Grimur didn't care if his children saw him beating up their mother or humiliating her with words that stabbed like stilettos.
The rest of the time, he paid them virtually no attention. Normally acted as though they did not exist. Very occasionally he played cards with the boys and even allowed Tomas to win. Sometimes, on Sundays, they all walked to Reykjavik and he would buy sweets for the boys. Very seldom Mikkelina was allowed to go with them and Grimur arranged a ride in the coal lorry so they did not need to carry her down from the hill. On these trips – which were few and far between – Simon felt his father was almost human. Almost like a father.
On the rare occasions when Simon saw his father as something other than a tyrant, he was mysterious and unfathomable. He sat at the kitchen table once, drinking coffee and watching Tomas playing on the floor, and he stroked the surface of the table with the flat of his hand and asked Simon, who was about to sneak out through the kitchen, to bring him another cup. And while Simon poured the coffee for him, he said:
'It makes me furious thinking about it.'
Simon stopped, holding the coffee jug in both hands, and stood still beside him.
'Makes me furious,' he said, still stroking the surface of the table.
Simon backed slowly away and put the jug down on the stove plate.
Looking at Tomas playing on the floor, Grimur said: 'It makes me furious to think I couldn't have been much older than him.'
Simon had never imagined his father as ever being any younger than he was then, or that he had ever been different. Now, suddenly, he became a child like Tomas, and a completely new side to his father's character was revealed.
'You and Tomas are friends, aren't you?'
Simon nodded.
'Aren't you?' he repeated, and Simon said yes.
His father went on stroking the table.
'We were friends too.'
Then he fell silent.
'That woman,' Grimur said eventually. 'I was sent there. The same age as Tomas. Spent years there.'
He fell silent again.
'And her husband.'
He stopped rubbing the table with his hand and clenched his fist.
'That fucking bastard. That bloody fucking bastard.'
Simon slowly retreated. Then his father seemed to regain his calm.
'I don't understand it myself,' he said. 'And I can't control it.'
He finished his coffee, stood up, went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. On his way, he picked up Tomas from the floor and took him with him.
Simon sensed a change in his mother as the years went by and as he grew up, matured and acquired a sense of responsibility. It was not as fast a change as when Grimur was suddenly transformed and became almost human; on the contrary, his mother changed gradually and subtly, over a long period, many years, and he realised the meaning behind it, with a sensitivity denied to most. He had a growing sense that this change in her was dangerous, no less dangerous than Grimur, and that inexplicably it would be his responsibility to intervene before it was too late. Mikkelina was too weak and Tomas was too small. He alone could help her.
Simon had trouble understanding this change or what it meant, but he became more intensely aware of it than ever around the time that Mikkelina shouted out her first word. Mikkelina's progress pleased her mother immeasurably. For a moment it was as if her gloom had been swept away, she smiled and hugged the girl and the two boys, and for the next weeks and months she helped Mikkelina to learn to talk, delighting in her slightest advances.
But it was not long before their mother was back in her old routine, as if the gloom that had lifted from her returned with greater intensity than ever. Sometimes she sat on the side of the bed, staring into space for hours, after cleaning every speck of dust from the little house. Glared in silent misery with half-closed eyes, her expression so infinitely sad, alone in the world. Once, when Grimur had punched her in the face and stormed out, Simon found her holding the carving knife, with the palm of her hand turned up, stroking the blade slowly across her wrist. When she noticed him she gave a wry smile and put the knife back in the drawer.
'What are you doing with that knife?' Simon asked.
'Checking that it's sharp. He likes the knives to be kept sharp.'
'He's completely different in town,' Simon said. 'He's not nasty then.'
'I know.'
'He's happy then, and he smiles.'
'Yes.'
'Why isn't he like that at home? To us?'
'I don't know. He doesn't feel well.'
'I wish he was different. I wish he was dead.'
His mother looked at him.
'None of that. Don't talk like him. You mustn't think like that. You're not like him and you never will be. Neither you nor Tomas. Never. Do you hear? I forbid you to think like that. You mustn't.'
Simon looked at his mother.
'Tell me about Mikkelina's dad,' he said. Simon had sometimes heard her talking about him to Mikkelina and tried to imagine what her world would have been like had he not died and left her. Imagined himself as that man's son in a family where his father was not a monster but a friend and companion who loved his children.
'He died,' his mother said with a hint of accusation in her voice. 'And that's that.'
'But he was different,' Simon said. 'You would be different.'
'If he hadn't died? If Mikkelina hadn't fallen ill? If I hadn't met your father? What's the point of thinking like that?'
'Why is he so nasty?'
He asked her this repeatedly and sometimes she answered, sometimes she just said nothing as if she herself had searched for the answer to that question for years without getting any closer to it. She just stared past Simon, alone in the world, and talked to herself sadly and remotely, as if nothing she said or did mattered any more.
'I don't know. I only know that we're not to blame. It's not our fault. It's something inside him. I blamed myself at first. Tried to find something I was doing wrong that made him angry, and I tried to change it. But I never knew what it was and nothing I did made any difference. I stopped blaming myself long ago and I don't want you or Tomas or Mikkelina to think the way he acts is your fault. Even when he curses and abuses you. It's not your fault.'
She looked at Simon.
'The little power that he has in this world, he has over us, and he doesn't intend to let go of it. He'll never let go of it.'
Simon looked at the drawer where the carving knives were kept.
'Is there nothing we can do?'
'No.'
'What were you going to do with the knife?'
'I told you. I was checking how sharp it was. He likes the knives kept sharp.'
Simon forgave his mother for lying because he knew she was trying, as always, to protect him, safeguard him, ensure that their terrible life as a family would have the least effect on his.
When Grimur got home that evening, filthy black from shovelling coal, he was in exceptionally good spirits and started talking to their mother about something he had heard in Reykjavik. He sat down on a kitchen stool, told her to bring him some coffee and said her name had cropped up at work. He didn't know why, but the coalmen had been talking about her and claimed she was one of them. One of the doomsday kids who were conceived in the Gasworks.
She kept her back turned to Grimur and didn't say a word. Simon sat at the table. Tomas and Mikkelina were outside.
'At the Gasworks!?'
