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

certain beauty in the movement of smoke and chemical pollutants across the pale skies and grey waves of the Irish Sea. Route 1 winds down the mountainside into Hveragerði. I carry on and find myself beyond our known world.

I leave the main road. The birch scrub beside the road is still leafless, skeletal, and where there is grass it is dry and dead. But the sun gets high in the sky now, and colours glow in the land, red volcanic soil, brown twigs rising from hay-coloured sedge, patches of bright snow in the hollows and black rock etched onto the grass. Dark grey cliffs lean over the road, and all the time the volcano is steaming and seething in the mirror. I lost the classical music station in Hveragerði and I haven’t seen another vehicle since I turned off the tarmac road. I drive on, upwards, checking the map as I go. There’s a ‘Site of Interest’ round the next bend, a place associated with supernatural beings, so I pull off and get out. I climb the col to find a family of Italian tourists photographing each other in front of a volcanic crater lined with red earth like the silk inside a Victorian top hat, and full of still, black water. No wind ripples the surface, no insect lands, no fish rises. One of the Italians is scrambling down to that dark pool, from which it is clear that a spectral hand, or perhaps tentacle, will reach to pull him down. The Volvo is waiting – I see the point of Volvos now – and I scurry back to it.

Just as I’m beginning to listen to my anxiety about being lost – though I still have a mobile phone signal, and actually there are quite a lot of summer houses scattered over these hillsides – I come to the two giant golf-balls I was told to look out for. I turn down the dust track between them, the car wallowing in loose gravel, and right and then left (the boiling volcano switching from one wing-mirror to the other), and there it is: a wooden chalet with a wraparound verandah looking out over the lava field to Eyjafjallajökull. Þórunn comes to welcome me, a small woman in her sixties with dark blonde hair in a rough bob and oversized, plastic-rimmed glasses. She’s wearing a mid-calf length skirt and a cream sweater. Nothing about her speaks of the supernatural; you wouldn’t give her a second glance on a bus. Come in, she says. Did you have a good journey?

We go up the wooden steps and in through the glass-paned front door, and I am swamped by envy. This little house has bright windows all around, looking over stunted trees and lava towards the mountains. The main room has a kitchen area, a fridge-freezer and an array of knives, seats arranged around a low table where a laptop waits, a big television in the background. There are two smaller rooms, one of which is almost filled by a double bed draped in an intricate patchwork quilt. The other is darkened, with a sofa-bed pushed against the wall. There is a small bathroom by the front door. Birch trees grow around the verandah and boulders slouch comfortably among the hillocks outside. It’s a cross between Little House on the Prairie and A Room of One’s Own and as such it seems, briefly, to define everything I’ve ever wanted in life. I exclaim over it and Þórunn says, yes, she loves it here, when she comes here she can do whatever she likes, whenever she likes. When she arrives she likes to go to bed for a few hours, after the drive, and then if she is bright in the night, well, she can write and eat and go walking then. When she gets back onto ‘city time’, she knows it might be time to go home. People say she must find it lonely, but she’s never alone. I look out of the window and think about what I could write if I could come here alone for days at a time. Maybe we should buy a summer house, I think, and come back to Iceland every year. Maybe we should come here and listen to the wind and the birdsong, although I know that the children’s fighting would drown out all but the strongest Icelandic wind and that none of us could sustain much interest in birdsong. Unless elves do good childcare.

I ask what she meant when she said she is never alone.

‘Well, there are seven kinds of beings around here. We’re talking about hidden people or elves, but to me there’s a difference between them. They all look human, all have human form. But the elves are more fun, and colourful, and different sizes. The hidden people are more like the working class, very down-to-earth, just thinking about their livestock and how to get food, and they’re always wearing very simple clothes, no colours, just brown and grey and white. I want to tell you about the woman who is just out there by the table.’

Þórunn gestures, and I gaze at the space she’s pointing to. I can see my own reflection, out there under the tree, and I can see the table on the verandah, and the wind stirring the rowan trees, and the ash cloud rising into the blue sky.

‘She’s from the hidden people, and she lives in the lava field with her family. I used to go and visit her, but about three years ago she started to come and see me, just for a visit. And there are tree elves that I can see out there, small tree elves, and the flower elves, which are even smaller’ – Þórunn holds her hand about a foot above the coffee table – ‘but usually elves are very delicate creatures, with a very fine bone structure. Well, beings, not creatures. And they’re in the trees and flowers and in the rocks.