The People in the Basement (Book)

SHOPPING
1.

Washing powder on offer, three brands all at the same price: two for the price of one. Klara has serious problems deciding which one to buy. Scans the supermarket looking for Svenni, stands on the points of her toes – but he’s nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’s in the fruit section; he mentioned they were out of fruit.
She saunters over there, glancing over thousands of oranges, thousands of apples, thousands of bundles of bananas. Crates overflowing with an abundance of succulent wholesome sustenance. She swipes some purple grapes.
Where is Svenni?
Which washing powder should she go for?
Shops have always thrown Klara into a tizzy. When she was five years old, her father took her to a toy shop. She was supposed to be getting a prize for her great patience; mom and dad had had to pour all their attention on her sister, Embla, who had been crying day and night. They drove off and daddy had told her that she could choose a gift herself, the excitement was unbearable. Klara ran into the shop ahead of him. Froze in front of a huge shelf and went weak in the knees. A vast array of elegantly dressed dolls, playmo toys, dollhouses, Lego, electric cars and baby crockery stretched out before her. Her eyes were popping out of her head, she bit her knuckles, burst into tears. Cried so hard the shop assistant had to ask her dad to take her away. He bought her Plasticine in the co-op on the way home. She liked Plasticine the most. The memory of it cracks a smile across her charming face, deep dimples.
“Klara!”
She swings her head to one side and sees Svenni.
“There you are,” he gasps with relief. “This store is a jungle.”
“It’s far too big. We’ll never come here again.”
Svenni laughs, kisses her forehead. “Have you found the washing powder yet?”
“I was just eating some grapes,” Klara answers, popping another one into her mouth. “Will you come help me find it?”
“No, I’ve got enough on my plate trying to think of a starter. Which do you prefer, salad or meat?”
She swallows the grape. “I dunno. What do you want?”
“I was asking you.”
“It’s your dinner party.”
“A dinner party in our house.”
She ironically concedes defeat. Suggesting both salad and meat.
“As a starter?”
“Yeah, or fish.”
“I’ve already marinated some salt cod for the main course.” Svenni answers with a wry smile. “Not that you’d ever notice.”
“Things have been so hectic. You know how snowed under I’ve been,” she says hurriedly.
“I’m just as busy as you are, Klara. How about some paté de foie gras as a starter?”
“Great.”
“Then I’m going to make a lemon sorbet, I’ve got this brilliant recipe. Could you find the pâté if I get the veg?”
“Okay.”
“And could you go home then and start on the salad while I stop off to get some wine?”
“Okay.”
“Maybe you could make a dressing too, if you feel like it. What shall we drink?”
“Just the usual.” She spins on her heels, heads towards the washing powders.
“White wine?” he calls after her.
“Yeah, white wine and… oh, you deal with it.”

“Are you going to stay on this balcony all day?” Svenni asks, tying an apron around his waist.
“I’m sunbathing.” Klara nestles into a deck chair.
“The vegetables are still in the bags. I thought you were going to help me cook.”
“You’re a better cook than I am,” she says, allowing her eyelids to droop. “I want to get a bit of colour.”
“Up to you.”
“Svenni! This is your dinner party.”
“You don’t have to drill it in.”
Mayhem

2.

A golden red light, the air as fresh as mountain water. The world seemed purer than it normally was until some screams shattered the peace and Klara sprang up with a pounding chest.
Shortly after midnight, they had fallen asleep, intertangled, in the tent; Klara, her sister Embla and their pals. They’d gradually dozed off, giggling and whispering, while the adults nattered over a plastic table loaded with booze. On a bright summer night, bathed in the cosy light of a lantern.
The table was in a mess, covered in sticky goo, leftovers and cigarette stubs – but even the dirt looked strangely clean, filtered through the sunrays dissolving the valley mist. The stink wafting through the tent flap indicated that someone hadn’t made it to the grass and had pissed on the tent. There was a commotion and they were all standing on the muddy banks of a strong-currented river, everyone except mom that is. She sat alone facing the mighty onslaught of water. Pent up inside the family car and waving her arms as the brown glacial water gushed forth, shouting that the only thing dad could ever think about was his prick.
Be that as it may, right now dad’s mind seemed to be on mom, as he clambered down the muddy slope, fumbling through the loose sludge, trying to find a grip. His leg slipped and mom shrieked in terror.

