Far North - Michael Ridpath [101]
Magnus hunched into his coat. He was cold, really cold, but the cold felt good compared to the angry heat inside the farmhouse.
Two years before, Magnus, Óli and his mother and father had all been living happily together in their little house in Thingholt with the blue corrugated iron roof and the whitebeam tree in the garden. Then things fell apart. There was arguing, anger, his father’s departure, his mother sleeping all the time, forgetting to get them dinner, not being able to speak properly. Within six months Magnus’s father was in Boston, his mother was in Reykjavík and Magnus and his little brother were at their grandparents’ farm at Bjarnarhöfn.
Magnus had never much liked his grandmother. She was a small woman, cool, detached, with a permanent look of mild disapproval on her face. His grandfather was scary but had a certain gruff charm. He would throw himself into playing games with his grandsons, and once they moved up to Bjarnarhöfn, took great pleasure in showing them the farm, the fells, the islands in the fjord. What Magnus and Óli enjoyed most was helping him collect the valuable feathers from the eider ducks’ nests among the dwarf willows by the stream.
And of course there was the Berserkjahraun. Hallgrímur led his grandsons through the fantastic twisted lava sculptures, telling them tales of the berserkers who had lived at their farm and at Hraun, and of the kind of games he used to play there as a kid. Óli was scared, but Magnus was fascinated.
But Grandpa liked to drink. And when he drank he became angry. And he became a bully.
Hallgrímur liked Magnus, at least at first. But Óli was weak and Hallgrímur detested weakness. Óli scared easily and Hallgrímur liked to scare him. He told him stories about the Kerlingin troll who took the babies of Stykkishólmur away with her, and might take Óli as well if he didn’t shape up. Of the berserkers who still tramped around the lava field at night. Of a man named Thórólfur Lame Foot who had been murdered centuries before, but roamed the fells terrorizing shepherds and their sheep. And of the fjörulalli, a sea monster with shells hanging from its fur, that cruised around the fjord just offshore, waiting to eat up small children who got too close to the sea.
Magnus stood up for his little brother. His grandfather didn’t like that. Scaring Magnus didn’t work, so Hallgrímur beat him instead. Hence the occasional visits to St Francis’s Hospital in Stykkishólmur, with lies about complicated farmyard accidents.
Then Hallgrímur would sober up, the sun would shine, and he would try to play with his grandchildren again. But Óli was too scared and Magnus too proud.
Throughout all this, their grandmother kept an aloof detachment, as though she didn’t care what happened to her grandchildren. As he got older, Magnus realized that she was beaten too.
The farm was isolated, cut off from the rest of civilization by the lava field. It became a kind of hell. Magnus thought of escape. Sometimes their mother would come to visit and for a while everything would be better, although by this stage Magnus had realized she was drunk, not sleepy. When he tried to explain what was happening to them, his mother just told them that ‘Grandpa was a little stricter than Daddy.’
Sounds drifted across the snow towards Magnus from the farmhouse, his grandfather’s deep roar, the high pitched scream of his little brother. Poor Óli. Even though there was nothing much he could do, Magnus stood up and ran back towards the house, hoping that his presence might distract his grandfather.
When he reached the kitchen, his grandmother was scouring a large pan over the sink. The shouting seemed to have stopped.
‘Where’s Óli?’
‘In the cellar, I think,’ Grandma said, without turning around.
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘He is being punished.’
‘What’s he being punished for?’
‘Don’t be so impertinent,