The Blood Strand Read online

  This was a product of trauma, the child psychologist had told Ketty and Peter, apparently. I don’t remember, but I’d always thought it was probably more simple than that. Even aged five I’d have known I would never go back, so why cling to the language? Why single myself out with a name no one would pronounce in the right way? Only Ketty still sounded my first name with a Y, and who in England could be bothered to put an accent on Reyná?

  Jan Reyna was easier. Jan Reyna was who I was.

  * * *

  When I’d arrived at their house, the day before I’d flown back to the Faroes, Ketty was on the phone. She was speaking Faroese and only looked up for a moment – enough to register I was there – before looking away to write something on a pad.

  In the kitchen I found Peter. We shook hands, hugged and stepped back. Always the way.

  Peter Sherland was sixty-eight, still a vigorous man with a grey-black goatee. Daily Telegraph crossword, Radio 4, three swims a week and the first signs of Parkinson’s in the slight tremor of his left hand.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said. “Ketty’s trying to find out more from the hospital – in Tórshavn,” he added, although it was unnecessary.

  I nodded – acknowledgement, but also a way of showing I didn’t want to get into it yet. Peter took the hint.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  He moved to the coffee maker. This was the way Peter dealt with situations of whatever size – taking his time, never rushing into an opinion or judgement – unlike Ketty, who was always one for instinctive direct action. She made up her mind and spoke it, rarely backing down afterwards.

  I knew I’d acquired a mixture of these traits, but it was Peter’s way I’d always admired and aspired to, even when I heard myself speaking as Ketty would do. Maybe seeking to be like Peter was just a way of trying to show my appreciation for what he’d done: taking me in, the adoption, and then putting up with all the shit that came later. I still didn’t know what it had cost him to suddenly have that troubled boy as part of his life. I’d never been able to ask, either. Instead I just tried to be measured.

  “Did you have any trouble getting away?” Peter asked. He ferried two espressos to the kitchen table – one at a time because of his tremor.

  “No, they can manage,” I told him, momentarily regretting the lie.

  He nodded, sat down. “Anything you can say?” Ever the solicitor.

  I made a half shrug. “Not much. They made an arrest but there’s not enough to charge yet.”

  He sipped his coffee.

  “So listen—” he began, changing tone. But before he could finish, Ketty came into the kitchen.

  I went over and kissed her on the cheek. She was still a striking woman – high cheekbones, grey-blonde hair cut on an angle, blue eyes given to smiling, although they were serious now. She kissed me back, then stepped away.

  “You have to go, Jan,” she said without any preamble.

  I wondered if I heard more of an accent now because she’d just been speaking her own language on the phone.

  “What did they say?”

  I moved back to my seat: a way to distance myself from the response.

  “That he’s seriously ill. It was a large stroke.”

  “Will he die?”

  “They won’t say that.” She shook her head. “But when I said I was ringing for his son they said that they think his relatives should come.”

  I wondered if all hospitals adopted the same standard euphemisms.

  “I can’t do anything,” I said.

  “That’s not the point.” For a second her tone was annoyed, as if I was being wilfully stupid. “Not to go now…”

  She was still standing and I knew she wouldn’t sit down. That was what she was like. She’d stand firm until she got what she wanted or I left. There wouldn’t be any compromise.

  “I can’t just pick up and leave,” I said. Another lie.

  “They won’t let you go even if your father might die?” Her turn to be wilfully obtuse.

  “Ketty—” Then I shook my head, negating it. “You can’t bully me into going,” I said. “Why the hell would I? I wouldn’t even be thinking about it if he’d died.”

  That was true. Why go back, just to stand at a graveside?

  But Signar Ravnsfjall wasn’t dead. He was in limbo; at some halfway point on the scale, like the questions that had always been there, not yet asked or answered. The “yet” implied there was still time for it, but I doubted that. So why go back just to stand at a bedside?

  “If Signar was dead it would be too late,” Ketty said. “It would be different. Now you have a choice.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “Good. You’ll have to.” She said it with a decided nod: flat.

  “Ketty…” Peter’s tone was mildly reproachful.

  But Ketty wouldn’t shift. “You’ll never know unless you see him.”

  “I don’t need to know.”

  “Yes, you do. You don’t see it – maybe you don’t want to see it – but I do.”

  I drew a slow breath. In an interview room I usually know when the suspect across the table has reached the turning point. There will be a pause – the moment of balance – and if their next words are anything other than “no comment” you know that the truth will come out. It might still be slow or grudging, but the path has been chosen.

  My own “no comment” would be to turn away now, pick up and go.

  “I tried before,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You were seventeen,” she said. “Try again.”

  * * *

  Once the baggage carousel started to move my holdall appeared relatively quickly and I towed it past non-existent passport control and customs checks, then through the entrance hall to emerge from the low terminal building. Outside, people were already dispersing to cars and minibuses, but I paused under the overhanging shelter, wanting to give myself a moment of adjustment before moving on.

