by Amy Liptrot
I’ve also been thinking about another woman I met on the programme. She had come from a residential rehab, where she had been living with her baby son, and had been off heroin for nine months but was honest about the way she felt: ‘I’m not comfortable in my skin’, ‘I still want to take drugs.’ She didn’t just say what they wanted to hear, talking shamelessly about her ‘sugar daddy’, saying the groups were boring, fidgeting and struggling to complete the work.
She was moving from a B&B into a local-authority halfway house, and I offered to help carry her bags but, unsurprisingly, she didn’t turn up at the agreed time and place and couldn’t be reached on the phone. After that weekend she didn’t come back to the centre and I’m almost certain that she’s back to her old life, working as a prostitute, using heroin, and that her son has been taken away from her.
I think for some people it’s gone too far, that all the help in the world isn’t going to make them go straight, and the trappings of a normal life will always be frustrating. I’ve been thinking about her because, although I’m much more adjusted to sobriety, I know how she felt: trapped, dissatisfied. But I also know she will not be happy now, out there.
As I remember these people – my friends – and think about how their lives will be back in active addiction, I know with increasing certainty that I can’t and won’t go back.
It is a clear, still evening, and the smell of paraffin lingers in the air under bright stars. As we are led down the hill to the bonfire by the Frog King, I momentarily think this would be more fun if I was drinking. Being sober at celebratory occasions still feels weird. Alcohol gave me the ability to be in the present. It lifted anxiety and gave me that initial buzz. I was more lively and confident after a few.
But I shake my head when someone offers me a hip flask. I’m smiling. The person with the whisky has no idea. This is no longer an option for me. For those of us for whom things went so far we ended up in rehab, addicted, the reality is that not stopping drinking or taking drugs will lead, maybe terrifyingly soon, to insanity, incarceration or death. I must find new kinds of fun and new ways to celebrate.
I see the Norwegian artist through the smoke and he smiles at me. The day before I’d met him on the beach. He was carrying a plastic bag containing six types of seaweed. He is about the same age and height as me and also has long blond hair. He feels a bit like a male version of myself – a nomadic artist who’s washed up on this island for a short time.
I often feel the same as I used to. I want to make connections and to communicate because we are only and really alive right now. I still want to experience the extremes so I must find ways to fulfil this need sober. I must be brave. I wonder if I can still be cheeky or flirtatious without booze. If I master this, I could be unstoppable. In the past months I’ve been stifled by bruised confidence and anxiety, but these things take time. I’m gradually learning to say things sober that other people wait to say drunk.
When I was drinking I wanted to have exciting experiences but I was lazy and unimaginative, expecting the mere act of getting messed up to be enough to make something happen. For every time I made a new friend and ended up back at their house trying on their dresses, while discussing our favourite writers, there would be more occasions when I’d find myself alone and stumbling at three a.m., without my jacket, trying to find a night bus home.
I’m offered a lift home from the bonfire but decline: I’m talking to the sculptor. He touches my arm. The Pleiades are visible and I suggest we walk along the coast under the stars. Passing North Wick, I tell him about the selkies, how they are the souls of people who have drowned, condemned for ever to swim in the sea.
Back at Rose Cottage, I light the fire and we sit either side of it, talking about seaweed, families and art. I slip off my shoes and put my feet on the edge of his chair and, still talking and looking at me, he puts his hand on my ankle. My body soaks up this point of contact with relief and pleasure. Being touched soothes months of loneliness. I know suddenly, from this one touch, that sex is possible not only tonight but also in my future, although he’s leaving the island in the morning and returning to Scandinavia. Life is opening up and stretches ahead, sparkling with possibility. He’s stroking my other ankle and the conversation is faltering.
I want to develop hardihood – boldness and daring. I am looking to the ways they did things in the past, ancient festivals and celebrations for the changes of the seasons. I’m looking for new enchantments to lift the spirits in late winter when the wind seems to change direction to face me whichever way I walk. I’m trying to drink up these times on the island because I know I’ll miss them when they’re gone. I’ve already wasted too much time.
