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
