She got a job as a ward maid at the hospital in Vordingborg. Abbe was studying to be a teacher. They sent laughing photos home. Omma in a white dress on the beach, Abbe with his sleeves rolled up, a snowstorm, pictures of a late summer, a winter, a spring; then the post stopped.

He’d been happy, Abbe. In the photographs from the time before the occupation, he looked happy. Not like a 90man whose dreams lay at the bottom of the sea or drowned in rum in a harbour pub somewhere. Maybe he gave up the idea of the power plant at Botni, the dignified rank of engineer, even then. It didn’t matter. The plant was his starting point, his Ithaca, and therefore mine as well; the place he wanted to leave and then go home to.

One morning we drove up there.

The man came walking towards us down the potholed road, bow-legged, like a retired sailor.

The marsh marigolds glittered yellow, a nervous velour. My mother bent to pick one. She was always plucking at the earth, picking up a piece of land and carrying it around with her in the small hollows of her skin. The air was raw, damp. The flowers and the stones were like Botox for the soul, she said.

The car stood parked at the roadside further down. We wanted to walk the final stretch, the Tarantula in his worn hiking boots, Ma with her springy strides. It was impossible to overlook: she was lighter just by being here, lush. She regained her elasticity.

I glanced over my shoulder to see whether the man was going to meet anybody. The road vanished empty into the fog, stopping abruptly a few metres beyond the car.

The fog had put a lid over the bay, grey proudly displaying green. The valley around the power plant is otherwise a scarred place. Dust-coloured. One of the few ugly spots 91on Suðuroy. Only the cratered moonscape offered to tourists around the airport hotel at Sørvágur is perhaps more disconsolate.

Big grey pipes zigzag up over the mountain from the plant. They suck water from the lakes on the island’s western side. One of them runs flush to the road. A thick, industrial worm.

We didn’t know the man who stopped and tapped his cloth cap as he sized us up. The Tarantula didn’t take him long. His dark skin and long legs didn’t match the terrain, but my mother: she had the eyes. The ivory skin. The old man nodded at her slowly, getting her scent.

‘You’ve not been home in a long time, eh?’

The moment was delicate. He had no idea who she was. It occurred to me that blood smells blood.

She answered in a mixture of Danish and Faroese, Dano-Faroese, please-excuse-my-Faroese, Danish with a Faroese sound. Her voice brightened, grew girlish.