The Outrun (16 page)

I still have a nervousness around other people. I’ve been bruised by the rejection of friends and flatmates. When you’ve spent so long messing up, covering up and apologising, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’ve done something wrong and default to the secretive and even sneaky behaviour that addiction involves. I often have a flickering sense that I must have said or done something terribly misjudged.

On the east shore, the coastal path is also the road and our walking group waves at every car that passes, as is the island custom. Cars do not need to undergo the MOT test here. The island feels simultaneously lawless and crime-free. There are no police – the old ‘parish handcuffs’ can be seen at Holland Farm – but your movements can be watched across the treeless landscape and neighbours notice what time your curtains are open in the morning. Some people on the island claim to know everyone’s car not only by sight but also by sound.

I leave Rose Cottage unlocked during this walk and every day. Someone burgling my computer or porridge would not get far and Anne the postie might drop off a book I’ve ordered from the internet. I remember one morning at six a.m., in London, being woken by a strange man in my bedroom. We looked at
each other in silence for a moment before he grabbed my laptop from the floor beside my bed and ran out. Neither the man nor the computer was ever found.

I had heard about ninety-year-old Maggie, famous locally for driving around an ancient blue tractor well into her eighties but I’d never met her because for the last few years she had lived in sheltered accommodation over on Westray. One morning this winter her body was brought home on the peedie ferry to the island she’d left only a handful of times.

Maggie had lived alone at Midhouse since her parents died in the sixties. In her lifetime she had seen water on tap and electricity come to the island, along with domestic and agricultural technology – the washing-machine, the tractor – that removed much of the back-breaking hard work that made up island lives. She was a link back to the more self-sufficient crofting lifestyle of farming and fishing: of bringing the seaweed, or ‘tangles and ware’, up off the beach to dry out – some parts to be used to fertilise the land and others to be shipped south as ‘kelp’ for use in soap- or glass-making; of using horses and cattle to pull the ploughs; of salting and drying fish for a staple food – cuthies and sillocks – eaten with tatties.

I go for a walk on the morning of Maggie’s funeral and the island is strangely still and silent – everyone else is in the kirk before going to the graveyard. It is mild for January and the wind has calmed. That evening, about five o’clock, the pressure
suddenly drops, the wind rises and, overnight, Orkney is battered by the strongest gales of the winter.

The Papay Walking Committee continues its circumnavigation, back up the west edge where the sun is dropping behind Westray, and where we slide over rocks and seaweed. I turn my back to the wind to blow my nose or get my camera from my pocket. We walk the eleven miles in hail, light snow and sun, under a rainbow and over stiles. At this time of year there is a lot of marshy ground and I regret not wearing wellies.

Although snow is rare on Papay, melting quickly in the salty atmosphere, our daily lives are highly influenced by the weather. In bad weather the boat and plane may not come. I turn up at the airfield for a shopping trip to Kirkwall but the plane has been cancelled due to fog. We need to be flexible in the winter, able to adjust to downtime or do without things. It’s when something goes wrong – a car or computer breaking down – that life can get more difficult. It can take a while to get new parts, and vehicles have to be winched onto the ferry and taken to mechanics in the town, an expensive business. There are different frustrations: like everywhere else in modern Britain, we have disagreements, spam email, letters from credit-card companies, unemployment, but we don’t have roadside advertising, traffic jams, pollution.

Over Christmas, bad weather meant there was no ferry for a couple of weeks and the shop ran low on fresh food. The usually
well-stocked Co-op is open for two or four hours a day, and going for milk often feels like a social occasion. I don’t have a car so have to ask for help with things like getting sacks of coal home. I was fearful, from warnings and childhood experiences, of doing the wrong thing, being too loud, too English, but I meet only friendliness and helpfulness on Papay, as well as a gentle curiosity about what I’m doing there.

One night there is a knock at the door: an unexpected delivery of a third of a cabbage after I’d mentioned in passing in the shop that a whole cabbage was a lot to buy if you’re living alone, and to carry on a bike. This small friendly gesture calmed me, helped soothe some anxiety that I wasn’t fitting in. The workings of society on an island are easier to understand than in a city and I’m gradually relaxing and seeing more clearly.

