The Outrun (5 page)

In those first weeks, I stopped in the pub on the way over to his house and, over a couple of pints, wrote him a letter about
how I was scared alcohol would come between us. Although we chatted easily about the small things, there were the gaps when I wasn’t there. I’d drink until my eyes went dead. Back then he had patience for my tears and blank-outs.

We were in a bubble. At two a.m. one night, in his bedroom in Dalston, I said I was so happy I would never forget that moment. We hadn’t met each other’s families when we moved in together after six months: a one-bedroom flat above a bookmaker on Hackney Road.

There were many more weekends and evenings after work in the park, with more and more people turning up. We felt at the centre of things. There was a gold rush of cool to this area of London, everyone afraid of missing out. After I met him I took him along too, showing off our partnership to the group. I look back at photos from that time and we’re holding each other too tight, every limb and finger entwined, not looking at the camera.

I said I was never going back to Orkney. I ignored phone calls and letters. The farmhouse was being sold and I didn’t want to know. My brother had moved away, too, following me to university. I was as angry with Mum and her faith as I was with Dad and his girlfriend – the woman he’d had an affair with several years earlier. But sometimes a smell in the air would remind me sharply that I was living in England. This leafy country with its red-brick skylines was not my home. I yearned for the open
skies and grey stone of Orkney. I missed the curlews and oyster-catchers, even the black-backed gulls. Sometimes I’d be walking down Bethnal Green Road, surprised by the tears rolling silently down my face.

On the island I was big. It was secure and unquestioned but all I wanted to do was leave. Now I’d prised myself into the city, with its constant life and content, and there was no one else to blame. In London it was not possible to look everyone in the face but I wanted to touch everything. I was all eyes. It felt impossible to make any sort of impression on a place so big but I was going to.

I hadn’t been particularly young when I started drinking, fifteen or sixteen, at teenage parties and dances in the auction mart. They were held in the room where the cattle were penned before sales. I loved seeing my friends and classmates – lumpen and self-conscious at school – open up, their inhibitions breaking down. Somehow I was often the one who took our half-bottle of vodka away on my own. I wanted to drink, fuck and photograph everything, but I’d end up in horrible states, crying, lashing out, my parents called. I wanted to experience things and no discipline was going to stop me.

With teenage friends in Orkney, I swallowed dried magic mushrooms we picked from the fields and walked around the harbour town through the graveyard. I tried to bite or kiss the cathedral, my mouth on one of its red-stone pillars, then drove
twenty miles back to the farm, stopping for lights on the road that weren’t there. I got home and scrawled in my notebook, urgently recording the fading sensations.

When I first left home the level of my drinking was not unusual for a student; the hangovers weren’t so bad. In the same way that Guide camp or school activities seemed tame to farm kids used to climbing on roofs and scrambling down geos, the Students’ Union was not enough. I found druggy clubs and outdoor raves, often accompanied by my brother. I balanced weekends taking ‘party drugs’ with weekdays reading and writing essays, often finishing them over a bottle of wine. But every year it got worse. As people around me began to drink and party less, I drank more and partied alone.

In London, months went by when I didn’t leave Zones One and Two. Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end. The drinking took hold of me. While others worked, turning down a night in the pub to reach the next London rung, I was emptying cans while on the phone, hiding the sound of the ring pull, talking of ambitions unfulfilled.

A photograph caught me unawares. He said I often looked like that: unfathomably, unquenchably sad.

On another unfamiliar bus route to a new temp job, I wondered if I’d ever feel at home again or if I would be blinking under a new light for ever. I wandered day-long, carrying phrases. At night I pushed my feet against the wall and felt as if my body was falling. There were flashes of happiness, a wild, open joy of life in little things that pleased and enfolded me. I felt lucky but
could never hold on to it. Another Sunday muffled and hung-over in bed, makeup oily in my eyes, doors slamming somewhere, while up north the waves still curled dark and endless, and the aurora lit up the sky.

Sometimes, around two or three a.m., when I had not drunk enough to sleep, I crept out of our flat. Without turning on the lights, I carried my bicycle down the narrow stairwell, felt my way along the walls and slipped out into the street. After central heating and the close stench of bodies, the night air was refreshing. It was cool and clear, like my mind.

