Ingrid knew as soon as she opened her eyes in the white room that she would have to go back to Barrøy to regain her senses. To find the man again. To salvage her childhood and life, everything that was on Barrøy, an empty, deserted island in the sea, and yet the idea seemed so alien that some outsider must have weasled it into her mind.

It wasn’t the first time she had opened her eyes in the white room, she had done that a week ago and stood at the window gazing across the snow-covered ground that resembled a freshly ironed sheet, wreathed by trees standing like soldiers in formation, with a perfectly conical spruce in the centre, it was like a black tooth, as it stood there waiting to be decorated because it was Christmas, inside and outside the hospital.

She had spoken to doctors, nurses and an old man who came into her room every day to do the cleaning, which he found shameful and only did because his wife was ill and they needed the money, he said. And he always sat in the chair looking out at the same spruce tree and told her he didn’t mind doing women’s work as the nutcases in this place were nicer than his workmates down at the harbour – they had it in for him because he was too old to carry a sack of coffee beans from the belly of a ship up the wobbly plank into the warehouse, that was before he fell.

Ingrid knew she wasn’t mad when she realised that he was, even though she too was a patient, like him. He was decrepit, stooped and almost hairless, and he didn’t come to do the cleaning but to hide, and he had chosen Ingrid.

She got out of bed and wanted to lay a hand on his shoulder, as he had these enormous hands, like her grandfather’s. But the sound of the sea wouldn’t go away, it would never be pure again, the lightning flashed behind her eyelids, but by then he had already managed to grip her fingertips, to hold them, the way a child holds an adult’s hand, it felt both disgusting and good, he was human and she could trust him.

~

Ingrid opened her eyes in the white room and remembered they had said she was dehydrated, she hadn’t known what that meant, and that she was weak from hunger and had been beaten black and blue and had suffered something she ought to forget, though there was still a risk of it returning, so she had to learn to deal with it, here in the hospital they couldn’t decide whether forgetting and remembering were two sides of the same coin, that was why she was here.