The Last Refuge (12 page)

I waved and shrugged and the girls giggled as Karis led me by the hand to a table next to the window. A voice in my head was telling me that I’d come to the Faroes to get away from people, to be on my own and not get involved. Another voice popped up to tell me that if that were the case, I wouldn’t have been trawling Torshavn in the hope of finding her.

‘So you’ve been out tonight before you came in here?’ she asked when we’d sat down. I guessed there was something in my eyes or my voice that gave it away.

‘Yeah. I was in Sirkús for a bit then the Irish Pub. They were both pretty quiet though.’ I thought it better not give her my entire itinerary.

‘Of course they were quiet,’ she laughed. ‘No one goes out that early, not on a Saturday. This is going to be a long night, Scotsman. I hope you’re up to it.’

I knew she was teasing, but I hoped the same thing. I’d been up since 6.30 and awake a fair bit of the night before that. Cafe Natur was open till four in the morning at weekends, like the rest of the bars in town. Could I last the pace?

‘The band on here tonight are pretty good. You going to stay and hear them? They won’t even be setting up till midnight though, and the bar will be jumping till four. Then . . .’ she looked at me coyly, ‘. . . my friends and I will be moving on somewhere else.’

I suddenly felt old, tired and hopeful all in one go.

‘How old are you?’ I asked, the words out of my mouth before I’d considered them. She sat back and regarded me with what I hoped was mock disapproval.

‘Is that not a rude question in Scotland? It is here. I’m twenty-four. What about you?’

‘Thirty-three.’

Karis leaned in, her face inches from mine across the table. ‘That’s
old
.’

‘I guess it is.’

She leaned even closer. ‘I like older men.’

My lips began to open in reply but Karis moved again and kissed me, full and hard. She lingered, meeting no resistance. Finally she sat back, smiling at her own boldness.

‘You taste of beer,’ she told me. ‘I like the taste of beer on a man. I guess that makes me weird.’

‘Good weird, I’d say.’

‘I think so.’ She laughed and raised her glass to chink it against mine. ‘
Skál!
’

‘
Sláinte!
’ I responded.

She raised her eyebrows enquiringly. ‘It’s Gaelic,’ I explained. ‘It means “health”.’

‘Like old Scots?’

‘Yes.’

‘I like old Scots,’ she giggled. ‘I want to draw you. Let me get paper.’

In moments she was back, her eyes darting from me to the paper she’d procured from behind the bar, her hand moving quickly, confidently. ‘Don’t look at it,’ she scolded. ‘Just look at me.’

‘Not a problem. I like looking at you.’

‘Smooth talker. So you live in the Faroes now?’

I hesitated. ‘Maybe it’s still too early to say. But I don’t live in Scotland any more.’

She smiled. ‘So you’re a nowhere man.’

‘That sounds about right.’

‘I think so. So what did you do in Scotland? What was your job?’

She was studying me intently. She’d see the look in my eyes if I lied. She’d probably already noticed the hesitation.

‘I was a schoolteacher. English.’

‘Really? Wow. I wouldn’t have guessed. Why did you give it up?’

Maybe I should kiss her again. Stop her asking questions. Her hand and eyes continued to work together, drawing me out.

‘I think I’d just had enough of it. The budget was always getting cut and we had no money for books or pencils for the kids. We spent half our time photocopying books so they could be shared around. Until we ran out of paper for the photocopier.’

‘Don’t you miss working with children though?’

I let the question roll around my head before answering.

‘I suppose so. They could be annoying though. Anyway, that’s all in the past. I’ve fish to farm now.’

She held my eyes. She knew. She changed the subject.

‘Did you have a girlfriend in Scotland. A wife, maybe?’

‘No wife. There was a girlfriend but that ended. What about you?’

She didn’t look up. ‘I told you. I have no boyfriend.’ I could hear the dismissive tone. It was all I was getting, for now at least.

‘Tell me about your art. Are you famous?’

The smile was modest, disarming. ‘A little, I guess. Only in the Faroes. And that doesn’t mean much.’

‘But you sell elsewhere? Like in other countries?’

‘Hm. Yes. I have sold to New York, Los Angeles, London. But the Faroes is where matters to me. Here, what do you think?’

