Girl in the Dark (4 page)

I am on a boat, slipping between white sky and silky grey sea. It is late morning in early June, and the high sun is intense behind the taut dome of haze. Leaning my elbows on the wooden rail, letting the wind blow on my face, I look out to the first of the Farne Islands, a weird black squiggle afloat on the North Sea.

I turn my head and smile as I see Pete, camera to his face, taking a photo of me and the island. I’m wearing a straw hat tied tightly round the crown with a bright scarf to stop it from blowing away. Having very pale
skin and an undertone of red in my dark brown hair, I’ve always sheltered under wide brims while others went bareheaded or sported tiny baseball caps. As a student, on a conservation work camp in Germany one summer, I was such a curiosity that I was photographed for the local paper—an eccentric Englishwoman in an enormous hat.

Pete and I are on holiday in Northumberland. I was unsure, at this crisis of my life, whether to go or not, but everyone agreed it would be a good thing to get out of London. “The great outdoors, fresh air, time to chill out, de-stress—you’ll soon be feeling better.”

Ah stress, that great explanatory factor. And indeed, I am starting to relax, on this small, gleaming, tourist-heavy boat, as it ploughs away from the Northumberland coast towards these unknown rough-hewn islands, strange citadels of birds. The tension slides off my shoulders like a stiff uncomfortable coat and the writhing knot of panic in my mind comes to rest, the snakes gently untangling themselves and wriggling away. Under the influence of emptiness, of vastness, my mind empties too, and finds, if not peace, at least a sort of truce.

The boat arrives at the main island, bumping up against a jetty beside a small beach. There is a visitor centre here and a wooden slatted path to follow, in order to observe the different colonies of birds.

“The first birds you’ll come to are the Arctic terns,” says the boatman. “It’s the nesting season, so they can be aggressive.”

We are already among them as we crunch across the beach; they squeak and skitter around our ankles, with
their white undersides ending in sharply forked tails, grey wings, blood-red bills and neat black skullcaps pulled down over their eyes.

“In what way are they aggressive?” I ask Pete, as we turn up a slatted walkway between lush hummocks of grass peppered with nesting terns.

“Oh, they dive-bomb you,” he answers nonchalantly. “Don’t worry about it. It happened to me in Iceland.”

At that moment I feel a sharp thump on the side of my head and the flurry of wings as the tern swoops away. Then there is another impact and another. I raise my arms to try to protect my face. It is not, by any means, pain-free, and I am glad I am wearing my hat, because those blood-red beaks could certainly draw blood.

Pete, having wandered on up the path, has turned round to photograph the action. No terns, I notice, are attacking him. I lower my head and hurry forwards, receiving farewell stabs on the back and scalp. I am feeling extremely cross and put out, having observed before that Pete has a reassuring and calming effect on animals, while I always seem to upset them. On our many country walks, berserk dogs will gambol playfully about him, before holding me at bay against a tree.

But then I remember that when I first met Pete, he had a calming and reassuring effect on me as well. I was sitting hopelessly on a sofa in a hotel in Devon, on the first evening of a group walking holiday, wishing I had not come. I had just been trying to make conversation with a couple of insipid secretaries, and was sure they thought I was a weirdo. Everyone else had gone through to dinner, and I stared wearily at the flowers on the
carpet, asking myself why I had ever thought a holiday alone with a bunch of strangers might conceivably be a good idea.

“So—where have you come from?”

I looked up, and saw a man standing in the doorway, facing back into the room. I noticed that he was long and thin, and stooped forward slightly to address me, in a friendly way.

“I’m from Wimbledon,” I said. “South-west London.”

“Ah,” he replied. “Where the tennis is.”

Slowly, I got up from my sofa and walked across to him. “Well, I say Wimbledon,” I said, smiling, “because people have heard of it, but I don’t actually live in the posh bit. What about you?”

“I’m from Itchingford. It’s a town in Hampshire—more towards the south than the north.”

“Hmm. Interesting place name. I hope it’s not descriptive.”

“Oh, Hampshire is full of silly names. There’s Popham and Lasham and Cosham and, of course, Nether Wallop.”

