Free Cold Comfort by Quentin Bates

to look. She placed it in front of her and Sigrún poured.
    “Is Laufey here?”
    “I sent her to the Co-op with Jens.”
    “Ah, peace and quiet for five minutes.”
    “Not for long.” Sigrún looked preoccupied and frowned.
    “What’s up?” Gunna asked, recognizing the signs. “Jörundur behaving himself?”
    “Well …” Sigrún began.
    Gunna sipped her scalding coffee and waited.
    “I don’t know what you think… and I really hope it’s not going to be a problem for you, what with Laufey and everything. But Jörundur and I have been, well, you know, talking about everything. And he’s been offered a job.”
    “That’s great,” Gunna said warmly. Sigrún’s surly bear of a husband had been one of the first victims of Iceland’s financial turmoil, as the construction business had ground to a halt even before the banks had admitted that their coffers were empty. “But it means moving, right?”
    Sigrún nodded. “Norway.”
    “Norway? Good grief.”
    Gunna wondered, as so many times before, how she would ever have managed to juggle work and family without Sigrún down the street to feed the children when police business called. With Gísli now away at sea much of the time and Laufey turning into an independent young woman in her next to last year of secondary school, Sigrún’s help was less frequently needed, but still invaluable.
    “He’s been unemployed for the best part of a year, and things don’t look like getting any better. It seems that one of the guys he used to work with up at the Kárahnjúkar dam got a job there on some tunnel-building project and they need people with experience, so he called Jörundur up and told him to apply. Jörundur’s good at what he does, you know. They told him to come over as soon as he can and the job’s his.”
    Sigrún looked suddenly tearful before taking a deep breath.
    “We’ve been over it again and again, but he’s set on it,” she continued. “I’ve told him often enough that if we’re careful we can live on what I bring in. There wouldn’t be any holidays in the sun, but I can live with that.”
    “But not Jörundur?”
    “Ach. You know what blokes are like, and my Jörundur’s not what you’d call a new man. As far as he’s concerned, a man provides, and if he can’t, he’s a waste of space. I suggested he could go back to college for a year and retrain, but that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.”
    “So when are you leaving?” Gunna asked softly.
    “Next month, probably.”
    “You’ll be fine,” she forced herself to say. “Something new.”
    “We thought about him commuting. You know, a week at home and two weeks over there, something like that,” Sigrún continued as if Gunna hadn’t spoken. “But that’d never work out. You know what Jörundur’s like. A couple of beers with the boys and he’d be off on one again.”
    “I understand. What about your job? What happens there?”
    “That’s no problem. The council’s so desperate to cut the wage bill that they couldn’t wait to tell me I could have a year’s unpaid leave whenever I want.”
    “So it’s there if you want to come back to it?”
    “That’s it. But it’s not as if work’s going to disappear. People keep on having children, so the demand for nursery school teachers isn’t going to go away.”
    “More, if anything. There seem to be more and more pregnant women than ever around these days. You’d have thought the recession would put people off having kids, but it seems it’s the opposite.”
    “Got to find something to cheer yourself up when times are hard,” Sigrún grinned, a smile returning to her round face at last. “There’s nothing like do-it-yourself entertainment. Are you eating? There’s enough fish for everyone.”
    Suddenly the back door opened and swung in with a bang as the wind caught it.
    “Mum! Guess what?” Laufey yelled from behind the gurgling toddler as she steered the pushchair through the door.
    “Hæ,