The Outrun (22 page)

I disturb grazing geese and they fly off, shifting smoothly from parallel lines into a V formation. Over a weekend in the autumn, more than 21,000 breeding greylag geese were counted in Orkney: there are now officially more geese than humans on the isles. During winter, with migrant birds from the north, numbers increase to around 76,000, roughly half of Iceland’s greylag population. The success of the birds makes them a pest to farmers, whose grass they eat, and over recent months hundreds have been shot.

A dome-shaped promontory jutting into the loch is, as Jocelyn Rendall of Holland Farm describes in her guide to Papay, ‘crowned with a tantalising confusion of ruined buildings’. This small circular peninsula, once an island, is an early Christian site, with the remains of a chapel dating back to around the eighth century. As with many important places, the chapel was built on the site of much older constructions, with archaeological remains – a wall and bank – that have been dated to the Iron Age. When the site was first excavated by Papay’s laird in 1879, underground passages were found along the lochside.

I sit at the top of the mound and smoke. I can see why this has been a special place over the centuries. Like the Ring of Brodgar on the Mainland, it feels at the heart of the island, encircled by a ring of loch, then land, then sea, with fine views across to the Holm and other islands beyond. In Orkney, land is often just a thin division between sky and water: the sea or a loch is nearly always in view.

Aerial photographs of the promontory show its concentric circles and the chapel within. This afternoon, the darkening sky is reflected on the different bodies of water – the loch rippled by the wind, the sea churning with the tide. The small plane flies over on its way back to the Mainland with propellers humming. I am calmed by the peace and beauty of the place.

St Tredwell, also known as Triduana, a ‘holy virgin’ or nun, was courted by Pictish King Nechtan, who admired her beautiful eyes. In response, Triduana gouged them out and sent them to him, skewered on a thorn. I read different accounts of the story, some saying that the king tried to rape her and
her actions were self-preservation, others suggesting it was an act of love.

The story of Tredwell is slippery. She may have been a pagan goddess who was reinvented in a saintly guise. Papay is ‘associated’ with her and has a claim to be her burial place; some even say that she lived alone in the chapel in the loch. It is more likely that her bones, or relics associated with her, were carried here a long time after her death, if indeed she existed at all.

There is a string of wells and other sites dedicated to Triduana in the north of Scotland. A stained-glass window depicting her, serene and haloed, is in St Magnus Cathedral, the light she could no longer see shining through.

By the twelfth century, the chapel in the loch became a place of pilgrimage, particularly for the blind or those with eye trouble. Pilgrims thought that on Papay they would find the cure they were seeking and travelled here from all over Orkney and beyond. An account in the Orkneyinga Saga tells of Earl Harald Maddadsson, tortured in 1201, ‘his tongue cut out and a knife driven into his eyes’, then taken to ‘where St Tredwell rests, and there he was restored to health in both speech and sight’.

The faithful were still travelling here five hundred years later in 1700, when Presbyterian minister John Brand describes the ‘Superstitious People’ making pilgrimage to the site. ‘Such as are able to walk used to go so many times about the loch as they think will perfect the cure before they make any use of the water, and that is without speaking any, for they believe that if they speak this will mar the cure.’ It is said pilgrims walked
three times around the loch, then bathed their eyes in its healing waters.

My aversion to religion – and my mum’s Church in particular – made me reluctant to begin the 12 Steps. I avoid thinking or talking about God and faith – it makes my heart beat faster and anger rise inside me. In AA, they say this type of ‘resentment’ is often what leads to drinking. Although I don’t want to get rid of my cool, rational mind, I do want to stay sober so I know I must, like they told me in the treatment centre, face these feelings.

I did believe once. From a young age, my brother and I went to church with Mum. It was not the conventional Church of Scotland, which is dotted around the islands, with dwindling congregations except at weddings and funerals. It was an all-pervading choice, a way of life.

The Orkney Christian Fellowship held meetings in schools and community centres. There were not hymns but worshipful pop songs, with guitars and arms raised, whoops of hallelujah. I watched charismatic preachers and theatrical salvations, heard the language of ‘born again’, ‘the Holy Spirit’, ‘being saved’ and ‘bearing witness’.

