by Amy Liptrot
When I first left home the level of my drinking was not unusual for a student; the hangovers weren’t so bad. In the same way that Guide camp or school activities seemed tame to farm kids used to climbing on roofs and scrambling down geos, the Students’ Union was not enough. I found druggy clubs and outdoor raves, often accompanied by my brother. I balanced weekends taking ‘party drugs’ with weekdays reading and writing essays, often finishing them over a bottle of wine. But every year it got worse. As people around me began to drink and party less, I drank more and partied alone.
In London, months went by when I didn’t leave Zones One and Two. Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end. The drinking took hold of me. While others worked, turning down a night in the pub to reach the next London rung, I was emptying cans while on the phone, hiding the sound of the ring pull, talking of ambitions unfulfilled.
A photograph caught me unawares. He said I often looked like that: unfathomably, unquenchably sad.
On another unfamiliar bus route to a new temp job, I wondered if I’d ever feel at home again or if I would be blinking under a new light for ever. I wandered day-long, carrying phrases. At night I pushed my feet against the wall and felt as if my body was falling. There were flashes of happiness, a wild, open joy of life in little things that pleased and enfolded me. I felt lucky but could never hold on to it. Another Sunday muffled and hung-over in bed, makeup oily in my eyes, doors slamming somewhere, while up north the waves still curled dark and endless, and the aurora lit up the sky.
Sometimes, around two or three a.m., when I had not drunk enough to sleep, I crept out of our flat. Without turning on the lights, I carried my bicycle down the narrow stairwell, felt my way along the walls and slipped out into the street. After central heating and the close stench of bodies, the night air was refreshing. It was cool and clear, like my mind.
I never felt sad when I was on my bicycle. I used no lights, wore no helmet and knew the location of every twenty-four-hour garage and off-licence in a five-mile radius – fluorescent oases in the shut-down city.
Poised at the lights, my foot hovered above the pedal, ready to unlock the down stroke of energy that meant I was off, gliding round the corner, into the breeze. Breaking off Hackney Road, lurching into Bethnal Green – just me, the lonely taxis and night buses. I startled a cat into running over wet concrete, leaving paw prints for ever.
The canal opened the city up. It was the lowest I’d ever seen it, and among the usual cans and plastic bags, there were a digital camera, a saw, citrus fruit and a BMX. I pedalled faster, insects and branches ricocheting off my limbs. A swollen dead fox was floating in the black water.
On my birthday in May, with multi-coloured helium balloons tied to my saddle and a bunch of flowers in my basket, I cycled the straight stretch from my office across London Bridge, through the City and Shoreditch, then along Hackney Road to our flat to tell him I had lost my job. It was warm in the rush-hour smog and van drivers shouted and beeped, but at night I travelled swiftly and smoothly.
As I cycled I tried not to think about the lost jobs and all the disappointments. The air was getting warmer. Delivery vans were bringing tomorrow’s newspapers and plastic-bagged bread. All the lights were green and a handsome boy in a top hat was sobering up at a bus stop. The police helicopter above was not looking for me. I tried to breathe in the dawn and realised I missed the sky.
Pedalling on, I chased the sensation of escape. I felt like I had as a teenager one night at the farm when the full moon was shining on the sea so temptingly that I left the house and walked down to the beach. I didn’t need a torch: I was guided by the moon reflecting on the puddles in the road. The tide was high and the sea was swelling in the bay. I sheltered from the wind behind a sand dune and looked up at the perfect whole moon, its light catching on the waves, forming a shining path out across the sea. Looking back towards the farm, the dark island was illuminated by just the moon and the only other lights were stars, the glowing windows of cosy houses and my lighter, which briefly flamed, then the red tip of my cigarette. On the way back up to the farm, flying geese were silhouetted against moonlit cloud.
