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

up at Anthony. At Gatwick, I had to drink some of the water in Tobias’s beaker to demonstrate that it wasn’t whatever presumably toxic substance people have thought of using to blow up a plane (though surely anyone intent on blowing himself up wouldn’t jib at a little poison). We had to take our shoes off and disassemble the pushchair so it would fit through the X-ray machine, and even then I set off the alarm and had to confirm that I was indeed wearing a bra with metal under-wires. Five kilogrammes of ammunition? We discover when we return to the airport and, fifteen minutes before take-off, are allowed to check in, that you don’t need to show a passport, or even a driving licence, to board a domestic flight with your gun and your explosives. Anyone could do it, anyone who had an interest in combining passenger aircraft with firearms. They don’t, because this is Iceland and that’s not the sort of thing that happens here.

After twenty minutes’ flight, passing low over hills, farmland and a river carved deep into a plain, we land, and climb down the stairs onto the tarmac. It’s a bright day, and the sun is warm on our faces and on the grass as we wander towards the terminal building, where we watch from the doorway as the pilot jumps down from the cabin and unloads the baggage onto a handcart, which he wheels inside so people can help themselves. The internet offered a timetable for a bus service into town. There’s no bus stop. We wait. There are no taxis either. Beside the hill, the sea sparkles in the sun. There is birdsong, and the smell of warm grass. When’s the bus coming, Mummy, asks Tobias. I go in and ask. No, there’s no bus. Never has been. Taxis? Not here. It’s not Reykjavík, you know. No, it’s too far to walk into town. Especially with the children. Maybe two kilometres. Or three. I go back out and we set off. There are no pavements, which bothers the children, but there’s little traffic and you can hear it a long way off. The road leads down the mountainside, which is a brighter green than the open spaces in the city and smells quite different, of turf and sea and maybe heather, though I think the heather is imaginary, has wandered in from memories of Orkney where clear summer days can be just like this. And why not; it’s part of the same archipelago, some more small islands a couple of hundred miles south, part of the same Norse empire for about half of the last millennium. The town appears below us, houses in Smartie colours huddled around the harbour and the fish-processing plant, scattered up the lower reaches of the volcano, which is still bare, black shale and red rock, with only a fuzz of green on its dark shoulders. We go down the hill. There’s no-one else walking, even when we come to the main street. There’s a shop selling children’s clothes, a bakery and a branch of Bonus, the ubiquitous ‘cheap’ supermarket owned by one of the disgraced bankers. There are a couple of banks. But just as in Garðabær, everyone is somewhere else. I’ve booked us a hotel room, but when we find the hotel – the rucksack dragging on Anthony’s shoulders now, Tobias beginning to pull on my arm – there’s no-one there. The door is open, and we can go in and up the stairs, covered with the kind of kaleidoscopic carpet found in Blackpool hotels in the 1980s, and along halls that smell of air freshener and feet, and into a dining room with plastic flowers on the tables and something sticky on the floor, but there’s no sign of life. We call, and our voices are absorbed by the carpet and the flock wallpaper and the silence. Mummy, what if they’ve died, whispers Max. Please can we go now? I hungry, says Tobias, for the tenth time.

We leave. We have to find somewhere to stay. I find myself suddenly, unreasonably, anxious, as if the rift in our plan to be tourists has turned us back into new immigrants, people with little power, jeopardised by inexperience. What if we can’t find somewhere, what if there’s nowhere vacant or nothing we can afford? Is there a flight back tonight? We took the children away from everything they knew and now we can’t even provide a bed for the night and although it’s August it’s too cold to be out at night, too cold for the children, and probably even the airport closes after the last flight of the day. Calm down, says Anthony. Why don’t we try the youth hostel? So we do, and they have a family room with bunk beds and there’s a kitchen and a couple of more-or-less clean bathrooms and we could stay three nights for the cost of one in the hotel. Tobias asks which bed is his, climbs onto it and demands his toys. He doesn’t want to leave. Not now, not later. No. He will stay here until we go back to the airport. No, he doesn’t want to go to the bathroom, or the bakery, or to see the sea or the puffins or the boats. No, he doesn’t want to look for the swings or – we are becoming desperate – have an ice cream. No. He takes his rainforest jigsaw out of the box and begins to reassemble it.

We carry him, first to the supermarket, where we buy the basis of the kind of student cooking I haven’t done for fifteen years, and then down to the harbour. We can see the path going up the volcano from here, and another path leading across the hill to the other side of the island. The sky is still blue and the wind gentle. If we didn’t have children, or at least if we didn’t have Tobias, we could go