They take it in turns to try, put the cod head onto the spike, force open the mouth and copy the circular knife-cut that Suzanne showed them, leaving the tongues piled up on the spike. Each of them succeeds in his own way, even Fredrik, who receives a little extra tuition from his mother because he isn’t that keen to stick his fingers in the cod-eyes, with the result that the heads slip out of his grasp, but he also receives more praise than he deserves because he goes for precision rather than speed, and has no interest in trying for both like the Finnmark boys.

Ingrid watches them until they are finished and have to hang the cod on the rack. She has walked around the outside of the quay house as if it were an unexploded bomb, now she has been inside, she has looked around and hasn’t smelled anything but fish and sea and tar, and rotting seaweed, a smell of decay that belongs here, and her eyes have been blank and white and indifferent the whole time.

She asks Arne if he will repair the roof, they have enough slates, a roof ladder too, over there in the grass, not where it should be actually, it must have blown off the pegs holding it in place, and as she lifts the crate of tongues Barbro shouts up in the direction of the drying rack:

“Hang ’em on th’ snag-stake, too!”

Which Fredrik has to have translated. Ingrid walks home with her aunt’s voice ringing in her ears: “Teik ’em wi’ th’ crotch-rod!”

Which doesn’t help much, there are snorts of laughter at any rate, and Ingrid is so strong after the fruitful visit to the quay house that she can reflect on those things about Nelvy that won’t leave her, no-one has lived and died like Nelvy. And it occurs to her, as she starts on dinner in the kitchen at the end of this almost bearable day – potatoes and fried cod tongues – that she didn’t know much about Nelvy’s life, only about her death, and for that very reason she will never disappear, but return in the form of shock and boundless remorse and something even more important, which has to do with Ingrid’s own inner darkness. But here in the kitchen she is alone and unseen, even Barbro is outside, she can hear her aunt’s voice through the window she has opened to let the smoke out and the spring weather in, turns the tongues in white flour and fries them in margarine before laying them half on top of each other on a dish to form a perfect spiral, by then the potatoes are done, too.

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