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

down the road. Traffic, we say, watching another driver go by steering with her knees because she needs both hands for texting. Water. Rocks. Abduction. Other children. Everything. That stuff doesn’t happen here, she says. I don’t know why but it just doesn’t. Come on, I say, seven-year-olds fall off things everywhere, things like sea walls built up out of piles of concrete blocks and ending in shallow water and rocks. I don’t believe Icelandic children just somehow have better balance. More practice, she says firmly. They learn to take responsibility for their own safety, which is pretty important with this climate in this landscape. Relax, you’re in Iceland now. Honestly, there’s no recorded case of a child being abducted here. You’ve seen how we leave babies in their prams in the street? Not one has ever been taken. Think about it, where would you go? Everyone knows everyone. They don’t know me, I say, suddenly understanding why foreigners might be treated with suspicion. I could abduct a child. I know you, she says. Pétur knows you. Mads and Mæja know you. And we know lots of other people. We’d notice if you suddenly disappeared, and where would you disappear to? You haven’t even got a car, and if you did, do you think the people at village petrol stations don’t notice strangers coming through? It’s not possible, not in Iceland.

We try letting Max go to the beach a few times and she is right, nothing bad happens, or at least, nothing bad happens outside our heads, where things are pretty terrifying. The pavements outside the cafés and designer boutiques of the city centre, we remind each other, are indeed lined with prams, each containing a sleeping infant inside layers of quilts and waterproof covers. Then there are a few stormy days when Max doesn’t want to go out anyway, and by the time the wind dies down we are back in our right minds. No, we say. Because however often we might decide that our better judgements are based on foreign foolishness in relation to parking or fruit-eating or assessment methods for postgraduate work, your safety is more important than cultural relativism. No. And I hear in my voice an echo I haven’t heard before, the echo of thousands of immigrant parents raising kids in a society they don’t fully understand or inhabit. I don’t care how things work here; I know what’s right and you’ll do what I say because I love you. Max goes along with it, for now, for the cold months when he doesn’t much want to be out there anyway, but he has tasted freedom, understood that it is cultural preference rather than a fact of life that says he can’t go out alone. His parents are fallible, their law a matter of cultural relativity.

Finding a nursery for Tobias is harder. At first we thought we wouldn’t need one, since Anthony intends to stay at home with the children until Tobias starts school. In Canterbury, Anthony and Tobias had a weekly round of Drama Tots, Monkey Music, playgroup and swimming. Once we’d worked out where these sorts of activities took place in Reykjavík, we thought, Anthony and Tobias would start to make friends. We ask around, try the Intercultural House, which is there to support recent immigrants, and the local council, check the leisure centres for adverts. There is nothing. You need to sign him up for playschool, the nice woman in the council office explains. It’s important. All children go. Look, he has priority because he comes from a non-Icelandic speaking home. She looks over her shiny wooden desk at the mud-spattered pushchair and our wet coats. It’s highly subsidised. You don’t pay much.

We go home and think about it, but there isn’t much to think about. Tobias can’t spend all day, every day, alone with Anthony in the flat, playing with his shoebox of toys and reading a couple of dozen books. We go down the road to see the nursery by the play-beach, warmly recommended by Matthew’s friend’s cousin, Hulda Kristín’s neighbour and Pétur’s daughter’s colleague. It is newly built, clean, with exposed brick walls and pale lino floors. The rooms radiate around a central atrium, which has a low wooden stage and big crash-mats for bouncing. The head, a fluent English speaker, shows us round. Small blonde children gather around low tables, concentrating on the movements of water and sand. Some are outside, where hills to run up and roll down have been built in a small field. There is a vegetable patch, and a cook who uses only fresh ingredients. We ask the usual questions, feeling competent in nursery selection after Max’s pre-school years, and are told about low staff turnover, simple rules calmly enforced, naps and toilet training to individual requirements. We ask why there are no books, and why the walls are bare. Because we are a Hjallastefnan establishment, she says. Did you not know? It is very popular here in Iceland. It is why the children have this uniform. We notice, now, that the children are all in navy tracksuits with a logo on the front. And it’s hard to be sure among two-year-olds in navy tracksuits, but all of the ones in the room we can see look like boys.

Yes, says the head. We have separate rooms for girls and boys, because that way they have a place where they are not always defined by gender. We have simple toys to give them space to be creative, a space away from all the Disney and advertising and pink for girls and guns for boys. They wear uniform so they don’t think about clothing, so the differences are only in character. It is very popular here. You should read about it.

We wander around a bit more and then go home. Well, we say, he has books at home, after all. He doesn’t know he’s a boy, so maybe he won’t notice the separation from girls. It’s