Betrayal

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  ‘We’ve chatted every now and again since the other evening, like you suggested, and I was wondering if it’s time to meet up, or wait a while?’

  Stella let out a low groan. The woman seemed to need to be guided every single step of the way to getting a date.

  ‘No, meet her right away,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to waste time on someone who’s no good. You need to find out if there’s a spark there or not. There’s no point spending time on some woman if there’s no spark.’

  ‘OK, I see what you mean,’ Gréta said. ‘Should I invite her to the annual get-together at work, or out to dinner somewhere?’

  ‘No!’ Stella yelped. ‘Absolutely not dinner for a first date. You don’t want to be too eager. And it would be a pain if you ended up having to sit through a whole dinner with some misery guts.’

  ‘She doesn’t come across as miserable,’ Gréta said, and Stella bit her lip. She was also thinking that it might not be easy for this apparently normal and rather pretty girl to be lumbered with Gréta for a whole evening.

  ‘Coffee,’ she said. ‘Ask her to meet for coffee, and be casual, y’know? Say, “Shall we get a coffee sometime this week?” Don’t come across as desperate; be confident, like you’re out on dates all the time. Girls like that.’

  ‘So just coffee, or coffee and cake? Or some kind of healthy cake so she can get the impression right away that I’m making an effort to not be too … solid?’

  ‘Jesus, Gréta! Just have what you want! Have cake, so at least she’ll get to see that you’re someone who enjoys life.’

  Gréta laughed awkwardly. ‘OK, yes. I’m just stressed and then I overthink everything.’

  Stella’s feeling was that once the girl had met Gréta in person, there would be no further dates, so it would be as well for Gréta to get some satisfaction out of the date; and that would be the cake.

  ‘Just try to relax,’ Stella said. ‘And just be yourself.’

  ‘OK,’ Gréta said, and Stella could hear her take a deep breath. ‘How are things at the ministry?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, there’s that scandal over the rape case that seems to have got bogged down in the justice system. Have you heard anything about it?’

  ‘You know I’m just a cleaner here,’ Stella said. ‘I’m not a permanent secretary.’

  ‘Just wondering if you’ve heard anything in passing, when you’re having a smoke with the minister.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Stella said, and ended the call, stowed her phone back in the waistband of her pants, unlocked the door using her card and backed through it, pushing it open as she went. Her arms were full of bags of waste and shredded paper, so she couldn’t see over them as she took the usual couple of steps to the container.

  ‘What would it cost for you to forget to shred stuff from a couple of bins and let me have it instead?’

  The man asking the question was leaning against the waste-paper container, chewing gum with his mouth open. Stella started as if she was unconsciously about to defend herself and dropped the bags on the ground.

  ‘It’s OK, you’re safe with me,’ the guy said, and as if to demonstrate this, he raised his hands and took a few steps back into the car park.

  ‘What the hell do you want rubbish for?’ she asked. This had to be either a journalist or a creep of some kind. Or both: a creepy journalist.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ he said. ‘Just think about how much you want. Seven hundred krónur a bag? A thousand?’

  She didn’t have to think too hard to know that this would break all sorts of rules and she’d be sacked on the spot if anyone found out. But at the same time, the sums ticked over in Stella’s mind. She was always so miserably skint at the end of each month, so a few extra notes wouldn’t come amiss. How much would depend on how many bags he would want.

  ‘Which bins are we talking about?’

  ‘The permanent secretary’s. And the minister’s, of course.’

  33

  Úrsúla had already let herself out of the car by the time Gunnar had made his way around it to open the door for her. She would have to talk this over with him; she was perfectly capable of getting out of a car by herself, at least here, outside her own house. There was something deeply ridiculous about sitting still, waiting for him to open the door for her.

  There was a light in the window; it warmed her heart to see the cheerful yellow glow behind the glass. Nonni had to be home, and probably the children as well, and all of them crowded into the kitchen most likely, the children playing a game or doing homework, and Nonni conjuring up something wonderful in a saucepan. She was thinking about discussing the South Coast Highway dilemma with Nonni this evening. She could always rely on him to have a sensible, grounded opinion and to keep things to himself. That at least was a feeling that hadn’t faded: that she could trust Nonni.

  The evening gloom made the street greyer than ever. The row of concrete-walled houses, of which theirs was the fourth from the corner, had been coarsely rendered in shell sand, as had the whole street. On the other side, directly opposite their place, was one of the large, white-painted detached houses that broke up the greyness of the street. In bright weather, myriad grey shades could be seen in the shell sand, and it sometimes glittered if the sunshine was strong, but now, in the darkness, the houses had a heavy, dark feel to them.

  She and Gunnar walked side-by-side over the slippery pavement to the steps then stopped as a police car came to a halt next to the ministerial car.

  ‘We roll past every couple of hours,’ said the police officer who stepped out of the patrol car. ‘So the chief told me to bring this, as I was coming this way anyway.’

  He handed her a large envelope.

  ‘It’s the statement about the incident with the car for you to sign,’ he said, walking with them to the front door. ‘I can take it back with me.’

