The Outrun (4 page)

As the afternoon turned into evening, we moved with the sun until all the groups of people were crowded onto one corner of grass covered with cigarette butts and empty cans. Nearby, men drinking cans of strong lager from thin blue plastic bags were selling odd selections of books and ornaments laid out on the footpath: a pink plastic telephone and a book about fondue cookery, a pair of children’s rollerskates and a kettle
with no lid. You could get a bag of weed if you asked the right person.

It was Gloria’s birthday and someone had a bottle of poppers. We were dismissive, recalling teenage headaches, but passed it around, sniffing between swigs from bottles of pink fizzy wine.

Meg was wearing tiny shorts, a halter-neck top and Lolita sunglasses, and had one foot hooked around her boyfriend’s thigh, although her body was pointing away. Someone in a full suit too hot for the weather came up and asked if he could take her picture. ‘It’s for a street-style website.’ She gave an exasperated look, then complied, posing expertly.

A group of parents and pushchairs walked by, an alien species, and Meg said to act normal. ‘But I don’t want to be normal,’ said Gloria. She was wearing a bright turquoise jumpsuit. Meg smeared the honey we were using to mix sickly cocktails over her slender ankle, above her cork wedge shoes, and ants began to crawl onto her. We tipsily watched the tiny animals rush to their sugary doom as Gloria blew bubbles from a bottle. Someone said it was cruel but Meg insisted the insects were having fun. She was so beautiful and I wanted to shake her.

The trips to the off-licence grew more frequent, the shrieks louder, and the poppers were passed around. Someone, it might have been me, dropped the bottle and the contents spilled onto the rainbow blanket. We all dashed to the wet spot, heads down, gasping in the fabric, snorting and squealing, like pigs at the trough, breasts down, ankles up. It was stupid and pitiable and fun, as I breathed in the solvent, rolled onto my back and looked at the sky. As the horizon tipped I was covered with warm light
and flying with my friends, limbs and sun cream and honey and ants, all sticky and sweet, and the sun was blinding me, and I had never been so high.

The sun lowered. The crowd gathered and tightened; flexed ankles met listless wrists and hands holding cigarettes. There were shaded glances down on the grass and drunken daydreams somewhere up there where the aeroplane vapour trails crossed. My bare toe touched his weekend stubble. I notice his bruised shoulder and felt my pulsing ambition.

Later, at the warehouse party, I’d lost the others but I didn’t mind being alone. Hair twisted high and tight, in my long dress, with my drink and the drum beat, I was so far above. I was becoming more and more myself, white shoulders and red mouth flashing through the crowd, a plume of smoke hand-flicked and rising.

I saw the occasional familiar face and liked the feeling of knowing people. Everyone there had something that they ‘did’ – making music, running a nightclub, designing clothes – but was not yet making a living from it. We all thought we would be running things in five years.

A gang of art-school graduates, nearing thirty, lived in that converted warehouse, sleeping in garden sheds and using the rest of the high-ceilinged space to make music videos and experimental films. Over pre-disco drinks, they were competitively critical. Clubs were over soon after they opened but when they
closed down were remembered with glowing nostalgia. Finding fault marked refined taste and superior experience.

The warehouse was used as a ‘cool-party’ location for films, making the landlord feel he could raise the rent, forcing the inhabitants out, meaning it was no longer the place for cool parties. This was a party to celebrate moving out. There were so many celebrations. A visitor from Scandinavia wondered just where he had found himself and why the hell everyone was drinking so much. ‘You can’t be dancing all the time,’ he said, and I didn’t understand.

Then I was out on the pavement alone, walking – with my jacket hooked over my arm and a bottle of beer – enjoying the night air on my bare skin. I was wasted but I wanted more. I wanted to rub the city onto my skin; I wanted to inhale the streets. I was walking faster, in worn-down boots, than the buses were travelling. The drugs I’d swallowed earlier made my breath fast and my cheeks tingle. Biting my mouth, I wanted to eat it all. There was heat in my face and lips and nipples and clitoris. I flicked open my cigarette box and went in again with the flash of the lighter and the quenching mouthful of drink. I could feel it entering, breathing deeply so the bubbles of oxygen processed the alcohol more quickly, sucking the smoke and holding my breath, squeezing each moment.

