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crack. He begins to whistle with his happiness. My grandmother doesn’t want to acknowledge him, but is getting increasingly irritable with a man who can be so annoyed by little things after less than twelve hours in a place. Juss let him try fix my skillet - he’ll know about it then. Just who did this perhaps on-the-run, possibly deranged, compulsive handyman think he was?
    She unwraps a loaf-shaped block of cold oatmeal porridge and cuts four thick slices from it, melts lard on the skillet and fries the slices till they’re golden brown. My grandfather’s fixing spree grinds to a halt as the smell of frying fat fills the air. She’s at it again, he thinks. He obediently sits at the table. A wonky table - but he even misses that, such is the power of the woman’s cookery.
    â€˜You carry on that fidget and I’ll clout you with the broom and that’s as solid as bugger,’ she began, ‘fannyin’ round like an old woman. Get your grub in an’ go fix the rowin’ boot.’
    Perhaps he smiles at this point the generous smile of a man grateful for small mercies. His dreamy blue eyes glinting with the sheer pleasure of being alive, being well, being useful. Relaxed by the handiwork and the warmth of porridge he says one word - pointing to himself, he tells her to call him Hans.
    â€˜ Hands? ’ she replies.
    Â 
    With his belly full of porridge, the hammer was given back to Hands - as he’d instantly become - and he was told to go fix the garden. Get out the house, more like, and Hands knew she meant it. Immediately outside the back door he almost tripped over a small rowing dinghy - the Pip - badly in need of caulking, splicing and varnish. Overjoyed with the project he went back to hug the marshwoman, but was met only with her finger pointing ‘out’ once more. He would need tools and materials, but other jobs needed doing first. So he vanished with a box of nails and spent the morning fastening wires to the fence and pegging the raspberry bushes, and as his sphere of fixing grew ever wider he returned to the roof, where he hammered down some of the loose tiles and finally, mercifully, ran out of nails. While he was up there he saw the longshoreman winding his tortuous way through the creeks like a man trying either to lose himself or find something he’d lost. A man not comfortable with straight lines.
    On the roof, however, tiles had been realigned, coping stones raised and guttering levelled. The marsh was obviously sucking the cottage down, twisting its beams and cracking its walls in the process, but Hands was doing his best to polish the rails of the sinking ship. As he reached up for the slanting chimneypot he spotted the longshoreman had arrived and was leaning against the gate. The gate leaned in turn against the longshoreman.
    â€˜Goose! You got some bloke up the roof. Goose!’
    Her real name’s Kitty, but it’s never used.
    Hands looked down, waiting for the marshwoman to come out, but nothing happened.
    The longshoreman waited too, nodded a quiet mornin’ to the man with the hammer, then began again: ‘Roof, Goose. Got some bloke on the chimney.’
    The longshoreman shut up when she came out. He grinned knowingly; not that he knew much about anything.
    â€˜What you grinnin’ at?’
    â€˜You’re a rum ’un.’
    â€˜You what?’
    â€˜You heard.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜What I said.’
    The days pass slowly in Norfolk. Hands sat down on his haunches, the hammer idle across his lap.
    â€˜Don’t you make my gate stink of fish.’
    â€˜Got you a dab, ain’t I,’ the longshoreman said, unhitching a pale flatfish from his belt and holding it out.
    â€˜Chuck it down. I ain’t coming no closer ’cause of your breath.’
    The longshoreman gave his fish a lingering kiss on the lips then chucked it down.
    â€˜Thanks.’
    â€˜That’s got grass on it