Ashes to Dust (35 page)

He looked away from the old-fashioned set of
shelves, which appeared to him to be starting to lean a little. They
weren’t the only thing in the room that mirrored the family’s declining
fortunes. Leifur gazed at his sleeping father, but everything that had once
characterized the old man’s face was now gone. His complexion was pale
and his strong jaw hollow, making his lips and teeth seem unnaturally large.
There were liver-spots on his cheeks and lips. Saliva glistened at the corner
of his mouth, and Leifur averted his eyes. This was the reason for everything
they had done; his father must live at home as long as he was able. Leifur
couldn’t picture the old man living alongside people who had known him
back when he was one of the pillars of local society, people who would now have
to care for him as though he were a small child. He would have none of the
child’s irresistible charm that makes people happily change their nappies
and wipe up their drool and vomit. His wife Maria had tried to convince him
that if they moved to Reykjavik they could put his father in a home where no
one knew him. Leifur had pointed out that they couldn’t get him into a
nursing home in Reykjavik, where the waiting lists were long. They’d be
at the bottom of the list, no matter how much they were willing to pay. So it
was better this way; they wouldn’t gain anything by moving to Reykjavik.
Of course, one thing would change: Maria would have more to occupy her time
there, and less time for her father-in-law.

There was a lot of pressure on Maria. She was
the one who spent the most time looking after her father-in-law, and although
it might have seemed hard to believe, she did it without complaining or
demanding any appreciation or credit from Klara and Leifur. She did deserve new
furniture, and he would agree immediately next time Maria raised the subject.
It would catch her completely unawares. Maybe he’d suggest they buy an
apartment in one of the new apartment blocks on Skulagata Street, so she could
make quick trips to Reykjavik to visit their son and get a brief respite from
everything here. In any case, it was time to hire some help; it would be
best if he could find a nurse or care assistant, perhaps a foreign one. It
wasn’t as if anyone needed to spend time chatting to his father -
Leifur’s mother could take care of that. The nurse could sleep in his
room, so they’d no longer need to lock the old man in there at night.
Leifur had started worrying that something might happen while they were all
asleep, although he wasn’t sure exactly what. In his father’s room
there wasn’t much he could easily injure himself on, but his outbursts
had become completely unpredictable; just recently he had pushed the family television
off its stand, breaking it. When Leifur asked him why he’d done it his
father had simply stared at him and
shaken
his head,
like a small child denying he’d made a mess. It had only been a few years
since he’d brought home the television and invited Leifur and Maria round
in order to show it off, since Leifur’s parents didn’t often spend
money on luxury items. Leifur still remembered how proud his father had been,
how beautiful he’d thought the colours looked on the huge screen.

His father muttered something and Leifur
turned back to him. The old man opened his eyes and smiled faintly. His bottom
lip was so dry that the smile made it
crack,
and drops
of blood appeared. The blood welled up slowly and did not spill beyond the
edges of his blue-tinged lips.

It was as though the blood in his veins was
as exhausted as his brain. The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come, and
Leifur thought it must be the pain of his cracked lip. But that wasn’t
the case. He looked straight into Leifur’s eyes with rare lucidity, his
stare unwavering. ‘That was a nasty trick we played on her,’ he
said, gripping his son’s upper arm tightly. Feeling his bony fingers,
Leifur thought that if he closed his eyes it would have been easy to imagine a
skeleton had taken hold of him.

‘On who, Dad?’ asked Leifur
calmly. ‘Were you having a bad dream?’

‘Alda,’ replied the old man.
‘You forgive me, don’t you?’

‘Me?’ asked Leifur, surprised.
‘Of course I forgive you, Dad.’

‘Good,’ replied the old man.
‘I know how much you like her, Markus.’ He shut his eyes.
‘Don’t be late for school, my boy,’ he said, letting go of
Leifur. ‘Don’t be late.’

