‘As soon as he’s on the line, hook him. A good yank at the right moment and he’s yours.’
I couldn’t get it, and blamed the speed of the boat. Under my own power, it would be different, I reasoned, and so I took off solo and rowed past the island to the more sheltered water on the far side of the lake. This channel opened onto a cove a little further along that caught my eye. I took the boat in, and found myself perfectly out of sight of the summerhouse. A light breeze passed through the heads. Now and again, it brought what I thought was Molly’s cooing, or perhaps it was just cooing. Birds were all around me, and it could well have been them.
I didn’t want to go back. I hadn’t caught any fish, but I didn’t care much about that, not now. The solitude in Iceland was still perfect and on that day only my paddling, which I could temper, broke it. Iceland had not been the site of personal catastrophe. There had been disasters of sorts in mine and my mother’s lives, but the country itself had escaped unpolluted. It remained an island of simple, more elemental, life—walking and swimming, rowing, fishing, and haymaking. Although life here was simple, it also seemed to offer a more complete version of how to be. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I see it now, that I had begun to regard Iceland as the place I went to become more fully myself, just as my mother had done in the 1970s.
When I did eventually row back, I followed the shoreline of birch trees and mossy grass, which sheltered me further and kept me out of sight until, at last, I emerged into the open stretch of shoreline in front of the summerhouse. On the balcony, I saw the three of them waving me in.
‘You had us worried us sick,’ Mum said when I got to the shore. It was about as close as she’d ever come to yelling at me.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We couldn’t see you. Whatever made you want to go out so far?’
I think I could have said that I liked the feeling of drifting out of sight, of solitude in the stretches of quiet water, just as much as she did.
9
THIN GIRLS IN YELLOW SHOES
There was, I felt, an alternative universe in Iceland, and it had something to do with love and nostalgia: my parents’ affair, the light, and the unthinking rhythms of childhood. But in Brisbane, where we came to live in 1986, love seemed everywhere. Before I even realised it, the girls here were smiling at me. No reserve. No Icelandic sullenness. No English snobbishness. They were all thin and wore yellow shoes—or seemed to, such was the effect of the sun and the brilliance it produced when it met the skin.
Time passed as a series of failed crushes. Katrina, I was told, I had missed my chance with by a week—she was now taken. Kristeen was simply bemused by me. Jane said that I’d do as a formal partner but, no, she couldn’t imagine anything beyond that. So it all came down to Nadia, the only girl at school who didn’t seem taken by the yellow of the Australian sky, and who kept herself out of the sun and away from the outdoor life it sponsored. And that wasn’t until 1989, when I was sixteen and in my last year of school in the outer Brisbane suburb of Brighton—a year before I met my father.
Nadia was small but strong, and had dyed her hair jet black. She had a backpack of badges: The Smiths, The Cure, The Mission, The Clash—you needed a definite article to get on. So maybe I would do for her; after all, I played guitar and wrote poetry. Nothing could dissuade me from these, not even my best friend Colin who said I was ‘just a wanker’. I knew I was a complicated young man but Nadia was different too. She was fucked-up but not in a considered way; you just sensed that something was amiss. You weren’t surprised when she told you that you were over-analysing her. But in fact her greatest appeal lay in those odd moments when she appeared to acknowledge the missing piece, the absence or sadness that drew you to her. It was a side that, now and then, she wanted someone else to see.
Colin—like me, tall and rather obnoxious in class—would check out what Nadia and her friend Janine were up to from behind the high taps of the biology classroom. He wasn’t interested in Nadia, she wasn’t his type, but then she wasn’t exactly mine, either. I had always fallen for bright-eyed girls with big hair, like Katrina of the best legs in the history of legs, or the delicate, indifferent ones like Björk in Reykjavík. That is what I initially told Janine, Nadia’s best friend, when she asked whether I’d go on a date with her. I’d said that Nadia and I weren’t suited, ‘she’s into The Clash and The Mission’.
