(National Hospital, Psychiatric Ward,
Children’s Hospital Trust, 09/05/1972)
~ ~ ~
There’s a bad smell in my room, a sour, burned smell. It lasts for many weeks. There is a huge burned spot on the carpet. A monument to yet another defeat for the Indians in the ruthless world of the white man.
I go out of my room. Mom is setting coffee cups and plates on the kitchen table. They are for visiting guests, clearly for people we know. Family and friends drink coffee in the kitchen. Only strangers get coffee in the living room. And only strangers get to drink coffee from the fancy cups.
— Who’s coming? I ask.
— No one in particular.
She sets out cake forks for the Christmas randalín.
— Who’s coming? I ask again.
— The girls are just coming to get made up, she replies.
It’s fun to put on makeup. Mom’s girlfriends, her sisters, come over to visit. And they get made-up. Mom laughs and is happy. I like seeing her happy. It happens all too rarely. Usually she’s just tired. But not when she does makeup. That’s always good fun.
Mom doesn’t say much when she’s at home with just Dad and me. Mom and Dad rarely talk, except when they argue about bridge. They play bridge on Monday evenings. When they come home, they’re arguing. I hear the quarrel until I fall asleep.
— Why did you say Three No Trumps on that hand, idiot! What gave you that idea? You must trust your partner!
— That hasn’t worked out in the past, though.
— And the round before that — what were you playing at?
— I had a decent hand of clubs.
— Why didn’t you lead, then, with clubs?
— Oh, so you think that would have made sense?
— Yes, at least it would have worked!
The doorbell rings. I know now that you don’t say “tinkles.” Stebbi’s mother taught me that. She often corrects me. She taught me that one “rings” a doorbell but doesn’t “tinkle” it. But you can tinkle a bell that’s on a table.
Gunna has arrived. She’s Mom’s sister. She’s fat and large. She’s a hoot. It’s like she’s a guy. She belches without putting her hand over her mouth. She farts, too, so everyone can hear; it’s freaking hilarious.
— I’ve got awful gas!
She talks loudly and sometimes says something funny that I don’t always get. I like, though, the way she says things. Sometimes she says something funny to my Dad when he’s grumbling about something boring like smoking or something someone said on the radio.
— Are you still smoking, Gunna?
— Why the dickens do you care?
— Didn’t you promise me you’d stop?
— I’ve never promised you anything.
Dad doesn’t know what to say to that.
Once she looked at me and said to my mother:
— The boy’s hung like a horse!
~ ~ ~
They looked at me and laughed. I didn’t know what it meant, but it was still a pleasure. It meant that there was something good about me. I wasn’t just a problem. Maybe I was incredibly tough. And it was fun to see everyone laughing, especially my mother.
Aunt Salla is here, too. She’s also my mom’s sister. She’s the eldest. She’s thin and has creased features. I like her best of all. She’s always nice to me.
Before we moved to Fossvogur suburb, we lived on Skipholt, on the top floor. During the day, Mom would take me out into the yard and tie me to a pole with a long rope, so that I could play in the garden but wouldn’t get too far away. I was little. But I worked out how to untie the rope. And I tried to run away to Aunt Salla’s home. At one point, the police stopped me because I was trailing this very long rope behind me. They asked me where I lived, but I wouldn’t tell them. I just wanted them to leave me alone so I could go to Salla’s. However, they put me in a police car and took me down to the police station. A very nice woman there gave me donuts.
I was just settling down and preparing to spend some time there when my father came past and noticed me. He was astonished. He was at work and didn’t know what I’d been up to.
— Isn’t that my kid? he asked.
Things are always fun around Salla. She gives me treats. Her house smells good, and behind it there’s a massive park with a playground. She also has a large, black elephant made of stone; he’s friends with Action Man. When Salla’s niece comes to visit, she always gives me candy. Sometimes she gives me toys, too, even if it’s not my birthday.
One time she gave me a metal plane. It was very cool. You could see the faces of the passengers through the windows. The aircraft had wind-up wheels and could drive itself along the floor. But planes don’t drive. They’re meant to fly. So I took it to the top of the apartment block that was being built close by. I often went there secretly. I knew it was forbidden, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t someone’s home so I wasn’t disturbing people.
I enjoyed climbing the scaffolding and throwing things off the roof. But you have to be careful when you are very high up on a roof: if you fall then you can die.
Once I did fall. But it was okay because I just hit the scaffolding below. I hurt myself, but not much. At least, I didn’t die. The Lone Ranger has often fallen down and has even hurt himself badly.
I played with the airplane for a while. It was going to fly to Trondheim, Norway, where my sister Kristín lives. All the passengers were very excited and felt happy to be going abroad. They all wanted to go to Duty-Free and buy salt licorice and PK-chewing gum. Then they were going to go see the cathedral in Trondheim.
I took a running start and threw the plane high up in the air, off the roof. The passengers grinned because they were airborne.
The aircraft completed many circles in the sky before it fell to the ground.
I ran down.
It had landed in a heap. The wheels had broken off. It was a plane crash, and in all plane crashes, the planes catch fire.
I had some matches on me. I piled rubbish around the fuselage and set fire to it. The paint on the plane scorched. The merry faces of the passengers melted and turned into black blobs. No one survived.
I wish I’d had some bombs. Sometimes, after New Year’s Eve fireworks, I have bombs. I stuff them into toys and light them.
It would have been fun to see the plane explode in the air and come apart.
~ ~ ~
Jón Gunnar’s problems increase innumerably. He is heedless, incautious, seems never to learn anything from experience. He is isolated from his group of friends, yet always wants to be in charge and uses any means at his disposal to become their leader, even damaging their toys. He can, however, on several occasions appear quite normal if just with one child at a time, especially indoors. The boy’s imagination is boundless — he’s always off in some other world — though he doesn’t especially suffer any distress from this. He is very careless about his things, as though nothing really matters to him. He doesn’t have a lot of fear; after the parents discussed it at length between themselves, they agreed that what had affected him most in the last two years were some scenes from children’s shows on TV. The parents find it very troublesome that he tends to have difficulty concentrating.