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

I don’t understand: ‘What about people who don’t have cars? Or can’t afford the petrol?’

‘Exactly. The poor things are going by the buses!’

Taking the bus here seems to be the last word in shame and deprivation, an equivalent to burning the furniture to keep warm, and yet the buses are cleaner, more frequent and more punctual than in European cities where catching a bus is perfectly normal behaviour for salaried adults.

‘I take the bus,’ I say firmly. ‘But fifty kilometres away there isn’t a bus.’ There’s no public transport outside Reykjavík and Akureyri, Iceland’s ‘second city’ in the north.

‘That’s true.’ He opens a new box of cheese.

‘So they just sit there in the villages and starve?’

‘Yep.’

‘How many people are we talking about? Have you any idea how many people are starving and can’t get to the free food?’

‘Nope.’

Einar and I look at each other.

‘So there could be hundreds of families all over Iceland who have no money and no food and no way of getting either?’

‘Yup.’

It’s only later that I think this isn’t really very likely. It’s hard enough to keep a secret in Reykjavík, and must be almost impossible in the smaller communities. People would know if a neighbour were starving, and if they knew they would do something about it, however strong the sense of shame. I think. Probably.

Einar and I wander outside, towards the queue. I put my gloves on. If it’s too cold to stand around here in May, what is it like in December?

‘Shall we talk to them?’ Einar asks.

I feel my insides knotting with shyness. We should, of course. It’s what we came for. I’d make a terrible journalist.

Einar approaches a couple, explains that I’m a visiting academic and am interested in the effect of the kreppa on ordinary people. ‘No,’ they say. ‘No, thank you.’

He tries someone else, a woman in her mid-twenties with teased hair, heavy make-up, and a three-year-old without a coat who keeps wandering off and scrambling up the embankment separating Fjölskylduhjálp’s yard from the dual carriageway. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘I’m an unemployed single mother of two. There’s no more to say.’ She pulls up her hood and turns away. Her friend shouts at the child, the first time I’ve heard someone yell at a child in Iceland.

Ashamed of our curiosity – and cold – we go into the clothes store, where they sell donated clothes for token sums, which are used to subsidise the food parcels. ‘We used to give the clothes away,’ the woman there confides, ‘but teenagers were coming and taking the best items just for fun.’ It’s as if Icelanders don’t know how to do this, second-hand stuff, as if they lack a blueprint for poverty. Which is bizarre, considering the stories I’ve heard from Vilborg and Pétur and a few others with long memories. It’s as if there’s been a collective forgetting, as if Icelandic poverty were as shameful as French wartime collaboration or the British concentration camps of the Boer War. A woman comes in and begins to rummage through the children’s clothes which I’ve been trying not to regard with a covetous eye, although there’s a pair of trousers that would fit Max, who has outgrown almost everything, and a coat that would be good on Tobias. I noticed this woman earlier, because she’s wearing a skirt I admire and has blonde plaits wound Heidi-style around her head. She looks as if she’s popped out of one of the downtown art galleries, or come straight on from a launch party. She looks like the kind of person I can talk to. She pulls out a pair of waterproof trousers to fit a boy smaller than Max and taller than Tobias. She’s not making eye contact, angling away from us. Einar goes up to her, explains again why we’re here. The woman looks at me with loathing, spits something at Einar in Icelandic which makes him redden, look away and stride out of the building. I follow.

‘What did she say?’ I ask, worried that I’ve caused offence.

‘She said it’s bad enough having to come here without talking to us about it,’ says Einar, avoiding my gaze. ‘Did you see what she was doing?’

‘Buying trousers?’ I hazard.

‘The poor woman,’ says Einar, recovering himself. ‘She was ashamed. Imagine the shame, buying her little boy’s clothes here.’

‘But I buy second-hand clothes for my kids,’ I protest. ‘I always have. Everyone does. It’s obvious, kids outgrow things before they wear out. What are you meant to do, throw things away just because your child has grown?’

I remember the queues outside twice-yearly NCT jumble sales in Canterbury, the way academics and lawyers and architects assemble outside the church hall before it opens on a Saturday morning to buy other people’s second-hand Boden. I remember a few treasured garments worn by both children, a pair of red-and-white striped OshKosh dungarees and a Petit Bateau Breton top, which came from the British Heart Foundation and went back to Oxfam six years later. Is it pretentious, I wonder, is there something odd about the English middle-class pleasure in thrift? We could all afford new Petit Bateau, and probably buy it for ourselves, but somehow it’s better to clothe children on the cheap. Is there cultural capital in the rejection of consumer imperatives?

‘You do?’ asks Einar. ‘Really? You buy things from charity shops?’

I shrug. ‘Yes. Why not? Especially things like waterproof trousers, they don’t get much wear before they’re outgrown.’

‘Oh, you’re right,’ he says. ‘Of course, you’re right. There’s no reason. But people don’t do that here. Nobody buys their children’s clothes from the Red Cross. They’d be so ashamed. Things get passed around families, but no-one would buy a stranger’s cast-offs.’

‘But why?’ I ask.

There isn’t an answer. I wasn’t expecting one.

We go back out, towards the queue, which has got longer, curving round the building into the car park, and doesn’t seem to have moved much. ‘Shall I try again?’ asks Einar. I dither, remembering the blonde woman’s expression. Einar’s photographic projects