The Last Refuge (14 page)

I shrugged. ‘It’s a bit scary, I guess. Someone else knowing everything about your make-up like that. And people are bound to find out things about themselves that they won’t like. Inherited diseases, things like that.’

‘Exactly. But we are the first in the world to have it done. An entire population. Incredible. But they have done DNA tests before to find out our ancestry. It was interesting. It told us that the men and the women of the Faroes come from different places and in different ways. The women, 84 per cent of them, had Scottish or Irish blood in them. Like you. But in the men, 60 per cent had Nordic blood. You see what that means?’

‘The Vikings went raiding Ireland and Scotland and brought the women here to live?’

Martin allowed himself a wry, almost apologetic smile. ‘Yes. It is doubtful that women came willingly. But that was a long time ago. We were two peoples, Celtic and Nordic, and now we are one. But even today, the words we use for domestic animals are derived from Celtic words, because that was the women’s domain. Like
ketta
for cat or
hundur
for dog. But wild animals take their names from Norse words, because man was the hunter. We don’t have deer but we still call them
hjørtur
or
rddyr.
Strange, perhaps, but logical too.’

‘But you feel completely Faroese?’

Martin shifted in the driver’s seat so that he could look at me properly. He seemed perplexed.

‘Of course. Of course. That is because we
are
Faroese. How can you even ask such a question? We are not Celtic or Nordic and we are certainly not Danish. Never that. They may have sovereignty over us but we are our own people.’

I’d hit a nerve. It hadn’t produced anger but pride. And some astonishment that I could think otherwise. ‘Will the islands one day be fully independent?’

He shrugged, his eyes back on the road. ‘It is inevitable. One day. But to me it does not matter so much. To me, we are already independent. We are independent in our minds and our hearts, and that is more important than anything else. More so than some treaty or a seat in the United Nations. It is nothing against the Danes, they are fine people. But they are not us and we are not them.’

‘And . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Can you afford it?’

Martin laughed. ‘I am a fish farmer not an economist. I leave that to others. Yes, Denmark gives us money. But when you are independent in your mind, do you swap that for being more independent but poorer? Maybe not. But then there is the oil. If the oil is found then we can have it all.’

Oil was the thing. It was to turn the Faroes into the new Kuwait, make everyone on the islands a millionaire. The seas that brought fish and wind and rain were now also thought to bring riches. Major companies were drilling off the coast and it was said to be just a matter of time until they struck black gold. The estimate was of public revenues of half a million US dollars for every person in the Faroes. Yet the grim tone of Martin Hojgaard didn’t suggest it was such a good thing.

‘You don’t sound like you believe that, Martin. You don’t want them to find oil?’

His hands came up off the steering wheel briefly. ‘I don’t know. Maybe there is no oil anyway. No one here is sitting on their behind waiting to find out. But if there is . . . once they turn that tap on there will be no way to turn it off. Everything will change. Yes, there will be money. Wealth. But will that be such a good thing? It will bring change that can’t be undone.’

I’d heard the argument before in town. Some craved the jobs and riches that oil would bring, others feared it. They were wary of the influx of migrant workers, possibly thousands of them, as well as the possible environmental impact.

‘It will change our society,’ Hojgaard continued. ‘How could it not? Now there is not a world between the richest person and the poorest, but if oil comes that gap will grow. When a whale hunt is successful and we have meat, it is divided equally. Everyone gets their share. With oil? That will not happen. We have the sea, we have lived from it for hundreds of years. Do we really want it to turn black?’

I was still thinking about Hojgaard’s independence speech and his wariness, when he dropped me off in town and I went for a coffee at Kaffihúsið. The western port was bathed in warm sunshine and I took a seat outside to enjoy it.

The statistic that I had learned – that it rains in the Faroes for three hundred days a year – had turned out to be less bleak than it sounded. If it rained for one minute on one spot on one island, that was enough to count as a rainy day. Yet, on these islands, it could be blowing a gale on one side of a hill but be statue-still on the other. Turn a corner and you moved from drizzle to brilliant sunshine. On a landscape shaped by time, tide and wind, every corner offered a different perspective.

