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 heads, 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