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

The next week, we are able to reciprocate. I have begun to bake again. (I must be settling in.) We have an English afternoon tea party for Max’s seventh birthday at the beginning of August, and Pétur and his wife Messíana bring bilingual grandchildren who play on the beach with Max and Tobias and Hulda Kristín’s children while the grown-ups – admittedly sitting on cushions on the floor, and admittedly using mugs they brought themselves – drink Earl Grey and eat cucumber sandwiches and toast with Patum Peperium, which I brought for its Englishness even though we don’t usually eat it at home. I find birthday candles in Hagkaup, and balloons, and we take two buses to get to a Toys R Us in a building like an aircraft hanger under a flyover, to buy a pogo stick on which Max can bounce on the coast path outside the flat. We have been here three weeks, and twelve people sing ‘Happy Birthday’/Til Hamingu over my pirate ship cake.

Darkness doesn’t fall. I stay up later and later, because there’s no particular reason to go to bed, and because I want to see what happens. On the field on the peninsula across the inlet, people start to play football at 11 p.m., and are still playing two hours later. In May, I didn’t believe the woman who told us that people go out to wash their cars at midnight in summer, but I find my own evenings stretching. The children go to bed late, around 9 p.m., and then I work on my book for a couple of hours, and then read for an hour or so, and then decide to go for a walk before bed. Icelandic children, out in unsupervised tribes as if it were the 1970s, swirl around the development and along the coast paths until midnight. Joggers come past in the early hours of the morning. We’re south of the Arctic Circle here, and it’s already July, a month past the solstice, so around 1 a.m. the light dims, the birds fall silent, the wind drops. It’s not a sleep but a holding of breath, a sudden thought of death that gets longer each night.

Anthony and I each go for a walk every evening, taking it in turns to have the sunset slot, which is a few minutes earlier every day. The shore path from the city out to Hafnarfjörður passes our apartment, and I take the same walk every day, will continue to take the same walk every day as the nights lengthen and sunset slips along the horizon, further south and earlier day by day, and the warm breath on the air in July is replaced by a screaming wind that tears at my skin. I pass the blocks of half-finished and empty flats by which we are surrounded. Automatic doors glide open as I walk by, as if there are invisible New York doormen to go with the ghosts of wealthy Icelanders who never came into being and never bought these apartments, big enough to park a freight truck in the living room and with triple-glazed windows of a size to admit several. I glance in to see wires hanging out of the walls and hardwood kitchen units stacked on the (heated) floors. Ramps lead into heated basement garages, cavernous as mausoleums from which imperial bodies have been stolen. Obese SUVs jostle on Reykjavík’s freeways, but here, in the cages built for them, there are none. The abandoned yellow crane reaches above the penthouses at the top, high as a holy statue set to watch over our folly. Reykjavík is ringed by these untenanted suburbs, whole townships built with imaginary money for people who never existed. There was a building boom but no housing shortage, a drive to cover the lava fields with more and more and more open-plan kitchens and steel-railed balconies and underground carports that reminds me of Max, aged about five, covering the floor with wooden train track that looped endlessly back on itself, going nowhere via flyover bridges and turntables and level crossings, a baroque engineering that was its own justification. I discover when autumn brings us darkness again that these Icelandic ghost towns blaze with light by night, even when the city council decides to turn the street lights on later and off earlier across Reykjavík to save money. They have to keep hot water running through the pipes, Pétur tells me, to stop the plumbing and sewage systems freezing in the winter. The doors open and close, like a museum diorama animated by the presence of an observer.

I go on, past the nursery beside the beach covered in imported pale sand. Icelandic sand is black, made by waves pounding cold lava, but some Icelanders – the non-existent rich Icelanders who were meant to buy these flats – want the pink sand they’ve seen abroad. Foreigners’ sand. So they imported it in sacks and spread it along the edge of the Arctic Ocean, where the sea gradually pulls it away. Past the artificial beach, the real shoreline is rocky, with turf and reeds growing right down to the sea. There are more blocks of expensive apartments on my left, a few years older and therefore at least half occupied. Every balcony holds a gas barbecue the size of a bed. I play at fantasy apartment shopping. Even the most desirable places, the ones with cathedral ceilings and glass walls over the foreshore, have large china elephants, dancing shepherdesses and gilt vases along the window-sills. Inside, I can see stuffed foxes, reproduction late-Victorian furniture and embroidered tablecloths. Some of them have net curtains blocking their view of the sea. Not all Icelanders, I remind myself, live in the paradise of Nordic interior design about which I fantasise. Being Icelandic does not oblige people to bin their china figurines in order to conform to my stereotypes.

On my right, across