The Outrun by Amy Liptrot Read Free Book Online Page A

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 alook. 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 every bed I’d ever slept in and even wondered at what hour he would crash in from a nightclub. I had the sensation that I was experiencing everything I had ever done or felt at the same time. I remembered how we had slept on the roof of the art school once, among concrete blocks and discarded sculptures. I remembered the thunder and lightning every night of the first week we spent together and that room without curtains where in bed we watched planes crossing London and created a new language.
    In the morning I remembered, with a lurch. My bassline had dropped out. When he’d left me I’d gasped and hadn’t exhaled.

 
    7
    WRECKED
    ONE JANUARY AFTERNOON, MY BROTHER’S tenth birthday, we were playing in the farmhouse when the phone rang. Something had happened on the Outrun.
    Mum, Dad, Tom and I went outside, through the farmyard and out of the gate towards the shore, meeting neighbours heading the same way. We fell into nervous silence as our pace quickened. When we reached the edge of the cliff, she rose into view: down below, a large fishing boat was balancing on a sloping outcrop of rock. With each incoming wave the vessel rocked, unsure whether to be washed back out to sea or be pushed the other way, into the cliffs.
    It was only mid-afternoon but it was getting dark and the tide was rising. The next wave came and there was a sickening creak, followed by a thunderous crash. The boat had tipped the wrong way and her hull had cracked. She was stuck. No tug boat would be able to pull her off the rocks now.
    It seemed like a disaster for our cliffside group but we were joined by a coastguard; he told us the fishermen who’d been aboard were not so concerned. Hours earlier, under cover of darkness, the crew had climbed over the edge of the boat, dropped down onto the rocks, picked their way along to the lower part of the cliffs and scrambled to the top. Instead of knocking on the door of a farm, they’d gone to the airport and had left Orkney on the