Authors: Amy Liptrot
The motivation is the same but my methods of dealing with the way I feel are changing. I used to confuse my neurotransmitters on a Friday night in a hot nightclub. Now I shock my senses on a Saturday morning in a biting sea, plunging warm skin into cold water, forcing a rush of sensation, cleansed.
21
THE HOLM
ON GOOGLE MAPS, LOOKING AT
uninhabited island the Holm of Papay, the satellite picture gives way to the default cerulean ocean blue. The Holm is where the internet ends, beyond the realm of digital cartographers: here be cyber monsters.
Britain is an island off Europe, Orkney is an island off Britain, Westray is an island off Orkney, Papay is an island off Westray and the Holm of Papay is at yet another remove. It is where to go when life on Papay gets too hectic.
There are ‘holms’ (pronounced ‘homes’) all around Orkney, the name coming from the Old Norse word
hólmr
meaning ‘small island’, offshore islets near the coast of a bigger island. The Holm of Papay is our ‘calf’ island, constantly in view to the east, a wedge shape topped by a stone cairn, across just a few hundred metres of shallow azure water. At low tide rocks are exposed between the two islands, and when people lived at the Knap of Howar, more than five thousand years ago, they might have been joined by land.
On a calm, bright morning, Neil, the farmer at Holland – the farm in the centre of Papay, seat of the island’s lairds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century – rings to tell me they will be taking a ram over to the Holm and I can come along. I career down to the old pier on my bike.
The ram, small and horned, is manhandled from a trailer into a little boat. He will have just a few weeks to carry out his one job of the year: servicing about twenty of the ewes on the Holm selected to have lambs in the spring. The crossing, in a small boat with four people, a ram and a sheepdog, takes less than ten minutes. Today, without much wind, I can see right to the bottom of the seabed: the water is clear, the surface unruffled.
Stepping off the boat onto an island where we are the only humans, I get a sense, as I did on Copinsay, of exhilaration tinged with fear. The birds and seals seem bigger and tougher. I take a wide berth around a fulmar in case it tries to vomit on me. There are hidden geos, pointed away towards North Ronaldsay, their secrets seen only by occasional visitors or from the sea. There is a dead seal pup on the grass by the shore but when I get closer it moves and I realise it is not dead at all but basking in the rare winter sun. Eighty or so ‘holmie’ ewes stay on the Holm all year round and, especially in the winter when the grass is scarce, live off a diet that includes seaweed. These sheep are incredibly hardy to survive out here all winter without extra food. The similar hill breeds we used to have on the farm were my favourite, more nimble-footed and independent than the stocky, docile Texels or Suffolks. The odd ewe would develop an ability to jump fences, breaking free of the nursery fields onto the Outrun, and was
sometimes followed, squeezing through the barbed wire, by her lambs. Once a year in summer on Papay, there is ‘holmie day’, one of the last remnants of communal farming in Orkney, when islanders go over to the Holm to help to catch and shear the sheep.
There are no signs that the Holm has ever been inhabited yet it is where the ancient people brought their dead. There are three chambered tombs, the biggest of which, the south cairn, well excavated and maintained, is now looked after by Historic Scotland. Due to its inaccessibility, it is Historic Scotland’s least visited site.
I see the cairn every day from Rose Cottage and it is strange now to be standing on top of it, the low sun casting my shadow over the island. I lift a metal hatch and descend a ladder into the mound. I use the torch left for visitors to crawl through the long passageway and look into the ten small cells or enclosures leading off. There are carvings of what look like eyebrows on the stone, similar to the ‘eyes’ of the Westray Wife.
A friend tells me that the cairn is – like the tomb of Maeshowe on the Orkney Mainland – aligned with the midwinter sun. At Maeshowe, on the solstice and a few days on either side, on the rare cloudless days at that time of year, the setting sun will shine directly down the entrance corridor. Webcams are set up there and one midwinter afternoon I watch over the internet as the golden light hits the end wall.