  Úrsúla went into the hall, kicked off her shoes and opened the drawer of junk in the phone table. She rooted through and found a purple felt-tip; it would do to sign the document. She scanned the statement as she stood there, reading the detailed description of how the homeless man had hidden in the boot of her car, and had jumped out and pushed her to the ground when she had found him there. She pulled off the cap of the felt-tip with her teeth and leaned over the old telephone table to scrawl her signature on the document. Then she straightened up sharply at the sight of the homeless man’s name.

  Her heart raced and a feeling of helpless fear swept through her. This was a name she knew; a name she knew very well.

  34

  Stella inspected her mother’s plump face and smiled. Her mother smiled back at her with the enigmatic look that meant she knew something Stella didn’t, but the drug-induced fog prevented her from saying what it might be. Stella sometimes wished her sedation could be reduced so that they could talk together properly and she could find out what was behind that mysterious smirk. But the doctors said that it was out of the question. Her mother would just become hysterical again, and possibly injure herself or someone else. That was the nature of the damage to her brain, they said.

  Sometimes when she sat with her mother, which she had to confess to herself was becoming increasingly seldom, questions about their whole existence came to her mind. Her mother was the only one at the care home who wasn’t as pale as snow, and sometimes Stella felt that she was in completely the wrong place. The round Aztec features seemed to be so impossibly far from their proper environment Stella couldn’t help but retreat to her childhood memories of her mother wrapped in a colourful poncho, with flowers in her hair and a long necklace made of bean pods around her neck. She wondered if everything they had fled – Stella’s father and his criminal gang – could in fact have been worse than this.

  ‘Tienes trabajo?’ her mother asked – You’re working?

  She asked the same question every time. There was nothing strange about this, of course; Stella had never been great at holding dow
n a job.

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ she said and stroked her mother’s hand. ‘I have a good job now.’

  Her mother smiled mysteriously and her almond eyes narrowed even further. It was no surprise that new staff at the care home assumed she was Asian and wanted to talk to her about Thailand and Vietnam. Stella’s own looks were more mixed as her father had been practically white. Her curly hair had come from him, although when her mother was in a bad mood, she would sometimes say that Stella was the child of a black delivery man who had appeared in the kitchen one day, and that was where the curls had come from. Of course that wasn’t the truth, and her golden skin was evidence of that. She was fair enough for people to assume, after they had moved to Iceland, that she was Guðmundur’s daughter. She had been proud of that, back when she had been a little girl and they had only just arrived in Iceland, but her attitude changed fast after she saw what Guðmundur did to her mother. Since then the misunderstanding was one she was always at pains to correct. She much preferred the thought that her father was a hit man in Mexico, rather than Guðmundur.

  ‘It’s your birthday soon,’ her mother said, and Stella felt her heart leap with delight. Her mother would sometimes forget Christmas and Easter, and normally she didn’t know what day of the week it was, but she always remembered Stella’s birthday – always, without fail.

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said. ‘Soon. I’ll be twenty.’

  ‘And then your grandmother will come flying to us,’ her mother said, and it was as if the drugged mist parted for a moment; she sat upright in her chair and leaned towards Stella. ‘She’ll come flying all that way on a broomstick to visit you on your birthday.’

  Joy made Stella’s heart beat faster as she looked into her mother’s eyes; they were now alive and the mysterious smirk had spread across her face into a real, clear and shining smile. It was the way her mother had smiled at her when she was little.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, gently stroking the back of her mother’s hand. ‘Grandmother will come soon.’

  ‘Flying on her broomstick,’ her mother said.

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said, and sniffed. This was a rare genuine conversation, which for a while banished her loneliness.

  ‘Your grandmother the flying witch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please give her my regards.’

  ‘I’ll do that, Mama,’ Stella promised and laughed as her mother giggled quietly.

  ‘You’ll have to tell me about everything she does and says when she visits you on your birthday.’

  ‘Of course.’

  It went without saying that Stella would tell her mother the news after her birthday. But she knew, as always, that there was no guarantee her mother would be in any condition to listen to her then.

  ‘Remember to tell her that I sent her my regards,’ her mother repeated, and smiled as the joy glittered in her eyes. ‘Remember to tell her that her daughter sends her regards. Tell her that, when she comes flying to you on her broomstick, your grandmother the witch. La bruja.’

  35

  The phone call had left Marita exhausted. Jónatan had been drunk and in tears, which she found even harder to cope with than the rage over all this that burst out of him when he was sober.

  ‘Maybe I deserve this,’ he said, and she shushed him.

  There was no point starting to think like that. He just mustn’t think or talk along those lines. If he were to say anything like this to anyone else, it could be misunderstood and seen as an admission of guilt. So she repeatedly shushed him and told him to go to bed and sleep it off. Tomorrow everything would look better. But that was just something she said, as tomorrow things would be no better. If anything, it would all be half as bad again.

  Tomorrow the interview with Rósa, Katrín Eva’s mother, would be published, undoubtedly a gut-wrenching, tearful interview full of the crap that the girl had fed her. And tomorrow Jónatan would call again and either yell or whine, and again she would have to calm him down and comfort him. She did feel sympathy for him, but it was painful.