I was enjoying my current one. The warmth of the sun on my skin was cooled by the hint of a breeze off the sea, while the cries of the seabirds were soothed by the water gently lapping against stone. My eyes closed, letting the sensations wash over me. I might even have drifted off, until I heard the sound of a coffee cup clinking against the table top.

Sitting upright, expecting it to be the waitress, I instead found myself facing Aron Dam across the table. Despite the sun, he still had his trademark blue woollen hat tugged low over his head, hair peeping out from beneath it in stray curls. His dark chunky-knit sweater was smeared in oil and he was unshaven. He wore his usual sullen expression, but it was set off by a self-satisfied sneer that forced one corner of his mouth to rise.

‘Why are you still here?’ His accent was heavy and his voice gruff. I realized it was the first time I’d heard him speak.

‘I haven’t finished my coffee.’

‘In Torshavn. Why are you still in Torshavn?’

I could feel my pulse quickening. What the fuck did it have to do with him?

‘I like it here. And I like the people.’

He didn’t like that. Bullseye. I saw his eyes widen and mouth tighten. Didn’t like it at all.

‘You should leave Karis alone.’

‘That is up to Karis, don’t you think?’

Dam put his arms further forward on the table and leaned in closer. ‘She doesn’t know what she wants. Better for you that you stay away. You understand?’

‘No, I don’t. You tell me. What is it between you two?’

He stared at me. He was much bigger than I was, broader and heavier. His hands were like shovels and I got the distinct feeling that he liked to use them. He didn’t scare me, though. I scared me.

‘None of your business. I told you, you should leave her alone. So. You say you like living here.’

‘Yes.’

‘In that shitty little house on the hill?’

My skin itched and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Aron Dam was smirking – a know-all, pleased-with-himself look that bothered me. The temptation was to wipe it off his face with my fist. I could feel that urge rise in me like water on the boil, and the feeling troubled me. I wouldn’t give in to that again. I couldn’t.

‘Yes. I like that shitty little house. And I’ll be staying there.’

He made an ugly grin and spread his arms wide, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Okay. Your choice. But you will want to move soon, I think.’

‘Why don’t you fuck off?’

Dam reached out and tipped my coffee cup over, getting to his feet in the same movement. When I didn’t get up to face him, he laughed, turned his back and walked away.

The walk back up the hill took the edge off the rage Dam had made me feel, if not my anger at myself. My only compensation was that I’d be hating myself even more right now if I’d responded as I had wanted to.

I found myself kicking at loose stones like a child, booting them as far from me as I could, and imagining Dam’s smirking face on every one. There were clouds gathering, threatening to snuff out the sun along with all the earlier good feeling.

The dark shape about five yards along the path from the shack sneaked its way into my consciousness. I saw it but didn’t process it fully until I was closer. There had been a puddle there that had stubbornly refused to disappear, loitering in a dip in the track, and at first I thought that was all I was seeing. Slowly, uncomfortably, it percolated through to my brain that it was something else.

As I got closer, I could smell it too. The familiar scent of death.

The puddle was still full of water but the stagnant pool was now flushed out with the bloated, decaying figure of a dead sheep. In truth, it was barely recognizable as one of the thousands that dotted the hillsides. Its coat was thickly wet, the curls lank and lengthy, like a doll’s tresses brushed out by an over-enthusiastic little girl. Its limbs were soft and shapeless, forming a greenish mush where they lolled at the surface.

The poor beast’s dark matted chest was half in, half out of the water. Its eyes had been pecked out and the soft bones of what remained of its head lay in a soggy misshapen mess, with no obvious point defining where it ended and the water began.

It was stinking. The afternoon heat had dragged the rancid stench of death from the carcass and left it floating in the air above it.

I didn’t know much about anatomy or decay or the rate of decomposition of a Faroese sheep. But I knew I would have noticed this rotting corpse if I’d stepped over it that morning. And I knew enough about death to know that it didn’t accelerate at this speed. The sheep hadn’t died where it lay; it had been placed there afterwards.

All I could think of was Aron Dam’s knowing smirk. The one I should have punched from his face.

