I bend over, Odin is exhausted and closes her eyes.
I gently stroke her fur.
Our neighbour said he had a tub of cream he was going to have on his prune porridge but instead had poured it into the cat’s milk bowl.
“She has no appetite,” he says, shaking his head.
The poet follows on my heels. He was returning from his night shift and crouches beside me to examine the furry heap under the table. He had come home with a cardboard box a few days earlier and placed it in the corner of the room. The cat had sniffed the box but shown no interest in it.
The poet straightens up.
“She didn’t want my cubbyhole but instead made a lair under the table you write on,” he concludes.
The undersized
On my way to Ísey’s, I stop by the Liverpool household-goods shop on Laugavegur and buy a green tractor with rubber wheels for Thorgerdur.
Ísey opens the door with the child on her hip and is visibly upset. The thing she had feared the most has happened: her mother-in-law has sent her a pile of ptarmigans.
“In their skin and all. I feel like she’s trying to make sure I look after Lýdur properly.”
She now stands bewildered over the frozen white-feathered bundle on the drainboard.
“The problem is we never had ptarmigan at Christmas and I don’t know how to cook them.”
I examine the birds.
We’re used to seabirds back home in Breidafjördur, so I say to my friend:
“Imagine they’re puffins. Then just act as if you’re cooking those.”
“That’s the problem, Hekla. Lýdur says I have to pluck them instead of skinning them.”
She sits her daughter in a high chair and sinks onto a kitchen stool.
The child sits at the end of the table and bangs a spoon against it.
I notice there are no curtains on the window.
Ísey tells me she had taken the curtains down and soaked them in bleach, but now she doesn’t feel like fishing them out again, or drying and ironing them.
“I told Lýdur I want a camera for Christmas. I’m also always thinking about the copybook hidden in the bucket,” she adds in a low voice.
She ties a bib around the child’s neck and, as she’s stirring the skyr, tells me that Lýdur is going to quit his job with the Road Administration in the east and try to find work building blocks of flats in Álfheimar.
“He had to fill out an application form,” she says and sighs. “That’s new. Now the trade union wants contracts to be in writing. The funny thing was that it was so full of spelling mistakes that I had to rewrite his application from scratch for him. He says he’s never been good at commas. But it wasn’t just commas. He can make anything with his hands but he can’t spell for peanuts. He mixes up all the letters, I don’t get it. He wrote: I the undersized.”
She is silent for a moment.
“Will you get a man in your book to say: Being a father and husband shaped me and gave my life a purpose and meaning? Do that for me, Hekla.”
I smile and stand up.
I tell her the cat is lighter and has a total of eight kittens.
“The mechanic, our neighbour, is going to take one and Sirrí, who works with me, another, but I have to find a home for the others.”
I hesitate.
“There’s one that’s different from all the rest. White. I’m wondering if you might like to have him?”
I button up my coat and she follows me to the door.
“Starkadur is asking whether any of the poets want a cat. It could be tricky, though, because Stefnir, the Brook Bard, says Laxness doesn’t have a cat.”
Mother’s nest
Behind the longest night lies the shortest day of the year.
On the coach, a suitcase and a tin of sweets with a picture of kittens on the lid sits above us in a net. Our neighbour, the mechanic, is going to take care of Odin and her offspring over Christmas.
“Mum wants sweets,” the poet had said.
There is a snowdrift on Sandskeid, then we drive into a dim cloud of hail in the white mottled lava field of Svínahraun and the world darkens for a brief moment. On the edge of the road, up the hill by the ski lodge, it clears for an instant and when I lean over to the window and look up, I glimpse blue sky.
“There’s gold in your hair,” says the poet.
At the same moment, we drive into a dense mass of fog.
The poet unwraps a Prince Polo bar which he bought in the shop at the BSÍ coach terminal, snaps the chocolate wafer in two and hands me half.
“I haven’t told Mum that we live together,” he says. “Just that you’re my girlfriend.”
It’s almost noon by the time the pink December sun rises above Mt Kambur. In front of us are two geologists who pull a pair of binoculars out of a holster and point them at the sea. The volcanic plume is clearly visible as it billows high into the air, like the head of a giant cauliflower, dark grey below, almost white at the top. The sight of the cloud of ash causes a stir among the passengers who huddle together at the windows on one side of the coach.
“Mum is putting us in separate rooms because we’re not officially engaged,” the poet continues.
After yet another bend round Kambur, the pink dawn is switched off and we drive into sleet. Here and there vapours shoot out of the earth between the mounds of snow.
The stench of skate fish hovers over the village as we step off the coach.
The poet’s mother receives us at the door with a chequered Dralon apron tied around her neck.
The poet introduces us:
“Hekla, my girlfriend. Ingigerdur, my mother.”
I stretch out my hand to the poet’s mother.
We’ve arrived just in time, she’s placing the skate fish and turnips on a dish.
“She wants to be called Lóló,” says the poet, when his
