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

July is a good time to arrive in Iceland. The lava field beside the road from the airport has wildflowers and rowan bushes growing out of its fissures, and the mountains are sharp against a blue sky. The city lies in a pool of sunlight, the red corrugated iron houses and white roofs small as Lego against the dark northern sea. People sit outside cafés in the city centre where we stay in a hotel for the first few days, and there’s a flow of tourists, of other people who also need a map and someone who speaks English, around the craft shops and museums of Reykjavík. We take the children out and show them the place to which we have committed them. Look, we say, a ship coming into harbour! Look, a playground! Look at the light on the mountains! Aren’t you glad to be here? We take the foot ferry to Viðey, an island in the bay, and the children fly high on the swings, to the top of the mountain behind them and up into the blue sky. We look around the Maritime Museum and Max joins other little boys from other countries yearning over the one gun on Iceland’s coastguard ship. There is no navy here, nor army nor air force. We walk up and down the main street, Laugavegur, rationing our café breaks and admiring the rows of prams in which babies await their parents’ return.

We’re waiting for the builders to finish our apartment, which we haven’t yet seen. It was organised for us by Hulda Kristín, one of the PhD students in my new department. Hulda Kristín is half-Lebanese, half-Icelandic, but grew up in London. She married an Icelander and came here to live when her two sons, born like mine four years apart, were pre-schoolers. We met her when we came to Reykjavík in May to find an apartment, a school and a nursery, and had more trouble with the apartment than we were expecting. Icelanders, by and large, don’t rent; ninety per cent of housing is owner-occupied and renting is a sign of youth or indigence. We needed to be in Garðabær, Iceland’s wealthiest suburb, for the International School, and, despite the newly built and empty blocks of flats crowding the shore, there was nothing to rent. Hulda Kristín heard me complaining to Pétur, my new head of department. Let me make some calls, she said. I can probably sort something out. Her husband is in charge of buildings safety inspections across Iceland and knows most of the builders. She did indeed sort something out, and we see our new home for the first time through the tinted windows of her lumbering SUV.

The other apartments in our block are shells. The building is on the corner of a development that was half-built when the banks collapsed and the money ran out, and it’s still half-built, as if the builders had downed tools and walked away one day in the winter of 2008. Our northward sea view will be blocked if the luxury flats across the road are ever finished. For now, we see the waves between the bars of metal rods that grow out of concrete foundations. Looking the other way, towards the city, a yellow crane towers over us, a line through our view of Mount Esja. No-one else lives in our building. The stairs are unfinished, raw concrete. The lift glides up and down its glass tower just for us. The automatic doors in the lobby sweep for us alone. The apartment comes with one of a catacomb of store-rooms, each labelled for one of the dwellings, and with a second store-room for skis and boats in the basement, opening off the heated underground garage where lights come on and doors open at our approach. The children, I suggest to Anthony, can play football down here in winter. Or we could cultivate mushrooms on an industrial scale.

The flat itself is full of light. When autumn comes, we will find that it is often somehow more light inside than out, but now, in July, light is the condition of Iceland, day and night, and it’s magnified by our floor-to-ceiling windows and white walls. We have a laundry room, which I plan to commandeer as a study, and a walk-in wardrobe that would hold all the clothes we own in both countries and still leave space for my stash of smuggled chocolate. The lowest setting for the underfloor heating is twenty degrees. Anthony and I both grew up in old houses with draughts that came through the floorboards and continued up the chimneys, both remember lying in bed watching the curtains blowing around with the windows closed in winter, and we’ve bought a house with the same qualities in Canterbury. The new apartment has triple glazing, and no curtains. Now, on the hottest days of summer, it’s almost as warm outside as in. We open all the windows, and hear children splashing on the beach at the end of the road. The boys rush out onto the balcony, which faces north and is shadowed by the unfinished block across the road.

Hulda Kristín drives me to IKEA to buy bedding, towels, a couple of pans, the least I think we can get away with. I choose four garden chairs – cheaper than dining chairs – and a table. Later, Pétur drives out from the other side of the city to bring us a set of flat-pack bookcases and an old table that can be my desk, and then, looking around, takes me off to the supermarket in the next town to stock up. Why not that one, I ask, as we pass the hypermarket nearest the apartment, the one to which we can walk so that we will be able to manage without a car. That’s Hagkaup, he says. Far too expensive. It would be like buying your washing-up liquid from Harrods. When we