Yes Yes More More Read online

  “Yes!” he said, and carried on. The woman began to talk to Pála in Icelandic. I didn’t understand why she’d spoken to her son in English. The child wriggled out of her lap and headed off down the table but she didn’t look round, just kept chatting. He was offering his buttery hands to the people sitting a few seats down and they cooed and grinned like they were delighted by the offer, even as they leaned away.

  Then Pála began to sing, not loud or showy, looking at her copy of a booklet that we each had in front of us. The woman next to her began to sing too, and before they’d got to the second line it seemed the whole room had joined in. Except for me and Leo and Cathy. I mouthed along a little, the way I might for hymns at a funeral, and then Pála leaned over and showed me which song in the booklet we were singing, what line we were up to. It was in Icelandic but this guidance helped – I joined in, had had enough wine that I didn’t feel too worried about my phonetic singing, the fact that I must have sounded like a badly programmed robot. Pála grinned at me and at her Geordie gravedigger husband, who knew the words without even looking at the sheet. The song was a lot like Islands In The Stream but without ever getting to the “and we rely on each other, uh-hu-uh” bit. Leo began to sing Islands In The Stream, a chunk of pink light from outside sat on his hair. Cathy was just laughing, and the buttery little boy was licking the back of his hands. As the song finished, someone tapped on their wine glass with a fork, people clapped and stamped their feet and looked to Inga and Magnus. The couple climbed up onto their chairs and kissed, arms round necks and getting cheered along by their guests.

  “They have to do that every time anyone taps a glass,” Pála told me. “It’s traditional.” So as soon as Inga and Magnus sat down, I tapped my glass and they got up, laughing, back on their chairs, and kissed again. More cheering.

  Once we’d eaten our kalkúnasalat and our plokkfiskur and sung more Icelandic songs and made the newlyweds kiss half a dozen times more, there was a speech from Inga’s dad. He began quietly and shuffled about. As he went on he got chattier. The words sounded stretchy and soft and fond. Inga gazed at him, grinning. He made a joke about Magnus, I think, and Magnus laughed along with everyone else. Then he got a bit serious, his chin ducked down a little, he looked to his wife, Inga’s mum, and said something that made everyone go, “Awww.” Then he turned back to all of us, raised his glass and said, “Skál!”

  “Skál!” we all said, or something like that. “Skál!”

  Then Inga gave a speech. “First of all I’d like to mention,” she said, climbing up onto her chair, “how wonderful I look.” Then she said the same thing, I think, in Icelandic, and then she was talking – in Icelandic but with these slivers of English – about her parents, and Magnus, and her friends, and the food, and she toasted us all, “Skál!” And we toasted her, “Skál!”, and we toasted her and Magnus, and her parents, and everyone there and all of our selves, “Skál! Skál! Skál! Skál!”

  The band that played after we’d cleared away the tables and drunk more wine seemed to be the greatest wedding band imaginable, singing Come On Eileen and Crazy In Love in Icelandic, singing Ticket To Ride in English but actually screaming it more than singing it, almost at double speed, seething.

  “My phone’s died,” Leo said. He was sitting by me, tired from doing his Beyoncé dance, trying to text his wife. He had shown me photos of his two children earlier, a newborn peachy thing and a little boy with bags under his eyes.

  “You want to borrow mine?” My phone was in my coat pocket, under a table somewhere across the room. It would be weird though, I thought, for him to text from the phone of a woman his wife hardly knew.

  “Fuck it,” he said, and leant back. He was watching Inga and Magnus doing a kind of jive, with a circle of friends around them.

  Cathy came and sat with us, rosy-cheeked from dancing. “Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh!” she sang, and jiggled her shoulders.

  “Sausage rolls!” Leo said, eyes lit up as he saw Inga’s mum and auntie arranging plates of leftovers on a table in the corner.

  “More coleslaw!” said Cathy. I thought it was about an hour since we’d eaten, two at the most, but the pair of them were straight over there, digging in.

