Pets Read online

  “Hello, it’s me, Havard, Hinrik’s friend, you remember me.” It sounds as though he has gone into the kitchen with the receiver. “Has he come home yet?” he continues. “Will you let me talk to him for a moment?” And then, before the phone gets put down, he adds: “Here, thanks for letting me use your toilet earlier, I don’t think I would have made it back without pissing in the taxi.”

  For some reason I get really annoyed listening to the way Havard talks to this woman and I’m about to crawl out from under the bed, jump on him, and tear the receiver away. But of course I don’t let myself. I don’t know how I would get him out of the flat in a decent manner, not to mention the fact that, when it comes down to it, I am afraid of this man. What he did, the final incident that led to his being locked up in this institution or home in Sweden, still upsets me, and I have to admit that I don’t have enough belief in medical science or mankind in general to imagine that it is possible to cure a man as crazy as Havard.

  As far as I know, he was accused of beating up a young girl not long after he returned from his trip with me, and he was interrogated in connection with another assault, though he was never convicted for it. However, about a years and a half ago, when he had moved to Sweden, he was found guilty of assaulting a fifty-year-old woman in her home in Gothenburg. I don’t know the details of the case or whether it was a case of rape or attempted rape, I only know that the less one has to do with Havard, the less likely one is to be drawn into some kind of trouble. Not that I am afraid he will lay his hands on me, but experience has shown me that hardly a day goes by without him managing to cause some sort of trouble.

  On the day we left England we hadn’t gotten any further than the airport here at home when Havard started accusing the waitress at the bar in the duty-free lounge of taking his pack of cigarettes while he was in the toilet. That resulted in them refusing to serve him any more drinks at the bar and he “was forced to open his own supply,” as he put it. On top of that he bought another pack of cigarettes to make up for the pack that I had tried many times to tell him had been taken by young German tourists who had been sitting beside us at the bar.

  “Hello, Rikki,” he says when Hinrik picks up the phone. “Come home? Yes, of course I have come home. No, I know. But I’ll have to tell you about it, we must meet. What? Yes, I dropped in today and you weren’t there! You were at work! So you have a regular job? You’ve just come home, you say? And? Do you have a gig this evening? A new group? Oh, really? The same guys then? Your wife told me that you only play on weekends now. Really? This evening? Here, I’ll be there. Eleven o’clock? So late? And where? Where is that? OK. Great. You know, something funny happened to me today. I was in this bar on Austurstraeti and there were some complete jerks who attacked me and were going to steal from me and what do you think I did? What? Leave? No, Hinrik, I don’t run away when someone is about to punch me. I walked out with eleven thousand kronur in cash and left those gentlemen on the floor and one of them was eleven thousand poorer. What do you say? Stupid? No, Rikki, that is just part of taking care of oneself. I don’t take nonsense from others, at the most I take money. But, listen, you don’t happen to know some guy called, let me see, what’s he called again, Gisli something . . .”

  He walks briskly into the bedroom, grabs his anorak from the bed and thumps down in the chair in front of the computer.

  “Oh, here, I just realized I don’t have his driver’s license, I let him keep it, poor fellow,” he says, propping his feet up on the bed. The worn springs squeak: it’s as if an elephant has flopped down on the edge of the bed.

  “He was some kind of Nordic devil. Gisli something, Nor something. No doubt half-Norwegian. He was only half a man, that’s for sure. What are you saying? Where am I? I’m at my old friend’s place, Emil. You remember, the one I went to England with: Emil Halldorsson. He’s rather a pussy, but a decent sort of a guy, I mean, he’s alright. You should see all the music he’s got here. You’d be sure to find something that you could listen to. Loads of weird things, there was some awful stuff on when I came in. I don’t know where those sounds came from, probably Hell. But listen, why don’t you drop by, I’m on Grettisgata, quite far up. Yes, why not? I was sure you would be at home earlier on, I thought you were just playing in the evenings and hung about at home in the daytime. Eh? No, no, I’m alone here, I don’t know what has happened to Emil. I arrived a short while ago and he had water boiling on the stove so he can’t have gone far. Yes, why not? Drop by this evening? Before you go to the gig? Isn’t it a good idea to have a little drink first, eh?”

