Quentin Bates - Chilled to the Bone

Fortunately she had already been to several cashpoints and had milked the cards of everything the machines would dispense after she had bought herself some expensive shoes and what she liked to think of as investments against a rainy day. The second guy’s cards had resulted in a good deal of cash and some more of the same expensive, understated gold and silver, which would keep its value in a safe deposit box.

As the city center disappeared behind her, Hekla relaxed at the wheel, feeling safer inside the cocoon of late afternoon traffic heading for the suburbs and listening to the wheels judder on the uneven road surface with its coat of gravel, thankful for the thick weather, which she wore like a disguise.

She shopped in Krónan, filling her trolley with as much as she could, including two heavy pork joints that the family wouldn’t normally be able to afford, one for the weekend and one for the freezer for Pétur’s birthday. She chose the checkout with the youngest cashier, a gawky youth who looked as if he should still be in school, with glasses and a fuzz of soft teenage beard on his cheeks. He looked stressed and tired, and seemed unlikely to look too closely at a credit card, Hekla decided.

He sneezed as she approached with the laden trolley.

“Bless you,” she said cheerfully.

The young man blinked behind his thick glasses. “Thanks,” he said, sniffing and swiping Hekla’s purchases rapidly past the till as she tried to keep up, stowing things into bags.

“That’s seventy-one-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty,” the young man said as if the number were a single word, sniffing again and kneading the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb as Hekla handed a card across as if it were her own while she continued stowing tins and boxes into bags.

“Sorry, it’s been rejected,” the young man said. There was an almost audible sigh of irritation from the queue for the till.

“What? It should be fine. I was paid yesterday and there’s plenty in there. Can you try it again?”

He swiped it again and the queue, muffled in coats and hats against the New Year chill outdoors and steaming gently in the supermarket’s heat, shuffled its feet with palpable impatience until the young man shook his head.

“Sorry.”

“What?” Hekla said in anguish. “Hell, that useless bank must have been messing me about again. I promise there’s more than enough in there to cover it. Could you try again, or charge it manually? Please?”

The young man shrugged and rubbed the card hard on his sleeve before swiping it through the machine a third time as the queue continued to fidget and sigh audibly.

“Shit,” the young man muttered with a glance at the impatient line of shoppers behind Hekla and the lengthening queues for every till in the shop, which snaked their way into the spaces between the aisles. He reached beneath the counter, came up with old-fashioned card-swipe machine and quickly made an imprint of the number.

“Sign, please,” he said as Hekla treated him to the most dazzling smile she could manage and the queue let out a collective sigh of relief. She threaded the trolley quickly through the throng and out into the darkness.

She was a tired woman with wisps of greying hair that floated around her face. She swept them back, and when she saw him the lines around her mouth became dimples and the fatigue vanished as a grin swept across her face. A second later Baddó’s face was crushed into her shoulder and she hugged him with an unexpected ferocity.

“It’s still a surprise to see you here,” she sighed, hugging him close a second time. “It’s so good to have you back after such a long time.”

“I’m not sure yet if it’s good to be back,” he said uncertainly, his nose sending him warning signals as he sneezed violently. He could feel his eyes start to sting and water.

“What’s the matter?” María asked.

“Nothing,” Baddó said, shaking his head and sneezing a second time. “Where have you been?”

“Of course. Hell, I’m really sorry, it slipped my mind,” she said as Baddó splashed his face with cold water from the kitchen tap. “I stopped to see old Nina on the way home and her cat was all over me. I’d forgotten they make you sneeze.”

“It’s all right, María,” Baddó said, the sneezing fit over as she hung up her coat. “I’m wondering, how long do you think you can put up with me?”

“You know you can stay here as long as you need,” she said, straightening up from stacking packets in the fridge. “As long as … you know,” she finished, lips pursed in disapproval.

“Yeah, I know,” he said morosely. “Just wondering what I’m going to do here. It’s not as if there’s a demand for my skills.”

María dealt cutlery and crockery onto the table like a croupier. “There’s work for those that want it.”

“I’m not fussy, but my CV doesn’t look great.”

“You’ll find something,” María said, but Baddó caught the uncertain waver in her voice. “Sit down. I’m sure you’re hungry, aren’t you?”

He munched a sandwich made with the heavy bread and solid, bland cheese that he remembered from his youth, while María spooned fragrant herring fillets onto a plate and sliced black rye bread, as thick and soft as any rich cake.

“I expect you’ve missed this.”

“María, I’ve been in prison for eight years,” he said. “I’ve missed everything.”

“Dad’s not well,” she added, clearly wanting to change the subject. “I go and see him a couple of times a week now. There’s only so much he can do for himself these days.”

Baddó nodded. Family matters were something he would have preferred to avoid discussing.

“He wrote to me once. Sent it through the Foreign Affairs Ministry, or some such government department.”

“Really?”

“Aye. Just half a page to say that whatever situation I was in, it was nothing to do with him and that as far as he was concerned, I wasn’t his son any more. Just what you need when you’re looking at eight years of four concrete walls.”

María said nothing, but Baddó could see that she was taken aback and the shadow of a tear slipped down her cheek.

“So that’s that. How did they find you, then?”

“It was someone from the prisons department. He said that you were being released and deported home. They’ve been keeping tabs on you, mostly because several of us have badgered the government to make sure you weren’t forgotten over there.”

Baddó laid chunks of herring fillet on a slice of black bread and bit deep into it, lingering over the texture of the bread and revelling in the aroma of the pickled herring. He wondered if this was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted and thought that it might well be.

“How’s Freyr?” He asked. “You hear from him?”

A spasm passed over María’s face. “Sometimes. He said he doesn’t want to see you right away and that he needs to square things away in his mind that you’re back first.”

Baddó nodded. “That’s more than I expected, I suppose. It’s not as if I’ve seen much of him.”

“He changed his name. He’s Freyr Jónínuson now.”

“Ach. Can’t say I’m surprised. Jónína always was a prissy bitch and I suppose she didn’t want him being Hróbjartsson after everything that happened back then. She found a new man, I suppose? Poor bastard, whoever he is.”

“A word?” Már said to Jóel Ingi as he passed his office, smiling at Hugrún, the human rights and gender equality officer, as she bustled along the corridor with a smile for everyone.

“ Hæ , Már, could you let me have yesterday’s reports when they’re ready, please?” She asked, her smile fading. “Absolutely terrible what’s happened in Libya, don’t you think? It could be such a wonderful place if it were run properly. It could be Norway in Africa with all that wealth,” she said sadly, continuing past him and hurrying past Ægir Lárusson’s lair.