The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

55 Prince Potato 2002

A few weeks later, there was a knock on the garage door. Obviously there was nothing I could do about it. I was unused to visits and hadn’t had a bell installed, so naturally I couldn’t traipse to the door with the gimpy legs and catheterised bladder I had in those years. So no invitation this time.

But several days after that, there was another knock, and I was so lucky, oh so lucky, that my Nancy, the girl who took care of me after Bóas and before Lóa, happened to still be in the house. She was able to open up for the visitor, who turned out to be my son Magnús, born in May ’69. He had acquired a rather feline air. I calculated he had to be thirty-three years old.

His father had grown fat at an early age, so fat, in fact, that I was forced to drink myself silly to get on top of him, after which it took me three years to clamber down. So now my little Magnús had outlived his hair, poor thing, and insulated his body with some extra layers for the winter that awaits all men over the age of thirty. With his sad look and helpless hands, my little prince was a clear disappointment to the woman who had thrust him into this world.

Nancy rushed towards the bed to grab the swivelling chair on wheels that had been waiting for visitors for two long years. I noticed that the boy was still badly pigeon toed; I who throughout his upbringing had tried to knock it into him to stand like a man, not a poem.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he said with a sigh, pushing his glasses up his little feline nose and stroking his cheeks, causing his bristles to make a scratching sound.

His late father, Jón, had rampant facial hair and had to shave twice a day. He was Mister Twice in other ways, too, because he was bald and energetic below the belt, despite the flab. Sex was the glue in our relationship. But once Magnús arrived on the scene, twice turned into once, then rarely, and finally never at all. That fat fire cooled bit by bit until I called him the cab. ‘Did you really have to be born?’ I once let slip when I was drowning in maternal misery and the Potato Prince was driving me nuts with his whining. He deserves a decent welcome from me now, I thought to myself, since he’s come to me with his problems.

‘So you’re here?’ he continued, looking around as he shuffled the chair closer to the bed with his bottom, pulling off his swishing anorak and allowing it to crumple in the chair behind him, which caused my skin to crawl.

I tried to pull myself together and turned off my laptop, put it away under my duvet, and stroked the hot spot under it with my cold paws. Nancy, who had promptly slipped into her winter coat, gave us a timid smile and said goodbye in her New Zealand accent.

‘Who’s she?’ the Prince asked as soon as the girl had shut the door behind her, a door that was frozen on the outside but lukewarm on the inside.

‘Her name is Nancy McCorgan. From Home Care Services.’

‘Yeah?’ he said, and then he shut up, just pulling a face and nodding several times, absentmindedly. ‘That’s… that’s good.’

Here my plump boy probably did a rewind on our entire mother-son relationship in twenty seconds, how painful it was to see me in a garage of all places, alone and abandoned, although I nevertheless deserved it, having turned his childhood into one protracted hangover morning and given him fifteen fathers.

I used the time to marvel at the fact that I had such a young man for a son. How could a chronic care crow with rattling lungs like mine have a thirty-year-old son? Oh, well, of course I was only just over seventy, but according to the doctors I was ninety. Smoked meat always looks older. I must have been over forty when I had Magnús. Almost past the childbearing age and at the risk of conceiving an idiot. I’m afraid he may have come dangerously close to the borderline. Oh, go on then, my princely cat.

‘And what, have you been…? Been here since…?’

‘Since last autumn. I seem to remember looking at that plane crash… the Twin Towers, I mean, on the TV here.’

‘Oh yeah? And what… are you…?’

I paused a moment, fluttered my eyelids, and finally said, ‘You’re having problems finishing your sentences, Magnús, dear.’

‘Yes, I… sorry.’ He heaved a heavy sigh and then burst out with that social studies sincerity: ‘I’m not feeling too good, Mum.’

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, you are… my Mum.’

‘Am I now?’

‘Forgive me.’

‘I’ll forgive you nothing, Magnús Jónsson. Where’s the money?’

‘What money?’

‘Where’s the forty million kronur your wife got for the house on Skothúsvegur?’

‘It wasn’t forty million, Mum. Twenty at the most. The apartment went for sixty-three million.’

‘Really? That’s not what the estate agent said.’

‘He must have confused you.’

‘Are you telling me I’m losing my marbles?’

‘No. I just know it was about twenty million that we… were supposed to… keep for you.’

‘Keep for me?!’

‘Yeah, like we discussed. Mum, the money is yours.’ ‘The money is mine? What am I doing in this garage like some Oldsmobile, then?’

‘You can have it whenever you want.’

I clenched my teeth, denture against denture, and growled each word.

‘Magnús, why do you think I moved in here?’ ‘Calm down, Mum. We’ve got that money for you. You can have it anytime.’ ‘Where is it?’

‘I… I don’t know exactly. Ragnheidur’s been taking care of it.’

‘Ragnheidur?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you trust her?’ ‘Er… yeah, she…’

‘She’s a wonderful wife, distinguished and respected?’ ‘Yeah…’

‘Are you divorced?’ ‘Huh?’

‘Have you left her?’ ‘Left her?’

‘Yes, you’re not going to hang around in that adulterous marriage much longer, are you?’ ‘Adulterous?’

‘Oh, forgive me, Magnús, I’m just a tactless old woman. And halfway into the oven. But just take this from an old-timer: Ragnheidur has been rowing on more than one boat, as they used to say in Breidafjördur.’ He squinted his eyes like a sailor bracing himself for a wave. ‘What’s… that supposed to mean?’ ‘How’s she doing, apart from that?’

