Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

Garðar put the pages down. ‘Okay. Maybe you won’t come with me, but I can still come.’ He seemed disappointed at their lack of reaction. ‘We can raise the price of the rooms if there’s a toilet here.’ He closed the box and grabbed another. ‘In the spring this will all seem like a bad dream. I promise you.’ Neither Líf nor Katrín uttered a word, although Katrín had her own opinion. She would never let him come here alone, or even accompanied. This was an evil place, full of bad feelings. Garðar, who had opened the second box, was rummaging silently through it. All this produced was a pair of binoculars, which Líf was quick to grab. She went over to the window and inspected the view.

‘There’s one thing we could do.’ Katrín watched as Garðar chose a third box and opened it. ‘We could move over to the doctor’s place. We could watch the house from there through the binoculars, and maybe we’ll see how the child gets in while we wait for the boat.’ Truth be told, Katrín was less interested in knowing how he got in than in getting out of this house and into alternative accommodation. Of course what she wanted most was to set sail immediately for Ísafjörður and fly home from there, but she knew the skipper would need time to get to them. He could hardly drop everything and come at a moment’s notice. She felt around in the pocket of her outermost jumper and felt the comforting shape of her mobile phone. She took it out and the familiar object warmed her cold palms. Soon they would be standing on the hilltop with the skipper at the other end of the line. Out of habit she turned it on. Nothing happened.

‘As I said before, it’s best if we stick to our original plan.’ Garðar took some notebooks out of the box and leafed through them. ‘It’ll soon be light enough for us to set off and go and call.’

Katrín stared at the grey screen. ‘My phone’s battery is dead. I must have turned it on by accident and the battery ran out.’ She shook the phone frantically, not believing her own explanation.

‘What?’ Garðar wiped the dust from his palms and went over to her. ‘That’s weird.’ He took out his own phone and turned it on. Holding it slightly away from him, he gawped at it in disbelief. ‘You’re kidding me,’ he said to himself, before shaking the phone in the same way as Katrín had shaken hers. He pushed the power button again, much more firmly than before. It made no difference. The phone was dead. ‘Oh, come on .’ He turned to Líf, who was still gazing complacently out of the window through the binoculars. ‘Líf. Try switching on your phone. There’s something wrong with ours.’

Líf turned around slowly and let the binoculars drop. The look of fear on her face was a familiar one to them by now. ‘No.’ She shook her head fervently. ‘I don’t want to. Let’s just go up the hill and try them there. I’m sure my phone is fine.’

‘Give me your phone, Líf.’ Garðar put out his hand. ‘We’re not going anywhere if we don’t have a phone that works.’ When he realized that Líf was once more on the verge of breaking down, he hurriedly added: ‘If it’s dead too, we’ll figure something out. There’s no reason to panic.’

Líf opened and closed her mouth twice without saying anything. Then she tentatively handed Garðar a bright pink clamshell phone, adorned with glittering rhinestone hearts. ‘Don’t tell me if it doesn’t work. I don’t want to know.’ She squeezed her eyes shut, but couldn’t resist the temptation to peek. Katrín realised she had crossed her fingers without meaning to.

‘I don’t fucking believe this.’ Garðar hammered on the keys of the little pink phone so hard that one of the hearts fell off.

‘How is this possible?’ Katrín uncrossed her fingers and took the phone from Garðar to see for herself. The screen of the gaudy little thing was just as blank as hers had been. ‘How can three phones that have been turned off the entire time be dead?’

Líf muttered something incomprehensible and let herself fall back against the wall. The dark blue of her irises stood out starkly in her pale face. ‘Why did you try it? Maybe it would have worked if we’d just gone up and turned it on when we were up there. You jinxed it.’

Garðar covered his eyes with his hand and took a slow, deep breath. He stood motionless for a few moments, before letting his hand drop and sighing loudly. ‘Okay. This isn’t exactly what I had planned.’ He tapped lightly with two fingers on the box. ‘I can’t deal with this right now. Unless you want me to punch a hole in the wall and add one more task to the list of renovations, I’ve got to pretend this thing with the phones isn’t happening.’ He looked at Líf and then at Katrín, who recognised this reaction all too well; he couldn’t cope with this sort of crisis at all. Her headache had intensified and it felt as if it were crushing her brain. ‘Maybe something will come out of these boxes to change things.’

Katrín could see Líf was stopping herself from saying something, obviously negative. Personally, she could think of nothing that would lighten the atmosphere, which at the moment she imagined was similar to that on board a submarine trapped under ice. So she followed Líf’s example, sat back down on her stool and watched miserably as Garðar rummaged through the latest box. In the silence they could now hear sounds that had escaped them as they were talking – the low groan of the wind and some cracks and creaks in the house, which made Katrín’s skin crawl. Líf twitched in fright at each sound. ‘Look!’ Garðar pulled a black zipped-up case out of the box. ‘Isn’t this a video camera?’ He unzipped the bag quickly. ‘It is!’ A neat silver camera emerged. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. ‘Please let the battery in it fit one of the phones.’

‘You’re not telling me that still works.’ Líf’s voice was devoid of its usual agitation and anxiety. ‘That would be ridiculous.’

After fiddling with the camera for a few moments, Garðar discovered how to turn it on, only to find out that of course the battery was dead. It was also a chunky block that was far too large for their phones; the idea had been ludicrous to begin with, formed from desperation rather than ingenuity. However, instead of putting the camera down, he continued to examine it, eventually opening a little compartment in its side that held the memory card. ‘I wonder if it’s possible to view this on a camera?’

‘It won’t fit in mine,’ said Líf. ‘The card is too big.’

Katrín reached for the card. ‘It’s like the one in our camera.’ They’d bought the camera five years ago when it was the latest model, but it looked rather lame now in comparison to Líf’s shiny new one. ‘Still, I don’t know whether you can look at videos on it.’

Garðar hurried to the front entrance to fetch the camera, ignoring Líf’s grumble that it wouldn’t work, since their camera battery was probably dead as well. He came back with the camera and immediately replaced its memory card with the other, smiling from ear to ear when the camera switched itself on.

‘There!’ He turned the little screen towards them where they could see the first frame of each piece of footage on the card. Most of them showed the house or its surroundings, and seemed to have been taken to document repairs or construction. ‘He probably wanted evidence of the work he put into the house. He must have had a lot to do.’ Garðar flipped to the next screen, which showed more opening frames. ‘These are completely black.’ He raised his eyebrows and tried to play one of them. Líf and Katrín had taken up position on either side of him in order to see better. Katrín’s headache eased off when she stood up, although other parts of her body moaned in pain with every movement.