— Leave me alone!
— Ohhh, you’re so soft.
— Shut up!
Dóri has recently moved to the Fossvogur suburb. He’s considered weird and therefore automatically my friend. He’s also sometimes called Little Blue because there’s a British cartoon on TV about an elephant whose name is Little Blue.
Dóri is a blast. His mom and dad are divorced and he’s usually always alone at home, just like me. We hang out at his home a lot and make prank calls.
Some boys are shy about getting naked. They’re teased a lot, too. They keep their dicks hidden and rush in and out of the shower. Sometimes, someone grabs their underwear and throws it in the shower or hides their towel.
If a person is a really big dork, he’s in danger of seeing his underwear in the toilet or else someone takes it and throws it into the girls’ changing room. That’s the most humiliating, especially if the underwear is embarrassing, like if it has childish pictures on it. Rubber Tarzan has this happen to him all the time. He’s really the only one everyone picks on. I don’t think he enjoys gym.
If we’re taking too long to get dressed then the shower attendant, a woman, comes to tell us off and hurry us up. She also comes in to make sure that we aren’t trying to spy on the girls in the shower.
I never torment anyone. On the other hand, I don’t try to intervene when others are being tormented. If I start interfering, I’ll just get teased, too. Everyone gets teased at some point. All you have to do is wear stupid clothes or simply have a silly towel.
On Fridays we go to Assembly. We all sit on the floor and the principal has us sing. We sing “Bless You, the Spring is Calling You” and “By the River Öxará” and songs like that. I enjoy it. I make up nonsense words. I forget about the lyrics and try to sing the tune wrong:
The river’s got axles, tycoons eating rice,
An erect sunshade, shit in the fields!
Shit on the flag, poop in the Light,
Sperm at Þingvellir and shit in the fields.
Onward, onward, never to shit.
Onward, onward, men and cows alike.
Join your chewing gum bands,
Clasp your mucky hands,
Fight friends, defend our land!
If it sounds like I’m messing about the teacher comes running over and pinches me and takes me away. It’s best if the distortion is close to the original. If so, no one can hear but those sitting near me. They all laugh, and I’m funny and entertaining.
Everything in school is a lot of fun, except for the learning.
~ ~ ~
I’d gone to the Co-op. You can get anything under the sun there. I’d gotten a little money and I wanted to buy Mom something. But all I could afford was some thread on a piece of cardboard. Still, I think my mom will be happy with it. She has a box full of all sorts of thread. All on spools. She doesn’t have any thread like this. It’s in a white paper bag. I want to cheer Mom up because she is always so tired.
I’m coming back from the countryside, where I’ve been all summer. Perhaps she’s tired because I can’t stay in the country any longer.
I think I’ve been sent home. I’m still not sure. But I sense it. After what I did.
The farm stands in a high valley, up on a hill. A river flows through the valley. Right opposite the farm is another farm; it’s deserted. Behind it is a big black mountain. Directly in front of the farm there’s an old dam in the river. Below the farm is another farm; a different family lives there. All around are steep slopes and high mountains.
This is “out west:” right by Bjarkalundur and Reykhólar. I’ve been there, too. They process the algae. They have large machines that are like tractors; they drive out to sea and pull up seaweed. Bjarkalundur is a hotel. Dad goes there in summer. I’ve never been.
The farmer’s wife is my aunt. She’s very strict.
When I first came to the farm, she was always asking me if I was mean to my grandmother and whether I didn’t think it was bad to be mean to my grandmother. I know that. But I’m not mean. Grandma and I are friends. We’re only playing. She enjoys it when I play around with her.
The farmer and his wife have two sons. Their names are Ingvi and Njörður.
Ingvi is the same age as me but Njörður is a teenager. He’s in the Youth Club and is very good at sports. He can jump as high as he is tall, without needing a run-up. There are also several other kids out there in the country, just like me. The farm is an ordinary house. Yet there’s a very weird smell there, the smell of animals.
Outside the house is a beautiful garden where the farmer’s wife grows flowers. Directly opposite the house, spread throughout the farmyard, are outbuildings: a cowshed, a sheep barn, another barn.
On the farm there’s a girl called Helga. Helga is the same age as me. She’s lots of fun. She’s not really a girl. Girls are so often prudes. But not Helga. She’s exactly like a boy. It’s fun to play with her.
We mostly play on the slope between the two farms. There’s a little house and some fences.
The kids in the country play differently than other kids. They don’t have Action Man. Instead, they play with ram’s horns and bones. The horns represent sheep. If you find an unmarked horn, you get to own it by marking it with a cut, the way it’s done with lambs in real life: when a lamb is born, a piece is cut from its ear and a special label is put on it. That’s how the farmer knows his sheep. It’s called a sheep-mark. The kids score their horns with their own unique sheep-mark. Some cut one piece, some more pieces than others can. The mark can also be a hole or a groove.
The kids keep their horns inside their homes during winter. In spring, they put all the horns together and throw them down a hill so that they scatter across a large meadow. Later in the summer, they act like shepherds. They walk across the field, looking in the tall grass and picking up their horns.
The bones are also animals. Cheekbones are cows. Sheep bones are horses. You put a yarn bundle around the bones and drag it behind you, between your feet. Small bones are dogs and cats.
I like playing these games. I don’t think they’re stupid. I could spend all day rooting around with farm toys, making roads, fixing the fence. Fences are made from poles and wires. There’s a skill to making a beautiful fence.
There’s a simple economic system on the slope. Business is conducted primarily through barter. Some things are more valuable than others and their value depends on supply and demand. What is rare is expensive and exciting. What there’s plenty of is worthless.
The formal currency on the slopes is the seed of Yellow Rattle, also called moneyflower. But since everyone has so many seeds, they’re actually worthless. They grow wild in the gravel through the valley.
I share the farm with Helga. We’re a farm couple. The boys tease me and call us sweethearts, though we aren’t. One boy tormented me by saying I’d kissed Helga. But it wasn’t true. I wouldn’t ever kiss her. I would rather drink a glass full of warm cow’s piss than kiss a girl. We’re just a farming couple who are trying to make our farm cool.
But we also play all sorts of other games. We play chase and hide-and-seek and make cars out of big cogs we mount on the end of a stick with a nail through the middle. Then we push the cogwheels in front of us, using the stick so they spin. We drive over obstacles and compete to make it to the cowshed, seeing how far we can go without getting stuck.