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

two years, I protest. He shrugs. They can if the planes can’t stay up. I look over his shoulder at the map, showing the ash making its way south and east across the Atlantic and spreading out towards central Europe. Post comes that way, I think. There are at least two parcels on their way to me now, Spanish chocolate from a friend who runs a Catalan food stall in Canterbury and the US edition of my novel. Our tenant has just forwarded our voting cards for the election. No post. Perhaps we should look at ferry tickets home, says Anthony, and I say, nonsense, they’ll have sorted something out by then. But earlier I was trying, and failing, to impress on Max that there is no way of controlling a volcano. Of course, Anthony adds as I disappear with some chocolate and a DVD, we’d have to go round by Akureyri to get to the ferry anyway, drive three-quarters of the way round the island, what with the road being broken by the volcano. Except that at the moment, that section is also closed by ash. There’s no way out.

We get used to it. Visitors from England, who have been waiting until spring to visit us, cancel. Our friend Henri, who has been in Somalia for most of the time we’ve been in Iceland, gets as far as Heathrow and stays there, valiantly, for most of the day. Anthony can’t visit his father in hospital, my parents are contentedly stuck on the Amalfi Coast. After long discussion of dates, I have, at last, booked flights to Singapore for a job interview in six days’ time. We know someone who has missed his child’s birth while trying to get back from Beijing by train, and someone else who couldn’t get to her own wedding. The internet is humming with stories of people’s rage, resourcefulness and dismay. That’s when I approach the volcano again. It feels like going into the eye of the storm, the crater full of curses and howls of outrage from airports around the globe. I’m going there to meet a woman who talks to elves.

Icelanders believe in elves. Maybe. Some of them. When deciding where to build roads, the Department of Transport consults mediums who speak to the hidden people. Many people, especially in the countryside, salute the guardian spirits of particular stones and waterfalls as they drive along. Tourist information magnifies this aspect of Icelandic life until you could be forgiven for imagining a nation that reverences animated garden gnomes frolicking across the lava. The tourist shops downtown do a good line in elf-tat, plaster figurines with toadstool houses or, at the up-market end, handmade dwarves made of undyed felt from Icelandic wool. Hafnarfjörður Tourist Board produces a map of the municipality – the settlement with the highest elf-density in Iceland – showing where elves’ houses and playgrounds are scattered between the industrial estates and apartment blocks. Icelanders’ ideas about tourists can be as embarrassing as tourists’ ideas about Icelanders, and it’s so obvious to me that none of my friends and students here believe any such thing that at first I don’t ask about elves. But I do like ghost stories. The sagas have some memorable ones, so I ask around for the modern equivalents. Pétur says, oh, but you must go see Þórunn. Messíana knows her. (Messíana knows everyone.) We’ll put you in touch. It turns out that Þórunn lives in Kópavogur, the next suburb in from Garðabær, but, says Pétur, I should go see her in her mountain house. Yes, Messíana agrees, then she can show you the elves. Þórunn showed Messíana the elves, but Messíana couldn’t see anything. Although she had fun.

I postpone the trip. I find the idea of talking to someone about elves embarrassing, and I’m still scared of driving on the unsurfaced roads outside the city, but one day after Easter Pétur tells me that Þórunn will be available to see me at her summer house on Saturday. He e-mails me a map. It’s a long way, much further out of the city than I’ve been before, and half the roads are gravel tracks. It’s also rather near Eyjafjallajökull.

I drive out of the city. I couldn’t eat breakfast, and can feel my heart banging as I join the freeway. It takes me a while to work out what the problem is. It’s not the driving, not on a bright Saturday with the children safely at home. It’s the solitude. I haven’t driven anywhere alone since we left England and it feels somehow unsafe, as if, through impulse or mishap, I might drive off the map and not come back. An obese Range Rover roars up behind, and drives along so close that I can’t see the number plate in the rear-view mirror. There is an empty overtaking lane but Icelanders try to push you along before resorting to that. I can hear his engine. I follow Hulda Kristín’s advice: turn the radio up, ease off the accelerator and stop looking in the mirror. He can’t get any closer so there is little point in watching, and as we come up to the hill above Hveragerði I lose interest anyway. I can see the volcano. I’m up among the hilltops here, and can see out across the sea to the Westman Islands and far inland over the mountains towards the glacier. The sky is baby-blue, the kind of blue that dupes foreigners into leaving their hats at home, but over in the eastern quadrant there’s what looks at first like an odd cloudscape. But it’s too well-defined, its energy too obviously coming from below: grey cloud boiling up far into the sky and sweeping across the eastern horizon in a storm of what might, from here, be particularly dark rain blowing across the sea. It reminds me of the cooling towers and factories we used to pass in the Wirral when going to Wales, when I could see a