The Outrun (6 page)

I looked at around twenty rooms, groups of people – friends or strangers – who wanted to be in London enough to pay the high rents and live in flats where five unrelated people shared a kitchen. Some were proud to tell me they had a sitting room, even when it could barely fit a sofa. A warehouse was split into apartments and the small room I was shown had a bed raised on a platform and no windows. I imagined shutting myself in there with books and whisky and said I’d take it. They chose someone else.

In a Haggerston tower block where most of the windows were either broken or boarded up, I went to see a room on a Saturday afternoon. The curtains were drawn, loud trance music was playing and the place smelt of cannabis. I said I’d let them know. In Homerton two girls, both said they were actresses, were just moving into a large, bright apartment, their handsome boyfriends carrying their boxes of clothes and antique furniture up the stairs. They gave me peppermint tea and asked why I was looking for somewhere to live. I mumbled my story. They chose someone else.

One sunny evening I cycled to see a room in Clapton, then the cheapest area in Hackney, where terraces of dark-windowed houses lined the last hill before the Olympics site. The residents were friends-of-friends and younger than me, born in the nineties. It was a small room in a Victorian terrace, and when I saw the sash window next to the bed I knew I’d be able to drink and smoke freely there. A few days later I moved in.

I was struggling to understand how I’d let myself lose another job. I’d seen it coming, documented in depth the reasons why it was coming but repeated the actions that would make it come. Then it had come. I wasn’t in control.

I thought I had it sorted out: a job in an obscure corner of the publishing industry, where the days were hung-over, the deadlines relaxed, and I came in with a different nightclub stamp on my hand each morning. I wrote complimentary profiles of
corporate leaders, keeping my head down, arriving late and leaving on time, weekends messing it up, then ghostlike working weeks trying to piece it back together.

And then I was unemployed again, blinking away tears as I left another temping agency, wondering how far the money I had would get me in this unforgiving city. I was a tourist, useless and homesick. I craved horizons and the sound of the sea but when I walked to Tower Bridge again London took my breath away.

No one held their head that high in the Job Centre, even the boys who had cars waiting for them outside blasting hip hop, or the man dressed in a suit, ready for work, or the woman waiting next to me who smelt so sour I had to cover my nose and mouth with my sleeve.

I didn’t get replies from most of the jobs I applied for. Sometimes I felt there were just too many people in the city. I felt unwanted, like I’d failed to find my space. My friends were now spread over different areas and groups or I’d lost touch when I moved in with my boyfriend. I was no longer at the centre of things.

I got an interview in the tallest building in the UK and was pleased that I’d never had vertigo. I bought a beer after the interview and looked up at the tower block: it reminded me of a cliff face and in particular St John’s Head on Hoy – the tallest cliffs in the UK, which I used to see from the ferry to Scotland. It was always windy at Canary Wharf, the breeze off the Thames funnelled between the tall buildings, which made me feel at home. Peregrine falcons nest on cliffs and tower blocks, and as
night came, the aircraft warning lights on tower tops were like lighthouses on the islands.

Although I’d left, and had wanted to leave, Orkney and the cliffs held me, and when I was away I always had, somewhere inside, a quietly vibrating sense of loss and disturbance. I carried within myself the furious seas, limitless skies and confidence with heights. I remembered sitting on my favourite stone, looking out to the Stack o’ Roo, watching seabirds from above. The colony of Arctic terns on the Outrun had dwindled and disappeared but more gannets were appearing out to sea. Hardy sea pinks grew at the cliff edge and I used to see white tails disappearing down rabbit holes where puffins nested. The ledge felt solid but, looking from another direction, you could see that it was overhanging. Unsettled in London, I felt as if I was dangerously suspended high above crashing waves.

I usually started drinking as soon as I got home from work. Sometimes I got off the bus halfway and had a couple of cans in the park. I couldn’t wait, and when I was unemployed I didn’t have to.

Drunk, I spilled an ashtray and hoovered a still-lit cigarette without realising; the smell of burning dust, skin cells and hair in the bag hung around the flat for weeks.

