I talk to my horse, sheep, dog, hens, and even the wild birds and mammals I encounter. I miss my old cat, who has died, but in her place I have two young rescue kittens. I fill my world with nature, and that feels strangely more peaceful than seeking out my own kind. But still some days are too quiet. Some days, some weeks, can be so quiet you can forget the sound of your own voice. The days that are not like this become fewer and further between. Day-to-day survival is visceral and frightening.
Even kindness can be double-edged. It may be offered freely and genuinely, or it may be laid with a tripwire and a snare. I am wary of accepting favours and help. Kindness that comes with strings attached can be subtly coercive. It creates its own debts, dependencies and bonds. Gratitude, its reward, has its own fragile weight and springs. You think its soft feathers are harmless until it flexes and draws you in. I am careful. I am becoming more adept at anticipating when I am being drawn in. Whenever I hear ‘Not much of a place for you now your man’s away,’ I swiftly change the subject. Even if it means just making small talk about the weather, or what is or is not growing in the garden, it is safer than being led, unwilling, into a forensic battery of questions or a minefield of loaded speculation. I try to keep conversations light and to restrict them to generalities.
Sometimes it seems odd that no one asks about my hands, even though one is still strapped for comfort and the other, whilst out of plaster, is held in an unwieldy protective brace. But these days nothing really surprises me.
I hunt for small gems that lift a day, gleaming, like the morning an elderly woman talks of the beauty of rainbows, or a young child excitedly tells me where the mackerel are feeding. Small moments of no consequence to others, but which I cherish.
One night I make myself go out. I go to the ceilidh dance. I want to hear music and I have not been to a large party in over a year. It is the usual set-up: a room with a raised platform; a shelf where you put your bottle with your name on a sticker affixed to it. Tonight three musicians are tuning up – accordion, fiddle and pipes. I get drunk, and I am happy because my hand in its brace is slowly mending. It is still not right, but I think, to hell with it, and I dance. It is the traditional reels and jigs, which means you dance with others. After a dance with one of the farmers, I am breathless. He shakes my free hand and then, unexpectedly, reaches out and touches my cheek.
‘So pretty. You are so pretty,’ he says.
It is too intimate a gesture, but his tone lulls me. It sounds kind. So even though I draw back, I smile.
‘Thank you,’ I say as I start to move away.
Only he reaches out and, ever so slowly, traces my cheek again with his finger. ‘But your skin, so dirty … so dirty.’ His clear eyes harden as he smiles.
I have no words. I hate that sinking feeling that comes when someone punches you like this. And suddenly I have tears in my eyes. There is nothing I can do to hide this from him. I turn quickly. But he sees and catches my arm lightly.
‘You see, you are different from us. You think you are the same, but that,’ he nods at my tears, ‘gives you away. We are family, if you get my meaning. You do not belong here. This island will never be your home.’
And instantly all of that music and laughter drains out of me as I watch him walk away, feeling like I am six years old, picking myself up in the playground. It hurts how hands still reach for those same tired stones.
Race is something that is not spoken about out loud on the island. You only catch it, like a cold wind that makes you draw your neck in close to your ears.
Some worries keep you awake at night. Hunger is one. So is debt. When one starts to feed another, that is when things get complicated. For a year and a half, maybe longer, I have been in the eye of a perfect storm. In that time I have lost unborn tiny lives, my marriage – and with it my trust – and broken both my hands. It is unsettling how quickly struggling to make ends meet can become a struggle to survive. I have tried to keep working to stay afloat, but there has been no time to recover from each disaster before the next has come rolling in like a wave.
I have heard that grief is stored in your lungs and mirrors the slow decay of autumn, and that’s how it feels. Three months after Rab’s departure in the early summer, my father dies, shockingly, and my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As the colder season shutters me in, it brings with it an insidious, devastating grief. It is harder to say goodbye to the things you love which have all your life been remote, strictly conditional or emotionally absent. Death robs you of your voice, of reconciliation and forgiveness, with such crushing finality that it can be overwhelming. I find comfort in the low-burning husk of winter slowly rising over the mountains. It irradiates the croft with light and helps my tears to flow more easily. But winter is long, and some mornings it is hard to find that bright sun.
Then I lose my voice. It starts off with a bout of laryngitis. It is strange trying to talk when your voice doesn’t work as it used to and no longer sounds like your own. I force it, because it is easier to try to speak than not to speak at all. Others expect you to make that basic effort. The only problem with this is that the muscles of the trachea and vocal cords become even more inflamed, and then one day I open my mouth and no sound comes out at all.
Next I start coughing up blood. I am diagnosed with a respiratory illness in my lungs, weakened by the physical effort of trying to function and cope with so much grief. With it comes a paralysing fatigue and an immune system that is compromised and struggles to recover. As the weeks and months pass and my voice doesn’t return, I retreat into silence. In some ways it is a relief to be quiet, because talking is exhausting. After a while I get used to the silence. Later I wonder at how grief can strip you of a physical feature like your voice. One day I find a young bird in the garden who is mute, and I am moved, because I had never thought that a songbird might not have a voice. I wonder what it might be like for a bird never to be able to sing.
