He wanted to make his father proud. He knew how much his father had sacrificed to make a successful singer of him, and now the fruits of that toil were going to be seen. It had cost relentless training. Complaining was futile. He had tried that and it made his father angry.

He trusted his father completely. That was the way it had always been. Even when he was singing in public against his own wishes. His father drove him on, encouraged him and had his own way in the end. It was torture for the boy the first time he sang for strangers: stage fright, bashful-ness in front of all those people. But his father would not yield an inch, not even when the boy was bullied over his singing. The more he performed in public, at school and in church, the worse the boys and some girls too treated him, calling him names, even mocking his voice. He could not understand what motivated them.

He did not want to provoke his father’s wrath. He was devastated after their mother died. She contracted leukaemia and it killed her within months. Their father was by her bedside day and night, accompanied her to the hospital and slept there while her life ebbed away. The last words he said before they left home for the concert were: Think about your mother. How proud she would have been of you.

The choir had taken up its position on the stage. All the girls in identical frocks paid for by the town council. The boys in white shirts and black trousers, just like he was wearing. They whispered together, excited at all the attention the choir was receiving, determined to do their best. Gabriel, the choirmaster, was talking to the stage manager. The compere stubbed out a cigarette on the floor. Everything was ready. Soon it would be curtain up.

Gabriel called him over.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s a packed house.”

“And they’ve all come to see you. Remember that. They’ve all come to see you and hear you sing and no one else, and you ought to be proud of that, pleased with yourself and not shy. Maybe you’re a bit nervous now, but that will wear off as soon as you start singing. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“Shall we start then?”

He nodded.

Gabriel put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“It’s bound to be difficult for you to look all those people in the eye, but you only need to sing and everything will be all right.”

“Yes.”

“The compere doesn’t come on until after the first song. We’ve rehearsed all this. You start singing and everything will be fine.”

Gabriel gave a sign to the stage manager. He gestured to the choir who immediately fell silent and lined up. Everything was in place. They were all ready.

The lights in the auditorium dimmed. The murmuring stopped. The curtain went up.

Think of your mother.

The last thought that crossed his mind before the auditorium opened up in front of him was his mother on her deathbed the final time he saw her, and for a second he lost his concentration. He was with his father, they were sitting together on one side of the bed, and she was so weak she could hardly keep her eyes open. She closed them and seemed to have fallen asleep, then opened them slowly, looked at him and tried to smile. They could not speak to each other any longer. When it was time to say goodbye they stood up, and he always regretted not having given her a farewell kiss, because this was the last time they were together. He simply stood up and walked out of the ward with his father, and the door closed behind them.

The curtain rose and he met his father’s gaze. The auditorium vanished from his sight and all he could see was his father’s glaring eyes.

Someone in the auditorium began laughing.

He came back to his senses. The choir had begun to sing and the choirmaster had given a sign, but he had missed it. Trying to gloss over the incident, the choirmaster took the choir through another round of the verse, and now he came in at the right place and had just started the song when something happened.

Something happened to his voice.

“It was a wolf,” Gabriel said, sitting in Erlendur’s cold hotel room. “There was a wolf in his voice, as the saying goes. Straight away in the first song, and then it was all over.”

14

Gabriel sat motionless on the bed, staring straight ahead, transported back to the stage at Hafnarfjordur cinema as the choir gradually fell silent. Gudlaugur, who could not understand what was happening to his voice, cleared his throat repeatedly and kept on trying to sing. His father got to his feet and his sister ran up onto the stage to make her brother stop. People whispered to each other at first, but soon the occasional half-smothered laugh broke out, gradually growing louder, and a few people whistled. Gabriel went to lead Gudlaugur off, but the boy stood as if nailed to the floor. The stage manager tried to bring down the curtain. The compere walked onto the stage with a cigarette in his hand, but did not know what to do. In the end Gabriel managed to move Gudlaugur and push him away. His sister was with him and shouted out to the audience not to laugh. His father was still standing in the same place in the front row, thunderstruck.

Gabriel came to earth and looked at Erlendur.

“I still shudder to think of it,” he said.

“A wolf in his voice?” Erlendur said. “I’m not too well up on…”

“It’s an idiom for when your voice breaks. What happens is that the vocal cords stretch in puberty, but you go on using your voice in the same way and it shifts an octave lower. The result isn’t pretty, you sort of yodel downwards. This is what ruins all boys” choirs. He could have had another two or three years, but Gudlaugur matured early. His hormones started working prematurely and produced the most tragic night of his life.”

“You must have been a good friend of his, if you were the first person he went to later to discuss the whole affair.”

“You could say that. He regarded me as a confidant. Then that gradually ended, the way it does. I tried to help him as best I could and he continued singing with me. His father did not want to give up. He was going to make a singer out of his son. Talked about sending him to Italy or Germany. Even Britain. They’ve cultivated the most boy sopranos and have hundreds of fallen choral stars. Nothing is as short-lived as a child star.”

“But he never became a singer?”

“No. It was over. He had a reasonable adult voice, nothing special actually, but his interest was gone. All the work that had been put into singing, his whole childhood really, turned to dust that evening. His father took him to another teacher but nothing came of that. The spark had gone. He just played along for his father’s sake, then he gave up for good. He told me he had never really wanted any of it. Being a singer and a choirboy and performing in public. It was all his fathers wish.”

“You mentioned something before that happened some years later,” Erlendur said. “Some years after the concert at the cinema. I thought it was connected with his father being in a wheelchair. Was I mistaken?”

“A rift gradually developed between them. Between Gudlaugur and his father. You described the way the old man behaved when he came to see you with his daughter. I don’t know the whole story. Only a fragment of it.”

“But you give the impression that Gudlaugur and his sister were close.”

“There was no question about that,” Gabriel said. “She often came to choir practice with him and was always there when he sang at school and in church. She was kind to him, but she was devoted to her father too. He had an incredibly strong character. He was unflinching and firm when he wanted his own way, but could be tender at other times. In the end she took her father’s side. The boy was in rebellion. I can’t explain what it was, but he ended up hating his father and blaming him for what happened. Not just up there on the stage but everything.”