Authors: Amy Liptrot
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There is some excitement on Papay at the arrival of a skip. Large rubbish is stored up for these occasions, to be taken off the island, rather than the old method of tipping it over a cliff. Historically, dead sheep were disposed of by being thrown over the cliff – on our farm, into Nebo Geo. Now this is illegal and Dad has a metal tank out at the far side of a field where the bodies are left to decompose. I catch a whiff of rotting flesh when I walk by.
Bonfires are another method of rubbish-disposal, popular here, and most houses have a blackened patch in the yard. Plumes of flame and smoke rise from the low island on still days and often on Sundays. Despite our small population, there are three different church groups here – Church of Scotland, a Gospel Hall and a Quaker meeting – but these fires are a link to something pre-Christian.
Papay has its own fire brigade, made up of five or so locals who are paid a retainer although the time commitment and training mean it’s hard to make up a full crew. Living in the city, I’d got used to local-authority-run fireworks displays, with safety barriers and officials in hi-vis vests. But I remember the bonfires once a week on the farm and the smell of burning black plastic from silage bales. We’re in control of our own fires here.
As well as for practical purposes, there are bonfires on Papay for celebrations and special occasions. For the last three years, in mid-February, a contemporary art festival has taken place on the island: Papay Gyro Nights, set up by Papay residents and artists Ivanov and Tsz Chan, a couple who moved to the island about five years ago and have a Papay-born daughter. That an art festival
is held here at all is surprising, even more so that it’s in the off-season when gales thrash and nights are dark and long.
The ancient Papay tradition of the Night of the Gyros was celebrated until the early twentieth century on the first full moon of February. Young boys went out into the winter night, chased by older boys to ‘weep them with a tangle under the full moon’s light’. The last known celebration was in 1914 but now, a hundred years later, the art festival is reviving the tradition with a modern interpretation.
The bias of the festival is towards experimental video art. Some artists have made the journey to Papay, alongside a small but enthusiastic group of international visitors and curious Orcadians. The hostel is pretty much full for the week – unheard of at this time of year – and island women make meals for everyone.
It is amusing to see islanders and visitors, from kids to old folks, farmers and performance artists, standing in the cold kelp store dutifully watching an hour-long experimental film, where masked figures perform strange rituals. It’s a much more diverse and attentive audience than there would be in a London gallery, although I notice some people slip out with the excuse of sleepy children. There is a general open-mindedness on Papay, a feeling that, although the art might not be for everyone, it is making something happen and bringing people to the island.
A Norwegian artist spends the week producing a ‘kinetic sculpture’ in and around an abandoned croft near Rose Cottage. I watch him through my telescope, battling to hang a canvas in the wind. An anthropologist from Minnesota gives a lecture, the
projector set up on a giant sperm whale vertebra. A Frog King from Hong Kong makes his nest in the school.
I remember how, on the first Thursday of each month, art galleries around east London were open late, with people walking between them as much for the free drink as the art. Girls in exaggerated head bows and boys in old men’s jackets drank cans of lager in the street. Hopeful artists inhabited these nights, displaying photographs of urban romance, keeping quiet about how they spent their days and paid their rent.
One night I accidentally destroyed the art. Elaborate foil ‘pieces’ were suspended from steel wires and dangled into the lobby of the gallery, like chandeliers, and, being a curious and sloshed viewer, I leaned over the balcony and hoisted one up. A security guard came and tapped me on the shoulder so I immediately dropped the wire, snapping it and sending the art smashing to the ground. It made a terrific noise.
Gyro Nights launches an architectural competition to design a bonfire – a ‘combustible centrepiece’ – to be constructed and burned at the festival, and they receive entries from around the world. Architecture students look at Papay on Google Maps to find the best location for their fire: a structure whose purpose is its own destruction. A bonfire is a type of controlled chaos. On the first night of the festival, we take part in a torch-lit procession, from the shop down the hill to the old pier where we put our flaming wooden torches together to light a fire.
