Authors: Amy Liptrot
I’m repairing these dykes at the same time as I’m putting myself back together. I am building my defences, and each time I don’t take a drink when I feel like it, I am strengthening new pathways in my brain. I have to break the walls down a bit more
before I can start to build them up again. I have to work with the stones I’ve got and can’t spend too long worrying if I’m making the perfect wall. I just have to get on with placing stones.
One night in the caravan, the weather turns wild again. Although it is well weighted down, the thin walls tremble and the wind and hail are crashing against the windows. It’s like being at sea.
I have drinking dreams. I’m so thirsty. Each night brings up flashes of locations I had forgotten: the floor of a train, somehow under a table of four strange men, not sure if I was being sick; a small town in Spain, late at night, knocking on random doors trying to find what I thought was a nightclub; in London, crying on a pavement underneath a cash machine, ringing on my ex’s buzzer in the middle of the night, unwanted; waking with someone in my bed who hadn’t been there when I’d passed out. I wish none of it had happened.
Half awake, I have a sensory flashback, as I often do when trying to sleep, of the night I was arrested when the car swerved and hit the grass verge. After I moved out of our flat, I had come back to Orkney for a few weeks, heartbroken, to try to find some calm but it wasn’t there. The police picked me up as I was passing the road leading to the cliffs of Yesnaby, which had become known as a local suicide spot. They had been alerted that I had gone out in a car, leaving two empty wine bottles, known to be terribly unhappy. They were waiting for me at the end of that road but I wasn’t going to drive down it. I was
driving to the farm, crazed with sadness. All I wanted was to get home.
I was so drunk that I had to close one eye to see the lines in the middle of the road. At one point I hit the verge – a sickening clunk – but regained control of the car and straightened up. For some time I had felt as if I was turning over endless stones looking for a safe place but I couldn’t find one. The drink offered the promise of ease but even that wasn’t working. My body was rejecting it – I would be gagging but trying to force more down.
When I saw the blue lights I thought at first it was strange that an ice-cream van would be out in the countryside. When they got me – sadly, acceptingly – into the back of the police car, I said, ‘I didn’t want to hurt anyone else.’
Trying to sleep in the wind-rocked caravan, the muscle memory of the car hitting the verge keeps jolting through my mind and body. Dropping off to sleep, I’m jolted awake. My car keeps swerving off the road.
Despite everything that has happened – the drink-driving conviction, giving up my job to undergo the programme and sort out my alcohol problem, all the pain my drinking has caused me, all that I have lost and all that I stand to gain through quitting – the thought of and desire for a drink still comes through me regularly, like an electric shock: when I hear a good song, or the sun comes out, or I feel angry, or I want to phone someone
and tell them something nice. Alcohol is woven into nearly every area of my life and it will take some time to untangle and develop new responses and strategies. It takes a while to build a strong wall.
I’ve lived in ten different houses in the last five years. My belongings are in friends’ attics and garages in London – a physical manifestation of my unsettledness and split loyalties. I am scattered and never at home. I think about having a drink like you might fantasise about having an affair. I know I can’t do it, but maybe if the conditions were perfect and nobody would find out, we could have a weekend together, my bottles and I.
Each evening when I take off my overalls and work gloves, I hide in the glow of my laptop and don’t drink. I want to drink but I have hope that something inside me will change. I’m back under these decaying clouds and deep skies, living among the elements that made me. I want to see if these forces will weigh me down, like coping stones, and stop the jolting.
11
AMBERGRIS
A MILE OR SO UP THE
coast from the farm, a whale corpse is decomposing in a geo and I scramble down the rocks to investigate. Colossal internal organs are scattered among the seaweed and driftwood, and the skin is spread, like a carpet, over the pebbles. Examining the carcass, I’m caught unaware by a wave and jump up on the nine-foot spine to escape but still get wellies full of sea water and rotting whale slime.