I had been walking through the city for so long that I didn’t know where I was. I’d walk towards any light, towards the highest point. I wanted to reach up above the buildings, following the part of me that needed cliffs, and the air to be clearer.

*    *    *

When I made it home I lay on my bed with the window open. There was some wine left and I listened to sad songs and looked at uninhabited Orkney islands on Wikipedia. The night air was still warm, my hair was smoky and my skin dirty. I could hear bins crashing – the late-night takeaway packing up – and drunk people getting off buses.

Outside the flat there were raised train tracks and a smoggy crossroads. When cars with powerful speakers stopped at the red lights, the whole building vibrated in time with the bass. Although the sea was a hundred miles away, and some kids in the area had never seen it, there were seagulls hustling around. I once saw one carrying a segment of Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

My bedroom, at the back of the house, overlooked the beer garden of one of the most notorious pubs in Hackney, which gained its fame by being open late at night after the clubs had closed, sheltering gangsters and alcoholics. Its reputation made it popular with the new waves of twenty-somethings who had moved into the area, into flats – ex-council, above shops – which, first, the Cockney families had left and now some of the Bengalis, too, looking for better things further east where London turns into Essex.

That night the pub held its weekly karaoke, the full-hearted, badly tuned versions of ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘My Way’ infesting my sleep. Some were doing it mockingly, some seriously, but they were all so drunk that the difference did not matter. The wails drifted up into my room and mixed with the laughter and arguments from the beer garden, which lacked any soil or plant life and offered only ashtrays and umbrellas advertising lager.

The sky blended downwards from black to blue to orange. The neighbours’ fridge must have been broken: they were storing their tonic water and meat on the windowsill. The new offices across the road were fully lit, yet empty. A factory, with a chimney of forgotten purpose, now housed art students, turning out their bedroom lamps and closing their laptops – one hundred wireless networks password protected, one thousand humans in an acre holding their wallets close to their genitals.

In the morning I could tell what time it was by the traffic noise. I could hear the call to prayer from the mosque. When my alarm clock rang for a few seconds I was rootless, without body or mind, but I didn’t panic in those moments before realisation.

The residents of my rented flat kept changing and it was hard to remember who was living there and what jobs they had, if any. Lately, there seemed to be more people around in the daytime, and envelopes from Hackney Revenues & Benefits Service were pushed through the letterbox along with the unpaid bills. London is where you come to meet your match. People who were the coolest at their provincial disco or the cleverest in their school class are out-styled and outsmarted. Given a few titbits, like an internship or a good party weekend, they decide to make the move. We chose uncertainty and overcrowding with a possibility of success and excitement.

One flatmate was a musician who worked in a bar and, on the rare times I bumped into him in the kitchen, shared morsels
of good news, like an email from a potential manager, but it was hard to tell the fairy godmothers from the sharks. The goddess on the dance-floor in a Cleopatra wig and a bikini put on her glasses the next morning and sat in Reception at an insurance company, browsing the internet. A stripper ran a techno club on her night off. I was temping in the parking department of a borough council on the other side of the city, writing record reviews on documents hidden under my spreadsheets.

The Afghan shopkeeper downstairs was the only person who had anywhere near an idea how much I drank. As evenings and months progressed, my trips grew more frequent into the shop where the light through the window was blocked out by fluorescent stars advertising special offers. Outside the door of the flat, the same man asked me for money, or a cigarette, or a cuddle, each day: ‘Love, love, spare us some change, love.’ The next day his eyes were swimming and he did not recognise me.

Back in Orkney, my friend Helga had told me that there is a mysterious, vanishing island called Hether Blether to the west of the island of Rousay. Although some Orcadians claim to have seen it, no one has ever been there.

