if he’s subdued, I worry it may signal the beginning of a period of depression and one of his long winters of inactivity.
Once, when I was about eleven, Dad was so ill that he went round the farmhouse smashing all the windows one by one. The wind flew through the rooms, whisking my schoolwork from my desk. When the doctor arrived with tranquillisers, followed by the police and an ambulance, I yelled at them to go away. He’d been taken by something beyond his control. As the sedatives kicked in, I crouched with my father in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. ‘You are my girl,’ he said.
The rumblings of mental illness under my life were amplified by the presence of my mother’s extreme religion and by the landscape I was born into, the continual, perceptible crashing of the sea at the edges. I read about the ‘shoaling process’ – how waves increase in height, then break as they reach shallower water near the shore. Energy never expires. The energy of waves, carried across the ocean, changes into noise and heat and vibrations that are absorbed into the land and passed through the generations.
Since his teens, Dad has been treated on fifty-six occasions with electroconvulsive therapy. Used in the most severe cases of mental illness, an electric shock is passed into the brain to induce a seizure. No one quite knows how or why it works but patients often report feeling better afterwards, at least temporarily.
Ripples were set off the day I was born, and although I moved far away, the seizures I began to experience as my drinking escalated felt as if the tremors had caught up with me too. In lonely London bedrooms or in toilets at nightclubs, my wrists and jaw would freeze and my limbs wouldn’t respond as usual. The alcohol I’d been pouring into myself for years was like the repeated action of the waves on the cliffs and it was beginning to cause physical damage. Something was crumbling deep within my nervous system and shook my body in powerful pulses to the extent that I was frozen and drooling, until they eased off enough for me to pour another drink or rejoin the party.
3
FLOTTA
EVEN ON THE BRIGHTEST DAY in Orkney there is a cool breeze that comes in from the sea. It reminds us that we are on an island, although we call the biggest island in the archipelago the ‘Mainland’ while everything else is just ‘south’. As soon as the agricultural shows are over at the beginning of August, so is summer, and there are regular gales for the rest of the year. Autumn is brief, there are few trees, and winter blows in quickly.
A decade ago, in a September equinox wind, I came home for a few months – a graduate unable to find a job in the city. It was the year my parents split up, like many people’s do, and, like most, I didn’t think it would happen to mine, although perhaps it’s surprising that a manic depressive and a born-again Christian stayed together so long.
I was working as a cleaner at the oil terminal on the island of Flotta and took the workers’ ferry across from the pier at Houton every day at dawn. Since the early seventies, pipelines and tankers have brought crude oil to the terminal from North Sea oil fields, dark energy from below the seabed. The oil industry was a boost for Orkney and provides some of its best-paid jobs but the cleaners were at the bottom of the pile.
The commute was the best thing about the job. Each day I drove across the island at sunrise and returned at sunset. Misty pastels appeared as I accelerated over the horizon listening to Radio Orkney or drum-and-bass, framing the islands and reflecting in the water of Scapa Flow. There were electric reds and oranges in the evening, the same colour as the flare that burns off excess gas at the terminal and the lights on the oil tankers out at sea.
After work, when I took off my tabard but never quite got rid of the smell of bleach, I spent nights on my own – Mum had recently moved out and Dad was elsewhere – in the farmhouse where I grew up. I was alone in a house on the edge of a cliff, drinking and smoking at the kitchen table where we used to have family meals, doing a job I didn’t want, phoning my far-away friends at midnight while drinking Dad’s homebrew, as my family came apart around me. Sometimes I would finish one bottle of wine, then drive five miles to the nearest open shop to get another. The next day I’d get on the ferry, headphones on, hung-over, furious and hurting.
At the oil terminal, I had to clean workers’ bedrooms, mop bathrooms, sweep corridors and make beds. I became familiar with different types of dirt: from sweat on sheets, unseen but smelt, to dry footprint mud, satisfyingly hooverable. Toothpaste flecks on mirrors revealed the enthusiastic brusher, and ash showed who had been smoking out of the window in a non-smoking area. Dry and wet poo, ably distinguished by my supervisor, required different cleaning methods, and pubic hairs were left coiled on toilet seats. Most of the rooms I cleaned contained partially drunk bottles of Irn-Bru and some had finger- and toenail clippings buried in the carpet.
I felt as if I had become a ghost, walking nameless corridors under buzzing lights carrying a mop. The world out there, down south, had forgotten about me, stuck on the island with the bin bags, struggling to get a laundry cart through swing doors on my own. I was the wall that had eyes, knowing if workers had slept in their beds last night. I was the shadowy figure, scuttling away when I heard footsteps. Being back in Orkney was a failure and I saw the cleaning job as simply a way to make money to leave again.
At eighteen, I couldn’t wait to leave. I saw life on the farm as dirty, hard and badly paid. I wanted comfort, glamour and to be at the centre of things. I didn’t understand people who said that they wanted to live in the country where they could see wildlife. People were more interesting than animals. In the winter, forced into ugly outdoor clothes to help muck out the livestock, I dreamed of the hot pulse of the city.
But in my student flat, I would mentally map the 150 acres of the farm onto the inner city, thousands of people in the space that contained just our family and animals. It drove me crazy that, in a block of flats, I was existing just metres from someone yet didn’t know who they were. Other people were sleeping through thin walls to the left and right of me, above and below. I didn’t talk much about Orkney to my new friends, but lying in bed on windy nights, the noise made me feel as if I was back in the stone farmhouse and I thought of the animals outside in the cold.
When I was in the south it was easiest for me to say that I was ‘Scottish’ or ‘come from Orkney’ but that was not what I would say to a real Orcadian. Although I was born in Orkney and lived there until I was eighteen, I don’t have an Orcadian accent and my family is from England. My parents met when they were eighteen, at college in Manchester, where Dad was retaking the A levels he’d missed due to his first bouts of illness and Mum was studying business. Mum grew up on a farm in Somerset, Dad is the son of teachers from Lancashire and was brought up in a Mancunian suburb. It was visits to Mum’s farm that made him decide to go to agricultural college. My parents have lived on the islands for more than thirty years, over half their lives, yet are still viewed as English, from ‘south’.
Usually, English people think that my accent is Scottish and Scottish people think I am English. The old Orcadian way to ask someone where they come from: ‘Where do you belong?’ My parents heard that often when they first arrived. I might come from Orkney but I often didn’t feel it was where I belonged. At primary school, ‘English’ was a term of abuse.
When I was little, the only black kid at the secondary school went missing. He lived up near the cliffs of Yesnaby. His younger brother came on our primary-school bus and the adults talked seriously at the bus stops. A week or so later his body was found washed up at the beach. My playground experiences made me assume that racism had driven him to the cliff.
As an adolescent I didn’t want to become part of what I saw as a subtle conspiracy to present Orkney as an island paradise. Tourist information proclaimed the beauty and history, endlessly reproducing pictures of the standing stones or the pretty winding street of Stromness when what I saw was boring buildings and grey skies. But although I regularly complained about Orkney, I was on the defence as soon as someone else was sceptical of its charms.
It’s a push and a pull familiar to many young people from the islands. We ended up back here again and again, washed back, like the inevitable tide. I grew up in the sky, with an immense sense of space, yet limited by the confines of the island and the