Whenever we were back home on the islands, not just this time, but always, my mother had many sacred places to visit. Things she had to call on. They plucked at her. For me, there wasn’t that much. The heart of Tórshavn. The white house. The hulder stone. Coordinates set in childhood.

But there were the pincer-shaped cliffs around the old natural harbour. Vágseiði. A particularly bright coordinate. I wanted to go out there alone. I was afraid I wouldn’t have time.

One morning, shortly before we were due to leave, I got up early and stole away. The piece of coastline with the flat rocks was beyond the nursing home and the lake, behind the sports centre.

The sun shone.

I found shelter. Sat down. The light rolled tenderly and diffusely up the cliffs, over the lacquer-blue water. To the west was Skúvanes Mountain, blackened in the sun. I listened. The wind jingled like glass between the fissures in the rocks and in the pools. The rock is brown, rough, 107uneven. There are knots and veins in the stone. Mossslippery basins. The seawater washes up and stays there. The pools glitter, hoarding algae, cigarette butts, a brown banana. I played here as a child. My cousins and I, we shouted to each other through the gaps in I-don’t-know-what-language. Childhood Esperanto.

I had a memory there, with Abbe.

That summer it had rained non-stop. I’d got my first top mark in geology; in fairness, my only one. Omma had died in the winter. Abbe was confused, porous. He longed to go north. When the holiday came, we all flew home together. That’s what it was called; that’s what it’s always been called. Back home on the islands. Home on Suðuroy. Home in Sørvágur.

My mother was born in Vordingborg, I was born at the Central Hospital in Copenhagen. People talk a lot about what home is. A state of mind, the people you meet, all that stuff. I thought it was bollocks. Something said by culturally displaced backpackers with a mouthful of earth, of meat, chewing and slurping their way through the world.

Home is a toponym, I thought. A place name.

But back then, with Abbe: a sopping wet and green August. Moss green, fog green, bottle green. My coat was thick and army green, a man’s coat, torn at the zip. I wore a hoodie underneath. I wound my new shawl around my 108throat like a scarf. The brown wool, the beautiful handiwork, was turning fluffy, the stitches stretching in places.

Abbe sighed at me. My worn trainers, the cigarettes. I’d just discovered global warming, overconsumption, industrial abattoirs, and had renounced the beef soup with cream and skinned tomatoes that was so popular, contenting myself stoically with rye bread, beer, schnapps. I was sitting pretty, and I was hungry all the time.

It was afternoon. Abbe and I were standing there.