He tells me that before he went to sea he’d worked at the whaling station.
“We worked on shifts night and day, carving meat, sawing bone and boiling. I was the only one who didn’t go sunbathing with the guys. When they realized I was different, I was afraid they’d shove me into a try pot.
“Still, there was another guy like me.
“I knew it as soon as I saw him.
“He knew it too.
“One evening when we had a break, we went off on a walk together.
“Nothing happened. After that he avoided me.”
He runs a hand through his tuft of hair. It’s shaking.
“They take such a long time to kill those giant creatures, the mortal battle can last a whole day.”
After the whaling, he said he took two trips on a side trawler, Saturnus.
“I was seasick for the whole time,” he says. “Constantly. With vomit in my throat. I couldn’t sleep I was so nauseous. The smell of slime and scales was everywhere, even in my quilt and pillow. The weather was foul. I couldn’t learn to rock with the waves. I slept on a top bunk and the horizon swayed up and down. It helped a bit when I covered the porthole with a curtain. I got the worst chores. My manhood was constantly put to the test. The crew were never sober, and they picked on me. I was so exhausted I couldn’t lift my arms from my sides. Every day I was afraid I’d drown.”
He hesitates.
“They tried to crawl up to me in bed, but because I slept with my clothes on, there was less danger of being raped.
“Then there was the whoring. They noticed I wasn’t into women so they decided to man me up by buying me a hooker when we docked at Hull.”
I look at my pale friend. Two swan couples swim close by on the Tjörnin Lake.
“I told them I didn’t want to be unfaithful to my girlfriend.”
He averts his gaze as he says this.
“I swear, Hekla, I couldn’t survive another trip, I’m never stepping on that rusty raft again. I’m willing to take on any job that doesn’t involve going out to sea.”
He is silent for a moment.
“There was one saving grace, though. The second mate. He paints pictures of schooners when he’s onshore but doesn’t want anyone to know.”
The subject makes me think of Ísey’s father-in-law.
“Once the cook was too drunk to be woken up, so the mate sent me down to the storage room to take some lamb out of the freezer and make meat soup. The kitchen was the only place where I was left in peace.
“That was also where they hid their smuggled stash on the way home. Blaupunkt television sets, cartons of cigarettes and bottles of gin. In nooks inside the walls behind the pantry and in the freezer.”
The moon is my closest neighbour
The path leads west to Stýrimannastígur, not far from the shipyard.
“Are you writing, Hekla?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
We halt by a timber house, clad in rusty corrugated-iron. A steep wooden staircase leads up to the sailor’s attic room. He sticks a key into the lock and says it’s stiff.
I look around.
The room has a sleeping couch, a wardrobe in the corner, a bookshelf by the bed and a sewing machine that stands on a small table under the skylight. He says there is a communal toilet in the basement and a view of the stars through the skylight when the weather allows. He spotted the first star three weeks ago, he adds.
“Here you can write,” he says, and removes the sewing machine from the table, opens the wardrobe and places it at the bottom.
I put the typewriter on the table.
He says he’s already moved twice in the space of six months and at first lived in a basement flat in Adalstræti, which was regularly flooded by the spring tides. He then moved into another basement room in Hafnarstræti right opposite the police station.
“So they knew where to find me,” he says, and adds that queers are watched by the police. Sometimes a Black Maria drives past twice a day and the cops slow down to gawk through the windows. Kids also peeped in to spot Sodom and sometimes even adults, which is why he tried to rent an attic room, also because there is less of a chance of anyone breaking in. Not that there’s anything to steal, except a sewing machine, he adds.
“Next week I’ll search for a job and a room,” I say.
“There’s enough room for both of us on the sofa,” he says.
He looks past me.
“Besides, I’m not always home at night.”
I sit on the bed and he reaches for the duffel bag, opens it and pulls out a brown suede coat.
“For you,” he says with a smile. “It’s the latest fashion in the British Isles.”
He hands it to me.
“Try it on.”
I stand up and slip on the coat. Meanwhile, he empties the bag and arranges more articles on the bed: a violet polo-neck sweater, a mini skirt, some kind of pinafore dress and a corduroy skirt. Finally he pulls out knee-high leather boots with heels and zippers on the side.
“You can’t be spending all your wages on me,” I say.
He says that when they docked, the second mate had sent him into town to buy food. On the way he’d been able to buy some clothes. While the crew went gallivanting around the harbour and got sloshed.
“I don’t understand how you manage to get the foreign cash.”
“I have connections. I know a cab driver who works up at the military base in Vellir.
“They’ve got currency.”
I change clothes in the middle of the wooden floor and he doesn’t look away. I first slip into the dress and leather boots and he tells me to walk up and down. I take two steps north and two steps south, two metres towards the harbour and two