  I stood up once they’d left me on my own, and I walked, adrift, around the edge of the party. Inga’s uncle, who looked like Leonard Cohen if Leonard Cohen was an elf, strolled up to me, gave a half-bow and offered a hand, swung me onto the dancefloor. He slid his hand round to the small of my back and chatted away to me as we danced. Maybe he didn’t realise that I couldn’t understand a word. It was nice to listen to the noises he made anyway and to dance with an old married man. I was clumsy and slow on my feet, and I pushed my hips towards him. Who was being nice to who? The band was singing, “You know that I could be in love with almost everyone, I think that people are the greatest fun,” and I did what I considered to be some kind of cha-cha. Leonard Cohen smiled, chuckled even. I thought his wife might be watching, rankled. I wondered if I looked foolish. One strap fell off my shoulder. I watched his eyes taking aim at my breasts. Perhaps he could see where my nipples were through the silk. I must have fun, I decided, I will dance merrily through all the indignities. Nothing to be sad about here.

  Magnus and Inga came over and intercepted us in the middle of a twirl. Inga grabbed her uncle and I got Magnus, they must have worked it out between them first. It felt much worse to be dancing with the groom.

  “Hallo,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. What a beautiful day. Thanks for inviting me.”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “This is a great party.”

  “Good band, huh?”

  And on we went like that until the song finished and I went outside, where the sky was pinks and blues and a few people were smoking. A couple – English, and a little younger than me and Leo and Cathy – were describing the previous day, which they’d spent at the blue lagoon a few miles away. As he spoke, about the warm water and the jets of steam and the bar where you could buy a Blue Lagoon cocktail, her eyes darted from his face to all of our faces. The fingers on her right hand tapped and tickled the engagement ring on her left hand. He kept on talking. “We spent ages in the sauna bit,” he said. “Drinking these cocktails.”

  “We were there quite early,” his fiancee said, looking at him now. “There was hardly anyone around.”

  I looked to another man, a friend of Inga’s or maybe a cousin, who was standing looking at this couple as if they were a deformed exhibit in the natural history museum.

  “Hallo,” I said, in a way that I thought might convey some sort of relaxed kinship and shared but not unkind distaste for certain other people, with just those two syllables and a lift of my eyebrows. He was chewing a little pad of tobacco. He was tall and he had soft, fine hair like a child’s, and soft, smooth skin, although he was in his early forties, maybe, or late thirties. Another man, smaller and smilier, came and stood next to him, grinned at me, and the engaged couple walked away without saying anything.

  “Some trolls over there, I think,” the smaller man said.

  “Oh yeah?” said the tobacco man, with a nod.

  “Trolls!” I said, grabbing the word like a lifebuoy. “Trolls are big in Iceland, hey?”

  “Trolls are small,” said the tobacco man, giving me a babysitter smile.

  “You believe in trolls though?”

  “It’s not whether we believe in them or not,” he told me. “There they are.”

  “There they are,” said the smaller man. “Look at the rocks. When you see the little rocks, there they are.”

  I looked over and saw, here and there across the grassy land, dark rocks in pairs and in threes.

  “They’re hidden in the rocks?” I said.

  “Or they are the rocks,” said the smaller man. “They turn into rocks if they’re caught out by the sunlight.”

  “It must be shit to be a troll in summer in Iceland,�
� I said.

  Leo and Cathy were standing next to me now. Leo was smiling at the two men, a drunk man radiating non-alpha-male friendliness.

  “You know what time it is?” he asked.

  The tobacco man got a watch out of his pocket and gave it a stroke. “Broken,” he said, regretfully.

  About five yards away, out in front of the scout hut, a group of Icelandic guests had gathered in a great big circle, holding hands. The pink light made everyone look beautiful, unless it was the wine. They began to sing – the hokeycokey. I was laughing. The universal pastime of hokeycokey-ing. Leo and Cathy had already joined in and I shimmied my way between the big Simon Callow man and a skinny, pretty man who might have been his boyfriend.

  “In OOT! In OOT!” we sang, kicking back and forth with our right leg, our left leg, our whole selves. The rest of that bit I sang in English but with an urge to rhyme – “Shake it all ab-OOT” – and then I mumbled the rest. We gathered in, all together, and out again, in-in-in to a tight boozy circle and back out-out-out but still holding hands, the circle intact. After we’d put our whole selves in and our whole selves out, and shaken it all about in Icelandic, the group dispersed, people went to get drinks, light cigarettes.

