Reykjavík, 30th June 1980

It’s six in the morning. Iceland is bathed in beautiful summer weather. The whole country, those who voted for Védís and those who didn’t, are waking up to a new reality. The eyes of the world are focused on tiny Iceland, where the world’s first female president has been elected after a tense election night. There’s quite a gathering of young people outside the home of Védís Finnsdóttir on Tjarnargata. These are people from every walk of life. Among them are Védís’s former colleagues from the Reykjavík Junior College, her comrades from the struggle for equality, a couple of MPs and two ministers, but also working people, senior citizens, children and teenagers. There are also journalists, photographers and a cameraman from the state TV station. A police car is stopped at the corner of Tjarnargata and Skothúsvegur. A uniformed police officer, arms folded and with a smile on his face, watches the throng. A girl stands at his side, maybe around eight years old, holding the hand of a small boy.

Sunshine glitters on the city’s lake and flowers in the bed outside Védís’s home wave their heads in the light breeze. Everyone’s waiting for the newly-elected president to appear and address the nation this morning. Every eye is on the handle of the front door. It turns, and Védís steps out, wearing a green silk blouse and a knitted skirt that had been a gift from a lady in the west. Védís has a smile on her face and despite the sleepless election night behind her, she’s radiant. Nobody present has any doubt that this is a unique event in human history. Védís looks down at the street as people start to call out, ‘We love you! We love you!’

She waves just as the first shot rings out. It’s as if nobody understands what’s happening. It’s the second shot that makes Védís jerk, put her hands to her chest, and slump down to the pavement in front of the house. Her head droops forward over her chest and blood stains the green silk red. It’s only now that the crowd take this in and terror takes hold.

You stand in the little kitchen of the apartment on Hringbraut and stare at the clock on the wall. According to that, it’s almost midday. That can’t be right as it’s not light outside and there’s nobody around. There’s no traffic, nothing at all. The clock’s stopped. It’s deceptive, as although the hour and minute hands are still, the second hand moves as usual. In your drowsy state the clock fools you for a moment. Then you pull the dressing gown tighter, turn on the tap and reach for the coffee pot. This is when you check the watch on your wrist and see it’s six-thirty. You have to wake your brother so he has time to dress and have a cup of coffee before the work truck comes to fetch him. Your brother’s name is Leifur and he works collecting garbage and garden waste around the city. He’s been doing this since he was nineteen.

He’s a little different to other people. Not that you’d notice it, looking at him. The scar is well hidden under his thick hair. It’s only when people speak to him that they realise. Up to a point, he’s aware of his own disability, and that makes him cautious. There’s a façade he puts up when he deals with other people. He’s sweet and courteous and tries to watch his words. In that way he’s like an Alzheimer’s patient, doing their best to convince people that they’re just fine. Which they don’t, naturally. They might be able to fool those closest to them for a while, but not for long.

Leifur doesn’t put on this show with you. He allows himself to be surly and irritable. He wasn’t like that as a child. He was happy then, with a practically permanent smile and quick to laugh. Leifur’s doctor, Ingimundur, told you after his last check-up that Leifur’s worsening temper could be linked to the diabetes that plagues him. It’s getting increasingly severe and you’ve had endless trouble getting him to take his health seriously. Leifur injects himself with insulin and measures his own blood sugar, but you never get to see the readings that you suspect are dangerously high (and they are). Thanks to outdoor work, Leifur has habitually been tanned and muscular, but now he’s pale, his face grey, eyes distant and his cheeks sunken. He reminds you of the bloodhound in the Disney film of Lady and the Tramp from 1955. You could also take a look at his diet. Although you make an effort to cook him healthy meals, he sneaks fast food and sweets that he eats in secret. There was a long argument over dates, until you gave up. Somehow Leifur had the idea that dates are super-healthy, especially for diabetics. He ate so many of them that they must have had the opposite of any positive effect.

You can hear the bed creak in Leifur’s room. That means he’s getting up. It’s a small apartment, just sixty square metres, and just one bedroom. You sleep in one of the living rooms, the smaller one, closed off from me by a glass door with a curtain. In there is a narrow bed, a clothes rack and a stack of books. You never meant to live for long like this. But you have. It’s been years now. You haven’t made the effort to hang a bookshelf or fix the room up in any way. The idea that you might go and live somewhere else has become old and tired by now. But it’s still treading water in your mind, there’s life still in it, despite how silly you believe it is. Any escape on your part goes only as far as the front door, certainly no further than the stairwell. Maybe you could leave the country. But you’ve no idea where you would go. It exhausts your imagination. You grew up in this apartment. It’s yours and Leifur’s childhood home. Your room was once yours and Leifur’s room. Back then there were two beds in there, with a chest of drawers for your clothes and toys. Leifur’s room was once your parents’ room. There are four years between you, plus four months. You recall a time when you had the room to yourself, one of the four times when Leifur was in a hostel or an asylum. Your parents could never agree on what was best for Leifur. He’d been in and out of school. Your mother had never wanted to be parted from him. Your father, on the other hand, never felt they could provide suitable support, that he would have to be in some kind of institution. But somehow your mother always managed to to persuade your father that Leifur should live at home.

When Leifur was eighteen he moved out for the last time, to a hostel in the eastern part of town, at Flókagata 23. Sometimes you used to visit him there. People with all kinds of disabilities had been shoved in there. Some of them suffered from debilitating depression, there was a man with Downs syndrome and other physically disabled people. You found it strange to go there. You never thought of your brother as being in any way disabled. He was certainly different, but that’s as far as it went. You remember eating a half-melted ice cream dessert in his little room at the hostel while someone screamed elsewhere in the building. It was as if someone was hurting that person. You were frightened, but Leifur acted as if he couldn’t hear the screams. What you remember is that it seemed as if Leifur was ashamed of being there, as if he was doing time for some other tearaway. It was understandable that he thought of it that way. Over the years he had always been placed somewhere whenever he caused trouble. That was mostly when your father had enough of him, because he could be noisy and difficult. He worked down at the slipway. It was best at home when he was on night shifts. Then your mother would make sure Leifur didn’t cause trouble during the day. The nights could be more difficult, when your father was on day shifts. Leifur was apt to wake up during the night and make enough noise to wake everyone up, switching on all the lights, the radio in the corridor and the TV in the living room. It was as if there was some mechanism missing in his head, some internal clock that enabled him to tell the difference between night and day.

Leifur’s still like that. There’s a flatscreen in his room and you often wake up in the night when he’s turned it on or is pottering around the kitchen. The only rule you’ve managed to get into his head is to not switch on the stove at night. That’s precisely why he was once sent to a children’s home in the country. He’d almost set fire to the apartment when he was a child. He started all this after the major operation that meant to save his life. You don’t remember how long he was away, but when he came back he was so much quieter. He was more withdrawn and you had the impression he thought through every movement before making it.

You look round and see your brother sidle into the kitchen and pour coffee into a cup. That was something he took up after that sojourn in the country, sidling. It gets on your nerves that he feels he needs to do this in his own home. Because this apartment truly is his home. He inherited it from your parents, contents and all. There’s the scratched dining table and the shabby chairs around it. There’s the tattered sofa facing the old tube TV and all the many, innumerable items to be found here. There’s everything from the potato peeler to the print of the little boy with the tear on his cheek that hung in the hallway. Now he’s sitting in the kitchen, drinking from the flower-patterned brown cup that your parents either received as a present or bought somewhere, long ago. Three cups, all mismatched, still stand unbroken on the shelf above the kitchen sink. Your parents were apt to hurl crockery whenever they argued.

You watch Leifur sip his coffee and sigh. He’s not talkative this early in the morning. Not that he usually has much to say. He’s wearing a grubby shirt and stained trousers, that’s his work gear. When it’s cold he wears a padded overall and pulls on a balaclava. But the weather in the city region is on the mild side this morning – south-easterly or variable winds. 3-10°C, warmest south of the mountains. So he puts on his bright green anorak and winter boots. You don’t say anything about his filthy clothes. You don’t bother any more. It’s not worth the effort. If you speak up, there’s a chance he’ll become agitated. He could easily ask you put them in the washing machine, and then wait until they dry. That’s even though he has dry clothes in the closet. There’s no point trying to explain it to him. You’ll put the dirty clothes in the wash this evening. You hear Leifur mutter something you’re not supposed to hear. he does this to settle himself. He peers out of the window and you know that what he means to say is taking shape in his head before he lets the words go.

‘The forecast says it’ll rain tomorrow,’ he says, looking at you.

He sounds as if he’s speaking to some stranger, and not to the sister he grew up with. With a few breaks, admittedly. You live together, after all. You say nothing. He doesn’t react to your lack of response. Then he yawns and mutters, with a smirk on his face, between sips of coffee. You look him up and down. He needs a haircut. But that can wait until he gets paid at the end of the month. He finally gets to his feet, goes out into the corridor and puts on his coat. He pulls on his shoes and looks at you, standing in the kitchen doorway. He asks if you’re having liver for dinner, as if he’s going to take part in preparing it – which he never does. There’s a note of accusation in his voice, but you know him well enough to be aware that’s not his meaning. He just sounds like that and it doesn’t mean anything. You nod and tell him there’ll be liver tonight. You can’t word it any other way. You have to be literal and that’s fine. You used to make a habit of speaking for both of you.

That was when you were younger, before Leifur started to be ashamed of having his sister ask for ice cream in the shop, or a bag of sweets at the kiosk, or tell people their names. Leifur reassures himself that dinner will be at seven. You nod again and tell him, in the murmur that you feel works best in your conversations with him, that it’ll be on the table at seven.

Leifur opens the front door, pauses there in the doorway and looks back at you. It’s clear there’s something on his mind. He comes out with it. He wants to be sure there’ll be bacon with it, and you assure him there will. Leifur nods and leaves the apartment just as you hear the diesel purr of the work truck through the half-open window. You watch as Leifur strides towards the truck, opens the rear passenger door and sits inside. A moment later and the truck’s gone. The traffic on Hringbraut is getting thicker.

You light a cigarette, sit at the kitchen table and take out the little black laptop that was on special offer in Elko, open it and switch it on. The machine starts up with much the same sounds as the percolator makes when it brews coffee. This was the cheapest computer in the shop, the only one you could afford. You stand up and pour the rest of the coffee into your cup, and sit back down in front of the computer. Your thoughts go back to that summer morning in 1980.

Reykjavík, 30th June 1980

It’s six in the morning. Iceland is bathed in beautiful summer weather. The whole country, those who voted for Védís and those who didn’t, are waking up to a new reality. The eyes of the world are focused on tiny Iceland, where the world’s first female president has been elected after a tense election night. There’s quite a gathering of young people outside the home of Védís Finnsdóttir on Tjarnargata. These are people from every walk of life. Among them are Védís’s former colleagues from the Reykjavík Junior College, her comrades from the struggle for equality, a couple of MPs and two ministers, but also working people, senior citizens, children and teenagers. There are also journalists, photographers and a cameraman from the state TV station. A police car is stopped at the corner of Tjarnargata and Skothúsvegur. A uniformed police officer, arms folded and with a smile on his face, watches the throng. A girl stands at his side, maybe around eight years old, holding the hand of a small boy. Nobody in the crowd seems to think that maybe such a young girl shouldn’t be in charge of such a small boy. Nobody asks where their parents are. You’re the one who laced his shoes and zipped up his coat while your parents slept after the long election night. You held his hand that short distance from Hringbraut down to Tjarnargata. You feel Leifur’s damp palm in yours, and you feel him convulse as the first shot rings out.

Broken by Jon Alti Jonasson is published by Corylus. The second novel will follow this summer.