The Outrun Read Online Free PDF Page B

his bedroom window.
    The lightning over skyscrapers in the City was different from at home on the farm where it flashed over the sea and was followed sometimes by power cuts and phone lines going down. There were once reports, during thunderstorms, of ball lightning – St Elmo’s Fire – inside houses on the West Mainland.
    I sought connection with a fired-up fury, the secrets in his pupils, laughing his name with my legs around him. Each time made my heart beat faster and I’d cycle to work smiling in the morning through Dalston and Hackney. We texted all day until we rushed to meet again.
    When we walked together he took me down unexpected routes and side streets. In the morning, sometimes, he looked like a hedgehog waking from hibernation. He was sensitive to hot and cold and many other sensations – cycling down windy streets and cooling his feet outside the duvet. We told each other about where we came from. He talked about his work technically and precisely and was different from most hipsters in Hackney because he had a proper job. He had an escape route.
    In those first weeks, I stopped in the pub on the way over to his house and, over a couple of pints, wrote him a letter abouthow I was scared alcohol would come between us. Although we chatted easily about the small things, there were the gaps when I wasn’t there. I’d drink until my eyes went dead. Back then he had patience for my tears and blank-outs.
    We were in a bubble. At two a.m. one night, in his bedroom in Dalston, I said I was so happy I would never forget that moment. We hadn’t met each other’s families when we moved in together after six months: a one-bedroom flat above a bookmaker on Hackney Road.
    There were many more weekends and evenings after work in the park, with more and more people turning up. We felt at the centre of things. There was a gold rush of cool to this area of London, everyone afraid of missing out. After I met him I took him along too, showing off our partnership to the group. I look back at photos from that time and we’re holding each other too tight, every limb and finger entwined, not looking at the camera.
    I said I was never going back to Orkney. I ignored phone calls and letters. The farmhouse was being sold and I didn’t want to know. My brother had moved away, too, following me to university. I was as angry with Mum and her faith as I was with Dad and his girlfriend – the woman he’d had an affair with several years earlier. But sometimes a smell in the air would remind me sharply that I was living in England. This leafy country with its red-brick skylines was not my home. I yearned for the openskies and grey stone of Orkney. I missed the curlews and oyster-catchers, even the black-backed gulls. Sometimes I’d be walking down Bethnal Green Road, surprised by the tears rolling silently down my face.
    On the island I was big. It was secure and unquestioned but all I wanted to do was leave. Now I’d prised myself into the city, with its constant life and content, and there was no one else to blame. In London it was not possible to look everyone in the face but I wanted to touch everything. I was all eyes. It felt impossible to make any sort of impression on a place so big but I was going to.
    I hadn’t been particularly young when I started drinking, fifteen or sixteen, at teenage parties and dances in the auction mart. They were held in the room where the cattle were penned before sales. I loved seeing my friends and classmates – lumpen and self-conscious at school – open up, their inhibitions breaking down. Somehow I was often the one who took our half-bottle of vodka away on my own. I wanted to drink, fuck and photograph everything, but I’d end up in horrible states, crying, lashing out, my parents called. I wanted to experience things and no discipline was going to stop me.
    With teenage friends in Orkney, I swallowed dried magic mushrooms we picked from the fields and walked around the harbour town