Chapter 20

A week passed without any further incidents at the shack. Aron Dam was largely out of sight, if not out of mind. On one seemingly accidental occasion we passed on opposite sides of Tinhusvegur, swapping glares as we did so. I swallowed the temptation to confront him and paid the price of seeing him assume a satisfied sneer.

Karis and I had fallen into an uneasy rollercoaster ride that managed to twist, dip and soar, even without Dam’s malice oiling the wheels. Karis managed to do that all by herself. She was gloriously volatile, irresistibly unpredictable. This was particularly true when she was painting, and I told myself it was an artistic-temperament thing, but the truth was it could happen at any time.

I was reading in the small room in her studio, lying on the sofa with its Indian-design throw in sunburst oranges and yellows. Karis was painting next door and I could hear the occasional mutter of discontent amid the faint swish of paint being laid down. For my part, I tried to turn the pages of my book quietly so as not to disturb her concentration. It was an unnecessary courtesy on my part, though, as a brass band could have marched through the room and she wouldn’t have noticed. When she was painting, Karis was part of her canvas.

I’d been lying there for four chapters, immersing myself in the thriller’s small-town Nebraska, and felt the need to move and get a drink. I knew she had orange juice in the fridge, and pushed myself off the sofa in search of it. Halfway there, I stopped and wondered which she would perceive as the greater fault: disturbing her, or not offering to get her a drink.

I knocked quietly on the doorframe but she didn’t respond. As I walked across the bare wooden floor, the canvas slowly appeared over her head, and I caught sight of blue skies painted above what looked like the slate roof of Torshavn Cathedral. The weather and mood seemed much improved from her normal scenes and I had to wonder if there was a storm on its way somewhere out of the frame.

Standing behind her, I reached down and put my hand round her upper arm, squeezing gently. The reaction was instant. Karis inhaled sharply, a choke of breath disappearing inside her as she nearly jumped out of her chair. She jerked her arm out of my grip and whirled in her seat, my vision clouding as the air turned white and something crashed violently into my chest. I took an instinctive step back, realizing I’d been sprayed with paint from her brush and a palette lay at my feet, its contents smeared across my shirt.

Karis had her arm drawn back as if ready to punch me, her mouth fierce but already slumping into confusion as she saw me standing there. She looked at me and seemed surprised at what she’d done. The hesitation only lasted seconds though.

‘What . . . what are you doing?’ There was a shake in her voice and in her body.

‘I only wanted to ask . . .’

‘Don’t creep up on me. Don’t . . . not when I’m working. Get out! Get out of the room.’

‘Karis for fu—’

‘I said get out!’

I stood my ground for a while, staring back at her and shaking my head. She got out of the chair and thrust her hand flat into my chest, the white paint leaking onto her fingers. She pushed me back until I reversed out of the room, the door slamming shut in my face.

Standing on the other side, freckled in white and drowning in bemusement, I didn’t know whether to roar or laugh. I was still contemplating it when the door opened again, just enough for a green eye to peer at me through the gap. She stared then blinked and the door eased open far enough for her head to poke through, looking at me sheepishly.

Her teeth nibbled at her lower lip and her eyes said sorry before her lips mouthed the same word.

‘Forgive me?’

‘Karis, look at the state of me.’

‘Sorry. I got a fright. And you know I don’t like being disturbed when I’m painting. Let me make it up to you.’

My disturbing her was a poor explanation for the way she had reacted. But I didn’t resist when she slipped through the door and put her arms round me. The paint on my chest imprinted itself on her black T-shirt, just as the flecks on my face found their way onto her cheeks as she kissed me.

‘Am I forgiven?’

‘Of course you are. Aren’t you always?’

She smiled sweetly, drew her index finger through the paint on my shirt and daubed it on the end of my nose.

It wasn’t about her looks, pretty as she was. It wasn’t about her mouth or her legs or her figure, any more than it was about her quiff or her clothes. It was because of – and in spite of – her volatility and her vitality; it was about her sense of life and the uncontainable wholeness of her. I’d never been one for believing that a person’s lifespan could be measured by some spurious crease in their palm, but I was prepared to accept that they could be judged by the amount of life inside them. Karis would have needed an entire zoo to be built to contain the life inside her. She was bursting with it.