‘Well, it’s just a game really,’ Skuli replied. ‘They want to go up to the construction site and the police can’t really stop them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Like the guy in the hat said, it’s a peaceful demo and unless they have a really good reason to believe there’s something illegal likely to happen, then they can’t stop them from using the road.’
‘Is that enough?’
‘Yes, probably,’ Skuli said slowly. ‘It’s hard to say how the police will handle this and it’s not easy to see exactly who’s in this group. I think there are a lot of people here who aren’t part of Clean Iceland.’
‘Who, then?’
‘There are people here from Asia and South America, places where InterAlu already does business. And there seem to be some kind of professional activists, people who were at that big camp at Heathrow airport in England last year.’
‘Do you know which ones they are? They might be worth talking to.’
‘They’re everywhere. Most of the foreigners are experienced campaigners. Hey, which magazine did you say you were working for?’ Skuli asked, turning to find that the man had silently disappeared.
The march drifted cheerfully past Hvalvik and along the gravel road to the smelter site on the industrial area. A bevy of police cars preceded the marchers and a small convoy of cars followed, with an ambulance bringing up the rear. The music died away and the mood darkened as the village dropped out of sight and they approached the chain link fence where Gunna and Haddi were waiting for them with a group of men in high-viz jackets behind the fence. Skuli was suddenly glad of his anorak as a cloud bank blotted out the sun.
The colourful crowd gathered at the fence around the site where they joined hands and chanted slogans. There was little for the police to do other than watch and stop a group from lighting a fire to grill hot dogs.
A low podium of crates and planks was erected and a small sound system rigged up so that representatives of Clean Iceland could speak to the whole gathering. A Green Party MP spent too long at the microphone and by the time he had finished, the crowd were becoming restless. Then the juggler stood up to take the microphone, speaking in clear but accented English.
‘We’re here today to protest against an environmental crime that is taking place in our country and against our will. Unfortunately the members of the government who have allowed this to happen by giving away the birthright of the people they were elected to serve are not here today,’ he declaimed in a ringing voice. ‘We invited them. We invited the Minister for Environmental Affairs, Bjarni Jon Bjarnason, to meet us here. We had hoped these people would be here to answer our questions, but it seems they have better things to do. Other business to attend to. More national assets to sell off to big business. More dirty deals to be done.’
He paused. The crowd roared. The juggler’s voice rose in fury.
‘These men and women are guilty! These people are criminals! They’ll sell our birthright and line their own pockets with a lot more than thirty shitty pieces of silver and expect us to keep quiet and accept this! I’m warning you here and now,’ he said as his voice dropped.
‘Warning you here and now,’ Skuli muttered, scribbling down the juggler’s words in his notebook, even though his recorder was running. Lara stood behind him shooting frame after frame, trying to capture the depth of the juggler’s passion. The man’s eyes bulged in anger and the veins along the side of his neck stood out like wires.
‘We do not accept this. You will be made to answer for these crimes and there will be much to answer for. Mark my words, Bjarni Jon Bjarnason and your cronies, one day you will be called to account for this.’
He swept an arm behind him towards the silent bulldozers and the arc of broken ground inside the fence where the vast steel-framed building was taking shape. He stepped down, drained, as the crowd whooped and cheered.
A grey woman in a traditional sweater took the stage and spoke sensibly about how successful the march had been, before asking people to start returning to Hvalvik and the buses that had been ordered to take them back to town. With evening upon them, the crowd moved willingly and Gunna let herself relax. She raised a hand to the site manager, who had spent the day standing with his posse of booted heavyweights inside the wire, and got into the station’s better Volvo with Haddi at the wheel.
‘Job done, no problems, eh, Haddi?’
‘Pleasant enough day out, I suppose.’
‘Home, then, if you please.’
‘Very peaceful. It’s hard to predict what these freaks are going to do, but they were fine,’ Haddi grumbled, annoyed by the disturbance to his normal routine.
‘Oh, come on. It’s not as if we have a problem with these people. I’d rather deal with this lot than the Saturday night drunks.’
‘No, not me. Give me drunks any time rather than these weirdos. When you’re dealing with pissheads, you know exactly where you stand.’
‘Haddi, you’re getting old. There’s no hurry back, we’ll just keep behind them and make sure there aren’t any stragglers. All right?’
Skuli composed his piece in his mind for the Sunday edition. This would be a front page, ‘reports Skuli Sn?dal, crime correspondent’, he thought.
Dagga and Lara walked ahead, wondering where their support car had gone.
‘Good photos?’ Dagga asked.
‘Not bad at all,’ Lara replied, scrolling through them and holding the camera up so that Dagga could share them.
‘He’s good-looking, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘Kolbeinn, the juggler guy,’ Lara said. ‘Didn’t you notice him? I couldn’t stop taking pics of him without his shirt on. Gorgeous, I thought.’
‘Passionate type,’ Dagga agreed. ‘Great-looking and has no idea of it. Hey, Skuli, what do you think? Lara was saying that juggler is just luscious. She reckons he can leave towels all over her bathroom floor whenever he wants.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know . . .’ Skuli muttered, flushing and dropping back behind in embarrassment.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he heard Dagga say. ‘I like that young policeman you had the pics of this morning.’
‘Gummi? Very young and innocent, I thought.’
‘Nothing like teaching a young dog new tricks. I was hoping he’d take my name and address.’
Skuli rolled his eyes and let himself drop even further behind.
As the marchers made their way home and night began to fall, heavy cloud rolled in off the Atlantic and settled low, shrouding the hills and hugging the mountainsides. It was almost fully dark as two figures emerged from the hillside overlooking the construction site, hauling themselves from shallow hiding places scooped in the ground where their friends had half-buried them.
They silently made their way to the part of the fence where security cameras had the most awkward angles to cover and quickly snipped at the wire until a hole big enough to crawl through had been made. Inside the compound they vanished, returning without the backpacks they had set out with. They rapidly patched the fence to hide their tracks and vanished back up the slope where they unearthed a pair of mountain bikes that had been hidden for them in the loose gravel. Swinging legs over, they bounced down the track towards Hvalvik.
They were long gone when flames began to lick hungrily at the row of trucks and bulldozers, as well as the site manager’s new Landcruiser, which the activists had felt was just as legitimate a target.
16
Sunday, 14 September
The site manager could hardly speak through his fury. The previous day’s demonstration had cost a day’s work, but at least it had been peaceful. He had been called out in the early hours to find that his fleet of vehicles