‘How about we go out as a group—bring Colin and some others’, suggested Janine. So that’s why a group of ten of us met at Albert Street, outside the bottle shop at The Victory Hotel, on the night Nadia and I got together.
‘Who’s going to get the booze?’ asked Melinda. Drinking was considered the thing to do—Expo ’88, for all it offered in terms of urban renewal, wasn’t much good to underage drinkers.
‘There’s no point us going in,’ replied Nadia. ‘We look thirteen.’
So I collected the money and told the others to keep going towards the Botanical Gardens. Colin stood guard for me and, when I came out with only wine, he expressed his usual, unsubtle view of me; something like, ‘I can’t believe you only got wine, you wanker.’
We caught up with the others inside the garden gates.
‘Where are we going to go now?’ asked Colin.
‘Let’s drink it there,’ Will, the sporty one in the group, said. ‘Over on that bench. That’ll do.’ He then promptly sat on the backrest, propped up like a thin, metal figure.
We were underneath a fig tree, it was nine o’clock on a Saturday night, and there wasn’t much else going on around us, just a rustle from the dark every now and then. A torchlight flashed on to us and the voice that went with it asked, ‘Having a nice evening?’ We told the police we were and they warned us to be careful in the gardens at night.
‘You haven’t seen any Aboriginal people, have you?’ one asked.
‘No, none,’ I replied.
With that, they ignored the wine and left us in peace. We decided to catch a ferry across to Kangaroo Point. When we got across the river Janine led us past the back of the hospital and on to a cliff ledge. On the way, Nadia surprised me by holding my hand. A set of dark steps ran down to a house fronted with tall windows. It stood silent and empty but for the scattered belongings of past squatters and drunks.
‘Nadia, how do you even know about this place?’ Colin asked.
‘Jesus, Colin,’ said Janine. ‘There’s more to life than Brighton, you know.’
This was about as close as you got to the ‘left bank’ of Brisbane, and it was actually rather lovely. The Story Bridge was lit up on our right, and the skyrises of the city stood close to the water on the other side. It was warm and hazy, as it always was in this town, even in winter.
As the night wore on Will got drunker, Janine began to understand Colin’s sarcasm, and Nadia’s body got closer to mine, until we were almost touching sides. I wasn’t used to this kind of sophisticated, out-of-the-way location for a booze-up. All the parties I’d been to before this one had led only to fights, vomity snogs, and long walks home. That was just the Brighton way.
Our night on the cliff face ended when the booze did. We dragged the drunk ones back up the steps, reboarded the ferry, and made the last train to Brighton. The ride back was fluorescent and revealing, in that way of all brightly lit public spaces. You became conscious of your zits and suburban taste in clothes. Nadia, though, forgave all this in me, and we held hands again as we made the slow midnight walk from the station to her home. It wasn’t the same as falling in love, but I could feel something stirring all the same.
We only went on one date after that. She arrived in a white dress with pink polka dots, and wore black Doc Marten boots with yellow shoelaces—her gesture to the yellow shoes of the other girls and the sunshine that inhabited them. My response to her off-key beauty was to take her to an awful, local play about Brisbane nurses
in the 1950s. We sat in the back row and kissed. I tried to get into a good position, but failed. I was too tall for the seats, which cramped my knees and pushed my legs sideways. So Nadia sat up, tossed her hair back, and leant in for a second kiss. It was a glorious, superior kiss. She was taller, over me, and in control. The audience disappeared.
That kiss . . . well, I nearly got over it by the end of the following year, after eighteen months of thinking about her commanding presence at the back of the theatre, and her hair as it enclosed me. Nadia got over it before the end of the night. She had something else on, and told me she would be fine to make her own way to the bus. She waved me goodbye from the lower end of the Queen Street Mall. Despite my following her home from school for the next three months, at a visible distance, she didn’t seek out another one of those kisses.
It was the start of a trend for me. For the next ten years girls like Nadia, fucked-up but friendly, drew out of me a melancholic, needy side that I suspected of being Icelandic in origin, and probably had something to do with my father. They all shared Nadia’s evasive style of only rarely acknowledging an inner disquiet, and I thought they wanted that to be acknowledged by me, as well. So I did it the only way I knew how—writing up to five incomprehensible poems a night. I fell in love more easily than I could write a single lucid sentence, and each day I swung between gregariousness and sullenness.
