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

make a square, or at least a quadrant, but the arcane language of knitting patterns, the need to be forever counting things, puts me off. I flick through my mother’s and my friends’ patterns, admiring the pictures, and occasionally get as far as buying wool, once or twice beginning to knit until I come to instructions I don’t understand. I will never be able to carry out an instruction to ‘Sl 1, k2, k2tog, k to last 5 sts, ssk, k3.’

Instead, I crochet. (I suspect crochet may be un-Icelandic.) My friend Kathryn, who can make gloves and skirts and fitted sweaters so fine you think they would drift towards the ground if you dropped them, gave me as a parting gift a box of cards detailing increasingly complicated lace stitches. Of course you can do it, she said, and she was right. Given a long winter’s evening and the box set of Mad Men which she also pressed into my hands, I can. I’ve learnt to do Blackberry Puff Stitch and Double Shell Stitch. Crochet is mostly holes, and therefore cheap on wool. I find that the finest Icelandic wool, loðband Einband, which feels like something you might use to snare rabbits, is fine enough to show off my precision and wiry enough to hold its shape. I graduate to Picot Double Fan Stitch, and embark on a shawl in dark grey. You could use the resulting mesh to catch large, angry fish or restrain lemmings, but it has an Edwardian intricacy and is eventually received with convincing pleasure by Kathy.

Early in May, when I’ve tracked down some traitorous Danish mercerised cotton and begun on a scarf I might wear myself, my student Mark comes to see me. He’s taking my Food and Literature class as part of his MA, one of a group of teachers from Menntaskóli who are now required to have an MA and therefore relieved of teaching to attend the university part-time. Icelanders tend to translate Menntaskóli as ‘high school’ but that misrepresents it; Menntaskóli is a college for sixteen- to twenty-year-olds which prepares people for university, further vocational training or employment. Mark, who is Canadian, here because he married an Icelander, teaches English. He stopped coming to class half-way through term, e-mailing to explain that he and his wife had a new son and he was taking some time to learn fatherhood. He’s kept up, and handed in a memoir about his childhood diet that makes me want to chat, for the unprofessional reason that his parents seem to have taken the 1970s denial of sugar and passion for wholegrains even further than mine. While I’m left feeling deprived by any meal that doesn’t include dessert, he is distressed by the idea of boiling rather than steaming vegetables.

Mark’s response to ‘how are you?’ is a jolting reminder of why not to have kids. He’s tired. Very tired. Maybe not as tired as his wife, with whom he has argued. There have been no meals for some time. None of the things he normally does, likes doing, are possible, and he cannot imagine how he will ever be able to do them again. I try to explain that life will become possible, bearable, even pleasurable again, albeit on new terms. I remind him that parents do write books, climb mountains and take long-haul flights. Maybe, he says, red-eyed, hollow. It’s not the kind of thing you can tell people, so instead I admire his sweater, which is a particularly fine example of the craft, in shades of green that aren’t part of the usual Icelandic palette.

His face changes. Really, he says, you like knitting? I explain about me and knitting, and he explains about his sweater. Yes, he knitted it himself but he also worsted the wool. His wife Sigrún María has a spinning wheel. They live out in Mosfellsbær – the last settlement out towards Esja on Route 1 – in a, well, a sort of cabin, really. He rebuilt it himself out of an old summer house. Sigrún María spins and weaves and they both knit, and they’re growing vegetables and working on the fruit and thinking of hens next year, Settlement Hens. He’s making a henhouse with lumber from the dump. They don’t have central heating, relying instead on a wood-burning stove.

He glances up at me, gauging the real extent of my enthusiasm, and then goes on. He and Sigrún María got much of their furniture from the dump, too. I didn’t know you could, I say, and recount our attempts to find unwanted furniture, the way we thought we’d be able to pick it up second-hand or free and found that that market doesn’t exist here, certainly not for foreigners. No, he agrees, it’s crazy. Every time he goes to the dump he sees useful and valuable things thrown away: garden furniture, sideboards, tables and chairs, a cement mixer he thought he could use. Televisions and computers. So after a couple of times he asked the guys there if he could take some of it. It was only going to landfill. They said no. He asked why not. They glanced at each other – crazy foreigner! Because, they explained slowly, someone’s thrown it out. It’s someone else’s trash. Mark didn’t mind. No, they said. No way. Imagine if you take it and someone sees that you’re using their trash! Imagine it!

Mark imagined, and was untroubled. He could see some prime building timber and a set of garden chairs. What if I just take it, he asked, what would you do? You can’t, they told him. Mark pulled out his phone and offered it to them. OK, he said, if there’s a law against taking other people’s trash, call the police and get that law enforced. Otherwise, I’m taking that wood and those chairs.

They didn’t call the police. He took what he wanted, and since then he’s been back, until their house is furnished with other people’s trash. But when he recounted this