* * *
One warm night, crazy and hopeful, I tried to reach Hampstead Heath for sunrise. On the towpath, I pedalled too fast and, swerving to go under a bridge, tilted uncontrollably and felt the crash of my cheek on the water, the weight of my bike pushing me down. I was submerged in the canal for seconds in slow motion before surfacing and dragging my sodden body to the bank where I lay flapping, like a fish, my right shoe lost under the dark water.
I pulled my bike out, then my diary and squeezed the canal from its pages. Pushing my bike with one shoe on, I came home to him bleeding and crying. It wouldn’t be long until he couldn’t take it any more.
6
FLITTING
I HEARD IT SAID THAT in London you’re always looking for either a job, a house or a lover. I did not realise how easily and how fast I could lose all three.
I woke up crying. It was 1 May and I should have been hopeful and happy but something in the night, some dark unease, had crept into the room and into my dreams. Although I’d been warned it was coming, I hadn’t known it would be today. Without telling me, he had taken the day off to pack up his stuff, separating his plates, papers and clothes from mine, untangling two years of intermingled lives. When I got home from work all that was left was my belongings, with dusty spaces where his had been.
When he was gone, I spent a week alone in the flat, making it through days in the office blankly. I’d been told I was losing my job and was working out my notice period. Our bedroom was destroyed – violently rearranged furniture, lines of poetry on the walls, books and photos on the floor. I couldn’t afford to live there alone.
I threw an apple against the wall and it lay rotting on the floor until the day he came round to clean for the new people who would be moving in. He told me that would be the last time and afterwards, using Sellotape, I collected his chest hairs, which had gathered in the sweat in my navel, and stuck them in the pages of my diary.
He had an escape route and he took it. He’d never meant to get so tangled with the wild girl on the phone box. I’d caught around him, like tights in the laundry.
When we met we were both drunk, then we drank together but at some point we no longer did. We didn’t have wine with meals. He wouldn’t touch me when I’d been drinking. He’d get home from work late and I was on the floor. He tried to take the glass from my hand and pour the rest of the bottle down the sink but I cried and said I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was allowed to drink, I said. He drank when he went out with his friends. I drank myself apart – from him and from everyone. I undid myself. I tried to pretend the bottle was the first when I knew he’d heard me go out to the shop for more.
The eye contact dwindled. I squeezed the last love from him.
That May was, I felt at the time, the worst month of my life: shaking in the office surrounded by powerless colleagues, smoking nine cigarettes in my lunch hour, developing an aggressive obsession with my mobile phone, going on a shopping spree for smaller-sized clothes – yellow skinny jeans from Dalston shopping centre – getting my eyelashes tinted in a salon and having an allergic reaction. I had four job interviews and four rejections.
I remember swigging expensive vodka from the bottle in a suite at a fashionable hotel before falling asleep at a bus stop, climbing over fences and being dragged angrily around a polished floor by my ankles in a silk party dress, trying to go to an AA meeting but ending up in a ‘spirituality workshop’, surrounded by middle-aged ladies in long skirts with bells sewn to the hems.
I spent eight days in southern Spain, with Mum, unsuccessfully trying to get the sun to bleach my mind, writing pages of distress in my diary in red biro, drinking one-euro beers, watching the Eurovision Song Contest in an Andalusian bar, convinced I was having a proper conversation even though I couldn’
t speak Spanish.
Trying to make an afternoon pass by spending my dole money on an unsustainable pose of iced coffees and political magazines, I had a dish of Turkish stew delivered to my solitary table where, with papers, diary and phone spread out, I looked like someone with things to do. At the next table six silent women were munching joylessly through fried breakfasts. They were all wearing bunny ears.
I scanned the internet blank-eyed for a solution that was not forthcoming, I cycled round east London aimlessly, with a bag full of confusion. I was drinking more than I was eating.
* * *
In Orcadian, ‘flitting’ means ‘moving house’. I can hear it spoken with a tinge of disapproval or pity: the air-headed English couple who couldn’t settle, the family who had to ‘do a flit’ quickly due to money problems. In London I was always flitting but was too battered to see it as an opportunity. I wanted to flit quickly so that no one noticed, slipping from one shadow to the next.
