The diver was winched down from the helicopter, which was deafening as it hovered directly above them. He dropped into the water next to Úrsúla, swam over to her, fastened the two of them together with some sort of harness and waved to the helicopter. They were instantly lifted into the air above the sea. The harness strapped around her pressed so tight that she felt she could not fill her lungs properly, and there, in the weightlessness between sea and sky, she allowed herself to yell as loudly as she could with the little air left in her chest. But her screams were drowned out by the thunderous din of the helicopter and as she was pulled on board, she was exhausted.

Someone strapped her into a seat, took off her helmet and mask, and handed her a towel, which she used to massage her 178chilled face and hair. She was startled by a sudden flash of light. She didn’t feel this was the ideal moment to be photographed, her face stiff with cold, eyes red from the salt water and her hair left in a mess by the helmet.

She blinked a few times before her vision returned and saw that the flash had come from the smartphone in Adolf’s hand, as he sat, wearing an overcoat and a scarf, in the seat opposite her, a malevolent smirk on his face.

76

‘It’s fucking creepy, buying trash,’ she said to the guy, who just grinned and took the bags, chucked them onto the back seat of his wreck of a car and gave her a couple of one-thousand-krónur notes.

Stella stuffed the cash in her pocket and set off determinedly towards the bus. She would use the time she’d have to wait between buses at Mjódd to buy a snack of some kind for her mother. She could scoff down a whole bag of paprika chips before dinner without denting her appetite, and another one after. This seemed to be one of the few things that genuinely brought her pleasure. She neither thanked Stella, nor offered to share, just as if she had become a small child. Stella liked to watch her work her way through the chips, every now and again pausing to lick the paprika dust from her fingers and lips.

Half an hour later she had bought the chips and smoked a cigarette outside the bus shelter at Mjódd. It would be another ten minutes before the bus showed up. It was too cold to wait outside, so she ambled around the waiting area, checking out the people waiting to be carried hither and thither. In Iceland only kids, old people and the poor used buses. Everyone else travelled around in their cars – the smarter the car, the better.

‘It’s the car that makes the man,’ Guðmundur had said. She and 179her mother had thought that funny, but it was something special to be driven around the city in such a cool car. That had only lasted until she had accidentally spilled a carton of juice over the back seat. She shook the memory off. Visits to her mother inevitably brought back thoughts of Guðmundur, even though she would have preferred to erase him completely from her memory, along with the screams, the scoldings and the beatings.