It was Omma’s choice that everything in my mother’s life should happen in Danish, including knitting. She taught herself the Danish method and passed it on to my mother. Thus my mother’s knitting body was made Danish, and my knitting body was made Danish; it was the assimilation of needlecraft.

But then, with time, when everyone had learned what they were supposed to, Omma retreated behind her shyoo, shyoo, shyoo, and kept ravelling as she’d always done.

In the TV room in the House among the Fields, one afternoon:

The sound of Abbe’s lawnmower coming through the open window, the scent of grass. Omma sat in one of the brown velvet chairs. I was in a heap of tangled yarn in the other. The weekends when they looked after me used to pass like that. His & Hers.

Brooke was pregnant and arguing with Ridge.

I swore. I’d just dropped half my stitches. Omma put her knitting in her lap and made to take up mine. The 78wide-reaching presence of her fingers. Her eyes remained on the screen and Ridge’s polished jaw. As soon as she got hold of my green yarn, her hands switched into Danish. It happened automatically, I saw it. Omma’s hands spoke a clumsy foreign language, which was mine and the only one I knew. The needles clicked against each other, ugly.

After that I wasn’t in the mood any more to knit and watch The Bold and the Beautiful. My lovely green project disappeared into the yarn basket and died of assorted stab wounds while Omma went out to get some tea.

Now I was an angry spirit, now I didn’t want the wholemilk Lipton, now I drifted aimlessly around the house with green yarn tangling inside me.

I moved between the dark spots in the living room, the dusty indoor dark that hangs about the furniture when the sun is thick outside. I was a monster in the crack between the armchair and the wall. Sitting there crumpled, I drew the shadows to me like seawater and swallowed them down, ready to spit them out over any stray sailors.

Abbe brought the light in from the terrace.

He had a sharp fragrance in his hands, chive flowers and greenhouse damp. The smell of earth always clung to him, heavy and dry, as though with him he carried a place.

He saw me in my craggy cave. I hissed, a little tentatively. Then he fetched the book, wafted it and captured me. 79

The luxury engine in Aunt Anna’s fridge and her rhythmic shyoo, shyoo, shyoo drifted into the living room, where he sat down and found his place in Morten Pontoppidan’s retelling of the Odyssey.

When Abbe read aloud, it was in fact an infinitely shy dialogue. His longing for home appeared between the lines. I followed the text with one finger.