‘If anything, she deserves more for having to put up with you for twenty years,’ she muttered as she got into her car.

She started the engine and drove slowly out of the parking lot, giving a cheerful wave to the car salesman, who stood as if he had been turned to stone. This was one of the real perks of her job: being able to dispense her own justice.

9

3

The sisters’ relationship had been sour right from the start. One of Áróra’s earliest memories was the pure loathing in her sister’s eyes as she picked up a shoe and flung it at her, hissing from between clenched teeth, ‘Lousy kid.’

‘Lousy kid’ was an expression Áróra had got used to hearing. Her mother called her ‘love’ or ‘darling’ and her father used quirky Icelandic terms of affection: ‘sweet morsel’ or ‘cuddle dumpling’. But Ísafold never referred to her as anything other than ‘the kid’, generally attached to a less than complimentary adjective. That six-year age difference hadn’t been good for them.

It all changed when they moved to England, to their mother’s home town of Newcastle, when Áróra was eight. Ísafold was fourteen and her raging teenage hormones manifested themselves in a faceful of livid red spots. She was struggling at school, where she was teased, and that was when she began to seek out her little sister’s company. After a day of schoolyard humiliation, it seemed to be a relief for her to play Barbie dolls with Áróra, who worshipped her in the illogical manner of younger siblings. Áróra still remembered how thankful she had been for the attention. She even turned down a couple of playdates with friends at school, preferring to spend the time with her big sister and the Barbies.

Thinking back, she couldn’t be sure if they had spoken Icelandic or English those first few years in the UK. More than likely they had used some mixture of both languages, as is normal when each parent has their own mother tongue, but it wasn’t long after their father died that they switched completely to English. There was something a little silly about speaking Icelandic when there was no clear need to.

In Newcastle they lived in a typical middle-class house, with bedrooms at the top of a steep flight of stairs, a living room and 10kitchen downstairs, and even a securely fenced garden at the back, where Áróra happily made mud pies all year round. She dug holes for ponds and replanted plants, and whenever her mother complained that she was destroying the garden, her father had always been there to take her side.

‘Leave her to it. After all, she’s half an Icelander.’