Using the last reserves of her strength she crossed the sound and jumped ashore, the boat left pitching against the rocks. She bound the mooring rope around her wrist, grabbed an oar and thrashed out at the swarm of screeching birds. The dead man came into view with a bluish-black hole for a face and his belly agape like a gutted cod through to the spine, his hands gnawed-off stumps of bone and his feet resembling charred wood. She slung the oar back into the boat, managed to lift him clear of the anchor peg and down into the seaweed, but not onto the boat. She wrapped the mooring rope around his thigh, leaped aboard and towed him along beneath clouds of birds making wilder and wilder dives into the wake. But now she had the wind at her back and sped along until, sheltered by the quay house, she was able to untie the mooring rope at the bow, step onto the quay and attach it to the hook on the windlass and hoist the man free of the water; he hung upside down like a man on the gallows.

The white-headed eagle stood on the quay beside her like a tame animal, she kicked out, it waddled away, she kicked again, screamed and lost her grip of the winch, caught it again and locked it into position, grabbed a wooden pole and lashed out wildly at the enormous bird, which lazily waddled to one side. She ran back to the windlass and lifted the man the last few metres up onto the stone quay, opened the doors of the quay house and dragged him inside, whereupon she discovered that one of his trouser legs was empty.

She closed the doors, shrieked at the swarm of cackling birds that had settled on the quay and the windlass and the roof, walked down to the boat and rowed back to the shed. She found herself crying and realised she had been doing so ever since she left the house.

She wiped her face on her drenched jumper, walked up the hill and again into the stench that filled her kitchen like intense cooking fumes and saw that the cup of redcurrant jelly was empty.

She tore off her jumper, tied a headscarf around her mouth, removed the blankets and began to undress him.

Beneath the uniform were the same brown rags, wood-shavings and an indefinable grey mass resembling sodden paper. She picked it all off him like dead skin from a sunburnt back, cloth, skin, soot, mould, and stuffed it into the stove, almost smothering the flames. She put in more wood and the temperature rose as he screamed in a voice that was not human.

Then she had to throw up before she could continue.