The Absolution

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry and shocked to hear that. There was a period when her father used to turn up here constantly and, stupidly, I assumed he’d have started coming again if the bullying had just continued. But we haven’t seen him in a while. It must be a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Well, possibly.’ Freyja changed the subject. Now that Adalheidur’s father had come up, she wanted to keep the woman on the phone. ‘Understandably, parents get very upset by this sort of thing. Was he noticeably worked up? I’ve heard of some quite serious incidents involving angry parents.’ This last bit was an invention; Freyja hadn’t heard of any such thing but had an intuition that before this case was over, that would have changed.

  ‘I don’t know how to put it politely but there were times when he was beside himself with rage. You can’t imagine how relieved I was when he stopped coming in and I thought the matter had been solved. I found being alone with him quite nerve-racking. Sometimes us staff could do with trauma counselling too. Or a bodyguard.’

  ‘I can believe it.’ Freyja reached out a toe to push a brick back into place where Molly had knocked it out of line. Luckily Saga had been fetching another brick at the time or she would have made her feelings powerfully clear. ‘Did Stella pick on anyone else apart from Adalheidur? Bullies aren’t usually satisfied with just one victim.’

  ‘Well, actually there was another girl Stella had it in for: Hekla. She and Adalheidur used to be friends but then they fell out. The last I heard, Hekla was part of Stella’s gang. I was hoping the same would happen with Adalheidur; that they’d make up and become friends before the end of the year. But of course there’s no chance of that now.’

  Freyja saw through this immediately. One of the aims of bullies was to isolate the victim, which was best achieved by luring away the few friends he or she had. ‘I see.’

  ‘I hope you understand that we take bullying extremely seriously here. We have a zero tolerance policy and do our best to crack down on any incidents. But it’s not easy.’

  ‘I know.’ After trawling the net for information, it was clear to Freyja that schools were in an unenviable position. However firmly they dealt with the problem, circumstances worked against them. The bullies had unlimited access to the victim in cyberspace, so separating the kids at school achieved little. Nor did the staff have any means of tackling the lies and declarations of innocence and the claims that it was all a misunderstanding. Bullies were cunning at hiding their vicious side, girls especially.

  Freyja kept the woman on the line for a little longer but she was running out of things to ask. Before ringing off, she reiterated the necessity of keeping an eye on Adalheidur, then asked what her patronymic was.

  The phone call had not been a complete waste of time. She’d learnt about Adalheidur’s attempted suicide, and that her father, Haukur, had become intimidatingly angry with staff about the things Stella had done. Freyja reached for her laptop again to see if Kjartan had replied.

  Chapter 13

  Kjartan needed a holiday. He should get his secretary to move his existing appointments, then book a hotel and a flight somewhere warm and sunny with enticing green golf courses. Preferably somewhere far away in the southern hemisphere where it was summer.

  There was a distinct lack of beer and shorts in his life. Office coffee and too many clients were no compensation. Especially not clients like the one presently sitting in front of him. The man, whose name was Bogi, was achingly dull and inclined to be querulous, and Kjartan found it hard enough to focus on what he said when he met him in the mornings, let alone late in the afternoon like now.

  ‘Boring Bogi’ was little better than his other middle-aged client, ‘Moaning Mördur’, who did at least have one redeeming feature: he knew a lot about computers. He’d agreed to create an online appointments system for Kjartan and the other psychologists in the practice – in return for a generous discount on his fee, of course. Kjartan would have to cancel his discount soon; it wouldn’t do to make it a permanent arrangement. After all, it wasn’t as if the appointments system had been offered for free. Come to think of it, though, Mördur had missed his appointment earlier that day, so perhaps he would stop coming altogether. Kjartan knew he was unlikely to be that lucky, though. You could never shake off clients like Bogi and Mördur.

  Bogi: a man who was all work and no play, who lived a life of unrelieved monotony. If Kjartan didn’t do something about it, he risked turning into Bogi in middle age.

