Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

I pulled myself together, wiped my tears, and noticed that I was still holding an unsmoked cigarette, the one the Buddy Holly boy had given me. I rummaged through my coat pockets for matches, without result, but didn’t feel like going back inside right away, so I let the cigarette fall down to the street.

I can see, as I lie here bedridden, warming myself on that ice-cold Imagine Peace Tower, that I should have kept that cigarette from Lennon’s pack, an unsmoked reminder of what might have been. I could have sold it on eBay, along with a wet Beatles kiss, and done up the garage nicely with the proceeds, put in some furniture and wallpaper, and bought a flat-screen TV that would show nothing but films based on my life.

As a woman I was terribly lonely in my generation. While my peers sat in secondary school, I had a whole world war to contend with. I graduated from that war at fifteen, but with the life experience of a thirty-year-old woman. I was twenty by 1949 and, according to the spirit of the times, was expected to apply to finishing school in Denmark and pursue marriage plans back in Iceland, a well-bred girl from the president’s family grooming her hair for balls in the Independence Party headquarters. An up-and-coming politician would have invited me, and together we would have ended up in the presidential residence at Bessastadir (he would have won with me at his side) surrounded by children and reporters. Instead I threw myself into yet more adventures, dancing on ship decks south of the Equator, never waiting for men to ask me out but going after them myself.

To compound it all, back in those days Iceland lagged a good sixteen years behind the trends of the day, so I always found it hard to cope with the small-town life of Reykjavík. I was a war child, but not in the sense that I’d been reared in the war: the war had reared me. I was a woman of the world before I ever became a woman. I was a party girl and drank all the men under the table. I had become a practising feminist before the word had been so much as printed in an Icelandic newspaper. I had been practising ‘free love’ years before the term was invented. And, of course, I had kissed John Lennon long before ‘Beatlemania’ struck our frosty shores.

And then I was expected to behave like a ‘normal person.’

I was independent, had few scruples, and didn’t let anything hold me back – dogma, men or gossip. I travelled around and took casual jobs, looked after my own interests, had children and lost one, but didn’t let the other ones tie me down, took them with me or left them behind, just kept moving and refused to allow myself to be drawn into marriage and to be bored to death, although that was the toughest part, of course. Long before the hippie girls appeared on the scene and began to hand their children over to their mothers so they could continue their debauched lives, I had devised the concept of the long-distance mother. ‘You can’t let the fruit of your previous sex life spoil the next,’ one of the heroines of the sixties once said, or was that me? Of course, you could say I led a kind of hippie existence, but I made it up all by myself, without following the latest trends from Paris.

I suspect the uninhibited lifestyle I enjoyed has become more commonplace among Icelandic women only in recent years. I recently came across an article about Iceland in a Spanish magazine in which young Ice Ladies praised the flexibility of life in a small country where anyone can have children with anyone, since everyone already has multiple spouses, children and foster children. If the article is to be believed, Iceland is one big orgy of divorces and relationships in which children are able to choose their homes and families for themselves.

I’m still waiting for a call from these modern women and for the bouquet of flowers they’ll present me with for being their pioneer, at a short ceremony here in the garage. Just so long as they don’t bring our first woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, star of my generation, with them. She’s always made me feel like shit.

Grandma ended up in a boathouse, I in a garage. That was what fate had in store for us two old women. But at least she had company, oh yes. Even though my laptop knows about everything and is very warm, I still haven’t managed to teach it the art of laughing. But of course, I’m quite happy to be free of other people’s snoring, farting and chit-chat, so for me it is absolutely fantastic living here in the garage. And here come the drugs. Here come the wonderful drugs. Oh dear, all those things they’ve invented for us.

‘Right, then, shall we start with the Sorbitol?’ says the girl in the short-sleeved uniform, pouring the sugary goo onto the spoon. To lubricate my bowels.

The taste reminds me of Grandma Georgía. She was really into sweet liqueurs. Then came my mother’s generation: they loved port. My generation just went for vodka. Then came other groups with shots of their own. Poor Lóa says she drinks beer only on those few occasions when she bares her beaver. That’s probably beer fat I see shimmering before me.

‘Right. And then there’s the Femara, isn’t that next?’

‘Oh, I don’t remember.’

‘Yes, two of those with a drop of water… that’s it, yes.’

‘Can I touch it?’

‘Touch what?’

‘Your arm. It looks so soft…’

‘Ha-ha. Yeah? Sure. It’s just way too chubby, ha-ha.’

Now I’m the dribbling witch groping Hansel and Gretel’s arms. Come now, Lóa, dear, and let this dried-up old fish of a woman feel your soft maiden flesh. With her last real tooth. Oh how soft and soft it is.

‘I’m sure it tastes really good,’ I say. The kind of thing I say.

‘I hope you’re not going to eat me!’

‘Just you wait and see.’

These are obviously the long-term side effects: the drugs seep into me like toxins into the soil. But poison must be fought with poison, the doctors say, to establish a lifelong ceasefire in the intestines. Apart from that, I’ve no interest in this toma de medicamentos. I do it only for Lóa’s sake. She enjoys poisoning me with this stuff, she does.

It was in 1991 that I got the diagnosis that I wouldn’t survive the spring. I’d been gasping with emphysema for seven years and fuelling it unremittingly with nicotine, which almost triggered a full-scale demonstration in the health care system. But then the cancer suddenly decided to invade the hollow of my chest like a German army. ‘It’s blitz cancer,’ I explained to the doctors as soon as they admitted me.

They would give me the spring, but then I would be pushing daisies under the green of summer. I wouldn’t be seeing the new century and was only sixty-two years old. I just couldn’t get my head around it, as young people say. But with treatment after treatment, injections, speculations, drugs and more drugs, it was as if a Russian winter settled over me, forcing the German army to retreat. For a while. It always came back, the bastard, and still does.

In hospital I also caught some abominable virus, and it was only by a miracle that I scraped out of there alive. I haven’t set foot in a hospital ever since. I don’t have the health for it.

For eighteen years now I’ve been carrying my Cancer Boy under my belt, though he is neither born nor dead yet. Canker Björnsson is an eighteen-year-old lad with stubble and acne, who could take his driving test if he wanted to. He will obviously only come crawling out when he is a fully qualified doctor, just to pronounce me dead. Some people think I’m the Icelander who has lived with this disease the longest. But the president hasn’t yet invited me to Bessastadir to pin a medal to the ruins of my departed breast.