Authors: Amy Liptrot
I stumbled to his house – he’d tried to hide his new address from me but I’d found it out – and was ringing the bell, bashing on the door, calling his phone. No answer. I was distraught. I had to get his attention. I walked on, down a side street in the vague direction of where I was staying. He asked later why I had started dressing so slutty. A car stopped beside me and, although I can’t remember exactly what he said, the driver asked me to get in and I did.
It seemed as if we were driving for a long time but I was eventually picked up by the ambulance not very far from where I’d got into the car. I remember having some kind of mundane conversation about the best route and I think I asked to be taken home. I was on my phone, calling my ex, and left a message on his answerphone telling him I was in a stranger’s car.
Then the driver of the car punched me in the face as hard as he could. Everything changed. I was more sober and knew I had to escape. I opened the car door but we were still moving. I later told the police that this was when I lost my shoe. He stopped, picked up a large heavy boot from the footwell and hit me over the back of the head. I knew with no doubt that he wanted to knock me out, if not kill me. There was a struggle and we were both on the ground outside the passenger door, beside the park. He began dragging me, by my ankles, into the park, towards some trees.
The only thing I remember him saying to me is ‘Be quiet.’ I was not quiet. I was terrified, drunk, on drugs, and had been hit hard on the head twice, but somehow I quickly sized up the situation. He was not a big man and didn’t have a weapon. Although I’d never experienced violence like that before, childhood play fights with my brother came back to me and I knew I had a chance of overpowering him. I screamed for help and shouted, ‘I am stronger than you, I am stronger than you,’ kicking and struggling as he tore at my tights.
I saw three men coming towards me. Moments later, it seemed, we were surrounded by flashing lights and people and my attacker had gone. I had held tightly onto my mobile phone the whole time.
At the police station they took my statement and my clothes, and in the hospital they X-rayed my head. I weighed myself and was lighter than I had been since I was a teenager. My ex was there. He’d finally returned my call and run to the park. I had his attention. We went for a cigarette outside the hospital. There
was a late-night pub across the road and I suggested we go over for a drink. He looked at me with disbelief and horror and told me he couldn’t stay with me.
The attacker had run from the scene, leaving his car. I don’t remember giving my statement to the police but apparently my description of an ‘early thirties, thin white male’ resulted in a swift search of the area and one wrong man being locked up for the night. My attacker was found at his own address the next day.
In the following days a police photographer came and took photos of my black eye and the bruises in the shape of fingers around my upper arms and ankles. Although the bump on my cheekbone from the punch eventually went away, I still have a scar on the back of my head from the boot. My hair grows unusually around it and sometimes I reach and touch it.
In court a few months later, I asked for a screen so I would not have to see him again. He was identified as the person responsible for a very similar attack on another young woman a few months before. While I had remained conscious after he hit me, apparently the other girl had not been so ‘lucky’ and was found later walking, confused, by a motorway. He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for two counts of attempted rape.
The sea is churned up around the Holm today. I ride my bike to the shop in a cross-wind, blowing hail into me horizontally
and tilting my bike. The chain snaps and I push the bike home, where an email from London upsets me, but then a different colour washes over my computer screen and I look back through the window and the sky is changing: there’s a patch of blue sky above Eday and the clouds are fringed with palest pink. A flame breaks through in the fire, my heart slows to a contented rate and everything momentarily is quivering and calm.
I’ve been on Papay for four weeks now and it’s like one of those months when I didn’t leave central London. London is an island within the rest of the UK, defined and separate. In these weeks on the island, living alone, where the markers of my routine are so different and I’m enjoying the simple challenges of keeping myself warm and fed, I am learning how to behave decently in everyday life after years of confusion. My possessions are scattered. My ties and traditions are my own to make. I can choose where I will belong.
I’ve worn no make-up and removed no body hair. On rare days I have a visitor – Mum comes from the Mainland, Jan gives me a lift to the shop: I wonder if I should brush my hair and take the animal bones off the table. I have the odd pang for takeaways and cafés, and sometimes I can physically feel the nightlife, happening out there without me while I sit by the fire with a blanket over my knees, wondering how I suddenly became an old lady. I miss seeing and being seen and feeling close to the centre of the action. The news here is different – the weather rather than politics.
