by Tia Wilson
The plane left the clouds and Lana got the first look at her new home. A vast expanse of dark rocks stretched out before her. The land was pitted and buckled and covered with a thin green covering of moss. The planes intercom crackled to life and announced, “We are now flying over the great and ancient lava fields of the Keflavik area. We will be landing shortly.” As the ground spread out before Lana through the tiny plane window she thought it looked like the surface of the moon. The only thing breaking up the rocky landscape was one thin ribbon of asphalt snaking its way through the forbidding landscape. The land below looked barren and harsh as the plane lowered it’s altitude and angled towards Keflavik airport.
“I thought there would be snow,” Lana said.
“The magazine said this part of the country gets the least snowfall and what little it gets is melted by now even though the summer is pretty mild,” Sara replied.
The planes wheels dug into the tarmac as it landed and it juddered and shook as the brakes slowed the metal bird to a stop. An audible sigh went up in the cabin and a few people clapped. Lana felt a little tension leave her body, she had felt like a balled up fist the whole flight, now that she was on the ground every mile further away she got from her old life eased her nerves in tiny increments. Lana got out of her chair and stretched stiff limbed and eager to get moving. An overhead luggage compartment opened with a loud thud and Lana spun around quickly half expecting to see the grey haired man standing behind her with a gun cocked at her head. They exited the plane and headed for the bus terminal.
The traffic was light on the road to Reykjavik. At first they passed though lava fields that stretched in all directions, the black rocks were jagged and the harsh profiles were only softened in spots where a tenacious bed of fluorescent green moss clung to the surface. On the horizon great plumes of white smoke bellowed into the air from a building clad in metallic silver pipes which cast sun sparks as it fell away into the distance. People on the bus wrinkled up there noses as a strong smell of ammonia and sulphur filled the air.
“Ugh what is that?” Lana asked Sara.
“Hey don’t blame me,” Sara said laughing, “Its from geothermal vents in the ground, there was an article about it on the plane, I skimmed through it.”
The smell soon dissipated and the lava fields started to diminish as small pockets of life whizzed by the window. Small houses with brightly painted roofs and corrugated metal walls zipped past Lana as she rested her head against the cool window. She let the unfolding landscape wash over her, trying not to think and letting herself slip into a half awake state. Soon the bus passed through a small village clustered around a harbour packed with fishing boats. As the bus took the road away from the village, Reykjavik was visible for the first time off in the distance. From here it was nothing more than a thin line on the horizon that winked and glittered like glass beads in the sun. Once the bus hit the main road to Reykjavik signs of habitation increased as industrial areas rolled by, followed by more and more houses clustered together.
The bus idled at a traffic light and Sara pointed at a sign by the side of the road. It was a picture of a tractor with a line through it. “Do you think thats much of a problem here? Tractors zipping about on the city streets?”
“Maybe farmers are crazy in Iceland and if they didn't have that sign up they would be holding drag races throughout the city,” Lana replied.
The day was bright and clear and more vehicles seemed to be leaving the city then entering it. Traffic was slow and congested on the road leading out, going into the city centre the bus sped along on a road practically empty. Over the intercom the driver announced that they would arrive at the bus station in five minutes and then repeated the message in Icelandic.
The bus pulled into a large lot in front of a large white building with the letters BSI in bright red on the front. Sara and Lana got off the bus and stood in the bright sun for a few minutes then headed into the bright and airy bus terminal. The back wall of the building was made of glass and gave the people waiting inside a view of the planes taking off from a small regional airport situated across a protected marshland that ran along the back of the bus station. They sat down on a hard metal bench and both let out a sigh in unison.
“How are you feeling?” Sara asked.
“Like I could sleep for a thousand years. I feel like I’ve been tensing every muscle in my body from the moment we booked our tickets. I keep looking around and expecting to see Gus coming out of a crowd with a smile on his face, telling us that there is no point in running, they will catch us no matter what. Im fucking drained.”
“I feel the same, why don't you get a table over there and we get something to eat. I see a ticket desk over in the corner, I’ll go and get everything arranged for Vik,” Sara said. She squeezed Lana's shoulder and said, “We are going to make it.”
At the back of the bus terminal was a large cafeteria and Lana wandered around looking at what kind of things they had for sale. A row of fridges sold sandwiches of cold smoked lamb and peas, Icelandic soft drinks with an array of brightly coloured labels, and packets of something called hardfisker. It looked like dried strips of pale jerky. Lana lifted up a packet and sniffed it, her nose was filled with the pungent aroma of dried fish and the salt of the sea. A small label in english said it was Icelandic cod dried in the traditional outdoors method. At the back of the cafeteria was a counter serving hot food. Above it was a row of pictures displaying what was available, Lana scanned across them. There was the usual fare of pizza, burgers and fries, fish and then at the last picture her stomach did a little queasy flip. The last meal was the full head of a sheep slit down the middle. The tongue lolled out onto the plate and was accompanied by mashed potatoes and a scoop of something yellow that Lana wasn’t sure of.
