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

down,’ she observes, pulling a small artist’s block, her watercolours and a screw-top bottle of water out of her cagoule pocket. Later, I start trying to write a paragraph or a poem for every painting, but for now I’m content to sit there licking my Kendal mint cake and watching as a little mountain appears on either side of the big one. As the sun comes up, the spaces between the triangles fill up with green fjords. Soon the fjords have a scattering of white houses with red roofs and then sheep safely grazing and cars rushing around like ants, even though it’s about four o’clock in the morning. Maybe I don’t want to be dead.

We were nineteen – we celebrated Kathy’s nineteenth birthday with an afternoon in a jacuzzi on a mountainside in Akureyri and a cake covered with a simulacrum of marzipan – and we spent six weeks making our way around Iceland, camping rough because we couldn’t afford campsites and living on an increasingly sparse and eccentric diet because we couldn’t, really, afford food either. In 1995 students didn’t have mobile phones and the internet was for geeks, some of whom checked their e-mail several times a week. (Why not just talk to people, we wondered. Or write a nice letter.) We were out of touch, gone, for the whole six weeks. It was towards the end of the years in which Radio Four would occasionally broadcast requests for Mr and Mrs Framlington of Ely, presently on holiday in the Ardèche, to contact their son Henry, but we had no radio and wouldn’t have been able to get Radio Four anyway. We wrote letters but stamps had to wait until we were back home and could spare money for postage. We each had a bus ticket taking us all the way round the island and back to Egilsstaðir for the ferry home. We had a tent and a Primus stove, a paperback Complete Shakespeare, root ginger, garlic and a few herbs. The Kendal mint cake went in the first two days, and after that we prowled the mini-marts trying to maximise calories per króna without actually drinking vegetable oil (though subsidised butter would have been nicer, and scarcely more expensive). I found a discounted jar of American peanut butter once, but after that we settled on Icelandic cream cheese with peculiar flavourings and the occasional bag of crisps. The bus stopped at petrol stations – roughly every thirty miles – but apart from that you just shouted to the driver when you wanted to get off. Sometimes we planned it, but more often we saw a likely spot and sang out. We camped foolishly on a cliff top and almost blew over in the night, ran out of meths for the stove and discovered that we were too young to buy it legally in Iceland. (Older German backpackers came to the rescue, but not until we’d been without cooked food or hot water for a couple of days.) We walked through a lunar landscape, where cracked black rock interspersed with white flowers spread to the horizon, and through orange and pink mud that boiled under our feet, and around a volcanic crater from which we could see to the Arctic sea. We saw puffins falling off cliffs onto the black sand beneath, and miniature turquoise icebergs calving off a glacier. It was light all the time, a summer day that lasted six weeks, and I woke and slept at whim like a baby, my lifelong insomnia for once seeming natural. I could piece together bits of modern Icelandic, enough to read signs and the odd headline, but we didn’t try to talk to anyone. Why should they want to talk to us? The local teenage girls – who had access to bathrooms and washing machines and clothes intended for indoor use – were more glamorous and confident than we were. And anyway, we weren’t there for the people. There were plenty of people, too many people, at home. We’d come for the landscape, for the pale nights and dark shores, rain sweeping over birch scrub, the whole circle of a flat world empty but for ourselves.

I always meant to go back to Iceland. Kathy and I finished our degrees, and took some more degrees, and married and found jobs. I had two sons, she moved to the Netherlands. We met often, talked regularly, and, late at night, over the end of the bottle or after our husbands had come past for the fourth time muttering about international phone calls, we remembered Iceland. The time I ran out naked in heavy rain to tighten the guy-lines (because I didn’t want to get my pyjamas wet). The time Kathy, out painting, found some blueberry bushes warm and heavy in the sun, and then there was a whole mountainside of blueberries which we grazed like famished sheep, having had no fruit or vegetables since we left home. The time an Icelandic child on the bus delivered the whole of the Dead Parrot Sketch, in English and with precisely copied intonation. It was the landscape of our coming of age that we were remembering, not the people who lived there.

I envied Kathy’s new life in the Netherlands, her gradual mastery of a new language, her appreciation of a new place and discoveries in a new culture. My husband and I had always meant to live ‘abroad’, as if abroad were a place, defined only by not-Englishness. Scotland might have done, France would have been better, Denmark or especially Sweden, headquarters of Nordic social democracy, would have been ideal, but meanwhile I kept an eye on academic jobs in the US, Canada and Australia. We settled in Kent, less than ten miles from where Anthony had grown up. We owned a house. The children started school. We had interesting jobs at comfortable salaries. It was all perfectly nice, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t continue to be perfectly