I Am an Island

by Tamsin Calidas

  Tamsin Calidas

  * * *

  I AM AN ISLAND

  Contents

  Map

  ACT I 1 Gulls

  2 Atlantic

  3 Island

  4 Croft

  5 Graft

  6 Winter

  7 The Unborn

  8 Brakes

  ACT II 1 Hands

  2 Foraging

  3 Auction Mart

  4 Dead Grass

  5 Swallow

  6 Tup

  7 Wild Cry

  8 Raw Element

  ACT III 1 Water

  2 Fire

  3 Kin

  4 Earth

  5 Air

  6 Stars

  7 Sun and Moon

  8 Wild

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Tamsin Calidas is a writer and photographer living in the wilds of the Scottish Hebrides.

  She worked in various roles in advertising, publishing and the BBC before giving it all up in 2004 to move to a tiny, remote island in Scotland to run a derelict croft with sheep and horses.

  To Cristall, all the wings, wilds and bright waters

  Nor fire shall burn me

  ni teintera teine mi

  Nor sun shall burn me

  no mo ghrian a losgadh mi

  Nor moon shall blanch me

  Cha leg a ’ghealch mo planadh

  Nor water shall drown me

  Cha teid usage a bhathadh dhomh

  ‘The Descent of Brighid’

  Carmina Gadelica

  ACT I

  * * *

  1

  Gulls

  Arriving into Oban, the first thing you notice is the grey sea and a close, huddled bay that shelters inside the protective arm of its sunken harbour. From a distance the tide is strangely thick, an amorphous mass of slow-moving, restless water. Step a little closer to the fishing boats and great hulking vessels and you will smell the rippling, dark metallic sheen, the striated channels where the diesel runs off as each hull is safely berthed, winched close or tied fast to the metal-ringed quays.

  The sound of the waves is not so different from the traffic of the city. But as soon as you lift your face and taste the fresh tang of salt on the air, you will mark how this sky is as different, fickle and changeable as all you have left behind. Then, if you listen, you will hear the laughing gulls. And beyond that, heading off in a low V-shape, the haunting call of the geese.

  It is an extraordinary moment when you recalibrate and find your compass. I had been dreaming of staring out at a raw, open horizon for years – ever since I found an old map of Scotland and pinned it up in the hallway in my flat. It was positioned across the full length of a narrow wall where I always saw it as I was passing, at an angle where your eyes fell into that empty space between giant masses of land. It is always during that notion of transit, of passing from one space to another, that your heart opens and all of your dreaming begins. I would press my nose to that thick paper, inhaling its musty scent, as my finger traced the ragged coastline of the fractured islets and islands of the Western Isles, straining against the bracing tides of the Atlantic, across the Minch, the North Sea and the Little Minch, to the tortuous fjordic coastline of the Norwegian Sea. In those moments, as my eyes closed, the traffic, shouts from the street, neighbours slamming doors would evaporate into the hurl of fresh spindrift, the thick, curling crests of the breakers drenching the salt-stung air, the gulls tearing the skies apart with an aching, screaming call.

  I would imagine how those great birds were somehow daring me, if not to follow, then at least to dream of living a wilder life. I don’t know what it is about gulls but they have a way of inviting your eyes to lift above the skyline, to seek some further-flung sky beyond the immediate vicinity or low horizon. Yet, always, as I sense their keening cry, my heart catches and something else dares to drift. It is as if something inside untethers, unsnarls itself from all the finer ties and close meshes that snare you within a life you know is too compressed for you. It can be startling when you open your eyes, and see that creased paper close up, pressed hard against your skin. Then I would walk quickly to the door, throw it open and stand with my eyes raised, shoulders braced, looking above the cars and buses at a thin, pale-blue sky. I would hear the gulls and see them, floating far away, white spattering drifts of light, circling far above the city. Held within a blue orbit that stretches around all continents and spaces, my compass was pulling me, leading unbroken from central London to Oban and those same wave-flung islands, washed by their restless sea.