  He had been temporarily transferred to another station after the accusation, and he was lonely, missing her and the boys. Although she felt sorry for him, she was also relieved in many ways not to have him there all the time, as regardless of how hard she tried to convince herself, there was always the same irritation with him deep inside her. He had got them into this mess. He had given the girl a beer, and that was what seemed to have set this whole crazy thing off.

  It wasn’t yet midnight when she sat at the computer to see if the pdfs of any of tomorrow’s papers were online yet. Over the last few months she had found that sometimes you didn’t have to wait until past midnight for the next day’s paper to be ready. She checked the main media outlets, but so far there was nothing. Midnight was half an hour away, so she wouldn’t have to wait long. She opened Facebook and scrolled through the news feed. She couldn’t see anything about the case, as she had blocked anyone who had commented negatively on it. That left only a few people, mainly from back home in the Faroes, who didn’t follow Icelandic news. Of those who were local, there were just some colleagues from the bank and a few youngsters, friends of Kiddi’s.

  Her heart skipped a beat when Katrín Eva appeared in a picture. It was one of her own photos that by some evil coincidence had shown up in Marita’s ‘memories’. Klemmi was in Katrín Eva’s arms; she guessed that he was around three years old, so she had just started babysitting him. It had been beneath Kiddi’s dignity to look after his little brother, even though they had offered to pay him. He had wanted to get a proper summer job, outside the house, so he had spent the summer on one of the tills at Bónus. Katrín Eva had looked after Klemmi all that summer, and sat for them every now and then over the winter, and had continued to do so right up until … Right up to when she had decided to go home howling to her mother, saying that Jónatan had raped her.

  Marita deleted the memory, then searched for the picture and deleted that as well. If only it was as easy to delete people in real life as it was on Facebook.

  She checked the papers again and saw that the first one had appeared online. She downloaded it and scanned it quickly. There was nothing on the front or back covers, or on the first couple of pages. And then it was there; almost half of the fourth page. It was yet another digest of the reported circumstances and the interior minister’s short response to the paper’s questions, with a pledge to find out what progress had been made on the case – as if there was anything to check on.

  Why didn’t the police write this off like any other stupidity? Surely they received dozens of complaints every day about this or that. One from a pissed-off mother, clearly angry that her daughter had been given a beer, could hardly be any more serious than anything else. This interior minister ought to have better ways to spend her time.

  Marita went back to Facebook and looked up the minister’s profile. She seemed to have trained as an engineer and had been involved in aid work. She had clearly changed her profile picture the day she had taken over as minister. The previous picture had shown her with a glass of red wine in her hand, obviously at some party, while the new picture was something more dignified, almost a passport photo with a blank background. Marita clicked on the picture and examined the minister’s face. If this woman had any sense, she would see soon enough that the accusations against Jónatan were based on lies, and that the wretched girl and her mother were both crazy. Marita saw that the minister’s email address was displayed on her Facebook page, and wondered whether she should write to her.

  36

  Gunnar stared at the empty text box and wondered how to begin the message he had already addressed to fossi@gmail.com. He needed to be courteous, but firm. His intention was to make this person aware that Úrsúla was not an unaccompanied, defenceless woman, that a team of men was in place to protect her. Guys like this, who loved to terrify women, only had respect for other men.

  Good evening, he began. My name is Gunnar and I am Interior Minister �
�rsúla Aradóttir’s bodyguard. The permanent secretary and the minister’s assistant drew your message to my attention and requested that I reply to you.

  Of course, this was completely untrue. To begin with, his role wasn’t that of a bodyguard but primarily her driver, and he hadn’t discussed replying to the message with anyone, but he wasn’t going to let this thug know that his email had reached Úrsúla, or give him the pleasure of knowing that it had done its job by causing her discomfort and fear.

  It is clear from your words that you are struggling with a great deal of anger that appears to have little to do with the interior minister. I would urge you to find other outlets for your feelings and request that you do not contact the minister again.

  With kind regards,

  Gunnar

  He hit send and heard the whoosh as the message set off on its electronic journey to its anonymous recipient. Gunnar lay on the floor and worked on his abdominal stretches. He did thirty crunches, rested for a while, and did another thirty. He was able to empty his mind while he exercised and focused his thoughts on counting the crunches. As he felt the muscles in his belly begin to tire, he slowed down, making the same movements, but as slowly as he could, to make them even harder. His muscles howled with the effort. No pain, no gain, he thought, as he dug deeper.

  ‘What are you doing up so late?’ Íris asked sleepily as she came out of the bedroom. They had fallen asleep after they’d made love, but he had woken after a few minutes and had not been able to get back to sleep.

  ‘Crunches,’ he said.

  ‘Why’s your laptop switched on?’

  ‘Just because. Some work I had to do.’

  ‘What work do you need to do in the middle of the night?’ she asked and stepped closer to the sofa where the laptop lay, bending to see the screen.

  Gunnar rolled over, reaching out to shut it.

  ‘What was that for?’ Íris said and he could hear the tone in her voice that he knew so well. This was the sharp, tense tone that preceded the storm. ‘What are you hiding?’ she asked.