The man behind the counter saw her lingering on the last picture and said, “Thats an Icelandic traditional dish. Sheep head with potatoes, turnips and peas. You can have it with or without the eyeball. Personally I’d recommend it with the eyes, very juicy and tasty,” he said in perfect english.
Lana’s stomach lurched again and she tried to force a smile onto her face. “I don't think I could face something like that after a long flight. Maybe another time?”
“Sure thing. Its worth a try. Are you here on holiday?” the man asked. He was tall and broadly built with short cropped hair. His eyes were slate grey and friendly.
“Yeah, I’m with a friend. We are here for a few weeks to see the sights. We are thinking of going to Vik,” She said and immediately regretted saying it that as soon as the words escaped her lips.
The young man smiled broadly and started writing something on a notebook attached by a piece of twine to the counter. He ripped off a page and handed it to her. “My parents run a guesthouse in Vik. Its very nice, mention my name and they will give you a discount. Im Gisli by the way.” He reached over the counter and Lana took his hand and shook it. “I grew up in Vik. Its a beautiful place this time of year. The birds are nesting in the cliffs behind the village, the lupin is in bloom and herds of sheep have come down from the mountains to graze. If you cant tell I love my home town,” he said as his cheeks reddened a little.
“Im looking forward to it. Do you have any other recommendations about the place?” Lana asked.
“Will you be there three weeks from now? There is a fisherman's festival on for a long weekend. There will be outdoor games, barbecues, fishing trips and on the Saturday night they will hold a ball. Everyone from the town will be there as well as people from the surrounding farms. Im going to be returning home for the festival, I never miss it.”
“Sounds pretty cool. We will have to check it out. Nice meeting you Gisli,” Lana said more abruptly than she had wanted to sound. She ordered food for herself and Gisli told her he would bring it over when ready. Lana sat at a table with her back to the wall and a clear view of the bus terminal. Groups of people with backpacks weighed down with camping gear milled about, children dodged in and out of
the crowds of adults and yelped as they chased each other. A bunch of young men and women dressed in black t-shirts and combat trousers, long hair and pale faces queued at a ticket desk laughing and waving to friends on the other side of the ticket hall. Sara slid into the high backed booth beside Lana and pushed two tickets across the table to her.
“We leave in a little over an hour and get to Vik in around 4 hours,” Sara said. “The woman at the ticket desk phoned ahead and said there are rooms available at both of the guesthouses in town. I think we can relax a little now,” Sara said looking directly into Lana eyes.
“I hope so. I feel like I am going to jump out of my skin. I keep expecting Gus to pop up from some unexpected place.”
“We made it. No one knows we are here and they have no way of finding out. We can start to relax a little, I think we are overthinking Gus’s reach, he's a low life pimp and nothing more,” Sara said in her most reassuring voice. Two bright blue tray were placed on the the table by Gisli.
“Here you go ladies. Enjoy your trip and don't forget to drop my name at the guesthouse,” he said.
“Aren't you going to introduce me to your new friend,” Sara practically purred. That was something that would sometimes annoy Lana when they were out together in a group, when it came to men Sara always had to be the centre of attention. She had a fiercely competitive streak when it came to the currency of male attention and she could get bitchy if she thought a woman she deemed lesser then her was soaking up some of it. Luckily she never turned her mean side towards Lana as she would not put up with that kind needy competition.
“This is Gisli and his parents run a guesthouse in Vik,” Lana said.
Sara stood up and Gisli stuck his hand out to be shook. Lana knew straight away that Sara was about to lay her patented soft touch on him straight away. Gisli was the kind of guy that Sara usually went for, broad and well muscled. They shook hands and with her left hand she ran her fingers across the back of his hand quickly and with very little pressure. It usually left the guy with a half smile and a bewildered look on his face as his body had registered the soft stroke of her fingers but it hadn't caught up with his brain yet. The unexpected nature of it could really throw some guys. It was like a magic trick, if you see it too many times it loses its ability to wow and Lana had seen Sara employ it time and again to disarm a man. Sara definitely saw dating as a game and men as something that needed to be somehow tamed or civilised by a womans touch. Lana felt a lot differently, she guarded her heart and pulled back anytime she found herself growing close to someone. Since she had been making money on the side as an escort she had lost all interest in finding someone to love and she knew that deep down it was because she wouldn't want anyone to find out the secret life she was leading.
Like many a man before him Gisli barely registered the slight stroke of Sara's fingers across the back of his hand and he had the kind of reaction Lana had seen before, he began to blush.
“Nice to meet you,” he said clearly disarmed.
