vulva?’ she asks. ‘You mean you have a vulva, right?’
‘No, I am one,’ Inge says simply.
‘A “vulva”?’
‘A “Völva” – v-ö-l-v-a.’
‘There’s a difference?’ Tricia appeals to Otto for help here.
‘The ö has dots over the top,’ he says, as though this will illuminate us.
‘Basically we beli
eve in Thor and Odin and everyone but we don’t rely on them to fix our problems – because, why should they care?’ Inge says, taking a gulp of beer. ‘Völva don’t wait around for a miracle …’
Jesus … Mary, Joseph and all their carpenter friends are getting some shade thrown at them here …
‘We’re more about making our own luck – and hospitality,’ she says. ‘So if I went into a room and there was no coffee, no beer, no cake – that would be bad form.’
Melissa looks a little dreamy-eyed and murmurs, ‘I think I might be a Völva …’
‘Being a true Viking isn’t about raiding or pillaging, either—’
‘Unless it’s the fridge!’ Melissa jokes but Inge ignores her.
‘It’s about being able to face yourself every morning. It’s about being a decent person who tells the truth, treats people fairly, and behaves well.’
Tricia shifts slightly in her seat.
Odd … I try to catch her eye but she won’t meet my gaze.
‘You must know that your actions always affect someone or something else – like nature or society or another person. What you send out comes back. It’s not about your qualifications, how many hours you work or what your job title is.’
Cannot compute …
I struggle to process this as all the things I’ve ever striven towards are dismissed in one swipe of Thor’s hammer. ‘Vikings earn respect through their behaviour. You start over, with everyone you meet. You inherit nothing. It’s not about money or social standing. Even if you’re born to status, you have to live up to it.’
Now it’s Margot’s turn to look uncomfortable. Only Melissa appears unruffled.
The children materialise and sit in their places around the table, with Otto lifting the littlest up and into her high chair as though she were a balloon, and then we’re invited to a feast of chicken and vegetable stew. A meal that Inge has apparently whipped up while simultaneously solo-parenting three children, sword-forging, axe-throwing, lamb-rearing and dispensing Viking gems.
She is my idol …
I begin to load my plate with stew, carefully eschewing the poultry on offer, before Otto notices and pushes the dish of chicken in my direction.
Gone Viking Page 17