What was I looking for in a girl? Puzzles, I suppose, that were nice to be with. Enigmas like Mum? Perhaps that, too. Like her, the thin girls in yellow shoes would say, ‘Never mind that’ or ‘You’re not still thinking about that, are you?’ I could never quite be light-hearted in the kind of way others were. They would denounce love and poetry, and insist that life was just the steady march of nothing-muches. But I was turning into a serious young man who knew better than they. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was about this time that my mother, sensing that I was perhaps a little too inclined to poetry, suggested I take the year off.
‘Why go straight to university?’ she asked. ‘Spend some time in England, maybe visit Iceland. You could look up your father.’
Although she claimed to have stopped moving around herself, she hadn’t yet stopped believing in the power of travel. I think she even saw it as her main gift to me—being restless was a virtue. I loved that about her, but my restlessness had different ends. She had always travelled as a way of feeling at home, and saw travel as an end in itself, while I travelled as a way of finding home. I was going back, not out into the greater world.
In ways that she didn’t really want to discuss, Mum and I were still the same. Like her, I couldn’t altogether separate Iceland from Gísli—he and the promise that surrounded him remained at the centre of an island community that I imagined was still mine. Finding home remained tied to finding him. And, even if I had never stopped to wonder why, I was sure that I loved him as much as I loved Iceland.
Jessica was not only the most beautiful girl in Aviemore in 1990; she also had the second-best working perm of all time. Since Björk, I had thought this more or less impossible. After all, that was 1984, and this was 1990. A lot had changed, including hairstyles, in those years.
I’d arrived in England in January to a winter of poll-tax riots and storms. I sheltered in a Westminster café with a Swiss girl in a bodysuit—I was not yet serious enough not to see this as wholly good. Outside the wind brought down trees; inside I fell in love and wrote my five poems for her. Then, I travelled to Nantwich and stayed with West, my best friend from Mostyn House School. We joked about how we had once fallen out over a pen, and for a second time made up, this time over beer in The Crown Hotel, a bar that tipped along the uneven lines of its Tudor frame.
‘Where are you from?’ asked the bar manager. When I replied Brisbane, he offered me a job. Mum had been right—you just went and got a job.
For the next two months I pulled pints. Then at Easter I wandered north to Aviemore in the Cairngorms with a letter of recommendation from a friend in the Glasgow Council. I arrived on a bright, spring morning, and sat in the sun watching the snow as it began to melt. The town was divided between modest streets of Highland housing and the Stakis resort, which stood a little apart from local life with its hotels and its large ice rink, go-kart track, and staff hostels.
There wasn’t really any work going, the recruitment officer at the big hotel told me. ‘But have a word with Andrew at The Rox, our nightclub. I think he needs a bouncer. You know, someone to stand at the door, collect glasses, break-up fights,’ he added.
My experience in this area was obviously limited. I had been kicked in the balls by a certain Tommy when I nine, and I had fallen angrily on Durant when I was twelve. But my lack of know-how didn’t seem to matter to Andrew.
‘Show me your hands,’ he said in his slow, unusually even Glaswegian. I held them out for him, flat out in front. No. He wanted me to lift them up.
‘Yes, they should do.’ I didn’t understand what he meant.
‘Here’s the thing,’ he said, ‘this is a resort town. We don’t hire big doormen. What we want is tall, thin men with big hands. If there’s a fight, get in and pick up any glass you see left standing. Straight away. And try not to take on the locals. They’ve been wanting to close us down for years. Highland Presbyterians.’
Andrew was also tall and thin with big hands, and so was Jason, a Jordie and the head bouncer, as was Alex, another Glaswegian with a handsome, battered face who immediately told me he’d had seventeen assault convictions by the time he was thirty. The others were all the same: tall, thin, and violent.