  He tells Hinrik the number of the house and says goodbye in Swedish. Then he takes his feet off the bed, gives it a shove with one foot so that everything shakes and shudders, and hops up from the chair. I feel as if I am about to be flattened any minute—that he’ll throw himself on to the bed and break it. But it doesn’t happen; he goes out. It sounds as if he takes his anorak too and when I have listened out for what he is going to do next, thunderous tones suddenly bellow out of the loudspeakers; he has put some rock music on and clearly turned it up full blast. He is quick to turn it down. The music disappears for a moment and then comes back louder and he leaves it like that; he is playing Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”

  And he has called me a pussy. And has invited his friends from some outdated band in Breidholt here.

  It’s almost as if Havard knows that I am in the next room and is enjoying rubbing salt into the wounds he has inflicted on me—both now and in the past—when he starts singing along with Elvis:

  You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.

  5

  The pocket money that Orn, my father’s friend, gave us for looking after the house and the animals should have been enough for Havard and me to live on, but we were much too extravagant during our first days in London; I, by buying CDs and books and Havard, by buying clothes, including the shoes that I thought I recognized, and a rather expensive, well-made ukulele. I wasn’t with him when he wandered around Denmark Street and bought that Hawaiian guitar—I was most probably in Waterstone’s flicking through books—but I was present on the only occasion that I remember when he tried to play the instrument. For some reason he thought it was highly appropriate to play the ukulele for the iguana. It was meant to be some kind of “Galapagos atmosphere,” as he called it, but the sound he produced was as sad as the fate the Mexican iguana was to meet three weeks later.

  Despite the fact that we quickly spent the allowance Orn had given us, we were by no means in difficulties. Havard had brought his last month’s pay from the hardware store and I had a reasonable sum, which I had intended to use to buy a car at home. Havard, however, managed to spend all his money—and some of mine too—in his last week in London. He discovered that one could walk into certain offices—that I initially took for printing firms because bookmakers was printed on the signs—and bet on horses and dogs, amongst other things. He managed to persuade me to lend him two hundred pounds after some dogs ran away with the last of his money. Two days later he asked me for four hundred pounds, on top of the four hundred that I had given him to ensure that he would disappear.

  But money matters weren’t the reason for my asking him—or rather ordering him—to get out. Money is something that one can always obtain again, even if it has disappeared once.

  6

  He doesn’t seem to have the patience to listen to a short song like “Hound Dog” right to the end. He switches off the stereo just as the guitar solo begins and it sounds like he is going into the kitchen to fetch more whisky. Then he takes several minutes choosing something new to play. He whistles something out of tune and I—who have really nothing better to do—try to find out from his whistling what his musical preferences are at the moment. I cross my fingers in the hope that he will leave the turntable alone; I still haven’t forgotten the terrible sound I heard when he scratched the needle across the shiny, immaculate vi
nyl recording of Bizet’s “Pearl Divers” that belonged to Orn’s daughter, Osk, on Brooke Road.

  After several bars of “Computer World” by Kraftwerk, the phone rings and Havard turns down the sound of the mysterious Germans before answering.

  “Emil’s place,” he says, as if he is acting as my secretary. “Emil? No, he isn’t . . . Armann? Armann Valur? Glasses? Did he call you? Just now? Yes, he had to go out for a minute, I’m expecting him in a short while. Yes, yes, we will be here. Just knock. What are you saying? Yes, that’s it. It stands back from the street, you’ll see a garden with a white fence, go into it and then you’re there. In half an hour? A quarter of an hour? The glasses? Wait a moment, I’ll have a look.”

  I hear him move the CDs on the table and before I know it he is standing in the hall by the bedroom door, no doubt trying to get away from the music.