“They don’t make men like you were I come from,” Sara said half teasingly. His face reddened even further.
Gisli laughed and said, “Hopefully I see both of you at the summer ball?” and started to walk away before either could answer.
“Oh you’ll see us again,” Sara said and turned to the burger and fries on the table in front of her, “Teasing the locals is hungry work,” she said as she stuffed a bunch of fries into her mouth.
This was the first time in what felt like forever that the old Sara was present and it made Lana happy. If Sara was relaxing a little maybe they were truly safe. Lana had meet Sara for the first time when they got assigned to the same room. Her first impressions of her were not good. Before she saw her she heard Sara's perpetually out of tune singing voice gamely trying to keep up with a cheesy ballad from the eighties blaring out from her laptop. When Lana stepped into her new dorm room it was as if a small makeup display had exploded and sent coloured shrapnel everywhere. Brushes, tubes, bags, bottles, jars, strips, and a multitude of instruments to pluck, tweeze and curl lay not only on Sara's bed but also on Lana's side of the room. They hadn't even started living together and already Lana wanted to turn around and exit stage left. Singing badly she could deal with, kinda, mess was another story and especially mess that infringed on her space.
Lana was an only child and the thought of sharing a room with someone had been making her nervous and panicky ever since she got the letter about the shared dorm room, she never for one second had thought about sharing and for some maybe hopeful reason had thought she would be in a room on her own. Lana stood in the doorway and cleared her throat. Sara wheeled around in mid note and dropped a felt bag of lipsticks on the floor. What looked like a hundred tubes of various colours skittered and spun on the floor, some spinning out into the corridor and others flying under the dusty beds.
For a brief second Sara looked annoyed and then she smiled widely and threw her arms wide saying, “Are you my new roomy?”
Lana nodded and stood in her spot, she was usually very reserved in first meetings. Sara was having none of it and wrapped her arms around her and squealed loudly, “We are going to be best friends.”
If Lana was to believe her on the strength of her enthusiasm well then it would look like they would be true and fast friends. Like so many things with Sara she was right, and after only a few days together Lana felt like she had the sister that she never got to have. Those first few months of college passed by in such a whirl of intoxicating and heady combinations of new people, new experiences and life slowly opening up for Lana. They were inseparable and shared everything. Before she had meet Sara, Lana had thought that friendship with another girl would be hard, Sara destroyed that assumption. Everything with Sara was easy, she was a great listener, knew the coolest people, always had the low down on where the best parties were and usually had a string of outrageous stories to titillate Lana.
During high school Lana had no female friends of any substance, she was bookish and a loner, her single child upbringing didn't help her integrate with the other kids who seemed to sniff out instinctively that she was different and weird. It wasn't until her final year and when she started to blossom that people started to take notice, before she was a gawky and scrawny teen who blended into the background of any event. Almost overnight she started to develop curves and a face that was once hidden by an angular frame started to come into sharp relief. Lana and the people around noticed that she while she was not knock out beautiful she was definitely attractive. A year before the prom she would of told herself that not a single boy would of asked her out. In her final year she had eight requests and all from guys who had barely said one word to her in all the time they had spent in school together.
“He was cute,” Sara said pulling Lana out of her daydream, “These viking guys are hot. I saw a few of them up at the ticket desk, square jawed, thick arms that looked like they could fell lumber in one swing of their mighty ax. I think I’m in heaven. If the burger flipper is as hot as your new friend Gisli is imagine what the real catches are like.”
“You seem to be getting back to normal, its good to see. I feel like we have both been under a cloud for too long,” Lana said unwrapping her burger from the grease spotted paper.
“My heart feels like it has been hammering along at overdrive for a month now. I need to blow off some steam or I’ll go crazy. I think we are in the clear. Maybe its the blue skies and the smoking hot men fooling me, but I really do think we are safe now. Gus has the only copy of the video and it would be a waste of time and money for him to hunt us,” she stopped mid sentence and stared at Lana. “Please tell me he has the only copy and has no reason to come looking for us, please tell me that.”
Sara had a canny ability to tell when Lana wasn't being wholly truthful and now was one of those times. “I made copies and uploaded them to my cloud storage for safety,” Lana said without looking at Sara.
Sara slumped down in her seat and a
low moan escaped from her, she pushed a few cooling fries around on her plate and avoided eye contact with Lana.
“Nobody knows about the copies. I did it for insurance, I was scared after watching the video I didn't want to hand over the only copy to someone that wouldn't have our best interests at heart. We never should of trusted Gus, we should of went straight to the cops,” Lana said.
“Go to the cops? We would of been thrown in jail too, our names splashed all over the news that we are both high class hookers. Do you really want that getting out and hanging around you like a bad stink for the rest of your life? You should of destroyed all the copies, you might of put us in even more danger,” Sara said her voice rising in anger.