The flaps of the tent hung over Klara’s shoulders like a royal orange mantle. A sun king with chattering teeth. She looked at the adults and heaved a sigh of relief when Raggi grabbed her dad’s sweater. Cowered as they grabbed a rope from the back of Raggi’s Land Rover, tied one end around dad’s waist and the other to the hook on the jeep. Half-shut her eyes as dad trudged into the river.
“It’ll be alright,” whispered a mellifluous voice, as slender hands in a baggy woollen sweater slipped around her.
Klara couldn’t answer, couldn’t move. As long as the river didn’t swallow them up, she vowed to say the Our Father every night, without ever rushing it.
“Honestly, Klara! Your dad’s tied to my dad’s jeep,” said Fjóla, sounding more like a patronising schoolmistress than a ten year old girl. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Course there is.”
“Suit yourself – but look! Your dad’s reached her now.”
“They still have to come back. That’s the most difficult part.”
The water was up to her dad’s chest and he was now struggling to get her mom out of the car, which was wavering dangerously. They heard him growl that she was a nutcase and had wrecked the car, that he hadn’t been with any woman and what the hell was wrong with her.
Klara knew dad was lying. A few days ago she had been competing with Embla to see who could design the best sand house, and Embla’s hovel had collapsed into Klara’s Chinese dragon house when an air hostess’s shoe had stepped on the roof. They looked up and saw a familiar-looking woman who whispered hello and reminded them of the women in Dallas. She twitched all over like Sue Ellen and reeked of perfume.
“You destroyed my house,” Embla protested, pulling a sulky face before shoving the spade into her mouth and scrutinising the woman. She stood wavering in the sandpit, pulled out a big packet of lollipops out of her handbag and handed it to Klara, saying sorry.
“Can I keep the lollies?”
“You can keep the lollies,” said the woman tearfully. “And I’m sorry for being with your dad.”
“You can be with him,” said Klara, ripping the packet open. Then it suddenly hit her, grown-ups used words in a different way: “being with your dad”, there was more mystery to those words than the girls could fathom. But it was a nice packet, better than a poke in the eye. And it never occurred to Klara to reject the offering. Nor to Embla who beamed with the strawberry lollipop in her mouth, and was already busy mending the roof of her hovel.

Klara dodged Fjóla’s embrace and closed her eyes. Had she committed a terrible crime by taking that packet? Dad had obviously been with this woman, whatever it was that they had done, and mom clearly wasn’t happy about it.
That strange woman must have done something wicked to mom, otherwise she wouldn’t have given them that packet of lollies, which they’d hidden in the house; in that wooden box that dad had nailed to the wall and granny has sown a curtain for, with blue patterns, to make it look like a real cupboard. And now mom was drowning and dad’s nice car was being destroyed; the car that Klara had chosen with dad in the car shop, back in the days when mom grilled beef steaks and sliced peppers on grill sticks and airplanes puffed cotton wool clouds into the sky while dad and Klara and Embla played football and everything was so hunky-dory…

Embla cried inside the tent and Klara bit the back of her hand. Maybe things would have worked out differently if she’d told mom about the bag of lollies and explained that the woman obviously hadn’t done anything wrong.
Fjóla’s mom approached: Elisabet with ringlets and big earrings. They jingled as she crouched in front of the children and told them to crawl back into the tent and go to sleep.
“Mammy’s drowning,” said Klara in a grave voice that made Embla cry even louder.
“She won’t drown, love,” Elisabet answered, maniacally blinking her eyes like a teenager. “The guys are towing the car out of the river.”
“What guys?” Klara asked.
“Why your dad and Raggi of course. Come on, try to sleep now. All the children in the world are asleep – except for you.”
They reluctantly crawled back into the tent.

