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

one way, an expression of alienation from home for which it’s hard to find international comparisons.

‘That night we went from parliament to another place, it’s by the sea. And there were people there who were way out of line, people who’d been clashing with the police before the riots, drug-dealers and felons. They’d gone off and found some rocks and come back to throw them at the police. At which point the police were running really low on pepper spray and they’d said, all right, that’s it, gas masks on, we’re going in.’

Things often run low in Iceland. Things are there and then not there again for a few weeks: limes and walnut oil, children’s ibuprofen, my preferred brand of tampon, nothing for which there is no substitute. Except pepper spray. Until then, someone had been making a decision about whether to use pepper spray or gas in each situation, but from now there was no choice. ‘And it was – I remember standing there and seeing this guy just pick up a bottle, a big glass bottle, and throw it at this police officer. There were seven police officers, and I’ll hand it to them, those were some brave police officers. Seven of them, and hundreds of us, and they were getting rocks and glass thrown at them. It was getting really unpleasant until one of the activists walked up to them and took a loudhailer and said, “Look, we can be angry, but let’s not take it out on these poor souls. They didn’t do this. We can paint the city red but we don’t go hurting people.” And then some of us ran up to him and stood with him and made a kind of blockade around the police. And after that the night turned into a sort of tug-of-war with the police and we were lighting benches and setting them on fire. There were some injuries, a friend of mine got shoved into a bench by a police officer and broke his sternum, there was bleeding, and they were hitting people on the head with batons which is illegal, they’re allowed to hit your arms and legs but not your head. The hospital was on standby because the police had told them, right, expect serious injuries, we’re not going to stand for any more of this. But the day after that was Wednesday, Wednesday the twenty-second, and that was the day the orange ribbon came out. If you wore an orange ribbon it meant you were protesting but you were peaceful, you didn’t want violence. I celebrated it this year; I called it “Gas Mask Day”. After that the police weren’t really needed at the demonstrations. Things quietened down. There was no more burning. There were a few others, smaller protests and demonstrations, but I didn’t partake in those, I just watched. And shortly after that the government fell.’

And after that, Tómas Gabríel says, he became disillusioned. He talks about the weaknesses of democracy, about people voting for the wrong reasons and about the compromises made by anyone who takes power, but I wonder if his disillusion has more to do with the way ‘things quietened down’. The quietening down was uniquely Icelandic; the police were overstretched and under-prepared, exhausted by back-to-back shifts and night working. The Reykjavík force had called in back-up from all over the country, putting administrators and new recruits on the streets with front-line officers, but the protests were unprecedented and no-one in Iceland had much experience of managing crowds and public order. According to the Reykjavík Grapevine, on 22nd January ‘protestors wearing orange armbands offered to relieve the police from their duties in guarding the parliament building. This was accepted, and the police in riot gear left the scene.’

Tómas Gabríel revives. ‘I feel really sorry for the people who missed it. I can always say that I went there, I did what I wanted to do, I shed tears, I bled blood, I now know what tear gas and pepper spray tastes like and I’ll tell my children and my grandchildren. That’s what 2009 was like and it was great. It was a brilliant, brilliant moment and next year on January the twenty-second I’m planning on getting a gas mask tattooed on my arm, with the date, just to remind me.’

Tómas Gabríel is watching his memories on the wall above my head again, as if there’s a re-run of the kind of sporting triumph that men seem to recall and discuss for decades afterwards. Tómas Gabríel wants something different from what there’s been for the last twenty years (almost exactly his own lifetime), something new and better. But he must – surely, at twenty-one – have a sense of the future as well as nostalgia for those three days fifteen months ago.

‘Do you still feel that sense of hope?’

He shrugs. ‘We’re in a situation where there’s not much we can do. Every account is heavily in debt, everything needs to be cut. But I feel happy that although this government will have to downgrade everything, it will be done with the people in mind. Not the private investors, not the big companies run by the Independence Party’s buddies. So even with this great cutting knife that has gone through our healthcare, when I arrived at hospital with my finger deformed, in a lot of pain, I was treated immediately and well. Within a couple of hours I was on a surgical table and I had capable staff around me and that tells me that we are doing something right.’

It takes time, I want to tell him; the state is an oil tanker that takes five miles to stop. The new government promises to defend the principle of not nationalising debt, promises to make the inevitable cuts in the most humane and accountable ways possible, promises to protect what Icelanders value about their country while accepting what the International Monetary Fund offers and considering EU membership.

‘So you’re optimistic about the future for