Oh yes, she was the daughter of Fritz down in Vágur, perhaps they’d known each other? She’d grown up among the Danes, herself, but her family lived here still.

She was pulping the yellow from the flower between her fingers.

‘We buried Fritz not so long ago,’ she said, ‘earlier in the summer. But as a young man he was fond of the power plant, actually, so we thought we’d take a walk up there.’ 92

She introduced us. I caught the word hjá, which I think means both with or at and belonging to. My mother was the daughter hjá Fritz in Vágur, I was the daughter hjá her and the Tarantula. The man looked at me with his small, paleblue eyes. Me, the composite product. The diluted version. Then he nodded graciously at the Tarantula. He was hjá no one, just a foreigner.

The old man stared into the fog and nodded again, more slowly. His wind jacket was open, and had been red at some point in the Eighties. A brown knitted jumper peeped out from beneath the plastic material. Silver buttons at the right shoulder. He spoke like Abbe, like older Vágbingar speak. Words that circle slowly, looking for the car park.

Oh indeed. He remembered my mother’s father. There was one time, he remembered now, when the two of them had invited a couple of Russian businessmen out on a little fishing trip. The blue-eyed man chuckled. They weren’t quite as hardy as you’d think, the Russians. As usual, they’d gone straight for the bottle. You’d have thought they of all people could hold a drop of schnapps.

I stood there on the patched asphalt while the fog pressed up behind me, listening to the story about the fishing trip.

You have to picture it like this: two Russian mackerel-dealers, herring-gangsters, and two Faroese in a four-man rowing boat, completely sloshed. The Russians tall and 93slender-limbed in suits and coats. Legs inexpertly folded in the low boat. Oar strokes making the fabric of their coats strain at the armpits as they set out into the green fjord, tiny beneath the colossal shadow of the mountainside. And then the Faroese. Compact and bandy-legged. At home in the boat. Red all the way down to their throats with stifled laughter.

They’d held the boat hard against the current and taken it easy at the oars while the Russians toiled till they were wheezing for breath and the boozy sweat was dripping. The water in the bottom muck-soaked their nice shiny shoes.

At last it dawned on them they were being taken for fools.

Things had nearly gone very badly.

‘Åhja,’ said the old man. ‘If you’re born to be hanged, you’ll never be drowned.’ Then he fell abruptly silent and raised his index finger to his cloth cap. Now he’d spoken in memory of the dead. Now he had to move on.