Authors: John Sweeney
SEA AREA SOUTH-EAST ICELAND
T
hick fog shrouded their whole world, the Atlantic itself somehow awed by the murk, its restlessness dimmed in the unseeingness of it all. Only the
bip-bip-bip
of the echo-sounding sonar guided the captain towards the shore. The fishing boat’s engine was trickling along at a few knots when they bumped into land before they had properly spied it.
True to form, Reilly leapt the moment the fishing boat hit the naturally formed jetty, an outcrop of black volcanic lava reaching out into the sea. Katya followed a second later, and Joe wasn’t long behind. It had been a dire journey, nothing like as dangerous as piloting the
SleepEasy
through the storm on the Irish Sea, but morally and mentally draining.
The captain had clearly not wanted them on his boat but had not had the stomach to overrule whoever had fixed their passage. He’d visited his grudge on the three of them – man, woman and dog – tirelessly. So they were only too happy to shout out their hurried goodbyes to the crew and captain, and he was only too happy to reverse engines and vanish into the fog.
Katya turned to Joe, her black eyes widening. ‘Promise me, we never go in a boat again.’
Joe nodded but she kicked him in the shins, none too lightly. Irritated, he scowled at her and her eyes widened once more, drawing him in. He buckled and said, ‘I promise, we never go in a boat again.’
‘Good Irishman,’ she said and kissed him. Joe worried that if they dare not fly, and they were trying to get to Utah and they were stuck in Iceland, promising never to go by boat again was foolish. But then he reflected the kiss was nice, to put it mildly, and that Katya was the worst, most difficult person to have an argument with on the whole planet.
Black rock underfoot, no horizon, no end to the murk – still, hard rock was hard rock and the three of them swayed from their mind’s memory of the rocking fishing boat and giggled at the joy of solidity. Joe found himself singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, and Katya was stunned by the fragile beauty of his voice and kissed him again, and Reilly rocketed to and fro, vanishing and reappearing in the fog, his tail swishing this way and that frantically, like a tadpole on LSD.
Perhaps it was a sea fret, perhaps the winds were different onshore, but within another hundred yards the murk lifted; a sun, of sorts, wafted lukewarmly in an evening sky, and beyond that to the north they could see the black rock taper towards an immense ice field crowned by a volcano. For as the far as the eye could see, there was no sign of humanity – no homes, no churches, no roads. Only black rock and white ice and a sky of deepening blue.
As they walked on, the sun began to fall in the sky and they could feel the temperature drop. The wind picked up and the awful bleakness of this place began to drill into their minds. If they didn’t find a road soon, death from exposure wasn’t just a possibility. It was fast becoming a likelihood. And then it started to snow.
The light had grown crepuscular, which explained why Joe did not see the sign; he tripped over it. It was tiny, at foot height, made of wood and written in a strange whirling script: ‘
Huldufólk
’. The sign led directly to an outcrop of volcanic rock, forty feet high, carved by wind and rain into a fist of stone, pointing at the sky. At its base was a small hole, the width of a man. Joe ducked his head inside and could see nothing, only gloom. He knelt down and crawled in, using his hands to explore. The cave had somehow been carved by volcanic action, smooth underfoot, billowing out so that he was able to stand up in the middle. The temperature was cool but not as cold or as windswept as outside. Strange resting place though it may be, the cave of the Huldufólk was their one chance of staying alive.
Joe’s fingers stumbled on a small box shape – at the very end of the cave, quite lost in the gloom – that sloshed when he picked it up, a big tin of something, and a rectangular packet which smelt, deliciously, of chocolate. Gathering up the stash, he reversed back on his knees and stuck his head out of the hole to see the entire landscape bathed in scarlet. The sunset revealed his treasure to be a carton of fresh milk, a tin of ham and a slab of dark chocolate – presents, he guessed, for the Huldufólk. They were Iceland’s version of leprechauns, he guessed again, and the food had been provided by locals keen to keep them happy. Still, whoever they were, they wouldn’t mind sharing with two humans and a dog.
He wanted to share his finds with Katya and Reilly but they had disappeared. In the distance he heard a squeal – of fear, delight? – and Reilly’s unmistakable soft bark:
Woof! Woof!
Joe loped around the other side of the rock outcrop. The stink hit him first, a noxious blend of bad eggs and stale farts. A dense cloud of steam vapour sat above a pool in a basin of volcanic rock, which Reilly was circling, occasionally dipping a paw experimentally in the water. Katya’s clothes were strewn to one side. Joe stripped off, put in a toe to test the temperature, and howled with pain. The water was hot, blisteringly so.
