Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Let’s hurry down to the shop. I’ve really got to pee, says Edda.

Buy yourself a Coke or something, as well, Edda dear. I hand her a five-hundred krónur bill. You can keep the change.

The girl isn’t accustomed to acts of kindness, and emits an awkward Thank you.

It’s so strange to see the remnants of manners that stir within Edda. She’s still able to say thanks. Occasionally, she still has it in her to say thanks for her meal, even if she turns up her nose at it when she sits down to eat. At times she’s even the first one to say good night and good morning.

Remarkable, really. All that hanging about with the rabble and all those harmful goings-on haven’t managed to eradicate her manners.

I’ll just be a minute, says Edda, as she steps out of the car.

How exhausted I am, much more exhausted now than I was before my nap on the slope. I want a soft bed, a down quilt that I can wrap around me twice and pull up over my head.

How much there is that needs to be done each day before sleep can come and take me: tend patients, cook food, keep Edda in line, sew buttons, wax the floor. Before night can come today I have to hang around in a car with two complicated women, carry luggage into a house, cook dinner, wash the dishes, and keep up a conversation with a foreigner who has nothing to do with me. Dear me.

I open my eyes and the Little Yellow Hen drives up.

I should have learned long ago not to open my eyes.

Damn it.

Good Lord.

The number of occupants in the yellow van has grown since Selfoss. Ringleader Theodór — Teddi — steps out. You can be sure that he’s directing this pursuit, the dapper, pretty-boy crime boss with forget-me-not eyes and a delicate, girlish mouth. Teddi dresses sportily in a stock of expensive ski outfits, but he never goes skiing as far as anyone knows. He always does his own thing, and has no scruples about putting on a Norwegian knitted cap, tassel and all. His comrades would rather be dead than let themselves be seen with such a contraption on their heads, underlings in the gang to which they have to conform. Teddi comes from a so-called regular household with a father, mother, siblings, and cars. Things are going well for everyone in that household but him. He operates an amphetamine-and-moonshine wholesale ring and has two thugs working for him, Vernharður and Nonni, whose job it is to beat up people in the evenings and on weekends if they’re late with their payments. One of Teddi’s innovations is having a female also dole out thrashings: Erla María, a fifteen-year-old girl from Grímsey. She has a job in a soap factory and works out at the Niflheimur Bodybuilding Clinic. Teddi’s favorite beverage is whole milk. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. He’s known for having a stash of mini milk-cartons and when the others are doing drugs, he takes one out, pokes a hole in the top with the accompanying straw, and starts sucking. This ringleader with the baby face so completely contradicts the stereotype that I’ve caught myself thinking about him in particular, even when I’ve been tending to the acutely ill and the dying. It’s remarkable that he who is the rottenest bastard inside is the most spic-and-span on the outside. He’s so fanatically ill-willed and such a control freak that he chases after his friend Edda to spoil her chances of being saved. I would have been more inclined to think that deep down he was bound to be concerned enough for Edda to have wanted her to get away. How silly of me.

What could be the reason that I saw only Gerti Chicken in the shop in Selfoss? It wouldn’t be Teddi’s thing to try to conceal his presence. Did Gerti pick him up somewhere on the highway? Perhaps the biggest mystery of all: How did the two of them manage to wake up on a Sunday morning? For about the first time in their lives. Something big must be brewing.

Hreinn Elías has appeared out of nowhere, as well.

Allow me to introduce Hreinn Elías, I say. Also known as Hreinn Brain.

That’s hilarious, says Heiður, cracking up.

The trio walks around their vehicle, the bastards, devastated at how badly the sand’s damaged the finish on the infernal van. I enjoy watching them running their sad hands over the scratched paint and the sandblasted windshield.

Dear friends, this scene should have been photographed, captured on video: Hreinn Elías, a shabby youth with angel hair, parted in the middle over his low brow and hanging down to his slumping shoulders, and glossy violet bags dividing his face beneath his dirt-gray eyes. The boy is like a cherub that devils have taken and pickled in brine. Gerti Chicken in his slimy-green leather pants with his shaved head and clumpy ponytail, looking like a seventy-year-old bum who’s gotten his getup from a biker. Ringleader Teddi: a plainclothes Scoutmaster.

Edda walks out of the shop. An instant hangover-type feeling washes over me, an iron cinch tightens around my head, my eyes can’t tolerate the sunlight, there’s a buzzing in my ears, my limbs are paralyzed, a film coats my tongue.

To behold this crooked picture of misery that I’ve nourished at my breast and that appears to limp because one leg is shorter than the other.

What happens now can determine the course of Edda’s life, the course of our trip to the east — whether we’ll make it all the way or whether it might end here, after we’ve made it nearly halfway.

Edda runs toward her friends. Goodness gracious, to see her run. It’s as if she’s never done it before, doesn’t know how, is on the verge of stopping at every step. She waves. Teddi walks toward her and greets her with a kiss on the cheek like a caring brother. It figures, that the greatest skunk gives the warmest greeting.

This skunk wants to turn my desperate efforts into nothing, kick us back to the point where we were when the outlook was bleakest. My inner fear is blended with anger, the lame-duck variety that’s long been my mistress. Can’t they be happy about their friend pulling herself together? Do they have to chase after her, persecute her, knock her down when she’s trying to pull herself up?

In my opinion, nothing less will do now than to make an assault on the wall where it’s highest, so I whip myself out of the car and take a few authoritative steps.

Hello, I say boldly. Where’s Teddi heading today?

Where are you heading? he asks in return, cheekily.

You must have some idea of that, dear, seeing as how you’ve come all this way.

They all fall silent.

Oh, look, Gerti’s got himself a chicken, I say, pointing at a glossy picture of a chicken that he’s stuck on the windshield.

Keep your damned nose in your own business, you fucking cow. Just stick with your fluty pervert there and eat shit, growls Edda.

The lady wouldn’t have learned this sort of language from tough Teddi now, would she? I think.

I can tell Edda’s afraid I’ll do something stupid again, like when I stuck out my tongue at Gerti. To tell the truth, this pleases me to no end.

Heiður’s come up next to me. She stares silently at the youngsters. I know there’s little that can shake them, but her piercing gaze is better than nothing.

I’m going to kill you when I’m sixteen, says Edda.

I notice Hreinn Elías and Gerti Chicken react slightly to this, whereas Teddi doesn’t flap an eyelash, doesn’t move a muscle in his noble face.

Why put it off? I say.

At that moment Edda spits from where she’s standing next to Teddi, aiming at my forehead. She’s such a good shot that it lands right between my eyebrows.

MY THIRD EYE. MADE FROM THE SPIT OF MY DELINQUENT CHILD.