Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

I’m on my knees with the receiver in my hand and a trail of water that has followed me down the corridor. The telephone table vanished in the move. It’s quite possible that I have this ticket, since I buy practically every lottery ticket that is offered to me. I do this primarily for three reasons. One: the person standing on my doorstep is blue from the cold. Two: too young to be out alone in the dark. Three: he or she is in difficulty for some reason, either because he or she is blind or deaf, for example, or in a wheelchair outside a store. Then I always forget about the tickets, without ever bothering to check the winning numbers.

The bath water is lukewarm when I climb back into it, but I can’t be bothered adding any hot water, as I try to figure out a possible location for the complete summer bungalow in my new life. Destiny isn’t something to be trifled with; in a single day I’ve lost my home and my neat little past. Instead I’ve been given a new prefabricated cottage which, for a number of obvious reasons, is more suited to a barren patch of Icelandic land or shrubbery than the tropical forests or coral reefs that featured in my future dreams.

Despite my goose bumps, I linger in the bath tub. My happiness is sinking and my body is beginning to re-emerge through the dissolving foam. Mom is right — I’m too skinny.

I see new possibilities opening up before me, new travel plans in my life. Maybe I should explore this island in the winter instead, make the most of the waning light, stretch out these short days, take little strolls away from the car every now and then, into the barren moors, maybe even go all the way east. It’s been seventeen years since I was there last; for some reason or another, my path has never led me back there. Nor have I done much travelling across the island’s mossy lava fields and dunes. I limited myself to two nights of camping a year with my former husband, in a double sleeping bag, in places where he felt he could stretch out by the entrance to the tent, facing the low vegetation with a bottle and cooling disposable grill in front of us, waiting for the snipes to shut up for a while in the summer nights so that we could finally catch some sleep. Thinking about it, I never venture any further from the city than the Gufunes cemetery after the beginning of November. But I can imagine how, after several hundred kilometres of driving, things might automatically start to solve themselves in my mind.

There is nothing to disturb my plans here but my ex, who obviously still has a set of keys, since he sticks his head through the doorway while I’m still marinating in the bath.

“I took a few pots and the wok and the mixer, but left the sandwich toaster behind.”

“OK.”

“See you soon then.”

I see him walk by with the folded Santa Claus suit under his arm. He was a big hit in the role at his office’s Christmas ball last year. “Me, the only childless employee,” he grudgingly remarked as we were driving home that evening.

“They wouldn’t have chosen you otherwise,” was the best answer I could come up with.

“Maybe I could have a quick shower since I’m here,” he says.

I don’t get my ex. He’s just moved out with most of the contents of the house when he’s back again. Always forgetting something, that’s the third toothbrush he is collecting, and he even takes mine, which I’d just removed from its wrapping and used maybe once. I keep on buying new ones so that he can come and swipe them, along with a book on the mating of insects and other trifles.

But I don’t quite get why he needs to take a shower on every visit. As he is washing himself he slips on our song, loud enough for him to be able to hear it under the jet of water.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, my ex strolls around the apartment with, at most, a small towel wrapped around his waist that just about covers his crotch or backside, but not both at once. As can be expected from a man in his comfortable position in life, I notice a slight accumulation of flab in the mid-section of his body.

He opens all the cupboards in his journey around the apartment, as if he were checking them for new signs of life. The fact is that most of them are empty, because thankfully he has removed almost everything that was in them. There is actually very little left of him, apart from the black hairs he leaves behind in the shower. By the next time he comes to pick up a toothbrush, I will have unclogged the drain. The question I am confronted with is this: for how long should deserting husbands be allowed to come back to take showers? What if he carries on like this, long into his new relationship? How would I explain these endless repeated clogs of hair in my shower to a new potential partner with perhaps a hairless chest?

On the threshold of a new life, it is important to shed all the things you don’t need. Any clothes that can’t fit into one case go to a charity, as do any of the furniture or household appliances that have been allocated to me. As I make a list of my belongings, I am greatly relieved to see they only fill half the squared sheet of a copybook. I would never have imagined such a great sense of liberation. I don’t even need to call a van; the boxes all fit into my back seat over two trips down to the harbour. Just three floors up and there they are, tidily lining the wall in front of the sofa bed in my studio, until I decide to pick them up again and move once more. I’m left sitting with nothing but the bare essentials, although unfortunately I can’t find the cream whisk I was going to use to make mousse au chocolat for Auður when she pops by for a visit.

As I’m struggling to open the front door downstairs, with a box balanced on my knees, my neighbour suddenly appears on the landing of the second floor and rushes in his black socks down the newly washed linoleum, which reeks of ammonia, to open the door for me. He then offers to help me carry the box up to the third floor. He looks like he could be in his fifties and smells of alcohol and aftershave. He gives me a brief summary of himself on our way up the stairs:

“The boy was three when we split up, he’ll be seventeen in nineteen days’ time, then he’ll get his driving licence and the two of us are going off on a hunting trip. He’ll be driving the old banger, while his old man takes it easy in the back seat with his flask. We made a deal when I paid for his driving test that he would drive me geese-hunting. It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other better, to catch up on things, we’ve waited such a long time for this.”

He has entered the kitchen now and taken out a measuring tape, while I arrange my things.

“If you moved the fridge and got rid of the shower, you could get a small bathtub in here,” he says, measuring vertically and then horizontally, before pulling out a little notebook and scribbling into it with a pencil.

“You girls are so much into bubble baths, I know your type,” he says roguishly as he expertly strokes the white-varnished doorway with the palm of his hand. If we were slightly more acquainted, he would already be at work.

A short while later my neighbour is back knocking on the door again, with a bottle of Captain Morgan rum in one hand and a gold-framed photo in the other. It’s a picture of a drowsy-looking and acned boy with a choppy mop of hair, disproportionate limbs and a headband stretched above his eyes, which fails to fully conceal the bigness of his ears.

I’m in no mood for talking and politely decline his offer of rum. I thank him once more for his help, impatient to see the back of him, so that I can get back to enjoying my solitude again and ponder on my immediate plans for the future.