  On Oban’s rain-drenched promenade, the needle of the compass is wavering.

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘Hmm?’ I ask, pulling the high neck of my jumper up to meet my ears.

  ‘Here.’

  I look up as my husband Rab thrusts a rain-spattered newspaper at me. We are huddled together, honeymoon-close, in a narrow doorway, only it is the kind of clinch spurred by necessity rather than desire, fighting to catch our breath and to dodge the wind and rain. We are both shivering, skin drenched, in unsuitably thin jackets, the cold masonry providing scant shelter from one of those torrential downpours that will become familiar as a regular feature of Oban’s climate. It is a rain that comes out of nowhere, as if all the open waters of the skies are descending, a furious sheeting-down. All along the grey promenade, water is shearing off the glistening pavements, bouncing back and ricocheting into whatever surface it can find. It is an impressive soaking. I can feel my toes wrinkling, whitening, cold-drenched inside my shoes.

  As the wind nearly rips the paper out of his hands, we run, laughing, jeans completely sodden, across the street into a smoky, peat-steeped inn. As the door opens, it is like stepping into another time, another world. It is all wood inside, toasty and warm, lit by small kerosene lamps. When I look through the window at the boats, I am struck by the thought that I have no family, kin, friends or emotional ties here. It is an unfamiliar yet strangely liberating feeling. Already the sky is darkening, a deeper blueing at its edges, so your eyes cling to the light, and blink, stupefied, as it dawns on you that you are a long way from home. And even after the long weary drive, I am excited because suddenly I realise that Scotland is a different, vibrant country, a whole world away from our stale, tired London life. Sometimes, a life can feel tight, like a jumper you have long outgrown, that restricts your movement, so you feel an urge to stretch and be rid of it. For years I had secretly been longing to wrench that last thread free. And now, still tingling from the chill wind wrapping around me, I feel unexpectedly alert and exhilarated. Change is fresh, sharp and invigorating. It makes you shiver with excitement and cold.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Rab asks again, half an hour later, two drams poured out on the bar glowing amber in the soft light. He wraps his fingers around the water-stained glass.

  ‘I think I could get used to this,’ I say, eyes shining. I take a nervous gulp of the whisky and feel its warmth flood through me. Suddenly our daring to imagine the prospect of embarking on a different way of life feels both dreamlike and also scarily real. I am still shivering, my jeans clinging to my legs, my hair soaking, dripping water into my eyes.

  ‘Here, take a look.’ Rab hands me the sheet. It is so fragile and wet it is tearing at the edges. I lay it flat and smooth it out carefully. Some of the ink has bled with the rain. And then I see it.

  The advert is small, with a tiny stamp-sized photograph of a derelict, run-down island croft. For years I have been dreaming of the waves and a ragged skyline, and here it is.

  All the detail was blurred, yet I knew it was one of those chance moments that can change your life for ever. That open sky with its cottage, outbuildings and weary fields was speaki
ng to me. Perhaps it was its aura of quiet abandonment that drew me instantly to it. I put down my glass and felt something inside me lift.

  Don’t say anything, I thought, willing Rab to keep silent. I held my breath and balled my fingers into fists. In my heart, I had no doubts. In my head, I knew it was perfect, apart from one thing. It was on an island. And living on an island was the one thing we’d said we’d never do.

  ‘So, it’s got everything, right?’ Rab’s voice rises with a questioning upward inflection. We look at each other. And then we look away. We both know what it is that we don’t say. So I say it aloud before he does, this promise we have made.

  ‘Not on an island,’ I grimace. ‘It’s too remote. Too impractical, difficult to do anything, impossible to find work. And it will be hard to settle in. Can you imagine island life?’ I flick my eyes off into the distance, shaking my head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Way too insular.’

  ‘OK, next.’ Rab shrugs, flicking over the page. But there is nothing else, nothing next that catches our eye.

