world and destroy cities with a flick of its tongue. A layabout called Assipattle dreamed of saving the world and got his chance when he killed the Stoorworm by stuffing a burning peat into its liver, cooking it slowly from the inside. Writhing in agony, the Stoorworm thrashed its head, knocking out hundreds of its teeth, which formed the islands of Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes. Dragging itself to the edge of the earth, it curled up and died, its smouldering body becoming Iceland – a country full of hot springs, geysers and volcanoes. That liver is still burning so maybe the Stoorworm isn’t dead at all. A tentacle may still be twitching around these shores and the tremors may be the aftershocks of the monster’s death-throes.
Talking to Dad about the tremors, I feel slightly nervous. Our conversations are normally limited to the farm – what jobs need to be done or the condition of the sheep and the land – so hearing him speak about uncanny sensations and strange geology makes me concerned that he might be getting high. Mum taught me to look for the signs. At first it could be exciting, with Dad talking a lot, full of optimism and energy, but this would bubble over into his making impulsive purchases, such as expensive rams or farm equipment, staying up all night and moving animals at four in the morning, then grandiose thoughts, with him feeling he could change time and control the weather.
On the floor of the caravan there’s a stool I remember from the farmhouse that Dad made in the hospital when he was a teenager. He was fifteen when he was first diagnosed with manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder, and schizophrenic tendencies. Since then, periodically, he has ups and downs of varying amplitude. Our family life was rocked by the waves of life at its extremes, by the cycles of manic depression. As well as the incidents with sectioning and straitjackets, followed by time away in a psychiatric hospital, there were months when he stayed in bed without saying a word. Today Dad is buoyant but, on other occasions, if he’s subdued, I worry it may signal the beginning of a period of depression and one of his long winters of inactivity.
Once, when I was about eleven, Dad was so ill that he went round the farmhouse smashing all the windows one by one. The wind flew through the rooms, whisking my schoolwork from my desk. When the doctor arrived with tranquillisers, followed by the police and an ambulance, I yelled at them to go away. He’d been taken by something beyond his control. As the sedatives kicked in, I crouched with my father in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. ‘You are my girl,’ he said.
The rumblings of mental illness under my life were amplified by the presence of my mother’s extreme religion and by the landscape I was born into, the continual, perceptible crashing of the sea at the edges. I read about the ‘shoaling process’ – how waves increase in height, then break as they reach shallower water near the shore. Energy never expires. The energy of waves, carried across the ocean, changes into noise and heat and vibrations that are absorbed into the land and passed through the generations.
Since his teens, Dad has been treated on fifty-six occasions with electroconvulsive therapy. Used in the most severe cases of mental illness, an electric shock is passed into the brain to induce a seizure. No one quite knows how or why it works but patients often report feeling better afterwards, at least temporarily.
Ripples were set off the day I was born, and although I moved far away, the seizures I began to experience as my drinking escalated felt as if the tremors had caught up with me too. In lonely London bedrooms or in toilets at nightclubs, my wrists and jaw would freeze and my limbs wouldn’t respond as usual. The alcohol I’d been pouring into myself for years was like the repeated action of the waves on the cliffs and it was beginning to cause physical damage. Something was crumbling deep within my nervous system and shook my body in powerful pulses to the extent that I was frozen and drooling, until they eased off enough for me to pour another drink or rejoin the party.
3
FLOTTA
EVEN ON THE BRIGHTEST DAY in Orkney there is a cool breeze that comes in from the sea. It reminds us that we are on an island, although we call the biggest island in the archipelago the ‘Mainland’ while everything else is just ‘south’. As soon as the agricultural shows are over at the beginning of August, so is summer, and there are regular gales for the rest of the year. Autumn is brief, there are few trees, and winter blows in quickly.
A decade ago, in a September equinox wind, I came home for a few months – a graduate unable to find a job in the city. It was the year my parents split up, like many people’s do, and, like most, I didn’t think it would happen to mine, although perhaps it’s surprising that a manic depressive and a born-again Christian stayed together so long.
I was working as a cleaner at the oil terminal on the island of Flotta and took the workers’ ferry across from the pier at Houton every day at dawn. Since the early seventies, pipelines and tankers have brought crude oil to the terminal from North Sea oil fields, dark energy from below the seabed. The oil industry was a boost for Orkney and provides some of its best-paid jobs but the cleaners were at the bottom of the pile.
The commute was the best thing about the job. Each day I drove across the island at sunrise and returned at sunset. Misty pastels appeared as I accelerated over the horizon listening to Radio Orkney or drum-and-bass, framing the islands and reflecting in the water of Scapa Flow. There were electric reds and oranges in the evening, the same colour as the flare that burns off excess gas at the terminal and the lights on the oil tankers out at sea.
After work, when I took off my tabard but never quite got rid of the smell of bleach, I spent nights on my own – Mum had recently moved out and Dad was elsewhere – in the farmhouse where I grew up. I was alone in a house on the edge of a cliff, drinking and smoking at the kitchen table where we used to have family meals, doing a job I didn’t want, phoning my far-away friends at midnight while drinking Dad’s homebrew, as my family came apart around me. Sometimes I would finish one bottle of wine, then drive five miles to the nearest open shop to get another. The next day I’d get on the ferry, headphones on, hung-over, furious and hurting.
At the oil terminal, I had to clean workers’ bedrooms, mop bathrooms, sweep corridors and make beds. I became familiar with different types of dirt: from sweat on sheets, unseen but smelt, to dry footprint mud, satisfyingly hooverable. Toothpaste flecks on mirrors revealed the enthusiastic brusher, and ash showed who had been smoking out of the window in a non-smoking area. Dry and wet poo, ably distinguished by my supervisor, required different cleaning methods, and pubic hairs were left coiled on toilet seats. Most of the rooms I cleaned contained partially drunk bottles of Irn-Bru and some had finger- and toenail clippings buried in the carpet.
I felt as if I had become a ghost, walking nameless corridors under buzzing lights carrying a mop. The world out there, down south, had forgotten about me, stuck on the island with the bin bags, struggling to get a laundry cart through swing doors on my own. I was the wall that had eyes, knowing if workers had slept in their beds last night. I was the shadowy figure, scuttling away when I heard footsteps. Being back in Orkney was a failure and I saw the cleaning job as simply a way to make money to leave again.
At eighteen, I couldn’t wait to leave. I saw life on the farm as dirty, hard and badly paid. I wanted comfort, glamour and to be at the centre of things. I didn’t understand people who said that they wanted to live in the country where they could see wildlife. People were more interesting than animals. In the winter, forced into ugly outdoor clothes to help muck out the livestock, I dreamed of the hot pulse of the city.
But in my student flat, I would mentally map the 150 acres of the farm onto the inner city, thousands of people in the space that contained just our family and animals. It drove me crazy that, in a block of flats, I was existing just metres from someone yet didn’t know who they were. Other people were sleeping through thin walls to the left and right of me, above and below. I didn’t talk much about Orkney to my new friends, but lying in bed on windy nights, the noise made me feel as if I was back in the stone
