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

travel, fluorescent light and the ice-cream tub over the radiator. Guerilla planting may be indicated, but at these temperatures I suspect it would be the same as throwing away and anyway I don’t have a trowel. So there they sit. Pétur sits beside them and talks. The flies flicker around his hair and after a bit he notices. Oh, you have flies! he cries, as if I have orchids or bottles of rare wine. It’s too cold for flies in Iceland most of the time. I know, I apologise, I need to get rid of the bulbs now the flowers have died. No, he says, how can you say that? Little sparks of life in the air? I see a solution. I stand up and present him with the ice-cream tub. He goes off, cackling, and when I stop by his office later he leans into his screen, his wild hair encircled by a halo of fruit flies. I think he is one of the most likeable people I have ever met.

At the end of April, it’s still cold. Window weather, says Mæja, meeting me stamping my feet and blowing into my gloves by the radiator in the lobby. Pretty to look at, too cold to go out. We’ve had a week of window weather, a bowl of blue sky upturned over the island, the glacier at Snæfellsnes flirting over the horizon at sunrise and sunset, sunshine in the air and on the mountains and amber in the streams that are not frozen. Winter is over, you think. You look out of your office window and think it is a shame and a sin to be inside on a day like this, after all that dark and snow and rain. Birds sing and rustle in the still-bare bushes, but there are buds of green pushing through, bright on their twigs like a child’s first teeth, a few catkins on the more sheltered willows and an abundance of light now, fourteen hours in which it would be possible to read outside. If it were possible to survive standing still outside for long enough to grasp a paragraph.

Ten weeks till we go home, says Anthony at breakfast. Max and I meet each other’s gaze, spoons arrested mid-air. Ten weeks? Three months, I say. Almost three months. Anthony shrugs. He’s counted. I shake it off, not wanting to think about the end, not wanting to lose the last three months to a count-down, but it’s time to make an effort. Get out and go somewhere. We can’t go home having spent eleven months in Reykjavík. Anthony wants to go to Geysir and I say it’s too far, the weather isn’t dependable and who wants to drive for five hours with two children in the car just to see one geyser? We’ll never see it if we don’t, he says. Later in the year, I say, when, for example, the sea isn’t frozen. The roads are dry, he says. Here they are, I say, you don’t know what it’s like over the mountain. What about Borgarnes? There’s a museum there, inside, and we haven’t been that way at all, out to the north. We should see what’s round the other side of Esja. I look in the Red Book, the Icelandic road atlas, bible of all that we are not going to do. There’s a hiking trail through some alpine forest, says Anthony, reading over my shoulder. You like trees. We can assemble the hot cross buns in the morning and go in the afternoon, forest walk and on to the museum and back in time for supper.

Even Tobias likes the forest walk, scampering goat-like up the lower slopes of Esja. There is sunlight through pine trees, some shelter from the wind, leaping streams frozen in action, icicles growing out of the moss like sea anemones, and just occasionally, in a sheltered spot, perhaps the ghost of the smell of fir, an intimation of what it might be like here in summer when it will smell of earth and trees and growing. But the afternoon is passing; we get back in the car and go on, following signs to The North. The sky over the sea turns grey, and then the horizon is swallowed by dark cloud. Snow begins to whirl over the mountains, and then to settle on the windscreen-wipers. We exchange glances. There’s no point moving to Iceland and being scared by a bit of snow. I can’t see the car in front any more, and then I can’t see the road. Damn it, I say. Let’s just go back to the flat. Window weather. It’s not charming, or wimpish, but a state of mind in which a fairly serious hope, that winter is over, that life is returning, is lost. It’s the antithesis of Easter.

Then the volcano blows again. It’s not a ‘tourist eruption’ any more, and Iceland is back on the front page. At first I think we can’t see it at all, but after a couple of days I notice that, even on a clear day, there’s always a cloud in the same place on the eastern horizon. From higher up, from Pétur’s office or from one of my teaching rooms, I can see that it’s a triangular cloud, the apex pointing below Reykjavík’s horizon. At first we keep checking the news, as if it’s a major disaster that might in some way unfold, might produce a story. It has the thrill of an international outrage without the vulgarity of suffering held up for mass consumption. Then we realise that our friend won’t be able to come from London at the weekend. If it continues past then, I won’t be able to go to Singapore for my job interview, and if it continues past then – When is it going to stop? I ask Anthony, who is refreshing the BBC website. It went on for two years last time, he says. They can’t close European airspace for