I boxed up my things and moved them to a storage unit, then went to stay with my brother, who was living with his girlfriend in Dalston. He helped me move my belongings but he didn’t know how to help with my bottomless pain and increasingly out-of-control behaviour.
Tom is twenty months younger than I, and as toddlers we were zipped into jackets and shod in wellies, and rode in the tractor cab together. As children, we made dens at the top of the hay barns, above the bales in the eaves, where it smelt sweet and dusty, and mice would dart out. We played in the barley store, the grain like quicksand. In summer we swam in the rock pools with friends, the water always bracingly cold. We reared caddy lambs with bottles before they were put back with the main flock – always a bit different, smaller and misshapen.
In the rafters of the big shed, raised from the ground, there is a hut made from half caravan, half wheelhouse-from-a-fishing-boat, and from there we would jump onto woolsacks at shearing time, soft and oily. When we were teenagers I often shouted at him to get out of my room but sometimes we rode the horses along the Bay of Skaill, galloping across the sand and in the sea as tourists at Skara Brae took our picture. I could never do impersonations but he could and I’d ask him to perform Orcadian characters: our grumpy primary-school bus driver, who swerved to hit rabbits and in his spare time ran an abattoir; the dinner lady who called out, ‘Plenty o’ seconds!’; the man who read the mart report on Radio Orkney.
Tom followed me to university, where we went to raves together and then to London, where we had many of the same friends. Later, he watched me drunkenly posting on the internet and answered when I phoned, distressed, late at night. It was Tom who came and got me from the hospital the night I was attacked by a stranger.
Sleeping on Tom’s sofa was a temporary arrangement. I knew I had to find somewhere to live, and looked at adverts online for flatshares. The adverts described households as ‘chilled’ or ‘creative’, perhaps euphemisms for their choice of drugs. Sitting in the park with a bottle, or in an internet café with a can, I called the numbers numbly, gave basic details about myself and arranged times to visit. I marked the addresses in my A–Z with a green felt tip, forming a dot-to-dot of my search on pages 68-9, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
I looked at around twenty rooms, groups of people – friends or strangers – who wanted to be in London enough to pay the high rents and live in flats where five unrelated people shared a kitchen. Some were proud to tell me they had a sitting room, even when it could barely fit a sofa. A warehouse was split into apartments and the small room I was shown had a bed raised on a platform and no windows. I imagined shutting myself in there with books and whisky and said I’d take it. They chose someone else.
In a Haggerston tower block where most of the windows were either broken or boarded up, I went to see a room on a Saturday afternoon. The curtains were drawn, loud trance music was playing and the place smelt of cannabis. I said I’d let them know. In Homerton two girls, both said they were actresses, were just moving into a large, bright apartment, their handsome boyfriends carrying their boxes of clothes and antique furniture up the stairs. They gave me peppermint tea and asked why I was looking for somewhere to live. I mumbled my story. They chose someone else.
One sunny evening I cycled to see a room in Clapton, then the cheapest area in Hackney, where terraces of dark-windowed houses lined the last hill before the Olympics site. The residents were friends-of-friends and younger than me, born in the nineties. It was a small room in a Victorian terrace, and when I saw the sash window next to the bed I knew I’d be able to drink and smoke freely there. A few days later I moved in.
I was struggling to understand how I’d let myself lose another job. I’d seen it coming, documented in depth the reasons why it was coming but repeated the actions that would make it come. Then it had come. I wasn’t in control.
I thought I had it sorted out: a job in an obscure corner of the publishing industry, where the days were hung-over, the deadlines relaxed, and I came in with a different nightclub stamp on my hand each morning. I wrote complimentary profiles of corporate leaders, keeping my head down, arriving late and leaving on time, weekends messing it up, then ghostlike working weeks trying to piece it back together.
