Fall Hard (20 page)

“So do I,” Mags said with a sad little smile, putting her purse away again. “Now come on,” she added in a much brisker tone. “Drink your coffee before it gets cold.”

I picked up my cup and took a dutiful sip. It was strong and bitter, and I took another swallow before tackling the Danish, which was, I found, as sticky as it looked. “Have we been here before?” I asked before biting into the pastry. It was very sweet, a good counterpart to the coffee.

Mags shook her head. “We always meant to but never quite got around to it. I came here for the first time a few months ago. It’s a bit touristy, isn’t it? But worth it for the views.”

“Have you been outside, yet?” There was an open-air viewing platform that circled the café, with telescopes dotted along it.

“Not yet. We can go out when we’ve finished. Bother. I meant to bring my camera. Oh, well, next time. So what have you been up to so far this weekend?”

“Oh, this and that.” My mind flicked back to what I’d spent much of Saturday doing. I hoped I wasn’t blushing.

“Was there something you particularly wanted to talk to me about? Not that it isn’t lovely to meet you here anyway.”

“I, ah, I found a strange thing when I went through some more of the storage boxes a couple of days ago,” I said, pretending interest in the way my coffee swirled as I stirred it.

“Oh?” Mags said, taking a sip from her cup.

“Yes. It was a horse’s skull.” I held my breath, watching her carefully for a response.

Mags just made a face. “Oh. Yes. That thing. Sorry. I should have warned you. Did it give you a fright? It was Sven’s, I remember you coming in and moaning about it one day.” She smiled. “Actually, you know, you were a bit mean to him about it. You told me once he was rather particular about how it was displayed, and you kept moving it around a few degrees and waiting for him to notice.”

Oh. It sounded like it had all been a bit of a joke between us. Why the hell had I overreacted so badly? “I remembered him, a bit, when I saw it,” I said, mostly against my better judgement.

Mags’s face lit up, and she leaned forward over the table. “Really? Oh, that’s wonderful!”

“Just his voice,” I explained, feeling oddly like I was letting her down. I should mention the flashback I’d had of Viggo, I knew. She’d be happy to hear further evidence of my memory returning. But I was uncomfortable about the implications.

“But that’s still something. Do you think it helped, going to Borgarnes?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.” I didn’t want to go into detail. I was uncomfortable thinking about my reaction to the museum exhibits. To be honest, it was a bit embarrassing.

“And you had a good time with Alex?” she prompted, looking teasingly over the top of her cup.

“Mags…” I sighed. “There’s nothing going on with me and Alex. And there isn’t going to be. I should have told you before, but I’m already seeing someone. Viggo, from the riverjet.”

“Oh.” Mags looked nonplussed but quickly rallied. “I’m so glad for you. And maybe this is better—after all, he lives here. You’ll have more time to be together.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

Understanding dawned. “You thought I ought to have a summer fling, didn’t you? A sort of holiday romance without the holiday?”

“Well, no, if you feel ready for a more serious relationship…”

Was that what it was? Viggo and I?

If I was honest with myself, yes, it was.

Mags was smiling at me. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to go into details. Well, not much. Have you met his family yet?”

“I—no. Well, actually, I don’t think he’s got any family.”

“He must have
some
, unless he sprang fully formed out of a rock somewhere. What’s his patronymic?” Icelandic last names were, as a rule, a simple combination of the father’s first name and “son”. Or “dottir”, as might be.

“Gudrunarson,” I admitted. Gudrun was a girl’s name, and Mags would know that.

Mags raised an eyebrow. “Well, it does happen. It doesn’t necessarily mean he grew up without a father. And in any case, Icelanders are very big on the whole extended-family thing. Single-parent families here generally just mean that grandparents, aunts and so on all pitch in.”

“Maybe. But I haven’t met any of them, if they are around.” I tried to sound uninterested in the subject in the hopes she wouldn’t pursue it. What Viggo had told me about his mother’s drinking and his father’s absence wasn’t mine to tell. I put down my cup. “If you’ve finished, shall we go out to the viewing platform?”

