Bragi Ólafsson - Pets

Havard has turned off the music and I hear him unwrapping the carton of cigarettes that I bought in the duty-free store. He has been strangely quiet the past few minutes but the silence is broken by his swearing; he burned himself on a match.

He must have lit the cigarette, and I guess that he has had a good swig of whisky; he lets out a deep “ah,” as one does sometimes when spirits burn one’s throat.

“Hinrik!” he says suddenly, as if the name has just popped out of his throat unexpectedly.

I try to remember if I know a Hinrik and Havard answers my thoughts — in the loud voice he uses when he talks to himself — when he says:

“Hinrik, mon ami in Breidholt. Why don’t I call him?”

I can’t remember any Hinrik in Breidholt, but perhaps that’s not surprising; I don’t know any of Havard’s acquaintances, except for one fellow, a skinny boy whose name was nothing like Hinrik, who worked with us in the hardware store. He had a shriveled arm and a thick mop of dark hair, which was obviously meant to hide his peculiarly big ears but didn’t. Their friendship seemed to be built on the fact that Havard protected him from two older workers who plagued him; in return Havard was allowed to tease him a little when I was around.

His kindness towards the dark-haired boy caused me to turn a blind eye to Havard’s obvious flaws, which I was quick to notice. However, there is no excuse for what I suspect is brewing in his mind right now. He is thinking of inviting someone over to my place.

“Hello, it’s me, Havard, Hinrik’s friend, you remember me.” It sounds as though he has gone into the kitchen with the receiver. “Has he come home yet?” he continues. “Will you let me talk to him for a moment?” And then, before the phone gets put down, he adds: “Here, thanks for letting me use your toilet earlier, I don’t think I would have made it back without pissing in the taxi.”

For some reason I get really annoyed listening to the way Havard talks to this woman and I’m about to crawl out from under the bed, jump on him, and tear the receiver away. But of course I don’t let myself. I don’t know how I would get him out of the flat in a decent manner, not to mention the fact that, when it comes down to it, I am afraid of this man. What he did, the final incident that led to his being locked up in this institution or home in Sweden, still upsets me, and I have to admit that I don’t have enough belief in medical science or mankind in general to imagine that it is possible to cure a man as crazy as Havard.

As far as I know, he was accused of beating up a young girl not long after he returned from his trip with me, and he was interrogated in connection with another assault, though he was never convicted for it. However, about a years and a half ago, when he had moved to Sweden, he was found guilty of assaulting a fifty-year-old woman in her home in Gothenburg. I don’t know the details of the case or whether it was a case of rape or attempted rape, I only know that the less one has to do with Havard, the less likely one is to be drawn into some kind of trouble. Not that I am afraid he will lay his hands on me, but experience has shown me that hardly a day goes by without him managing to cause some sort of trouble.

On the day we left England we hadn’t gotten any further than the airport here at home when Havard started accusing the waitress at the bar in the duty-free lounge of taking his pack of cigarettes while he was in the toilet. That resulted in them refusing to serve him any more drinks at the bar and he “was forced to open his own supply,” as he put it. On top of that he bought another pack of cigarettes to make up for the pack that I had tried many times to tell him had been taken by young German tourists who had been sitting beside us at the bar.

“Hello, Rikki,” he says when Hinrik picks up the phone. “Come home? Yes, of course I have come home. No, I know. But I’ll have to tell you about it, we must meet. What? Yes, I dropped in today and you weren’t there! You were at work! So you have a regular job? You’ve just come home, you say? And? Do you have a gig this evening? A new group? Oh, really? The same guys then? Your wife told me that you only play on weekends now. Really? This evening? Here, I’ll be there. Eleven o’clock? So late? And where? Where is that? OK. Great. You know, something funny happened to me today. I was in this bar on Austurstraeti and there were some complete jerks who attacked me and were going to steal from me and what do you think I did? What? Leave? No, Hinrik, I don’t run away when someone is about to punch me. I walked out with eleven thousand kronur in cash and left those gentlemen on the floor and one of them was eleven thousand poorer. What do you say? Stupid? No, Rikki, that is just part of taking care of oneself. I don’t take nonsense from others, at the most I take money. But, listen, you don’t happen to know some guy called, let me see, what’s he called again, Gisli something. .”

He walks briskly into the bedroom, grabs his anorak from the bed and thumps down in the chair in front of the computer.

“Oh, here, I just realized I don’t have his driver’s license, I let him keep it, poor fellow,” he says, propping his feet up on the bed. The worn springs squeak: it’s as if an elephant has flopped down on the edge of the bed.

“He was some kind of Nordic devil. Gisli something, Nor something. No doubt half-Norwegian. He was only half a man, that’s for sure. What are you saying? Where am I? I’m at my old friend’s place, Emil. You remember, the one I went to England with: Emil Halldorsson. He’s rather a pussy, but a decent sort of a guy, I mean, he’s alright. You should see all the music he’s got here. You’d be sure to find something that you could listen to. Loads of weird things, there was some awful stuff on when I came in. I don’t know where those sounds came from, probably Hell. But listen, why don’t you drop by, I’m on Grettisgata, quite far up. Yes, why not? I was sure you would be at home earlier on, I thought you were just playing in the evenings and hung about at home in the daytime. Eh? No, no, I’m alone here, I don’t know what has happened to Emil. I arrived a short while ago and he had water boiling on the stove so he can’t have gone far. Yes, why not? Drop by this evening? Before you go to the gig? Isn’t it a good idea to have a little drink first, eh?”

He tells Hinrik the number of the house and says goodbye in Swedish. Then he takes his feet off the bed, gives it a shove with one foot so that everything shakes and shudders, and hops up from the chair. I feel as if I am about to be flattened any minute — that he’ll throw himself on to the bed and break it. But it doesn’t happen; he goes out. It sounds as if he takes his anorak too and when I have listened out for what he is going to do next, thunderous tones suddenly bellow out of the loudspeakers; he has put some rock music on and clearly turned it up full blast. He is quick to turn it down. The music disappears for a moment and then comes back louder and he leaves it like that; he is playing Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”

And he has called me a pussy. And has invited his friends from some outdated band in Breidholt here.

It’s almost as if Havard knows that I am in the next room and is enjoying rubbing salt into the wounds he has inflicted on me — both now and in the past — when he starts singing along with Elvis:

You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.

5

The pocket money that Orn, my father’s friend, gave us for looking after the house and the animals should have been enough for Havard and me to live on, but we were much too extravagant during our first days in London; I, by buying CDs and books and Havard, by buying clothes, including the shoes that I thought I recognized, and a rather expensive, well-made ukulele. I wasn’t with him when he wandered around Denmark Street and bought that Hawaiian guitar — I was most probably in Waterstone’s flicking through books — but I was present on the only occasion that I remember when he tried to play the instrument. For some reason he thought it was highly appropriate to play the ukulele for the iguana. It was meant to be some kind of “Galapagos atmosphere,” as he called it, but the sound he produced was as sad as the fate the Mexican iguana was to meet three weeks later.