I never felt sad when I was on my bicycle. I used no lights, wore no helmet and knew the location of every twenty-four-hour garage and off-licence in a five-mile radius – fluorescent oases in the shut-down city.

Poised at the lights, my foot hovered above the pedal, ready to unlock the down stroke of energy that meant I was off, gliding round the corner, into the breeze. Breaking off Hackney Road, lurching into Bethnal Green – just me, the lonely taxis and night buses. I startled a cat into running over wet concrete, leaving paw prints for ever.

The canal opened the city up. It was the lowest I’d ever seen it, and among the usual cans and plastic bags, there were a digital camera, a saw, citrus fruit and a BMX. I pedalled faster, insects and branches ricocheting off my limbs. A swollen dead fox was floating in the black water.

On my birthday in May, with multi-coloured helium balloons tied to my saddle and a bunch of flowers in my basket, I cycled the straight stretch from my office across London Bridge, through the City and Shoreditch, then along Hackney Road to our flat to tell him I had lost my job. It was warm in the rush-hour smog and van drivers shouted and beeped, but at night I travelled swiftly and smoothly.

As I cycled I tried not to think about the lost jobs and all the disappointments. The air was getting warmer. Delivery vans were bringing tomorrow’s newspapers and plastic-bagged bread. All the lights were green and a handsome boy in a top hat was sobering up at a bus stop. The police helicopter above was not looking for me. I tried to breathe in the dawn and realised I missed the sky.

Pedalling on, I chased the sensation of escape. I felt like I had as a teenager one night at the farm when the full moon was shining on the sea so temptingly that I left the house and walked down to the beach. I didn’t need a torch: I was guided by the moon reflecting on the puddles in the road. The tide was high and the sea was swelling in the bay. I sheltered from the wind behind a sand dune and looked up at the perfect whole moon, its light catching on the waves, forming a shining path out across the sea. Looking back towards the farm, the dark island was illuminated by just the moon and the only other lights were stars, the glowing windows of cosy houses and my lighter, which briefly flamed, then the red tip of my cigarette. On the way back up to the farm, flying geese were silhouetted against moonlit cloud.

*    *    *

One warm night, crazy and hopeful, I tried to reach Hampstead Heath for sunrise. On the towpath, I pedalled too fast and, swerving to go under a bridge, tilted uncontrollably and felt the crash of my cheek on the water, the weight of my bike pushing me down. I was submerged in the canal for seconds in slow motion before surfacing and dragging my sodden body to the bank where I lay flapping, like a fish, my right shoe lost under the dark water.

I pulled my bike out, then my diary and squeezed the canal from its pages. Pushing my bike with one shoe on, I came home to him bleeding and crying. It wouldn’t be long until he couldn’t take it any more.

6

FLITTING

I HEARD IT SAID THAT
in London you’re always looking for either a job, a house or a lover. I did not realise how easily and how fast I could lose all three.

I woke up crying. It was 1 May and I should have been hopeful and happy but something in the night, some dark unease, had crept into the room and into my dreams. Although I’d been warned it was coming, I hadn’t known it would be today. Without telling me, he had taken the day off to pack up his stuff, separating his plates, papers and clothes from mine, untangling two years of intermingled lives. When I got home from work all that was left was my belongings, with dusty spaces where his had been.

When he was gone, I spent a week alone in the flat, making it through days in the office blankly. I’d been told I was losing my job and was working out my notice period. Our bedroom was destroyed – violently rearranged furniture, lines of poetry
on the walls, books and photos on the floor. I couldn’t afford to live there alone.

I threw an apple against the wall and it lay rotting on the floor until the day he came round to clean for the new people who would be moving in. He told me that would be the last time and afterwards, using Sellotape, I collected his chest hairs, which had gathered in the sweat in my navel, and stuck them in the pages of my diary.

He had an escape route and he took it. He’d never meant to get so tangled with the wild girl on the phone box. I’d caught around him, like tights in the laundry.

