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

slowly behind a brown curtain of ash. The world’s gone sepia. At last we go to bed, and I lie there, hot, airless, wondering how the flat is ventilated. When we lived in a newly built, double-glazed flat in England, there were little vents set into the window-frames, but there aren’t here. There are three heavy, sealed, double-glazed doors and two flights of stairs between our flat and the outside world, and not a breath of draft around the triple-glazed windows. I remember a wartime story I read to Max last week, in which people trapped in an air-raid shelter were told not to panic because hyperventilating would use up too much oxygen. How long will it be before we can go out again? They can’t, can they, have designed a flat with a finite air supply? I must be being ridiculous. It’s not a submarine. (But I remember about Icelandic health and safety.) I turn over, tweak the piece of fabric we hang over the roller blind as a kind of curtain. Nothing has changed out there. There’s no birdsong.

The ash is still there in the morning, maybe even thicker. The sun’s bright but there are no shadows, and we can’t see Esja or even across the bay. The balcony is carpeted with brown dust, swirling idly as the wind plays down the street. Guy is worrying on behalf of people who care about the state of the paintwork on their cars, and the temperature in the flat is twenty-six degrees and rising. I start to make waffles, panacea for everything, or at least a distraction for me. Even the mixing bowls in the cupboards are gritty to touch. I’ve wiped the counters, but every time I put anything down it leaves a paler outline on the white stone. Guy and Anthony are online, their laptops back to back on the table. Government advice, says Anthony, is that dwellers of the city should live in their homes. Guy runs it through different translation software, but the message is clear. Guy has flown from London for the weekend and no-one’s going anywhere.

It’s twenty-nine degrees and the children are fighting over a book neither of them wants to read. I soak tea towels in cold water, open the windows and try to drape the towels to cover the gaps. More dust comes in. Sweat trickles down my side. The children are chasing each other up and down. Wearily, recalling the techniques for winter weekends – but then at least we could go swimming – Anthony gets out the arts-and-crafts box and I take Tobias into the lobby to ride up and down in the lift. Later, I go out and move the car into the underground garage so the children can get in without going outside and we drive to the mall, which is full of parents chasing young children the length of its stone floors and buying nothing. The piped music is too loud, constantly interrupted by announcements of sales on cookware and mobile phones. Being in the mall quickly becomes worse than being in the flat. There is, I remind Anthony, the indoor pool in Hafnarfjörður, but neither of us can face it. We are out of courage, out of energy, out of adventure. Time to go home.

By the end of the week, the wind has changed, carrying the ash out to sea, and our seven boxes have been taken away by men in a van who seemed to know what they were doing. My bike is gone. Mæja posted our washing machine’s availability on Facebook and a young couple, about to move out of his parents’ house, came round and bought it. (The taboo on second-hand goods may be shifting after all.) I’ve cleaned the fridge and Anthony has helped a man with a van manoeuvre it out of the flat so it can be returned to Hulda Kristín’s step-father. Pétur comes to disassemble and collect his bookshelves and the Formica table that has been my desk. Hot, now, in the sun flooding through the triple glazing, I pack everything too precious to go in the boxes. There are a lot of precious things and many of them are heavy. Wooden toys, books. More books. Computers. Children’s drawings and schoolwork. When I’ve finished, and lined up the cases in the middle of the bare room, there is still too much left. I call my students and they come round, while Anthony and the children are still swimming. The two shop-soiled IKEA wicker armchairs go. Sigrid, who has three kids, takes the elephant rug we bought for Tobias in IKEA, its matching cushion and both children’s duvets. I can’t, she says, let me at least pay you. You can take them, I say, remembering the house full of objects waiting for us in Canterbury, and needing to be sold so we can move to Cornwall before the new school year begins. And you can’t pay, I don’t need any more króna and they were always meant to be disposable. I give a pestle and mortar which have always been too small, so the spices ping out when you try to grind them, to another student. She drops it while loading her car; oh well, she says, it wasn’t meant to be. It was a wedding present. Mads accepts our duplicate copies of Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddleduck, 1970s editions with odd colours and mismatches between text and pictures, because he enjoyed the week on children’s books in my food and literature course. Mads and Mæja are among the people I’ll miss most, and he’s a bibliophile, so that’s all right, I tell myself. Part of the circulation of objects. It is all right, but I think my dead grandparents gave me one of those when I was a toddler. Katrin takes a piece of batik that I bought when I first went to university to cover my bed, which lay in a drawer in Canterbury for years before