The fish came first. Man is merely a persistent guest. The foreman came in and asked if any of the girls could split, there had been an unexpected influx of cod. Ingrid looked up from the barrel of herring and directed her gaze towards the quay, where dancing snowflakes melted into the black wood- work. She wiped her hands on her apron, followed him into the salting room and went over to the splitting bench and a tub of gutted fish. They looked at each other. He nodded at the knife lying there, it resembled a small axe. She pulled a two-foot long cod from the rinsing tub and placed it on the bench, slit its throat, flipped up the gill cover and sliced through the ribs from the neck down to the belly and out to the tail, severed the backbone at the anus, cut through all the ribs on the right-hand side too, ripped out the spine as if she were undoing a rusty zip, and held it aloft in her left hand; the fish on the bloodstained bench looked like a white wing, waiting to be rinsed and stacked in layers, before being salted and turned and dried and washed and piled and sold, as the ivory-white gold that has sustained life on this scraggy coast for the eight hundred years that have passed since the place was first chronicled.

"Let''s have a keek a'' th'' spine." Ingrid switched it to her right hand to conceal the cut between her thumb and index finger. "Clien as a whistle." He added that she could stay for as long as it took, you could never be sure in the autumn . "But get s''m gloves on tha." Ingrid looked down at her blood mingling with that of the fish and forming a drop that fell to the floor, as he turned his back and squelched over to the office on his rubber soles. Ingrid longed to be gone, to be back on Barrøy, but no-one can be alone on an island and this autumn neither man nor beast was there, Barrøy lay deserted and abandoned, it hadn''t even been visible since the end of October, but she couldn''t be here on the main island either. 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 coming 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. Ingrid got up, washed in the galvanised bucket, packed her suitcase, didn''t eat or make any coffee, carried her stinking work clothes down to the place behind the canning factory where the Germans burned rubbish, and tossed them into the oil drum, staring at the flames until people began to assemble on the quay, it was snowing lightly. She went back and brewed some coffee of sorts, poured a cup and placed it on the chair by the bedhead next to Nelly, who still lay there looking like a serene corpse, waited for the reflection on the wall to tell her that the foreman had also arrived, that day was now dawning, though it was still dark, then got to her feet, went down to the office with her suitcase and said she wanted to settle up. a single fish in their holds.ght him on the hop, he couldn''t do without her, fish would be coming in that evening, he was sure of that, she was both necessary and surplus to requirements, the paymaster''s usual convoluted trickery, but Ingrid was from an island, the sky was her roof and walls, so she repeated that she wanted her money now, and waited patiently for all the drawers to be opened and closed, all the papers to be shuffled, the ambivalent sighs over the time sheet and the equally laborious counting of the dog-eared banknotes, as though it were an insult to ask for your wages, as though on payday it were the master who was to be pitied, not the slave.