Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

My escort livens up again. There’s a job to be done and there’s no need for me to worry, they say. I should just sit the boy inside the warmth of the car, while they happily take care of this for me.

“You can admire us in the meantime,” says one of them, jestingly.

I omit to tell them that I have a perfectly good little manual in the car with diagrams and that it would take me as long to learn how to change a tire as it would to learn how to give my hair a colour rinse; both operations are conducted in four phases, according to the diagrams. I see no reason to memorize knowledge that might never serve me, to prepare for an eventuality that may never happen. We will all most certainly die, and yet there are plenty of people who get through this life without ever having to change a tire. I therefore strive to focus my preparations with that in mind.

The nine gunmen change the wheel like a well-trained team of surgeons and nurses. Without a word being spoken, they split into those who pass the tools and those who perform the operation on the four-year-old manual patient, who has recently been oiled and sprayed with anti-rust. They find the right monkey wrench, take it in turns to loosen the bolts, effortlessly jack up the car, swiftly pull the spare wheel out of its hidden compartment, without even having to ask me where it is, and then put everything back into its place, professionally, seamlessly.

One of the men even places a comforting hand on the hood, as his colleagues wind up the operation. Performing their tasks with warmth and care, they fondle the car with gentle slaps and caresses.

“You poor little thing, you punctured yourself.”

“Did you bump into a hole or a stone, old man, is that what you did?”

“All over now, all taken care of, little man.”

Here I am, wandering through the rain and darkness with an unrelated child, three pets in a jar, a small pile of documents barely worth mentioning and last, but not least, a glove compartment crammed with cash, perfect. I’ve deliberately left my mobile behind; my sole link to my immediate environment at this moment in time is the weather woman on the car radio, who is saying that the eye of a depression is now pressing all its weight on the centre of another depression.

Who I am is intrinsically linked to where I am and whom I’m with. Right now all my efforts are centred on making the most out of the fading light, while my travelling companion sleeps in his balaclava, tilted against the window in the back. The only decision that needs to be made now is whether we stop or not and, if so, where. The highway seems almost uninhabited; where are the natives of this island? Apart from the boy and the hunters, the only company we encounter on our way are the shopkeepers inside the petrol stations that punctuate our journey, the woman reading the weather forecast on the radio and, at this very moment, the velvet voice of the host of an afternoon culture show, whose words seem to be streaming into an echo chamber without punctuation.

A giant Pepsi sign shines through the darkness.

Yuletide lights have been hung over the petrol pump; only five weeks to Christmas. We’re the only customers and a scrawny, weary-looking girl with big eyes and a dyed ponytail comes running out of the house next door to serve us some petrol. I imagine that must be her brother who comes following her, a little bit younger, taking slow steps, as if he were tackling the strong current of a river. His spotty face and swollen eyelids suggest he’s just woken up from a long summer sleep, with a knitted hat pulled over his eyes. He replaces his sister at the pump, petrol is obviously his job. She tells us there was little traffic over the weekend, but that they ran out of hot dogs on Sunday, unfortunately, and they don’t have the ice cream machine turned on in the winter. Instead, Tumi gets to choose from a range of multi-coloured gumdrops and sweets from last year, displayed in boxes under the glass counter.

Elísabet Marilyn turns out to be a worldly-wise girl, who informs us that she recently came second in a beauty contest at a ball, that she likes reading good books and going to good parties where there is something other to drink than home-brews, that she is currently pregnant, but that she hasn’t decided on whether she is going to keep the baby or enter more beauty competitions, and that she has been invited to compete in the Golden Blonde of the World Award. The competition is only open to blondes, she says, because up until now judges have shown a strong bias for brunettes, who always score higher, like the recent Miss India and Miss Brazil, for example; and this is unethical, professionally speaking, particularly since the members of the jury often give the opposite impression in their one-to-one interviews with blonde contestants in the preparatory rounds.

I buy a knitted sweater for the boy with a hood and a jigsaw of two puffins rubbing each other’s beaks, as well as a souvenir for myself, a miniature hand-made painted church about the size of my palm, skilfully crafted in wood by a cousin at the farm. I’ll put it up on the dashboard. E. Marilyn hands me some glue to ensure it withstands the country’s network of notoriously bumpy roads. I wonder whether I should buy the knitted yellow baby trousers on display in the craft corner. That way I could set up a meeting with my ex in some neutral café and, when he sat down at the table in front of me with a wriggling baby in striped stockings in his arms, I could pull out the parcel and hand it to him over the cups of hot chocolate and say:

“Well then, congratulations on the baby.”

“Thank you very much, this is the baby we should have had together,” he’d say, stroking the light down on the crown of the head of the baby, who would look like neither of us.

But instead I buy two knitted trousers for Auður’s unborn twins.

The boy doesn’t want me close to him while he’s choosing his candy, because he’s his own boss in this and is quite proud to be able to buy it on his own. He seems to have a slight crush on the girl in the pink T-shirt and stares at her intently to be able to capture the words being shaped by her pink lips. It’s not easy for a deaf boy to decipher the syllables coming out of a mouth that is masticating gum.

I see from the boy’s lips that he is doing his best to enunciate his words as clearly as possible, trying to produce sounds that he himself can only barely hear. But she doesn’t understand him and looks at him, bewildered, several times before glancing over at me. He suddenly starts to fiddle with his hearing aid, trying to reset it. I can see that he’s deeply offended, and by the time he’s outside on the gravel by the shop wall again, he’s holding in a green cellophane bag something completely different to what he wanted. I walk up to him and tell him he can buy some chocolate as well, but he is unable to choose between the three types that are on display on the glass counter, unable to decide because he’s already been distracted once, it’s thrown him off-kilter and he’s scared of making a dreadful mistake. So I end up buying all three types of chocolate for him — pleasing a child doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

As we’re leaving, the owner and father of the girl steps out into the yard to corroborate all of the main points of his daughter’s story about her second place in the beauty contest and her pregnancy, which explains why the girl looks so sickly, poor thing, she can no longer bear the smell of petrol. Recently she even threw up all over a family of four who were sitting in their car.

“But on the other hand, no one understands what she sees in that silly wimp at the pig farm, the guy even plucks his eyebrows,” says the father.