— Look at how disgusting he is!
But she likes his music. She listens to the songs.
— He sings quite well, really. But he’s revolting.
Dad has no interest in music. I’ve never seen him listen to any songs. I’ve never heard him sing, except when he’s just babbling something. All the same, he’s in the police choir. I don’t think that’s fun. All choirs are boring except the Sunshine Choir.
My dad has even sung overseas with the police choir.
Dad thinks he sings well. Mom doesn’t agree. She thinks the police choir is annoying.
Dad often boasts he has been abroad on a music tour. That makes Mom roll her eyes and shake her head. She hates it when Dad boasts.
— People even got up from their seats and clapped.
— Did they?
— We sang well.
— No, you didn’t.
— Why do you say that?
— Because you sang badly. It was nothing special.
— Oh, it wasn’t, wasn’t it?
— No.
— Why not?
— It was more like screeching.
Dad gets mad when Mom belittles his choir.
— And what expertise allows you to talk like that?
— I just know the difference between singing and screaming.
— Why did people stand up and clap for us if we were that bad?
— Perhaps it was a courtesy? Or maybe they were glad you’d stopped screeching.
Dad gets pissed and starts listening to the radio. Mom sighs.
~ ~ ~
I’m getting ill. Mom says I’m dommara-like. Last night, I almost fell asleep in front of the TV.
When I watch TV I usually lie on my stomach in front of it. I watch with one eye at a time. When I get tired, I close that eye and look through the other. But yesterday, I had such a sore stomach that I couldn’t lie on it. I was cold, too, so I lay down on the sofa with a blanket over me. I can’t always see the TV when I lie there, but it didn’t matter much — there wasn’t anything interesting on.
I kept falling asleep and waking up; I dozed like that more or less all evening.
When the TV was turned off, it seemed like I was asleep. Dad picked me up and took me to bed. That was nice. He laid me in my bed and tucked me in.
— Good night, lad, he said quietly.
Sometimes, Dad is nice. He’s quiet and talks to me and answers the questions I ask him without making things up. Those times, he bothers to play chess with me and read me poetry. Once he even took Gummi and me as outlaws up to Þingvellir. We camped and caught fish.
He’s often tired when he comes home and I irritate him. His job is too difficult. Cops have to do so many things that other people won’t do. I’ve heard my mother and her friends talk about it. He’s always having to talk to drunk guys like Rubber Tarzan’s dad and chase gangsters. Sometimes he also has to help people who have gotten into accidents and tell people about other people’s deaths. Once, there was a man who threw himself from the top floor of the City Hospital. My mom knew about it because she was at work.
The police came to fetch the man. Mom saw my dad was one of the cops. I know because I heard her tell Aunt Salla.
Dad never talks to anyone about it. He just tries to forget.
Dad owns a ton of cop stuff. He has handcuffs and a baton and even a real handgun. He’s the best handgun shot in the police and has lots of prizes. Once I got to go with him when he was competing. The men were all in a row, with headphones, and they shot at targets. Dad won.
One time when I was home alone, I stole his handcuffs and played with them. There’s a strange sound when you click them together: klick, klick, klick. Then when you close them completely, they open again.
I handcuffed myself by mistake. I only meant to try to lock them and to slip my hands out of them but they fastened unexpectedly quickly so that I couldn’t free myself. I had also inadvertently attached the other end to the radiator so I was completely stuck.
I was trapped inside my room for hours, until Mom came home. She had to call my dad and he came home from work with a key. They were still not that angry because I did it entirely by accident. Dad was just annoyed to have to come home from work. Mom thought it was funny that I had been there all day handcuffed to the radiator.
~ ~ ~
I leave my room. Mom is sitting inside the kitchen playing solitaire. She often does that when she isn’t working or napping: she sits in the kitchen and smokes and drinks coffee and plays solitaire.
— Am I better?
— You don’t have a fever.
— Can I go out, then?
— No.
— Why not?
— You know why.
— I’m done being sick.
— You need to stay inside for one day without a fever because otherwise you’ll end up ill again.
There’s no point arguing with Mom. Her word is law.
Mom and I don’t talk to each other much. She does sometimes ask me how things are going and what the news is from my friends and what this or that person is up to. I tell her stories and she starts laughing. It’s hard to tell Dad stories because he always stops listening in the middle of the narrative and goes off to do something else before I’ve finished, or else he interrupts and starts talking about something different.
Dad talks a lot about politics and what’s in the news. He talks about it a lot when someone says stupid stuff. Dad gets angry if a reporter says a car has driven somewhere.
— The car drove itself? There was no one driving it?!
Mom doesn’t care about that stuff. Dad often talks about the same thing over and over and asks questions you can’t answer:
— Why did the man say that?
— I don’t know.
— Is this normal?
— How on earth would I know, Kristinn?!
Sometimes Dad talks but Mom doesn’t answer and keeps playing solitaire. Then he raises his voice more and more until Mom gets angry and shouts at him.
— Will you stop your bloody noise!
Then Dad gets sore and begins to watch the news on TV or listen to it on the radio. He feels unhappy that no one wants to talk about politics with him or tell him why people say certain things. Sometimes he just speaks to the television. During debate shows, Dad speaks more often than the people on the program. He asks questions and laughs at what the people say.
— What the hell is this dreck? Answer the question, man!
My dad is a collector. He collects stamps and all sorts of old stuff, buttons and stickers. He keeps a barrel out on the balcony full of pickled meat. The barrel mainly contains liver and blood pudding and sheep testicles, but also sheep bones and seal flippers and other things — I don’t know what they are.
From time to time, some kind of “shipment” comes from out west for Dad. Then he gets very happy and puts it in the barrel. Often these shipments are packed in the newspapers that are wet and leaking.
I don’t much like pickled meat. Often Dad eats it with porridge in the morning. The only thing I like is sour liver sausage. The other stuff I find disgusting, especially sheep testicles. I could never eat any animal’s balls. Whale blubber and seal flippers are awful, too.