The Outrun (27 page)

I’m not sure what’s next. Maybe after this winter on Papay, picnicking behind dykes, I’ll return to London for a while, dining on the fortieth floor of a City skyscraper. I’ve swung from active alcoholism to strict sobriety, from inner city to outer isle. I seek pure sensation, just as an octopus can taste with all of its skin. I feel good alone and going somewhere.

The developers are interested in buying a hundred acres of land – sixty-two from Dad, including most of the Outrun, and the rest from neighbouring farms. Two huge buildings are planned, each with a footprint of ten acres. Even if the farmers don’t want to sell, the development is important enough potentially to force a compulsory purchase order.

I’ve returned to the islands at exciting times. I am generally in favour of renewable energy. This is a new way of using the land and our natural resources, providing income for the islands into the twenty-first century and reducing our use of fossil fuels, as well as giving a one-off cash boost to ageing farmers. But the idea that this beautiful, barely touched stretch of land where I grew up, where I chased lambs, watched birds and hid with my
brother, should become an industrial zone is dizzying. Computer-modelled plans pull at my memories and emotions. Dad and neighbouring farmers are in limbo.

Things change and move on. For me, the way the farm was when I was a child was lost when Mum left and the house was sold. The Outrun could be sold for the substation but the waves will still crash indifferently up against its cliffs. The engineers laying the cables will feel the tremors. The same wind that whistles through the windows of my peedie pink house will turn the blade of turbines, cutting the air in an endless pattern.

Spring is coming, guillemots are returning to the cliffs at Fowl Craig and the RSPB warden will soon be back, so it is time for me to leave Papay. I choose to leave not by plane but more slowly, on the steamer.

The spring equinox is soon: I will be two years’ sober. Although I mainly rely on my own forms of therapy – walking, swimming – I have started going through the rest of the 12 Steps, designed to be a programme for sustainable living. Step Nine is to make ‘amends’ with those people we have harmed. I write my ex-boyfriend a letter that I will not send but keep in my bag in case I meet him again. I get a text from the girl, my peer, who was in the psychiatric ward telling me she’s got to ninety days’ sober – a significant milestone in AA – for the first time and has been accepted to become a student nurse.

The forces that I grew up with are being utilised in unexpected
ways. Recovery is making use of something once thought worthless. I might have been washed-up but I can be renewed. In these two years I have put my energy into searching for elusive corncrakes, Merry Dancers and rare cloud; into swimming in cold seas, running naked around stone circles, sailing to abandoned islands, flying on tiny planes, coming back home.

I’m on my way to see my toddler nephew Joe, who was born shortly after I got sober. He will never see me drunk. I feel powerful. I expect more from myself than I would wish on others. At night I have visions, perfectly conjured spaces and memories: every window I’ve ever smoked out of and all my favourite songs; all the parties I’ve been to and forgotten; a stone X I saw from the plane, built so that sheep can shelter from wind blowing from all directions. I wake in the night and experience an instant of raised consciousness, a new state that is to ‘awake’ what awake is to sleep.

Rain on me. Strike me with fire. I feel like lightning in slow motion. I am one fathom deep and contain the unknown. I am vibrating at a frequency invisible to man and I’m ready to be brave. From the upper saloon of the MV
Thorfinn
, I watch Papay disappear over the horizon. The last two years stretch and glitter behind me like the wake of the ferry. The powers are churning inside me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY THANKS, FOR SUPPORT AND
inspiration in many ways, go to Jeremy Allen, Fong Chau, Cate Finlayson, Amelia Green, Jenni Fagan, Henrik Hedinge, Katharine Hibbert, Karen Hinckley, Mira Manga, Sarah Perry, John Rogers, Dee Quintas, Dave Wheeler, Sam and all the staff and peers of the Island Day Programme, everyone at RSPB Orkney, Orkney Polar Bear Club, my Twitter and Facebook friends, and the people of Papay.

I was lucky to have readers who helped with the manuscript at various stages. Thank you, Tristan Burke, Mathew Clayton, Patrick Hussey, Karen Hinckley, John McGill and Malachy Tallack. I’m also grateful for the care and enthusiasm of my agent, James MacDonald Lockhart of Antony Harwood Ltd, and my editor at Canongate, Jenny Lord.

My special thanks go to Robin Turner, Jeff Barrett and Andrew Walsh, who published some early parts of this material on the
wonderful Caught by the River website and encouraged me to develop it.

During my time on Papay I was supported by, and am highly grateful for, an artist’s bursary from Creative Scotland.

With love to my family, this book is for you: Jane, John, Dorothy, Tom, Peggy, Joseph and Stella.