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.
Despite the fact that we quickly spent the allowance Orn had given us, we were by no means in difficulties. Havard had brought his last month’s pay from the hardware store and I had a reasonable sum, which I had intended to use to buy a car at home. Havard, however, managed to spend all his money — and some of mine too — in his last week in London. He discovered that one could walk into certain offices — that I initially took for printing firms because bookmakers was printed on the signs — and bet on horses and dogs, amongst other things. He managed to persuade me to lend him two hundred pounds after some dogs ran away with the last of his money. Two days later he asked me for four hundred pounds, on top of the four hundred that I had given him to ensure that he would disappear.
But money matters weren’t the reason for my asking him — or rather ordering him — to get out. Money is something that one can always obtain again, even if it has disappeared once.
6
He doesn’t seem to have the patience to listen to a short song like “Hound Dog” right to the end. He switches off the stereo just as the guitar solo begins and it sounds like he is going into the kitchen to fetch more whisky. Then he takes several minutes choosing something new to play. He whistles something out of tune and I — who have really nothing better to do — try to find out from his whistling what his musical preferences are at the moment. I cross my fingers in the hope that he will leave the turntable alone; I still haven’t forgotten the terrible sound I heard when he scratched the needle across the shiny, immaculate vinyl recording of Bizet’s “Pearl Divers” that belonged to Orn’s daughter, Osk, on Brooke Road.
After several bars of “Computer World” by Kraftwerk, the phone rings and Havard turns down the sound of the mysterious Germans before answering.
“Emil’s place,” he says, as if he is acting as my secretary. “Emil? No, he isn’t. . Armann? Armann Valur? Glasses? Did he call you? Just now? Yes, he had to go out for a minute, I’m expecting him in a short while. Yes, yes, we will be here. Just knock. What are you saying? Yes, that’s it. It stands back from the street, you’ll see a garden with a white fence, go into it and then you’re there. In half an hour? A quarter of an hour? The glasses? Wait a moment, I’ll have a look.”
I hear him move the CDs on the table and before I know it he is standing in the hall by the bedroom door, no doubt trying to get away from the music.
“Here, I’ve found some glasses, they have. . yes, that’s right. Quite thick, yes. OK, just come along.”