We packed the car and left Gásadalur. We were supposed to spend a day or two in Tórshavn then take the ferry back to Suðuroy.

I shut my eyes for the sharp bend just before the tunnel, thinking of the crosses you see planted by the roadside. The drooping flowers. Battered crash barrier. Sometimes there are sheep lolling in the middle of the carriageway. Leaping out of the fog. There’s no sign, no Caution! Leaping sheep!

I was looking forward to Aunt Anna’s homemade rye bread and the sound of her baby-blue fridge, which purred like a Jaguar.

Aunt Anna’s house was the heart of Tórshavn. In its midst sat Anna herself, half mythical figure, half librarian, with her chalk-white hair, her beautiful skin the delicate shade of skimmed milk, and her inexhaustible knowledge of the islands’ history. She could talk about the pirates who came all the way from Algeria, from Turkey, and about small, yellow-eyed Celts brought by the first Vikings who settled here. At Aunt Anna’s, being a tarantula child was an easy thing.

After the tunnel, the road sloped down past the grassy 74roofs of Bøur, the leaden beach and the outlook over Tindhólmur. The island thrust its jagged dragon’s spine up through the clouds. At one time no one lived there. It was cursed, they said, and left to erode in peace. Now there were the odd few summer cabins.

The road continued along the Sørvág Fjord, the shore, the level water ending at Mykines, then cut up through the village. We drove past the raised foundations of the church, the painted black wood, the gravestones with my DNA in the soil. And onward, past the white house in the meadow beyond the edge of the town, which had quietly crept upwards since we were there last.

We stayed in the white house one summer. That was with Omma and Abbe. I was six, maybe seven.

A gable window offered a view over the village and the fjord. I remembered the feeling of Mykines, which stole closer every time I blinked.

That summer I wore my wool jumper like it was the national dress. Several bigger children would play down by the river. They let me join in. I told them my family owned all the houses. They spoke Danish to me, and I thought I was speaking Faroese. I smothered slices of warm, cooked blood sausage under a mountain of powdered sugar. I watched the dusk swallow the flowers in the meadow. I was too small to understand that we were acting like tourists.

* * *

75The road between Sørvágur and Tórshavn crosses Mjørkadalur. The Valley of Fog. When it snapped into the valley, the sun disappeared. I put in earbuds.

It’s still early in the morning, sang Björk.

Elephant-grey clouds churned between the valley walls, a heavy centrifugal lightshow that alternated between shadow and more shadow.