  “Here, I’ve found some glasses, they have . . . yes, that’s right. Quite thick, yes. OK, just come along.”

  He hangs up, walks into the bathroom, and copies the sound of the drums—or rather the drum machine—that is coming from the music in the living room. I lift up the sheet a fraction. I can’t see a cigarette in his hand, but I detect the faint smell of tobacco smoke. He stands there for a little while, and seems to be stretching his face towards the mirror above the sink. For a few seconds he taps one of his feet on the floor, though not in time to the music.

  Although he has already been here twenty minutes or half an hour, I still find it strange; I still can’t believe it. I tell myself that I may be having a nightmare. But just maybe. There is so little chance that it is impossible. In other words, it is reality. It is reality with a capital R; the most emphatic R I have ever experienced in reality.

  What Havard does next makes the reality—at least the reality that I experience from two and a half meters away—even more meaningful, although I don’t know whether there is any meaning in reality. By lifting the sheet slightly higher, I see him take off his jacket, put down the lighted cigarette on the edge of the sink, and begin to undo his belt. Then he drops his pants to the floor, lifts his shirt and pulls down his white underwear. I can’t see his face—I would need to lift the sheet dangerously high—but I get a full view of his penis in profile (if one can talk about such things in profile); it’s thick, though not very big, and strangely dark, as if it had been sunbathing on its own. Havard lifts it with the palm of his hand, pulls it out, and moves it up and down until it begins to stiffen. My heart begins to beat faster. Now I feel like I am prying into Havard’s life, but I know that if I let the sheet fall he is likely to notice. So I am sort of forced to watch. When his penis has started to stretch upwards, Havard suddenly stops playing with it. He lets his shirt fall down, turns his back to the door, and opens the toilet. Before he sits down on the seat I notice how white his legs are, especially compared to his dark penis.

  While he is sitting I let the sheet fall down carefully to the carpet. Though I have the opportunity to see his face while he is sitting on the toilet, there is more chance that he will look into the bedroom from that position; besides, I have had enough of prying into his life, at least for the time being.

  I can’t help hearing the noises that accompany what he is doing. He takes his time, though he doesn’t seem to be having any difficulty, and when I hear him stand up and flush the toilet, we are halfway through another track. Then, suddenly, I become aware of the smell from the toilet, and when it gets stronger—I could say disgustingly strong—I think of a sentence from Herzog: “Do you think I could give myself to a man whose shit smells like that!”

  While Havard is calmly doing up his pants, I suddenly feel a tickle in my nose and realize that I’ll have to sneeze sooner or later. I ask God to let Havard turn on the tap, or do something noisy, when I hear water start pouring forcefully into the sink; God seems to be listening to me. I bury my face in my hands and smother the sneeze as well as I possibly can. Then I wait in suspense for Havard to turn off the tap and search the bedroom, but nothing happens. The water keeps pouring into the sink and I begin to hear heavy sighs from Havard, sighs that soon change into rapid groans. I lift up the sheet one or two centimeters—enough to see up as far as Havard’s waist—and watch him press his thighs against the sink. His right hand goes up and down; he is masturbating. Not only is he about to soil my sink but he drags Vigdis’s name into it too; I think I can hear her name being called between groans. He wants her “to come here,” he wants to show her something, she will have to bend down, and then, all at once, as if he wasn’t quite expecting it, he comes; he lifts his body up and presses even harder against the sink. Compared to his previous groans, the sound he makes when he ejaculates is half choked, as if he is disappointed, as if Vigdis hasn’t done what he had told her to do.

  I try not to imagine how he will clean up or if he will bother to at all. I lay my cheek down on the carpet and shut my eyes; I feel like I have been straining to do something difficult too. The water continues pouring into the sink, and when it finally stops Havard goes into the living room and plays the first track of the CD again. Soon he starts singing—or rather talking—along to the music from the loudspeakers:

  Interpol and Deutsche Bank. FBI and Scotland Yard.