“They’re crazy!” Fjóla muttered, stretching her lanky body over her sleeping bag. “No-one’s parents are as crazy as ours.”
“I know,” Klara snorted, clearing her nose and slithering into her sleeping bag. But that was her only comment, she wanted to hear what was going on outside. Fjóla understood that without needing to be told. Stared into the red glow of the morning, with a hand poised under her cheek and listened too, with old eyes like Klara’s maternal granny’s.
She always did this when there was something up, whether they were at home in her house or at Klara’s. Fjóla was better than anyone on stormy nights, the opposite to the other girls, who would be scared or shocked if they happened to be sleeping over that week-end. In Fjóla’s house people behaved like in Klara’s house, they could have a laugh together. But sometimes it was impossible to laugh so they’d comfort Embla or Lúlli, Fjóla’s brother – right now they had to comfort Embla.
“Would you?” Klara asked.
“Yeah,” said Fjóla, slipping her arms around Embla. Lied to her in a smooth voice, saying that the grownups were only playing a game and that the screaming was the climax of it.
“Go away! I want mammy,” Embla snapped.
Klara glared at her: “Shh, you’ll wake Lúlli up!”
“I don’t care. Mammy, mammy!”
“Mammy’s playing,” Fjóla repeated, unflappable. “Isn’t she, Klara?”
“Yeah.”
“Mammy!” Embla broke free, kicking Lúlli’s head, who turned in his sleep.
“Shut up or I’ll hit you,” said Klara, burying her head under a pile of blankets.
“Embla, you can have my Prince Polo if you stop crying.” Fjóla dug her hand into a backpack and produced a bar glistening in gold wrapping. Embla shut up.
Her cheeks were covered in chocolate by the time mom stumbled into the tent, soaking wet, and knocking over the front pole.

3.

There was talk of chlamydia.
Klara didn’t know what chlamydia was, but she’d already decided that chlamydia would be strictly forbidden when she became a grownup and was in charge of everything. No chlamydia. Just spaghetti and tomato sauce every day in the yellow house, packed with dogs, bitches with swollen puppy tummies.
But she knew chlamydia was something bad. Mom didn’t speak a word to dad until the family had got home from the trip. When Klara and Embla had eaten their boiled fish and crawled into bed with the sweet taste of toothpaste on their teeth, they heard agitated raps and whispers, a terror-stricken bird standing before a female cat, pleading for his life.
In the morning, mom went off before the alarm clock did, yelling at the sisters to shake a leg and get dressed because she had to drive dad to the doctor.
“But the car’s wrecked!” The statement turned into an accusation. “You drove it into a river.” – Period.
They always ended with a period when something terrible had happened, never a comma or an AND – and then the fairy godmother comes, waves her wand and sings: “Now everything will be as it was before and you’ll live happily ever after in a brand-new Fiat Uno.” Never. Just a period. But the car’s wrecked – you drove it into a river – period, end of story.
Mamma told Klara to cut out the nonsense and repeated her order to the sisters to get a move on. Embla had started to get dressed. With a pensive air, she was struggling to get her right foot into a red-striped sock. Mom clutched her in her arms and shoved her into the two socks, a sweater and dungarees with flowers embroidered on the knees. Dumped her on a chair at the kitchen table.
The sisters ate Cornflakes while mom did her face up in front of the mirror and dad went to the bathroom. But he didn’t sing this time and Embla’s forehead was furrowed with worry. “What’s chlamydia?” she asked in a quivering voice, milk dribbling out of the corners of her mouth.
“Dunno. Maybe it’s a cream,” Klara answered.
“Hmm,” Embla mumbled. The six-year old still wasn’t satisfied with the explanation.

Mom insisted on driving. Dad didn’t protest. The sisters sat in the backseat of main granny’s burgundy Skoda. Embla was in a daze but gave a start every time mom cursed and thumped the steering wheel. Klara pressed her nose against the window and steamed the glass with her breath to draw a picture of a boy.
“This old banger is conking out. I’ll grab a cab and you stay at home with the girls,” dad spluttered, adjusting the glasses on his nose.
“Shut up!”
“Don’t be stubborn! Can’t you see that this rattletrap is just as wrecked as the Fiat?” He’d had enough of feeling ashamed now.
“Don’t you tell me what I am,” mom shrieked and Embla blocked her ears and shut her eyes.
“I’m going to miss my appointment.”
Mom looked daggers at him and growled at him to just piss off then. He didn’t hang around a moment longer, dashed into the house to call a cab.
She silently watched him run into the wooden house they’d built themselves with the help of some friends when Klara was two years old and they were still in love. Sunk into her seat and stared. Lit a cigarette, opened a window.
“Shouldn’t we go in?” Klara asked.
“You can do whatever you want,” she answered.
Embla moped but Klara nudged her. “Shhh!” she whispered.

