We played Catch the Horizon. It was something we’d done together since I was a child, and now we could glide wordlessly, synchronously into the game. The object was to keep quiet, settle in and stay still, even as the fierce pressure of the air made your eyes water, even on days when it was bucketing down, when the sea rose and shot forward, when the waves broke blindly over the land.

I let go of the line with my gaze. Lost. Cast a sideways glance at Abbe. He stood rocking on his heels. The movement was slow, rolling, encoded into the musculature of his ankles.

Gusts of wind slapped against the moss-speckled cliffs, tugging at his eyelids and sweeping his hair back over the crown of his head. He kept his hands folded behind his back. Unvanquished.

I had a cold. My nose was dribbling thinly.

Abbe’s light summer jacket hung open, unzipped to the solar plexus. People drove to the supermarket in their 109shirtsleeves. I carried my foreignness wherever I went, bundled snugly inside it. That sort of difference. I felt ashamed.

Now he was watching the knobbly shawl, the clumsy knot wrenching at the yarn. My hair whipped about, sticking to my lips, the wet skin below my nose.

‘You are a slovenly little thing.’

It was okay. My marks were good, my future prospects bright. On the whole, Abbe was satisfied.

I reached up, wound my hair into a dark, matted cable around my wrist and stuffed it underneath my hood.

The sea came rolling underneath the fret.

The women in my mother’s family have a lightness to them, fat as well as thin, a brightness. They’re delicately formed, their skin pale and pristine. I’m a lummock. Smoothing the folds in my shawl, I accepted Abbe’s ‘little’ with gratitude.

Beneath the shore the water was grey, darkening further out. The breakers came hissing over the rocks.

Abbe told me about the old harbour, the fishery.

A broad stone chute at our feet, planed out of the rock itself, led down to the sea. Down the middle ran a rib of metallic piping, bolted to the stone. They were something definite, they’d had a function. Abbe couldn’t remember the word in Danish.

Back when the harbour was still in use, and later, when they went whaling, they carried the boats down the chute. The fishermen walked in step, their knees slightly bent, 110taking short steps. Their shoulders worked. I could picture it under his jacket—that movement, a specific rhythm, their bodies sharing the weight, jointly carrying the boat; precisely that: joined.

The wind acted like cotton wool in my ears. I saw more than heard his loneliness.

He zipped up his jacket. It was getting late. They probably had food waiting for us.

The road back to the village passed through the silence of the birds. The fog.