Björn took her elbow and steered her out through the doors and into the street. The sun was high in the sky and it was close to midday, but the contrast between bright sunshine and cool air still took Áróra by surprise every time she stepped outside. She preferred the milder climate in Britain. She could live with Scotland’s hard winters, as long as there were some warm days in summer. But the chill of the Icelandic summer was somehow a symbol of hopelessness.

‘Where’s she working now?’

‘How should I know?’ Björn asked, taking out an e-cigarette, 25puffing on it and exhaling a cloud of smoke with a strong strawberry aroma.

‘You live together, so you must know where she works,’ Áróra replied, trying to hide her impatience – with little success, judging by Björn’s expression.

‘We don’t live together any more,’ he said, dropping the vape into his pocket. ‘Ísafold walked out. I reckon she must have gone back to England.’

‘What?’ Áróra’s jaw dropped and she stared.

This wasn’t what she had expected. Ísafold was besotted with Björn. In her eyes he was the best, the greatest, the most wonderful, and as far as she was concerned, he couldn’t say or do anything that fell short of fantastic. That was apart from the hour or so after he had hit her. That was when she wept and wanted to leave. But the feeling rarely lasted longer than the time it took to patch her up. That was the way it had been each of the three times Áróra had hurried to Iceland when Ísafold had called her in tears.

‘Yeah,’ Björn said, and the familiar look of contempt that she loathed so much appeared on his face. ‘And if you were a decent sister to her, you’d have known that.’

He spun on his heel and went back into the phone shop. Áróra stood and stared at a bright-yellow dandelion that had pushed its way up through a crack in the pavement, shivering in the fresh breeze. Something serious must have happened for Ísafold to have decided to go back to England. She had never felt comfortable there, and Iceland had been her home for the last few years. Through most of her adult life she had made repeated attempts to settle in Iceland, taking a job in a fish plant that came with housing, and even spending a year running a farm. Most of these ventures had ended with her returning to Newcastle and immediately starting to organise the next trip to Iceland. Her repeated attempts to put down roots on this cold island had been unsuccessful, as if the country just spat her out again – until she met Björn.26