I had got to the point in the city where I felt as if there wasn’t room for me – there was barely room for anyone. I had fruitless job interviews, difficulty finding a room, was crushed in public transport and paid high rent. In comparison, this island is calling for people to come and live here, to the extent of having a ‘trial house’ where people, particularly families, can test island life before making the commitment to relocate.

Islands have to adjust their ideas of community in line with a more transient society. There will be people, like me, who come to stay for just a few months and will always have a link to the place in the future, returning for visits. An adventurous family coming to stay for just a couple of years before they move on should not be seen as a failure but, rather, a healthy part of the flow of people bringing new ways and keeping the place
working. People here are often called by their house name rather than surname. The houses are familiar, in collective memory, and will outlive the people staying in them.

The sun has just set when we reach the furthest north point of Papay and in the fading twilight we can just see the white tips of the churning waves telling of the currents meeting deep below. The light of a ship out to the north of the island travels east and later the marine-traffic website tells me it’s a Croatian oil tanker making its way to Estonia. Shopkeeper Amanda tells me she is obsessed with torches and has sixty or seventy. To the east, the North Ronaldsay lighthouse blinks, and a flicker further north could be either Fair Isle’s lighthouse or a faint star on the horizon.

Tonight the stars are stunningly clear and numerous. We turn off our torches and walk the beach in darkness, following the Milky Way. We talk about moonbows, rainbows created at night by the light of a full moon, which my neighbour saw a few days earlier during an evening shower. On the summer nights when I was out doing the corncrake surveys there was never the deep darkness required to see the stars like this: we have to wait until winter for the dark to reveal its glories. Two bright satellites speed across. The moon glows from behind a low cloud.

We walk the east side back to our starting point at the old pier in the dark. The route has taken five hours. Completing the
circuit and closing the loop feels like a ritual. We’ve walked the four compass points in the weather of four seasons, in light and dark. We’ve followed the geographical limits of our island home, marking out the little area of land we claim against the sea.

17

MERRY DANCERS

I’D SET MY ALARM FOR
before dawn – six thirty a.m. – when I’d read it might be possible to see four planets in the sky at once. I get out of bed, don’t turn any lights on, trying to keep my eyes dark-adjusted, and go outside with binoculars, my jacket over my pyjamas.

The Sky Map on my phone helps me look in the right direction and, to the south-west, Jupiter is shining while, to the south-east, I can see Venus. I am fairly familiar with these two, but just above Venus, appearing about one moon’s distance apart, there is a more distant planet: Saturn. On Saturn, there is ring-light similar to our moonlight. On Venus, a day is longer than a year. I hope to see Mercury rising from below the horizon but low dark cloud obscures this area of sky.

I go back to bed and, through my window, clouds move across Venus and Saturn. I hear the rain start and a bull bogling before
I fall asleep again. When I wake later it’s as if it had been a dream: my early-morning sleepwalk among the planets.

Last midwinter, soon after I returned to Orkney, I began for the first time to be interested in astronomy. The long winter nights up here, combined with the lack of light pollution and the open landscape without trees, tall buildings or mountains, make it an ideal location for stargazing. Under certain conditions, the Andromeda galaxy can be seen by the naked eye from here, something only possible in places with really dark skies. ‘Doing some astronomy’ is a good excuse for a smoker to pop outside, although it soon develops into something more than that for me.

One evening, instead of going to an AA meeting, I went to the first ever gathering of the Orkney Astronomical Society. I stopped drinking to do things, rather than to spend my time talking about stopping drinking. Since then, I’ve been outside at nights taking my astronomy stance: head back, mouth open, getting dizzy. On a freezing hillside in Orphir, I watched the International Space Station speed overhead. At the centre of Orkney, I sheltered behind one of the standing stones at Brodgar, and the night sky formed a glittering canopy over the low hills and dark lochs that circled me.

One morning in Rose Cottage I woke furious. I’d had a dream about being in a nightclub but feeling awkward and hating it because I wasn’t drinking. I spent a decade in clubs, gigs and late-night bars and – at least for the first few years – was carried along madly by the bodies and bass and vodka. Since I’d been sober, I’d very rarely been out late, after midnight.
Sometimes I felt like I was over. I couldn’t imagine how to dance sober.

