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

a steep rocky hillside and the lake, which is ruffling in the wind and dotted with birds. More birds flicker around the cliffs up the hill. There are stands of spruce trees and a couple of wooden cabins. No street lights, no traffic. We jolt and lurch over the gravel. Here, he says, park here. You can’t get a car up to the house. We get out. I hear wind, lapping water, the chatter of birds. The air smells of trees and turf. Max and I heard a new bird while walking in Heiðmörk at the weekend, something with a curlew’s beak and fast-beating wings that ascends until you can hardly see it and then drops in swoops, once each swoop calling a piccolo phrase that doesn’t sound avian at all. Hrossagaukur, said Einar. A kind of snipe, Pétur glosses. There are two above us, waltzing in three dimensions, their clear notes echoing off the cliff. We walk up a steep track, through a painted wooden gate and under tall spruce trees into a garden neat as Mr McGregor’s. There are vegetable beds, edged with turf, terraced up the hill in semi-circles, a pear tree in a greenhouse, some flowering trees that aren’t coping with the wind, a sheltered area for sitting, and at the top, under the trees and looking out over the lake, Mark’s latest work in progress, a study for Sigrún María who is working on a PhD and needs a room of her own. Sigrún María texts from the house; she’s trying to get the baby to sleep and would rather we didn’t come in until he’s down. So we go into her study. It’s perfect: away from the house, with a view of trees and hills and water, and the inside made of perfectly jointed wood, double-glazed against the climate. Envy nibbles my fingers.

The study seems to be more of a spinning-shed at the moment. There are bags of raw wool and baskets of spun hanks. There’s a wooden spinning wheel, not the ancient artefact I’d been expecting but newly made of birch, with rounded treadles that invite touch. It reminds me of the heavy wooden toys we left at home, the garage and the push-along caterpillar with the same pale curves. Mark offers me some yarn to feel, dark and shiny. It’s cool and soft to the touch. Dog hair, he says.

I recoil. I wouldn’t voluntarily touch a dog unless it was attacking my children. Even dog-owners think dog hair is dirty, don’t they? I remember Mark’s colleague talking about ‘trash’ and take the dog yarn into my hand. Sigrún must have washed it, anyway. Sigrún asked her friend to collect it when he combed his dog, Mark explains. Here, this one’s goat hair.

It’s coarser than the dog hair, though both of them would knit into the silkiest clothes. There are skeins of unworsted wool too – carded roving, Mark says – and he shows me how to worst as you knit, twisting the strands as you wind them round the needles. Sigrún María texts again; the baby is asleep and we can go in.

Mark has another flurry of worry as we cross the garden. He hopes I won’t think it’s poor and makeshift. He’s always anxious about bringing people back here. My kids, I remind him, play with cardboard boxes. We’ve been using garden chairs as dining chairs all year; we’re all sleeping on air-mattresses on the floor. We go in, through a long lobby designed to keep warmth in and muddy boots out. It’s all wood inside, warm and comforting as an old sweater. People, I realise, aren’t meant to live in concrete, they’re meant to live like this. There are plaited rag-rugs on the floors, not trodden into grey anonymity because no-one wears shoes in Icelandic houses, and books, books in Icelandic and English and Danish, jostling each other off floor-to-ceiling shelves. Steely ligh floods through the windows, which face over the lake. There’s a kitchen area, with wooden shelves and counters, and armchairs gathered around a wood-burning stove.

Sigrún María comes through one of the doors leading off to the bedrooms. She has short honey hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, carries herself like someone riding the waves and watching the horizon. I thank her for letting me visit, tell her I won’t mind at all if she wants to go rest while the baby sleeps. No, she says, just at the moment she needs adult company even more than she needs sleep. Mark makes tea, and we all sit down by the fire and talk about knitting, while outside the spruce branches sway and the wind moves across the lake like a magnet over iron filings. I curl up in my chair, which is covered by a blanket, and warm my hands on my mug. Well, Sigrún María is saying, when I used to work as a crime reporter–

I sit up. A crime reporter? In Iceland? ‘I thought there was hardly any crime,’ I blurt.

‘We have about the same rates of violent and sexual crime against women as you do in the UK,’ she says. ‘Domestic violence is endemic, just like in the UK, and a quarter of women report sexual assault in anonymous surveys.’

I stop myself dropping my tea.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘OK. Actually all the Nordic countries report fairly high rates, though we’re the highest. It’s partly that there are fewer taboos about reporting sexual violence here than in the UK, for example.’ Sigrún María also has nursing qualifications, and spent a few years working in London hospitals. One year, there was a rapist who preyed particularly on nurses in uniform making their way to and from the Tube during the night. ‘A lot of our police force is female and there’s no bullying of women who’ve been attacked. It’s not clear if Icelandic women report a higher proportion of rape or suffer more rapes. Of course there are reasons why you’d get higher reported rates that might not mean