There was something in the attic that creaked and scratched and had, we thought, been causing the unseasonal volume of flies. The landlord eventually sent someone around to have a
look. There was a hole in the roof where pigeons had been getting in and becoming trapped. In the space above our sitting room, just above our heads, a pile of dead pigeons was rotting.

That summer I felt as if I was just passing time, not living. I was in a blank-minded, waiting-to-feel-normal state for months, flitting from one thought to another. The weather was warm and I had itchy palms and sweaty thighs. I got up in the night and smoked cigarettes at four o’clock after lonely, empty days.

A distant car alarm kept me awake until dawn, until I could no longer distinguish its incessant chatter from birdsong. It was a balmy July night in London but in those hours I imagined myself in every bed I’d ever slept in and even wondered at what hour he would crash in from a nightclub. I had the sensation that I was experiencing everything I had ever done or felt at the same time. I remembered how we had slept on the roof of the art school once, among concrete blocks and discarded sculptures. I remembered the thunder and lightning every night of the first week we spent together and that room without curtains where in bed we watched planes crossing London and created a new language.

In the morning I remembered, with a lurch. My bassline had dropped out. When he’d left me I’d gasped and hadn’t exhaled.

7

WRECKED

ONE JANUARY AFTERNOON, MY BROTHER’S
tenth birthday, we were playing in the farmhouse when the phone rang. Something had happened on the Outrun.

Mum, Dad, Tom and I went outside, through the farmyard and out of the gate towards the shore, meeting neighbours heading the same way. We fell into nervous silence as our pace quickened. When we reached the edge of the cliff, she rose into view: down below, a large fishing boat was balancing on a sloping outcrop of rock. With each incoming wave the vessel rocked, unsure whether to be washed back out to sea or be pushed the other way, into the cliffs.

It was only mid-afternoon but it was getting dark and the tide was rising. The next wave came and there was a sickening creak, followed by a thunderous crash. The boat had tipped the wrong way and her hull had cracked. She was stuck. No tug boat would be able to pull her off the rocks now.

It seemed like a disaster for our cliffside group but we were joined by a coastguard; he told us the fishermen who’d been aboard were not so concerned. Hours earlier, under cover of darkness, the crew had climbed over the edge of the boat, dropped down onto the rocks, picked their way along to the lower part of the cliffs and scrambled to the top. Instead of knocking on the door of a farm, they’d gone to the airport and had left Orkney on the first plane.

Udal Law, the Norse system that still applies in some cases in Orkney and Shetland, has different rules about the ownership of the coastline from the rest of Britain. In other places, ownership of land extends only to the high-water mark but in Orkney it extends further out to the tide’s lowest spring ebb. Other interpretations of the Udal limit of land rights include: as far as a stone can be thrown, a horse can be waded or a salmon net thrown. Under this law, if something comes ashore on someone’s foreshore, it becomes their property.

The next day, the farmers knew they had to take their chance and climbed down the rocks the same way the fishermen had come up. I watched Dad go first, long-legged, clambering aboard the boat, then helping others up. We held our breath, hoping their weight would not tip the vessel, before watching them disappear inside the cabin. They emerged a few minutes later and, although they were too far away to see properly, I could tell that they were beaming, arms full of computer equipment.

Over the next few days, with the farm work continuing, one of our byres became a showroom of electronic navigation and fishing equipment, and fishermen from all over Orkney came
to look and buy. The farmers made a deal to give the insurance company five hundred pounds so that they could sell everything from the boat, including the catch; the profit came to many times that.

A few days later the wind got up and the boat was toppled from its perch. Overnight, the force of the sea against the rocks smashed it, leaving only small pieces floating on the waves and washed up in geos.

Almost twenty years later, like the boat, I was in a precarious position. The division between my appearance-maintaining daytime reality and the secrets of my nights was slipping. The cracks were showing. The worry about keeping my cover left my back aching and my hands fidgeting, rolling cigarettes. I was in a dangerous loop, now consciously drinking to ease the shame of what I’d done while drinking the night before.