These days a beached whale is somewhere between a curiosity and a tragedy but not so long ago it was a bonanza. The meat was eaten, if fresh, the blubber made into oil for lamps, lubricants or used in the manufacture of soaps and other products, the whalebone in construction and for making corsets. You just had to know what you were looking for. These days, bird-watchers know that dead whales bring rare birds. While I’m examining the dead fin whale in the geo, white gulls, Iceland and Glaucous gulls, more usually found in the Arctic, are hanging around. They
were blown in on a weather system but stay for days, feasting on the carcass.
In different ways, whales have been used by people in Orkney for millennia. A whalebone hammer was excavated from the five-thousand-year-old settlement at the Knap of Howar on Papa Westray. One theory about the coverings of the now roofless Neolithic houses at Skara Brae suggests that, in the absence of much wood, the inhabitants used whale ribs as rafters, stretching animal skins between them, perhaps turfed on top. Bones twice the height of a man made a warm home, like a heart inside a ribcage.
In the late eighteenth century, whaleships called at Orkney on their way to Arctic waters, to take on fresh provisions and skilled oarsmen. In
Moby-Dick
, Herman Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, says: ‘How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too.’
On 14 March 1955, around the spring equinox when the winds are often strong and seas high, sixty-seven pilot whales were stranded at Point of Cott on Westray, beached when they followed each other hunting or in rough weather. I try to imagine this sight and the excitement on the island at the unexpected event. On 7 December in 1994, when whales were now seen in terms of conservation rather than hunting, eleven sperm whales were beached at Backaskaill Bay on Sanday, where, collapsing under their own weight, they died the next morning.
At the furthest north-west point of the Orkney mainland, near a tidal island called the Broch of Birsay and fishermen’s cove
Skipi Geo, there is a local landmark, ‘the whale bone’: an upright of a rib and a cross-piece of part of a skull. It was set up about 130 years ago by local people after they’d used the other parts of a washed-up whale. It is well loved and over the years has been blown down and reinstated many times, now marking the turning point at the end of a dog walk. I see a photograph of the whale bone with the Northern Lights and the Milky Way in the background, a raw, grisly sculpture with yellow lichen growing on the eroded bones.
A few weeks ago, Dad was chatting to a beachcomber friend and asked him to name the best thing he could imagine finding on the shore. ‘Ambergris,’ he replied. Ambergris is a rare and highly valuable substance, produced in the stomachs of sperm whales, either vomited or excreted, and found floating on the sea or washed up on the shore. Dad’s friend described the substance – waxy, between white and grey and amber – and Dad said, ‘Oh, we’ve got some of that.’ A lump of waxy material fitting the description has been in the tractor shed for decades, ever since my parents bought the farm more than thirty years ago.
We’ve been reading everything we can about ambergris. Melville writes that it is ‘soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastilles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that
frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavour it.’ On the internet, we wonder at parfumiers’ descriptions, of a ‘pheromone’ with ‘a transformative quality’ that ‘seduces particularly feminine noses, who instinctively recognise the odour that will attract males’, read claims that it can ‘cure Parkinson’s’, and watch eBay auctions where lumps have been selling for forty dollars a gram, not much less than gold.
When my parents moved to the farm before I was born, there were whale bones around the buildings. I remember, as a child, climbing up a dyke and standing on a massive vertebra that sat on top, part wall, part animal. The remains give us a link to these sea beasts and encourage the idea that our lump might be what we hope. It is now the size and shape of a large naan bread or a toilet seat, although Dad remembers that it has changed shape over the years – to fit a bucket it was put in, then flattening out gradually when tipped onto the byre floor. It’s a piece of farmyard junk that could easily have been thrown on a bonfire or midden.
Our fortune – how much? Fifty thousand? A hundred? – might have been sitting on the floor of the shed all this time: the answer to our financial problems in a lump of whale puke! Ishmael again: ‘Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!’
