Authors: Amy Liptrot
The devilish thoughts flickered. I worried that my life was over and I’d never have fun again. I thought that if I wasn’t going to amount to anything I might as well drink. I wanted to have a glass of champagne on a pavement outside an art-gallery opening with good-looking fashionable people, maybe one of whom would take me home if we got drunk enough. I wanted cocaine. I missed the moment where inhibitions gave way, and my heart ached for that brief enlivenment. I had purposefully put barriers between myself and alcohol but was finding it hard to be restrained.
I parked my bike and sat on a bench by the canal, drinking a cold bottle of water, reading, in
Moby-Dick
, about bursting a
whale’s heart. Two lads with dreadlocks and long shorts were setting up a tightrope between two trees near the railway bridge. They called to me, asking if I wanted a go, so I ran over and slipped off my shoes. ‘You could hold onto the tree or me, but the best thing to do is to use the power from your own push-up to balance yourself,’ he told me. My legs quivered uncontrollably sending vibrations along the rope and, as Central Line trains thundered above, I tried to keep my back straight and my eyes on the horizon. I fell almost immediately.
Back in my bedsit, on Friday and Saturday nights, I’d tensely smoke out of the window, listening to the pub downstairs, wondering if this was all there was to sobriety. I felt as if I had got myself ready for something but didn’t know what it was. I was fit, healthy, clean, and home alone again all weekend, too scared to go anywhere. If this was the future, I didn’t want it.
Coming out of rehab was not the end of the story but the beginning. Getting sober is one thing – I did it hundreds of times – but staying sober is a daily challenge in which there are moments when it comes together and I felt certain I’d done the right thing, then times when it was painfully hard.
It hadn’t mattered to me so much when I was drinking but now I was feeling the distance between me and my family eight hundred miles away. I was speaking to my parents more. Dad needed some help on the farm and Mum encouraged me to come up for a visit. Although it was nearly winter, a short time in the island air while I was applying for jobs might help me regain my strength and appetite.
London wasn’t the same. I was a stranger in my old life and
was discontent. But, back in Orkney, people had been to visit Dad on the farm, surveyors and businessmen, and there was talk of money. If the farm was sold, what would be there for me? What was next? What was the point of saving my life?
I plotted. I agreed with Mum that some space would do me good but part of me, the addict, had other ideas. Going back to Orkney would be a test. If I got to a year sober, still hadn’t found decent work and still felt frustrated, I would get an anonymous job somewhere, maybe as a cleaner, move into another rented room, cut myself off and just drink. It would feel so good to give in.
10
DYKING
THE SKY GETS BIGGER
as the train travels further north. The temperature changes in inverse correlation, and for each leg of the journey – London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Orkney – I put on another layer of clothing.
I posted the keys to my bedsit through the letterbox of the pub, dragged my suitcase onto the bus and got to King’s Cross early in the morning. I’m not settled until the train pulls away from the station and we are in motion. Although I’ve got good at negotiating the booking websites to find the cheapest fares, the journey is expensive and will take a whole day. I could have flown to any European capital in a shorter time and for less money. I sleep a lot on the train, waking every half-hour to pins and needles and new geography. Other passengers get off at their destinations – Peterborough, Durham, Newcastle – but I keep going north. Somewhere after Berwick upon Tweed, there’s a rush of light into the
carriage as the sky and sea open up. I’m in Scotland but not even halfway home.
After Edinburgh, we cross the Forth Rail Bridge and pass through Dundee. Getting the shorter ferry crossing from John O’Groats to Orkney would have meant staying overnight so today I get off the train in Aberdeen and don’t have long to get from the station to the pier. Huge oil-industry ships are docked in the harbour and seagulls are hustling around. I’m rushing and crumpled, struggling with my luggage, but the sea air and a cold breeze hit me. It’s been a while since I’ve tasted the wind like this. There’s a sign saying ‘Northern Isles Ferries’ but I know the way. I board the boat at five o’clock to sail into the North Sea as night falls.
