“That guy’s queer,” says Jón John, nodding towards the man. “He works at the bank. He’s only into young boys and he’s in a relationship with a bloke I know.”
He sips his coffee and then rests his chin on one hand.
“Most of the men who hunt for boys like me are married family men and only queers at weekends. They get married to cover up their unnaturalness. Their wives know it. They know their husbands. Then many of the queers from around the country pretend they have a girlfriend and child back home in the countryside.”
He looks down and buries his face in his hands.
“I don’t want to be like them and live some secret game. I just want to love a guy like me. I want to hold his hand on the street. That’ll never happen, Hekla.”
“Have you met someone?”
“When I moved to Reykjavík, I was with a man for the first time. He wanted to know if I had any experience. I told him I had. I was afraid that he wouldn’t want to be with me otherwise. He wasn’t a lot older than I was, but he’d been with soldiers at the base in Vellir.
“He had this thing for uniforms.”
The first time only happens once
“You were my first,” I say.
He smiles.
“I know.”
He lived in the village with his mother and I’d heard stories about him. That he knew how to use a sewing machine and had sewn kitchen curtains for his mother and put them up while she was at work. That he’d also made a Christmas dress for her. When I first met him, he was the shortest of the boys and I was the tallest of the girls. Then I went through puberty and stopped growing and he went through puberty and started to grow. He wore a bomber jacket like the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.*
It was said that he had made it from leftover pelts that had been given to him at the slaughterhouse, and that he’d managed to transform lamb skin into cow leather.
Like other youngsters, we worked in the slaughterhouse in the autumn, which is how our paths crossed, under the flayed carcasses of lambs that hung from hooks over the chlorine-washed stone floor. Initially, I was assigned to stirring the blood before it was canned and weighing the hearts, kidneys and livers, while he was in the freezer room, stacking soup meat in white gauze bags. One day I fetched him from a frosty white cloud of ice and we ate our picnics by the slaughterhouse wall in the limpid, cold autumn sunlight. The smell of congealed blood clung to us.
He was different from the other boys and didn’t try to kiss me. It was then that I decided that he would be the first. Not that there were many candidates in the sparsely populated Dalir.
When the moment had come, I fetched a bottle of brandy that had been looted from a stranded ship and stored in the cabinet at home, untouched as far back as I can remember.
“Nobody will miss it,” I said.
We spent some time searching for a patch of geraniums or corrie where the grass hadn’t been cut and was higher than our groins. Most important of all was that we were hidden from my brother, younger by two years, who tried to cling to us all the time. He was going to go to agricultural college and then take over the farm, 280 sheep and 17 cows, 14 of them red and 3 mottled. He had recently started to train in Icelandic wrestling and had become a member of the Dalir Young Men’s Association. This now meant that he tried to wrestle any man who crossed his path. Even Revd Stefán was not exempt. My parents sometimes had to apologize to the guests my brother assaulted and invited to tackle him. They looked at him as if he were a stranger, unrelated to them, a teenager who followed his own laws but mainly his whims.
“He’s training for the Grettir’s Belt Cup,” they would say hesitantly. My mother’s expression seemed to express regret at having wasted an eagle’s name on him. His first moves entailed clutching the guest’s belt or grabbing his sleeve and twisting his garment in an effort to lift him up and knock him over with brute force, without losing his own balance. Gradually, his technique improved and he grew more agile and even demanded that his opponents be well versed in the wrestling jargon: upright position… step, step… trip and defend…
He was a slow developer and acned, listened to Cliff Richard, still pubescent and not yet in full control of his voice. The unwitting guests stepped back and forth and struggled in the ring.
“… Relax the arms… step… clockwise…” my brother could be heard saying.
After some time, we found the right spot, behind the sheep shed. Tall, green, whistling grass grew nearby. There we lay down, arms down by our sides, and gazed up at the sky, a wind-blown stratocumulus cloud. I would rather have chosen a cumulus cloud or cloudless sky for my first time, I wrote that evening. There were only five centimetres between us, which is the narrowest gap there can be between a woman and a man without touching. He was in a blue flannel shirt, I in a red skirt in honour of the day. We were both wearing waders.
“I wanted to touch the fabric of your skirt more than I wanted to touch what was underneath it,” my friend now admits.
That was precisely what he did, asked me if he could touch the fabric. “Is that jersey?” he asked. He turned the hem, examined the lining, stroked it with his finger.
“Did you do the hemming yourself?” he asked.
“Are you afraid to touch me?” I