The things I did in shared flats were usually not so much bad or dramatic as stupid and annoying: making a mess when trying to cook drunk late at night; eating flatmates’ food as I never had enough of my own; their alcohol drunk and replaced, drunk and replaced; asking to borrow ten or twenty pounds to see me over until payday, then going to the off-licence, slipping back into my room with the door closed and the window open.

I would put a token number of bottles and cans in the recycling, then tie up the rest in carrier bags and push them into dustbins on the street. I left the house chinking and smelling of stale booze.
There were empty bottles in the bottom of my wardrobe and empty cans lined up along my bedroom skirting board.

My behaviour brought tension into the household: unpredictable noise levels; Tuesday-night parties with strangers, men I brought home; leaving my handbag outside the front door and possessions trailing up the stairs. These episodes were followed by the depressive shadow of my hung-over days in bed.

I was always getting into horrible states but what other people perhaps didn’t realise was that I didn’t want to get into horrible states. I remember and respect the people who had the courage to try to talk to me about my drinking. I would nod and cry but after the break-up I was self-pitying and self-justifying. ‘You’re quite right to be worried about me,’ I’d say. ‘I’m in pain.’ He’d left me because of my drinking so now I was free to drink.

It wasn’t the break-up that tipped my drinking out of control, although I used it as an excuse. While I was still living with my boyfriend, I went to a friend’s birthday party in a bar in central London. I left after an hour or so and a couple of drinks, saying I was tired or ill or going home to write when in fact I was going home to drink alone at a faster pace than the drinks were coming there. That evening I chose alcohol over friends and had crossed a line. After this, I crossed lines quicker and quicker, choosing to drink despite warnings from work, doctors, family and the law.

I wished there was a reset button on my emotions, history and compulsions so I could forget about what I had lost as I lay
awake listening to shrieks and bass from the street below. I made plans to be out there, getting it back, jolting emails from daybreak, getting fit, having a radical haircut and typing the words that would save me, but it didn’t happen and I kept ending up in the same place.

Half cut in bed I wanted to speak to him and whispered out loud, ‘I am shining a light over the city for you. Stay warm, keep safe, wherever you are.’

Everyone began to know that I was trouble. I didn’t get invited to so many parties. I was a burden, the girl who always cried. I knew I was in trouble after that Saturday. I hadn’t thrown the bottle at the girl’s head although that was what it had looked like to everyone in the pub whose eyes turned at the crash and scream. Instead I threw the bottle down towards the table and it ricocheted upwards to hit the innocent, now-screaming girl. I realised the differentiation did not matter.

There were many times I recognised I had a problem and resolved to change. I went to some AA meetings. On a concrete step outside a church after a meeting in Holborn, drinking a milkshake, watching Boris Bikes pass me, I had an unexpected feeling of calm but that weekend I was in a mess again, drinking from two p.m. until two a.m., climbing over walls. To show my distress one night I stripped naked in a stranger’s flat.

Over the course of a month I was involved in events that meant I appeared in court twice, first as a criminal, second as a victim. I’d only ever been into a courtroom as a newspaper reporter before.

Referred by a doctor, I started going to a counsellor on Friday
afternoons; she made me write a ‘drink diary’ and I promised to limit my intake. Later that day I was in the off-licence, buying just two cans but going back half an hour later for more. It was never just two cans although I told myself, on hundreds of occasions, it would be. I spent my nights drinking alone in my bedroom, increasingly few people inclined to talk to me, in another undistinguished job. I thought, now I was single, it would be a good time to ‘have dinner parties’ and ‘take my portfolio to editors’ but I found myself crying in doctors’ surgeries, waking lower and lower each morning with more mysterious bruises.

Part of me enjoyed the wildness of running across London, alone on the top deck of a bus with a can of lager, but it was rarely fun at the end of the night, drooling and lonely. I never gave myself up completely – I always tried to function at work, eat well, stay social and afloat – but it was a painful and exhausting cycle, trying to maintain a hold on balance, always trying desperately to smooth my rough edges.