Úrsúla went into the hall, kicked off her shoes and opened the drawer of junk in the phone table. She rooted through and found a purple felt-tip; it would do to sign the document. She scanned the statement as she stood there, reading the detailed description of how the homeless man had hidden in the boot of her car, and had jumped out and pushed her to the ground when she had found him there. She pulled off the cap of the felt-tip with her teeth and leaned over the old telephone table to scrawl her signature on the document. Then she straightened up sharply at the sight of the homeless man’s name.

Her heart raced and a feeling of helpless fear swept through her. This was a name she knew; a name she knew very well.

34

Stella inspected her mother’s plump face and smiled. Her mother smiled back at her with the enigmatic look that meant she knew something Stella didn’t, but the drug-induced fog prevented her from saying what it might be. Stella sometimes wished her sedation could be reduced so that they could talk together properly and she could find out what was behind that mysterious smirk. But the doctors said that it was out of the question. Her mother would just become hysterical again, and possibly injure herself or someone else. That was the nature of the damage to her brain, they said.

Sometimes when she sat with her mother, which she had to confess to herself was becoming increasingly seldom, questions about their whole existence came to her mind. Her mother was the only one at the care home who wasn’t as pale as snow, and sometimes Stella felt that she was in completely the wrong place. The round Aztec features seemed to be so impossibly far from 85their proper environment Stella couldn’t help but retreat to her childhood memories of her mother wrapped in a colourful poncho, with flowers in her hair and a long necklace made of bean pods around her neck. She wondered if everything they had fled – Stella’s father and his criminal gang – could in fact have been worse than this.

‘Tienes trabajo?’ her mother asked – You’re working?

She asked the same question every time. There was nothing strange about this, of course; Stella had never been great at holding down a job.

‘Yes, Mama,’ she said and stroked her mother’s hand. ‘I have a good job now.’

Her mother smiled mysteriously and her almond eyes narrowed even further. It was no surprise that new staff at the care home assumed she was Asian and wanted to talk to her about Thailand and Vietnam. Stella’s own looks were more mixed as her father had been practically white. Her curly hair had come from him, although when her mother was in a bad mood, she would sometimes say that Stella was the child of a black delivery man who had appeared in the kitchen one day, and that was where the curls had come from. Of course that wasn’t the truth, and her golden skin was evidence of that. She was fair enough for people to assume, after they had moved to Iceland, that she was Guðmundur’s daughter. She had been proud of that, back when she had been a little girl and they had only just arrived in Iceland, but her attitude changed fast after she saw what Guðmundur did to her mother. Since then the misunderstanding was one she was always at pains to correct. She much preferred the thought that her father was a hit man in Mexico, rather than Guðmundur.