On-board, the ferry from Aberdeen to Orkney is kitted out to look like a hotel but cannot disguise the reality of its daily trips through the temperamental North Sea and retains the whiff of sick. The carpets are patterned to disguise vomit stains and the chairs are chained to the floor to stop them tumbling across the room in rough seas. When the captain announces over the intercom there might be a ‘bit of chop’, I know enough about Orcadian understatement to refrain from eating and swallow a travel-sickness tablet. I’d been told that if I was feeling seasick, I should hold my gaze on the horizon but right now I want to sleep.
I can’t tell if people are drunk or if it’s just the motion of the waves. I bed down under my jacket on the sea-rocked floor and watch a mother and son have an argument in sign language. Voices carry over the lounge in the Orcadian accent
I have not heard in months; it brings back schoolmates and neighbours. It’s a Celtic lilt, vastly different from something like Glaswegian, somewhere between Welsh and Scandinavian, coy and almost sarcastic. Hearing the accent does not give me comfort but a jolt of anxiety and old feelings of not fitting in. I am too big and too English, remembering the sense of being trapped on ‘the Rock’, as frustrated teenagers call Orkney.
I buy a copy of the
Orcadian
from the bar and am interested in reading local news but at the same time don’t want to bump into anyone I know. I am tatty and defeated, with bad skin and nerves. I don’t want to have to admit that I’ve come back – that I’ve failed. I wonder if it’s possible to really come back once you’ve lived away for a while, or if it’s called coming ‘home’ when you never belonged.
I’ve been sober for a few months but I feel like a fraud accepting praise when people say ‘well done’ because I want to drink and feel it’s impossible that I won’t again. Yet I don’t drink, day after day. Perhaps this is just how it is, I think, this daily battle and my small, careful life is what the so-called miracle is.
On my last trip home I spent the entire seven-hour ferry journey in the bar and had to be helped off the boat by strangers. This time, I am able to stand out on deck as the ferry arrives into Kirkwall around midnight, feeling the salty wind on my face as the lights of the harbour grow closer in the night. When Mum meets me I see her relief.
In the car on the way to her house, I remember how, when Tom and I were small, Mum would reach back when she was
driving and hold our ankles to reassure herself we were still there. Even now she does it sometimes.
Mum now lives in Kirkwall, Orkney’s main town, in the large bungalow she bought after the sale of the farmhouse. She lets rooms to lodgers but tonight there is one free for me. Although the house contains furniture, pictures and crockery from the farmhouse, I have never lived there and it’s not my home. When we get back, Mum makes me a cup of tea and we sit at the big wooden kitchen table that our family of four used to eat around at the farm.
Once a month, around full moon, Mum goes to the Bay of Skaill as a volunteer to help with the RSPB’s beached-birds survey. She walks the high-tide line, looking for, identifying and counting dead birds. The findings give information about disease, food shortages or oil spills, although she doesn’t usually find much, a good sign. A couple of days after I arrive back, I join her. As we walk, we look across the bay to the farm – this is the closest Mum goes, these days. We find one dead fulmar, one dead cormorant and one dead sheep.
Mum drives back to Kirkwall and I walk up along the coast to the farm from the beach and notice, as they taught me to in the treatment centre, my feelings about the place: the surge of affection as the buildings come into view. The people who live in the farmhouse are no longer my family but this is where I come from and it’s special to me.
Dad is here, although most nights he stays with his girlfriend. I’m thinking about everything that has happened when I sit down by the freezer, then decide to walk up to the Outrun. In his caravan, Dad tells me about the tremors and we go together to feed the Highland cattle.
I stay at Mum’s for a few weeks, sleeping a lot, looking at job websites, signing on the dole and attending a few AA meetings in Kirkwall. Mum gets the worst of me. She is supportive and good-natured but I’m irritable. In Orkney I revert to a surly teenager. I know she is pleased that I’m not drinking but I don’t want to discuss it, as if this would be to admit I had made some wrong choices in the past or that she was right.
Soon after I arrive back, there are storms. Although life in the town is different from at the farm – there are trees in the garden and we’re more sheltered – Mum’s house is still noisy in the wind. The daylight hours are short and I often sleep into them. At Christmas, I take a trip to Manchester to visit my brother and his pregnant wife. Life is carrying on and I return to Orkney, knowing that I need to do more with myself than just not drinking.
