The road was bordered with young cherry trees. When the fruit fell it lay messily among the gravel like bloody dollops of spit on the white ground. The gravel in other people’s carports was black. Abbe wasn’t stingy, even though he’d never get rid of so much as a bent nail. He would happily pay extra for nicer gravel.

Now I sat in the car, angry at both of them.

Omma because she cuckoo-ed. Abbe because he just sang.

I was thinking about the mermaid’s prophecy, or I had it on the brain, her turn back, turn back. My feet moved on the rubber mat while the Tarantula backed out and paused so we could wave again.

Later, several years later, as Abbe stood and gazed bewildered at the floor in Omma’s nursing home while a little lady was led away by the elbow, it struck me again.

The drowned cannot lie: a mermaid never lies. She says turn back and then turn back, she’s saying spin around and around, she’s saying ha ha! It’s the nature of the mermaid. She has no stake in the outcome, she is merely 144the prompter—but the prompter of the drowned. She has no other function than that. To laugh and point. Longing is placeless, and the mermaid knows it.

She laughs and points.

But that morning, after Abbe’s birthday, the sun was shining on Omma’s face. Her fine white hair fell in impeccable waves. Her cardigan was buttoned up wrong. She laughed and cried as she waved. I waved back through the rear window, trying to see something other than her slack, open mouth and the spittle at the corners. Something in her had disappeared. Later she disappeared completely.

145

THE LISTENING STATION

It was the Tarantula who mentioned that Ragnar was a regular at Skúvanes during the Cold War.

We were standing in the night outside Aunt Ása’s kitchen window.

I laughed till there were cramps in the small of my back. Swallowing smoke, I coughed. The Tarantula shushed me as he thumped me on the back. The laughter came in white-and-yellow gulps; now I couldn’t stop, just the thought of it! That they’d let him go wandering around up there several times, even after the war, Red Ragnar, that he’d waltzed right into the listening station among all the intelligence officers listening out for Communists.

The Loran-A station at Skúvanes was the principal among a chain of listening posts stretching from Iceland to the Hebrides. During the war it was the RAF who had operated the station. Who sat there listening. When the war was over and the British went home, the Danish navy arrived and listened in their stead. Later it was the Lighthouse Authority’s turn. Finally, in the 1970s, shortly before the station was shut down, there were only the 146Faroese. Today the sheep live there. Gulls nest not far away.