Читать книгу The Outrun - Amy Liptrot - Страница 13

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 heard a 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 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 about how 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 open skies 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 through the graveyard. I tried to bite or kiss the cathedral, my mouth on one of its red-stone pillars, then drove twenty miles back to the farm, stopping for lights on the road that weren’t there. I got home and scrawled in my notebook, urgently recording the fading sensations.

When I first left home the level of my drinking was not unusual for a student; the hangovers weren’t so bad. In the same way that Guide camp or school activities seemed tame to farm kids used to climbing on roofs and scrambling down geos, the Students’ Union was not enough. I found druggy clubs and outdoor raves, often accompanied by my brother. I balanced weekends taking ‘party drugs’ with weekdays reading and writing essays, often finishing them over a bottle of wine. But every year it got worse. As people around me began to drink and party less, I drank more and partied alone.

In London, months went by when I didn’t leave Zones One and Two. Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end. The drinking took hold of me. While others worked, turning down a night in the pub to reach the next London rung, I was emptying cans while on the phone, hiding the sound of the ring pull, talking of ambitions unfulfilled.

A photograph caught me unawares. He said I often looked like that: unfathomably, unquenchably sad.

On another unfamiliar bus route to a new temp job, I wondered if I’d ever feel at home again or if I would be blinking under a new light for ever. I wandered day-long, carrying phrases. At night I pushed my feet against the wall and felt as if my body was falling. There were flashes of happiness, a wild, open joy of life in little things that pleased and enfolded me. I felt lucky but could never hold on to it. Another Sunday muffled and hung-over in bed, makeup oily in my eyes, doors slamming somewhere, while up north the waves still curled dark and endless, and the aurora lit up the sky.

Sometimes, around two or three a.m., when I had not drunk enough to sleep, I crept out of our flat. Without turning on the lights, I carried my bicycle down the narrow stairwell, felt my way along the walls and slipped out into the street. After central heating and the close stench of bodies, the night air was refreshing. It was cool and clear, like my mind.

I never felt sad when I was on my bicycle. I used no lights, wore no helmet and knew the location of every twenty-four-hour garage and off-licence in a five-mile radius – fluorescent oases in the shut-down city.

Poised at the lights, my foot hovered above the pedal, ready to unlock the down stroke of energy that meant I was off, gliding round the corner, into the breeze. Breaking off Hackney Road, lurching into Bethnal Green – just me, the lonely taxis and night buses. I startled a cat into running over wet concrete, leaving paw prints for ever.

The canal opened the city up. It was the lowest I’d ever seen it, and among the usual cans and plastic bags, there were a digital camera, a saw, citrus fruit and a BMX. I pedalled faster, insects and branches ricocheting off my limbs. A swollen dead fox was floating in the black water.

On my birthday in May, with multi-coloured helium balloons tied to my saddle and a bunch of flowers in my basket, I cycled the straight stretch from my office across London Bridge, through the City and Shoreditch, then along Hackney Road to our flat to tell him I had lost my job. It was warm in the rush-hour smog and van drivers shouted and beeped, but at night I travelled swiftly and smoothly.

As I cycled I tried not to think about the lost jobs and all the disappointments. The air was getting warmer. Delivery vans were bringing tomorrow’s newspapers and plastic-bagged bread. All the lights were green and a handsome boy in a top hat was sobering up at a bus stop. The police helicopter above was not looking for me. I tried to breathe in the dawn and realised I missed the sky.

Pedalling on, I chased the sensation of escape. I felt like I had as a teenager one night at the farm when the full moon was shining on the sea so temptingly that I left the house and walked down to the beach. I didn’t need a torch: I was guided by the moon reflecting on the puddles in the road. The tide was high and the sea was swelling in the bay. I sheltered from the wind behind a sand dune and looked up at the perfect whole moon, its light catching on the waves, forming a shining path out across the sea. Looking back towards the farm, the dark island was illuminated by just the moon and the only other lights were stars, the glowing windows of cosy houses and my lighter, which briefly flamed, then the red tip of my cigarette. On the way back up to the farm, flying geese were silhouetted against moonlit cloud.

* * *

One warm night, crazy and hopeful, I tried to reach Hampstead Heath for sunrise. On the towpath, I pedalled too fast and, swerving to go under a bridge, tilted uncontrollably and felt the crash of my cheek on the water, the weight of my bike pushing me down. I was submerged in the canal for seconds in slow motion before surfacing and dragging my sodden body to the bank where I lay flapping, like a fish, my right shoe lost under the dark water.

I pulled my bike out, then my diary and squeezed the canal from its pages. Pushing my bike with one shoe on, I came home to him bleeding and crying. It wouldn’t be long until he couldn’t take it any more.