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

sun and the distance from the jumble of headlights and the silhouettes of photographers in front of them. Max notices what I’m calculating and gets anxious. Mummy, how much further, how long will it take, when do we need to get back, what time is it? Never mind, I say, look at the volcano. Look! Red light leaps into the fading sky, and as the sun slips away the cloud of steam is lit from below by the orange glow of the lava. The flame begins to slide down the hill, slow as tar, and a cloud of helicopters and light aircraft dances like midges in its light; richer tourists, who have paid a few hundred pounds for a closer view.

There’s another half-hour ‘technical stop’ at the same petrol station on the way back, and again all the doors are left open so that the passengers, having just begun to warm up after standing outside to watch as much volcanic action as the body could stand, huddle shaking in our seats again. Even Max doesn’t complain; as tourists on a bus we seem to be powerless, vulnerable as babies to the negligence of those charged with our care. At last the tour guide reappears and we set off. Max dozes as the temperature rises. The driver turns the lights off. People wrap themselves up, recline their seats and close their eyes. Max’s head settles on my shoulder. I reach up the other arm and turn my reading-light on, find my page and continue re-reading Adam Bede, which I’m teaching next week. Adam discovers that Hetty has been seduced. There’s a summer house, an English woodland. The sound system twangs and the guide starts talking again. Just before you all settle down for a nap, she says, and tells us when and by whom Route 1 was widened, before outlining other tours offered by the company in the coming days. Brits up and down the bus go so far as to murmur at each other, the Polish man turns up his collar as the expression of one who has a weapon and will use it later settles on his face and an Australian voice from the back swears. Max opens his eyes and gazes startled into my face. Don’t worry, I say, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep now. And he does. Darkness settles again. We’re coming back through Hveragerði, where the geothermal greenhouses shine all night, alien spaceships between the road and the mountain. Just to let you all know I think I see the Northern Lights ahead! says the guide. Oh, just fucking fuck off, says the fat blonde, giving up all pretence at civility and tolerance. Just fuck the fuck off. But a ripple goes down the bus and we all crane to see out of the windscreen, where there’s nothing but our reflected hope and the greenhouses. The bus climbs the switchbacks out of Hveragerði and pulls into a lay-by. The doors open. The blonde demonstrates the limits of her vocabulary until her friend tells her to shut up, there’s a kid there. But Max is still asleep, and I leave him there while I get out and stand at the roadside. There they are, bright green, flickering across half the sky. Everyone’s trying to take pictures, flashes grazing the dark. Just look at the damn things, I think, buy a postcard later. The aurora hang low over the mountain, lunge into the west, sweep the northern horizon. Late March, probably the last time I’ll see them. I salute them and get back into the bus, where Max is still fast asleep.

A week later one of the students on my writing course hands in a story about growing up on the Westman Islands. Teddi’s grandfather used to take him up onto Eldfell to feel the warmth of the ground, and once or twice to bake bread by burying it on the hillside. For a boy who preferred reading to football and walking to fishing, Heimaey was not an easy place to grow up. It was beautiful when we were there, I say wistfully, liking the idea of living on an island. It’s all right, he agrees, in summer, for a visit. But no-one thinks about anything but fishing, there’s nothing to do except fishing, and if you want to leave it’s always too windy to fly so you have to get the boat and watch people puke for three hours except that it’s always too rough to sail. Teddi is an older student, even for Iceland where most people are twenty before they leave high school, but not old enough to remember the eruption. No, he says, I wasn’t born then, though my sister was two. But my grandfather carried people away in his fishing boat. A few weeks later, Teddi’s grandparents are in town, staying in their Reykjavík flat for some medical treatment and he invites me over to meet them.

The flat is behind the mall, a nondescript part of town between Route 1 and the retail parks, apartment blocks inaccessible except by car and unrelieved by even the corner shops and fast-food outlets that punctuate the more desolate urban landscapes at home. We ring at a communal door with paint flaking around corrugated glass panels, and go up a flight of stairs covered in worn carpet. Teddi’s grandfather, also Theódór, comes to the door. Inside, a wooden floor gleams like still water and white walls reflect on a kitchen so tidy that you would need to introduce artful disarray for a photo-shoot. It is the home of someone who has spent his life on boats; a place for everything, as if anything not fastened down or shut in would fly around in the next rough gust. Come in, says Teddi’s grandmother Margrét. Sit down. Eat.

She pours coffee. There is cheese and biscuits, a stack of flat Icelandic pancakes and a plate of folded pancakes bulging with something that will probably turn out to be