The knees of her white thermals were black because the sand was black. Arctic wind cut, terns shrieked, and Lilith dug with the small spade. They had been in the cabin spring through summer, and now winter was calling; there was little autumn here.
Lilith knew the waves on this beach could creep up behind you, scoop you up and throw you back at the rocks like laundry, so she faced the sea. She sang with numb lips in that high thin voice he’d so taken to. She sang with a pretty tune but no particular meaning: the song was a list. Ravens on the cliffs bobbed. She heard the vixen and her cubs chirruping from the outcrop above her.
‘Arctic fox. Vulpes lagopus,’ she sang against the wind, ‘Melrakki, little dog on the snow. White, brown,’ she jerked the spade, ‘and blue.’ There were so many words for fox in Icelandic it still excited her. He’d taught her the words, sometimes moving her mouth into the right shape with his fingers.
‘Tófa. Refur. Melrakki. Skolli. Holtaflór. No, Lil, hol-tah- floor,’ he’d said.
Then there was her very own nameless fox. Lilith had spent that first sunny June day following the vixen along the shoreline: she was blue with copper eyes. It was her fox up on the cliffs now, sucking up gull eggs, feeding on carrion, and oblivious to all she’d done. Lilith tore off her gloves; she was burning up.
‘I know,’ she shouted at the wind, ‘a sign of bloody hypothermia!’ She laughed, which she knew, of course, was an added tic of madness. Wind-blown sand stabbed her legs through her thermals; she’d remembered boots, a scarf, a hat, and she’d taken his coat, but she’d forgotten her trousers. It’s the simple things, she thought. She touched the bite mark on her thumb; it had healed well. Black and white eider ducks watched her from the shore and she glanced up at the cabin. She wanted to get in there and pack. This business on the beach was taking too long and as sure as she had been, now she didn’t quite know why she had to do this. Still, Lilith picked up the guitar, a fine 0018 Martin (because he said if it was good enough for early Nanci Griffith then it was good enough for him, and that had made Lilith’s skin itch). She placed the brown guitar in the black hole and sang again, this time a lullaby about going to sleep while the waves wash you clean, and your lover waits on the cliffs until darkness catches him. Lilith stood, wobbly in the growing wind. The raven- boys and her foxes had long gone from the cliffs as she shovelled the last of the sand, and buried the guitar in black. It was done.
Dillon Bar in Reykjavík, that’s where she first saw him play: Timotei hair and beard, and ice-blue eyes. He was such a cliché it hurt. He called himself ‘Thor’, though he confessed to a softer ‘Einar’ after their first night in the van. Lilith knew she was a cliché too when she found herself paying for petrol with her mother’s credit card and sitting at the side of the stage at each of his pub gigs with a cheap can of Heineken and a permanent smile. She took to driving the ring road when the weather wasn’t too bad, while he strummed the 0018 Martin in the back.
‘What’s that?’ she asked at most things, because even the light was strange on this island.
He mumbled, ‘Pink-footed goose, keep your eyes open.’ Other times he said, ‘The aurora borealis, silly,’ and ‘No, they are not spaceships landing, Lil. They’re lit-up greenhouses for tomatoes.’
He said ‘tom-ay-toes’ not ‘tom-ahh-toes’, and Lilith sang a song she’d made up about terns dive-bombing the parked van. When spring storms came, he drove, and she would curl up in the front seat and pretend she was safe. When she saw the glacier river for the first time she stood at the shore, dazzled, while he jumped from one block of ice to the next, freezing water running beneath him. A guy yelled from the shoreline that dumb tourists should go home.
‘Where were you born on the island?’ Lilith asked one night in the van and he dodged the question by pulling down her knickers. (It was April but too cold to sleep in a van without thermals and underwear.) As they made their way back to Reykjavík for another small gig in a small bar, and then up, up to the Westfjords and a place he told her was his, she found signs of other women in the van: a silver bangle, a hair clip (though she reasoned that both could easily be his). One morning when he was peeing next to short-legged, long-haired horses, she found a hefty white bra beneath his seat and a screwed-up note written in red lipstick beneath the foldaway mattress. ‘FUCK YOU’, it said. Everyone has a history, Lilith thought.