* * *
My centre of gravity has moved north. I’ve been thinking more about Shetland, Iceland and Faroe. I am still sometimes shocked by everything that happened, that I was in such dangerous situations, that I ended up in rehab, that I haven’t drunk alcohol for twenty months, two weeks and four days and that this is how it feels. I’m back here, on these windy rocks, looking for hope in my imagination and my surroundings.
Every day on Papay, there’s a moment, looking back, facing into the northerly wind, at the coastline I’ve just walked, for instance, when my heart soars. I see starlings flocking, hundreds of individual birds forming and re-forming shapes in liquid geometry, outwitting predators and following each other to find a place to roost for the night. The wind blows me from behind so strongly that I’m running and laughing. Calm yet alert, after a few weeks on Papay I notice that I am always pretty much aware of the height of the tide, the direction of the wind, the time of sunrise and sunset, and the phase of the moon.
I start noticing that low tides – when the rocks reaching over to the Holm are most exposed – come later twice a day, as the moon appears earlier, and I think about how they are connected. The tide is influenced not just by the earth’s rotation and the positions of the moon and the sun, but also the moon’s altitude above the equator and the topography of the seabed – or bathymetry – and the complicated way water moves between islands. I think about the earth’s rotation, and realise that it’s not the tide that is going out or the moon rising: rather, I am moving away from them.
Nearby, on the uninhabited skerry of Rusk Holm, a stone
tower with a spiralling walkway was built so that, at the highest tides, the hardy ‘holmie’ sheep that live there eating seaweed could climb to escape being swept away by the highest waves and drowning. Right now this little house and island is my Rusk Holm tower, somewhere I can breathe as the churning waters rise below.
16
PAPAY
ALTHOUGH PAPAY IS FAIRLY REMOTE
, life here doesn’t have to be isolated. Over winter there is a programme of community events. On 1 December, a Saturday, the semi-seriously named ‘Papay Walking Committee’ – the island is organised by many committees – has planned a walk around the whole island. We’re asked to gather at the old pier at midday and to bring torches: walking the eleven or so miles will take us beyond sunset at three twenty. It’s hailing and I worry that, as the over-enthusiastic newcomer, I might be the only walker, but others turn up. We set off south along the east coast, following the shoreline around jagged geos and curving bays, chasing the winter sun around the tip of the island.
Talking to people while walking is a good tactic for the anxious ex-drinker. It solves the problem of what I’m meant to be doing with my body now I’m not lifting a drink. Each person who wasn’t born or bred here has their own story about how
they came to Papay, refined by retelling. Some people ‘fall in love’ with a particular island and wait for years for a time when they can leave their lives in the south and move up. Others are attracted simply by the cheaper property prices, buying a broken-down croft house and moving here without even visiting first. Daniel tells me about his two years working on Douglas’s creel boat, a job he started on the first day he moved to the island from England, with no experience. Marie tells me how she realised that, as a nurse, she could work anywhere. The Northern Isles were a good place to live so she and her husband bought a house and moved from the south of England.
Many folk on the island have more than one job: David, the farmer who meets the plane, is also a coastguard, and Anne, who lives near Rose Cottage, is the postie, a mother of four, janitor at the school and creator of beautiful delicate jewellery made from things she finds on the beach – groatie buckies and sea-polished glass.
The 1851 census recorded 371 people living on Papay. As we pass now-derelict crofts scattered along the coast, I imagine each of them filled by an extended family with many children. Our current population of seventy seems to be the critical mass for keeping amenities, like a shop and the school. Islands that don’t have these things are less attractive to newcomers. Thanks to the arrival of new islanders, the population of Papay has risen from a low of fifty-something in the mid-nineties and the school now has six children.