I had a reckless idea to get farmer Neil or fisherman Douglas to take me out to the Holm one day around midwinter and
leave me overnight – for both sunset and sunrise – so I could investigate and find out if there is any sun alignment. I thought I was brave and had no superstitions to stop me spending a night in the tomb, but now, after just a few minutes down there, I want to get out: it is cold, damp, dark and scary. There is no way I’m going to spend a night there.
I climb out of the cairn and walk to the south-east corner of the Holm, the part that is not on Google Maps, and feel I have escaped. I am beyond the internet.
I am attracted to these places at the edge. I crave either life in the inner city or to go to islands beyond islands, islands of the dead. In a Hackney pub Gloria and I played pool with two guys who invited us back to their place across the road where they had some beers. Their place was a homeless hostel. A few nights later we were in a luxury hotel with a band, sneaking into the sauna in the early hours, spraying each other’s warm skin with plastic bottles of cold water until the fridge was empty. I want to have splendid success or to fail beautifully.
Sometimes I’m indignant: it’s unjust that a conscientious person such as me, with much good fortune, opportunity and support, ended up in rehab. But when I look at it from another perspective, it’s no surprise at all. Extremes were normal for me. I grew up with mental illness: unpredictable flurries of unusual and wild behaviour, followed by withdrawn lows. I remember in glimpses: looking up at Dad and Mum fighting and pushing at the top of the stairs, a neighbour taking me out of the house, and when I came back Dad being gone for weeks or months. I was born into dramatic scenes, lived in the landscape of shipwrecks and
howling storms, with animal birth and death, religious visions, on the edge of chaos, with the possibility of something exciting happening at the same time as the threat of something going wrong. A part of me thinks that these wildly swinging fluctuations are, if not normal, at least desirable, and I grew to expect and even seek the edge. The alternative, of balance, seems pale and limited. I seek sensation and want to be more alive.
At the edge of the Holm, I spin around on the spot for a few rotations – the islands on the horizon whirl around me in a blurred panorama. I’m dipping in and out of phone reception and satellite view, trying to get one step ahead of my short attention span, spinning like the rotating beams when I slept at the bottom of the lighthouse or the helicopter’s blades on the day I was born.
I don’t have long here before Neil wants to go back to Papay – lighter without the ram – and get on with the rest of the day’s work, so I make my way across the Holm to the boat. Gradually, on winter walks and these exploratory trips, my understanding of myself is growing. I’m seeing patterns and tracing the roots of my desires. But in order to find a way forward, I will need help.
I first encountered Dee when she emailed offering her support as another sober woman in Orkney. At that point I didn’t know that I would be coming to live on her island: she and her husband, Mo, had moved to Papay four years ago and since then had turned a derelict croft into a warm home. I had not asked anyone
to be my sponsor. I was only interested in someone who shared my prejudices and didn’t mention Jesus.
Before I went to my first AA meeting, four or five years before my time in the treatment centre, I spent a long time reading material on the internet that criticised the organisation: alternative programmes that allowed you to drink in moderation and articles on atheist fora. I was suspicious of the coercive and religious aspects of the programme, wanted to be fully informed and, if possible, have an excuse not to attend.
The essential paradox of AA/NA, and the treatment centre, is that the thing we are trying to eradicate from our lives – the thing we used obsessively to seek out and consume – is the very thing we spend all day discussing, analysing, reminiscing about. Many would say that it is simply replacing one way of being fixated with it for another.
When I’m in a spiky mood I fear it will be impossible ever to leave the world of addiction, that I’ll be defined by alcohol – or, more accurately,
defined by its absence
– for ever. I don’t want to be endlessly telling the newcomers about what I took, what it made me do and how I kicked it. I want to do other things with my liberation.
Back in the treatment centre, I was sometimes scared about what the treatment programme was turning me into. Endlessly self-absorbed and self-doubting, I was shocked to find myself speaking platitudes that used to make my brain recoil. Was my moral compass wonky? We listened to people ‘share’ about terrible behaviour and crimes they had committed under the influence, and praised them for being ‘honest’. I hung out all day with
jailbirds, junkies and crackheads, and nodded when one peer told me proudly that his family was so well connected in Bangladesh that his brother had literally got away with murder.
