The Outrun by Amy Liptrot Read Free Book Online

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 ofcorporate 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 asnight came, the aircraft warning lights on tower tops were like lighthouses on the islands.
    Although I’d left, and had wanted to leave,