She split fish for ten hours a day, kept her distance from two salters and after a week couldn’t sleep at night in the damp, chilly cooper’s loft, where she lay with Nelly and two young girls from the mainland who were here because of the war. They pretended not to cry themselves to sleep, they gutted herring, boned them and salted them in barrels, added brine and drank ersatz coffee, salted and slept and washed themselves every other evening in cold water, their hair once a week, in cold water too, rust red beneath a starry firmament of glistening herring scales, and Ingrid split cod like a man.

In the middle of the second week one of the salters left and Nelly was sent to work with Ingrid. The following day was stormy and the fishing boats sought shelter in the islands. They didn’t come in the next day either and when eventually they managed on the third morning to tack through the snow they didn’t have a single fish in their holds.

But many people were waiting for them, a whole village was there to welcome men returning alive, once again. Then more bad weather, confined to harbour with idle fishing gear, catches that were of no value except perhaps for making guano, it depended on so much, especially the market prices in a different world from this; the sorted fish were tail-tied and hung, and the autumn’s bizarre adventure was over.

~

Ingrid and Nelly turned over the salted fish, discarded the bad ones, ensuring that those at the bottom of the old pile were at the top of the new one. Now it was the end of the herring season, and the mainland girls were given notice, they received their meagre wages, picked the fish scales from each other’s faces, washed each other’s hair in cold water, dried and combed it, taking care to ensure their hairbands were straight before they left on the steamboat laughing and wearing clothes no-one had seen before.

With the same steamer came a letter – from Ingrid’s aunt, Barbro, who was in hospital – set down on paper by a nurse whose handwriting was like a doctor’s, a scrawl which Ingrid was able to read but did not understand. Her aunt wasn’t com-ing up north because her upper femur was not knitting and because she couldn’t get a lift . . . she would be back in good time for Christmas, she said twice, Barbro was fifty-nine and Ingrid thirty-five, that evening she soon fell asleep and had no dreams.

She also woke early and lay listening to the wind clawing at the slate roof and the sea gurgling and lashing between the posts beneath the quay and Nelly’s breathing, Nelly’s sleep was human, it was the only thing here that was as it should be, the sound of Nelly sleeping, night after night, now she couldn’t stand it anymore.