and down empty country lanes, to a tree that I used as a hide that looked out over the top of an abandoned limestone quarry, and it was here that I would sit with my binoculars and bird-watch. In the town the only birds you ever saw were little common backyard birds like tits and chaffinches and sparrows and wagtails but out in the quarry and away from the town there were birds that prey on other things, other birds, predatory and exciting.
I had myself an Identification of British Birdlife book and would sit still for hours just to collect the sight of them and the sound of the name of them like talismans. There were plentiful buzzards and kestrels that would slip in and out of the area on their hunting routes, sliding on the warm air to hang and observe like snorkellers at the water’s surface, periscoping their necks then locking still before the dive, limiting any movement to the final flurry. Or the thrill of the goshawks that would sometimes weave and dip in and out of the trees either in the valley beyond the quarry or on the opposite ravine. Sometimes the goshawks display-danced, spreading their tail feathers like splayed fingers and falling through the sky like grabbing hands.
But what I really held out for were the days when I got to see one or both of the rare pair of peregrine falcons that nested somewhere in the trees around the quarry. They would always fill me up with the magic of hope, their tiny defiant bodies wheeling against the sky so small against the big, so dark against the blue, and so free. In their sky-dance they revelled disobediently against their declared local extinction.
To be able to tell the difference in these birds by their shape and their movements and to point at them and call them by their names has always been to me an affirmation of the solid truth of the natural world as a system that can be described with taxonomy, and a reminder of my place in it. It is also a reassurance; it shows me that these things still exist because I can collect them. That there are still places to watch and be a part of a realer order outside of severed civilisation.
I do not know if Urla can tell that I was the kind of person to spend my lunchtimes at school in toilet cubicles with my feet up so no one would recognise my shoes. My parents can’t reconcile this sudden bid for independence and shrugging off of domesticity with what they think of as my nature; introverted and docile. They are confused by my surety and think that instead this impulse must stem from some malady; that I overthink things, that I feel too much, that I should not watch the news if it scares me so much that it makes me want to leave what I must see as the train wreck of modern society.
What they could not seem to see was that this limiting aspect of me is in part the drive for my leaving, that I want to learn how to be without it. To prove to myself and everyone else that solitude is as much mine as any Mountain Man’s and that I do not have to be relegated to loneliness and displacement just for being female. It is rational and deliberate and it had always been part of the plan. I have always been obedient, the model daughter. Mum and Dad said finish school and try hard at it so I did. I kept my nose clean and I always ate my vegetables (frozen for goodness).
Already I feel something changing. I look at Urla and the way she oozes and I think, does doing this project make her think that of me? Am I that person, even if only from certain angles? Is it having a camera and a plan that gives me that authority? Or actually, just being nineteen and female and travelling alone, does it do that? It is possible that Kris’s discomfort around me came from a place of awe, like the awe he shows for Urla in never talking back to her.
Yesterday Thilda took us to a geothermal spring. Neither of us remembered to pack swimming things so we had to go in our underwear and bras. It did not matter because it was raining so we only saw a few hikers and they weren’t close enough to distinguish underwear from swimwear anyway.
‘The best time to go to the springs is when there is rain, because the tourists like to stay dry. But in Iceland we think, if you are going to get wet, you might as well get wet, okay?’ Thilda had said.
We parked the SUV where the off-road terrain offered no more leeway, still a bit of a distance from the pools, whose grey iridescence we could just make out. The sky hung low like the pelt of a sad, wet sheep, the rain fading all outlines into each other like a bleeding watercolour and the mossy ground skirting the rocks and water, luminous in contrast. We took off our clothes and shoes, slammed the doors, and ran towards steaming water, laughing and screaming. The rain stung our skin pink.
We fell on our fronts into the hot water, slipping and flailing, trying to submerge every inch from the cold and spitting and coughing and laughing at the water filling our mouths. Then we settled still and quiet with just our eyes and the tops of our heads out of the water, blinking the rain off our lashes and bringing our noses up for air like seals. Thilda started to tell us a story.
‘The famous saga of Erik the Red may be called so but it is really about a skörungur, which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his daughter-in-law, and she lived in the tenth century.’
Iceland is steeped in sagas and mysticism because the landscape is animated as if it is telling its own story. Glaciers walk, the ground moves and magma seeps, and geysers erupt like blowholes on the humped back of some giant. It is as though these are living parts acting out their own narratives. The Icelandic legends are shaped by the elements, because here the elements are all-pervasive.
And the landscape is volatile and fierce. Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea winds which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong.
In the landscape the elements merge like there is no limit to their pervasiveness, no clearly defined contours. You can feel it seeping into you; trading off with the algae in the water and the mud between your toes like nourishment. You can feel the shuddering of the water making everything on your body reach out in reciprocity, every hair a tentacle. Half submerged in the hot spring; in and out; half still and warm, half cold and lashed; ears under, eyes out; the patter of rain on the surface, the gasping of the spring.
Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place. Like finding an object you never noticed was missing until you found it and realised its lack had been haunting you all along. I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my own home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered.
Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factory, a sugar beet factory, and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a thirty-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their yards because the power station left radon in the topsoil.
The outside that I know is pastoral, a grid of owned and regimented spaces, moderated for production. Some people think the English countryside is pretty but that is the tragedy of it. It is a result of the way our small country was built, when a bunch of rich men parcelled up what was once shared land to make it easier to go about ploughing and producing more crops. Our common wilderness became a commodity. On an island so small the mark of this is hard to not see: a monotonous quilt of rectangles divided by hedgerows. Especially in the Midlands, where there are not many mountains or bogs or other bits of stubbornly unprofitable land, and where the remains of failed industry create a graveyard landscape, the stumps covered over with prosthetic suburbia.
The peregrine quarry was the one place I knew that