In storms last month, conditions – including hurricane-force northerly winds and water-logged earth – were such that sections of drystone dyke made of huge grey slabs, which had stood through gales for 150 years, collapsed all over the farm.
The morning after one storm, I walk along the shore, looking
for driftwood or treasure. I find one unusual piece of flotsam: a seal, on the other side of the fence from the sea, perhaps carried by a huge wave. A young straggler, blown off course.
I’ve washed up on this island again, nine months sober, worn down and scrubbed clean, like a pebble. I’m back home, at the end of a rough year, in the winds that shaped me and where the sea salt left me raw. I’ve got a fresh start but I’m not sure what to use it for, so I’m going to make myself useful, building walls in the short hours of daylight and staying in a caravan at night.
After fifty-four days when it rained each day, with only eight hours of sunshine in the whole of December, there were some magical days in January: dreamy sunsets reflected on calm sea. Mum drops me off at the farm with my bags and I feel pleased to have something useful to do. Dad has shown me in the past how to build drystone dykes. It’s slow work. A dyke is actually two walls, built to be flat on the outer faces, joined at the top by large linking stones and filled in the middle with smaller loose ones. Although repairing a broken-down section is easier than building from nothing, it’s not breezeblock mindlessness: I have constantly to visualise and discriminate. I select and estimate the odd-shaped stones for shape and size, forming a unique 3D jigsaw that has to last.
The stones are heavy and ancient, and modern technology seems flimsy. I carry a digital camera and a lump hammer. When I crouch behind the wall to smoke, I watch the sun’s short journey across the southern sky, over the Bay of Skaill and the hills of Hoy before it falls below the Atlantic horizon
and I can no longer see my stones. I start to think in decades and centuries rather than days and months. I think about the people who built the original dykes, when the farms employed many more workers, and I wonder if my part will stay standing for as long. I have flitted and drifted but I want my wall to be permanent.
In the fading light the farm is timeless and two huge horses appear, like time travellers, out of the mist. When I was a kid, there were the bones of working horses down by the shore, left where they were shot by farmers forced to replace them with tractors. In ‘Horses’, the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir imagined strange horses coming back to the landscape after a future apocalyptic event. These two Clydesdales graze Dad’s cliff fields; like in the poem, they have returned.
When it’s finally built, the last big ‘coping stones’ lifted on top to bind the two sides of the wall together, I lie on the dyke on my back and let my head hang over the end. Upside down, I view the sky as if I am looking down on it. It seems deep and wide rather than a two-dimensional arc, with cloud paths stretching out into the earth’s atmosphere.
I’m learning to identify clouds, cloud-spotting in the same way that others bird-watch. The international cloud-classification system defines clouds by genera, species and variety, using Latin names. The high wispy clouds are called cirrus and the ones in the shape of a fish skeleton are called vertebratus. Stratus, the
grey, featureless sheet of a cloud we often have at this time of year, is known as opacus or translucidus, depending on whether the sun is visible through it. One afternoon, I spot some rare lenticular cloud, formed by the wind into cigar shapes.
I become interested in a fairly recently discovered meteorological phenomenon: noctilucent cloud, literally ‘night shining’, the highest and one of the rarest types, drifting in the upper atmosphere. Unlike most cloud it is made of ice crystals rather than water droplets. It’s usually invisible but just after sunset around midsummer, in ‘deep twilight’, the tilt of the earth allows it to catch the last light of the sun.
Sometimes known as ‘space cloud’, its first recorded observation was in 1885, two years after the eruption of Krakatoa. It could be that the ice crystals have formed around specks of dust – from volcanoes, meteors or space-shuttle exhausts. I like the idea of pollution creating something beautiful.
Despite the absurdity of classifying the ever-changing clouds, trying to define the sky like this opens up new ways of thinking to me: of the beauty of Orkney’s highly changeable climate, of rain as simply the decay of a cloud.
Just as these islands seem impossible when I’m in London, friends online talking about Japanese restaurants, new bars and the tube at rush-hour now seem preposterous. My fingernails are dirty, my lips chapped from the wind.