Breathtaken

 

I decided to walk to the end of the island. 

 

It’s funny I had never thought of doing this before. Happy with the idea of being able to see the beautiful views of Orkney through my window, or equally happy to get in the car and drive to a scenic spot, I hadn’t ever considered walking out of the front door and continuing. 

 

There is one road that goes through Burray. It curves all the way round the island and if you’re in a car shoots off to one of the two neighbouring islands in the archipelago. But if you’re on foot the road doesn’t have to curve, and it doesn’t remain a main road either. It turns into a single track and goes on straight over a very low undulating hill. 

 

I had a dog with me so I felt there was more purpose to my walk, although I’m sure if you were a seasoned rambler you wouldn’t think twice about it. Walking a dog gets me out of awkward situations, like standing aimlessly outside a person’s garden as they hang their washing on the line. I can’t help worrying that if I didn’t have a dog the residents would think, ‘What is she doing up here?’

 

The rustle of my waterproof jacket and the clink of ROLO’s nametag on her collar added rhythm to my momentum.

 

As you walk further away from the main road and the pier, the sights and sounds fall away too. You start straining to look at things in the distance. The cluster of houses on the opposite island, South Ronaldsay, look like a quaint fishing village from a time of sepia photographs. The number of telegraph poles lessen until you look up and spot a single one with four thick wires, each extending to a lone house. 

 

The old houses are bungalows. Low and squat to the ground to withstand the battering wind. There are barely any trees in Orkney, so there’s nothing to break the horizon when you take in the scenery with a sweeping gaze. Flat as a pebble. I can clearly see the hills of Orphir on the mainland as if I were looking through a telescope. Picking out details like walking trails and telephone masts – or am I making it up and my eyes are filling in the blanks of the maroon dark hills. 

 

Unused to seeing anything that far away I begin to doubt what’s real. 

 

There is nothing between sea and sky apart from us.

 

You’d think the breath-taking views are the thing that takes your breath away. It’s not. It’s the quiet. I stop walking and it’s totally quiet – so I stop breathing. A seagull glides in the air and falls back, like a film that’s dropped its decibels down to zero to add weight to its frames. 

 

When a bird chirrups it’s like a phone ringing. 

When a cow moos it’s like a dinner gong. 

Suddenly you’re aware you are breathing and it’s the loudest thing on earth. 

 

The wind stopped for a second and I was engulfed by my own sound, the rushing of blood and body heat to a degree which makes me think I am never sensationally aware of my existence. It’s shocking. I braced myself; I missed the banal buzz of beings; clung onto the sound of the city for safety, but it felt goddam sacred too.

 

I plodded on escaping from the sound of myself into the wind and up hill, hell bent on reaching the end of the island. Maybe I would see a selkie? I got up the gravel path but was impeded by a tractor parked at the end where a big man was getting out of its cab. 

 

The farmer had stopped beside a field where another man was strolling towards him. They both looked similar. Big rubber boots, heavyset bodies, sweat-browned faces, dried mud mingled with hay on their trousers. They looked weather-worn and comfortable.

 

The man who’d left his tractor sidled up to the fence where his friend now stood leaning over it with both arms. I turned and headed back catching their opening conversation, which chimed through the silence at the far edges of this island.

 

-       I’d thought you’d died. You’ve growan a beerd an’ evry’in.

 

-       Aye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flash in the heart

A mad looking man on a bicycle pushing a trolley cart shouts, ‘It’s actually Happy Hour all the time!’ at some students who are looking at their shoes. I pass by them on the tight pavement, looking at that man’s harrowed eyes beneath that GoPro strapped to his forehead, blinking.

My heart is pounding inside my cavity and I wonder what if it all blurs in to one and happens in a split second? 

One thought escapes my confines and flutters in to the big world, never to be regained exactly, but thought again, by me and anyone else who thinks. Sometimes my brain clicks off. Then whirrs back ON at high-speed I shock myself.

I learnt today that there are hidden words at the ends of sentences. The easiest ones are those with ellipses, like, ‘Last night was fun…’ (so let’s not get emotionally involved)

Or there are agreements made between those who should truly know what it means when they say, ‘Let’s make it happen!’ (not yet or ever, so, see you in about a year)

The classic one is, ‘Are you alright?’

‘I’m fine.’

Strange the road looks wet when it hasn’t been raining. May be a spillage. The scaffolding looks like ship’s sails. The decking wet with salt water splashes, the ground uneven and being on the sea, is bent at all levels underfoot. The loud bassoon of a fog horn cuts through the pedestrians and we’re back in the city, after dark, before any of the bells toll.

Power cuts are nice

The sky is teeming with stars but we kill it with our light. I never knew this until the power cuts. In the middle of the night when the storm had risen up, gale-force winds cracking against the windows, a wind buffets through the house and I feel the panes expand and contract as though they were sails and malleable like that for an instance, of a ship.

When I arrive in Orkney by ferry, on the island of Burray where we live, what strikes me is the silence.

The lack of hum from the planes and pollution, or sirens and tarmac being sped across by vehicles. It is never silent but how I imagine silence should sound. Underwritten by the purring immensity of the waves and broken by gulls and birdsong in the day.

It’s revealing for a city-dweller like me, filled with hubris, to not only see but hear Nature and how vast and unpredictable she is. Never having to endure frightful storms in the city, ones that blow the power cables out from right beneath you, and blot the street lights out completely. Torches and candles, firelighters and smoke detectors. Grubby coaled fingers. Hushed scramble.

At 1 a.m. I heard a thunderclap so loud that it shuddered through my skin and rose me out of bed. Flick the light switch on but nothing and so there was nothing. In my flimsy nightgown I walk the corridor to the porch where it’s all panes of glass and the sea close by and I peer around the island. Electricity is dead and the sky is lighting up instead.

Sheet lightning is what you would use in a film for utmost dramatic effect, because for once light does not shine up but is a blanket that comes down. Cascading all over the scene in one fell crash, lighting up every crevice and exhuming every shadow. A flash this bright and all-round emboldens angles and crooked edges, flattening out empty land, so to a loner wide-eyed looking out at open space the thought flickers of how frightened one would be if the next illumination defined the outline of a figure standing there, where there was nothing a moment before.

When the storm had passed I stayed fixed to the spot by curiosity and fear. This was silence. The air had been smashed out by thunder. I walked outside to feel the alien calmness, the winds had dropped and I couldn’t decipher the sea. Looking up I gawped at the stars and stars and more stars. Tiny million flecks like a detailed map and brighter larger ones too, they sparkle who knew, really that these lights were there all along dampened by the smog and 24-hour shop.

I stopped. And in the cold I spoke a gasp each time more stars opened up to me. I never wanted the lights to come back on and that’s when I learnt power cuts are nice.