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

and I want to take Max up into Heiðmörk for a last walk. We’ve been there so often through the spring in our sweaters and coats and scarves and hats and gloves, sniffing the air under the trees to convince ourselves it smells of greenery, pushing our hoods back to see if it’s bearable to expose our ears, that I want to take him again now it’s warm, warm enough to stroll and sit down and feel the sun on our backs, and still enough to hear all the birds in the air. By the end of lunch the air is odd, brownish, muted, although the white sun is still strong behind the fog and the heat is almost oppressive. Something’s brewing. Best take Tobias’s cagoule, I suggest to Anthony, who is off on the nursery run, and I shrug a jacket onto my shoulders before I leave for school.

But by the time the bell rings, the fog is so dense that there’s no point going to Heiðmörk, where a lot of the pleasure is being able to see from Esja to the airport and far out to sea as you climb out of the woods. Instead, we drop Max’s bags at the flat and head out along the coast path towards Hafnarfjörður, our daily walk but different in every light and season and weather. Weird weather, Max says. Despite the fog, which is so dense we can see it eddying in front of the rocks by the path, there’s a warm wind. Usually there’s a carnival of children along here after school, swooping on roller-skates and bicycles, kicking balls into the paths of joggers, throwing stones into the sea and bread for the swans, but there are only a few solitary walkers today. I check my watch: if Guy’s plane was on time and he had only hand luggage, he could be at the flat soon. We turn back, walking briskly. Max is talking about space travel, but I’m listening to the voice in my mind chuntering about the move, about the need to sell things and pack things and give things away, see people for the real last time, worry about whether the shipping firm’s assurance that everything will be all right results from expertise or poor English. The other two are still out when we get back, and I check my phone for messages from Guy to find that Vodafone have disconnected our mobile phones a week early. I’m waiting for calls, from people who might be buying the washing machine and the car seat, not to mention the car, which Ása Björk has had checked by her mechanic. I use the landline to call Ása Björk, who does want the car and whose friend has bought the bicycle. She’ll pass on the cash after the weekend; she’s about to go to Stykkishólmur now, ash permitting. Ash? I ask. You drive to Stykkishólmur. Yes, she says, haven’t you looked out of the window? This horrible thick fog of it? Don’t go out, it’s really not good for you.

God, but I am stupid. And Anthony and Tobias, who is asthmatic, are out there, walking home from nursery. Max, remembering Pompeii again, pales. Mummy, they’ll be dead! he says. His eyes fill. Mummy, quick! Do something, they’ll be dying out there. No they won’t, I say, look, there’s someone walking past. He’s not dying. We were out in it, weren’t we?

Though I do now have a sore throat. The official line is that there’s no evidence that volcanic ash inhalation causes long-term health problems, except in vulnerable people, which includes small children and asthmatics. Would nursery have told Anthony that it was ash and Tobias shouldn’t be outside? It’s not as if he could have called me if he needed collecting. I leave a message for Guy and bundle Max into the car. He holds his breath until the doors are closed. I close the vents. We cruise the route to nursery, turn round and come back. They’re not there. The car is getting hotter and hotter under the brown sun. I try to call again, trying not to hear ambulance sirens. Tobias’s inhaler is in the kitchen cupboard. I park, badly, in front of the flat, and rush Max into the lobby. They’re back, and Guy’s called from the bus stop. Anthony heads out to meet him and I cuddle Tobias and worry.

We all spend the rest of the day in the flat, with the windows closed. It’s hot. The children fight. The windows are dimmed, and a fine layer of grit settles on the countertops, on the window-sills, on my keyboard, on the towels and soap in the bathroom, which has no windows or external walls. We’ve never had the windows closed before, even at minus fifteen in January. No-one in Iceland has the windows closed, not with underfloor heating and triple glazing in every room. The heating is centrally controlled and although we keep it as low as possible, we can’t turn it off. It gets hotter. The sun, boring through the fog, won’t set until after midnight. Guy builds Lego aeroplanes with Max, helps Tobias construct a wooden train track, talks me through a flap about whether making cookies would be worth having the oven on and making us even hotter. Everyone is coughing. We look out at the cars, under a brown snow which drifts and eddies along the road exactly as white snow did on Guy’s last visit. The adults stay up too late, revelling in adult company after so many weeks of nuclear family life, and looking at houses in Cornwall on the internet. Guy’s ideas about how we might live after the move are grandiose; he keeps pulling up small-holdings and disintegrating Georgian piles in ex-mining towns, scolding when I offer heritage-painted cottages in seaside villages. We giggle, and it gets later, and dustier, but not dark. We crane at the kitchen window to see the sun, a beige disk, slide