‘We had an Australian here, before,’ Alex said. ‘He was fine until he knocked up a local girl. Took off last month. You’re the replacement.’
‘Is it a very rough club?’ I asked.
‘The squadies from Dundee can be a handful,’ said Jason. ‘Just make sure you fuck them up before they fuck you up.’
‘Right.’ Clearly, I would need to toughen up.
‘Who broke your nose?’ he asked.
‘Me.’
‘Oh, Jesus. What have we got here, lads? A fucking Australian who breaks his own nose.’
‘Well, I fell down some steps. In Iceland, actually.’
‘Right.’ He meant, shut up, and went on, ‘Try not to hit a local. Try to look reasonably capable. You’re working tonight. It’s a rave. No booze, just water and pills. Shouldn’t be any trouble at all. Smile, be nice.’
The rave was held in a nearby conference hall given over to a few, cheap blue lights and an end-of-room bar that sold only bottled water, at five pounds each. It was twelve hours of acid music, and I was bored senseless after the first hour. I walked up and down in a daze and then I tripped. What caught me? An outstretched leg. I could see it being drawn back. Be nice. Smile.
‘Did you just trip me?’ I asked the leg’s owner, an enormous, broad man with smallish hands. They looked hard.
‘Yes, I did.’ He leaned forward and, with a heavy smile, growled, ‘I was hit by a car this evening, and I’ve been on the beers since. Now, I want someone to fight.’
‘Right.’ I sounded weak. What to do next. Kick him out? That was unlikely. Hit him?
‘And you’re fucking English!’ he continued.
‘No, actually I’m not.’
‘You’re fucking English,’ he said again, smiling.
‘I’m Australian,’ I told him, as I wondered whether he was the brother of the pregnant girl?
‘Come here. C’mon.’
Fuck it, I thought. I was busting for something to happen. I dreaded the thought of having to hit someone but maybe this would be a defining moment. I might as well get it over with. So I moved in and then . . . he hugged me.
‘I love Australians,’ he said. ‘Except for that bastard who just left.’ He was yelling over the music, but the intention was friendly. ‘Leave the lo
cal girls alone.’
‘Sounds a good idea.’
‘You don’t want that nose broken again.’
‘No.’
‘We’ll watch out for you.’ A Highlands threat, I wondered.
That was the closest I came to a fight. The locals and the other bouncers soon learnt that I was either incapable of hitting someone or not prepared to try. Both were true. And, strangely, they liked this about me.
Jason and I became close. Like so many of my friends from this time on, and all of my girlfriends, he was inhabited by a sadness that he didn’t understand, and which he mistakenly thought I might be able to articulate for him. Out of that sadness came an extraordinary punch, a deadly, short-arm jab that detonated as it made contact. He’d say to me, ‘Come in with me,’ keeping me close but out of harm’s way, and then he’d hit one of the drunks, just once. The punches, or rather their sound, made me nauseous, but one hit was always enough to end it. Never before had I seen grown men run away like those before Jason, tripping over themselves to get out of his way. It was decisive, and so completely at odds with my own laboured complexity, that he engrossed me.
Alex didn’t tower like Jason; he scuffled. He was a street fighter. He said he was only concerned with speed; unlike Jason, who was one-punch elegance and timing—something power gave you. He would drag me in to the scuffles and then hold me off—keep the boss happy by giving me some level of involvement, and then stop me from getting hurt.
The reason they protected me, and the reason we became friends, was that they were both romantics, and I sometimes suspected they wanted me to write poetry for them. Perhaps, wanting me to write poems about them.
In the early evenings before work, when we were allowed on to the ice rink, all eight of us bouncers would meet and skate together. The jukebox was unlocked, and for an hour we danced—invariably, it was U2’s cover of ‘Unchained Melody’ that began and ended our sessions. The other bouncers made wonderful, elegant skaters—Jason, in particular. But every now and then, he would stop his jumps and quite deliberately smash into one of us. He couldn’t manage an hour’s exercise without violence of some kind.
The Promise of Iceland Page 10