I hear of how, in 1952, a whole hill on the Mainland caught alight. The flames rolled with the wind, lighting the night. At this time of year, hybrid beings emerge and mingle with people, ancestral beings return from the dead, we forage for molluscs and light the dark sky with fire. These are times for people to come together and liven each other’s spirits, burning the past.
26
UNDERSEA
THERE ARE THINGS I REMEMBER. A farm tom cat went missing, out chasing rabbits on the Outrun, and returned months later, twice his old size, face scarred with half his whiskers missing, walking confidently into his old home and scaring us. I remember Dad walking home from Stromness in bare feet, seven miles as the crow flies across fields and fences, leaving possessions along the way and coming through the door early in the morning when we were still in bed, ranting about a black bull.
When doctors ask, I say there is no history of heart disease, cancer or diabetes in my family. Mental illness is another matter. It’s on both sides. Mum’s dad was also a manic depressive and only recently I learned that a paternal great-grandmother committed suicide. There were times I thought that if I stopped drinking I would discover that I was bipolar too, that I was just self-medicating. If I were to go mad, it would come as no surprise at all.
Some aspects of my childhood didn’t seem unusual until I moved away from Orkney and looked back. As teenagers, we picked winkles from the shore and sold them by the bucket, by weight, to a local shellfish dealer, who sent them to Spain or to be used for water purification in fish farms. I remember summer days up at the peat hill at the centre of the Mainland where farms are assigned a patch to cut peat, to be burned over winter. While Mum and Dad worked, stamping down the cutters and slicing up the millennia-old bog into bricks, I’d crawl, eyes at ground-level among cotton grass and water-skating insects.
Tom and I found scores of jellyfish washed up in a geo at the farm. There were so many that they coated the rocks and we picked our way among them, distressed. One by one, we picked up the cool gelatinous animals in our arms, some of them breaking, carried them to the shoreline and placed them back in the sea. This species – moon jellyfish – doesn’t sting but leaves a mild envenomation and our bare arms and hands were red and buzzing but we didn’t care: we were children performing a disaster-relief mission, running over slidy pebbles with armfuls of wobbling transparent pink.
These mass ‘strandings’ of jellyfish happen when currents wash a swarm into shore, often in spring. Jellyfish are only capable of upwards independent movement so are moved horizontally by currents and tides. The names of jellyfish and hydromedusae found around UK coasts are poetry: blue, compass, by-the-wind-sailor, moon, lion’s mane, mauve, Portuguese man o’ war. Moon jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, are transparent with a hint of pink, and blue rings inside – their reproductive organs. Jellyfish are the outline of a creature barely there, drifting in the currents, pelagic and intangible.
I have been looking, amazed, at some underwater photographs. Strange and beautiful creatures and bright colours suggest the tropics but the pictures were all taken in Orkney waters, in the shallows close to shore. Local snorkellers find and photograph many species of fish, shellfish, anemones and jellyfish. They see sea urchins, sponges, starfish and sea slugs.
My friend Anne from t
he RSPB comes out to Papay from the Mainland to show me how to snorkel. At a rocky area of North Wick Bay, we put on wetsuits, neoprene boots, gloves and hoods, flippers and snorkel masks, and slip into the water, like less-elegant seals.
My first time snorkelling hits me with several new sensations: first, being in the water with the protection of the wetsuit and breathing through the snorkel, but second, and most memorable, looking under water, close to the seabed, able to see clearly what’s usually hidden. Although today the tide is too high and wind too strong for ideal snorkelling conditions, the dip is enough to get an idea of the ‘different world’ Anne talks enthusiastically about entering.
Anne leaves me with a set of snorkel gear, and at low tide after the next full moon, I go out to try it alone. Walking down to the sea, I feel nervous about getting cold or swept out, and I choose a sheltered spot at the corner of the bay known as Weelie’s Taing, circled by rocks like a lagoon. I crawl into the shallow water on my face and after a few minutes I realise that I am breathing easily through the snorkel and don’t feel cold in the wetsuit. I begin to relax and enjoy it.
