The gull, Beate’s gull, moved in with her the spring after Ragnar’s death.

He’d passed away in the autumn.

Beate was alone with the radio, the sprigged porcelain. She was alone with Ragnar’s books and the schnapps. All 151winter her long, pale hands rested in her lap, or they reached for the bottle.

It lasted into a raging spring. Storm after storm trampled through the fjord. The water rushed into the boatsheds on the quay, and several new-build houses collapsed like milk cartons.

One morning, by the skin of their teeth, two Norwegian meteorologists avoided being crushed underneath the busstop roof when it came sailing through the air and landed on the grass outside the sports association building.

Then, one smoke-coloured afternoon in late spring, the gull landed on Beate’s roof. It clung to the sidelong edge, its beak chattering in the rough wind. It was as though spring gained a foothold.

The gull made itself at home. It got into the habit of tapping at the windowpane early in the morning. Beate wasn’t especially devout, but later she said that when she first heard it tapping, she understood it was time. Time for the rubbish to be taken out and the duvets to be shaken, for no one can grieve without end.

After a while the gull settled in comfortably. Beate built a kind of terrace out of a large old earthenware dish, which she fastened to the top of the fencepost by the garden gate. There, each morning, the gull was served leftovers and milk. On special occasions, when Beate permitted herself some whale blubber, the gull had some too.152

Beate began to sing again. She left the window open.

There were stories going round about Beate’s Gull. It didn’t flutter off when people walked by; it watched them, scowling or shrewdly, depending on their nature. Perhaps it’s true the bird scowled especially at Unionists and the Salvation Army lot, no one can say for sure. But when I was a child it belonged at Beate’s, and I can attest that it looked like a squat old man with a luxuriantly feathered breast, sinking its beak into its plumage when the wind was rough.

When, once a year, it flew off to the summer assembly of the gulls at Skúvanes, Beate wasn’t the only one who missed it. There was a fairy tale glow around Beate’s property and its various inhabitants, like the gull, the hulder and Beate herself.

As Beate regained her zest for life, her skin drained of colour. It wasn’t something people talked about. After all, she wasn’t a young woman any more. But the years were passing, and the day came when she’d drained completely white. It’ll probably be me before the gull, she said.