‘Just fine. She’s just become a bit… she goes to church a lot.’ ‘Church?’

‘Yes, all of a sudden she’s going to mass every Sunday.’

‘Really? Holy shit.’

‘Yes, it’s a bit weird. And she never goes to the same church. Last Sunday she went to Hafnarfjördur and the one before that up to Mosfellsbær.’ He shook his head, took off his glasses, wiped away the mist, and was silent a long moment. Meanwhile, backstage in my brain, I was having a laughing fit, jumping up and down on enormous spring shoes, the most peculiar scene.

‘Yeah…’ he said, heaving a leaden sigh. His eyes lay deep in his pudgy-cheeked face, like two glistening raisins that had been pressed into a thick lump of dough. ‘She’s left me.’

‘What are you saying? Left you?’

‘Yeah, or… well, I was still the one who moved out.’

‘She left you but you moved out? She threw you out?’

‘No, no. I… I didn’t feel good there and… just left.’

‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that. Of women leaving their husbands and then just walking into the kitchen. And have you been left to roam the streets?… Staying in some wino hotel in town? Where are the children?’

‘With her. But I get to meet them, OK.’

‘Do you, now? How magnanimous of her. And has the other guy moved in?’

‘What guy?’

‘That bearded twat. And where’s the money?’

‘The money?’

‘Yes, didn’t you just say she was taking care of it?’

‘Yeah? Sure. But Mum, everything’s fine with that. It’s kept in some book that she—’

‘Magnús. Let me stop you right there. One massive stop. She’s already taken my house and now yours as well. You’ve still got your car, though?’

‘Erm…’

‘You kept your car?’

‘No, but I’ve rented a car and—’

‘What kind of a ruthless bitch is this woman anyway? And bouncing off the walls in disabled toilets with that mister… that mysterious… mysterious style of hers.’

Oh, now he was looking at me as if I was some kind of rambling nutcase talking nonsense. This was followed by a deadly silence that was crammed with all of life’s failures and said: Here are two frustrated individuals. The only thing they’ve managed in life is to have each other. But we didn’t face each other as equals. I had managed to bring him into the world, but he hadn’t yet managed to bring me out of it.

‘Does she come here every day, that… Nancy?’ he said at last.

‘Don’t you worry about me.’

‘Mum, you have your money. It’s in the accounts, you know.’

I gave him a good, long stare. And then slowly and calmly said, ‘Magnús. No one’s come here for… for fourteen months. Neither you nor Haraldur, Ólafur, nor your children. Not since you got your hands on my life’s savings. I haven’t even had an e-mail from you, let alone a phone call, yeah… except for Gudrún, who called me on my birthday. Do you think that’s…?’

I couldn’t go on, a lump had swollen up in my throat, bloody bitterness and self-pity. The hot water was buried deep inside me, but once it was tapped it came bursting out.

‘Are you on e-mail, Mum?’ he asked, clearly amazed.

‘Of course I’m on e-mail,’ I snapped. ‘I’ve got a net connection here, I’m permanently connected, on the computer! What kind of bullshit is this? You don’t know your own mother, yeah… no more than your own wife. Have you smacked her yet?’

‘Smacked her?’ he huffed, scandalised, as if he were the spokesman for a new species of men, cultivated in a partnership between the state and the media, that never laid a finger on women.

‘No, no, we parted on good terms.’

‘Good? And she with another man between her legs?’

‘No, no, Mum, there’s no one else.’

‘Magnús, the last thing I want to be is the mother of a wimp. I want you to go home now to the house you own and tell your lascivious wife… to… to join you for a picnic, where… yes, where the white dew falls on the green grass…’

I froze. He was staring at me with such surprise that the raisins protruded slightly from the dough.

‘Am I to go and… recite that poem to her?’

‘Oh, it’s best if I just write the name down. Tell her you have proof and cause for revenge, that you’re absolutely furious and demand your apartment, your car, your children, and the forty million that belongs to your mother.’

‘You mean twenty?’

I scribbled Engelbert Humperdick’s real name on the back of a used envelope, which he found on the kitchen counter and handed to me as if I were a vengeful mother from the Viking age. He read it with quivering lips. His face said, Am I really supposed to kill him, Mum? His tone of voice was unbearable.

‘And how… how do you know this, Mum?’

‘He who is bedridden has the all-seeing eye.’

He asked no further questions but folded the envelope in two, as if it were his manhood, and shoved it into a pocket. Then I watched him slip back into his anorak and lean over with his strong scent of the outside world.

‘Bye, Mum.’

It was a clumsy kiss he gave me and I had to wipe my cheek afterwards. But as I watched him moping towards the door, I suddenly didn’t understand anything about this life and how I, a wreck of a woman with a raisin for a liver and a glove for a breast, had managed to give birth to this 220-pound male body. It was as incomprehensible to me as a desiccated cactus being informed that it had a grown kangaroo for a son. He exited with sadness in his dark blue eyes, and then, needless to say, I didn’t hear from him again.

What a dreadfully wicked thing for his mother to do, and above all, how inconsiderate. My son’s peace of mind was gone, and my bitchy soul was to blame. Even on the cold summit of my old age, I hadn’t managed to tame that ferocious beast. That’s always been the way with me. The person that I am, Herbjörg María Björnsson, has never had full control over her voice and actions because there’s a far greater power at the helm, which I choose to call ‘Herra’s life force’ and which radiates inside, deciding on everything, taking control, and hurling bombs, causing flashes all around me, the only flowers in my garden.