Black Skies

20

To begin with, he hardly got to know his mother’s new boyfriend, as the man, who she never called anything but Röggi, was rarely home. Röggi was either at sea or working out of town and had little contact with mother and son.

After moving home from the farm he mostly looked after himself. He met other kids in the neighbourhood and would go to the three o’clock cinema showings with them. When school began in the autumn he ended up in the same class as some of these new friends. He was entirely responsible for getting himself to school; waking himself up in the morning, finding his clothes and, if there was any food to be had in the kitchen, making a packed lunch. His mother never surfaced that early, since she would invariably stay up late at night, sometimes receiving visitors that he did not know and tried to avoid meeting. Unable to sleep in the living room, he would flee into his mother’s room. Sometimes he heard the sounds of drinking and once a fight broke out and someone called the police. He watched from the bedroom window as a staggering drunk was hustled into a police car, hurling abuse at the officers. They were not gentle with him either, ramming him into the car door and knocking his feet from under him. He saw his mother standing in the doorway, yelling obscenities. Then she slammed the door and the noise of partying continued unabated till morning.

He was ashamed of himself for losing the thousand-krona note that the farmer had given him in parting. He had had it in the bus on the way to town, stuffed for safe keeping into his trouser pocket which he patted from time to time. But he had forgotten all about the money during the long wait at the bus station, such was his fear that no one would come to fetch him. When he got home he had fallen asleep at the kitchen table and by the time he woke up on the sofa the next day he had forgotten all about the money, unused as he was to owning anything, least of all a treasure like that. It was not until late in the evening that he remembered the gift. As he was still wearing the same trousers, he shoved his hand in his pocket, then in the other, then in the back pockets, then in increasing desperation he found the jacket he had been wearing and searched all its pockets, followed by his suitcase, the kitchen, the sofa, the living room, even behind the television. He told his mother that he had lost the money and asked if they could go down to the bus station to see if anyone had returned it.

‘A thousand kronur!’ his mother exclaimed. ‘Who do you think would give you a thousand kronur?’

It took him a while to convince her that he was telling the truth.

‘It must have fallen out of your pocket,’ said Sigurveig. ‘You can forget it. Nobody will hand in a thousand kronur. Nobody. You’re such an idiot — it’s a lot of money. Are you sure you weren’t just dreaming?’ She lit a cigarette.

Eventually, after persistent pleading on his part, she agreed to ring the bus station. He listened to the extremely brief conversation.

‘No, of course not, I didn’t think so,’ she said when she was satisfied that no thousand-krona note had been handed in.

And that was that. His mother cut short any further mention of the money and the next time the subject came up when Röggi was at home, he claimed he had no idea what the boy was on about: he had never seen any thousand-krona note.

He felt unable to establish any real connection with his mother, and was at a loss to understand why she had insisted on summoning him home from the countryside. He knew precious little about her; she behaved like a stranger and showed virtually no interest in him. She seemed to live in a world of her own in which there was no place for him, nor did she have any contact with her other children or relatives. Since she was unemployed, the only people she mixed with seemed to be night owls like herself. She rarely asked how he was, if he had made any friends, if he liked school, if he was bullied.

If she had ever shown any curiosity he would have told her that he was happy at school and getting on fine with his lessons. He could have done with some help with arithmetic, but he did not know where to look for that. Spelling was difficult too; the rules were a mystery and he got poor marks in his tests, although his teacher was understanding and patient. He was also slow at writing, which did not help when they played the spelling test unnecessarily fast on the tape player, making it hard for him to get it all down. He could have told her too that he found it uncomfortable when people noticed that he had no packed lunch or that he had been wearing the same clothes for so long that they had begun to smell.

He did his homework conscientiously every day and spent the evenings glued to the television; it was like having a cinema in your living room. He watched the entire schedule with equal enthusiasm: news, chat shows, cop dramas and Icelandic light-entertainment programmes with musical interludes. At weekends they showed the odd film and he never missed any. Along with the cartoons, the films were probably his favourite.

Röggi was taciturn when he was at home and gave away little about what he did. He did not appear to have any friends or acquaintances. Nobody came round and no one ever rang for him. The man slept a lot on his days off and was up all night. Once he woke up in the middle of the night to see Röggi in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette with a bottle in front of him. Another time he woke up to find Röggi standing over him, watching him expressionlessly, before returning to the bedroom without saying a word. If anything, he felt that Röggi showed more interest in him than his mother did. He would ask him about school and about his teachers, and watch TV with him. He gave him little presents too: sweets, fizzy drinks, chewing gum.

Then, one autumn evening while his mother was out and Röggi was at home sitting in front of the TV with him, Röggi asked if he would like to see some proper films, cartoons. Yes, he said. Röggi went into the bedroom and came out carrying the strange box that he had noticed on the living-room table on his first evening home from the country. Röggi prised off the cover to reveal the projector, then went back into the bedroom to fetch a cardboard box full of films, and finally a small screen on a tripod that he pulled down out of a long cylinder.

‘I’m going to show you some cartoons I’ve got,’ Röggi said, taking some reels from the box and starting to thread one into the machine.

He flicked a switch and the machine started up. A white glare lit up the screen. The projector emitted a pleasant whirring sound as the film ran in front of the bulb and the glare developed lines, dots and numbers until finally images appeared.

They watched it through to the end. Then Röggi rewound the film, put it away and took out another, just as lively and entertaining as the first. Both were Donald Duck cartoons.

When it was over, Röggi threaded a third reel into the projector without saying a word. The film was in colour, foreign, and began with a grown-up man stroking the hair of a girl who could not have been more than seven years old. Then he started to undress her.

‘I never wanted it!’ he shouted, as he stood over the old man. He had toppled backwards on to the floor, still tied to the chair. ‘I never wanted to watch that filthy shit. You made me do it, you forced me and forced me … you forced me …’

He kicked the man, kicked him like a dog, kicked him and sobbed and yelled at him, kept on kicking and sobbing.

‘I never wanted it!’