The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

54 Rainmaker 2002

In my first months in the garage I was served by a young man whose life was on pause; he didn’t know whether he wanted to be a priest in Iceland or an IT expert in America. While he was waiting for the answer to come to him and the acne to clear from his face, he had fun wiping old people’s arses. Bóas was his name, a boy with gentle hands who wore ginormous glasses and trainers and was a true guru in all things technical. Bit by bit, I told him my sad story about how my clan had looted all my belongings. In a two-week course, he taught me how to become a computer cracker or hacker or whatever it’s called.

‘Now you’re a hacker, man, as cool as any high-school nerd,’ he told me, pushing my glasses back up the bridge of my nose and then his own.

He taught me how to break into my demonic daughters-in-laws’ mailboxes. Now I could read about all their scheming (‘We should just hurry up and sell, immediately’) and I could even reply to e-mails under their names. Life in Garageville was finally turning out to be fun.

Through all that research, it transpired that Magnús’s wife, Ragnheidur, aka Rainmaker, wasn’t altogether devoted to her marriage and was engaged in a steady exchange of e-mails with a colleague from work whom I nicknamed Engelbert Humperdick. He was one of those insipid men who generally started his e-mails with a quote pasted from someone else and the words: ‘Have you seen this?’ This was followed by a brief and unimaginative commentary on Rainmaker’s appearance. ‘You were so cute when you came into work this morning. Red really suits you.’ Then I immediately answered: ‘Yeah, I’m red hot to fuck you tonight.’ Of course they weren’t my words. Although one could hardly call me a prude, that kind of language just isn’t my style. It was Bóas who typed that in – the future priest – for the sake of his protégée, totally convinced it would ‘work like dynamite, man.’

This kind of dirty talk was also very unlike Rainmaker, and in this way we managed to inject some entertaining tension into their erotic shenanigans, which, judging by their correspondence, mainly took place within the walls of their workplace, in broom cupboards and toilets for the disabled.

‘Look, I mean it’s one thing to park in a disabled parking space, but to desecrate their toilets, that’s just…’ said Bóas, shaking his head as he formulated messages that occasionally went over my head but always achieved the desired effect. He had worked with people with disabilities and was angry on their behalf for the sacrilege these ‘healthy’ individuals had committed in their bathrooms. As was often the case with deceitful people, my daughter-in-law had a very elegant writing style, using beautiful metaphors and tasteful humour that was often lost on the fairly square Mr Humperdick.

‘Sorry about this morning, it’s cock and bull anyway,’ she said in an e-mail one morning.

‘Huh?’

‘Never mind, I’ll treat you to cock and bull for lunch!’

‘Lunch is great, but sorry, I don’t eat meat any more.’

It was fun following these exchanges.

‘Wanna go for a picnic?’ she wrote.

‘Isn’t it a little bit cold today?’ he answered.

This is what Bóas and I answered: ‘Nothing beats white dew on green grass. Let’s go for a picnic.’

‘Wow, that’s like poetry, man,’ said my apprentice priest, elated by our collaboration, as we waited a whole twenty minutes to see Mr Humperdick’s answer.

‘I don’t get it, what do you mean by white dew?’

‘Spunk,’ Bóas swiftly typed.

‘I’ll come down.’

They worked together in a brand-new, shiny building that had sprung up on the shore during the boom, and we’d taken our spying to such extremes that Bóas once took a trip down there to catch a snapshot of the couple slipping out of the toilet after a quickie. We then sent them the photo in an e-mail from a fictitious address. It turned out to be a bad move, however, because it burst their bubble, and the days that followed were pretty dull, although it might have given my Magnús a better night’s sleep. But I later regained my destructive zeal again. The ingenious Bóas created a new e-mail address for me: bishopoficeland@church.is. From it, Rainmaker received the following e-mail: