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

a deep, slurred voice. It’s not quite uncanny – any woman with a trained voice could probably do it – but it sounds male, drunk, and not like Þórunn.

The ghosts made him drink, I think, and I’m attended by spirits who tell me to check my e-mail every ten minutes when I’m writing and eat chocolate all afternoon. Why not? Something makes us fail, something uninvited. Hidden.

‘So they look so human that you couldn’t tell the difference between the guy drinking and the guy telling him to drink?’

‘When I looked closely there was a difference. The dead guy was wearing clothes that weren’t modern, and the colours weren’t as bright. His hair wasn’t a specific colour.’

These are Icelandic beings, then. They live in rocks around town, dance attendance on men who get drunk alone in bars. People don’t see elves in Canterbury, say, or Verona or Chicago. Has Þórunn ever seen them outside Iceland?

She brightens up. She used to be married, and her husband was a keen golfer. She went with him to Hawaii and there were the elves, more lightly dressed than the Icelandic ones but just the same. The Swedish ones, though, in the forest, were slimmer than Icelandic elves, and the Italian beings were more like angels. Maybe, I suggest, it’s because Iceland and Hawaii are both volcanic islands. Þórunn half-closes her eyes, tilts her head. She’s hearing something.

‘I just asked my guide, and he’s telling me –’ She pauses, like someone waiting to translate. ‘He’s telling me that both Iceland and Hawaii have connections to the middle of the earth, where there is a floating, something floating like lava . . . It’s like the hidden people are connected to the lava, but not every kind of lava. Just this kind.’

So there are different kinds of hidden people connected to different geologies?

Þórunn attends to her guide, and then looks at me again. I don’t know if the guide, who seemed to be standing at her left shoulder, is still present. I don’t believe in any of this, I remind myself, but I’m looking at the space beside her and fear strokes my neck and ruffles my hair. ‘I was too curious once when I met a being I had never seen before on a mountaintop. It’s the only time I have been harmed – well, not harmed, but the only time it didn’t do me good. I gave them access to me for about two years and it made me sick, it drained me. I just got sicker and sicker, and then I stopped communicating with them.’

It doesn’t sound as if it’s all about peace and love.

‘So there are some beings with whom it’s dangerous to communicate?’ I ask.

‘Well, love and nourishing, that’s my thing. But there was no love from them, it was all calculated. I was so eager, so curious, and I just didn’t notice that they didn’t have a heart. But they weren’t evil, not demons or anything like that.’

But they weren’t, I think, particularly friendly.

‘So are these ancient beings? Were they here before people?’

Þórunn smiles slowly. She tells me a story that ‘the old men’ told her, that there were hidden beings in Norway, ‘two or maybe three thousand years before Iceland was settled’. The people in Norway then were given to evil, greedy, almost as materialistic as we are now, thuggish. (I’m not sure if these are human or hidden people.) There were four families of hidden people who survived a particularly violent raid (can humans then kill hidden people?), and one good man among the Norwegian villains helped them and their livestock to escape in four shells. The shells drifted out to sea and came at last to shore in the north, south, east and west of Iceland, and the families multiplied, divided into slaves and landowners, and populated the earth. And then, a thousand years later, the people arrived from Norway and Britain.

Þórunn talks for a while about how she knows this, about the old man in 1950s clothes who told her these ‘beautiful facts’. But I don’t need convincing; we’ve known this story from Genesis and before. It’s a settlement legend, as if the hidden people are the indigenous inhabitants missing from more conventional accounts of Icelandic history, in which the island remains uninhabited until the medieval Norse colonization of the ninth century. There is a version of national history in which Iceland was an egalitarian democracy from the moment in 872 when the first settler Ingólfur Árnarson cast his house-pillars from his boat as a kind of augury and saw them come to rest on the shore where his statue now stands in Reykjavík. Revisionist histories have proved the presence of Celtic slaves who were not equal to their Nordic masters, but there’s still a popular idea that Icelanders have never oppressed anyone, that Iceland is a guiltless nation. From what Þórunn is saying, it seems that in the absence of an oppressed aboriginal population it is necessary to invent one. The hidden people were here before we were, they know how to live in harmony with Mother Earth, and instead of honouring their wisdom we steal their land to make golf courses. The hidden people bear the sins of the world, although unlike Christ they can also personify what we like least about ourselves. I see the appeal. And I’m hungry; Þórunn invited me for noon, which is after lunch for many Icelanders, and we’ve been talking for over an hour.

I look around. The house feels peaceful to me, scattered with handmade objects, formed around its owner’s sense of the necessary. ‘Finally,’ I ask, ‘tell me what you can see now that is invisible to me.’

Þórunn looks around, smiles at someone who must be either sitting with us at the table or just outside the window. ‘Well, she is out there, and she’s very, very curious.’

I strain to see. I would like to catch the suspicion of a glimpse, at least an intimation of something. I