  He tried not to let these thoughts show in his face, reminding himself that he was much better-looking and more interesting than the man with the weak, sloping shoulders sitting in front of him. Not that this was anything to boast about.

  Bogi droned on: ‘It’s not a problem I can do anything about. It’s all in the past. I don’t know why I keep brooding about it. I haven’t a clue how to deal with my thoughts. You’re the expert – what would you have advised me to do if I’d come to you when I was young? What advice do you give your other clients? I’m sure lots of the kids you see are facing the same issues.’

  ‘I’m not discussing my other clients with you, Bogi. Any more than I’d discuss your problems with them.’ Kjartan looked up from his notes. ‘And I don’t know where you get your information from about who else I see.’

  Bogi’s head jerked back. Perhaps Kjartan had spoken too harshly.

  ‘I’m just going by the people I see in the waiting room. They’re usually kids.’

  Kjartan nodded. ‘Anyway, going back to you. Perhaps your obsession with the past is a smokescreen. Perhaps the problem doesn’t really lie in the past at all but now, today. By constantly dwelling on what happened then, you’re avoiding dealing with the issues confronting you now. Why don’t you run through the things that are bothering you at the moment, for a change? You know how it helps to put your feelings into words. If you face up to what’s going on in your life now, perhaps the past won’t loom as large in your thoughts.’

  Bogi had been seeing him for eight months; Mördur for two years. Neither seemed to be making any progress. They were constantly ruminating on the same problems and Kjartan had begun to suspect that they only came to see him out of loneliness. They had few friends, were rarely invited out to dinner or to parties and when they were, he guessed they had a habit of buttonholing the other guests, who would listen and nod, while desperately seeking a way of extracting themselves from the conversation. It wasn’t something he was familiar with himself. The instant he mentioned his job, people were intrigued. Particularly if he mentioned the sort of cases he specialised in. Everyone had a good story to share about bullying.

  As Bogi embarked on a monotonous account of what was troubling him, Kjartan pretended to listen while letting his mind drift.

  ‘… and I can’t get over my frustration with myself for not reacting differently. We might be married today if only I’d told her how much I liked her. Happily married. But of course that’s absurd. We were young. We’d probably have broken up like other teenagers. Maybe I should visit her, though?’ Bogi looked enquiringly at Kjartan. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It sounds to me as if you’re dwelling on the past again. I thought you were going to talk about what’s wrong with your life today. Once we’ve done that, we can discuss whether this visit is a good idea.’

  Bogi beamed. But his smile faded a little when Kjartan closed the file and put down his pen on the desk. Funny that the man still hadn’t twigged what it meant when that note of finality entered Kjartan’s voice. ‘I’m afraid our time’s up. Here’s what I’d like you to think about for our next appointment. You say you’re unhappy at work. Why don’t you talk to your boss, listen to what he has to say and let him know how you feel? Don’t argue with him. It’s better to avoid conflict. And next time we can discuss how it went.’

  With this advice under his belt, the man said goodbye and left. Hopefully in a better frame of mind than when he had arrived, though Kjartan doubted it. Adults weren’t his forte. Their problems we
re more often than not so ingrained that the kind of psychological plasters he provided would be of limited use. You couldn’t wait for them to grow out of it, either, as they’d already been moulded by life and rarely managed to change much.

  Since his next client hadn’t yet arrived, Kjartan turned to his computer, though he usually left this until after his final appointment of the day. He made it a rule to deal with all his e-mails before leaving the office, as a way of ensuring that he didn’t take his work home with him. And since he invariably booked more appointments than he ought to, this meant he usually got home late. Too late to have a proper life. That needed changing. He could make a start by taking on fewer new clients. Looking at his diary, Kjartan saw that his next appointment was Davíd Ævarsson. The boy was struggling with cripplingly low self-esteem as a result of chronic bullying and Kjartan had been seeing him for almost a year, with little sign of improvement. Unlike Bogi and Mördur, though, the boy was an interesting subject.