‘Come around the side, the water gets cooler,’ said a disembodied voice from deep within the steam. Fearing making the same mistake twice, Joe went to the very end of the pool and dipped in his toe. The water was freezing. Again, he emitted a howl.
‘Pussy,’ came the retort from the lady hidden by the steam. He backtracked, experimenting with the water temperature, which climbed from frigid to tepidly lukewarm to pleasantly warm. Gingerly, he lowered his body into the water while Reilly skipped to and fro, both excited and appalled at this fresh spectacle of humankind’s madness. Joe swam towards where the steam cloud was at its most impenetrable, and slid into an embrace as magically and bewilderingly erotic as a dream.
MOSCOW
S
ausage fingers danced nimbly on the laptop’s touchpad, idling through YouTube, finally finding what he was looking for, and then he sighed and clicked play. His computer came to life, the image fuzzy, not especially distinct, but clear enough to be damning: Zoba, in black suit and tie, on his way to the Kremlin, on foot for once, a warm Moscow summer’s day, bumps into a crowd of nobodies, families from the sticks, his natural supporters, kids, grandmas, the usual. A boy, no more than seven years of age, ash blond, stick arms and legs, a symbol of Russian innocence, none purer, catches Zoba’s eye and suddenly, catastrophically, the President stops and kneels – kneels, for God’s sake – before the boy. The child is wearing cream shorts and a white basketball top, edged with black. Zoba’s hands lock onto the boy’s torso, he lifts up his top, caresses his ribs, leans forward and kisses the child on his naked belly. He pats the boy’s head and then is moving away, fast, surrounded by the usual complement of officers from the Presidential Regiment. And no one stops the slime who is filming the whole thing, the slime who uploads it onto YouTube so the whole world can laugh at Zoba.
Grozhov extracted a silk handkerchief from his suit pocket and dabbed his jowls, forehead and the back of his neck. His fingers were on the move again, caressing ‘Filters’, coquettishly hitting ‘View Count’, and up popped
306,664
. About that, about them, he could do nothing. Of course, there were more sites out there, showing Zoba kissing the boy, but that one site was his constant migraine. Its numbers went up, not down.
Grozhov’s chins wobbled in gentle agreement with each other as he tapped away at the laptop, capturing all 539 comments and printing them.
He scooped up the pages from his printer, took out his black-ink fountain pen, and scribbled on a note to operatives on lower floors of the Lubyanka, the best-paid IT technicians in Moscow, that they should investigate any Russian citizen who had dared to mock Zoba for a simple affectionate kiss of a young patriot. Nothing direct, of course, but if one of these snotty fuckers drove to work, then the vigilance of the traffic police towards violations of speed limits and parking regulations would be rewarded; the Tax Inspectorate to be alerted, too; the housing, health and safety, education and social services inspectorates also to be put on their guard. No action by the state organs should be in any way connectable back to the security organ, the FSB – that was a given.
That task complete, he studied the report from Dr Penkovsky, the lead psychiatrist at the FSB’s special hospital in Yakutsk, six time zones east of Moscow. Grozhov allowed himself a moment’s self-congratulation.
Patient 10095
– he relished the anonymity of the numerical coding of ‘difficult’ psychiatric cases, a system he himself had devised –
is in a state of catatonia. Thus far, he has not responded to pharmaceutical treatment and when the effect of the drug treatment appears to lessen he returns to his anti-social and obnoxious attitudes towards the authorities. His most dangerous delusion is that his daughter was in some way murdered by an officer of the Tax
Inspectorate, a fantasy he will not desist from. Regrettably, I suggest that the only possible treatment available to us is a severe course of electroconvulsive therapy. May I have the permission of the relevant authorities to start this therapy?
The Hero of the Soviet Union had always been a difficulty, Gennady’s fame creating a bubble of impenetrability around him. Killing him was always a possibility – but better, far better, for him to undergo psychiatric treatment. Afghanistan had driven many people mad, and why should that tragic fate not also affect the nation’s youngest general to serve there? Why not indeed?
Grozhov smacked his chops with satisfaction and lifted up his fountain pen.
ECT – proceed
, he wrote, and signed underneath.
