Áróra followed her to the counter, but couldn’t stop herself from constantly glancing at the child in his pram outside.

‘He’s fine,’ Ellý said with a laugh as she patted Áróra’s shoulder. ‘People round here have plenty of children already, so nobody needs more.’

75

30

When Grímur returned home with his Sunday pastries and opened the main door, he was unpleasantly surprised by a woman almost walking into him as she left the building. It was Björn’s new girlfriend. He sucked in his belly and pressed his back against the wall to allow her to squeeze past, sensing the aroma of herbal shampoo and wet hair. The smell called to him, triggering a longing in his heart, and a pain he hadn’t experienced since he had first got to know Ísafold. It was a scent of innocence, of spring, of new beginnings. At the same time he longed to yell at the woman, to tell her to save herself, to never again come near this building, to avoid the apartment block like the plague.

His eyes followed her as she strode across the car park, heading for the bus stop opposite. The fact that she was leaving Björn’s place at this time on a Sunday meant that she had spent the night there, and as Grímur approached the door of his own flat, he could feel a pressure growing inside his chest. Their relationship developing so rapidly added to the urgency. There was no time to waste to organise everything. He would have to work fast.

He dropped the shopping bag on the kitchen table. He had bought a couple of doughnuts and two pieces of an oat cake known as a ‘marital bliss’. Ísafold was fond of it, so he had started buying it some months ago in case she stopped by. More than once she had giggled through the tears that streamed from her black eyes over the irony that her favourite should be called ‘marital bliss’. He recalled the turmoil within him that had swelled into a mixture of anger and love, and a desire to liberate her. He longed to set her free from Björn, as well as from herself, from her adoration of a man who didn’t deserve her – no more than he deserved this new woman.

This kind of thing had been a burden to him as a young man. 76He recalled how the girls had flocked around the idiots at college, the self-obsessed bad boys, convinced they were God’s gift, but who treated the girls like dirt. The girls had wanted nothing to do with boys like him, guys who treated them with respect, who never knocked them about or bullied them into doing things in bed, the boys who listened to them when they talked, and asked about their dreams and their feelings, the ones who knew how to truly appreciate them.