I don’t have to keep moving, I just float on my front, observing what’s around, moving with the tide, like a corpse. I forget I am floating on the surface and feel I am deep on the ocean bed. I use my hands to drag myself over the rocks, parting seaweed, looking for sunken treasure. Hermit crabs cram themselves back into their shells at my approach. I see red anemones and paddle-worm eggs – tiny balls of electric green strands in jelly, linked by stalks to the rocks. I discover a rusting ship part, perhaps from the boiler of the Bellavista.
Usually we see seaweed at low tide on the shore and jellyfish washed up dead, but under water they come alive. Going a little deeper, I’m surrounded by seaweed and kelp of vivid greens and browns and reds standing up straight and swaying – it’s like I’m in a lush forest.
I am exploring a very strange environment, like being in space. It reminds me of the thrill I got the first time I went to a dark nightclub under the railway arches in the city, seeing ornate Goths and pierced metallers; the thrill that I could be among these exotic and tattooed creatures, that it was so easy to walk into a world I’d only ever seen in films and music videos. Under water, I feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass.
I put my head above the surface and my stomach lurches when I realise I’ve drifted. It is hard to tell time, distance and direction in the water. I don’t know how long I’ve been in. Due to the refraction of light in water, objects appear larger and closer. Sound travels faster. This distortion interferes with co-ordination. I try to pick up a shell and find my hand clumsily swishing through water.
It doesn’t take long for this world to become my new reality. The swaying seaweed is reflected on the underside of the water’s surface, which has formed my new sky. It’s a grey, overcast day and when I pop my mask up above, I immediately want to get back under water – it’s brighter and bigger there. When I do stand up, I feel invincible in the wetsuit, able to walk through nettle patches and wade across lochs. Back home, I peel it off like a selkie’s skin.
Anne keeps posting pictures: urchins and father-lashers and lumpsuckers and seven-armed starfish. She hopes to see an octopus or even make Orkney’s first record in more than 150 years of a seahorse. She often snorkels in Scapa Flow and says that sometimes she is surrounded by so many swimming and seabed creatures that it feels like being in a fishbowl. I want to learn and see more. The sea has more depth than land and even a small surface area reveals many layers; the possibilities of entering it make Orkney seem many times bigger. ‘In Orkney, our forests are under water,’ my Polar Bear friend Sam tells me.
There are about a million marine species, with hundreds of thousands still undiscovered. If a rare bird is spotted in Orkney, many people will rush to see it but there is so much still unknown about sea life. Government policy on marine protection zones is still being formulated with more discoveries made all the time. A recent survey found a puzzling ‘faceless, brainless fish-like creature’ in waters off the East Mainland.
Papay fisherman Douglas goes out most days, year-round, on his boat Dawn Harvest, setting and retrieving creels laid on the seabed around the island to catch lobsters and crabs, which he sells to the shellfish factory in Westray. There used to be three creel boats working around Papay, and before that most crofters would have had a small boat they used to catch fish for their own table and to bolster their meagre incomes.
Out on his boat, Douglas has seen not only minke and right whales and orca, but also sunfish – gigantic, circular fish, like a tractor wheel, with a dorsal fin that pokes above the water. He tells me about fishermen in Westray pulling up a tropical turtle that had become tangled in fishing lines. He tells me about gannets flying, trailing plastic necklaces – they had dived straight through the holes in drink-can packaging. He once pulled up a guillemot that had dived into a creel sitting on the seabed 30 fathoms (55 metres) deep.
Anne has never seen an octopus but Douglas confirms they are in Orkney’s waters. Octopus enter the creels while hunting and inject the crabs with poison that pulverises their flesh within the shells. The octopus are clever enough to eat the crab, getting to Douglas’s catch before him, leaving him just the shells, then exit the creel and escape.
* * *
Back in the summer, I went searching for bats in one of Orkney’s only woods, using a special detector that converts their echo-location into noise audible by humans. There are more dimensions than I thought: frequencies we can’t usually hear, habitats we can’t normally breathe in. It is thrilling to enter them, just for a short time.
