*

And then it’s dusk. Dark. But I finally, finally see the figures up on the bluff. Their silhouettes stark against the fading grey of the inland sky behind. All of them standing and watching, their torches spheres of yellow-gold light. There are men down on the beach too – now just a darker strip of land between the bluffs and the sea.

I’m thrown up and down by rising waves. High tide must still be three or four hours away, but the wind is up – icy cold and north-westerly. I feel suddenly awake, even though I can barely force my hands to go on clinging to the rock, the muscles in my legs and arms won’t work, and my wet clothes are pulling me down. When I look up at the sky, those clouds are one amorphous dark mass now, so low it feels like I could reach up and touch them if I wanted to. I feel pressed between the two: the heavy sky and the angry sea, and then a rumble of thunder, deep and close enough that I can feel it inside my chest. Fear – sharp and hot – floods what’s left of my resolve. To do this right.

This was what I wanted. This, exactly this. To die like my father died. Like a fisherman dies. On rocks in a storm, watched and mourned from the shore. I wanted atonement. Forgiveness. Peace. A wave slaps hard against the rock – now at least two-thirds submerged – sending up sprays of water that sting my eyes. I cough as another slams my shoulder and flank against the rock, scraping its sharp edge along my cheek and bruised chin. I scream when I can, when I finally stop choking – and the heavy rolling sea yanks me backwards and spins me around. I cling frantically to the rock, filled up with that old and paralysing dread of being swept out into the soulless sea, never to be seen again.

I taste blood. And the black shadows are all around me, Sjóvættir crouching inside the merciless waves; bòcain with their nets and knives. The horror that has always been fathomless – that I will be drowned by this ocean, by its cruelty that is as cold and vengeful as a boy tracing boats against a window. Because somehow I’ve forgotten. That the one thing I’m more afraid of than fear is dying alone.

Lightning tears open the sky and throws the sea – the chaos all around me – into stark relief. A white frozen snapshot of hell. Waves suddenly like mountains; the spaces between them black and bottomless chasms. When the light is gone again, I look up at the dark sky, down at the dark sea. Back at those spheres of yellow-gold. I was wrong. There is no peace in this.

I push away from the rock and start to swim for the shore, but I only sink. The water sucking me down like a peat bog. Terror takes the last of my strength and pushes me to the surface, where I flail and choke until my knuckles smack hard against rock again. I start to scream. To wave. To try and pull myself up onto what’s left of the rock, so that they can see me. So that they know. I don’t want this. I want to come back. I want to come home.