‘That was funny, wasn’t it, them knowing each other.’

The Tarantula gave my mother a little squeeze. The old man trundled slowly off into the mist. Ma and I said nothing. It wasn’t funny in the least. Her fingertips were yellow and greasy. The power plant glowed to meet us like a church.

The plant, the first on the Faroe Islands, came into being around the same time as Abbe. While his teeth were 94coming in, the plant was shooting its dust-grey tentacles across the soil. Starting to drone and crackle. Hardening the valley for its function.

It was the Tarantula who said the plant looked like a blind church. ‘And a bit mournful somehow.’ I was thinking it was old now. That the birds flew past and shat on the roof.

I’d begun to feel like I was in a low-budget road movie: those scenes where the landscape simply flits past, and you see the same cactus in the background again and again.

I needed the plant to be a null point, a beginning, a place in the centre of the world. A blind old power plant was no use to me.

On the other side of the fog was the water.

It struck me that the horizon, gold or charcoal-grey, sometimes purple or emerald-green, governs the angles of the universe. That it always does.

One April morning in 1940 the plant was still young.

The horizon: a strip of black velour.

The mountain hums, the wind has rolled itself up and is asleep on the roof. The light is in the last residue of night-time, like a boiled sweet in waxed paper. But then—this thing that happens. The big, historic thing the plant has witnessed: HMS Suffolk gliding by on the horizon with two hundred and fifty royal marines.

Soundlessly, soundlessly comes the war. 95

We walked around the plant. The wall was egg-yellow and naked without windows, the side painted red. I tried a small green door without result.

At first the war just sailed past, rounded Suðuroy and continued towards Streymoy. Then it came ashore everywhere. It’s easy to imagine the plant, still a little young and rash, taking stock of the occupation. The British with their garrison caps and fuzzy ‘t’s, their inexhaustible craving for tinned fish. Perhaps the plant was content. The British made the technology electric. Everywhere they shuffled the turf flat. They roared to and fro in their aeroplanes. Barracks and vehicles arrived, and they erected tall masts on the top of the cliff at Skúvanes, so that the island pricked up its ears and was made a vessel for listening. Radio waves from the new Loran-A station crackled across the Atlantic.

For the plant, the occupation wasn’t a distressing time. It had to be blacked out, but the great current rushed on.