  We linger at the inn, wrapped in close conversation, hatching ideas. As I look out of the window I see the clouds clearing. Out there, floating in that sea, are all the islands. And one, lying just apart from the others, has a tiny derelict croft standing empty, just waiting for someone to love it, to come and find it, to make it a home at last. I try not to think about it, but it keeps drifting through my thoughts, coming to find me. As I look out at the dark sea, I know that some new direction is waiting for us. And, even though it makes no sense, it feels as if we, like the geese, are following a wilder sight or some call of the heart, each somehow coming home.

  I had loved my early years in London. I lived in Notting Hill in a garden flat with a little iron gate leading out on to the communal gardens. It was a quiet sanctuary in the heart of west London, with a buzzing, cosmopolitan local community on tap. I was there years before the film came out, when you still bought your vegetables in a brown paper bag with cash, knew all the street vendors, and got your cigarettes from the cashier at the toy shop on the corner of Kensington Park Road. Life was a mandala necklace, a glittering brittle string of parties and unrelenting, rapid-fire movement. It was a time of hope and dreaming of your beautiful life, and Brit Pop singing the world real again.

  I could never understand why no one else used the gardens. They were quiet and beautiful, so I used to lie out there at night, wrapped in blankets, listening to the waves of traffic rising and falling into the darkness, and looking up at a pale handful of stars. We were all watching the skyline in our different ways with some anxious feeling that it was now or never. Everyone was trying to make it, to find their own slipstream. In reality, most days, just like everyone else I knew, I got by holding on tight.

  Those early months, I lived off udon noodles, miso soup, rice cakes, eye-watering sour-sweet lime-soaked caipirinhas and brown rolls of 35mm film. Photography shoots led to the BBC and then to publishing and eventually to advertising. Brand names rolled off each day of the week. Time passed. My career began moving fast, as I started directing new business pitches and flying regularly to the US on shoot location work. As work hours increased, even crossing the Atlantic above the cloud line there was no let-up in sight. Just a browning urban haze clinging to the city’s skyline, like some overspill of anxiety.

  And then one day, life slowed to a sudden, jarring stop. I was in an accident. A black cab ran headlong into the taxi I was sitting in, jumping a red light at speed. The ambulance arrived, lights flashing, whisking me to the hospital and placing me into a long metal tube for an emergency MRI. The pain was unbearable. I was barely able to walk, sleep or lie down in bed, let alone stand, sit or move my neck without screaming in agony. In the end, they administered morphine. It was a relief to have a brief interlude in that searing pain. I had a smashed sacrum, whiplash of the neck and thoracic spine, an anteriorly tilted pelvis from the impact, a fractured and dislocated coccyx spun completely around at 90 degrees and a severely prolapsed lumbar spine. It is amazing what the body can withstand and endure. During the intensive rehabilitation, I drew a line under and through my life. Overnight, my daily existence was shuttered with a different light and dark lens. Suddenly I was aware of my own mortality. It felt like the whole of London was walking a tightrope between life and death.

  After I recovered, I realised I was looking for something different. And then I met someone. It was the catalyst to moving from my home in Notting Hill into a bigger space just a short mile north up the road. I fell in love with Rab. There was something about him that was quirky and original. An irresistible, carefree charm emanated from him and we connected straight away. Our new home was close to a reservoir so I could always hear the sound of the gulls, a wilder cry that I loved. Our small community, with its outwardly bright face and tiny streets, was local, family-orientated, and different from the one we had known. One day, I won a bag of goldfish at a local fair that we visited with friends and afterwards we tipped them into a homemade pond in our back garden. I started to dream of one day having a family of my own, and hoped that I might still be able to have children, even after so much structural trauma to my body. And then one summer everything changed.