We wandered out of the glass doors. Mags’s gaze lingered for a moment on a father holding up a small child to look through a telescope, then darted determinedly away. “Isn’t the view fantastic today? I’ve been up here before when you could barely see the bay, let alone anything beyond.”

I looked. True enough, the sunlight glinting off the blue water was almost painful, and the mountains beyond were clearly visible. The pointed spire of the Hallgrimskirkja gleamed white, standing head and shoulders over the rest of the city, although its unusual stepped construction made it look more like something a child might have constructed out of Lego bricks. Actually the whole city seemed toylike, unreal, a patchwork of blocky white buildings and red roofs, with more trees in between than I would have credited.

Something else occurred to me as we walked up to the railings. “Did Sven have tattoos?” I asked awkwardly. “Sorry—I know it’s an odd question, no reason you should know—”

“Oh, but I do, actually.” Mags leaned her arms on the rail, gazing out at the view. “Yes. We took a trip to the Blue Lagoon together, just a few of us from the department, and you brought Sven. I mean, other people took their other halves too; it wasn’t just you.”

“And?” I tried not to sound impatient.

“I was quite surprised—I mean, I wouldn’t have thought he was the sort, but he was a bit of an
Illustrated Man
. You couldn’t see when he had his shirt on, but his back, and his chest and shoulders—they were covered with tattoos.” She gave a funny little smile. “I said something about it to you afterwards. I got the impression you rather liked them.”

My skin felt a little too tight. I kept my gaze firmly on the rooftops of Reykjavik. “What were they of?”

Mags scrunched up her face. “A bit horrible, really. Sorry, but they weren’t my cup of tea at all. Lots of ghoulish faces and figures. Norse warriors being warlike, cleaving skulls and whatnot. A bit, well, morbid.”

I was thrown back to England and the barista with the tattooed skulls. So it had been Sven he’d reminded me of. Not Viggo. I felt a pang of loss at the knowledge. But that was stupid.

Wasn’t it? Despite the warmth of the day, I shivered.

“Want to go back in?” Mags asked. “Actually, I probably ought to be getting on. The shopping isn’t going to buy itself. And I’m sure you’ve got lots of things to do.”

I managed a smile. “Now you come to mention it, I should probably hit a supermarket myself. If I want to eat this week.”

We strolled back inside and took the stairs down past cheerful family groups on their way up.

“I take it you don’t fancy popping into the exhibition?” Mags asked as we passed the entrance to the museum set up in one of the empty drums. “They’ve got an exhibit of Egil, you know. And it’s all very well done. You’d almost think the figures were alive.”

My mind flashing back to the museum in Borgarnes, I shivered again. “I—no.” I swallowed. “Things to do. Like you said.”

“Oh, well. But it’s worth a look, if you’re here again.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

The drive back from Perlan helped calm me down again, ground me in modern reality. I did some food shopping on the way back, working smartly through aisles of disconcertingly familiar Icelandic brands. It was a relief to get to the fresh fruit and vegetables, which looked the same everywhere, although there was less variety here than I’d expect in England.

Once back at my flat, I tried to get a bit of work done but found myself unable to settle. How could I concentrate on Egil’s character, his idiosyncratic version of heroism, when I was having doubts about my own? I should have been reassured by Mags’s revelation about Sven’s tattoos, the realisation I really must have desired him—must have felt something for him, at least. That my attraction to the barista in England had been a memory, of sorts, of Sven.

Instead I found myself wondering why, if we were only friends, Viggo had felt the need to try to please me by getting himself inked. The more I thought about it, the less I liked the picture the whole business painted of me. But did it really matter—now—whether I’d cheated on Sven? Surely the very fact that it was so uncomfortable to contemplate meant it wasn’t something I’d ever do now. If I had—well, couldn’t I just forgive myself and move on?

