The Outrun Read Online Free PDF

Years later, the girl’s father and brother were out fishing when their boat was enveloped in a cloud. They came ashore on a strange and beautiful island and were met by the girl, now a woman, who told themthat this was Hether Blether and she was now married to a man from the island and there she had made her home. She gave them a wooden stake and said this would allow them to reach the island again but the stake fell overboard on the trip back to Rousay.
    There are many versions of the story and different Orkney myths of imaginary or vanishing islands – the magical Hildaland is linked to what we now know as Eynhallow – as well as similar stories from other places, often associated with foggy sea conditions. In Orkney, banks of sea mist appear and disappear quickly, perhaps the story’s origin.
    Vanishing islands still occur. Last year, geologists in the south Pacific on an Australian surveyor ship undertook a journey in which they were able to prove that an island shown on maps, including Google’s, did not actually exist. Sandy Island is now defined on Wikipedia as a ‘non-island’. It has been undiscovered. Cartographers say the phantom island could ‘turn up’ nearby – the Coral Sea area is vast and remote – having been wrongly located by mistake, or it might never have existed at all, created as a joke or as a test to expose cartological plagiarists.
    There are islands of seaweed, islands of plastic and islands of sewage and other human waste. After volcanic explosions, rafts of pumice that look like islands can drift across the oceans for decades. There are islands of seabirds, puffins sheltering together in the months they spend out on the winter seas without ever coming to land.
    Hether Blether is still enchanted, rising only on rare occasions. Some say that it is only visible on leap years. Anyone who seesthe island should row towards it while holding steel in their hand, always keeping their eyes on its shores. If you are able to set foot on Hether Blether, you will free the island from its spell and it will become visible to human eyes.
    When I left Orkney on the ferry it was foggy; arriving on mainland Britain was like emerging into another realm. I’d crossed a boundary not just of sea but also of imagination. Because I came from an island, London was the fantasy and London Fields was my Hether Blether. I became accustomed to an unsustainable enchanted lifestyle of summer days in the park with beautiful people and intoxicated nights at parties. I didn’t expect the spell to be broken and I didn’t want to find my way back through the mist to home.

 
    5
    NIGHTBIKE
    THE FIRST TIME HE saw me I was climbing on top of a phone box. We were outside a gig held in an empty shop on Kingsland Road where a rap group from south London took to the middle of the floor and the crowd circled around them. In the audience a model was pouting in a duck costume and I noticed a boyish American with mischievous eyes. Later, I sat on the pavement and told passers-by I was going to the beach. I could feel the tremors.
    Although we didn’t talk that night, I found out afterwards that he’d written about me online. He was worried about me but found me interesting. I was intrigued so the next weekend I turned up at a club where I knew he would be. I went up to say hello, touched him gently on the arm, and saw my reflection in the expanding black pupils of his eyes – dark floods of desire. When he spoke, my skin was alert.
    We left together in a taxi for a house party where we’d hearda French DJ duo were playing. We sat on the doorstep and kissed, totally easy. When my friends went home I told them it was okay to leave me with him. The sole fell off my boot as we walked back to my flat. I don’t remember much of that night but I do remember the night we spent together the next weekend, and the ten nights in a row after that, when there were electrical storms and we watched the thunder and lightning over London from