Authors: Amy Liptrot
I was working as a cleaner at the oil terminal on the island of Flotta and took the workers’ ferry across from the pier at
Houton every day at dawn. Since the early seventies, pipelines and tankers have brought crude oil to the terminal from North Sea oil fields, dark energy from below the seabed. The oil industry was a boost for Orkney and provides some of its best-paid jobs but the cleaners were at the bottom of the pile.
The commute was the best thing about the job. Each day I drove across the island at sunrise and returned at sunset. Misty pastels appeared as I accelerated over the horizon listening to Radio Orkney or drum-and-bass, framing the islands and reflecting in the water of Scapa Flow. There were electric reds and oranges in the evening, the same colour as the flare that burns off excess gas at the terminal and the lights on the oil tankers out at sea.
After work, when I took off my tabard but never quite got rid of the smell of bleach, I spent nights on my own – Mum had recently moved out and Dad was elsewhere – in the farmhouse where I grew up. I was alone in a house on the edge of a cliff, drinking and smoking at the kitchen table where we used to have family meals, doing a job I didn’t want, phoning my far-away friends at midnight while drinking Dad’s homebrew, as my family came apart around me. Sometimes I would finish one bottle of wine, then drive five miles to the nearest open shop to get another. The next day I’d get on the ferry, headphones on, hung-over, furious and hurting.
At the oil terminal, I had to clean workers’ bedrooms, mop bathrooms, sweep corridors and make beds. I became familiar with different types of dirt: from sweat on sheets, unseen but smelt, to dry footprint mud, satisfyingly hooverable. Toothpaste
flecks on mirrors revealed the enthusiastic brusher, and ash showed who had been smoking out of the window in a non-smoking area. Dry and wet poo, ably distinguished by my supervisor, required different cleaning methods, and pubic hairs were left coiled on toilet seats. Most of the rooms I cleaned contained partially drunk bottles of Irn-Bru and some had finger- and toenail clippings buried in the carpet.
I felt as if I had become a ghost, walking nameless corridors under buzzing lights carrying a mop. The world out there, down south, had forgotten about me, stuck on the island with the bin bags, struggling to get a laundry cart through swing doors on my own. I was the wall that had eyes, knowing if workers had slept in their beds last night. I was the shadowy figure, scuttling away when I heard footsteps. Being back in Orkney was a failure and I saw the cleaning job as simply a way to make money to leave again.
At eighteen, I couldn’t wait to leave. I saw life on the farm as dirty, hard and badly paid. I wanted comfort, glamour and to be at the centre of things. I didn’t understand people who said that they wanted to live in the country where they could see wildlife. People were more interesting than animals. In the winter, forced into ugly outdoor clothes to help muck out the livestock, I dreamed of the hot pulse of the city.
But in my student flat, I would mentally map the 150 acres of the farm onto the inner city, thousands of people in the space
that contained just our family and animals. It drove me crazy that, in a block of flats, I was existing just metres from someone yet didn’t know who they were. Other people were sleeping through thin walls to the left and right of me, above and below. I didn’t talk much about Orkney to my new friends, but lying in bed on windy nights, the noise made me feel as if I was back in the stone farmhouse and I thought of the animals outside in the cold.
When I was in the south it was easiest for me to say that I was ‘Scottish’ or ‘come from Orkney’ but that was not what I would say to a real Orcadian. Although I was born in Orkney and lived there until I was eighteen, I don’t have an Orcadian accent and my family is from England. My parents met when they were eighteen, at college in Manchester, where Dad was retaking the A levels he’d missed due to his first bouts of illness and Mum was studying business. Mum grew up on a farm in Somerset, Dad is the son of teachers from Lancashire and was brought up in a Mancunian suburb. It was visits to Mum’s farm that made him decide to go to agricultural college. My parents have lived on the islands for more than thirty years, over half their lives, yet are still viewed as English, from ‘south’.
Usually, English people think that my accent is Scottish and Scottish people think I am English. The old Orcadian way to ask someone where they come from: ‘Where do you belong?’ My parents heard that often when they first arrived. I might come from Orkney but I often didn’t feel it was where I belonged. At primary school, ‘English’ was a term of abuse.