It is easy to underestimate how debilitating grief can be, and how powerfully a shattering break-up of your old life and dreams can hit you, physically as well as emotionally and psychologically. I am ashamed that I, like so many others, used to think of it in such simplistic terms – OK, so you grieve, and then it is over. As if it was easy to roll up your sleeves and carry on as before. I had precious little idea how hard it is to pick up those dropped threads and start to weave substance into the hole where your life used to be. We are so silent on the subject of grief that we render death invisible, yet all the while we know that life is just a fleeting pause, a beautiful, brief intake of breath, before death embraces us all. I wonder how it is that we can bear this contradiction, and why it is that we are so immune or resistant to another’s grief, or simply unable to cope with it. Is it because we are trying to avoid facing our own mortality? Do we become defensive instinctively when we see another’s weakness, for fear of opening wide the door to our own vulnerability? It shocks me how we do not make room for sharing another’s pain.
I quickly learn that trauma is different from grief. Its physical, emotional, psychological threads are infinitely more subtle and complex. Trauma is an ambush that waits patiently until long after the catastrophe that precipitates it is over. It is like being bound, gagged and having your head held underwater. It makes you panicky and lightheaded. You can tread water for only so long before you tire of struggling. And there comes a moment when you think how peaceful it might be not to have to fight to breathe.
Once the lambing begins I have no choice but to endure the raw, bitter weeks of early March. When the ewes start pressing and their lambs start coming, there is nothing you can do to delay those lives from being born. It is difficult and painful working with those crushing contractions whilst still trying to protect my slowly healing left hand. There have been complications due to the bones having been incorrectly set and the muscles have atrophied. Lambing requires two hands and, with no other assistance, I have to use both of mine. I am in constant pain, and still wearing the pro
tective brace, but there are times when I need to work freely and have to grit my teeth and remove it. It is a relief that my right hand is improving, daily becoming more mobile, although, in the damp freezing conditions, the fingers that were so badly hurt still ache and are often stiff and sore.
I try to take comfort in the knowledge that winter is ending and spring, a time of renewal, is on the way. But in April the weather is shocking – hailstorms, snow flurries freezing, torrential rain – and the days and nights blur into one another. I am out all hours with Maude in icy hail, wind, rain and plummeting temperatures. I create a small billet for Maude and me in the barn, a few blankets folded into a bed and laid on to clean, fresh straw, where I can curl into her warm fur and sleep for a few hours, the two of us wrapped deep in blankets in the soft-breathing darkness, our own breath steaming in the cold air. On the nights it is raining, it feels beautiful and quiet inside, listening to the wind and water hammering against the corrugated-iron roof. I doze alongside my sheep, waking in the early hours to the restless bleating of the ewes as they strain, heads back, turning and pawing the ground, with the first pains of labour. There is a bone-clicking sound as jaws clench and breath is stifled; as nostrils flare, flanks heave; and then the sound of gentle panting. And then I know to get up, to move slowly to help ease a tiny, slippery, warm life out on to the straw and to clear its airways. And afterwards, when the lambs stagger to their feet and I have checked the flow of colostrum to teats, and they have sucked, I go outside, wash my face and hands in the water butt and gaze up at the sky.
At dawn, I get up and warm my stiff body by jogging across the croft. There is no hot water because both the oil and the money to pay for the tank to be filled have run out. The house is cold – the temperature inside reads just seven degrees – so it makes little difference to my comfort to sleep in the barn. Those mornings after only a broken handful of hours’ sleep are a struggle, but that early run kick-starts my system. I run fast, as fast as I dare without risking falling, in the hope I will not need to gather up any cold bodies lying lifeless on the ground. I dread seeing those dark-blue, unseeing eyes.
If we find a lamb that may be saved, Maude gently licks its face and then I place it in the warm range, or under a heat lamp hung over a box filled with straw, and wait for its mouth to warm from blue to pink. I drink strong, hot tea, shivering as my hands and face thaw. It is a strange relief to feel the pain of life returning. My hands are still so weak that I have little grip left in my fingers or arms. I try not to think back to the events of last summer. It takes time for the body to heal, I tell myself. But I know this work is strengthening, and all these sensations are good. It is heartening to feel that scalding brew propelling the blood around my body. It makes me appreciate how cold those small lambs must feel, waking to the world outside. A lamb is thin-skinned, with barely any fleece for the first few weeks after birth. It is a wonder they cope in that bitter, cold wind.
Once the mucking-out, feeding and watering is done, it is time to start the rounds again. Hours later, I wash my hands and face under a running tap, lay fresh straw, wrap up in thick blankets and prepare for another long night.
On still nights, you hear things differently. Sound amplifies under a quiet black sky, the cries of screech owls and the wind in the trees like a roaring sea. Those first five weeks of lambing are relentless – feeding, watering, fighting the elements, desperate to keep those new lives living. There are those that don’t make it, lambs that are stillborn or premature, an umbilical cord snapped too early, a caul smothering an airway, tiny lungs drowned before they reach their first breath. It is tiring, heartbreaking to see the waste of those perfectly formed, motionless bodies.
