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

young as mine in countries that haven’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I buy lots and lots and lots of food, wandering around Sainsbury’s in a fog of happiness because there are five different kinds of tangerine and none of them are rotten and because I can buy peppers and aubergines and squash and bags and bags of salad that I don’t even have to wash. I order locally reared organic meat and vegetables online and then go back to Sainsbury’s the next day, and to the farmers’ market in the afternoon. I buy four new cookbooks in glorious Technicolor, two of them pertaining to cuisines I know nothing about and have never eaten. I buy an embroidered merino cardigan one day because I’m bored by the one I’m wearing. I buy two knee-length cord skirts in muted colours to complement the three I already have. I go to Waterstone’s and to the bookshop in Whitstable and back to Waterstone’s, buying so many books that each trip ends with several bulging bags. I buy shoes. I have an expensive haircut. And it all makes me feel very happy.

And then it’s time to return. I’m looking forward to oblique light along the coast path, the wind coming over the lava field, the weekly contingents of birds: seagulls and then ducks and then geese and at last the terns. I’m looking forward to feeling the Earth tilt back towards the sun, back towards life, in the knowledge that this, too, is only for a season.

It’s an easy enough journey this time. There’s a delay because they’re having to de-ice all planes leaving Reykjavík, during which Anthony and I have a row and I stalk off to duty-free, Tobias in tow, and buy a large bottle of a perfume I’ve been wanting for years but have hitherto considered too expensive. We don’t come to terms until landing, when I realise that I need Anthony to co-operate, need his inscrutability, because under all the new clothes and books in the suitcase are two whole salamis, a wheel of Kentish cheese, five packets of spring bulbs which promise ‘fragrance’, approximately three kilogrammes of chocolate, from Cadbury to Valrhona, two Christmas cakes and a stollen, half a dozen russet apples, a bag of unwaxed lemons and a couple of dozen tins of anchovies, capers and vine leaves. I haven’t checked the details because it’s always preferable, in my experience, not to know when you are breaking the law, but I’ve heard colleagues and students complaining about protectionist legislation that makes criminals of the most casual gourmet travellers. People swap stories about how to get fresh herbs into a country where you can’t even buy the seeds, reminisce about the owner of the first pizzeria in Iceland who used to smuggle mozzarella on a friend’s fishing boat in the days before Icelandic dairies started to produce ‘pizza-cheese’ which comes in greyish rubber blocks and tastes like salted plastic. I send Anthony first with the suitcase and pointed instructions to look arrogant, and follow holding both children’s hands, trying to look harassed and speaking English loudly. It’s Icelanders who get stopped. Tourists don’t need to smuggle because they can go home and buy anything that pleases them for half what it would cost in Iceland. I smile at the customs officers, looking up through my hassled-Mummy hair and chirping at the children to come on and hold hands and stop wandering off, which they aren’t. There are sniffer dogs. Trained for sausages or heroin? You can’t conceal fear from dogs, and it would be egregious to go up to one of those uniformed men and explain that I’m scared of the dogs because they’re dogs and not because I’m carrying contraband. The worst that can happen, I remind myself, is the loss of some food. I can feel heat in my face and my heartbeat banging high in my chest. Max, who knows what we’re doing, grips my hand, looks anxiously into my face. He’d make a lousy chorizo mule.

And then we’re outside, the air a cool flannel on the face after a long run under a hot sun. There’s snow, a drift of crystals each the size of a dandelion seed, and, at 2 p.m., sun on the snow, the slanting late-afternoon light that’s the Icelandic winter zenith. The snow is so light that when the children kick it, it drifts down again like feathers, and all the lines in the land are softened. As the bus sets off, the low sunlight is pink, the mountains and the swaddled outlines of the lava field the colour of candyfloss. Ghosts of steam rise from the pools at the side of the airport road and hang there, swaying a little. There’s no wind. The few motionless clouds are the colour of pink carnations. Tobias goes to sleep, and I cradle him in my lap, watching Esja shining rose from head to foot, the smudge of the forest above Bessastaðir that marks the furthest Tobias will walk from the flat, the sea below the aluminium smelter steaming as if coming to the boil. There’s something odd about the light, about the water, a stillness I don’t understand until we wake Tobias, get off the bus and begin to haul our suitcases along the snowy footpath down the coast. The snow’s too deep for the wheels and the cases are so heavy with gluttony that we can’t carry them, and meanwhile Tobias is struggling because the snow comes above his knees and our footprints are too far apart for him to use. Follow the suitcases, I tell him, watching them scythe the snow. We come down past the school, where there are footprints of the children who come to play on the snowy basketball pitch and frozen swings. The sea is silent. There are no birds. Most of the sun is below the lava field now, and the eastern sky is darkening. Careful across the