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

There are no other cars moving, no-one on the pavements or in the gardens. The houses are large by British standards but visibly dilapidated in a way that I haven’t seen in Reykjavík, the paint peeling off corrugated iron walls and gates hanging off their hinges. We get out of the car like people lowering themselves into cold water, force Tobias into his snowsuit and set off, carrying him as he kicks and screams that he hates the snowsuit and wants to be cold. His tantrum is the only sound in town, maybe the only sound this side of Reykjavík. Max scampers ahead. There are more of those bungalows that would look equally at home – or equally out of place – in New Jersey or Wilmslow or Barcelona. But there are also the trees, pine trees that tower over us, breaking up the sky and murmuring at us, and we realise how much we have acclimatised to a world in which there is nothing between us and the sky, where trees, if any, are sociable things of human stature, rowans and dwarf willows. Consulting the map, we climb up past the church, a modern church with angled white walls and bright windows, and come out above the river. It must be the river that’s meant to be warm, but the thermometer in town was showing an air temperature of minus five and it’s not steaming. Can I swim, asks Max, who has seen the pictures. Try taking your gloves off, I tell him. Oh, he says. OK.

There’s a narrow, arched wooden bridge over the river, vaguely willow-pattern. Tobias wriggles out of my arms and trots across, with me scurrying after him because it’s high and narrow and there’s room for him to fall under the rail. Halfway up the hill at the other side, we turn to look back at the town. Village, by English standards. There are wooden houses lining the river, and they all have jacuzzis hanging on to the rocks over the water, all covered with blue tarpaulins. There’s no-one moving, not in the gardens or on the streets or in the fields between the river and the mountainside, although there are a few horses mooching around a red corrugated-iron farmhouse with white wooden lace under its eaves. Horses, says Tobias, look, horses in a field, eating grass! The ones in the zoo are still inside, eating hay, and I think he’s stopped believing us when we tell him that spring will come and they will run in their field again.

There are clouds of steam drifting from the top of the hill, which is made of shale and red mud. As we climb, the ground under our feet boils and seethes, sulphur steam blowing into our cold noses. There is a path that winds between the simmering puddles, but they are always shifting, spreading, contracting, and sometimes the quaking mud has invaded the track. I take Tobias’s hand, warn Max to keep back, as if hand-holding will stop the ground opening under their feet. There are boiled worms in the puddles, and earth the texture of baked custard. My hands are contracting painfully in the cold and I hold one over the steam, but of course what steams in an air temperature below zero is still far below blood heat. Iceland’s geothermal Sturm und Drang, I realise, is exaggerated by cold. In a warmer climate, you’d see less steam. When Tobias stops talking about the horses we can hear the ground rumbling, as if there are stones being rolled around a cauldron at an angry boil. (This is probably exactly what is happening, somewhere below our feet where the trolls cook in their underground cave.) Steam hisses from under a rock. We follow the path, Tobias unusually docile about holding hands. The children poke their feet into puddles the colour of oranges, of fresh, sun-ripened oranges that you can’t get here, and around us steam rises from the streams that skitter through rocks and shrubs down to the river, and from soft red patches where it looks as if the ground has been rubbed raw, as if the Earth’s innards are poking indecently through. The heat has incubated spring, and there are patches of grass the colour of English lawns in May, and trees with bright new leaves and even buds on their low branches. The boiling and steaming is almost menacing, but I find myself reassured. Because there’s something moving in this landscape that isn’t me, because there’s a precedent, a geological endorsement, for warmth and movement in an otherwise bleak and silent land. Tobias is getting tired and my feet are numb. We pick our way back to the car, passing – at last – some locals coming out of a house, who laugh at Anthony because he’s carrying my handbag because I’m carrying Tobias. Icelandic men don’t carry handbags. Icelandic women don’t carry toddlers, who seem to move around only in cars. As we close the boot and the car doors, the sound echoes over the low roofs of Hveragerði, and we drive away like thieves in the night.

9

Eyjafjallajökull

On the 22nd of March, the Icelandic papers report a small eruption in the south. The farms in the valley below the volcano have been evacuated, and then the police close the roads in the area, not because there is immediate danger to travellers but to stop the tracks being choked by gawkers. Even Route 1 is only dual track for most of the way round Iceland, and the smaller roads aren’t built to handle more than a few dozen cars a day. I phone Matthew, whose partner Hjölli is a seismologist working at the meteorological institute. Journalists are getting close to the volcano; could I? No, he says. It’s between two glaciers and anyway there isn’t much to see, just a little glow and some steam which could very well be cloud to most of us. The worry, he adds, is