I trace the lettering with a finger, as if I might learn something from that, then snatch my hand back, suddenly worried that I might damage it with the oils in my fingertips. Carrie has already gone to bed, otherwise I would show her this. Who wrote it, and why did they feel compelled to do so? A furnace. It’s such a specific word, and yet I don’t understand. Was it written in quiet contemplation or is it an anguished cry for help? Did the author mean a cozy living room fire, warm and inviting on a winter’s day, or a raging incinerator, reducing all it swallows to ashes, to atoms even, in seconds? I think of the oil rig, blazing with a fury beyond comprehension as it slides below the black surface of the sea. I think of the words tattooed down the pale forearm of the bartender. I think of the furiously buzzing flies. I don’t understand any of it, least of all the roiling unease in my stomach, as if the very ground beneath me was bucking and shifting. I stretch out a tentative hand again, and the angry buzzing in my head increases even as the bile rises to my throat, and before my fingers can touch the lettering, I have to run from the room to retch repeatedly into the blessedly quiet cool bowl of the downstairs toilet.

My father is living in Orkney under an assumed name. He ran off with the local woman with whom he was having an affair for the previous two years, and they had two children together, but now that the children have grown up, she has left him for the man who runs the Orkney Film Festival. He always liked the film festival, but it rather takes the edge off now to see her there with him; he’s thinking of leaving Orkney. His art gallery can be managed from a distance in any case. He would like to know what his daughter is like—he even knows where she works; he could get in touch—but he can’t help thinking what a disappointment he would be to her. It all feels like too little, too late.

THIRTEEN