by Grant Nicol
When we reached her door she thanked me and asked me when I had moved into the flats and which number I was. I think she thought she had found a new friend in the building, or at least a useful neighbour. I told her that I was just dropping something off for a friend. She smiled and told me again that she was very grateful for my help. One day she would move into a building that had a lift but until then she would have to rely on the kindness of people like myself.
Baldvin answered the door almost as soon as I’d knocked on it. He looked unsure as to whether he should give me a hug or not and in the end just stepped aside and let me in. To describe his flat as sparsely furnished would have been something of an understatement. He had taken the Icelandic concept of minimalism to new heights. The place had the bare necessities required for existence and no more. I couldn’t decide if he hadn’t lived in the place long or just preferred it empty.
There were a few dirty coffee mugs and plates on the kitchen bench and a television and sofa in the space that passed for a living room. Next to the television were a computer and a collection of DVDs. The place was impeccably clean, which made me feel even more out of place. It really couldn’t have been any more different from my own apartment. While he busied himself in the kitchen making some coffee, I took a seat on the sofa and put his watch down on the coffee table. His head turned slightly when he heard the noise.
‘Thanks for bringing that over. I must have kicked it under there when I was grabbing my clothes after your sister burst in on us.’
‘No problem. I’m heading out to see my father so it was on the way.’
He brought my coffee over and put his watch back on before taking a seat next to me and fixing me with a slightly quizzical look.
‘So you’re seeing someone else?’
It didn’t sound as though he was really expecting an answer so I just nodded.
‘I suppose I’ve only got myself to blame,’ he said.
‘I thought because I hadn’t heard from you that, you know, it had just been a bit of fun and nothing more.’
This time it was his turn to nod his head slowly and sip his coffee.
‘I guess you’re right. I should have known better than to ignore a pretty girl like you for too long.’
He smiled when he said that but it was an unnatural smile that made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t know whether to be complimented or not so I just kept my mouth shut. If he was waiting for a reply he wasn’t going to get one. I didn’t feel like making unnecessary conversation. It would only prolong my visit and now that I was on the way towards Hafnarfjörður I thought I may as well keep going and see Dad and Ólafur while I had some free time.
‘What are those plans that you have for today? I don’t suppose you’ll be able to stay very long.’
‘No. I’m on way out to the farm to see my father. He’s got an old friend staying with him who he wants me to meet.’
Another smile. This time it was more confident but it made me feel just as uncomfortable as the first one.
‘An old friend?’
‘Yeah, an old school friend, I suppose. Someone he hasn’t seen for quite some time, anyway.’
The way he looked at me, it felt as though he knew I was lying, or at least not being completely honest with him. Either way, his smile was one of over-confidence now and I couldn’t quite figure out why. He had his watch back and I had made it clear that we weren’t going to be seeing each other any more. What could he possibly be feeling so smug about? Not wanting to sit and ponder that question too long I finished my coffee, put my mug down on the table and stood up to leave.
‘I’ve got to get going. It was good to see you again but I’ve got loads to do.’
I needed to use the toilet before I set off so I asked him where it was. He said it was just off the bedroom and pointed me in the right direction. His bedroom was just as frugally furnished as the rest of the flat. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere with no artwork and nothing to look at on the walls. The place felt clinical, like an office or a workplace, not somewhere you might call home.
Just as I closed the bathroom door behind me my vision started to fade in and out of focus. When I looked at myself in the mirror I saw a confused woman who looked considerably paler than she should have. I ran some cold water and splashed it over my face just before I threw up violently into the hand basin. I stood there gripping the sides of the basin with both hands, wondering what I was doing. I had no idea what was wrong with me but I felt as weak as a child, and a rather poorly child at that. I threw up again and then washed my mouth out with water.
I didn’t fancy spending any more time in his overly clean little flat than I had to. I didn’t fancy that at all but the bottom line was that I didn’t feel up to going anywhere just yet. I used the toilet and then made my way into the bedroom. My phone started to ring as I stood next to the bed trying to collect my befuddled thoughts. I sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed and tried to get my phone out of my jeans pocket. Such a simple everyday task had somehow become unmanageable and I was forced to lie right back to get my hand into my pocket. By the time I had extricated the mobile, the call had gone to voicemail. What felt like several minutes of fumbling with the buttons ensued before I was able to listen to the message. I think Baldvin may have called out to see if I was all right but I just ignored him.
The message was from Stefán Jón. He had done some digging on Daníel Bergsson and had come up with some news. Apparently, he had, until very recently, worked part-time at a law firm on Borgartún. Elín’s law firm, the one that belonged to Elias and Bjarki. He said that would explain how he would have been able to take her from her place of work so easily. If in fact it was him. He probably still had access to the building and knew her well enough for her to feel completely comfortable around him.
Finally it all made sense.