She held the sheet of paper up and I saw myself staring back at me. Broad, assured strokes and a definite style. She was good. Too good, actually. She’d caught a sadness in my eyes that I’d hoped to have disguised better. She made me look handsome but . . . vulnerable. Damaged, perhaps. Dark, definitely.

‘I think you’re flattering me,’ I told her. ‘I must look older than that.’

She laughed and teased. ‘You do, but I wouldn’t get many commissions if I did portraits the way people
actually
looked. I did you a favour.’

‘Ha. Want to do me another favour?’ Sometimes these words came out before I recognized them.

‘Oh yeah? What is that then?’ Her eyes danced and dared me. I chickened out.

‘Get us another drink.’

She looked disappointed, but only half as much as I was. Still, she bought them and we sat, we drank, we chatted, we flirted and we got up and moved to the music of the band when they came on. Time swirled round us, passing easily, my doubts crumbling with each hour, each drink and each smile from her. It came as a surprise when they announced it was four in the morning and we found ourselves falling into the street.

It comes as something of a shock to the system to leave a bar and find it light outside. If you are Scottish, there is a slap of Calvinist guilt at having imbibed before dark. If you are Faroese and it is summer, then you are used to it.

‘It is still early,’ Karis instructed me. ‘Now we go to Mica. Everyone will. You’ll see.’

We wandered haphazardly up Aarvegur past the Hotel Hafnia and the City Hall, buildings blurring by. I knew Mica was on the pedestrianized street of Nils Finsens gøta but even if I hadn’t, I would have located it by the chatter before we got there. Karis was right.

Everyone in town under the age of forty must have been milling outside Mica. It was like wandering across a nightclub in the middle of the desert. The only equivalent I could think of in Glasgow were the throngs that congregated at taxi ranks at Central Station or Byres Road when the licensed premises would serve them no more. There was a similar sense of drunken camaraderie, but the underlying threat of getting your head kicked in seemed to be missing.

‘We come here to meet, to talk and to eat,’ Karis told me, her head resting on my shoulder. ‘People will go and get pizzas or French hotdogs and come here to meet friends. And there will be parties. Private parties. Some of them will go on for a very long time. They will be arranged here. You will like it.’

The mass gathering outside Mica wasn’t the end of something; it was a beginning. The crowd were open, friendly and extremely chatty. Karis was pulled gently and laughingly from my grasp by two of her friends from the bar, Petra and Elisabet. I wasn’t alone for long, though, as first a couple of guys, then some others, made conversation, seemingly knowing who I was.

‘Hey, man! Are you with Karis? Cool. She’s great, huh?’

‘Hey, you’re the Scottish guy, right? I went to Edinburgh once, man.
Great
city.’

There was more booze, too, happily shared and lazily drunk. I was in a haze of acceptance and an unfamiliar sense of contentment, albeit it largely borne of alcohol. Between the beer, the vodka and weeks of sleep deprivation, I was feeling no pain and happily let Torshavn spin before me.

Then something jarred. As the square circled us in a mid-night, mid-morning whirl, something put on the brakes.

It was because of the constant movement of people around me that the still figure stood out. He was staring at me. Glaring at me. Someone tugged at my arm and forced me to turn, shaking my hand and talking nonsense in broken English. Someone else wanted to know about football in Glasgow, and by the time I turned back, the still form had moved away. Then I saw him again. A shadow in the half-light, standing motionless and facing directly towards me.

I moved to my right so that I could see better, making use of the almost redundant street lighting. The tall, broad silhouette was Aron Dam, a drink moving to his lips and a stream of smoke escaping from the cigarette held close to his chin.

Karis saw me looking, saw the expression on my face. She followed my gaze and saw her former boyfriend standing there and staring at us. At me.

She excused herself from her friends and hurried over, placing a calming hand on my arm. ‘Let me speak to him. Please. Stay here.’

Karis marched across the square until she was in Aron’s face. Her slight figure looking diminutive next to his in the pale light of the newly risen sun. Whatever she said, he took a step back and began waving his arms about demonstratively. I felt the urge to go over, but Karis stepped forward again until Dam had nowhere to go, his back against the wall, and I saw a tiny hand come up and jab him in the chest.