“Goodness,” I said. “It all sounds very violent.”

We entered the large dining room, where about fifty people sat around long tables and the noise of talk bounced off the walls, and he took me to join the friends he had come with, who seemed to be nice, and the dinner was tasty, and everything began to look more cheerful.

The holiday in Devon lasted a week and, as is the way of these things, I spent the first five days lusting after
someone else. He was a loud, posh, super-confident person called Marcus, a natural social leader, quite unlike myself. He had pale, translucent skin, black-brown hair and a very square head which seemed as though it ought to have a bolt through it. The only time I spoke to him alone, after he’d helped me over a stile, we managed to antagonise each other within minutes. He made some crack about the boringness of civil servants, and I gave an unnecessarily savage response.

Oh, but I watched him from afar. I was constantly aware of him, I could have told you, at every point of every day, where he was and what he was doing (easier with him than with another person, actually, because of the loudness of his voice). Such is the hopeless obtuseness of lust.

On the penultimate day we went to Dartmoor for our walk. Everything was shrouded in thick grey fog that oozed soft droplets on to our coats and faces, and made it impossible to see more than a hundred metres in any direction. But the air was mild and sweet, full of herby moorland flavours.

I trudged up a long gentle rise covered in tufted yellow grass towards a tor at the top, a mad sculpture of massive grey boulders piled on one another in contiguous columns like a collapsed abacus. Kathy, a placid blonde woman, one of Pete’s group of friends, was walking with me, chatting. Suddenly, she said, apropos of nothing, “So what do you think of Pete?”

“Well …” I said, rather taken aback, “he seems a bit lugubrious—but nice, definitely nice.”

Kathy smiled and went on, “He’s taken rather a sh—”
and then abruptly broke off and began talking about the weather. But I wasn’t listening, because I had heard the words she didn’t say, as clearly as if she’d shouted them into my ear—“shine to you, he’s taken rather a shine to you”—and an explosion had gone off in my head.

The others were already at the top and there were only a few metres of yellow grass in which to compose myself before I was there too. Weird glittering fragments were still flying round my skull, as though a lens through which I’d seen the world had disintegrated beneath a laser’s beam. Why waste time on Frankenstein’s monster, I asked myself, who is clearly arrogant, unpleasant and unobtainable, when there is this other chap who you actually like talking to, and who looks not uninteresting—in fact, who resembles a craggy blond vampire, complete with deadpan humour and slightly pointy teeth.

It was unfortunate that I had realised this just as the holiday was about to end.

I scrambled up an angled slab of rock and stood gingerly upright on top of the tor, staring at the panoramic non-view. A faint patchwork of browns, purples and greens lay under the fog, like a filthy old quilt in an attic, covered in cobwebs and dust. I was alone on an island in a sinister grey sea that floated upwards all around me to merge with the sky. Uncertainly, I shifted my feet on my narrow perch, suddenly aware that it was slippery, and that I was not sure how to descend. I noticed Pete standing on the ground beside my boulder, looking upwards, a blond head against the grey. “Would
you like a hand down?” he asked gravely, stretching out an arm. I placed my hand in his, and jumped.

N
OW, HAVING GOT
together, split up and got together again, we have been reunited for two years, and have made it past the violent terns on to the highest part of this low-slung, treeless island. “We’re lucky they weren’t Arctic skuas,” says Pete.

“Why, what do they do?” I ask.

“Oh, they’re very fierce. They pursue you well away from their nesting sites, and then they sku-a you.”

To this sort of thing, a groan is the only possible response.

The slatted walkway meets another going across at right angles, and in one of the corners made by the joining of the paths, there is what appears at first to be a heap of earth and stones. Struck by some oddity of texture, I look again—and realise that the muddy heap has two brown eyes and a long brown beak, and that it is actually a female eider duck, its feathers comfortably fluffed out, perfectly camouflaged against the ground. “One can see why it would make a good duvet,” I say, as we stand on the walkway admiring it. The duck sits on, presumably hatching something, pillowy and unperturbed.

