After HB Tórshavn, which more or less always won, KÍ Klaksvík ran away with the most victories in the First Division. Abbe’s opinion was that the Klaksvíkers’ natural 148pugnacity always stood them in good stead, even there. Whispering, I passed this on to the Tarantula. He picked up the tune and nodded eagerly, drawing patterns in the twilight with the glow of his cigarette.

‘And do you remember,’ I said, now we were underway, ‘the stuff about them taking Kalle’s wooden leg off him when he got too crazy at parties?’

‘Oh yeah.’ The Tarantula’s solid outline was terra firma in the dark. ‘One time he made himself so popular they chucked it in the septic tank.’

In time, Kalle-Leg and Arni ended up with more than a passion for football in common. In the early 1950s, as the last great polio epidemic crept through the Danish Realm, it reached Suðuroy. Arni got infected. The paralysis took his left leg. Then there was no more football.

‘After that, of course, he couldn’t even find work on a boat,’ said the Tarantula. ‘But then somehow he wangled himself a job as a mechanic up at the station.’

‘Poor Arni,’ I said.

How he’d made it two hundred metres up the mountain to the listening station we had no idea. Maybe someone drove him. The important thing, anyway, was that he’d been wriggling around up there and from time to time had Ragnar over for a visit. We laughed again. Then we flicked away our cigarettes and went inside.

My room in the basement was pitch-black. 149

I heard Ma and the Tarantula going to bed, then silence.

Lying on my back, I stared up into the drowsy indoor darkness.

The station at Skúvanes was completed in 1943. Ragnar must have been up there during the war. I thought of his affection for the world. Now I pictured him inside the ear of the war. Standing up there listening to the sea in flames. Connected to everything and powerless. The emptiness in his weaponless hands.

150

BEATE’S GULL

Red ragnar was unmusical. He never sang, not even when he drank. But Beate, she could sing. Her big hit was Mallebro, about the Duke of Marlborough, who never came home from the war.

Malle tom, tom, tom, went the refrain, like a war drum.

Beate, she was very beautiful, even as an old woman. I remembered her as she looked in my childhood. Her long, cream-white neck and even whiter hair.

By then she lived alone in the little pistachio-green house. She served jet-black coffee with sugar lumps I’d suck on. She hummed. The notes were of a piece with her light, white arms in flower-patterned sleeves, which flowed through the air with a cup, a plate of biscuits.

Outside, on a fencepost by the pistachio-green front door, lived Beate’s Gull.