It gave them all something to do, something to talk about.
At about ten o’clock, Eggert said he should be going home. Grandma and Anna Rós went up to bed, leaving Dísa with her grandfather.
‘Dísa?’ he said. ‘Do you think you could get into Helga’s Thomocoin account? I don’t know how to do it.’
Dísa smiled weakly. ‘Yeah. I set it up for Mum. I know where she keeps her wallet, and I set up her password.’
‘Will you be able to give them instructions? To sell the Thomocoin?’
‘I guess so,’ said Dísa. ‘Is the exchange running yet?’
Dísa had transferred all her bitcoin to Mum three years before. With Fjóla’s help, she had set up a Thomocoin wallet for her mother and used the bitcoin to invest in it. Which had worked out well. The end of 2017 had been a wild ride for bitcoin. The price had doubled to almost twenty thousand dollars in December before crashing off, at one point falling 25 per cent in a single day. The new Thomocoin that Helga had bought had retained its value, and indeed the price had grown slowly but steadily over the following three years.
But in order to convert Thomocoin into real money, there needed to be an exchange through which to sell it.
‘Not yet,’ said Grandpa. ‘The haters are still managing to stall it. But approval from the Icelandic government is very close.’
‘I didn’t know you knew much about Thomocoin,’ said Dísa.
‘I have to,’ said Grandpa. ‘The future of the farm depends on it. And I bought some myself, you know? Not nearly as much as your mother, but enough to make a nice little return.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘A lot of people in town bought it. And Eggert. And some of Helga’s colleagues at the hospital.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Dísa.
‘Oh yes. Mind you, it was good for your mother. She got a cut of all the Thomocoin sold, a kind of commission for herself. Half in Thomocoin, half in bitcoin. Which she used to buy more Thomocoin.’ Grandpa smiled. ‘She had quite a pile.’
Dísa wasn’t sure what to make of Grandpa’s interest in her mother’s crypto-fortune. Anxiety about the viability of the farm was certainly fair enough. But there was a flash of greed in his eyes, the same flash that she had seen occasionally in her mother’s.
And why hadn’t Mum told her that she had been persuading all and sundry to buy Thomocoin?
Dísa suddenly felt very tired. ‘Don’t worry, Grandpa. I’m sure I can get into Mum’s wallet. But I’ll do it later, OK?’
‘OK,’ said Grandpa, relieved.
‘I’m off to bed now.’
Dísa lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of her mother. Her smile. Her unruly red hair. Her infectious laugh. Her warmth. There was something about being hugged by your mother that nothing — no one — could replace.
She tried to think of her first-ever memory of her. Was it in that house in Fossvogur? No, it was being dropped off at nursery and screaming her head off at the fear that she was going to be abandoned. She had sat on her mother’s lap and Mum hugged her. Then Mum had stayed with her as they both watched the other kids playing.
Eventually Mum had left Dísa, and it had been OK because Dísa felt strong.
How old had Dísa been? Three?
The tears came. She sobbed.
Then, later, spent, she waited for sleep to come. But it wouldn’t.
Thoughts of Thomocoin drifted into her consciousness and she hung on to them as a distraction. There wouldn’t be a problem logging into Mum’s wallet, would there? She knew the password for Mum’s cold wallet, and she knew where it should be. Should be. What if Mum had put it somewhere different?
Well, then she knew where Mum had hidden the paper copy of the private key. In a box under a stone at the back of the farm, next to the rock where the hidden people had lived for centuries.
Most farms in Iceland had a family of hidden people living with them, usually in an identified rock or mound. Neither Grandpa nor Grandma put much store in them, but Dísa remembered her great-grandmother had been a firm believer. In fact, just after Mum had been born, a hidden woman had come to her great-grandmother in the night to tell her the new baby should be named Helga.
Helga it was. You didn’t argue with the hidden people. And you certainly didn’t argue with Great-Grandma.
Dísa had suggested the hiding place, remembering what Dad had told her about how he had stashed his private key at his summer house, which was supposed to be inhabited by the local hidden people. She and Mum had selected a stone by the rock where the Blábrekka hidden people lived, and dug a little hole underneath it, together.
Sleep didn’t come.
Dísa got up and went down the landing to her mother’s room, switching on the light. She stood there, silent, her gaze drifting over the bed, the bedside table, the wardrobe. Mum had made the bed that morning, but there was underwear strewn on a chair. And there were photographs. Of Anna Rós, of Grandpa and Grandma. Even of Great-Grandma. And one of Dísa, aged about five, laughing in her mother’s lap.
The cold wallet USB stick should be at the back of the bottom drawer under her mother’s sweaters. Dísa opened it, and felt around. Nothing.
What now? Should she search the whole room? Maybe it would be in the desk by the window?
She couldn’t face it.
The sensible thing to do would be to wait until it turned up somewhere, as it probably would once they started going through Mum’s things. But Dísa didn’t want to wait. And she liked the idea of looking in the secret hiding place she and her mother had dreamed up together for an eventuality like this.
So she pulled on jeans and a sweater, crept downstairs and out of the back door, making sure not to awaken Hosi, the farm sheepdog.
It was a cool, fresh night. The sky was clear, and a three-quarter moon illuminated the mountainside above the farm in a shimmering blue. Dísa stared at it, allowing her eyes to adjust. Blue slope. Blábrekka.
A dim, glimmering curtain of green swished and swayed in the sky above the horizon to the north, over the fjord. She had missed the northern lights in Reykjavík. They were much less visible there with all the ambient light from the city, whereas here in the valley the heavens were dark and clear, and the aurora could perform in all its glory. When there was no cloud, of course.
She knew that the large barn would be full of a warm, seething mass of wool. The week before, Grandpa and the other farmers in the valley had ridden up to the mountain with their dogs to bring the sheep down for the winter. Many would be sent off to the slaughterhouse at Blönduós, but the survivors would be shorn and spend the winter indoors until right after their lambs were born the following spring.
The elves’ rock was fifty metres higher up the slope from the barn, over rough ground. Dísa found the stone, the largest of a group scattered next to it.
Dísa didn’t believe in hidden people but, nevertheless, she felt compelled to announce her intentions.
‘Good evening,’ she said to the stone. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I just need to get something of my mother’s. She died yesterday.’ Dísa looked up and along the hillside to where Anna Rós had found Mum. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’
She listened for a response. There wasn’t one.
For a second she felt foolish. Yet she thought of her ancestors on the farm, going back countless centuries, who had communicated with the hidden people by this very rock.
It wasn’t so dumb.
She knelt down and lifted the flat stone. Underneath was the shallow hole and the clear plastic food-storage box she had watched Mum place there, a folded sheet of paper dimly visible inside.