TWENTY-ONE

Auður phones as we are on our way to the store for a basic weekend shop, stocking up for the kid. She tells me she is undergoing some tests and that they’ve put a pressure bandage on her foot and are now examining other parts of her body, the mid-section, for example, which is actually the job of another department and belongs to another area of expertise. She can’t talk long, she says, but just wants to know if the boy is OK.

“And another thing,” she says, lowering her voice. “Could you buy me a bottle of red wine? The only beverage they offer with your meal in ward 22b is milk.”

One can spot the weekend dads a mile away. Even though they haven’t bought any food for dinner yet, at 7:30 on a Friday night, and they’ve yet to go home to cook for their exhausted children, they still find the time to ogle me and cast meaningful glances over the stacks of paper towel rolls. I’ve got my eyes on them too, but purely for practical reasons, to see what they buy and how they go about it — which is why I pick one out of the herd and decide to follow him, some guy with two timid children sitting in his cart in overalls. I study the manner in which he arranges items in the cart, how he first chucks them to the sides of the children and then piles the merchandise under their knees: whey, Superman yogurt, bananas, hopping sausages, children’s cheese, Little Rascal bread, milk, kindergarten pâté, alphabet pasta and Cutie cookies. He wedges some packets of cold cuts between the children, and stacks paper towel rolls over their boots.

When I try to recall what it was like to be a child, nothing significant comes to mind. It does, however, occur to me to buy some oats, since Dad always used to make porridge for my brother and me in the mornings; it was about the only thing he could cook. I then add some roasted chicken drumsticks, simply because the boy indicates to me that he wants them. Then he points at a jar of olives, he wants olives with the chicken. Once we’re in line for the checkout, I add a Ken doll in a swimsuit with a child in his arms, because I notice Tumi staring at it at length. If memory serves, childhood was all about yearning for the things one couldn’t have. I’m not about to let that happen to my protégé for just one weekend. It’s not nearly as complicated as I imagined, shopping for a child. I simply buy the things the kid wants; he either shakes his head or nods.

On the way home, I pop into the video store around the corner. I was lucky I got to keep the DVD player, Nína Lind has a new one of her own. While I’m torn between two films, which the transvestite working behind the counter emphatically recommends — both for singles or divorcees, he says — the boy is quick to choose his own.

I step into the adjacent shop where a young man with a lot of gel in his hair, shaped into a cone, sells me a lottery ticket. Tumi chooses the numbers. I hoist him up to the height of the counter where he skilfully ticks five boxes with a badly sharpened pencil.

“We’ll go fifty-fifty on the winnings,” I tell him, “you’ll get your half,” but he’s too busy concentrating on his writing and doesn’t even seem to realize that I’m talking to him.

“The winnings are sevenfold this week and a chance is always a chance, no matter how slim it may be,” says the young man behind the counter, who seems to be more mature than his pimples might suggest. We walk out with The Lion King and La Pianiste, the sadomasochistic masterpiece that isn’t suitable for sensitive viewers, but will remain indelibly imprinted on the minds of those who are not, according to the blurb on the case.

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