The Quiet Mother

9

Now and then on her way through the Þingholt neighbourhood, Eygló passed the house with the attic flat and recalled the story of the sick girl. The house had long since fallen into complete disrepair, and no one had lived in it for years. The windows and doors were boarded up and the graffiti artists had been ruthless with it, and in addition, someone had apparently even tried once to set it on fire. When Eygló stopped in front of the house, memories slowly crept into her head of the narrow stairs to the attic, the mother’s worries and the girl’s illness. Málfríður had mentioned Eygló’s visit to that house the last time Eygló saw her in the hospital. She’d dreamed of her husband shortly before her death and believed that Kristleifur would escort her into the afterlife.

Eygló wasn’t going to make any more such house calls. She knew the history of those who were at the forefront in psychic healing but realised, following her visit to that attic flat, that when life hung in the balance, she didn’t want to be the one holding on to that thread.

That was in line with her feelings about the abilities that both her father and later Málfríður wanted her to develop better. She had long repressed what she sensed, the visions that she saw as a child and discussed with her father while he was still alive. She resisted them and wanted nothing to do with them, as they could arouse fear and uneasiness in her. Over the years, her attitude changed and she began to acquaint herself better with the theories of psychological causes for such visions or hallucinations that weren’t at all related to life after death, but also stories about the afterlife and seers and incidents that occurred for which no explanations could be found unless people believed firmly in an afterlife.

Her house call with Kristleifur was a part of her learning process. Eygló couldn’t explain her strange perception of the disease that was harrying the girl. It came to her unbidden and in the oddest way. She’d gone on house calls with Kristleifur before, but hadn’t experienced anything like it.

Nor did she know anything more about the people who’d called the healer and once lived in the house that was now so dilapidated. She’d never run into them afterwards.

She’d come to Þingholt to meet Hansína’s son, who lived one street down. His name was Böðvar and she hadn’t been able to reach him by phone, so she set out in the hope of meeting him. Jósteinn, who told her about Hansína, had given her the son’s name, and when she couldn’t find him online, she looked him up in an old phone book she still had. There, she found him listed along with an address, and hoped he would still be living there.

The house at the address listed for him didn’t look much better than the one that Eygló had just passed by. It was a two-storey house and hadn’t had any maintenance done on it for what appeared to be ages; the gutters were rusty and the window frames were rotting. The gable was in particularly bad shape, with cracks and peeling paint. There was a small front garden that was untended and overgrown.

The house had one entrance, and Eygló knocked on the door without anyone answering, so she stepped into a small hall, where she found a door to the flat on the ground floor and a wooden staircase to the upper floor. She didn’t know which floor Böðvar occupied, and when no one answered on the ground floor, she climbed the stairs and knocked on the first-floor door. When nothing happened, she knocked again, harder this time, and heard a rustling sound inside. She was about to knock a third time when the door opened and an angry eye stared at her through a small gap.

‘Böðvar?’ she said.

The eye stared silently at her.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ said Eygló, ‘but I wanted to talk to you about your mother, Hansína. Wasn’t that her name?’

The eye took her measure.

‘Are you Böðvar?’

The eye continued to stare at her through the chink.

‘Was your mother Hansína?’

The eye disappeared, but the door didn’t close. After several moments, Eygló ventured to push it open. She was immediately met by the stench of years of neglect, mingled with the odours of sewage, dampness and mildew that had seeped out onto the landing but erupted once the door was opened all the way. She just managed to cover her nose, so awful was the stench. The man was seated on a filthy sofa in the living room, where there was an old tube television. The room wasn’t particularly well lit, but when Eygló got used to the darkness, she noticed all sorts of stuff that the man had collected and that filled every nook and cranny: metal junk of various kinds, cardboard boxes of newspapers and piles of books reaching from the floor to the ceiling.

‘What the fuck do you care about my mother?’ the man asked.

‘I wanted to know if she’d been in any contact with my father,’ said Eygló.

‘Who was he?’

‘His name was Engilbert,’ Eygló said, instinctively not going too far into the flat, but staying close to the door.

‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ said the man. Eygló assumed that he was the Böðvar she’d come to visit. He was almost completely bald, but made up for it with a big beard that reached high up his cheeks, grey and unkempt. He was particularly repulsive as he leaned back in blue sweatpants and a red T-shirt that bore the logo of a foreign football club and swung his knees casually open and shut as if revealing his crotch to her. ‘I don’t know any Engilbert,’ he said.

‘He was a medium. I heard that he visited your mother.’