He had weaselled his way into Elín’s workplace and then I had invited him into my bed before introducing him to my other sister. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. I managed to roll over onto an elbow before I dropped the phone and vomited again. This time all over the bed and onto the parquet floor.
Baldvin, or Daníel as he was really known, stuck his head into the bedroom and asked how I was getting on. He picked my phone up off the floor and smiled at me again. Finally, I understood why he had been smiling so much. I couldn’t move my legs anymore. Whatever he had put in my coffee had done the trick. My head and my stomach had traded places and brilliant colours spiralled across the walls.
Before I fell away into an invisible hole that had opened up below me in what was beginning to feel like a really bad dream I tried to call out to Stefán Jón and tell him that I needed his help. I wanted to tell him that I knew what Daníel Bergsson was up to these days, and it was no good.
Daníel stood at the end of the bed and lent over me. I wanted so badly to kill him and tried to tell him just that before the world around me became very small and very cold and then very, very dark. It was going to have to wait.
CHAPTER 25
By the time I had regained a vague semblance of consciousness I found my hands and feet were tied and there was some sort of vile-tasting gag in my mouth. Luckily, though, the urge to throw up had passed, which didn’t appeal one bit with a mouth full of what tasted suspiciously like an oily rag. I was lying on my side in the back of Baldvin’s 4-wheel drive with something hard and painful sticking into my ribs. It felt like I was lying on a selection of tools, which may have been exactly what I was lying on.
I could hear the rain beating down relentlessly on the roof as we turned sharply at speed onto much rougher ground. I had no idea how long I had been out of it but my instincts told me that we had travelled quite a distance. We were definitely no longer on the smooth streets of Reykjavík. Every turn we took sent me rolling from one side to the other and without my arms free to protect myself I banged my head over and over again until I was swollen and sore all down both sides.
When I m
anaged to get myself into something akin to a sitting position by pushing my legs against one side of the vehicle I could glimpse a small amount of the outside world through the darkened windows of the vehicle. We were already in Hella and moving towards the volcanic hills to the north.
Another twist in the road and I was thrown back down onto my side. I decided to stay where I was rather than risk injuring myself any further. Saving whatever strength I had left was more important than ascertaining my exact whereabouts. I was in trouble; that was all I needed to know for the time being.
I soon saw the world go dark again but this time it was as we came to a shuddering, stomach-churning halt. I heard Daníel get out of the vehicle and slam the door shut. The sound that followed was the unmistakeable high-pitched scream of corrugated iron rubbing against itself. He had driven us into a barn and was closing the doors on the world behind us.
The rear of the 4-wheel drive was thrown open and his hands felt around in the dark for my feet. When he had a good and firm grip on them I was pulled out of the back of the vehicle so hard my head bounced off the dirt below like a ball. He rolled me onto my stomach and with a knee on my back he pressed all the air out of me and held me down until I was deflated and broken.
He took one of my arms and drove a needle into the vein. The cool liquid that ran up my arm almost felt nice for a moment before sending me diving back into that jet-black pool that I had just pulled myself out of. Once again I fell, once more down into that deep, cold hole from which I feared I would never return.
Next thing I knew, I was cold. Not merely a bit chilly or uncomfortably frosty, but frozen to the bone. I was pretty sure that I was well along the road to hypothermia and then inevitably freezing to death. I was as wet as if I’d just stepped out of a bath and I could feel the wind coming in through one of the walls of wherever I was. It was very dark. Black, like the middle of the night. I noticed I had been tied up again, only in a slightly different fashion this time, and I had been stripped of all my clothes. He had left the oily gag where it was, tied in place by a piece of string, but even if it hadn’t been there I doubted there would have been anyone close enough to hear my screams. It was small and outdoors somewhere. It was old and falling apart. The front of it appeared to be wooden with an old bent out-of-shape door in it. The rest of it smelled as if it had been dug out of the side of a hill.
It was probably an old sod hut that had once been used to shelter sheep during foul weather but had been left to fall apart long ago. Abandoned and left to decay much the same way as I was going to fade from this life. I was going to die there, I could see no other way for it to end.
I heard him somewhere behind me. He cleared his throat as he grabbed me under my arms and pulled me up so that I was sitting with my back against his legs.
He was on a chair behind me and had a fistful of my hair. He ran his fingers across my throat and made me flinch as they dropped further down my chest. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark I could see shapes beginning to form around the two of us. The floor was dirt. Three walls were a combination of wooden supports and dirt; the other had the broken down old door, which didn’t shut properly, and a tiny window somewhere near the top of it. I was hidden away from the world and alone with his voice.
When he started talking it was slow and methodical as if what he wanted to say he had thought about for some time, such was the deliberate manner of his delivery.
