Ingrid walked south through the gardens, avoided the gates and clambered over the stone walls as she did when a child. But she was a child no more. She continued to the southernmost point, where she stopped and stared at the ruins of the lighthouse, which she and Barbro had blown up with the last of her father’s dynamite when war broke out, shattered glass in clear, garish colours, strands of seaweed and kelp wrapped like black hair around rusting, twisted iron girders, a paraffin drum resembling a scorched rose. She sat down on the tree trunk they had found drifting in the water and had secured with bolts and wires so that the sea wouldn’t take it from them again, this colossal bone-white giant they thought one day would be worth something, maybe a fortune even, now it had served as a bench for three decades, for people who never sat down.

And Ingrid was no longer a child.

She waited until she began to feel the cold, walked north along the rocks to the west without seeing any footprints or hearing anything but the dismal wail of the sea, past the Hammer with the new quay and the three boat houses, that was at least one too many; she realised that if she had woken Nelly that morning, if she had allowed herself to hear her voice and see her smile, she would still have been at the trading post, tearing the backbones out of dead cod as her thoughts ebbed and flowed.

~

Standing in the new quay house, Ingrid bunched her wet hair and let it fall, repeated the action, wondering why she still wasn’t hungry. She noticed a hole in the sleeve of her woollen jumper, was unable to remember how it got there. In a rectangular box on top of the workbench were some wooden floats arranged according to size. She took the largest and played with it, saw the teeth marks left by Lars, who chewed everything when he was a toddler. She still had dried fish blood under her nails. Her jumper had caught on a nail on the staircase as she went down with her suitcase that morning. On the shelf above the bench were spools of yarn of all dimensions, knives, whetstones, hooks, corks . . . and bodkins, Barbro’s bodkins.

Ingrid pulled over the stool and sat by the iron hook beneath the window, threaded a bodkin and set to work on the gill nets. An hour later she had made three fathoms with a mesh size of fifteen. Her hands were soft and delicate in the cool air. She was ravenous, went out into the darkness of the night and back to the house, she had been wrong about the weather, the rain had turned to snow, as light and dry as soot, and she was no longer afraid.

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