Butterflies in November

TWENTY-EIGHT

My happiness could almost be complete. I don’t even have to see all that clearly, I just switch on the windscreen wipers, turn on the heating full blast and, bit by bit, the mist vanishes from the windows. There’s a great freedom in not knowing exactly where you are heading, to surrender to the security of the Ring Road, where one point leads to another, and you always effortlessly end up back at square one again, almost without realizing it.

Since we’re travelling companions, the boy sits in the front seat beside me, barely reaching the dashboard, looking manly with an open packet of raisins on his lap. His seat belt is a bit high, though, even though I’ve slipped a cushion under him. At the Raudavatn Lake I’m stopped by the police, who check my lights and seat belts and give me some advice.

“There aren’t many people out travelling today,” says the uniformed officer out in the lashing rain.

The boy willingly climbs into the back seat while I burrow through the bundles of thousand-krónur notes in the glove compartment to find my driving licence. For a moment, I wonder if I should behave as if I were in a B movie and slip the officer a folded wad of cash and then, without a word, drive off into the withered lupin fields ahead of us, vanishing into the mist and darkness, which is eating its way into the day with each kilometre.

Now that the passenger seat to my right has been freed, I use the opportunity to unfold a road map of the island.

“Dog,” says the boy quite distinctly, pointing at the map.

It’s true, the compressed island looks like a poor vagrant wet puppy dragging its paws. I’m heading towards the tummy, that’s the point where my journey begins — our journey — where the lupin fields end.

“We’re on our way now.”

That’s what Dad used to say every time we drove east at the beginning of the summer and had been driving for a while, at least an hour from home and way out of town. I’m inclined to think it was once he’d passed the lupin fields. Then he and Mom would exchange a brief glance and smile, and he would gently pat her hand with a contented air.

As soon as it starts to rain, the outline of the world begins to blur and the horizon is supplanted by vague landmarks. Everything more or less turns to wasteland as soon as you travel beyond the road grid of the city, vast expanses of black sand and black lava fields, with the black ocean not far beyond and the black sky above. At times like this it’s good to have objectives. At the moment, mine consist in keeping my foot pressed moderately hard on the pedal, sticking to the right-hand side of the road, and not straying beyond the striped lines dividing my lane to the right and left. No need to make any decisions about what comes next, I just have to stick to the legal speed limit and move into the future that advances towards us as naturally as the next petrol station, as naturally as finding one’s future husband leaning nonchalantly against the railings of a bridge — these things happen. It is no small feat for a woman to have to stick to the right-hand side of the road; that’s where reason reigns, not the heart.

For the moment, my focus is fixed on the reflecting posts on the side of the road and the glow of the red rear lights of the old jeep towing a horse trailer in front of me, without, however, driving too close, in case some splashes of mud mar my vision. We seem to be the only two vehicles on National Highway One and that creates a kind of solidarity between us. If, for example, we were to continue heading further east and fire were to finally break through the surface of the glacier, and the sandy plains were to be flooded with water, would I and the boy and the man in the jeep, whom I don’t know from Adam, end up sharing the half-packet of oat biscuits I brought along on the same floating iceberg? Other people don’t take their summer holidays in November. At this time of the year, normal people have other things to do than renew their bond with the darkness of the land. I switch on the radio, it’s the last song before the weather forecast: If there is a road, there is a way.

The boy is totally silent in the back seat and refuses to take his hood off, despite the heat in the car. But I can see through the mirror that he is, nevertheless, alert and staring out at the road into the darkness. I mustn’t forget that mute children don’t attract attention to themselves the same way other kids do and require another kind of care.

The jeep unexpectedly skids to a halt in front of me and the trailer swerves on the drenched pavement, leaving me no choice but to do the same, to avoid a collision, so I too pull up on the side of the road and kill the engine.

The man leaps out of his jeep. After checking something under his car and giving his horse trailer a kick, I’m not surprised to see him knocking on my streaming window. It’s only once his face is right up against the glass and I can see the water trickling down his neckline from his hair that I realize it’s the guy from the pet shop, the man in the fish section, who gave me the handwritten note in cursive blue letters.

“No, there’s nothing wrong,” I tell him, “I didn’t mean to be following you, I just like to know there’s a car in front of me, I’m following the rear red lights.”

I tell him that, even though I know from experience that I’ll soon be able to see the lights of the greenhouses in the village on the other side of the mountain, I find it reassuring to know there is someone else on the road, with a comfortable gap between us, provided he has no objections.

“I don’t mean to pry or anything,” I repeat.

I feel an urge to speak to him further, to ask him something important, but the best I can come up with is to ask him for the time: what time is it? Absurd as it may seem, I suddenly felt in this precise spot, with no visible landmarks in sight, that I needed to know the time. In the rush of the moment I forget that I have a dual-time watch on the wrist of the hand holding the steering wheel. My divorce watch is blatantly visible to the man looking through the window. He turns back to his jeep without deigning to answer me, slams his door closed and drives off. The time is most definitely a quarter past five.