Leifur had long ago given up taking it
personally when his father didn’t recognize him, though he remembered how
much it had hurt the first time it happened. His father had been telling his
secretary that he was going to take a week off and that Leifur would fill in
for him, but when he came to his son’s name he had stood gaping at
Leifur, just as surprised as his son at his inability to recall it.

‘I won’t be late,’ said
Leifur, and went to stand up. His father was already asleep, and it would only
upset him to sit with him any longer.

‘Do you think the falcon will be all
right?’ said a weak voice as Leifur was trying to open the door without
the hinges creaking.

‘Yes, Dad,’ whispered Leifur.
‘The falcon will be fine. Don’t worry.’ He shut the door
behind him, confused. He’d never known his father to have much interest
in birds, with the exception of puffin, which had been his favourite food. Now
that they had to force-feed him everything he never got puffin, only whatever
was easiest to get into his mouth and least likely to get caught in his throat.
Leifur had never heard his father talk about falcons before. It could be random
nonsense, jumbled memories, even fragments of some television programme that
were still floating around in his dusty mind. Whatever this bird meant to him,
it was a shame his father seemed unable to forget the bad things in his life
and remember only the positive. It certainly wasn’t fair that he should
have to remember Alda.

Not fair at all.

Saturday 21 July
2007

As the boat left the jetty, Thóra
waved at two boys who were swimming around the harbour in wetsuits. One winked back
but the other, who appeared to be several years older, acted as though he
didn’t see her and kept swimming after a little boat that had left the
harbour at the same time as Thóra, Bella and their guide.

‘Haven’t they banned
puffin-hunting now?’ Thóra asked the weather-beaten man at the
tiller when she saw the pocket- nets lined up in the other boat. ‘I read
somewhere that they were having trouble nesting, for the third year in a
row,’ she added, wondering if she sounded like a resident of the Islands.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the man, clearly
unimpressed. ‘It’s not a ban, just a recommendation. People can
hunt puffins for their own consumption as long as they don’t affect the
stock.’

‘Is that what those men are
doing?’ she asked, pointing at the little boat about to overtake them.

Paddi the Hook waved at the three men, who
lifted their hands in return. None of them smiled or showed any emotion.
Thóra watched Paddi at the helm as he stared out to sea. When they met
him she had been relieved to see he still had both hands, since she’d
been wondering why he had the nickname ‘Hook’. As they sailed past
Heimaklettur Cliff they saw a young man sitting at the top, many metres above
them. He was surrounded by dead puffins. At his side lay a
pocket-net,
and he had stuck a yellow flag into a grassy patch just behind him. Puffins
were circling all around him. ‘What’s the flag for?’ asked
Thóra, expecting it to be some sort of security measure.

‘Puffins are curious by nature,’
replied Paddi the Hook, after looking up to see what Thóra was pointing
at. ‘They want to see the flag, which makes it easier for the boy to
catch them.’

‘Does he have a large family?’
said Thóra, surprised at the number of birds lying like felled saplings
around the young hunter.

‘Lining up the dead birds like that
calms the fear of the ones still flying around,’ replied Paddi, choosing
to ignore Thóra’s snide remark about the number of puffins.
‘They don’t know what happened to their comrades so they think
it’s safe to come near.’

Thóra decided to stop asking about
puffin hunting. She knew the man saw her as a typical city mouse
who
knew nothing about hunting and didn’t really have
the right to comment. She knew how he felt; it really got on her nerves when
foreign whaling activists protested against Icelanders hunting whales. She
didn’t want to offend the skipper, so she settled for silently watching
the boy on the cliff edge as he swept the net in wide arcs over his head. She
smiled to herself when the puffin he had his eye on narrowly avoided capture and
continued its ungainly flight. She was on the puffin’s side; there was
something quite appealing about it, the clumsy little thing. The booklet
Thóra had read while waiting for Bella to get changed said that the
puffin mated for life. In the autumn each member of the nesting pair went its
own way, but the male would return several weeks ahead of the female.
Thóra was particularly impressed that the male used the time to clean
the cave and make it presentable for his spouse. When their palace was fit for a
queen, he would sit at the entrance and wait for his mate. She was equally
struck by the fact that if the female did not come back the male took a new
mate, who he kicked out immediately if the first one returned. ‘Are we
going far?’ she asked as they entered open water.