Coming to this island without light pollution, I remember just how dark it can get. At midwinter I close my curtains at half past three. In days gone by, four times every year, hilltops across Orkney blazed with orange firelight. Giant bonfires were constructed and lit to commemorate the ancient festivals of Yule, Beltane, Johnsmas and Hallowmas. In the seventeenth century, cattle, horses, the sick or infirm were led ‘sunwise’ around bonfires because the flames were believed to have a purifying or revitalising power. In the past they would burn heather and peat; today it’s more likely to be packaging pallets or old fence posts. The fires light up the winter nights, giving excitement and hope.
The full moon and new moons of winter – including the full moon of Gyro Nights – are also the times when it’s possible to forage for spoots, the local name for razor fish or razor shells, long, thin shellfish that can be caught without the need for a boat, at the lowest tides.
At new moon, Tim shows me the best spot on the beach where the ‘spoot sand’ is exposed at the ebb tide. We walk backwards and the spoots, which lie vertically just under the surface, are disturbed by our booming footsteps and burrow downwards, leaving a telltale bubble in the sand. By walking backwards, I am able to spot these bubbles – the ‘spoot’ of water – and dig furiously with a trowel, then with my rubber-gloved hands. I feel the razor fish pulling downwards away from me and it’s a battle of woman versus spoot but I manage to get it and put it into my bucket. That night I fry them up with some garlic and eat them with spaghetti – a small meal
but one of the most satisfying I’ve had in a long time, caught for free and with fun.
I have been sober for exactly twenty-three months. I remember 21 February as being Said’s ‘clean date’ because we had to repeat these to each other once a week in the treatment centre. He was one of the very few others that got through the three months of treatment without ‘picking up’ but I haven’t spoken to him for more than a year. My last text, a few months ago, went unanswered. I try another. It doesn’t feel good.
I text another person I became friendly with in the centre, a funny, fragile girl with jewelled fingernails and more problems than just the drink, including a history of anorexia and relationships with abusive men. She was thrown out of the programme halfway through after admitting taking some of her boyfriend’s prescription painkillers one night when she was feeling desperate. The rule was zero tolerance. I saw her later in AA meetings and she was back drinking, getting a few weeks sober then relapse after relapse. She replies telling me she is in a psychiatric unit after getting arrested for breach of the peace.
I’ve also been thinking about another woman I met on the programme. She had come from a residential rehab, where she had been living with her baby son, and had been off heroin for nine months but was honest about the way she felt: ‘I’m not comfortable in my skin’, ‘I still want to take drugs.’ She didn’t just say what they wanted to hear, talking shamelessly about her
‘sugar daddy’, saying the groups were boring, fidgeting and struggling to complete the work.
She was moving from a B&B into a local-authority halfway house, and I offered to help carry her bags but, unsurprisingly, she didn’t turn up at the agreed time and place and couldn’t be reached on the phone. After that weekend she didn’t come back to the centre and I’m almost certain that she’s back to her old life, working as a prostitute, using heroin, and that her son has been taken away from her.
I think for some people it’s gone too far, that all the help in the world isn’t going to make them go straight, and the trappings of a normal life will always be frustrating. I’ve been thinking about her because, although I’m much more adjusted to sobriety, I know how she felt: trapped, dissatisfied. But I also know she will not be happy now, out there.
As I remember these people – my friends – and think about how their lives will be back in active addiction, I know with increasing certainty that I can’t and won’t go back.
It is a clear, still evening, and the smell of paraffin lingers in the air under bright stars. As we are led down the hill to the bonfire by the Frog King, I momentarily think this would be more fun if I was drinking. Being sober at celebratory occasions still feels weird. Alcohol gave me the ability to be in the present. It lifted anxiety and gave me that initial buzz. I was more lively and confident after a few.
But I shake my head when someone offers me a hip flask. I’m smiling. The person with the whisky has no idea. This is no longer an option for me. For those of us for whom things went so far we ended up in rehab, addicted, the reality is that not stopping drinking or taking drugs will lead, maybe terrifyingly soon, to insanity, incarceration or death. I must find new kinds of fun and new ways to celebrate.
I see the Norwegian artist through the smoke and he smiles at me. The day before I’d met him on the beach. He was carrying a plastic bag containing six types of seaweed. He is about the same age and height as me and also has long blond hair. He feels a bit like a male version of myself – a nomadic artist who’s washed up on this island for a short time.
