The Greenhouse

Six

The air hostesses scuttle between the seats; legs in brown nylon stockings and high-heeled mules are now in my direct line of vision as I crouch in a crash-landing position. They’ve got their eye on me and shuffle up and down the aisle to check on me, dust the fluff off the back of my seat, offer me a pillow and blanket, adjust and rearrange.

— Would you like a pillow, would you like a blanket? they ask with anxious airs, slipping a pillow under my head and throwing a blanket over me. Then they move away again to discuss my case.

— Are you sick? my neighbor in the yellow polo in the window seat asks.

— Yeah, I’m not feeling too good, I say.

— Don’t be afraid, she says with a smile, adjusting the blanket over me. I realize now she could be Mom’s age. There are three women tending to me on the plane; I’m a little boy on the verge of tears. I stretch in my seat and peer under the tinfoil lid over the tray of food. Then, when a hostess passes, I ask her what was in the meal.

— I’ll check, she says and vanishes down the aisle.

She doesn’t come straight back, however, and just to show the woman sitting next to me that I’m a well-brought-up fellow, which Mom would certainly confirm, I hold out my hand and introduce myself.

— Arnljótur Thórir.

And better still I dig into my leather jacket and pull out a photograph of a bareheaded infant in a green bodysuit. She might very well be thinking that it isn’t very manly of me to be traveling with flower cuttings wrapped in soaked obituaries and to be throwing up the in-flight meal, but I’m not going to give her a chance to ask me any personal questions or even to offer me chocolate, but stay one step ahead of her.

— My daughter, I say, handing her the photograph.

She seems slightly taken aback, but then gives me a friendly smile, fishes her glasses out of her handbag, takes the photograph, and holds it up to the light.

— Pretty child, she says. How old is she?

— Five months old when that picture was taken. Six and a half now, I add. I feel like saying six months and nineteen days, but the pain in my gut won’t allow me to dwell on such details.

— A beautiful and intelligent-looking child, she repeats, big bright eyes. She doesn’t have a lot of hair for a girl, though, I thought she was a boy, to be honest.

The woman looks at me warmly.

— As far as I remember she’d just woken up and they’d just taken her bonnet off, I say, that’s why the hair’s like that. Yeah, she was just out of the carriage, I add. I take the picture back and stick it into my pocket. I’ve nothing to add on the subject of my daughter’s lack of hair, so that topic has been exhausted. And this weird pain is rapidly starting to dominate all my thoughts. I have to throw up again, and when I close my eyes I have a flashback of the green sauce over the fried fish. My neighbor looks at me anxiously. I don’t have the energy for any further conversation so I pretend I’ve got other things to be thinking about and rummage through my backpack again. I dig out the book with my collection of dried plants and, as if I were being mocked by fate, immediately stumble upon the page with the oldest plants: the pressed six-leaf clovers, which were all picked on the same morning in our tiny yard back home. Dad thought it was significant that I had found these three six-leaf clovers on my sixth birthday, and saw it as a lucky omen for what lay ahead, at the birthday party later that day maybe, or some dream that would come true, such as a tree growing in the garden for me to climb on.

— Is that a plant collection you’ve got with you? my female neighbor asks, visibly interested. I don’t answer but carefully fish out a clover and hold it up against the reading light; it’s the last one that’s still intact, delicate and fragile, eternity’s flower. I think I’m more than likely suffering from an acute case of food poisoning, but it’s no doubt symbolic of the state of my life that the stem of the plant is hanging from a blue thread.