Mom was sure there were more women. Klara had heard her talking about some German Nordic scholar in a skirt and a horticulturist that dad had met at a party. She was always counting the women dad was suspected of having been with and it was mutual. He paced the room at night, adding up the men that she supposedly had been with. It sometimes came to blows. They screamed and belted each other. Slammed doors, rasped and spoke of fucks and cunts and pricks and flirts and two-timing. The racket drove the sisters crazy.
“What IS chlamydia?” Embla asked everyone whom she felt worthy of her trust. Klara told her to ask main granny since she was so bloody curious about it. But in the end it was Klara who asked granny as she was preparing some lunch.
“Does someone have chlamydia?” granny asked, stooping over the pot of goulash.
“I don’t know. I heard someone talking about it, in school or somewhere,” she spluttered.
“I see. Pass me that pepper a moment.”
Klara told Embla that Chlamydia was the woman in the sandpit. With the knowing look of a police officer she’d nodded and muttered that Chlamydia was good.

When Fjóla heard Embla’s explanation she laughed, but was just as ignorant as she was. Although she did have the idea of going to the library to look chlamydia up in a book. They took a bus into Reykjavik, bought hotdogs at the terminal, and then took a bus into town. Wandered around the Thingholt district for an hour, looking for the municipal library, finally stumbled into the right building, and browsed through crammed bookshelves until a friendly librarian found the book that Fjóla was looking for.
“Mom came here once to have a look at this book. It’s called the woman’s handbook.”
“Why didn’t she go to the library back home?”
“Just because,” said Fjóla, slamming the tome onto a round table. “Look at all of them things that can happen to women.”
“at all of the things… “ Klara corrected her, licking the ketchup off her mouth. “Dad says you shouldn’t say them things, it’s bad grammar.”
“Big deal, Klara know-all – do you want to know what chlamydia is or not?”
“I think I have an idea.”
“So why did you ask me then?” Fjóla quickly scanned through the table of contents with pensive eyes; her oversized teeth chewing on her lips.
“I want to know more.”
“Let’s see.” She flipped through some pages until she finally found the chapter on sexually transmitted diseases. “Look! Yuck, yuck, yuck, disgusting…”

They hunched over the book. Fjóla, long-limbed with a jaw like a foal and blond hair tied in a rough ponytail, smart in her Adidas tracksuit and plimsolls. Klara, a bit on the plump side, with hair that had been blond but was beginning to darken, amber skin and eyes that reminded one of the bog around her house. In a wine-coloured T-shirt and dungarees that were way out of fashion.
Two little girls engulfed by the world. They breathed more calmly on their way out.

4.

Four years later Fjóla caught chlamydia. She seemed to have turned into an adult all of a sudden. Not Klara.
Fjóla drank diet-Coke and smoked. Sighed about her chlamydia and read the penicillin instructions leaflet out loud. Klara wanted to catch chlamydia too, easier said than done though, unfortunately. You had to sleep around for that and for Klara, with her acne, button nose, and braced teeth, the prospect of participating in any activity of that kind was about as remote as the Miss Iceland title. Although she had actually had a French kiss when she got drunk for the first time in Laekjartorg, but the memory was as blurred as a dream, and Fjóla later laughed at her about it. The kisser was just as much a loser as Klara was.
Fjóla had told Klara in a maternal tone that next time she had to find a nice boy and go the whole way with him; French-kissing wasn’t good enough. And there was nothing to be afraid of: “Just relax, it’s great fun afterwards when you have a cigarette.”
It all sounded totally alien to Klara, even though she’d twice caught her parents rolling on top of each other in their bare asses. She thought about it a great deal and promised herself that if she hadn’t been with anyone by the age of fifty, she’d drink loads of booze somewhere abroad, walk into a bar where no-one knew her, and ask some stranger to sleep with her. Some ugly man so he wouldn’t be too shocked.
She decided to keep that resolution to herself. Fjóla no longer enjoyed her trust. Secrets were a whole new ball game now. They were hers: dirty and titillating, too precious to risk Fjóla laughing at them, she who fulfilled all her dreams.
And nine years later there was Klara hanging out in the Odal strip club, drinking outrageously expensive spumante and kissing a blushing boyfriend, but unable to take her eyes off a man in a wheelchair tucking a five thousand Kronur note into a stripper’s G-string.
“I was just like that man when I was fourteen,” Klara whispered to the boyfriend who asked if she’d had too much to drink.