But I couldn’t ask Sven to forgive me. I couldn’t even visit his grave.

Maybe we’d had an open relationship? Each of us free to see other people?

I couldn’t imagine it. I’d tried an open relationship precisely once in my life, many years ago and under protest. It’d been an abject failure. Although was it really a failing to hate the sight of your lover in someone else’s arms? Whatever-his-name-was had thought so. He’d called me hidebound by society and a closet heterosexual. I cringed internally at the memory of his vitriol, although since I could barely remember the man who’d flung it, perhaps it was time to let go.

Perhaps that was the trouble. At heart, I was pretty traditional in my views on monogamy. I tried to picture Sven with another man—out of mischief, I made it Alex—to see if it would stir feelings of jealousy.

All it engendered were faint feelings of distaste, although perhaps that was more to do with the fact that Sven kept morphing into me. God, why the hell could I still not get a mental grasp on him?

To punish myself, I flipped the mental image, so now it was Viggo with another man. Viggo and Alex just seemed absurd, so I pictured him entwined with Sven.

The image slammed into me with shocking clarity. I could see them, clear as day—although it was evening, as the skies had darkened to twilight. Viggo, laughing as ever, walking up to Sven with a spring in his step and flinging his arms around him from behind. Sven was standing on a rocky outcrop, gazing down—

Oh God.

It was Gullfoss. Sven was looking down at the raging white torrents of the waterfall that had claimed his life.

I couldn’t breathe. Was this a memory? Had I seen this happen? Had I—?

Nausea rose.

Was this why I could summon no feelings for Sven? Because he’d been the one cheating on me? With Viggo?

No. It was just some trick of my battered mind. I knew, intellectually, that Sven had died at Gullfoss; I’d seen pictures of the place. My imagination was just playing devil’s advocate with me, that was all. Or maybe this was my guilty conscience, trying to shove the blame onto the one person who couldn’t plead his innocence.

It hadn’t happened.

It hadn’t, damn it.

My phone rang, startling me so much I wrenched my neck spinning round to look at it. Viggo. It was Viggo ringing. For several rings, I stared at the caller ID, my thumb hovering ready to accept the call.

I switched off the phone instead. I couldn’t speak to him right now. What would I say? Accuse him of cheating on me with no more evidence than my own damaged mind? But I couldn’t face looking at the four walls of my flat any longer either. I needed to get out. I grabbed my stick and hobbled out to the car, my leg aching fiercely. I slammed the door and barely noticed what direction I set off in, but when I came to a major junction, I turned off the main road and drove away from Reykjavik, away from civilisation.

The road surface was all right for a while, then abruptly changed to a gravel track. I was climbing into the mountains of Reykjanes, an indirect route to the airport at Keflavik. Realising what my subconscious had done, I slowed my pace. I’d been driving too fast for safety, and I had no actual intention of leaving the country. When I found a patch of road wide enough that any other driver mad enough to come this way would be able to pass me, I pulled the car over and got out, heedless of the drizzle-soaked wind that buffeted me. The weather had turned with a vengeance.

There was a bite to the air here, and even up so high, I fancied I could smell the sea. Alex would hate this place. All around, there was nothing but lava. Grey-black rocks covered with slime-green moss that looked more like seaweed. If I stepped off the road’s steep edge, I’d likely fall. I imagined my corpse lying in the rocks for days or weeks before another driver passed who was curious enough to stop at the sight of my abandoned car. Perhaps the raven of Viggo’s song wouldn’t go hungry after all.

Viggo. God, I could just imagine his face if he caught me being so absurdly morbid. I laughed and took in a lungful of chill, moist air, my mood bizarrely lifted. I was an idiot. A cold, wet, shivering idiot, who’d come out in just jeans and a shirt. It was stupid to get so worked up over an imagined memory. I’d go home, take a hot bath and give Viggo a call.

I drove back to Reykjavik, my damp clothes clinging uncomfortably and doing their best to steam up the car windows.