Then he first turned his attention to what was behind the fabric and his hand slid up towards the elastic of my panties. The moment had come to put my body on the line. To become a woman. I pulled up my skirt and he down his trousers.
Afterwards we sat side by side up on the hill and gazed at the shore of seaweed and islands in the fjord; his braces were down and he smoked. I spotted three seals on the shore.
Then I tell him.
That I write.
Every day.
That I started writing about the weather like my father and about the shades of light over the glacier beyond the fjord, that I described how white clouds lay like fleece over the glacier, and how people, events and places were then added.
“I feel like many things happen at once, like I see many images and experience many feelings at the same time, like I’m standing on some new starting point and it’s the first day of the world and everything is new and pure,” I say to my friend. “Like a spring morning in Dalir and I’ve just finished feeding the sheep in the barn and the bank of fog hovering over Breidafjördur lifts and dissolves. At that moment I’m holding the baton and tell the world it can be born.”
In return the most handsome boy in Dalir told me that he loved boys.
We kept each other’s secrets.
We were equals.
“People wondered why such a sweet boy didn’t have a girlfriend. I knew I was queer. The only thing that could save me was to sleep with a girl. I’m glad it was you.”
You’ve done it and I haven’t
The next day I was quizzed about the bottle of brandy that had vanished from the cabinet in broad daylight and been returned after four big gulps.
My brother Örn conducts the interrogation. He is not satisfied.
He claims to be a witness to what he shouldn’t have been a witness to.
“I saw you rush up the hill,” he says. “And disappear behind it.”
Now he follows me edgeways, trying to corner me, and bombards me with questions.
He wants to know where we went and what we were up to. Why he wasn’t allowed to come? Whether Jón John had mentioned his name and, if so, what had he said, had he mentioned the wrestling? He continues to pressure me in the days that follow. Ultimately all the questions revolve around Jón John. Is he going away and, if so, where to? To Reykjavík? What’s he going to do? Between the interrogations he sulks.
“Traitor,” he ends up shrieking after me. Then I remember how he and Jón John were sparring once and, in some peculiar way, it reminded me more of birds dancing in a mating ritual than wrestling; it looked more like clumsy embraces than attacks. All of a sudden they were both lying on the grass. Then Jón John had broken free.
“Did you do it?” Ísey asks when I next see her.
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve done it and I haven’t,” she says.
That meant that my best friend had to do it as well. In August a group of labourers came west to lay electrical cables and Ísey got pregnant, moved to Reykjavík and got married. Jón John went not long after her with the sewing machine and hoped to get a job in the National Theatre’s wardrobe department or, as a backup, in the Vogue fabric store in Skólavördustígur.
“You saved my life, Hekla. When we became friends, people left me in peace. I thought to myself: she’s like me.”
Skyr
I have two job interviews today: one in a dairy shop that’s also a bakery and another at Hotel Borg. I start with the dairy shop.
The middle-aged baker receives me in a quilted apron, standing on a black-and-white stone tiled floor with a drain in the middle. He treats me informally and shows me around the shop: what shelves the regular loaves of bread are stocked on, white bread here and rye bread there, how the glazed buns and Danish pastries should be arranged and how the pastry should be sliced.
“You get to keep the tag ends of the Danish pastries and take them home,” he says. Finally he makes me practise serving glazed buns over the counter.
“Imagine it’s some high school boy,” he says merrily.
In the end he fetches a tub of skyr from the fridge and wants me to practise wrapping a dollop of it in waxed paper.
He guides me.
“You fold the corners of the paper underneath,” he says.
He says he would go home to rest when I arrive in the mornings and then come back in the afternoons to balance the cash register. But that I’d have to clean the store and tidy up. I stand on the stone floor as he stares at me.
“I could well imagine bun sales increasing with you behind the counter, those high school boys will be standing there with gaping jaws. With that waist and those hips.”
He then wants to know where I live.
I tell him I’m living with a friend until I find a room.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“No.”
He ogles me.
“You could live at my place. I have a spare room in the cellar.”
Serving girl wanted at Hotel Borg
The other option was the serving girl job at Hotel Borg. I wait for the man I’m supposed to meet at the bar. The counter is dark wood and the bartender leans over to me, knocks on the timber and says:
“Palisander.”
Jón John has told me that gays seek each other out at the bar here on weekends. And that he sometimes watches how a man dances with a woman in the Gilded Ballroom.
While I’m waiting I contemplate a giant painting of Mt Esja and the islands in the bay between the mountain and the city. A fishing boat floats on the strait and in the foreground one can make out seagulls and puffins with colourful beaks, on the shore as the sun sinks into the sea.
The man ushers me