The legend goes that a girl disappeared from Rousay and, after some time, was given up for dead. Years later, the girl’s father and brother were out fishing when their boat was enveloped in a cloud. They came ashore on a strange and beautiful island and were met by the girl, now a woman, who told them
that this was Hether Blether and she was now married to a man from the island and there she had made her home. She gave them a wooden stake and said this would allow them to reach the island again but the stake fell overboard on the trip back to Rousay.

There are many versions of the story and different Orkney myths of imaginary or vanishing islands – the magical Hildaland is linked to what we now know as Eynhallow – as well as similar stories from other places, often associated with foggy sea conditions. In Orkney, banks of sea mist appear and disappear quickly, perhaps the story’s origin.

Vanishing islands still occur. Last year, geologists in the south Pacific on an Australian surveyor ship undertook a journey in which they were able to prove that an island shown on maps, including Google’s, did not actually exist. Sandy Island is now defined on Wikipedia as a ‘non-island’. It has been undiscovered. Cartographers say the phantom island could ‘turn up’ nearby – the Coral Sea area is vast and remote – having been wrongly located by mistake, or it might never have existed at all, created as a joke or as a test to expose cartological plagiarists.

There are islands of seaweed, islands of plastic and islands of sewage and other human waste. After volcanic explosions, rafts of pumice that look like islands can drift across the oceans for decades. There are islands of seabirds, puffins sheltering together in the months they spend out on the winter seas without ever coming to land.

Hether Blether is still enchanted, rising only on rare occasions. Some say that it is only visible on leap years. Anyone who sees
the island should row towards it while holding steel in their hand, always keeping their eyes on its shores. If you are able to set foot on Hether Blether, you will free the island from its spell and it will become visible to human eyes.

When I left Orkney on the ferry it was foggy; arriving on mainland Britain was like emerging into another realm. I’d crossed a boundary not just of sea but also of imagination. Because I came from an island, London was the fantasy and London Fields was my Hether Blether. I became accustomed to an unsustainable enchanted lifestyle of summer days in the park with beautiful people and intoxicated nights at parties. I didn’t expect the spell to be broken and I didn’t want to find my way back through the mist to home.

5

NIGHTBIKE

THE FIRST TIME HE
saw me I was climbing on top of a phone box. We were outside a gig held in an empty shop on Kingsland Road where a rap group from south London took to the middle of the floor and the crowd circled around them. In the audience a model was pouting in a duck costume and I noticed a boyish American with mischievous eyes. Later, I sat on the pavement and told passers-by I was going to the beach. I could feel the tremors.

Although we didn’t talk that night, I found out afterwards that he’d written about me online. He was worried about me but found me interesting. I was intrigued so the next weekend I turned up at a club where I knew he would be. I went up to say hello, touched him gently on the arm, and saw my reflection in the expanding black pupils of his eyes – dark floods of desire. When he spoke, my skin was alert.

We left together in a taxi for a house party where we’d heard
a French DJ duo were playing. We sat on the doorstep and kissed, totally easy. When my friends went home I told them it was okay to leave me with him. The sole fell off my boot as we walked back to my flat. I don’t remember much of that night but I do remember the night we spent together the next weekend, and the ten nights in a row after that, when there were electrical storms and we watched the thunder and lightning over London from his bedroom window.

The lightning over skyscrapers in the City was different from at home on the farm where it flashed over the sea and was followed sometimes by power cuts and phone lines going down. There were once reports, during thunderstorms, of ball lightning – St Elmo’s Fire – inside houses on the West Mainland.

I sought connection with a fired-up fury, the secrets in his pupils, laughing his name with my legs around him. Each time made my heart beat faster and I’d cycle to work smiling in the morning through Dalston and Hackney. We texted all day until we rushed to meet again.

When we walked together he took me down unexpected routes and side streets. In the morning, sometimes, he looked like a hedgehog waking from hibernation. He was sensitive to hot and cold and many other sensations – cycling down windy streets and cooling his feet outside the duvet. We told each other about where we came from. He talked about his work technically and precisely and was different from most hipsters in Hackney because he had a proper job. He had an escape route.