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

is in his office next to mine, happy to explain the coding on the timetable by which ‘A’ can mean one of three buildings, two located at opposite ends of the main campus and the other on the far side of town, but on my first day of teaching he’s not there. I set off for class, which cannot be more than two hundred metres away, half an hour early. I rule out the first two buildings I try, which turn out, after I’ve climbed three flights of stairs and walked five corridors, not to contain enough storeys or rooms to make sense of the room number. I still have fifteen minutes. I hope the students’ English is good enough to follow the material I’m planning to discuss. I hope my corduroy skirt and cotton jersey top are not unusual wear for a university lecturer here. I hope I haven’t smudged my mascara. I work my way back to a corridor I’ve traversed before, and glimpse the building third on my list of possibilities, but now I can’t get out. The door I want doesn’t open when I walk up to it, and there is white writing on a green sticker across it that almost certainly means ‘emergency exit’ but has extra words as well, probably warning that alarms will sound, alerting the whole institution to my foreign-ness and incompetence, if I take matters into my own hands and push on the door handle. I go back down the corridor. Doors slide. There are people going along but no-one else trying to get out, although there are several of these green-stickered doors. I go the other way but there is no way out towards the building where I think forty-five students may be waiting to hear my thoughts about English Romantic poetry. I go back, round, out through the student cafeteria, but I can’t see the building. I traverse a car park, late now, the wind whipping my hair over my head, rain hurling itself over my glasses, up a flight of concrete stairs. The hour has struck and there are fewer people moving around. I approach a door that does not open and has no green sticker and, thinking that I have a whole car park into which to run if alarms sound, haul it open. Someone behind me coughs and presses a button in the wall that causes the door to glide towards me. The rooms on the ground floor have the right letter code but the numbers are too high. There must be a lower floor. I hurry along the corridor, my heels tapping an authority I lost at Gatwick. Most of the doors are labelled with someone’s name and a job title that might be ‘janitor’ or ‘vice-chancellor.’ There must be stairs somewhere. I rush to the other end of the corridor, ten minutes late now. No stairs. Someone’s door is open and I tap and put my head around, I’m very sorry I don’t speak Icelandic, but where is room 49, please? Downstairs, she says. Yes, but where are the stairs? She looks at me as if I have asked where the sky is. At the end of the corridor, of course. Which end, I want to ask, but I don’t dare. I run back to the other end and find that the penultimate door bears a small label in the same font as people’s names and job titles, ‘stigahús’. Stiga could mean stairs, I think, and I’m fairly sure it’s not the Gents or the president’s office, so I open it cautiously, and there are the stairs, and at the bottom of the stairs, along the corridor on the left – though with the cars being on the wrong side of the road even my sense of left and right has become less reliable than usual – is room 49. I try to smooth my hair, wipe my forehead on the back of my hand, and go in. Here, at least, anthology in hand, I know what I’m doing.

And so, it turns out, do the students. Class sizes are at least twice as big as I’m used to, and my groups of around forty are smaller than my colleagues’. But the students are incontrovertibly adult in a way that British undergraduates en masse are not. Anyone who has finished high school has the right to attend Háskóli Íslands, and there are state loans available for subsistence and no fees to pay, so with rising unemployment there are several reasons to go to university and no reasons not to do so. The result is an unprecedented number of students with no increase in university staff, and English is a popular choice because it seems easy to people who have grown up watching American television, reading British and American magazines and listening to British and American as well as Icelandic music. Many of the students plan to become English teachers. Some see an English degree as a way out of Iceland, and a few love English literature. The shortage of staff means that we have to merge third-year and postgraduate classes and that group sizes are rising to the point where a classroom discussion is becoming impossible. At home, there would be outrage and despair. Here, we go to staff meetings where people knit and agree that the situation is unsustainable, that none of the possible ways forward is satisfactory and that something – admissions criteria, budget allocation, contact hours – will have to change. Then they shrug and go back to work, teaching groups of forty and up without handouts, which we can’t afford to print, or scholarly texts, which we can’t afford to buy. There’s always the internet. Þetta reddast, everyone always says at the end. It will sort itself out somehow.

After a few of these meetings, I talk to Matthew. I’m torn between admiration for my colleagues’ sangfroid and horror at the conditions they seem willing to accept. How can the students learn