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The Stygian gloom of the long Icelandic winter was giving way to the endless light of summer. The night sky was bright enough for Callum to discern vibrant clusters of houses painted in lurid shades of lilac, lemon, lime and raspberry. Reykjavík had been coloured in by a five year old.
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| They were sitting outdoors in the beer garden at Sirkus. Callum was surrounded on all sides by bright blue skies and fat green palm trees that had been painted on to the walls, lending a Caribbean flavour to this most un-Caribbean setting (though the candied fug of burning cannabis sweetened the Reykjavík air). |
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| ‘Ásta named her pony Snær, meaning snow, because of his white coat,’ said Birna. ‘In winter, when he is standing outside our house, it is difficult to tell where the snow ends and the pony begins.’ |
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| The roar of the falls filled his ears. Skógafoss fell straight and true like wet hair run through with a comb. To his colleagues further downstream, Callum had become little more than a dark asterisk at the foot of a blank page. |
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| They got out of the car and walked to the edge of a canyon that had been carved out by the river. Beneath their feet a violent glacial torrent, creamy brown with rock flour, bullied its way between disjointed banks of basalt and lava. It proved to be a convenient and reliable place of execution. |
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| ‘You know,’ said Birna, ‘I think that when I die I want to be cremated and have my ashes packed into a firework. I want to explode into colour and light. I want to illuminate the faces of my loved ones. I want to dance in their eyes.’ |
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| Callum and Anna Björk checked into Hotel Freysnes, the lonely, blue-roofed building that they had passed earlier that afternoon. The prosaic hotel lacked a swimming pool, a gym and a business centre but all the rooms came with an ensuite glacier. Skaftafellsjökull pressed its icy snout right up against Callum’s bedroom window. |
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| The road curved inland giving them their first eerie glimpse of the snout of a glacier. The giant river of ice flowed at an indiscernible pace and terminated in a fractured white wall that flaked into segments like a boiled cod. |
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| A shale hill offered them a more lofty view of the ice lagoon. Bright blue chunks of ice clacked on water like a tacky cocktail. A low mist clung to the dominant glacier, creating a backdrop that disappeared into infinity. A passing Fokker 50 looked no more substantial than a toy plane made from balsa and propelled by an elastic band. |
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| ‘When we buried Birna’s father I saw a light over the small organ in our church. I knew it was Svein. I could feel his presence wash over the place. He was letting me know he was on his way somewhere else.’ Sigriður shrugged. ‘So I let him go.’ |
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| Up ahead of them a seemingly static plume of smoke hovered above an industrial looking building. Wide pools of colour spread low in the foreground. It was a colour beyond classification, a colour without a Pantone reference and a colour Dulux couldn’t match. Astral Azure? Fluorescent Lunar Blue? |
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| Hallgrímskirkja shot up like a space shuttle at launch, sharply delineating itself from the sky. Its concrete columns curved up into an apex, giving the impression of organ pipes, as if the whole building was one vast instrument that could be operated by keys, pedals and stops. |
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The Toyota thundered out of Reykjavík, following the signs for Hveragerði and Selfoss. The weather couldn’t make up its mind. Sun and rain played tag across the mossy fields of stratified lava. The inhospitable plains gave way to a fertile patch of green studded with turf-roofed houses, symbols of an older Iceland, their dusty net curtains lying still against dark windows.
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