Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

It’s raining when we land. The bareness of the landscape between the airport and the outside of the city is startling again: fifty kilometres of lava, a cold desert the colour of tarmac that stretches towards the horizon, where dark mountains loom. The ugliness of the industrial buildings that line the road into Hafnarfjörður is still upsetting, though they are no worse than what you see from most of the M25. The sea below the road seems like a different element from the Cornish coast, although Cornwall has a darkness of its own in winter. It’s all the North Atlantic, the Viking and Celtic sea-road, but comparing Iceland’s sea and Cornwall’s is like comparing a cello with a violin, oil painting with watercolour. Every port has a name for the sea. There are flowers in the cracks in the lava, and rowan trees gathering in the hollows. Esja is monochrome in the rain, its top blotted by cloud. Tobias leans on my shoulder, watching out of the bus window, until we come into Hafnarfjörður, when he turns to me as if with a question. We used to come here, I say. Do you remember? There’s a swimming pool up there, he says. I fed the ducks on that pond. He sits up now, intent as if the windows are showing a film he can hardly follow. We bought kleinur there once, he says, pointing to a bakery. Kleinur are cardamom-flavoured doughnuts, and we have not mentioned them, so far as I know, since we left Iceland. There’s my old school, says Max, turning away as if from the scene of an accident, not wanting to see that what he has lost is still there. And my Lundaból nursery, Tobias adds, pointing out of the other window. Am I going back there? No, I say, watching as my bike-route to work begins to unfurl along the beach. No, this is just a holiday, remember?

I can see Pétur before the bus pulls into the station, and we’re the first ones off. We hug. Tobias remembers him, and remembers his car, and remembers that there was a different child-seat in it last time. He takes us to the university flat where we stayed when we came house-hunting two years ago, and that hasn’t changed either. The small planes are still taking off over the hedge, and the northern sea at the end of the road is still reflected in the sky. Pétur takes me to the big Bonus in the industrial park by the harbour, and even the sight of the oil storage tanks and the corrugated iron warehouses in front of Esja lifts my heart.

Bonus has changed. There is coconut milk and wholewheat noodles and agave syrup, and miso powder in sachets and Earl Grey tea, all at prices comparable to those at home. No, Pétur says, things haven’t got cheaper, it’s just that British prices have risen so much that ours seem normal to you now. And our salaries haven’t gone up either. But maybe there’s a wider range of food again. You were here at a strange time for Iceland, you know. Look, we’ve got four kinds of apple now. And Spanish peaches and air-freighted American basil, and look at the cheese! We stand together in the chiller aisle, looking at the cheese. There are perhaps a dozen kinds of Icelandic soft cheese, and several blue cheeses, many of them named after the farms from which they come. Some of these, I remind myself, were available a year ago, but we couldn’t afford them then. I choose one, and a leg of Icelandic lamb to celebrate our return, and barley flatkökur and a pot of skyr, and when we come to the checkout I find that I still can’t say the Icelandic words I have in my head, and still can’t bear the arrogance of asking people to speak English for me, and still, therefore, mutter and smile as if I had no language at all.

We’ve been travelling since before dawn and it’s ten o’clock by the time the children are fed, washed and settled in bed, but there’s a candy-pink light coming out of the west onto the concrete buildings between our flat and the coast. I’m just going out for a minute, I say to Anthony, who is trying to keep his eyes open long enough to brush his teeth and find his pyjamas. You’re mad, he says, and I’ll probably be asleep when you get back. I know, I say. I slip my shoes on, take my coat, ease the door open and step out. The evening smells of rain and turf, of the wildflowers that are scattered wherever there is grass, making the most of the brief summer. I have to admit that it’s cold. If I had gloves, I would put them on. I put my hands in my pockets and walk across campus and down one of the streets lined with big, mid-twentieth-century houses to the sea. This is a wealthy part of town, but there are only a couple of SUVs, and most of the cars parked along the road are European. I pull my hood up. There’s no-one else out. I take the path between the gardens that leads via a playground to the shore. There are flowerbeds in some of the gardens, filled with poppies and lupins and daffodils, and children’s tricycles scattered on the lawns where they can stay all night. The sea gleams across the road, where the bike track passes a sculpture of fish on the pavement that Tobias has always liked, and when I get there, around eleven, the sun is just slipping below the church on the hill in Seltjarnarnes, and the shoreline and the hills behind Garðabær reflect the sunset. A handful of birds skim the waves, and the lights of Álftanes across the bay are