‘We used to share a room together in his house. My mother, Lauga and I. Surrounded at all times by the fury that we had learned to endure and cower from, the way beaten dogs hide from their masters. How my mother came to be with him I was never told. I could never imagine how she could ever have made such a mistake. She had wound up in a poor situation from which she had never been able to recover. One thing she did tell me, though, over and over again in fact, was that he was not my father. It made the circumstances even more difficult for me to understand but she insisted that it had been someone else even though she never told me exactly who it was who had left us both in such a lurch. Whoever it had been, he had fled like a coward and sentenced us to a nightmare of a life.
‘Men used to sleep over in the house, often in the living room. I used to sneak out of our room in the middle of the night once they had fallen asleep and go through their pockets for loose change. Once I had been successful with my thieving I would return to our room and hide whatever I had found inside the old torn mattress we slept on. Most of the time they wouldn’t even notice it was gone. They had come to spend their money on sleeping with her and drinking. By the time they had passed out they had probably had so much to drink that they had lost count of what he had charged them for the privilege of indulging their sins. Sometimes they would pay with something for us to burn to keep from freezing, coal, perhaps, if we were lucky or dung from their animals. Sometimes they would bring home-grown food or homemade liquor from their illegal stills. Mostly, they drank from the one that bubbled and gurgled away in our shed. The one I was never allowed into.
‘All forms of payment were considered. He would accept almost anything for her services that he could use for himself. If he could burn it, eat it or drink himself stupid with it then she would have to let them defile her or risk yet another beating.
‘Even if they discovered that they had been stolen from, very few of them would ever say a word. To incur his wrath over a few coins was foolish. His fuse was short and his temper volatile.
‘There were times when he looked for a fight just to see if they would stand up to him. Most of them thought better of it but there would always be one or two who fancied themselves after an afternoon or evening of heavy drinking. Normally, he would win these drunken stupidity contests but occasionally not. Sometimes, when a particularly determined adversary would get the better of him, a beating would come his way to even things up for a while. I used to love seeing his face bruised and bloodied but I soon learned that it would be a fleeting pleasure.
Once he had recovered his bearings and readjusted his damaged pride, the way a clown hitches up its fallen pants, he would seek revenge on the softest targets he had available to him. My mother and me.
‘I was no more than five years old so the majority of his anger was vented on my sweet but tormented mother. He would avoid hitting her in the face but would instead take his frustration out on her with a leather strap that he used to thrash her legs and backside until they were red and raw.
‘If I was stupid enough to try to protect her he would just whip me instead. So I would hide in that room of ours and listen through the door to him behaving like a monster. At least the other men never hit her. They degraded her in many other ways but the violence was his and his alone.
‘When she made her way back to our bedroom I would hold her and let the tears she had been holding in finally flow.
‘She would read to me from her Bible. It was the only book we ever had, the only one I ever knew and how I learned to read. The stories were supposed to help me get through what was happening to us. They were meant to make me believe. Believe that there was another way for us to live. A better way for me to hope for, a brighter tomorrow somewhere for us both.
‘The Book of Daniel was her favourite and has always been mine as well. When anyone has such terrible dreams all they want is for someone to explain what it is that they have been seeing. I’m sure you must agree.
‘Every time I hear her voice, I hear those words about Daniel and how his faith preserved him in the face of such ungodliness. Every time I see her face, it is the face that convinced me to run away from him. Even though she never made it further than the front of the house.
‘You see, he knew we were going to run and he set a trap for her. By the time she attempted to smuggle me through the front door late one night he had attached a bell to it so he would hear us as we left. As soon as we heard the bell ring she picked me up and ran but only managed a few steps before she fell. He had dug a hole in front of the house right in front o
f the door. He had covered it with branches and leaves and filled it with spikes. The same way they trap wolves in some countries. She fell through the cover and got caught on those spikes like an animal.
‘She told me to run, to get away but I couldn’t leave her. So I cried and I watched him work her loose from those horrific lances. He said he was going to take her to someone who would make her better and I wanted to believe it so badly that I did. But the look on her face told me that as a team we were done and from then on it would be just me and him until I got away.
‘At first I pleaded with him to take me to see her but there was always some reason why I couldn’t go. He would make up such ridiculous stories to keep me quiet and to make sure I would wait for her to return. He used hope as a means of keeping me there until he could use me to fill the one void she had left that he couldn’t fill himself.
‘It wasn’t until he raped me in the bath that I finally found the courage to run away. Why he would have wanted to do that to such a young child I still don’t know. Something must have made him evil before we came along. What that was, I will never know.
‘I was found and eventually taken in by another couple while he just moved on with his life without us. Years went by as I tried and failed to forget the evil that had been handed down to us like an old pair of shoes that were worse than no shoes at all. Eventually, it became clear that I would never forget and so I could never forgive. My life had nothing of any worth left in it so I decided to take what was left of his. That’s where you came into it.
‘You never asked to be part of my world, but then, I never asked to be part of his. I guess we both got what we were given, not what we asked for.’