Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“I can’t handle children, you know me, I haven’t a clue about kids.”

“You were a child once. Isn’t your ex always saying you’re still a wretched child?”

I clutch at every thought that springs to mind and spurt it all out. He could die in my arms, I even end up saying. Auður glances at the windows of the fashion boutiques as we crawl down Laugavegur.

“I just don’t have that maternal gene, I’ve never considered having kids. I don’t even look like a mother.”

“The only thing mothers have in common with each other is the fact that they slept with a man while they were ovulating without the appropriate protection. They don’t even have to repeat the deed. Not with the same man at any rate.”

“I’d neglect him, he wouldn’t get enough to eat, enough sleep, I’m in the middle of a divorce right now and moving.”

“Being a mother is about waking up and doing one’s best and then going to bed again and hoping for the best. I heard that in an American movie once.”

“But what about his dad?”

“Last I heard he’d moved to Hveragerði.”

“Besides, I’m about to go off on a trip — on a long holiday — and I’ll be away for at least six weeks, maybe even for Christmas. I’m going to try to find a spot for the chalet in the east. In fact, they’re about to load it onto the truck as we speak — all disassembled,” I say to add weight and credibility to my information. I’m trying to think as fast as I can, although it sounds false to tell her I need to be on my own, that I’m preparing this voyage into the unknown precisely to find myself again.

“You can just take him with you, he’s the easiest kid in the world, he doesn’t need any entertaining. He just sits in the back seat, you’ll barely notice him, he won’t nag or pester you, doesn’t even sing the way other kids do, all you’ve got to do is give him something to drink every now and then, hand him a banana every hundred kilometres or so, and stick a straw into his chocolate milk.”

“I don’t know sign language.”

“He hears a bit, lip-reads, and gesticulates when he speaks to people who don’t understand sign language. He’s a linguistic genius, just like you, four years old and he speaks three languages. You’ll just have to learn his language, add another one to your collection. Seriously, you could understand a camel.”

I don’t bother telling her I sometimes have enough problems trying to express myself to people with perfectly good hearing and speech. Maybe it’ll be no worse with a hearing-impaired child with a speech impediment.

“Hasn’t the time come for the linguistic expert to examine the appearance and shape of words? To see what concepts look like in three dimensions and learn how to make words with your body, without your voice?”

At least I have a weekend’s experience of what it’s like to have a child in one’s care; it’s quite similar to being alone with one’s self. You don’t even have to cook, just buy something ready-made and split it in two. He has no idea of when regular mealtimes are, has nothing to say about their preparation and eats what he’s given, pretty much like a monkey at the zoo.

By this stage of the conversation, my friend has moved closer to me and is almost sitting on the handbrake with her arm around my shoulders.

“But what about you? Don’t you think you’d miss him?” I ask.

“I have enough on my plate, I wouldn’t be able to take good care of him, it’ll be another two and a half months before the twins are born and I’m supposed to lie still until then. Otherwise, there’s the danger of Tumi’s history repeating itself — respirators, oxygen tents, kidney problems and all that. He didn’t cry until he was six weeks old, and even then it was more like the meowing of a kitten.”

“But what about him? Can he be without you for that long?”

“The only thing I’m allowed to do in the ward is watch American soaps and wildlife documentaries until I’m driven mad. And kill everyone around me because I get so depressed when I can’t play. I’ve nothing to give the child.”

By now she has drunk over half the bottle.

“It’ll do you good to have some company. Mark my words, he’ll change you.”

“In what way then?”

She chooses to ignore the question.

“Besides, he likes your smell.”

“Huh?”

“He’s told me he wants to be like you when he grows up; he’s very fond of you.”

Guilt isn’t an easy thing to swallow, which is why a woman ceases to think rationally and starts to see only one side of the issue: Auður is a close friend of mine, who has chosen an unconventional lifestyle, a single mom with two more fatherless children on the way, highly educated, a music teacher with a fondness for wine, who slipped on the unsalted steps of my house one lunchtime, with a vegetarian Indian takeout with rice for two in her bag, a broken ankle and six months pregnant.

She was the one who had come over to comfort me. I could, of course, turn this on its head, the same way Auður did, and say that it was a stroke of luck that she fell on my steps and got a thorough medical examination. “If one looks at the big picture,” as the article I’m currently proof-reading keeps on repeating (and I don’t know whether I should edit it or not), “If one looks at the big picture,” all of these factors will help to ensure that my friend has children just like any others, and not children for whose survival she will have to struggle and who will then have to prove that they were worth struggling for, even though they might just be the way they are. It therefore falls directly on me, the friend she was coming to comfort when she slipped on my steps, to take care of the boy who loves my smell. Females can tend to each other’s offspring, just like those ducks do at the lake.

I glance over my shoulder; he seems apprehensive. All he can see is the backs of our heads and he doesn’t realize we are deciding his fate. I probably have no other choice but to take the child with me on the trip.

“You’re my best friend, the best person I’ve ever met.”

“Do you really think you should drink any more?”

“I won’t get many other chances over the next months, it’s good for the blood.”

I give it one more shot:

“I won’t even be able to sleep with anyone.”

“Join the club. It’s no big deal in my experience. You don’t have to have him in bed with you. Besides, I thought you were divorcing and going off on a trip to have a change, to be alone, into the Christmas darkness of the east, however refreshing that may be.”

I make no comment, but that is precisely what’s on my mind. Who knows if there’s a man waiting for me on the Ring Road? Who knows if he won’t suddenly appear, somewhere within my grasp, by a waterfall or a mound of fallen rocks on the side of a mountain that plunges straight into the sea, or perhaps I’ll find him leaning nonchalantly on the fragment of an iceberg in the middle of the black sand, a man one could talk to. He would suddenly appear, freshly divorced, a responsible father of two who wants no more children, dressed in full hunting gear with a rifle slung over his shoulder. But instead of blasting the meat with lead, over his hunting companions’ heads, or shooting himself in the foot, he would look straight at the goose and shoot it right between the eyes. A good part of the excitement would lie in tracking such a man down.

“Did you let Thorsteinn take everything?”

“No, just the things he wanted, some stuff.”

She is obviously drunk. The boy is growing restless in the back seat, despite the strawberry ice cream I bought in the petrol station on the way.

“You’re my best friend, the only person who doesn’t try to change me. No one else would have brought me a bottle.”