  “Let’s go and commune with the trolls,” Cathy said. She had her shoes off again and a bottle of wine in her hand. We headed towards the rocks and grass, towards the pink horizon where the sun seemed to be sliding along, peeking at us, giving no sense of the time. My phone was still in my bag under that table and neither of us wore a watch. Leo ran towards the light, arms out, making zoooooooom noises.

  “Is it strange to be away from the kids?” I asked Cathy. She had two boys.

  “No, not really, it’s nice to have a break, stay up late, not worry about the babysitter. It’ll be nice to see them when I get home.”

  I couldn’t remember if Cathy’s sister, also a good friend of mine, was pregnant again. Sometimes I thought I’d imagined pregnancies and births among my friends. I wasn’t losing track though – it always turned out they actually were pregnant, or they actually had had another child. Or sometimes a miscarriage.

  “Ouch!” Cathy had stepped on something sharp.

  “Angry trolls,” I said. “Watch it, we’re trespassing.”

  She hopped up onto a bigger rock, a couple of feet tall, and stretched her arms out like an opera singer. She couldn’t think of a song, though, and so she just opened her mouth and started laughing.

  Leo was up ahead of us. “I want to take photos,” he said. “To show the kids. Anyone got a camera? A phone?”

  We didn’t.

  “You’ll have to remember it and then render it in oil or perhaps watercolour for them,” Cathy said, putting an arm through Leo’s and smiling up at him all silly.

  “Kate could do that,” Leo said. His wife was an artist. “I’m better with a camera.”

  “They wouldn’t be interested in pictures anyway,” said Cathy. “Stop fooling yourself. They want sweets and a cuddly toy from the airport.”

  “A cuddly toy,” said Leo. “That’s what they’ll have, a nice cuddly seal or a whale. A chunk of volcanic rock if they’re lucky.”

  We were heading further and further away from the party, as if we might get to see the sun properly if we got far enough round the horizon, or as if we were actually looking for trolls. Then a little further up the hill we saw a bench. It looked incongruous in a place where you could imagine – if you were citydwellers like us – that no people ever came.

  The bench seemed to be thoughtlessly positioned. Instead of looking out on the glorious Icelandic vista available a few yards further up the hill, it faced up the looming slope so that you got horizon and sky a little way above you. Next to it was an angled metal lectern with etched illustrations of native birds, all named in Icelandic.

  “Toppskarfur,” I said, in my Icelandic accent that brought out my latent Bolton accent mixed with the Swedish Chef. “What do you think that is? Topp-skar-fur. Fyll.” I looked at another one. “Fyll. What would that be in England?” The birds did not look familiar, I couldn’t identify anything.

  Leo stood next to me, maybe looking at the lectern too. “Ah well, they don’t know either,” he said.

  “Look at these two,” I pointed at a couple of black-and-white seabirds strutting about a few yards away.

  Leo pulled some tiny biscuits from his pocket, in cellophane wrappers. “From the plane,” he said. I took a couple and we crumbled them, threw them to the birds.

  “Are you a toppskarfur?” I asked one as it approached.

  “He doesn’t look toppskarfic,” said Leo, throwing more biscuits. No other birds came, it was just these two.

  Cathy was looking in the direction of the scout hut. “We should get back to the reception. I want some more of that coleslaw.”

  “I’ll stay here a bit I think. I fancy a sit-down.” I smiled and they smiled, and they strolled off towards the singing and dancing.

  I watched them for a minute then I stood up on the bench, walked along it, steady enough on my high heels, looking down at my feet and feeling the sky around me. Things happen, one after another, whether we believe it or not. I stopped and looked around, saw birds – toppskarfurs, perhaps, or fylls – soaring, flapping, strutting. Then I jumped off the end of the bench, walked back to the middle, sat there for a while and watched the sun coming up (or going down).

