Nothing has changed, and yet it’s as if everything has changed. My desk is still in its place under the window, the bookshelves by the wall, the fish tank on the chest of drawers in the corner. I sit up in my blue-striped pyjamas and look around.
But until then I’m just as far from being considered a grown up as I am from being a child I’m the missing link in the evolution of Homo sapiens. I’m a year closer to being considered a grown up, as Mum likes to put it, with a shadow of apprehension in her voice. She and Dad had danced to that song nine months earlier at some ball somewhere and it had since become their song.Then it became my song. She went into labour and the midwife came running into the room, arriving almost too late because she’d got stuck in a snow drift on the way, and screamed, “You're not seriously thinking of giving birth in this weather, are you?” It’s exactly thirteen years and twenty four minutes since the moment I was born into this world, on that cold February morning, when a Beatles song played for Mum on the radio. Light seeps through my eyelids, I blink twice and glance at the alarm clock. I’m a boy on the outside, but a girl on the inside innocent in body, guilty in soul. I’m an infant on the edge of a grave and an old man in a cradle, both a fish in the sky and a bird in the sea. The novel Góða ferð, Sveinn Ólafsson (1998), translated to English by the author and Lucy Culthew.
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