On the rest of our walk, we see puffins popping in and out of puffin burrows scraped into the flat featureless turf, an unexpectedly prosaic setting for such an arty-looking bird. We stand at the top of an inlet, its sheer sides drenched in guano, and inhale the mixed
stench of salt, shit and fish as we look down on colonies of kittiwakes and auks. The latter look like corporate types attending a formal event, with their smart black plumage, white shirt fronts and tendency to stand about in rows on outsize patent-leather feet.

Back on the boat, we cruise around the other islands, but do not land. These are the private bailiwicks of birds, birds in their thousands, birds stacked on shelves of black rock, perched in jostling rows on top of low cliffs, bouncing across expanses of turf, shrieking, rasping, swooping, diving, living their intense unfathomable lives.

I say to Pete, “I can see why people get obsessed by birds. They’re probably the wild creature that most people see most often, and in greatest profusion.”

“Yes,” he replies. “Or at least in parts of the world where herds of wildebeest are less common. And there are lots of different sorts, so you get to check them off a list, which people really like.”

“If I were a bird,” I say dreamily, “I think I’d be a gannet. I would get to do those amazing dives, from hundreds of feet in the air, head first into the sea. I remember watching them when I was small, on holiday on the Isle of Arran, with my mum and dad.”

Pete laughs and puts his arm round me. “Head for heights, voracious appetite, likes fish,” he says. “Sounds appropriate.”

“How rude,” I retort. “Anyway, how about you?”

He looks into the distance, considering. “I think I’d be an owl,” he says judiciously, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with love for him, as though those six short
words have released some warm bright substance into my system, and it is surging through my veins.

We huddle together on the hard narrow seats that line the deck of the boat. Three hours have passed since the start of the trip, and the sky is growing greyer. The small amount of colour that the islands possess drains away and the seascape becomes a study in monochrome. A chilly wind has sprung up and the boat plunges and soars as it noses its way through the swell. Leaving the last of the islands, it begins a wide arc towards home.

The change in direction means a shift in our position relative to the wind. The current of air which has been blowing past me ceases, and I become aware of something that up to now I have failed to notice, or perhaps that I have been refusing to notice, have kept pushing back below the surface of consciousness like an inconveniently buoyant corpse.

My face.

My face.

The tension that fell from me earlier in the day rears up from the deck of the boat. It binds itself round my body, tighter and fiercer than before.

I have followed everyone’s advice. I am here in the wildness, in the emptiness, surrounded only by elemental things: sea and air and rock and sky. I have removed myself from the artificial environment of the office, fetid with the stench of deadlines and the plasticky fumes of computers. There are no fluorescent lights or screens. There is only—

There is only the sun.

The human body is an amazing thing. Parts of it
gamely keep functioning, even as other parts reel. My hands grip the edges of the wooden bench and my heart zigzags inside my chest. My vision is blurring and I can hardly get air into my lungs. But my voice remains calm. I hear myself chatting to Pete about birds, and what we might do for dinner, and the shots he wants to take of Dunstanburgh Castle, and our rather ghastly room at the B&B, all dark MDF and glass ornaments with a view into a hedge and the base of a telegraph pole. I listen to our laughter as though from outside of myself, and am astonished at how normal I sound.

I do not want to spoil this day, this lovely day of birds and sky. I want to keep it whole and pure so I can hold it in my mind, a talisman against whatever is to come.

It is only in the evening, back in our weird B&B, that, my face on fire, I let go and howl. Pete holds me in his arms on the cramped double bed. “Oh God, this is the end,” I cry. “It’s got to be the sunlight. It can’t be anything else.”

Neither of us knows what to do. We pass a sleepless night, rigid, side by side, a pair of waxworks under the slippery purple quilt.

The next day, I decide to go home. I leave Pete to have the rest of the holiday, to visit Dunstanburgh and Lindisfarne, and take photographs in the pure light of midsummer in this land of vast beaches and infinite sky. At Alnmouth, he puts me on to an intercity train. It is hard to know what we mean when we say goodbye. “Wish me luck,” I say.

“Good luck,” he replies.

And I flee from the ironic and agonising beauty,
bolting like an animal to its lair. Something is afoot within me that I do not understand, the breaking of a contract that I thought could not be broken, a slow perverting of my very substance.