Man and woman

1.

Svenni was different to all the others. Klara stared at him the same way she used to stare at that George Michael poster she’d had when she was a kid with a precocious bout of teenage blues. She’d got the poster from a Bravo magazine and kissed it good-night every night. Now she was kissing a soft cheek that reeked of aftershave.
Actually, she’d had another boyfriend for six years, but never experienced that exotic feeling that Svenni’s presence gave her. She’d been young and had a crush, but would have been willing to go out with anyone else who’d wanted to. The ex was pretty cool, he was also different to all the others – but in a different way. In a way that no longer appealed to her. She had changed, even though he had been the one to break it off. Maybe because she would never have come round to doing it. They’d been close friends.
Svenni would never be as much of a friend as her ex was. Of course he was her friend, best friend, yeah, they were together. But there was a tension between them that had been lacking in the previous relationship over the last years. She enjoyed quarrelling with him and kissing him afterwards, loving him and teasingly twisting his words, sleeping with him, again and again and again and again and again…
Was absolutely thrilled when he asked her to move in with him, welcomed him with open arms when he took the engagement ring out of the breast pocket of his starch-pressed shirt.

Svenni had a seventy-five square metre flat in the Hlidum district, and even though they’d only been together for three months, Klara didn’t hesitate to give up the room she had been renting at a risibly low price. But she did warn him: “I can barely scrape by on my student’s loan and I owe the bank a hell of a lot.”
“It’ll all work out.” He pinched her cheek. “Trust me.”
“And I always forget to hand in my tax returns.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
She was about to be twenty-two and hoped to graduate from the Arts & Crafts school in a few years time. He was twenty-six, had started primary school at the age of five, and had finished his masters in Marketing in the US; now worked for an up-and-coming cosmetics firm. She wanted to have ten kids with him and lie in bed all day, just like Yoko Ono and John Lennon. He wanted to eat her, but preferred to put the babies on hold and she knew he had enough brains for both of them.
They had fun redecorating the apartment. It was fun to prance around furniture shops and small specialised stores. Svenni had some money and she was sufficiently in love to run a full overdraft. In just a few days the place was transformed into a minimally designed but cosy flat, nothing superfluous, just what they needed.
They looked at it with pride and started to mix their books, CD’s, clothes, toothbrushes, camping equipment stuff and working tools. Then dropped onto their new American double bed, and had started to undress each other when Svenni broke out of his reverie: “The hardware store closes in thirty minutes!”
“So?”
“We were going to varnish the shelves tonight, I’ve got to buy varnish.”
“Can’t we do it tomorrow?”
“It might rain tomorrow,” he said, tying his belt again.
That was the first time Klara was alone in their flat. She got up from the bed and wandered curiously between rooms, running her hands over the tiles in the bathroom and the new gas cooker, inhaled some fresh air on the balcony. Mumbled, contented. Looked forward to sitting at the new desk, to drinking coffee and drawing while the rain pelted the windows. To listening to CD’s on dark nights, to reading a book or cooking something good with Svenni.
“This is where life begins,” she said to the white wall in the sitting room, toying with the idea of buying a canary.

By the time Svenni got back, she was lying asleep on the sofa. Stirred slightly when he spread the newspapers on the balcony, put the shelves on them, and slapped on the first coat of varnish.

2.

The flat was on the ground floor of a pretty old building, the back garden boasted rosebushes and pansies in tidy flowerbeds. An elderly woman who lived in the basement flat had green fingers and pottered about the garden, day after day, to the delight of the other occupants in the building.
Two years after Klara had moved in, the woman with the green fingers suddenly died and the garden hadn’t been the same since. Her grandson inherited the flat, but not her fingers. He was more interested in barbecues than flowers, a heap of stones that Svenni and Klara had built during a garden party.
“It’s an obsession,” Svenni would say when he got home from work, and the barbecue smoke wafted through the balcony door.
“So what – can a man not grill?” Klara would say, pushing the balcony door back.