Our islands are home to a peculiar mix of the type of eccentric, adventurous ‘south folk’, who would choose to move up
from, say, Reading to Stronsay, and the more conservative Orcadians who can trace their family on the island back generations and have watched members move away, as well as incomers who come and go. It is a mistake to think that islanders can ‘get away from it all’: in such a small place we are required to have more interaction with neighbours than in a city. For the most part we get along well.
As we walk, we can hear waves breaking on the Holm, tractors, squawking gulls, piping oystercatchers and intermittent hammering at a house being renovated. We smell occasional wafts of rotting seaweed and slurry from farms. The kye are kept inside from November until May and when we walk past their byres we hear the beasts rattling and roaring. A flock of curlew intersects with a skein of geese.
On the east side, a crushed car is balanced on the edge of the cliff. A few months earlier, the owner failed in a plan for quick disposal and the evidence is there for all to see, precarious and rusting, losing parts and being corroded. A few weeks later, after a westerly gale, it has gone over, leaving just one small piece of bodywork.
The land prompts tales: of shipwrecks and caves, weather and wartime, stories told through families, taught in school or happened upon on the shore. On the flagstones near the empty farm of Vestness sit two split halves of a wrecked ship: a fishing vessel run aground when a captain fell asleep. An islander’s son,
Danny, worked on that ship and jumped from the sinking vessel into an RNLI inflatable, leaving behind a box of possessions including his childhood best friend, a grey teddy bear called Sammy. Sammy has never been found.
I’m told that the lime green walls in some island houses are from tins of paint once washed up on the shore. I’m told that Papay folk are known as ‘doondies’, a dialect term for cod, while people from Westray are ‘auks’ (guillemots), from Sanday ‘gruelly belkies’ (porridge bellies) and from Stronsay ‘limpets’. I’m shown a ten-metre section of concrete path by cliffs, once part of a wartime quarry but now a road to nowhere, and the remains of the
Bellavista
, a cargo vessel grounded in 1948, rusting on the pebbles.
Papay has at least sixty archaeological sites and the map is strewn with mysterious ‘burned mounds’. The most famous site is the Knap of Howar, which, in another of Papay’s record claims, is western Europe’s oldest surviving settlement. These two stone dwellings, kept preserved for centuries under sand, were occupied by a Neolithic family around five thousand years ago, and are older than the Egyptian Pyramids and even Skara Brae.
I’ve arrived on Papay just in time for the annual Muckle Supper in early November. ‘Muckle’ means big and, historically, the supper is a celebration of the gathering of the last crops, in other places known as the Harvest Home. More than half of the population gathers in the hall, pots of soup are wheeled out,
then plates piled with ‘holmie lamb’, meat from the sheep that live on the Holm. Later, there is music and traditional Scottish dancing. Some of the dances I know from school but others are unique to Papay, with strange names like ‘The Eight Men of Moidart’. Mainly I sit and watch but join in for Strip the Willow.
On New Year’s Eve, there is ‘first footing’, a tradition once common all over Scotland but now mostly forgotten due to drink-driving concerns or lack of neighbourly ties. After the watch-night service at the kirk, finishing at midnight when a handbell is rung, we proceed in a loose group around houses that are open for the night, and have food and drink on offer. The first footing carries on until morning, finishing, as the sun rises on a new year, with a fry-up at the last house at the north of the island and a game called ‘bum jumping’ where participants race on their buttocks. Papay is carrying on old traditions but also making new ones.
On Wednesdays, I don’t have breakfast and instead fill up on delicious cheese scones and home bakes at the coffee morning in the room between the church and the doctor’s surgery. Here I find out that the stone piles in some fields are ‘steeves’ for stooks, now listed monuments to bygone agricultural ways. We discuss where to get vegetarian haggis for the Burns Supper, plans to recreate the killing of the last great auk, now an extinct bird, by chasing an island lad around the hill with paint guns, and the mandible morphology of Papay mice.
Here I have been mixing with people of all ages and backgrounds – we have to – whereas in London I was in a bubble. I went to the city to meet new people, to expand my ideas and
social circles, but ended up meeting people more and more like myself. We curated our experiences into ever narrower subsections until we were unlikely to encounter anything that made us uncomfortable.