High up on the mountain is the old military base, once run by the Americans, which has now been reassigned to the prison services. Today it’s a detention centre with space for twelve inmates. Longer sentences are served in Denmark. The killer who was held there recently while awaiting his verdict was the first in twenty-three years. I didn’t know where he was now. Herstedvester. Vridsløselille. It struck me that the Faroe Islands were perhaps the only country in the world without a proper prison. The thought made me proud, then ashamed.

‘How do they deal with juvenile detention centres, youth residential institutions, stuff like that?’

Neither the Tarantula nor my mother was sure. I persisted. If young people were being sent away from their own country into ours to be locked up, I said, if a mother had to drop several thousand kroner on a plane ticket every time she wanted to give her sixteen-year-old a hug and a change of underpants, shouldn’t we at least know about it? That sort of stuff? Here in the Danish Realm? 76

My mother didn’t think the Faroese youth were especially criminal. The Tarantula said something about sheep-tipping. Then my mother said there were plenty of good opportunities to commit juvenile crime on the Faroe Islands, if the youth were so inclined. I gave up. The clouds lingered, hanging in the valley.

We drove out into the light.

Aunt Anna had inherited Tórshavn’s heart from her mother. It occurred to me now that Anna’s mother was Great-Aunt Ingrún. That I hadn’t even realized. It made the house a different house. I lay in the guest bedroom in the bright night and stared out through the curtain.

I was sorry I’d made Ingrún so coarse and chestnutty, when Aunt Anna was mildness itself and had soft, finely drawn hands.

But now she was who she was, Ingrún. I couldn’t undo it. The image of the chestnut arms and drum-belly was stuck. The big hands.

To pour a kind of oil on the waters, I showed a grovelling affection for everything in the house. I trod softly on the stairs. I slipped vigilantly through the rooms, and handled every fork, every knick-knack, as if it were the brittlest glass.

We sat in the kitchen. On the baby-blue fridge hung a postcard depicting palm trees and an orange beach umbrella. The Tarantula drank a dark Faroese beer. It was evening. The sun was a white square on the curtain. 77

Aunt Anna measured my hands then began to knit. I inhaled the scent of the brown, slightly oily yarn.

Aunt Anna knitted in Faroese. The thread was over her right index finger, and the stitches slipped vertically from needle to needle, a smooth movement, shyoo, shyoo, shyoo, without any pumping of the elbow. The difference ran through her whole knitting body. ‘Look,’ said Ma, ‘Anna’s ravelling.’