Grozhov was about to turn his attention to matters more pleasurable, to considering the merits of a new batch of orphans from Krasnoyarsk, when he realised that the note from Dr Penkovsky continued over the page:
Patient 10096 has not proved receptive to pharmaceutical treatment in any way. Her medical knowledge makes her an intractable patient.
Grozhov’s mind struggled, momentarily, to remember who on earth ‘Patient 10096’ might be. Ah, yes – Venny Svaerkova, the irritating pathologist who had produced multiple autopsies of use to the fascist enemy, propagating the absurd notion that there were Russian forces inside Ukraine. Irritating, moreover, because she had become some kind of bedfellow with Gennady in his campaign to blame the authorities for the so-called death of his daughter.
Grozhov’s fingers rested on the bell tent of his stomach. Gennady had many admirers from the old days, some indeed still active inside the Ministry of Defence, all of which made direct action against him tricky. But as to Venny Svaerkova, she was a nobody. If she died under treatment, nobody would know, nobody would care.
He took up his fountain pen again and struck out ‘
Patient 10096
’. Dr Penkovsky would know what this meant.
SOUTH-EAST ICELAND
T
hey found the road in the morning and walked along the empty asphalt, heading west, in what Joe guessed would be the direction of the capital, Reykjavik – thumbs in the air, hoping for a lift. The sky was overcast, gloomy.
A selection of cars and lorries and a tourist coach hurried past them until an ambulance for the elderly slowed to a stop. The driver opened the back doors, put a finger to his lips, suggesting that he shouldn’t be giving them a lift at all, and they climbed in. The ambulance had two long bench seats, and in its well sat an electric wheelchair bearing an elderly lady, in her late eighties or early nineties, perilously thin, her hair snow-white, her fingers glistening with diamonds. At the sight of Joe, her features puckered into a scowl, but the moment Katya and Reilly jumped in, her face lit up.
‘Oh, what a cutie!’ she cried out, pointing to Reilly and gripping Katya’s arm. ‘I just love your dawg.’
Her accent was profoundly that of a New Yorker made good, but suggested a life and a language before America. She started stroking Reilly’s coat as the ambulance gathered speed, then it braked, suddenly, the driver shouting something unpronounceable in Icelandic and then ‘Bloody reindeer!’ in English. Through the opaque glass they caught a glimpse of a smudge of reindeer, moving fast away from the road. The braking caused Joe, who hadn’t yet sat down properly, to stumble and collide with Katya, cannoning her into the lap of the old lady in the wheelchair. Katya swore loudly in Russian and the lady started to cackle with glee, uncontrollably. Eventually, the cackling slowed down and she started talking in a language Joe had no comprehension of. Katya exploded with laughter and Joe, uneasy at being out of the conversation, shot her a quizzical look.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I made a joke at your expense in Russian and this lady found it funny.’
‘What was the joke exactly?’ asked Joe, looking pained.
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Come on, Kasha.’
‘All right then, I said in Russian that you were a typical stupid man who didn’t know his arse from his dick and she said, also in Russian, that was exactly, exactly what she used to say about her late husband. He didn’t know his arse from his dick either, God rest his soul.’
The old lady began cackling all over again and the two women started gabbling away at each other, nine to the dozen, all too often bursting into giggles.
Her name was Masha Cohen – ‘well, Cohen these days anyway’ – and she lived on a cruise ship, a permanent residency. The ship was presently doing the Northern Lights but they hadn’t seen anything that would match a light bulb yet; 275,000 dollars for a fancy cabin for life and she had more lights back at home in Florida. She was too old for these kind of shenanigans but Manny, her late husband, he’d been a good man to her, though it was true he didn’t know his arse from his dick – cue more cackling. Manny had always wanted to live on a cruise ship so she’d done it for him, more for his memory than anything else, but she’d regretted it, and all the other passengers were either ancient like her or gaga or worst of all snobby or all three, and really this was the first time for ages that she’d had a good laugh and what a sweet dog she had and her man – Joe, was it? – he looked a big man but was he big in that department? – cue yet more cackling – and she was Jewish, of course, was Katya Jewish? – no, a Muslim – well, never mind, we’re all the same under the skin and he’s a Catholic, isn’t he? You can always tell a Catholic, funny lot, and she had left Russia in 1945 and had ended up in Flatbush, got married, then they moved to Florida. No children, sadly, but Manny had done well in the property business and he worked hard every day of his life, and the very week he’d promised her he was going to retire he dropped down dead and . . .