He gestured some more in protest, but when she leaned in close and said something that only he could hear, he threw his arms high then turned away, seemingly defeated. Yet again someone else was fighting my battles for me. It couldn’t carry on that way.

She walked back, head down, with her hat covering her face. I saw her shoulders drop as she sighed, and knew that the conversation had cost her. Still, when she came up to look at me, she was smiling. It was as much apology as explanation.

‘It is over. He knows I am with you now.’

This was news to me. ‘You are?’

‘Yes. If you want me to be.’

‘Yes, I do.’

She smiled. ‘Good. Now take me to your place. I don’t want to go on to a party. We can have our own.’

It had been a long day but I was happy for it to get longer. She slipped her arms through mine and I felt the heat rise from her body as we kissed.

As we turned away, Karis hugging me close, I looked to the other side of the square and saw Aron Dam staring back, the tip of his cigarette glowing furiously in the shadows.

Chapter 18

We were in Karis’s flat and she was curled up with her back to me, her hair inches from my nose, the smell of her making me feel almost drunk. This was our third night together in a row and I was getting used to it, sharing my space and my body heat. More than that, I was getting to like it, and that in itself unsettled me.

It had become obvious to me the previous two nights, both spent in my shack, that I still wouldn’t sleep much, but at least now I had something useful to do while awake. In fact, rather than struggle to sleep, I fought to avoid it. I was ever mindful of the potential consequences of slumber, wary of the dreams and the words and the shouts that might betray me in the night.

Instead, I wrapped myself around her, content to look at her while she slept. I watched her breathe: gently in, gently out. She lay so still, her face expressionless, as if she knew she was being watched and didn’t want to spoil the illusion for me. She was perhaps even more beautiful asleep than awake, even devoid of the mischievous spark that lit up her eyes.

The chaos of her flat, which doubled as her studio, was all around us. A mess of canvasses and materials strewn seemingly where they fell. Yet I’d watched her step between them effortlessly, picking a path without a sideways glance. Brushing my lips past her ear, I lifted my head so that I could see the half-finished painting that sat on the easel near the window.

The soft light caught half of it, making it appear even more brooding than she’d intended. Half of my face in light, half in darkness. The broad strokes had partly been filled in and colour added to my jaw and cheek, my mouth set fast in defiance. I recognized my hair, dark and unruly in its sweep to the right. Noticeably untouched were my eyes, just blank spaces waiting to be filled.

Her other work was scattered round the room, some finished, some seemingly abandoned halfway through, waiting for inspiration to reappear. There were more canvasses, dark works in variations of oil, acrylics and charcoals. Others seemed to be experiments in mixed media using paint and collage. These depicted raging storms or menacing clouds hanging over various island scenes. I recognized the dramatic sea stack at Drangarnir, with its amazing natural arch in the middle of it; the dumpy Lítla Dímun island with its vertical cliffs; and the ruins of the unfinished Magnus Cathedral at Kirkjubøur. All of them under attack from glowering skies, cowering beneath Nature’s rage.

I didn’t know much about art. I wasn’t even sure that I knew what I liked. But I could see that these were startling works. There was an intensity about them, something driven. This wasn’t someone just playing at painting things; her work shouted out that she was compelled to do it. The canvasses were brilliant, and even I could see why she had sold to Los Angeles and London.

They were dark, though; there was no escaping that. Just as there was no getting away from the menace from above depicted in almost every piece. What did they say about her mindset or how she really felt about her country? I decided it was better not to know.

My head sank once more, my lips against her shoulder, and she flickered momentarily before she settled again. I watched some more, wondering how the hell I had got myself into something I’d sworn to avoid, and wondering how the hell I’d done so well as to find myself with her. Tiny little breaths escaped from between her lips, making the slightest whistle, and I was the only person in the world that could hear it.

I could feel the comfort and the calm getting the better of me, and I knew I was swimming into a half-sleep, carried away by the warmth of her skin and the smell of her natural perfume. I wasn’t sleeping, though, I was sure I wasn’t. Instead it was fitful serenity; a workable compromise, some kind of sleep mode where I could retain some control. That was what I told myself as I drifted deeper.