And then I was unemployed again, blinking away tears as I left another temping agency, wondering how far the money I had would get me in this unforgiving city. I was a tourist, useless and homesick. I craved horizons and the sound of the sea but when I walked to Tower Bridge again London took my breath away.
No one held their head that high in the Job Centre, even the boys who had cars waiting for them outside blasting hip hop, or the man dressed in a suit, ready for work, or the woman waiting next to me who smelt so sour I had to cover my nose and mouth with my sleeve.
I didn’t get replies from most of the jobs I applied for. Sometimes I felt there were just too many people in the city. I felt unwanted, like I’d failed to find my space. My friends were now spread over different areas and groups or I’d lost touch when I moved in with my boyfriend. I was no longer at the centre of things.
I got an interview in the tallest building in the UK and was pleased that I’d never had vertigo. I bought a beer after the interview and looked up at the tower block: it reminded me of a cliff face and in particular St John’s Head on Hoy – the tallest cliffs in the UK, which I used to see from the ferry to Scotland. It was always windy at Canary Wharf, the breeze off the Thames funnelled between the tall buildings, which made me feel at home. Peregrine falcons nest on cliffs and tower blocks, and as night came, the aircraft warning lights on tower tops were like lighthouses on the islands.
Although I’d left, and had wanted to leave, Orkney and the cliffs held me, and when I was away I always had, somewhere inside, a quietly vibrating sense of loss and disturbance. I carried within myself the furious seas, limitless skies and confidence with heights. I remembered sitting on my favourite stone, looking out to the Stack o’ Roo, watching seabirds from above. The colony of Arctic terns on the Outrun had dwindled and disappeared but more gannets were appearing out to sea. Hardy sea pinks grew at the cliff edge and I used to see white tails disappearing down rabbit holes where puffins nested. The ledge felt solid but, looking from another direction, you could see that it was overhanging. Unsettled in London, I felt as if I was dangerously suspended high above crashing waves.
I usually started drinking as soon as I got home from work. Sometimes I got off the bus halfway and had a couple of cans in the park. I couldn’t wait, and when I was unemployed I didn’t have to.
Drunk, I spilled an ashtray and hoovered a still-lit cigarette without realising; the smell of burning dust, skin cells and hair in the bag hung around the flat for weeks.
There was something in the attic that creaked and scratched and had, we thought, been causing the unseasonal volume of flies. The landlord eventually sent someone around to have a look. There was a hole in the roof where pigeons had been getting in and becoming trapped. In the space above our sitting room, just above our hea
ds, a pile of dead pigeons was rotting.
That summer I felt as if I was just passing time, not living. I was in a blank-minded, waiting-to-feel-normal state for months, flitting from one thought to another. The weather was warm and I had itchy palms and sweaty thighs. I got up in the night and smoked cigarettes at four o’clock after lonely, empty days.
A distant car alarm kept me awake until dawn, until I could no longer distinguish its incessant chatter from birdsong. It was a balmy July night in London but in those hours I imagined myself in every bed I’d ever slept in and even wondered at what hour he would crash in from a nightclub. I had the sensation that I was experiencing everything I had ever done or felt at the same time. I remembered how we had slept on the roof of the art school once, among concrete blocks and discarded sculptures. I remembered the thunder and lightning every night of the first week we spent together and that room without curtains where in bed we watched planes crossing London and created a new language.
In the morning I remembered, with a lurch. My bassline had dropped out. When he’d left me I’d gasped and hadn’t exhaled.
7
WRECKED
ONE JANUARY AFTERNOON, MY BROTHER’S tenth birthday, we were playing in the farmhouse when the phone rang. Something had happened on the Outrun.
Mum, Dad, Tom and I went outside, through the farmyard and out of the gate towards the shore, meeting neighbours heading the same way. We fell into nervous silence as our pace quickened. When we reached the edge of the cliff, she rose into view: down below, a large fishing boat was balancing on a sloping outcrop of rock. With each incoming wave the vessel rocked, unsure whether to be washed back out to sea or be pushed the other way, into the cliffs.