We rose, those of us supposed to carry it. Just in time the Tarantula leant forward and whispered, ‘It’s not as 28heavy as you think.’ For a moment I felt it in my arm. The weight misjudged, the lightness, my elbow flying upwards, my hand letting go in fright, the thing crashing to the floor. Then we lined up, and my skin stuck to the handle on the side of the coffin. I concentrated. At the very moment we lifted, the air around me smelled of Omma. It was sudden, penetrating. Her perfume, hair. Freshly ironed cotton. I completely forgot to worry about the white wood, which would splinter as the coffin thundered to the floor, the body, Omma’s waxen cheek against the cold stone. When the organist struck a deep and unexpectedly clear tone, my legs simply began to move. I kept time, moving away from Omma’s scent. It hung still, as though she’d come to a halt in the aisle. Watching us go.

The hearse drove. The wake was being held at the community centre. We walked the short stretch through the fog, taking the path that began between the church and the old village school. What with the weddings and the funerals, the cars were packed tight in the small church car park. Behind it was the school, which wasn’t a school any more but was still called that, because it was my mother’s childhood home.

In those days the brick building had been divided into teachers’ accommodation and schoolrooms. I know that an oak hedge separated the ornamental garden from the fruit garden behind the building. That the hedge rustled 29darkly when it was August and evening, and they came home from summer on the Faroe Islands, loaded with dried fish and mutton and duty-free cigarettes from the boat.

In the fruit garden, one of the trees grew summer apples. Coming home from summer: a wedge of torchlight in the faintly scorched August darkness. Nettles grown caustic while the building stood empty. Stinging legs, longing and release, the first foaming white bite of apple.

The school was my mother’s childhood, one of the places she could mean when she said home.

I know that Abbe built the House among the Fields later, after Ma grew up—after the village school and the other small schools nearby were emptied, and the children swilled onto grey concrete.

From the big windows in the community centre’s main hall, the uppermost branches of the apple tree were just visible. The room was long and high-ceilinged, sanatorium-white.

Along the row of windows sat the people wanting schnapps. They were the majority, so many that we all had to help with pouring. With a cold bottle of Brøndum sweating in my palm and one of Omma’s sea-green crystal glasses, I went from chair to chair and served. Everybody drank from the same green glass. Saliva collected along the rim. 30