When we met we were both drunk, then we drank together but at some point we no longer did. We didn’t have wine with meals. He wouldn’t touch me when I’d been drinking. He’d get home from work late and I was on the floor. He tried to take the glass from my hand and pour the rest of the bottle down the sink but I cried and said I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was allowed to drink, I said. He drank when he went out with his friends. I drank myself apart – from him and from everyone. I undid myself. I tried to pretend the bottle was the first when I knew he’d heard me go out to the shop for more.

The eye contact dwindled. I squeezed the last love from him.

That May was, I felt at the time, the worst month of my life: shaking in the office surrounded by powerless colleagues, smoking nine cigarettes in my lunch hour, developing an
aggressive obsession with my mobile phone, going on a shopping spree for smaller-sized clothes – yellow skinny jeans from Dalston shopping centre – getting my eyelashes tinted in a salon and having an allergic reaction. I had four job interviews and four rejections.

I remember swigging expensive vodka from the bottle in a suite at a fashionable hotel before falling asleep at a bus stop, climbing over fences and being dragged angrily around a polished floor by my ankles in a silk party dress, trying to go to an AA meeting but ending up in a ‘spirituality workshop’, surrounded by middle-aged ladies in long skirts with bells sewn to the hems.

I spent eight days in southern Spain, with Mum, unsuccessfully trying to get the sun to bleach my mind, writing pages of distress in my diary in red biro, drinking one-euro beers, watching the Eurovision Song Contest in an Andalusian bar, convinced I was having a proper conversation even though I couldn’t speak Spanish.

Trying to make an afternoon pass by spending my dole money on an unsustainable pose of iced coffees and political magazines, I had a dish of Turkish stew delivered to my solitary table where, with papers, diary and phone spread out, I looked like someone with things to do. At the next table six silent women were munching joylessly through fried breakfasts. They were all wearing bunny ears.

I scanned the internet blank-eyed for a solution that was not forthcoming, I cycled round east London aimlessly, with a bag full of confusion. I was drinking more than I was eating.

*    *    *

In Orcadian, ‘flitting’ means ‘moving house’. I can hear it spoken with a tinge of disapproval or pity: the air-headed English couple who couldn’t settle, the family who had to ‘do a flit’ quickly due to money problems. In London I was always flitting but was too battered to see it as an opportunity. I wanted to flit quickly so that no one noticed, slipping from one shadow to the next.

I boxed up my things and moved them to a storage unit, then went to stay with my brother, who was living with his girlfriend in Dalston. He helped me move my belongings but he didn’t know how to help with my bottomless pain and increasingly out-of-control behaviour.

Tom is twenty months younger than I, and as toddlers we were zipped into jackets and shod in wellies, and rode in the tractor cab together. As children, we made dens at the top of the hay barns, above the bales in the eaves, where it smelt sweet and dusty, and mice would dart out. We played in the barley store, the grain like quicksand. In summer we swam in the rock pools with friends, the water always bracingly cold. We reared caddy lambs with bottles before they were put back with the main flock – always a bit different, smaller and misshapen.

In the rafters of the big shed, raised from the ground, there is a hut made from half caravan, half wheelhouse-from-a-fishing-boat, and from there we would jump onto woolsacks at shearing time, soft and oily. When we were teenagers I often shouted at him to get out of my room but sometimes we rode the horses along the Bay of Skaill, galloping across the sand and in the sea as tourists at Skara Brae took our picture. I could never do impersonations but he could and I’d ask him to perform Orcadian
characters: our grumpy primary-school bus driver, who swerved to hit rabbits and in his spare time ran an abattoir; the dinner lady who called out, ‘Plenty o’ seconds!’; the man who read the mart report on Radio Orkney.

Tom followed me to university, where we went to raves together and then to London, where we had many of the same friends. Later, he watched me drunkenly posting on the internet and answered when I phoned, distressed, late at night. It was Tom who came and got me from the hospital the night I was attacked by a stranger.

Sleeping on Tom’s sofa was a temporary arrangement. I knew I had to find somewhere to live, and looked at adverts online for flatshares. The adverts described households as ‘chilled’ or ‘creative’, perhaps euphemisms for their choice of drugs. Sitting in the park with a bottle, or in an internet café with a can, I called the numbers numbly, gave basic details about myself and arranged times to visit. I marked the addresses in my
A–Z
with a green felt tip, forming a dot-to-dot of my search on pages 68-9, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.