Back in Orkney, my friend Helga had told me that there is a mysterious, vanishing island called Hether Blether to the west of the island of Rousay. Although some Orcadians claim to have seen it, no one has ever been there.
The legend goes that a girl disappeared from Rousay and, after some time, was given up for dead. Years later, the girl’s father and brother were out fishing when their boat was enveloped in a cloud. They came ashore on a strange and beautiful island and were met by the girl, now a woman, who told them that this was Hether Blether and she was now married to a man from the island and there she had made her home. She gave them a wooden stake and said this would allow them to reach the island again but the stake fell overboard on the trip back to Rousay.
There are many versions of the story and different Orkney myths of imaginary or vanishing islands – the magical Hildaland is linked to what we now know as Eynhallow – as well as similar stories from other places, often associated with foggy sea conditions. In Orkney, banks of sea mist appear and disappear quickly, perhaps the story’s origin.
Vanishing islands still occur. Last year, geologists in the south Pacific on an Australian surveyor ship undertook a journey in which they were able to prove that an island shown on maps, including Google’s, did not actually exist. Sandy Island is now defined on Wikipedia as a ‘non-island’. It has been undiscovered. Cartographers say the phantom island could ‘turn up’ nearby – the Coral Sea area is vast and remote – having been wrongly located by mistake, or it might never have existed at all, created as a joke or as a test to expose cartological plagiarists.
There are islands of seaweed, islands of plastic and islands of sewage and other human waste. After volcanic explosions, rafts of pumice that look like islands can drift across the oceans for decades. There are islands of seabirds, puffins sheltering together in the months they spend out on the winter seas without ever coming to land.
Hether Blether is still enchanted, rising only on rare occasions. Some say that it is only visible on leap years. Anyone who sees the island should row towards it while holding steel in their hand, always keeping their eyes on its shores. If you are able to set foot on Hether Blether, you will free the island from its spell and it will become visible to human eyes.
When I left Orkney on the ferry it was foggy; arriving on mainland Britain was like emerging into another realm. I’d crossed a boundary not just of sea but also of imagination. Because I came from an island, London was the fantasy and London Fields was my Hether Blether. I became accustomed to an unsustainable enchanted lifestyle of summer days in the park with beautiful people and intoxicated nights at parties. I didn’t expect the spell to be broken and I didn’t want to find my way back through the mist to home.
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