We landed at Vágar airport in the morning.
Earlier, over the Atlantic, I had listened to the voices in the cabin. To the Icelandic pilot, who spoke Danish and Faroese with the same vaguely moist lisp. To the peculiar Suðingar dialect. The slower one from the north fjords. I strained to understand the sleepy exchanges between the seats. Thought again of the young Faroese musician leaning forward in a smoky Christianshavn bar and saying, ‘You? You can’t even pronounce your own name.’
‘You don’t have to speak Danish,’ Bára had said. ‘My friend’s half Faroese.’
The journey from Kastrup to Vágar is short, but the approach feels endless. The mountains lean heavily against the plane. Green fills the window. Reaches in. I closed my eyes for the last bit. If sheep walk by at the right moment, you glimpse their yellow slitted eyes a split second before the wings scrape past. I’d had a schnapps, then another. There was still a whine in my ears.
As soon as we’d been let off the plane, the Tarantula and I looked for a place to smoke. 10
Ma said something about the bags and disappeared.
Beneath a large NO SMOKING sign a clutch of Faroese were lighting up. One had brought an ashtray. Heavy, creamy white. The conversation drifted with the smoke.
They’d arranged themselves into a circle around the arm holding the outstretched porcelain. I held up my lighter like a plastic orange ticket, and we were ushered in.
Politics was the current topic. A woman in an egg-white pullover was insisting it was a good thing the Faroe Islands had had the wit to keep out of Europe. What a shambles. She puffed authoritatively through her nose. Everyone in the circle nodded. A small lady in a blue windbreaker responded with åhja, which can be a question or unqualified assent, and which here was the latter.
The arrivals hall was a greying white, the way transit dirties walls. Through the pane of glass and beyond the car park I saw the mountains. Deep green. The clouds drifted low along the crash barrier. I needed air. The scent of Faroese air.
The Tarantula coughed. His face bobbed above the hair-dos in the group like a friendly, full-bearded balloon. Now he stooped a little until he was eye level. The Faroe Islands, he objected politely, were in Europe, actually. All of us, when you thought about it, including the people in the airport right now, were in Europe.
The circle of puffing Faroese surveyed him. Not unkindly.
Nobody nodded. 11
Then the authoritative woman spoke up. Switching into Danish, she answered slowly and clearly, almost tenderly, as though to an obstinate sheep.
‘No. We’re not in Europe here.’
The Tarantula’s hand with its cigarette hung poised there for a moment, then made a hesitant salvo. The Faroes weren’t part of the EU, that was clear, it wasn’t Europe in that sense. But purely geographically? If you looked at the atlas?
The woman smiled. I knew that smile from my mother. It’s a freebie women get to claim once most of their life is lived. The circle smiled too, variations on a theme, the women gentle, the men somewhat embarrassed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You may be right about lots of things, but there you’re mistaken.’
With her Prince 100 she sketched it all in a soft circle: the mountains, the deep fjords, the dark tunnels.
‘This isn’t Europe. This is the Faroe Islands.’
‘Hette er Føroyar,’ repeated a man in a woolly jumper. A mild åhja hummed around the circle.
The Tarantula inhaled. Slowly. I took a little step to the side and aimed my heel at his foot.
We found our suitcases, the rented car. This visit was my mother’s idea. She was longing to go home after all the funerals, she said. All those goodbyes. We could have a holiday together. See the family. She knew quite well that 12the longing was mine. I’d said so. ‘I can’t even pronounce my own name.’ And so she planned the trip.
The moment the wheels hit the landing strip, everybody on the islands knows that you’ve arrived. It’s impossible to say how. Maybe all you do is ring the aunt you’re staying with, or you land incognito and spend the night at a hotel, but knock unannounced at your grandfather’s brother’s house, or your half-uncle’s, on a completely different island, and you get: ‘Well, well. So there you are.’ Though that’s not necessarily true of all families.
Ma had rung Aunt Ása. We were travelling onward to Suðuroy.
Later, in the car, the Tarantula kept giggling.
‘It’s not something you can just decide!’
He said other things, too. Something about big ideas in small communities, something about mountain hobbits. It was affectionate enough, but it was precisely the fondness in his way of joking that made me angry. I felt like kicking the front seat, but didn’t. Instead I muttered. ‘Home isn’t necessarily a question of geography. Not even if you’re looking at an atlas.’
The first tunnel on the way to the ferry slurped us up. My mother leant forward over the wheel. Tightly narrowed. Into the stony darkness.