I often feel the same as I used to. I want to make connections and to communicate because we are only and really alive right now. I still want to experience the extremes so I must find ways to fulfil this need sober. I must be brave. I wonder if I can still be cheeky or flirtatious without booze. If I master this, I could be unstoppable. In the past months I’ve been stifled by bruised confidence and anxiety, but these things take time. I’m gradually learning to say things sober that other people wait to say drunk.
When I was drinking I wanted to have exciting experiences but I was lazy and unimaginative, expecting the mere act of getting messed up to be enough to make something happen. For every time I made a new friend and ended up back at their house trying on their dresses, while discussing our favourite writers, there would be more occasions when I’d find myself
alone and stumbling at three a.m., without my jacket, trying to find a night bus home.
I’m offered a lift home from the bonfire but decline: I’m talking to the sculptor. He touches my arm. The Pleiades are visible and I suggest we walk along the coast under the stars. Passing North Wick, I tell him about the selkies, how they are the souls of people who have drowned, condemned for ever to swim in the sea.
Back at Rose Cottage, I light the fire and we sit either side of it, talking about seaweed, families and art. I slip off my shoes and put my feet on the edge of his chair and, still talking and looking at me, he puts his hand on my ankle. My body soaks up this point of contact with relief and pleasure. Being touched soothes months of loneliness. I know suddenly, from this one touch, that sex is possible not only tonight but also in my future, although he’s leaving the island in the morning and returning to Scandinavia. Life is opening up and stretches ahead, sparkling with possibility. He’s stroking my other ankle and the conversation is faltering.
I want to develop hardihood – boldness and daring. I am looking to the ways they did things in the past, ancient festivals and celebrations for the changes of the seasons. I’m looking for new enchantments to lift the spirits in late winter when the wind seems to change direction to face me whichever way I walk. I’m trying to drink up these times on the island because I know I’ll miss them when they’re gone. I’ve already wasted too much time.
I hear of how, in 1952, a whole hill on the Mainland caught
alight. The flames rolled with the wind, lighting the night. At this time of year, hybrid beings emerge and mingle with people, ancestral beings return from the dead, we forage for molluscs and light the dark sky with fire. These are times for people to come together and liven each other’s spirits, burning the past.
26
UNDERSEA
THERE ARE THINGS I REMEMBER
. A farm tom cat went missing, out chasing rabbits on the Outrun, and returned months later, twice his old size, face scarred with half his whiskers missing, walking confidently into his old home and scaring us. I remember Dad walking home from Stromness in bare feet, seven miles as the crow flies across fields and fences, leaving possessions along the way and coming through the door early in the morning when we were still in bed, ranting about a black bull.
When doctors ask, I say there is no history of heart disease, cancer or diabetes in my family. Mental illness is another matter. It’s on both sides. Mum’s dad was also a manic depressive and only recently I learned that a paternal great-grandmother committed suicide. There were times I thought that if I stopped drinking I would discover that I was bipolar too, that I was just self-medicating. If I were to go mad, it would come as no surprise at all.
Some aspects of my childhood didn’t seem unusual until I moved away from Orkney and looked back. As teenagers, we picked winkles from the shore and sold them by the bucket, by weight, to a local shellfish dealer, who sent them to Spain or to be used for water purification in fish farms. I remember summer days up at the peat hill at the centre of the Mainland where farms are assigned a patch to cut peat, to be burned over winter. While Mum and Dad worked, stamping down the cutters and slicing up the millennia-old bog into bricks, I’d crawl, eyes at ground-level among cotton grass and water-skating insects.
Tom and I found scores of jellyfish washed up in a geo at the farm. There were so many that they coated the rocks and we picked our way among them, distressed. One by one, we picked up the cool gelatinous animals in our arms, some of them breaking, carried them to the shoreline and placed them back in the sea. This species – moon jellyfish – doesn’t sting but leaves a mild envenomation and our bare arms and hands were red and buzzing but we didn’t care: we were children performing a disaster-relief mission, running over slidy pebbles with armfuls of wobbling transparent pink.