I had a lot of prejudice against AA: that it would in some way brainwash me, that I would have to relinquish intellectual control; that if I was in an AA meeting on a Saturday morning then I might just as well be in a church on a Sunday morning; that the ‘Big Book’ is really a Bible; that I would start using recovery-therapy jargon in everyday speech – ‘resentments’, ‘taking inventory’, ‘relapse’, ‘the rooms’, ‘dry drunk’, ‘higher power’.
But around me, in meetings, I heard people who said they were atheists and used the programme, people who seemed to have maintained their personality, sense of humour and critical thought, people who were doing things with their lives. An AA friend gave me a useful way of seeing the jargon as a kind of internal ‘Esperanto’ – a way of shorthanding complex ideas and experiences so we know what we’re talking to each other about.
I have been – successfully – working the first parts of the programme. Not having a drink one day – one hour, one minute – at a time, but failing to move beyond that into acceptance of and contentment in my new sober state. While I have doubts about AA, I have been struggling and need help so am willing to give it a try.
It seems fortuitous to be on a tiny island with a woman who has decades of sobriety behind her so I, nervously, ask Dee to take me through the 12 Steps during my time on Papay. We begin with a study of AA’s Big Book. I can’t decide whether I’m taking control or letting go.
* * *
On midwinter days the sky never gets beyond murky, but at what could be called dusk I walk down the coast in keen wind and hard rain to the Knap of Howar. I shelter down by the Stone Age structure and admire – one dyke-builder to another – the curved walls that have stood for five thousand years. I imagine living here. Like Rose Cottage, it has a hearth, and it has a stone for crushing seeds and making bread. I could be cosy under a whale-ribs roof, covered with animal skins.
Although the sun is obscured by grey stratus cloud, I feel I should come down here for sunset on the solstice – when the passageway at Maeshowe is aligned – to somehow mark and celebrate another quarter-year sober. I feel a bit silly waiting for something to happen but at 15:15, exactly sunset, across the water of Papa Sound, which is being blown against the tide by the wind in trembling ripples, the landing lights at the airstrip on Westray pop on: eight bright stars in the murk.
From inside the roofless Stone Age house, I watch the plane hop over from Westray, two white wing-lights and one red tail-light, guided into the Papay airfield by the runway lights, a new installation meaning that flights can be extended later into winter nights. People come from far afield to wonder at our ancient monuments but these are our daily miracles. My Neolithic fantasy may be broken but I am in a new awe: of the transport system, skilful pilots guiding the planes, in the strongest winds, down at midwinter to the lights of home.
22
PERSONAL GEOLOGY
I’VE BEEN TRYING TO REMEMBER
my last drink, almost two years ago, the weekend before I started the detox programme. It must have been the dregs of someone else’s, picked up at the end of the night in a pub in south London as I stumbled around desperately. I then got into a taxi I couldn’t afford and, at traffic lights near my house, opened the door, ran and hid from the driver in the walkways of a Bethnal Green estate, heart pounding. That hadn’t been my plan for the evening. It never was.
The Big Book describes well the vicious cycle of ‘the Alcoholic’: the drunken sprees, after which ‘coming to his senses, he [the drunk] is revolted at certain episodes he vaguely remembers’, how the memories are pushed away, and how the alcoholic lives in fear and tension that lead to more drinking.
There were secrets of the night. Wonderful and dreadful things happened, I met and re-met people, but in the sober daylight, at work, it seemed impossible that that was me. At times, I liked
this dangerous part of myself but I knew the game was up when I began drinking to ease the memories of the night before. Lonely and despairing, I was lost in what the Book calls ‘that bitter morass of self-pity’. I was sinking and knew that alcohol had beaten me.
Walking around the island, it is hard to not start thinking about how the land itself was formed. Even a short stretch of coast has a variety of interesting rock formations: precarious piles of parallelograms where rockpools gather, parts that look like ‘crazy paving’, undulating ripples like waves. Layers of rock are clearly visible on the cliffs, like the pages of a book. These layers on different islands once met up when the archipelago was one continuous landmass but have been worn away by the action of sea and ice over millennia. Sea arches, sea stacks and caves are evidence of the continuing erosion.