As I hurry away, I hear the man say:
“You should raise your skirt above the knees. It’s a shame to hide such beautiful knees. It’s important to doll yourself up.”
Sirrí is waiting for me behind the swinging doors in the kitchen and with a tip of the chin, indicates a man at the round table I need to watch out for.
“Several girls have been pestered by him.”
When I’ve hung up my apron and punched out, my colleague comes rushing after me. She tells me she knows a girl who participated in Miss Iceland a few years back when the competition was still held in the open air in Vatnsmýri and now works at the switchboard at the Hreyfill cab company. She can introduce me to her if I want.
“She was also promised a fur coat and trips abroad. It never happened.”
“I’m not thinking of participating,” I say.
She adjusts her headscarf around her hair, lights a cigarette and puffs smoke out of the corner of her mouth.
“I just wanted you to know.”
The ocean planets
Jón John has given up trying to find a job on land.
“It’s hopeless,” he says. “I’m going to have to take another fishing trip. Even if it kills me. Even if I sink with the rusty wreck. I’m named after the swan poet, not after the sea poet, I’m not the son of rocks and waves.”
He is lying on the bed and says he’s thinking of heading west to the fjords, where he can get a place on the Freyja motorboat from Tálknafjördur or a temporary herring-fishing job with the boat Trausti in Ísafjördur. Is it more trustworthy to choose a boat that is named after a man or a woman? He’s also considering spending the winter in a fishing factory in Neskaupsstadur in the east. But wages are low everywhere and people are brazenly cheated.
“It’ll take me a year to save enough to go abroad,” he adds.
He stands up, walks up to the skylight and stands there, staring into the darkness.
“A last resort would be to get hired on that rusty trawler raft again, Saturnus, emptying the net.
“I could try choosing one of the other ocean planets: maybe Pluto, Neptune or Uranus?”
I walk over to my friend and place a hand on his shoulder.
“Not that it matters what planet or drunkards I go down to a watery grave with.”
“Isn’t it pretty dangerous to stand under those tons of fish?” I ask.
He paces the length of the floor.
“Unless I take a three-month salt-fish trip to Greenland. If the skipper isn’t too drunk, there’s a chance I’ll survive the icebergs and polar bears.”
By evening Jón John has decided to go to the western fjords, but by the following morning, he has changed his mind and been taken on by the Saturnus side trawler again, in the faint hope that he’ll get to substitute for the cook, be left in peace and survive the trip.
“We sail tonight,” he says, when I come home from work.
The duffel bag is ready by the bedroom door.
“We’re sailing to Hull with the catch.”
My friend dawdles in the middle of the floor and I can see there is something troubling him.
“I want to ask you to do me a favour, Hekla.” He looks down at the splintered wooden floor and then past me before he continues, as if he were standing peering at the horizon in the offing, and not under a barely habitable dormer bedroom on Stýrimannastígur.
“I wanted to ask you to see me off at the docks.”
He hesitates.
“I told them the clothes were for my girlfriend, but they wouldn’t believe me and wanted to see you.”
I’ve never drowned myself
Splinters of white scatter in the air and the wind is picking up, so I button up my suede coat and put on some gloves. My sailor, on the other hand, is bareheaded in a wool sweater. Darkness has fallen and the warehouses by the harbour are closed. Between the slippery wooden planks, one can glimpse the oil-patched sea. The rusty trawler stands at the end of the wharf.
The crew is boarding, staggering on their feet, with hands in their pockets and cigarettes in their mouths. Some come straight from the pubs in crumpled suits and Sunday best shoes. I can’t help staring at two who are heading up the gangway, both wearing ties and patent leather shoes. One of them is holding the other under the arm, actually dragging him along, while the other has a bottle from which he occasionally sips. When he spots Jón John, he tries to wave the bottle in our direction, but trips and slips on the gangway.
“There’s the fucking freak with a lady on his arm,” I hear him say. Once he’s regained his balance with some difficulty, like a newborn foal trying to stand on its legs for the first time, he runs a comb through his brilliantined hair and, after several attempts, manages to fish a cigarette out of a packet in his pocket and light it.
“Aren’t you going to invite the lady down to the cabin?” the other calls out, slurring.
“That’s Konni Nonsense and Steini Nozzle,” says Jón John. “Coming straight from the Rödull club.”
He smiles faintly.
“They have nicknames like poets,” he adds.
I grab my friend’s hand, he looks at me with gratitude and holds on to it tightly like a drowning man to a life buoy.
“I’ll buy some books for you in Hull,” he says.
I escort him to the gangway and embrace him, waves lapping under our feet.
“You’re not allowed to drown,” I say.
“It’s not the worst thing that can happen. It doesn’t take long to croak in the cold.”
I hug him tight.
“I won’t, out of consideration for Mum,” he adds. A seagull draws a circle in the air, for a moment the bird hovers straight above us and allows its legs to sink as if it were preparing
