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

Every night, Max and I check the online aurora forecast, run by the University of Alaska but also covering ‘Europe’ where, roughly, we are. The scale for auroral activity goes up to ten, which never happens, but we’ve found that on a clear night, anything over three is usually visible, even if only as a green wavering on the northern horizon. I check both the forecast and the sky just before going to bed, and we have a pact that I’ll wake him for anything over a five. And one day it happens: a six on the scale, and purple flames licking the sea. It’s only half past ten. I shake Max awake and put out layers of clothes: thermal underwear, socks, trousers, thicker socks, over-trousers. T-shirt, polo-neck, jumper, gloves, coat, hat, hood. We creep out and ease the door shut, scurry like excited children into the car park and bundle ourselves into the car. This time, we’re going to look properly, not blocking out the city lights by crouching behind the builders’ rubble on the headland.

I drive out across the isthmus to the Álftanes peninsula. There’s no thermometer in the car, which is probably just as well, but the warm air coming out of the exhaust fills the rear-view mirror and there’s ice on the gritted road. There are no other cars, and the settlement ahead lies silently under the street lights and the curtains of green and pink light. I turn right, northwards, and we’re bumping along a gravel track behind the last houses before the breakwater. I stop when I realise that I have no idea how we’ll turn round and get back in the dark, and we get out. We should have brought a torch. We stumble towards the sea wall. I climb it, and haul Max up behind me, and we sit there. The sea is still rough after the last storm, refracting oblongs of lime and violet framed by white foam, and the upper half of the world is festooned with light, swaying in figures and swathes that remind me one minute of a crowd of ball gowns hanging to dry, the next of searchlights coming from above. The aurora are unsettling partly because they show the depth of the space, the falsity of our illusion that the sky is two-dimensional, and partly because it’s hard to convince your instincts that something bigger than you and grabbing at the sky isn’t out to get you. Salt spray spatters against my coat, and suddenly the lights are all around us, between us and the yards on the other side of the car, sweeping the sea at our feet. I clutch Max and we keep still, as if they might take us for rocks, these bright forms coming out of the sky. Max talks about aliens all the way home, and for once I can see why.

At the beginning of March, there’s daylight at breakfast time and I’m cooking supper at sunset. It’s not a treat to be outside in the light any more, and for several weeks it’s not much of a treat to be outside at all. Rain falls on snow. I walk along the coast path to pick up the bus to work at Kópavogur. There are cycle tracks and a few boot-marks along the path, but on the pavements mine are the only footprints for days. The walls of snow shovelled off the roads rise higher, covering more of the pavement, and there are trenches in the slush where people drive in and out of their garages. But nobody, evidently, leaves any of these houses on foot from one week to the next.

The children have a day off school – there seem to be a great many bank holidays in Iceland – so I take them swimming. The sea is freezing again, as if there’s a layer of silk lying on top of the water, and by the shore the waves wobble under the silk as if trying to get out. We hurry into the pool, and then the clouds part and for the first time in months there is sunlight in the water, translucent sunbursts and flames of light. Look, I say to the children, look, and Tobias comes over and tries to catch the darts of brightness. The old people are sitting on the steps, huddled like animals in the patch of sun, silent, heads tilted back and eyes closed as if waiting for death-masks to be made. When they leave, I take their place. The sun is so low it shines straight into my face and I close my eyes, seeing my eyelids’ red as if for the first time. I lift my face to the light, the wind chill around my chin. I had faith, I think, and it is rewarded.

The bulbs I smuggled back after Christmas do nothing for a long time. Pétur, who gardens enthusiastically although his house is so close to the sea that the windows are marine-quality and in winter storms he finds shells thrown over the house into the back garden, has given me some spare plant pots. We fill them with a mixture of expensive potting compost and soil stolen from the abandoned building site across the road. One dark weekend, when it’s too cold even to go out on the balcony, Tobias and I carpet the kitchen with newspaper and squat there with spoons, ladling soil and nestling the bulbs. I hang over them assiduously, moving them around the flat as direct sunlight comes back and again as its angles change. They spend mornings in the laundry room, moving to the bookcase after lunch and then at last, one happy day when the sun makes it round to the other side of the building before it sets, to the dining table. By the end of February, green blades have appeared. Don’t touch them, I tell Tobias,