  But not as interesting as the message waiting in his inbox.

  It was from Freyja Styrmisdóttir, a fellow psychologist he remembered clearly from their university days. He’d hit on her once when he was drunk at a student party but she hadn’t so much as looked at him, just headed out into the night with somebody else. After reading her e-mail, he looked her up online. To his disappointment, she shared her landline with a man called Baldur Fransson, but Kjartan cheered up again when he saw that this Baldur didn’t have a mobile registered to his name. Perhaps he was her son? The address was in a rather downmarket area too, which would make sense if she was a single mother. Perhaps she would be less picky now than she had been in the old days. Smiling, he replied to her message, saying he would be happy to meet up. He suggested a bar that was neither aggressively trendy nor mentioned in the tourist guides, where they should be able to chat in relative peace. By way of underlining his qualifications, he added that he was the Icelandic expert on bullying, to make sure she wouldn’t back out.

  Kjartan pressed ‘Send’ just as his next client entered: Davíd, a teenage boy with the hunched shoulders and drooping head of someone who felt he hardly had any right to walk on God’s green earth. Prepared to reveal every detail of his miserable existence to a sympathetic ear. As always, Kjartan felt a rush of sympathy for the boy and wondered how his tormentor was feeling at that moment. He couldn’t help hoping that he was having the day from hell.

  Chapter 14

  It wasn’t even seven in the evening but there wasn’t the faintest gleam of light; the sky was uniformly opaque. In the unrelieved darkness, the large garden seemed desolate. The outdoor lights they’d installed when they moved in had stopped working, just like they did every winter. ‘Sealant’s letting in water,’ was the electrician’s verdict every year when he came out to fix them – only for the lights to fail again the next time it snowed. Not that it mattered, since the garden’s only function, once the nights started drawing in, was to provide a toilet for the dog. Egill peered at what he could see of the wide lawn and the tiled terrace his parents had put in at the same time as the outdoor lighting. The terrace didn’t go with the house; it looked like it had been stolen from a beach hotel and plonked down in the middle of an Icelandic suburb. The fact became even more glaringly obvious once autumn arrived, though Egill’s parents didn’t see it that way. In an attempt to make better use of it, they’d added a couple of patio heaters, still with their price tags on. But no one wanted to sit out there with freezing feet and a scorching head.

  Egill edged past the smart garden furniture shrouded in the specially designed covers that he had put on in the autumn – not out of choice but because he’d been ordered to. He hadn’t got any thanks either. And if one of the covers came loose and blew away in a gale, he knew who would get the blame. Personally, he couldn’t give a shit about the furniture. It wasn’t like his parents ever invited him to the parties they held out there in the summer. That privilege was reserved for their swanky friends – if you could call it a privilege. The parties made him cringe: all those tragic forty-year-olds, deluded enough to think they were still young and hip, playing compilation CDs from the year he was born.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, get a move on!’ Egill yelled at the dog. It was sniffing the bush where it had urinated yesterday, as if convinced that some other dog had invaded its territory. ‘Just get on with it and piss, you stupid animal!’ The dog didn’t even look up. Perhaps he’d have more luck attracting its attention if he called it by its name, but he couldn’t bring himself to. It was so lame he was embarrassed to say it aloud. Anyway, he got a kick out of yelling abuse at the fucking loser. If the strong couldn’t take out their frustrations on losers, what were they there for?

  The dog belonged to his sister, who had left it behind when she’d moved out that autumn. She had swapped their big, posh house for a crappy little student flat where pets weren’t allowed. Unlike Egill, she loved the dog, but her love hadn’t been as strong as her desire to leave home. He could understand that. Of course, he wasn’t happy about her going, since this left him to bear the brunt of their parents’ moaning, but he’d have done the same in her shoes. They weren’t particularly close, never had been – and never would be now. When she did come home, it wasn’t to see him, and her visits to the dog were becoming less frequent with every month that passed.