This year I am grateful because there are no losses, but there have been plenty of years when I have had to grit my teeth and just do what has to be done. When a lamb is stillborn, or dies shortly after birth, there is no time for regrets. You learn to desensitise and to put your emotions and tears aside to get on with the sometimes brutal work that may be required. I may need to take a sharp blade and gently remove the lamb out of sight of its mother. I do not wipe it or wash it, but take it immediately outside and skin it.
You have to cut through the joints of the knees and the elbows, then make an incision under the jaw and slice the skin in a straight line down the chest to the umbilicus. You grip the lamb, head down, between your knees, draw the tiny fleece and skin over its head and drag it down its back. It is important not to cut too deep when you prepare the lamb for skinning, otherwise you will also draw off tissue and muscle which, after a few days, will start to rot. The hardest part is pulling the last of the fleece over the haunches and tail.
When I put the carcass into a bucket, it looks like a dead skinned rabbit. Later I will bury it, and give thanks for its short or unborn life. Skinning is a hideous task, shocking to witness as the sun comes up first thing in the morning. But the reality is that this skin, tied on to another newborn lamb, will give another struggling creature a chance to be twinned with the ewe. Lambing is a tightly drawn bow string, a tightrope walk between endings and beginnings, life and death.
I feel better for a while afterwards, as if the battle to deliver those tiny cries into the world has invigorated my body. I fight for each and every one of those lives I deliver. This year my ewes produce triplets and twins with only two singles. At the end of the cycle there are 110 lambs out of forty-eight ewes, and I am proud of this achievement because it matters. It matters for my livelihood but it also matters fiercely to me to hear that first wailing cry. I think of my own little ones, who I was unable to help; who, too many times, slipped away into darkness inside me.
And then my lungs give way again. I wake one morning struggling for breath and, once more, I am coughing up blood. I tell myself, give it a bit longer, and that is when the ambush takes on a different shape. It is hard to fight shadows, but that is what it feels as if I am fighting. Shadows and a silent, creeping fatigue.
I start foraging when there is nothing in the fridge and no money to fill it. I have barely been able to function for long spells when I needed to be working to full capacity, my scarce funds have gone, and still the overdue bills keep coming in. There have been too many false starts and enforced stops due to ongoing pain and complications with my hands, and my situation is made all the more precarious when my lungs relapse and my body surrenders again.
‘If it’s so hard, why don’t you just pack up and leave?’ a neighbour asks me.
At this low point of my life, I only wish I could. But when a marriage breaks down, there is often an extended period when you cannot equally share the financial load you previously shouldered together. In short, I am broke. It is overwhelming to feel so financially out of my depth. The thought of a move is more than I can cope with. It is hard enough to exist, let alone to make and implement such a big decision. I wish I felt stronger and sufficiently mentally resilient to deal with these logistics.
But whatever my own fallibilities, there is no way of escaping an irrefutable truth: I cannot leave because the house is not finished and there is no certificate to confirm that our ambitious, and as yet unfinished, renovations have been satisfactorily completed. Without that vital document, it cannot be sold. I could seek a comfort letter, but I have no way of covering the three-page list of work still required by the building control regulations before this could be issued. There is already a worrying backlog of bills from the still-to-be-completed extension that was added on to the original tiny cottage years before. I do not know how to begin to pay these.
Sometimes it is tempting just to dig a hole and bury all your debris. It’s what happens out here when there is no other way of disposing of all that is redundant, unwanted or undesirable: graveyards of rubble. Walking the croft, I notice how the rocky ground is freshly covered with thistles. It makes me consider how sometimes you have no option but to tough it out, kick the soil over and put down whatever shallow roots you can. Sometimes all you can do is just hol
d on.
I had such dreams for this home when we first arrived on the island. Initially there was only one bedroom, but I had always imagined that one day this might be a family home full of children to love. Now there is just an empty house with two more unoccupied bedrooms. Nothing is finished – some parts are not even started – and sometimes I wonder if it will ever be signed off. One of my biggest immediate worries is that so far, this year is one of the wettest the islands have known, and there is no guttering in sight or any rainwater drains laid around the house. The rain falls unrelentingly and there is a three-foot-deep tide mark on the exterior walls. When the rain occasionally stops, that tide mark is a cheerful livid green, a glistening, viscous reminder of the threat to the house. On wet days – which are most days – water sits stagnant in pools all around the cottage.
As the months pass, it will turn darker as soil splashes back and seeps into the cracking whitewashed walls. If I look closely, I can see living things growing there: small, gleaming slug-like whorls like molluscs, clumps of tussocky moss, pallid white and then dark, browning mushroom spores. I pull out the shoots and plants growing from the lintels, and every few months I scrub at the walls. Often I worry that the house will become so damp it will start to crumble and fall down. I have piles of unopened post in a box by the door. I throw any mail that is not a letter into this box of bills. At first I tell myself that I will open them later; after a while it gets too scary to look. It is amazing how a pile of bits of paper can feel as heavy as a millstone around my neck.
I Am an Island Page 13