  There was a sense of altitude here, and between breaks in the low, rolling grey cloud the sun glistened off the car park’s wet tarmac. The air was cool, cold even, after the unseasonal September heat I’d been used to in England. The wind shepherded the clouds quickly across the bowl of sky between the undulating, rounded peaks of the surrounding mountains and fells. The landscape was treeless, brown-green. In places it was traced out by black strata of rock, as if the long-buried bones of the hills were gradually being exposed by erosion. I knew the feeling.

  The second taxi I approached – a minivan – was free and I sat in the back behind the driver as a signal that I didn’t want to talk. Instead I checked my phone as the van pulled out of the airport, then settled to watch the passing terrain: sculpted and weathered, often crossed by water in streams and cascades.

  The smooth, sweeping road gave a sense of plunging through the landscape as if on a theme-park ride and I got the same feeling of make-believe when I looked at the villages and settlements as they passed, laid out in the valleys and inlets. The buildings were painted in primary colours, saturated by the patchy sunlight, as simple and angular as illustrations from a child’s storybook. There was an underlying otherness to it all, it felt to me then – a vague foreignness that was hard to define, but a sense of uneasy familiarity, too.

  Where from?

  Was it a real recollection, or a memory of a childhood picture book? Either would have to have come from the time before Lýdia took me away from the islands, but now, as ever, I couldn’t penetrate the void of childhood – not of living here, not of the first years in England. It was too far away and in the end I left it alone and simply watched the landscape going past, with no fixed point of reference and no sense of home. Because it wasn’t.

  2

  BY THE TIME THE TAXI REACHED TÓRSHAVN THE BRIGHT PATCHES of sunshine had given way to a grey drizzle. I persuaded the driver to wait while I dropped off my bags at the Hotel Streym, and then to take me on to the hospit
al. When we pulled up outside the block-like building I paid the driver off with crisp Danish notes from a bureau de change envelope and went in through sliding glass doors to look for the main desk.

  The visiting hour had just started, I was told, and after getting directions, I took the lift to the third floor, navigating the Faroese signs as best I could until I reached a nurses’ station and asked where I could find Signar Ravnsfjall.

  The nurse was in her late twenties and took a moment to think herself into English. “I’m sorry, the visiting hour is for the family only,” she said.

  “I’m his son,” I told her. “From England.”

  I knew that the last bit was clumsy: an attempt to distance myself from the claim of kinship and hold it at arm’s length for a little while longer. “Ah. Okay,” the nurse said. “At the moment the family are with him. Perhaps I can tell them you’re here. You can come to the visiting room.”

  I followed her round a corner on to a corridor where she showed me into a glass-fronted room with firm-looking sofas and a view of the harbour. Leaving me there she went off, further along the corridor, but after a moment I returned to the doorway and waited. I didn’t want to sit.

  A couple of minutes later the nurse came out of a side room and returned along the corridor, passing me with a smile. Behind her I saw a man emerge from the room she’d just left. He cast a glance around, then headed towards me.

  I knew without doubt who the man was. Magnus Ravnsfjall was in his late thirties and his resemblance to Signar was unmistakable. Father and son shared the same heavy-set, square build, the same slightly broad features and coarse hair, and watching him now I realised that Magnus was only a few years younger than Signar had been the last time I saw him. It gave me an odd sense that somehow time had sprung outwards, as if it had been compressed under pressure until now.

  “Eg eiti Magnus Ravnsfjall. Hvat vilt tú her?”

  Even though I didn’t know what he was saying, the brisk, businesslike tone left no doubt that Magnus Ravnsfjall felt he was here to confront a disagreeable task.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  Coming to a halt Magnus looked at me more suspiciously. “I’m Magnus Ravnsfjall,” he said.

  “Jan Reyna.” I held out my hand but Magnus ignored it.

  “What is it you want here?”

  For a moment I let the question hang, just long enough to show I wasn’t impressed by the hostility. “I came to see your father,” I said.

  He frowned then, as if finally pinning down a deceit. “He is your father also,” he said.

  “Not really.”

  I shook my head, but if I’d hoped it might allay some of his suspicion, I was wrong. Instead it seemed to have the opposite effect as he set his shoulders, like an icebreaker that would plough its way through any opposition. And again I was struck by the similarity between him and his father. My lasting impression of Signar was as a bull of a man.

  “There is nothing for you here,” Magnus said then, as if he wanted to put the matter to rest once and for all.

  Again, I shook my head, trying to get out of this groove and to relocate the exchange somewhere more neutral. “I don’t want anything,” I told him. “I got a message that he was seriously ill and—”

  “Who was that from?”

  “The message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Along the corridor I became aware of another person – a woman, blonde, seemingly hesitant to intrude. That was all I saw in the short glance I made before turning back to Magnus.

  “Listen, I don’t want to interfere – that wasn’t why I came.”

  “So I ask again,” Magnus insisted. “What is it you want?”

  “Just to visit, that’s all.”

  “You don’t see him for more than twenty years and now you arrive from nowhere? Why?” It was insistent and stubborn.