Böðvar stared at her from the sofa.

‘A medium?’

‘A seer. He held meetings and séances. I understand he paid visits to Hansína.’

‘Who did you say you were?’

‘His daughter. Was your mother interested in such things? Séances?’

His knees swinging open and shut, Böðvar continued to stare at her.

‘Mum died thirty years ago,’ he said.

‘This happened much further back,’ said Eygló, glancing around at all the junk in the flat and the man’s miserable living conditions. It all made her feel very ill at ease. ‘Did she have... did she have a lot of money?’ she asked.

‘A lot of money?’ the man snorted. ‘What gives you that idea?’

‘There was a story that they... that he’d intended to fleece her,’ said Eygló. ‘She was a believer in the afterlife and my father took advantage of that to finagle money from her. Does that ring any bells?’

Böðvar had stopped swinging his knees open and shut.

‘Hold on, was that your dad? Weren’t there two of them?’

‘Could have been,’ said Eygló, thinking of Konrád’s father.

‘Damned con men. I remember them. They tried to take what little she had from her. Fucking bastards. They pretended to be in contact with our grandma in the beyond and knew all about her, somehow, and all kinds of orders came from her about giving money to this and that charity and they said they’d take it and get it into the right hands. Mum paid them some money until me and my brothers got wind of it and were there waiting for them at home the next time. They didn’t pay any more visits to Mum after that.’

The man stood up. He seemed drunk to her. There was an open bottle of vodka on the table. Empty wine bottles and beer cans lay strewn about the flat.

‘What did you do when they showed up?’ asked Eygló.

‘One of them was just some wimpy loser. Was that your dad?! He immediately started wailing excuses to us. The other was rock hard and clearly controlled him. Bastard. Fucking maggot. He came at us. Wasn’t he killed afterwards? Wasn’t that him? Aren’t you talking about him?’

‘He was stabbed to death, if it’s the same man,’ said Eygló.

‘At the slaughterhouse, wasn’t it? Why are you asking about all this now?’

‘Were those two working together?’

‘Sure were. We threw them out. The bastard wasn’t going to have any of it and we had to rough him up a bit. Why are you asking about this now?’

‘Do you know if they swindled others... maybe other women at that time? Are you aware of any such thing? Other visits?’

‘Mum wasn’t the only one. Her friend Stella was another. They played her badly. There were probably more. Those kinds of guys are everywhere, with their nets out. Fraudsters and losers.’

‘Is she alive? This Stella?’

‘Are you like him, your dad, maybe? Are you swindling people, too? Pretending to be some kind of medium, maybe?’

‘Can you tell me where I can find her, and—’

‘Do you see all kinds of ghosts in here?!’ said the man, raising his voice and pretending to look all around. ‘Are there ghouls hovering around here? What are they saying? Where are they? What do you see?’

Eygló looked at the man calmly, but had to settle herself before saying anything. The only ghoul in there was the sad picture before her.

‘Can you tell—’

‘I can tell you to get the hell out of here!’ the man shouted, stepping threateningly closer to her. ‘Get out! Leave! I don’t want to see your face here again! Piss off! Out!’

Eygló was relieved to get back out into the fresh air and walked back past the derelict house where the sick girl had lived. Again she stopped in front of it, and was standing there regarding the graffiti and the dereliction when a middle-aged man stepped out of the house next door and noticed her standing there looking at it.

‘It’s in damned awful shape,’ he said.

‘How long has it been since anyone lived in it?’ she asked.

‘Two decades at least. Apparently it’s going to be torn down and a new one built. Do you know anything about the house?’

‘No, not much. I went there once,’ said Eygló. ‘A woman with two young children was living there. It was in the seventies. It’s been a long time.’

‘Did she have a girl and a boy?’ said the man.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I got to know them a little when I lived here. I just bought my childhood home here next door and I’m going to fix it up,’ he added as if in explanation, smiling.

‘Do you know what happened to her?’

‘No, she was divorced, I recall,’ said the man, taking out a key fob, ‘but I don’t know what became of her. We actually moved to another neighbourhood.’

‘I don’t remember much about the boy,’ said Eygló. ‘His sister got sick and it was so sad...’

‘They weren’t actually siblings,’ said the man, and a car behind Eygló beeped as he unlocked it. ‘He was a foster child. He told me that when I ran into him a number of years ago. He was pretty confused, the poor fellow, and didn’t look good. Had been hitting the bottle, I’m afraid,’ the man remarked, before getting into the car and driving off down the street.