Whenever we were back home on the islands, not just this time, but always, my mother had many sacred places to visit. Things she had to call on. They plucked at her. For me, there wasn’t that much. The heart of Tórshavn. The white house. The hulder stone. Coordinates set in childhood.
But there were the pincer-shaped cliffs around the old natural harbour. Vágseiði. A particularly bright coordinate. I wanted to go out there alone. I was afraid I wouldn’t have time.
One morning, shortly before we were due to leave, I got up early and stole away. The piece of coastline with the flat rocks was beyond the nursing home and the lake, behind the sports centre.
The sun shone.
I found shelter. Sat down. The light rolled tenderly and diffusely up the cliffs, over the lacquer-blue water. To the west was Skúvanes Mountain, blackened in the sun. I listened. The wind jingled like glass between the fissures in the rocks and in the pools. The rock is brown, rough, 107uneven. There are knots and veins in the stone. Mossslippery basins. The seawater washes up and stays there. The pools glitter, hoarding algae, cigarette butts, a brown banana. I played here as a child. My cousins and I, we shouted to each other through the gaps in I-don’t-know-what-language. Childhood Esperanto.
I had a memory there, with Abbe.
That summer it had rained non-stop. I’d got my first top mark in geology; in fairness, my only one. Omma had died in the winter. Abbe was confused, porous. He longed to go north. When the holiday came, we all flew home together. That’s what it was called; that’s what it’s always been called. Back home on the islands. Home on Suðuroy. Home in Sørvágur.
My mother was born in Vordingborg, I was born at the Central Hospital in Copenhagen. People talk a lot about what home is. A state of mind, the people you meet, all that stuff. I thought it was bollocks. Something said by culturally displaced backpackers with a mouthful of earth, of meat, chewing and slurping their way through the world.
Home is a toponym, I thought. A place name.
But back then, with Abbe: a sopping wet and green August. Moss green, fog green, bottle green. My coat was thick and army green, a man’s coat, torn at the zip. I wore a hoodie underneath. I wound my new shawl around my 108throat like a scarf. The brown wool, the beautiful handiwork, was turning fluffy, the stitches stretching in places.
Abbe sighed at me. My worn trainers, the cigarettes. I’d just discovered global warming, overconsumption, industrial abattoirs, and had renounced the beef soup with cream and skinned tomatoes that was so popular, contenting myself stoically with rye bread, beer, schnapps. I was sitting pretty, and I was hungry all the time.
It was afternoon. Abbe and I were standing there.
We played Catch the Horizon. It was something we’d done together since I was a child, and now we could glide wordlessly, synchronously into the game. The object was to keep quiet, settle in and stay still, even as the fierce pressure of the air made your eyes water, even on days when it was bucketing down, when the sea rose and shot forward, when the waves broke blindly over the land.
I let go of the line with my gaze. Lost. Cast a sideways glance at Abbe. He stood rocking on his heels. The movement was slow, rolling, encoded into the musculature of his ankles.
Gusts of wind slapped against the moss-speckled cliffs, tugging at his eyelids and sweeping his hair back over the crown of his head. He kept his hands folded behind his back. Unvanquished.
I had a cold. My nose was dribbling thinly.
Abbe’s light summer jacket hung open, unzipped to the solar plexus. People drove to the supermarket in their 109shirtsleeves. I carried my foreignness wherever I went, bundled snugly inside it. That sort of difference. I felt ashamed.
Now he was watching the knobbly shawl, the clumsy knot wrenching at the yarn. My hair whipped about, sticking to my lips, the wet skin below my nose.
‘You are a slovenly little thing.’
It was okay. My marks were good, my future prospects bright. On the whole, Abbe was satisfied.
I reached up, wound my hair into a dark, matted cable around my wrist and stuffed it underneath my hood.
The sea came rolling underneath the fret.
The women in my mother’s family have a lightness to them, fat as well as thin, a brightness. They’re delicately formed, their skin pale and pristine. I’m a lummock. Smoothing the folds in my shawl, I accepted Abbe’s ‘little’ with gratitude.
Beneath the shore the water was grey, darkening further out. The breakers came hissing over the rocks.
Abbe told me about the old harbour, the fishery.
A broad stone chute at our feet, planed out of the rock itself, led down to the sea. Down the middle ran a rib of metallic piping, bolted to the stone. They were something definite, they’d had a function. Abbe couldn’t remember the word in Danish.
Back when the harbour was still in use, and later, when they went whaling, they carried the boats down the chute. The fishermen walked in step, their knees slightly bent, 110taking short steps. Their shoulders worked. I could picture it under his jacket—that movement, a specific rhythm, their bodies sharing the weight, jointly carrying the boat; precisely that: joined.
The wind acted like cotton wool in my ears. I saw more than heard his loneliness.
He zipped up his jacket. It was getting late. They probably had food waiting for us.
The road back to the village passed through the silence of the birds. The fog.
Just before death by old age, the face assumes its final form. Something happens to the nose: the cartilage subsides a little, or the bone is sharper. I thought of Omma’s face at the nursing home. The unabashed mouth. The sliver of eye beneath the lid and her bare nose. I wanted to ask if he missed her, if he was thinking of moving back now. Home. Then I didn’t dare.
At the fjord’s end the fog was dense. Stretching out an arm, I saw my hand vanish into grey air. Abbe didn’t look ahead, he walked by memory. I held onto his coat.
Now the corner of a house came into view, then a peeling wall. A blue metal roundness, the bonnet of a car. A cold sense of space between the houses, out towards the quay.
Abbe spoke in an undertone, constantly. A kind of sonar. Now we were passing the stone woman on her pedestal outside the church.
‘You remember who she is?’ 111
I nodded and squinted, seeing only the grey. Then I remembered he couldn’t see me. ‘Yes.’
The memorial was for those lost and drowned at sea, as I recalled. Drowning their sorrows, I thought, and immediately felt guilty. Meanwhile Abbe talked on.
There was the memorial to Nólsoyar Páll.
He stopped now and pointed. His sleeve brushed my shoulder. Páll was a prosperous farmer and poet and visionary; he’d built the first Faroe-owned ship since the Middle Ages. Royndin Fríða she was called. I asked whether Abbe had sailed on the ship, if he’d sailed with Páll?
Abbe was quiet for a while. Then he said Nólsoyar Páll had died at sea, or so the story went. He was last seen on the Thames in 1808, then never again. Perhaps I remembered him from the fifty, the bank note? Abbe’s voice came out of the fog. It sounded sad.
‘Oh right,’ I hurried to say. ‘Yeah.’
He went on for a while about the trade monopoly, which Nólsoyar Páll had opposed, and about something called the Ballad of the Birds. I thought of the old twenty-krone note with the house sparrows. We walked.
Royndin Fríða means The Bid for Freedom.
I asked if it had succeeded.
‘In time, it will,’ he replied.
The path sloped upwards. The harbour’s salt and tar disappeared into new-mown hay. Home trembled around us out of the grey.