I read about how we might have more than five senses, like the heat sensors in our skin that can tell if something is warm without actually touching it, or how we are able to know if we are upside down.
When I came to Papay, I was attracted to the idea that, by living and walking within its coast, I could become familiar with the whole island and know all of its residents. Small islands are easier to comprehend than cities and I thought I could be able to understand it all. However, I find out about the ‘coastline paradox’, which explains how it is impossible accurately to measure the length of a coastline. The smaller the scale used to measure, the longer it becomes: a coastline is fractal, breaking into ever smaller inlets and cracks and promontories and bumps, from hundreds of miles to millimetres. This accounts for the vastly different estimates for the length of coastline in Orkney and how, the longer I am on Papay, the more there is to discover. I am thrilled and daunted.
People with longer sober times in AA say that the good things about their new lives are things they didn’t imagine, things they couldn’t explain to a newcomer. They say that what you think you wanted is likely not, in fact, to be what you want.
I never saw myself as, and resist becoming, the wholesome ‘outdoors’ type. But the things I experience keep dragging me in. There are moments that thrill and glow: the few seconds a silver male hen harrier flies beside my car one afternoon; the porpoise surfacing around our small boat; the wonderful sight of a herd of cattle let out on grass after a winter indoors, skipping and jumping, tails straight up to the sky with joy.
I am free-falling but grabbing these things as I plunge. Maybe this is what happens. I’ve given up drugs, don’t believe in God and love has gone wrong, so now I find my happiness and flight in the world around me.
Snorkelling is a completely new experience. I enter a new ecosystem, stimulating my thoughts and senses, shaking myself out of sad routine. I feel elated and refreshed afterwards, wanting to tell others of the strange seldom-seen world lying so close to our everyday lives, the secrets under piers and at the edge of car parks.
I’ve not gone mad. Dad doesn’t take any medication to control his manic depression and has not been seriously ill for years. He has found a way to deal with it himself, to recognise the triggers, to know the shifts and the lie of the ocean bed.
Since I got sober, I sometimes
find myself surprised and made joyful by normal life. It can feel like a hallucination, this stunning reality. Face down in shallow water, coated in neoprene and breathing through a tube, I feel as if I’ve opened a door that has always been in my house but I had never noticed. Life can be bigger and richer than I knew.
27
STRANDINGS
IN 1952 THERE WERE WINDS in Orkney so strong they blew away hen houses, killing 70,000 chickens and effectively ending the islands’ poultry industry. An account of the storm said ‘tethered cows had been flying in the air like kites’.
At primary school, on the windiest days, the smallest children are not allowed outside at playtimes. In the big winds of early December last year, half of one of Dad’s cattle-feeders – a six-foot-diameter steel ring – was found five fields away, having crossed fences and dykes. The old chest freezer I liked to shelter behind blew across the field and almost hit the caravan, and the shopping-trolley shelters at Tesco in Kirkwall bent and buckled.
Orkney has a fairly temperate climate, with warmer temperatures than other places on a similar latitude, thanks to the Gulf Stream, but the wind is our most defining weather characteristic, and its relentlessness is often the thing newcomers find hardest to deal with. Farmers battle against the wind, often losing. Dad planted a field of new grass but early gales ripped it out.
The wind, as well as the salty air, is the main reason there are few trees in Orkney and none on the farm. People don’t bother with flimsy bird-feeders or greenhouses that would be gone in the first gale, and umbrellas are rare. This year, the Papay Christmas tree is sunk in concrete: the last few blew over.
Because I grew up in it, I like the wind: it makes me excited, as it does the calves in the field, frisky in blustery weather. It gives me energy, like a fire. I remember power cuts, lights and TV flickering, torches and candles, school closed. In an easterly gale on Papay, waves and spume come over the top of Fowl Craig. I go for a short walk and return ears aching, mania whipped. A small burn is being blown backwards, water rising in a vapour catching the light. The weather-vane on my house has given up and is simply spinning.