  ‌Chronicle of a Baffled Spinster

  May

  The whole day before their date she is extremely careful crossing roads and feels nervous when the tube stops in a tunnel. She just wants one date with this man. It would be awful if she was knocked over or killed before they’d even had their first date.

  Tony has dark ginger hair, honey-freckled skin, brown eyes and a broken nose. She thinks he is the kind of beautiful that only she finds beautiful, so that (a) there won’t be too much competition and (b) he will be grateful for her attentions. It turns out she is wrong about both these things.

  They sit in the park, his jacket laid out on the grass, drinking champagne from the bottle. He sings “I wanna hold your hand”, and holds her hand. Later when he kisses her he whispers, “I like you.” She wishes she could get that in writing. The next day he sends a text message that just says “xxx”. She worries about what to text back.

  On what she thinks is their second date, in a pub with some of Tony’s friends, he tells her he met the woman he’s going to marry last week. After a dizzy second she realises he isn’t talking about her. She spends the next half hour listening to Tony’s friend Richard, who explains that he never gets involved with women who don’t trim their pubic hair properly. “A messy bush is a sign of low self-esteem,” he says.

  Tony walks her to the taxi rank. “You’re a fox,” he says. “You’re a superfox. I’m really sorry.” But he’s happy to have met someone, all jittery and smiles about this girl. “We own all the same records,” he says, astonished.

  She tells the taxi driver that the man she likes is in love with someone else. “Well, that’s a kick in the teeth,” he tells her. At home, she gets halfway up the stairs before she sits down to cry.

  June

  One Tuesday morning, riding her bicycle down Clements Hill, she closes her eyes for five full seconds, her mind held quiet, waiting.

  July

  She and Stella both blag the afternoon off work and meet at the park. The sun is full out and baking, and they lie in the heat with nothing to do. They get Orange Maid lollies from an ice-cream van. They stroke and pull on the long grass, watch ladybirds and spiders, follow birds across the sky.

  The sunlight dazzles in Stella’s shiny hair, as if the two were made for playing together. The noise of other people is a cosy distant wall around their calm and quiet spot. They take off their shoes and lie on their bellies, toes wriggling against the earth and cheeks collapsed on arms, eyes squinting in the sun.

  August

  She watches eight episodes of The Wire in one Sat
urday and slowly eats three silver trays of takeaway curry. She’s so happy she could cry.

  September

  At Chloe’s house party, she wears a slinky dress and feels sexy.

  “This guy Jack just asked about you,” Chloe tells her. “You’ll like him. He’s cute.”

  Jack is in the lounge talking to Chloe’s boyfriend Mike. They are looking at the back of a Funkadelic CD. They tell each other that George Clinton is really fucking cool.

  She and Chloe walk over. She puts Bonnie Tyler on the stereo – Total Eclipse Of The Heart. It’s a karaoke classic, although there’s no chance of karaoke here. Chloe starts talking quietly to Mike, stroking his arm. He has one finger hooked in the front of her top.

  Bonnie sings. We’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks.

  Jack smiles, already pleased with himself, then opens his mouth to say something to her.

  “Why do women wear make-up and perfume?” she asks him.

  “I don’t know.” He frowns. “Why do women wear make-up and perfume?”

  “Because they’re ugly and they smell.”

  “Oh,” says Jack. He turns to change the CD.

  October

  In the pub one Friday after work she is trapped in a discussion about the rights of terror suspects. Mark, a friend of Karen’s, is mispronouncing habeas corpus. Habby-uss corpus. When he makes a point he’s especially pleased with he says, “Think about it,” afterwards, and raises his eyebrows at her.

  “The world is a dangerous and complicated place,” he tells her. He uses her name when he talks to her. She is laughing, at him. His eyes have stopped flicking back and forth between her face and her breasts. She imagines holding the back of his head by the hair, smashing his face into her knee.

  November

  One lunchtime, hungover, she goes to the small pharmacy near her office to get the morning-after pill. As the chemist is explaining possible side-effects, her mouth starts to water and the blood plummets out of her head. The chemist catches her and helps her to a chair, gives her glucose tablets and talks softly about blood sugar. The woman behind the counter fetches a plastic cup of water.