When I was little, the only black kid at the secondary
school went missing. He lived up near the cliffs of Yesnaby. His younger brother came on our primary-school bus and the adults talked seriously at the bus stops. A week or so later his body was found washed up at the beach. My playground experiences made me assume that racism had driven him to the cliff.
As an adolescent I didn’t want to become part of what I saw as a subtle conspiracy to present Orkney as an island paradise. Tourist information proclaimed the beauty and history, endlessly reproducing pictures of the standing stones or the pretty winding street of Stromness when what I saw was boring buildings and grey skies. But although I regularly complained about Orkney, I was on the defence as soon as someone else was sceptical of its charms.
It’s a push and a pull familiar to many young people from the islands. We ended up back here again and again, washed back, like the inevitable tide. I grew up in the sky, with an immense sense of space, yet limited by the confines of the island and the farm. On a day off from cleaning, the wind was in my hair down at the harbour in Kirkwall, which smelt of fish and diesel; out to sea, lights twinkled on the low hills of the north islands, Shapinsay, Sanday, and beyond them, over the horizon, Papa Westray. I was conspicuous and discontent in that small town after having lived away.
When we were teenagers we mocked the tourists. This World Heritage Site was our home, not just somewhere holidaymakers could buy tickets to see. After hours, when the coach tours had left, my brother, friends and I climbed into the stone Neolithic
houses and tombs, with fingerless gloves and disposable cameras. In the morning the attendant would find burned-out tea-lights and empty wine bottles.
I was a physically brave and foolhardy child. I climbed up stone dykes and onto shed roofs. I threw my body from high rafters onto hay or wool bags below. Later I plunged myself into parties – alcohol, drugs, relationships, sex – wanting to taste the extremes, not worrying about the consequences, always seeking sensation and raging against those who warned me away from the edge. My life was rough and windy and tangled.
Growing up in the wind leaves you strong, sloped and adept at seeking shelter. I was far away when the farmhouse was sold, the value of the farm and our home split between my parents. Dad kept the farm and installed a caravan there for the nights he wasn’t staying with his girlfriend, while Mum bought a house in town and rarely visited the farm again.
Mum was a farmer’s wife and a farmer’s daughter but also a farmer herself. As well as doing all the cooking and housework for the family, she drove tractors, mucked out cattle, built fences and dykes, and filled in the potholes in the farm track again and again. She and Dad worked together to dose the sheep with wormer and clip the feet of the ones with foot-rot, and to pick the stones, which each year worked their way up from the earth’s mantle, from the ploughed fields before the barley was sown. Dad sheared the sheep, then Mum rolled the fleeces into tight bundles. After the divorce, she missed the farm terribly but it was too hard to visit.
* * *
Every cleaner was female and every room that we cleaned was occupied by a man. These women cleaned and scrubbed and washed all day at work, then went home and did the same for their husbands and children, and had done for years. They were experts. As I watched my supervisor’s finesse with the mop, how she squeezed at just the right pressure and angle for optimum water and bubbles, I knew I would never achieve such skill. I thought that the firemen on the island were capable of doing their own laundry and changing their own beds.
As I paired up grizzled socks, threw away discarded pornography and cleaned toilets, I wondered if I would be happier if I had never left. Would it be easier if I’d married someone I’d gone to school with and stayed off the internet, if there had been less of a gap between my aspirations and reality? I thought about my mum. Maybe she had wanted more too. She was not much older than me when she found herself with two kids, abandoned on the day she gave birth and many times after that. She was a capable and caring woman, pushed to her limit on a cliffside farm on a strange island.
Mum turned to the Church when my brother and I were small and she was looking after a farm and toddlers while her husband was in a psychiatric ward two hundred miles away, across the sea. Once she had to sell the whole sheep flock because she couldn’t manage them on her own and didn’t know when Dad would be back. They thought that might be the end for the farm but they managed to piece it back together. In many ways, her faith kept the family going for a long time but, later, it was part of what broke it up.
