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

a higher incidence.’ There surely are. I’ve discussed this with my friends at home. None of us, a completely unrepresentative sample of middle-class working mothers in their thirties, would report rape in the UK. Sigrún María pours more tea, picks up her knitting. ‘But anonymous surveys and police records together suggest that our rates are pretty high, especially domestic violence. Basically, Icelandic men damage Icelandic women, especially at home and especially when they’re drunk. Which is rather a lot.’

‘But it’s meant to be the most egalitarian society in the world,’ I protest. ‘You know, lesbian prime minister, almost full employment among mothers, shared nine-month parental leave, a majority of women at university –’ Only at undergraduate level, I remember, not among lecturers and most certainly not among professors; I have not yet seen a portrait of a woman among the dozens displayed around the university.

‘Some people say that’s partly why. That Icelandic men find it very hard living in a feminist society and take it out on their partners behind closed doors.’

We look at each other, not knowing where to start with this idea. I remember reading about a survey showing that Icelandic men do less housework than the men of any other northern European nation (though still more than the Portuguese and Italians; the further south you go, the greater the sexual inequality – blame the Pope), and various friends complaining that their partners won’t entertain the idea that people with penises can clean bathrooms. Anecdote, and easy enough to find English women sharing the same complaints, but I don’t know any thirty-something professional men in England who deny the principle of equality, whatever happens in practice.

‘Also, of course, there are drunken fights among men. A lot of those. And recently we’ve had a spate of drug-dealers having someone beat up the families of people who owe them money.’

I remember Hulda Kristín telling me back in August that Iceland had no drug problem until immigration rose in the boom years.

‘I never read about it,’ I say weakly. ‘None of it. And people keep telling me how safe it is here.’

‘It is,’ says Mark. ‘Compare it to London, or Vancouver. It is. But we have crime like everywhere else.’

Not in the English-language media. Yesterday Pétur told me that, at the same time as a violent molester of children had been given a five year prison sentence, a group of young people who entered the parliament building – which every Icelander has the right to do – during the demonstrations, has been told to expect seven years in prison. The headlines in the English language Iceland Review and on the English pages of Morgunblaðið were about a cycle-to-work scheme and Eyjafjallajökull’s most recent contribution to international airspace. I don’t think there’s any conspiracy; these sites are meant for and used by tourists, who want Iceland to be green and geologically interesting and have little interest in the workings of the judicial system. The crime rate is another thing, an important thing, I’ve missed by being foreign and in particular by not making enough effort to learn Icelandic.

‘I still find it easier being a woman here than in the UK,’ says Sigrún María. ‘I found it really upsetting the way men would open doors and hold my chair. I was like, “Get off, stop it!”’

I think about this.

‘It was really intrusive,’ she says. ‘As if I wasn’t just like them. Manipulative.’

‘It’s just training,’ I tell her. ‘My husband could no more go through a door first than I could start eating before everyone’s sitting down, or take the last piece of something.’

‘Icelanders don’t have that either,’ Mark points out.

Mark makes comparisons with violence and alcoholism in British Columbia, where he taught in a Native American village before coming to Iceland, and then I notice exactly how Sigrún María is knitting. It’s completely different from the English way. Her fingers are doing something I’ve never seen before, and the whole dance of yarn and needles and hands is unfamiliar. And much faster. Maybe if I could knit like that . . .

‘Show me,’ I demand.

‘Oh, this is how we do it,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen the British way. It’s weird.’

But then the baby wakes up, and we all stop what we’re doing and admire him, because he’s that kind of child, until he reminds me of my own admirable kids. Time to go.

Mark’s directions were plain enough, and all I need to do is go down the valley until I come to the sea and then turn left to follow Route 1 along the coast back into the city, but somehow I get lost. I find myself on a tarmac road, with markings down the middle, punctuated by mini-roundabouts every few hundred metres. Up and down hill, with rocky turf on both sides. At the tops of the hills, I can see the sea straight ahead, so I keep going. There are street lights but no traffic, no pavements, as if the road was built just for me. I glimpse Route 1 over to the west and take the next turn towards it. There are houses ahead, but when I come to them – after a couple more mini-roundabouts – I see that they are unfinished. There are walls and roofs, and in most cases windows, but some are no more than foundations with steel rods sprouting into the sky, and none are inhabited. I slow down, peer down side streets. It’s a whole suburb, abandoned as if the bomb had fallen one night after the builders and plumbers and electricians had gone home. It reminds me of Heimaey, of Clearance villages in Scotland, entombed settlements, stories cut short, a broken history, and as I keep going, guessing my way out, it begins to be alarming. What if I never get out of here, what if I keep coming to more roundabouts and making more wrong decisions and driving through more of this aborted town? I come to a crossroads, with a traffic