Names for the Sea Sarah Moss (list of ebook readers txt) 📖

to fly to South East Asia, or over Europe, so that I can get to London but not from London to Singapore. Anthony and I spend several evenings trying to piece together flights the long way round, Reykjavík – New York – San Francisco – Tokyo –Singapore. And back. We also spend quite a lot of time reading the blogs of expats in Singapore, trying to imagine ourselves in a world without seasons, on a campus planted to provide shade and cool, eating spicy street food and fresh mangos and ice cream. There are, we gather, excellent international schools. I wander Reykjavík, enlisting incredulous shop-assistants in my search for affordable interview clothes in which I might look employable in temperatures twenty-five degrees higher than the Iceland summer average. Meanwhile, I am also called for interview in Cornwall. My students, and some of our Icelandic friends, tell us to go for Singapore. Keep going, follow the money, raid foreign shores. I know what Pétur would say. He doesn’t approve of money.

I don’t ask his advice. Instead, over waffles, I recount my trip to see Þórunn. I don’t believe it, I say, I didn’t change my mind. You are not saying she is making it all up, surely, says Messíana. You know these things are important to many people here. No, I say, of course not, I never doubted that she is in good faith, that she has the experiences she describes. And I was, I admit, a bit spooked by the end, alone with the seer and her spirits in that strange landscape. But there must be rational explanations. Pétur and Messíana look at each other. I do agree with you, says Pétur, but one night when Þórunn came to dinner she began speaking in a strange voice and held forth about many things, political and economic things, about which she knows nothing at all, using words that couldn’t be in her usual vocabulary. And then she fell silent, and then became herself again and cried a little. It was odd, very odd. Messíana shrugs. It must be a cultural difference, she says. You two did not understand each other. You should go see Brynja.

Messíana has a friend who made an elf-map of Brynja’s farm out to the north-west, beyond Borgarnes. In her studio overlooking the fjord, Messíana shows me postcards based on the map. They show humanoid couples, coloured in bright pencil crayon, superimposed on photographs of a lava field with cliffs behind it. Some of the couples are squat with bulbous faces vaguely reminiscent of medieval squalor, others are elongated like cartoon characters stretched out and about to ping back into shape. Most of these beings stand in front of dwellings rather smaller than their inhabitants, which are canopied with blue and red rainbows. You might find her more familiar than Þórunn, says Messíana.

On the appointed day, Kathy and Alec have come from the Netherlands for a few days. Many friends promised to visit, but most of those who got as far as booking tickets have been thwarted by the volcano, which allows take-off and landing from London when the wind is in the west or from Reykjavík when the wind is in the east. Every couple of weeks a north wind lets the post through, although too late for our postal voting cards and a crucial birthday present. We are disenfranchised by the volcano. But in the middle of May Kathy and Alec have got through, at least one way, and are happy to come elf-hunting.

I pick them up from their hotel on an industrial estate behind Route 1, the only one that had vacancies with so many tourists stranded in Iceland. Alec volunteers to map-read. It’s not summer, not even spring by European standards. There’s low cloud over the city, with only the lower slopes of Esja visible. The squeak of the windscreen wipers is the day’s metronome. It’s the end of rush hour, I say, and the traffic is still a bit crazy. SUVs weave across the lanes, three people drive bumper to bumper at eighty kilometres per hour, horns blaring and lights flashing in the aftermath of an altercation. We have about 100 metres before our entry lane becomes an exit lane and we get funnelled back into suburbia. I accelerate hard into a gap between two jeeps that doesn’t exist as I start to pull out but does, just about, before we get siphoned off to the south. Bloody hell, says Kathy. It’s roughly what would happen if you let Italian drivers loose on American freeways, observes Alec. Worse, I say, worse. Think Greeks on the M25. Driving tanks in heavy rain. I spend too much time trying to find metaphors that will convey the awfulness of Icelandic driving and am pleased to have a willing audience. (I do not tell them that a few days ago, driving home alone, I found myself thinking that I’d better indicate at the approaching intersection because it’s not a place where anyone would expect me to make a left turn. And then realised that I’d driven across the city while thinking about my book and not noticed anyone’s driving. I fear I may lose my UK licence before we get home from Gatwick.) We leave the city via a slalom race over gravel tracks around roadworks, and all the extra lanes peel off into malls, industrial estates, supermarkets and the outer suburbs that trickle towards Esja, until Route 1 is dual track and the car behind is a Golf in no particular hurry to overtake. The windscreen wipers creak, and we crane up at the mountain. There’s a lovely walk up through those trees, I tell them. Maybe on the way back, if the rain clears. We round Esja and the city is gone. The rear-view mirror holds sky and sea, and a mountain, dark with rain, fills the windscreen. There’s some kind of factory at the far end of the fjord, a complex of