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

way of getting the children to sleep is to lie in darkness ourselves, we go for a walk. Tobias sits, dressed, on his bed, playing with his puzzles, and doesn’t want to go anywhere but the airport. We bully him into his shoes and coat and set off. Max capers ahead. He’s been reading about Pompeii and is ready to be interested in a town drowned in lava.

The road ends in a wall of black rock. We follow the wall towards the sea, and find the end of a white house sticking out, its wooden wall buckled half-way down. There’s a path at the side, taking us up onto the new part of Heimaey, so we follow it. It’s colder than it was yesterday and the sky is full of grey cloud. There are outbreaks of white flowers in the lava, and a few rowan trees along the track. Birds sing. Every few metres, there are signs giving the names and sometimes floor-plans of the houses entombed below our feet. At first we are walking over the remains of wooden houses from the early twentieth century. A few like this survive in Reykjavík, painted Danish red and Swedish blue with white wooden lace under the eaves, and we’ve been inside the collection of old houses at Árbæjarsafn, the outdoor museum. Because these houses are recognisably part of Northern European heritage and pretty, I feel a proper sadness for their destruction. It’s harder to know how to respond to the 1970s pebble-dash poking out of the rock further up the hill; these were people’s homes, and yet I’m not acculturated to grieve for the loss of such buildings. There’s a grid system here, part of it laid out on the hillside, part drowned under black rock. In the surviving streets cars smaller than in Reykjavík are parked on crazy-paved drives, and there are net curtains in the windows and basketball hoops on the garages. Then, cutting across suburbia, there’s a river of stone, entombing the rest of the grid of houses and gardens. Max and I peer in through a window-frame sticking out of the lava and see twisted copper pipes, a bath-tub, the belly of a toilet. I point the torch on my phone into the darkness and we glimpse half a radiator and something that might be an electricity meter half-eaten by the volcano. There’s a photo of the house, which wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in European post-war suburbia, and a list of the people who lived there. Two parents and three children. Nobody died, not in the eruption itself, although one of the rescue workers inhaled a fatal quantity of poison gas during the cleaning operation in the following spring. It’s not a graveyard, but it’s not quite a museum either.

We skid down the edge of the lava flow to the half of the street that isn’t in the underworld, and find that there are plaques outside these houses too, showing what they looked like during the eruption or when the family returned in the summer of 1973 to find the windows gone, the rooms full to the ceiling with ash and the roofs bending under its weight. Some houses have gauges outside showing the peak height of the ash, like the signs outside fund-raising churches at home. Eldfell peers down over our shoulders, still there.

Later, Max and I go to watch The Volcano Show at the local cinema. This film is shown several times a day, with English, French or German subtitles, and the outside of the cinema building is covered with a mural of a spewing volcano. Inside, it reminds me of the cheap, local cinema where I saw most of the brat-pack films of the 1980s, a relic of the 1930s with red velvet seats from which the plush had been worn by two generations of Mancunian bottoms, where they still stopped films half-way through so that a girl could come out and sell Cornettos from a tray slung round her neck. There is a sweeping staircase up to the box office of Heimaey cinema, but the paint is peeling off the walls and the banister is sticky to the touch. We creep into the darkened auditorium, late, and see that it is empty. We are the audience. When we tip the creaking seats and fold our coats, the curtain rises, purple and gold as if revealing Gone With the Wind, and the film begins.

Among the emergency workers, apparently, was a cameraman. We watch the mountain explode, orange as an oil flare against the winter night, and a glacier of molten lava inches down to the town. Smoke and ash hang in the air, and bearded Icelandic men in wide-cut trousers wield shovels. Cigarettes hang from the corners of their mouths while they dig, as if there wasn’t enough glow and smoke on set, and occasionally, as the lava laps their shoes, they stand back and allow a slight ruefulness to flicker over their faces as their houses collapse and red flame leaps across the screen. Nobody runs or raises his voice. There are no women in this film. Snow falls. Lava slithers. At the harbour, in front of a fish-processing plant that isn’t there any more, men stand holding snaking hoses in both hands, as if engaged in a gargantuan pissing contest. A cat threads the burning ruins.

The music changes. The mountain is still steaming, but there is no more lava. People appear on the slopes, and in the graveyard and on the roof of the school and the medical centre. They have spades, and are shovelling ash. Where the ash is going is not apparent. Foreigners came to help, recalls the voiceover, not specifying which foreigners, and there they are, flower children in dungarees and floppy hats with daisies around the brims. I wonder how the men from the pissing contest regarded these volunteers. I cannot imagine Icelanders as willing objects of foreign charity, especially when it came wearing CND badges.