Dad would say the modern, evangelical Church found her, preyed on and brainwashed her. She would say she was saved. It depends who I’m speaking to as to which side I agree with. I remember people from the Church helping out and decorating our living room while Dad was in hospital. He remembers coming back and finding new Bibles and religious books in the house, in their bedroom.
As the days grew shorter, it was dark when I left home to go to Flotta in the morning and when I returned at night. At the end of Orkney’s long, bleak winter I was fading, hiding in the shadows. One afternoon, carrying my Hoover up a glass stairway, I walked into a shaft of sunlight. I looked around to see if it was safe, and lay down on the carpet, the light warming my hair.
Another day, when my supervisor found me crying in the toilets, not for the first time, she told me, with the kindest intentions, I had to leave: this was obviously not where I wanted to be. With my next wage slip, they sent me off on the workers’ boat for the last time. A few days later, I walked into each room of the farmhouse, saying goodbye, before leaving with a rucksack and a one-way ticket for London.
4
LONDON FIELDS
MAY IS MY POWERFUL MONTH
of change and possibility: it’s my birthday and my middle name. There is a manic freshness in the air: I cut my hair and take baths at six a.m., draw pictures, wear strange dresses, apply for jobs and take drugs. There are new people to fall in love with and I have a spark that attracts things, needing less sleep and food. I drink more. My body feels right and I walk straight and strong across town. On these days composed of quests for experience, I say yes and pull on my boots again, excited and uneasy.
We called it a picnic although no one was there for the food, of which there was little – a few tubs of corner-shop dips turning crisp in the sun and a punnet of cherry tomatoes. Our group was sitting around a rainbow-striped blanket. It was one of the first truly hot days of the year and the sun on my bare feet felt luxurious. I ran my hands up and down my legs under my long skirt.
In London, with our commutes and travel cards and high rents, we could be isolated and had to find new ways to make a community. Each weekend when the sun shone we went down to the park, to London Fields. There was an unspoken rule that all the kids who thought they were cool went to this bit of dirty grass near the pubs, off-licences and cash machines, while the families and dog walkers were over by the play-park.
This was where suburban-bedroom fashion-magazine daydreams could almost come true. Looking for my friends, with electronic music on my headphones, I walked past lolling groups of Gothic ballerinas and landlocked urban sailors on the grass. Each girl in the park had taken time to consider her outfit: fifties housewives in gingham dresses and headscarves, eighties aerobics teachers in leotards and leggings, aristocratic hippies. The boys looked like mods, skateboarders or underweight lumberjacks. It was hotter than it had ever been in Orkney. I was in a foreign country.
When I moved to London, I threw myself in. I arrived in a flurry, with no certainties apart from some sort of self-belief. Several nights a week I would get on the bus to the Soho and Shoreditch nightclubs that I’d read about in magazines. I would try out colouring in my fair eyebrows with red eyeliner or slashing the back of a dress with scissors, and go down to the bus stop with a bottle. I met a lot of people in that first year, characters I identified from online message-boards and introduced myself to while waiting for the band to come on. ‘I’m a penniless newcomer, can I write for your blog?’; ‘I’ve seen you on Friendster’; ‘I’ve read your online column.’
It was a relief when the first person from our picnicking group suggested going to buy booze. Banknotes were thrust towards them with requests for cider and wine. The rest of us waited, the girls making daisy chains and plaiting each other’s hair, and the boys taking turns on someone’s bike. We were overgrown children, not men and women, searching headlong for a good time. Text messages invited more people to join us, the next party, promising something better or more. Each weekend was more messed up than the last. We were careering around, taking taxis and buying drinks we couldn’t afford.
Next to us a circle of wide-eyed club kids, who hadn’t slept the night before, one in a lion’s headdress, were taking photos of each other and laughing.
Our conversation was about work opportunities, whether the internship might result in some paid work, name-dropping fashion designers, magazine houses or record labels. Someone dressed in leggings, like an eighteenth-century lord, was complaining loudly about how the budget for his project was only ten thousand pounds. I heard a girl asking around for LSD, and it felt like the perpetual last day of a festival. A guy on a phone said, ‘Someone could make a killing here.’