In mid-December each year, while we’re going about our daily routines and Christmas preparations, the earth passes through a cloud of debris left by an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon. When tiny pieces of dust and ice from this cloud hit the earth’s atmosphere, at around 134,000 m.p.h., they burn up to create what we know as ‘shooting stars’, but of course they aren’t stars at all. Meteors are what we see as shooting stars, ‘ablating’ as they collide with the atmosphere, creating this annual Geminid meteor shower.

For a few nights last winter I walked out alone to the outskirts of Kirkwall, beyond the streetlights, looking for shooting stars at the time of the Geminids. It was too cloudy to see any but I liked being out late in the cold, acting suspiciously, stunningly sober. This year, on Papay, around eleven thirty p.m., I take a chair and a duvet into the garden, lean back and fill my gaze with sky. There is no moon to pollute the view of the stars and it is a beautifully clear night, the Milky Way stretching out over Rose Cottage.

I’ve turned out all the lights in the house, even closing my laptop, so nothing spills outside. I scan the Milky Way with binoculars and count seven Pleiades. On a night like this, Orkney poet Robert Rendall described the night sky as ‘tullimentan’ or ‘glittering’. In half an hour I see nineteen meteors, leaving streaks
of brilliant light for just a second. The meteors are different sizes and brightnesses, including one so bright and low in the sky I say, ‘Whoa,’ out loud, but all are tantalisingly brief.

A few houses have lights on across the island, and I listen to its noises: cows moo and the occasional dog barks but mainly I hear the sea. It sounds different on either side of the island: on the east, where the North Sea meets the beach, it’s a crackling crashing; but on the west, where the Atlantic collides with rocks and cliffs, it’s a thundery rumble. The oceans and shore create a constant, shifting harmony, the background music to life on Papay.

Quickly, clouds move to obscure the area of visible stars and the sky is once again completely dark. When I get inside it’s raining heavily.

With my wellies heavy on the ground, I’m building a picture of where I am: on earth, travelling, and what the moon, sun and stars are doing out there. In winter, the old folk on Papay would visit neighbours on the nights around full moon when there was enough light to walk home. I’m thinking about why seasons and years occur and how my personal anatomy affects my experience of it: developing spatial awareness on an astronomical scale, pushing my brain outwards. I’m learning new and pleasing information, such as that there are three stages of twilight: civil, nautical and astronomical. Nautical twilight ends when the sea is no longer distinguishable from the sky and ship navigation using the horizon becomes impossible.

I hear about how peripheral vision is best for looking into the far distance – sometimes when you look at an object directly it can disappear; and about why the stars appear to twinkle – because of atmospheric turbulence around the earth disturbing the travelling light. The light struggling to reach us is what makes it especially beautiful.

There are four freckles in a parallelogram on my left wrist and now I can see that they resemble the constellation Gemini. I think about how the moon is getting further away from the Earth and although this is only happening at about 3.78 centimetres per year, or the same speed at which our fingernails grow, it seems terribly sad.

When first I left Orkney, my friend Sean gave me a compass. I used to wear it round my neck at parties, and when people asked about it, I would tell them it was so I could find my way home. Wherever I was, north was always home. I left the compass somewhere one night. Then I was totally lost.

In Kirkwall, I discovered the best place in town for a clear view of the sky to the north: the top of the fire-escape stairway at the side of the old theatre. On nights I heard geomagnetic activity was high, I climbed up there, looking for the Northern Lights, known locally as the Merry Dancers. Usually I was disappointed but sometimes I watched the eerie glow behind the clouds.

But this winter increased solar activity is forecast, and a ‘solar maximum’ some time in 2013, the period of greatest activity in
the sun’s eleven-year cycle. When electrically charged particles expelled by the sun collide with the earth’s atmosphere, lights are created, following the lines of the earth’s magnetic forces, shifting and combining to create the ‘dancing’ effect. We are far enough north here to experience them fairly regularly, usually by looking north rather than being directly under them as you would be in the Arctic Circle.