  I started to draw a breath, but even as I did so I’d suddenly had enough of him. His intransigence made no sense, but more than that it was ridiculous, self-defeating. So instead I made a gesture, dismissive. “Okay, forget it,” I said, turning away. “I’ll come back later.”

  As I turned and started down the corridor Magnus said something in Faroese but I took no notice and kept going. At the end of the corridor I rounded the corner to the desk where the nurse was speaking on the phone.

  While I waited for her to finish I made a conscious effort to settle my annoyance – as much at myself for not handling it better as at Magnus Ravnsfjall’s obstinacy. But what had I expected – just to walk into a hospital room, take a look at Signar, lying there unconscious, and then simply walk away? Or had I had some child-like belief that there would have been a miraculous recovery, enabling him to… what?

  The nurse hung up the phone.

  “I’d like to speak to Sig— to my father’s doctor about his condition,” I said. “Is that possible?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr Heinason isn’t here now. Tomorrow, perhaps, you could call?”

  “Could you give me the number?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  She found a pad and wrote out a number, then handed it to me. “We think he is better today,” she added, as if in consolation. “A little.”

  I nodded. “Thank you. Takk.”

  I put the slip of paper in my wallet and headed away towards the lifts. When I got there I pressed the call button, then crossed to a window overlooking the car park below.

  “Jan?” A woman’s voice.

  I turned, but not quickly.

  “Yes?”

  She was watching me with a faint crease of concern between her eyebrows, something that didn’t lift entirely as I faced her. She was tall – maybe five ten – and dressed mostly in black and grey – trousers, boots, a large chunky-knit cardigan. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her features were strikingly Scandinavian with something of a determined set to her jaw. I guessed she was a little older than me, but knew it would take a while to be sure.

  “I’m Fríða,” she said, clearly expecting the name to be familiar to me.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Fríða Sólsker,” she said. Then by way of explanation: “My mother is Signar’s sister, Estur.”

  I made the connection then. Estur Sólsker was the name Ketty most often quoted as her source of news or information from the Faroes, telling me despite my unwillingness to listen. And it had been Estur Sólsker who had called Ketty with the news of Signar’s stroke.

  “Yes, sorry. Of course,” I said.

  Fríða shook her head, dismissing the apology as unnecessary. She held out a slim hand, two silver rings, and her handshake was firm and warm.

  “I remember you a little from when you lived here,” she said. “Not much, just – er – bits and pieces.”

  “I don’t remember any of it,” I said. “Not really.”

  She nodded, as if she thought that was possible. “You were a little younger than me,” she said. “And it was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at me for a second, again as if she was assessing something, then she said, “I saw you speaking to Magnus.”

  “Right.” Flat and dry.

  “This is difficult for him. He’s close to Signar and this has happened suddenly. They thought he might die.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” I said. It came out more pointed than I’d intended but Fríða just nodded.

  “Do you know how he is?” I asked then. “Have you seen him?”

  “Yes, for a short time. He’s very sick, but maybe not so much as before. He has strength.”

  “Right.” Again.

  Beside us the lift arrived and as the doors opened Fríða seemed to decide something. “There’s a café here,” she said. “Would you like to have coffee?”

  I hesitated, then nodded. “Sure.”

  The café was only moderately busy, a double-height space with a right-angle wa
ll of glass which looked inland, over functional buildings on a hillside. We took our drinks to a circular aluminium table near the windows and sat on pale wood and steel chairs.

  It seemed that, like me, Fríða Sólsker had decided to wait until we were seated before saying anything meaningful. It suited me. I wasn’t used to thinking in terms of family connections and I needed time to adjust to thinking of Fríða Sólsker as my cousin.

  She poured a single sachet of sugar into her black coffee and stirred it before looking up at me with a faintly apologetic smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I have the advantage.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I think I might know more about you than the other way round. My mother told me you were coming but I didn’t think you would arrive until later or I would have warned Magnus.”

  “Did he need to be warned?”

  Fríða had an agile face and I saw the reaction to my abrasiveness. “Maybe that isn’t the right word,” she said. “I meant so he could get used to the idea. I don’t think it’s easy to meet a brother for the first time.”

  “Half-brother.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  She conceded the point without issue and I knew I’d sounded unnecessarily pedantic. I made another effort to rein in my mood. Fríða had done nothing to deserve my poor mood, and she didn’t have to be sitting across from me now.

  “So, how long can you stay?” she asked. I knew she was giving me a way out.

  “A few days – it depends. I’m not sure it was a good idea to come at all, though.”

  She shook her head. “Of course you should see him.”

  “You think I should fight my way in past Magnus?”

  She seemed to consider that as a serious idea for a moment, then said, “Maybe I can help. I work here in the hospital some of the time, so if you would like to see Signar outside the visiting hours I think I can arrange it.”

  “What do you do?” The easy way to put off an acceptance or commitment.

  “I’m a counsellor, mostly with children and young people,” she said, but I hadn’t distracted her from her original proposal. “So if you like I can ask Dr Heinason to meet you. He’s Signar’s consultant.”