The years go by. Svenni gets used to the new neighbour’s compulsive grilling, but still fears his presence might bring the property value down. Klara continued to redecorate the apartment and discovered that she could endlessly extend her overdraft without the bank clerk batting an eyelid. Of course in the meantime, she’d qualified as an illustrator, and she was also helped by Svenni who kept the bank happy, by occasionally depositing substantial sums into her account; a generous young entrepreneur tuned into modern times.
Too conscious of the unexpected twists of fate that life can take, he’d avoided setting up a joint account, but never hesitated to share any extra funds with Klara. He liked luxury but enjoyed it more with her at his side. They often popped abroad: to a summerhouse in Spain, a tour to New York, a romantic trip to Paris, a beach in Thailand, a holiday in Cuba. Anything…
They’d recently celebrated their first nine years of cohabitation with a week-end trip to London. All at Svenni’s expense.
When they got back the flat had been turned upside down. The neighbour’s cat had crept through the window, broken and destroyed everything, eaten the plants in the sitting room, pissed, puked and shitted in the wardrobe.
“There he is, poor thing!” said Bardi, the neighbour, when Svenni knocked on his door with the tatty cat in his arms.
“The poor thing has just wrecked our apartment,” Svenni growled.
“He’s dying of thirst.” Bardi said accusingly.
“Did you expect us to leave a bowl of water out while we were away so that your cat wouldn’t be thirsty while he was destroying our apartment?”
“Serves you right for leaving the window open.”
“You’ve no right to blame it on others.”
“That’s what you think.”
Svenni was beside himself with rage when he came back, and Klara had to put all her energy into calming him down again. As they were finishing cleaning the flat, Bardi went out to his post by the grill with the purring cat at his feet. The black fiend laughed as they sat on the balcony, and Klara wondered how he could gnaw those chops with practically no teeth.

Always with a six-pack at hand. Propped up against a wall of coal black stones. Normally in jeans and a discoloured working shirt that he also used when he was paving. Occasionally in threadbare underpants and a tank top when the weather is warm and the evening sun turns Icelandic gardens into foreign summer resorts.
Klara finally grows weary of observing him. Wonders how a man can live, day in and day out, without ever combing himself or washing his clothes. He knows she’s watching him, but he doesn’t offer her a wave or a smile. Just grills and sips beer. Squints his eyes at the sun. Stacks the chops on a plate while Metallica roars through the ghetto blaster covered in splatters of green paint.
The cat greedily eyes the food and Bardi occasionally deliberately drops chunks of raw meat onto the lawn. The sharp-toothed beast tears through the bloody morsels in record time. Bardi laughs, rasps like a cooing cat. They eat the grilled meat together in the basement flat and the cat has got into the habit of licking the barbecue sauce and black pepper. He’s constantly thirsty, like his master, much to the displeasure of the other occupants in the building.
It’s almost a month now since the chubby woman of an indeterminate age stopped waddling into the back garden at midnight. On bright evenings you could see the burst veins on her face and the dark bags below her eyes under her cotton cap and bluish black hair. She wearily toddled over and repeatedly stubbed out her cigarette on the basement steps. Then she vanished into Bardi and the cat’s apartment.
At one or maybe two-thirty, Klara forced herself to head for bed and drew the curtains to shut off the blueness that would have kept them awake. But the light was haunting, and they tossed and turned in the summer night until Bardi and the chubby woman started yelling. Then Klara got out of bed to close the window and the bathroom door to stop the noise travelling up the drainpipe. She also closed the bedroom door and buried her head under her down pillow – but that wasn’t enough. The screams grew louder and then smashing sounds were heard. A taxi drove up with a carton of cigarettes or a bottle of Vodka and Bardi tiptoed out onto the pavement to pay in his underwear, while the cab driver was being called on the radio and the engine purred. Once the car had left, the row got ten times worse, broke into screeching.
Klara never called the cops, but Svenni called them the night the chubby woman stubbornly refused to die.