We have been performing experiments, melting and poking fragments of our treasure, looking for the cuttlefish beaks that are a sure sign of a whale’s digestion. Insertion of a red-hot
needle produces a satisfying puff of white smoke but while there is some kind of smell it’s not quite the ‘peculiar odour that is at once sweet, earthy, marine, and animalic’ we’ve read about. We are also concerned that the dogs and rats on the farm have never tried to eat it. In the caravan, Dad and I joke that the blob we’re experimenting on is worth hundreds of pounds but we can afford to waste it. Results, so far, are inconclusive.
I’ve been fighting to avoid falling into the depression that is apparently common in the first year of sobriety, missing some of the chaos and unpredictability of my old life. There are many things I am scared may happen by surrendering myself to sobriety but near the top of the list is
losing my edge
. By ‘edge’ I mean my cool, by which I mean my enlivening sense of discontent, and my youth, and sex – narrowed eyes and full lips – and enjoyment of testing the boundaries, of saying something uncomfortable and an excitement in the unexpected.
I don’t want to become someone sanctimonious, who tuts at teenagers drinking alcopops; neither do I want to talk in therapy platitudes nor acquire the evangelical tone of voice I know from church preachers.
But the truth is, my edge was blunted some time ago. I’d hear a great song and think, This’ll sound fantastic in a club or live, with other people, but by the time I’d got there – if, indeed, I’d got there at all after too many over-excited sharpeners at home – I’d been too trolleyed to take in, let alone enjoy or remember,
the music or conversation. Where was my edge when I was physically ejected from a nightclub in front of loads of people I know, kicking and screaming against bouncers, for reasons I don’t remember and have been too embarrassed to find out? It wasn’t cool to be crying at parties to anyone who would listen about how my boyfriend had left me because of my drinking while swigging from a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. It wasn’t a good look to ruin my friend’s poetry reading with coked-up incomprehensible heckles, or to be lying on the floor of a pub toilet, my friends too weary to do anything to move me.
Alcohol wasn’t working for me any more. I remember being so drunk I was falling down, but feeling I’d barely scratched the surface, buying shots at the bar, never able to fill the emptiness. The exhausting and boring cycle of alcoholism would have continued. I could have been a sad, lonely drunk of forty, fifty, sixty years old. In the end, I was chasing a promise that never delivered and now I’m looking to the surprises of my natural surroundings to stir my imagination.
Uncertainty is hanging over the farm. Developers have visited, interested in the Outrun. At this lean time of year, before the lambs have been sold, the suggestion of large sums of money is attractive. As with the ambergris, we’re seduced by the idea that the land might provide an unexpected fortune.
The next step is to send a small sample of our ‘ambergris’,
for testing and verification, to one of the perfume houses in France or traders in New Zealand. Perhaps we’re stalling to keep the daydreams of multiplying bank accounts and new tractors alive, in the knowledge that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. Soon, all we might have is a lump of worthless wax but for now it’s a thing of wonder and riches, magic washed up by the sea, thanks to the dyspepsia of a whale.
At one time our farm contained a ‘smithy’, where a blacksmith would repair other farmers’ tools, ploughs dragged by horses and, later, tractors. Dad sends a sample of our waxy lump to a Parisian perfume company and they eventually reply saying that it is probably a crude form of animal-bone wax or glue, not ambergris. It’s disappointing but while the lump doesn’t connect us to the sea, it does link us, with blacksmith’s glue made from the melted bones and hoofs of horses, to the history of the farm.
12
ABANDONED ISLANDS
IT IS NOT UNTIL LATER
that spring that I see my first living cetaceans – the name for whales, dolphins and porpoises. On a small Rigid Inflatable Boat, returning from the uninhabited island of Copinsay, we are suddenly among a pod of harbour porpoise. The captain cuts the engine and they surface intermittently, six or ten of them, close enough that we can hear them breathe. The Shetland name for porpoise is ‘neesick’, onomatopoeia of the sound they make as they breach. On the small boat, we are at their level and everyone aboard is transfixed, talking in whispers. I’d always known that the porpoise were out there but to see and be among them is more moving than I’d imagined, an unexpected bonus at the end of a magical twenty-four hours on the tiny island.