I was taught that the Church was the people not the building. I was taught that we needed to ask Jesus into our hearts. I was taught that hell and the devil were real. When I was twelve, I went to a ‘Lessons in Love’ weekend and was told that
homosexuality and masturbation were wrong. I talked in tongues. When I was thirteen, and suffering from headaches that doctors couldn’t provide a reason for, Mum took me south to a conference held by an American evangelist preacher where I saw queues of sick and afflicted believers touched by him on the forehead then falling to the floor, ‘slain in the spirit’.

The new recruits to Mum’s Church were often people who, like her, had moved to Orkney and were struggling. The leaders were well meaning but also domineering, imposing their views and style of worship on others.

When I was about fourteen, I started listening to things that other people, including my father, were saying. I had influences outside the Church. In my teenage years I swung from religion to rock and roll, from reading modern American translations of the Bible to dead poets and music magazines. My childhood moved between the freedom of the farm and Church-influenced discipline.

I stopped going to church. I no longer believed. I screamed at Mum that I would never be the daughter she wanted: I was never going to follow Jesus and I was going to hell. Later, I’d often – arrogantly, spitefully – compare Mum’s experience in church on a Sunday morning, arms aloft, singing, transported, to mine in a club on a Saturday night. ‘But,’ I’d say with a flourish, ‘at least I know I’m deluded.’

Once you’ve been baptised it is hard to go back. This kind of belief is so strong it alienates the believer from other people – from friends, from family.

*    *    *

Step Three suggests that we ‘made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him’. I am resistant to giving up control and think it is impossible for anyone to do this: we still have to make decisions. But Dee asks me to think about ‘turning something over’ as simply looking at things from a different angle. It is possible to think of AA’s ‘God stuff’ as another way of thinking in order to recover. Addicts have to learn to restrain their egos – the intellects that have run us aground. My thinking processes seem to have got me into trouble so far so surely it is worthwhile to try to behave differently.

The programme is, in fact, not that mystical. It often resembles cognitive behavioural therapy, with advice about recognising damaging thought patterns and behaviours and attempting to change them, and suggestions to take a step back and consider the consequences before acting.

I am struggling with my thoughts. It is as if there are two separate parts of myself: the one that took me to rehab and AA meetings and who hasn’t drunk for twenty-two months and twenty days; and the one on the other side, dreaming of a bottle of wine and feeling as if this, despite my actions, is somehow the ‘real me’. I don’t want to let go. There are battles inside me.

I have good eyesight and little faith but today, as a gesture towards trying new things, I recreate the pilgrims’ ritual, walking around the loch anticlockwise. According to the GPS tracker on my
phone, the circumnavigation is 3.1 miles and takes me seventy-eight minutes. I duck under electric fences, climb over barbed wire and balance along the tops of stone dykes. The ground is marshy with uneven turf and water sloshes up around my wellies. Halfway around the rain starts, blowing into my face off the sea. I think about someone sick carrying out this walk, someone half blind in skirts and petticoats, making the loop three times in silence.

By coming here to Papay, I am following the route taken by desperate pilgrims, who’d made difficult journeys to reach this holy isle. It was a special place even back in the days of the Vikings, and the Orkneyinga Saga describes how the body of Earl Rognvald was carried to Papa Westray for burial.

Did Triduana walk the shores of this loch? I wonder how she might have felt, a beautiful young woman, her energies and beliefs so strong that she could hurt herself so violently. Her act of romance or chaste fervour showed a strength of conviction that created a centuries-long cult.

Breaking the peace of my lochside trudge, a swooping hen harrier terrifies and flushes assorted ducks and waders from the loch. I rub the scar on the back of my head. I picture myself midway through a backwards roll, attached to bungee cords, on a trampoline. I am caught between places: here on Papay but my mind in the internet and London, resisting a ‘spiritual programme’ but wanting to get better.

Incomers to islands, these days, are still often either looking for or running away from something. What am I expecting from this ritual? Do I somehow think that coming here, bravely facing
the winter alone, will make me a better person or cure me? Am I hoping for a miracle? If I walk the right configuration round the loch, will Triduana remove my addiction?