‘If you want to catch anything
we’ve got to go a bit farther out,’ said Paddi, scanning the
horizon as if he expected leaping schools of fish to appear any second.

‘It doesn’t bother me if we
don’t catch anything,’ chirped Bella. ‘I don’t eat
fish. I think it’s disgusting.’ Thóra turned to her and
scowled meaningfully — they had to keep Paddi sweet, and that
wasn’t the way to do it. Bella gave her a sharp look in return, but
added: ‘I think puffin is absolutely delicious, though.’
Thóra breathed easier.

Paddi the Hook muttered something
unintelligible and continued to scrutinize the calm water. They couldn’t
have asked for better weather. The rays of the sun bounced off the shallow
waves, creating a glittering sea of light.

Paddi stopped the boat just beyond Bjarnarey
Island. On the tall, sheer cliff walls rising from the sea they could see the
ropes that were used to clamber up to the grassy area at the top of the island,
where there was a handsome hunting shed. Thóra didn’t know what
would induce her to climb up there. If she ever did go up, she would have to
live there forever — she would never make it back down.
‘Let’s try here,’ said the old sailor, wiping his hands on
his tattered jeans. ‘We should be able to catch something.’ A
gaggle of seagulls that had been hovering above the boat drifted down and
settled on the sea, where they rocked in the waves. They were obviously hoping
for a free lunch.

‘Well then, now the great hunt
begins,’ said Paddi, and he showed them to the lower deck where several
large, powerful rods were set up next to an open barrel. Paddi handed each of
them their own leather belt with a holster for the rod, and helped them to
fasten them. Luckily the belt just reached around Bella, who took all
Paddi’s comments about it calmly, without blushing. He showed them how to
position themselves before strapping on his own belt and taking his place
next to them. ‘You’ve got to make sure you let the line go all the
way to the bottom,’ he said, taking a pinch of snuff. ‘That’s
where the fish are,’ he said, and watched them critically.
Thóra’s sunglasses had slipped down her nose, but she didn’t
dare let go of the rod for fear that it would fall into the sea.

Thóra silently prayed no fish would
bite her hook, and tried to avoid letting her line sink all the way to the
bottom as Paddi had recommended. This was difficult, as she had no idea where
the line was located. For all she knew she could be scraping the bottom in the
middle of a hungry school of fish. She looked back at Heimaey, where the new
lava could be seen clearly. ‘That was quite a disaster,’ she said,
directing her statement at Paddi.

‘You mean the eruption?’ he
asked. His rod jerked slightly and he started to reel the line in.

‘Yes,’ said Thóra,
sweeping her rod clumsily over her shoulder and back out over the gunwale as
Paddi had shown them. ‘Did you live here back then?’

‘Yes, I’ve lived here all my
life,’ he answered, still reeling his line in. ‘It’s been
great.’

Thóra didn’t understand what he
meant by this. ‘What did you take with you from home, in the
evacuation?’ she asked curiously. What would a man like this choose to
save? A fishing
rod,
or his favourite bottle of
whisky?

‘I took my wife,’ replied Paddi,
tautening
his line. ‘And it was a good thing I did,
because my house was one of the first to disappear beneath the lava. I would
have had a tough time finding a new wife.’ He leaned into his line and
turned the reel with enormous effort. Up came two haddock. Paddi removed the
hooks and threw the wriggling fish into the barrel. Thóra and Bella
gawped at it as a knocking sound came from inside. They had both expected the
man to knock the fish out, not let them die slowly. Paddi wiped his hands on a
stained towel tied to the ladder rail and turned back to the women, who were
still staring dumbly at the barrel. ‘You need to grip tighter,’ he
said, and came over to them, whereupon they immediately made a feeble
effort to perform correctly. ‘You don’t want me to do it all for
you.’