  The animal disappeared inside the bush and Egill gave an explosive sigh. The stupid fleabag was so shaggy it was bound to get tangled up in the branches. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  An empty plastic glass that had caught on a twig – a relic of his parents’ last barbecue of the autumn – was knocked loose by the dog and blew away over the hard-packed snow. Unbelievable how much noise an empty plastic glass could make. The irritating rattling would persist until it got caught in the bushes again, which could take days, even weeks, but it didn’t cross his mind to go and pick it up. His bedroom window faced onto the street, not the garden. He glanced round at his parents’ window with a nasty grin: it was their problem.

  He turned back to the garden: his parents’ darkened windows were a depressing reminder that he would be alone at home tonight. If it had been the weekend, he couldn’t have been happier, but on a weekday there was no chance of inviting a mate to stay over. Like him, all his friends were in deep shit; they had Christmas exams coming up and it was clear to their parents that they’d been slacking this term. ‘Fucking stupid dog! Come here or I’ll leave you outside all night.’

  His dad had really taken his poor performance at school to heart, whereas his mum obviously couldn’t give a shit. But then all she cared about was her next teeth-whitening appointment, her exercise class, gossiping with her friends and shopping for clothes. The only times she’d spoken to him in months were when she wanted him to pass her something. She never asked Egill about school, never took any interest in his life. The last question he remembered her asking him was whether her eyeliner was even. He’d answered yes, though it wasn’t true. Actually, she had shown her face the last time his father had laid into him about getting his act together, nodding in all the right places when she wasn’t glued to her phone, messaging her friends. He didn’t blame her; his dad’s lecture hadn’t exactly been earth-shattering, just a boring rant about how his son would end up as a road sweeper or a cleaner if he didn’t pull his finger out. Which was ironic, seeing as his father made his money out of selling cleaning services. He reckoned his dad’s employees wouldn’t be too pleased to hear that he held them up as examples of wasted lives.

  Not that Egill was about to tell them. He appreciated his family’s comfortable financial situation, and any dissatisfaction or resignations among the staff risked putting a spanner in the works. Anyway he only saw one employee regularly, the woman who cleaned their house, but she spoke no Icelandic and it wasn’t like he had anything to say to her. Pointing was enough: at the sticky Coke spillage in the sitting room where he’d overfilled his glass, at the dirty clothes heaped on the floor of the
shower room, the packaging from the latest computer game littering the TV room, the pool of piss from when he couldn’t be arsed to take the dog out, and so on.

  Fucking animal. He couldn’t see any sign of it. There was no movement from the bush, so it must have either crawled along the flowerbed to a new spot or fallen asleep out there. Unless it had dropped dead. Jesus wept.

  Egill would have to fetch it. He should have let it piss indoors. The cleaner was coming tomorrow so it wouldn’t have mattered. And his parents wouldn’t have known. They never spoke to the cleaner either, just let her in and locked the door after her. According to his mum, if you were too nice to the home help, they started taking advantage.

  Egill hesitated momentarily before stepping off the snow-free, underheated terrace in his slippers. It had been drummed into him that he had to wear outdoor shoes in the garden; an unbreakable rule.

  But there was no one home to object, so, a smirk on his face, Egill walked out onto the snowy lawn, his open-toed indoor sandals slipping on the frozen surface. He picked his way gingerly over to the bush and shook it hard, but the dog didn’t come running out and there was no bark from among the tangle of branches. For all he knew it could still be in there, though, as it was too dark to see anything much. There were no lights on in the neighbouring gardens either.

  Although Egill wasn’t particularly afraid of the dark, he had no desire to linger out there so he shook the bush harder in the hope of flushing the dog out. Nothing happened. He moved along the hedge, shaking that as well. He had to find the bloody animal, despite his threats of leaving it out there all night. After all, the dog’s company was better than nothing. Although he did have the internet. He quickened his pace, longing to get back to the computer and his mates. They were supposed to be studying but he knew they’d be online. He himself was always telling his parents that he needed his computer to do his homework.