When I am in motion I am at ease, able to move forward mentally as well as physically. I use walking and swimming to calm my churning thoughts. My sea swims are increasingly important in relieving the non-specific low-level anxiety I often feel. The cold water shocks out any mental stress – my body suddenly has something more immediate to deal with. In this way, swimming is a mild form of the ECT Dad was given.

When I complete the circuit, I walk the periphery of the promontory before carefully following the walls of the two inner circles, making sure that the shapes would be picked up by my GPS tracker. In my notebook, I have written my own ‘Step Three prayer’, suggested as part of the 12 Steps process. Examples that I have read mention God or mystical powers that I can’t honestly believe in so my statement goes only as far as I am comfortable. I pick up a small stone from the promontory. I begin to read my prayer out loud. The idea of praying is almost repulsive to me but as I speak I gain confidence and volume. Thinking about the idea of ‘turning it over’, I throw the stone into the loch, watching the ripples it leaves until they disappear.

I’ve been deep-sea dream-walking, tipping eyelashes out of my computer keyboard, grinding my teeth, but right now I’m relaxed. This chapel in the loch is a place of retreat, a well-defended lookout. I think of the eyes of Triduana on a stick. I think of the eyes of the last great auk, preserved in spirits and stored in Copenhagen’s Zoological Museum, staring out for ever.

I don’t hate Mum and her Church for what they taught me, any more than I hate the ancient pilgrims for seeking their cure. In some ways, I admire the evangelicals’ conviction. What is the point of religion if you don’t really believe? If their interpretation of the Bible is correct and all the unsaved are going to hell, surely believers should be out there, screaming it.

Religion is another way of attempting to access the transcendental, seeking the same highs of experience and places of comfort that others find at raves, in drunkenness, in love, in superstition, in mania. Without these things, life lies flat. Now, despite its extreme form, I wouldn’t take Mum’s faith away from her.

The loch is still again, my stone sunk among the relics and collapsed tunnels. I am not a devout eighth-century Celtic girl with a bandage around her eyes, I’m a twenty-first-century heathen with my scarf wrapped around my head, wearing wellies on a BMX. I must get a move on: my hands are cold and the shop is open only for two hours on a Friday.

24

FAIR ISLE

ON PAPAY, FAIR ISLE HAS
been a spectre at the edge of my field of vision, just over the horizon. A reproduction of a 1654 map of Orkney and Shetland hangs over the kitchen table showing ‘The Faire Yle’, a detail-free outline halfway between the two island groups. Orkney and Shetland are in the Fair Isle sea area of the shipping forecast and, getting ready for bed, my ears tune in when its name is read: ‘Wind: easterly or north-easterly six to gale eight. Sea state: rough or very rough. Wintry showers. Visibility: good, occasionally poor.’

There’s so much sky here in Orkney and I watch the ever-changing weather approaching. In northerly winds on Papay, it comes over the North Hill from Fair Isle. Short-term weather forecasting is best done by looking out of the window but I also check internet forecasts avidly. As well as the BBC weather site, I look at Northern Isles Weather, a website run by Dave Wheeler on Fair Isle. I like imagining him as a renegade
meteorologist, operating independently on that far-flung isle, just north of view.

On Hogmanay I’m told that some people in Papay are descended from a family of Irvines who came here from Fair Isle, and Irvine’s Geo at the north of the island is where their boat came ashore. Living conditions on Fair Isle in the early nineteenth century were so tough that even life on Papay looked appealing. The family loaded their possessions into a small boat and rowed south, probably not knowing exactly where they would wash up. They would never see their home again, apart from on the horizon on a clear day.

As mentions of the isle keep coming up, my notion of visiting grows and becomes irresistible. On ‘Mad Friday’, as they call the last Friday before Christmas in the pubs in Kirkwall, when, it seems to me, everyone else is out getting lashed at parties, I make a reckless plan to visit in early January: I’ll take the overnight ferry from Kirkwall to Lerwick in Shetland (Fair Isle is officially part of Shetland), then fly out to Fair Isle. When I book the flights, I’m warned that I might be stuck there for longer than planned. At this time of year, the ferry and planes are often delayed by weather: fog, wind or rough seas.