  Then I hear him pouring something into a glass and lighting a match. He is still muttering the lyrics to himself:

  Business . . . numbers . . . money . . . people.

  7

  When I hear Havard giving a toast in Spanish—he is no doubt rewarding himself for his achievement in the bathroom—I recall our visit to a little Spanish bar in a narrow lane off Oxford Street. It was around the time when he bought his ukulele. I remember the visit particularly well because it was almost the only occasion on which Havard and I had a sensible talk. He told me about his mother and father, who didn’t consider themselves capable of looking after him when he was small because of their drinking problem, and how he grew up more or less with his grandmother who lived next door. When he told me about it I felt that I was listening to a sensitive, sincere individual, and I imagine now that he must have felt unusually well that day and was perhaps genuinely grateful to be there with me in another country. I don’t remember his exact words, but there in the bar he spoke about people at home not understanding him; sometimes he felt as if he lived in a different world from Icelanders in general, but in the same breath he mentioned how comfortable it was to be in England and speak a language which no one else could understand.

  Except me of course.

  I told him I understood what he meant, and while we laughed at the idea that he should perhaps speak English in Iceland—as there would be a chance of someone understanding him then—I thought he was cheerful and ready to make the best of our stay in London.

  But then, exactly a day later, it seemed that Havard had gone off the rails emotionally and intellectually, and with each day that passed he seemed to move further and further away from the equilibrium that he had enjoyed that afternoon. It is probably ridiculous to talk about mental equilibrium in a person who has just arrived in a new country and spends a large amount of money on a musical instrument which he has never heard of before, but, considering his behavior during the rest of his stay, he seemed comparatively normal as we chatted in this friendly bar—even though that was the place where he decided to call himself Howard and to introduce me as Email from then on. Emil was far too Scandinavian a name for the British Isles.

  It was also in this Spanish bar that Havard explained to two native bank clerks why we were in London. When he had finished telling me about his past, he took out his new instrument to have a look at it and handle it, and the men at the next table became very keen to find out what kind of guitar it was. One of them thought it was a toy guitar, and when Havard told him it was a ukulele, they admitted that they had never heard of anything called that. We were both rather chatty after the beer and the Spanish brandy that the bartender had recommend
ed and were quite willing to talk to these city men. All Havard knew about the instrument he had been told by the man in the shop. It was a special guitar from Hawaii and originated in Portugal, and, when he mentioned that Elvis held a similar guitar on the cover of his album Blue Hawaii, the men remembered it and thought it was quite remarkable. Then they were curious to know where we came from, were we from Holland or Germany? Their interest didn’t diminish when they heard that we came from Iceland, and they asked what we were doing in London, since we weren’t just ordinary tourists, as Havard put it.

  “We are taking care of some animals,” he told them and they grew even more interested. He told them about the animals: the cat Ratty, which Orn thought looked like a rat when he got it as a kitten; Moby, the albino guinea pig, which was named in honor of the white whale in the owner’s favorite book; Dick, the rabbit, which came into the house the day after Moby, so it seemed logical to call it that (even though it was a female); and last but not least, Ahab, the iguana, a nineteen-year-old lizard from prehistoric times—the oldest animal on earth and so on. It was named Ahab because of its expressive eyes, which Orn thought must be as deep as those of the captain of the ship Pequod; he assumed that it would have the same wisdom and experience.

  Orn told us all of this in the half hour we spent with him on our arrival at Brooke Road. He also showed us the flat, taught us a bit about the implements in the house, and set limits on how far we could go in making ourselves at home. Then he went off to the airport to board a plane heading for South America, where he was going to spend the summer on business.

  “You are some noble Icelanders,” I think I remember one of the bank clerks saying, and though I realized that he was gently making fun of us, I didn’t mind; in fact it was understandable. I would think it rather amusing if I met two foreigners in Reykjavik who had come here specifically to feed some cats, hamsters, or even budgies.