  In London, neighbourhoods are transient and can shift as quickly as the low skies gusting overhead. There was a disconcerting invisibility to the formerly gregarious community, and a disheartening, unsettling and desolate feeling that permeated the neighbourhood. It seemed that we were not the only ones to sense it. On the streets, people started walking more quickly, heads bowed, barely meeting your eyes as you walked by. Humanity is a vulnerable, vigilant thing. Overnight our building was spray-painted with graffiti, windows were broken and the police were called. But after a while even they stopped talking to us, because there was nothing anyone could do. We hoped to sit it out. One day, arriving home, I screamed as I walked through to the back garden. The plants were torn apart, some that were flowering had been uprooted. I held my hand to my mouth, fighting tears as I looked into the pond. Cans of paint had been poured over the wall and the containers left floating in the water. Amongst them, hidden in the reeds, were the faded, bloated corpses of our beautiful bright little fish. Something died in me as well that day.

  A neighbour was mugged, then another knocked to the ground. I stopped walking around the neighbourhood. Those weeks were a tense, nail-biting time when everything became dark and feral. Stress is invisible; subtle and insidious, it builds up over time. Anxiety is like a smouldering fire. All it takes is a scream, a moment of fear, to whip those flickering embers into burning flames.

  Worn down by months of this, I start waking in the night, feeling breathless, my heart thudding. And then one day I witness a man throw a woman out of his car and try to kick her while she lies on the ground. She is a beautiful woman, with fine features, and smartly dressed. I look on in stunned silence, frozen until I hear my own voice screaming. Sometimes it takes you a moment to act when you see violence right in front of your eyes. It shocks me. I feel I am being drawn back into a past I don’t want to remember, a silent slow-motion movie in which a young child is being thrown down, wrestled to the ground. It is my scream that wakes me from paralysis. It is disturbing to hear my voice. It sounds different: wild and furious, unleashed from a place inside me I didn’t know existed.

  ‘Get off her!’ I yell, dragging the woman by the arm towards the house. The man is tugging at her jacket. He is tall, with broad shoulders and a thick, angry voice. I am scared that he will lunge for me, because he keeps on at me, ‘Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking bitch.’

  So I carry on screaming and hold on to the woman in a crazy tug-of-war. There is no one on the street, but I am sure people are watching from their windows. I am desperate, but no one comes to help; the cars just keep driving by. And then I announce: ‘I’m going to take a photo of you,’ and make as if to pull out my phone, which I know I left inside the house. At last he leaps into the car, shouting, ‘YOU FUCKING BITCH! I’m c
oming back for you!’ Then he floors it, leaving dark tyre marks on the road.

  I watch him go, and now I am crying and shaking. It is a strange sensation, being so angry and so frightened, as if you are being pulled in two directions. I feel frozen inside, and yet my body is pumped up, so full of adrenaline that my voice is too loud. I hear it crack through my angry sobs. The woman stops crying, looks at me as if for the first time and says, ‘Thank you.’ And then, ‘Can I come inside for a minute? I think I am going to faint.’

  When I get her into the house, I rush away quickly to make her something hot. Shock is like that. You need something hot and sweet inside you. I leave her sitting alone on the sofa in my front room. When she leaves an hour later, I give her my number. ‘Call me when you get home,’ I ask her, ‘so I know that you’re safe.’ Only she doesn’t.

  Later, I ask Rab, ‘Hey, have you seen my keys? I can’t find them anywhere.’ And I am surprised when the taxi company rings me. ‘She gave us your number. She said you were going to pay her bill.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’ I ask Rab.

  He looks at me, and then says, ‘Because she could.’

  That night, I wake again with my heart thudding. As I open my eyes, I know instantly something isn’t right. I hold my breath, and there it is – a noise on the landing. A second later, a stranger comes into the room and stands over me as I lie there, immobilised by fear. A tall, dark shape with broad shoulders. It is only later that I think, I have seen you before. At first I open my mouth, and I think I am screaming. But no sound comes out. It is like being underwater and pulling so hard through that darkness that you can see the surface just above you, but you know your lungs are going to run out of air before you get there. And then, suddenly, I am screaming for real. So I feel I am slowly coming to and waking from a dream. But this nightmare is still happening: the man leans in and comes closer. Rab wakes up.