The Outrun Read Online Free

I knew I would never achieve such skill. I thought that the firemen on the island were capable of doing their own laundry and changing their own beds.
    As I paired up grizzled socks, threw away discarded pornography and cleaned toilets, I wondered if I would be happier if I had never left. Would it be easier if I’d married someone I’d gone to school with and stayed off the internet, if there had been less of a gap between my aspirations and reality? I thought about my mum. Maybe she had wanted more too. She was not much older than me when she found herself with two kids, abandoned on the day she gave birth and many times after that. She was a capable and caring woman, pushed to her limit on a cliffside farm on a strange island.
    Mum turned to the Church when my brother and I were small and she was looking after a farm and toddlers while her husband was in a psychiatric ward two hundred miles away, across the sea. Once she had to sell the whole sheep flock because she couldn’t manage them on her own and didn’t know when Dad would be back. They thought that might be the end for the farm but they managed to piece it back together. In many ways, her faith kept the family going for a long time but, later, it was part of what broke it up.
    Dad would say the modern, evangelical Church found her, preyed on and brainwashed her. She would say she was saved. It depends who I’m speaking to as to which side I agree with. I remember people from the Church helping out and decorating our living room while Dad was in hospital. He remembers coming back and finding new Bibles and religious books in the house, in their bedroom.
    As the days grew shorter, it was dark when I left home to go to Flotta in the morning and when I returned at night. At the end of Orkney’s long, bleak winter I was fading, hiding in the shadows. One afternoon, carrying my Hoover up a glass stairway, I walked into a shaft of sunlight. I looked around to see if it was safe, and lay down on the carpet, the light warming my hair.
    Another day, when my supervisor found me crying in the toilets, not for the first time, she told me, with the kindest intentions, I had to leave: this was obviously not where I wanted to be. With my next wage slip, they sent me off on the workers’ boat for the last time. A few days later, I walked into each room of the farmhouse, saying goodbye, before leaving with a rucksack and a one-way ticket for London.

 
    4
    LONDON FIELDS
    MAY IS MY POWERFUL MONTH of change and possibility: it’s my birthday and my middle name. There is a manic freshness in the air: I cut my hair and take baths at six a.m., draw pictures, wear strange dresses, apply for jobs and take drugs. There are new people to fall in love with and I have a spark that attracts things, needing less sleep and food. I drink more. My body feels right and I walk straight and strong across town. On these days composed of quests for experience, I say yes and pull on my boots again, excited and uneasy.
    We called it a picnic although no one was there for the food, of which there was little – a few tubs of corner-shop dips turning crisp in the sun and a punnet of cherry tomatoes. Our group was sitting around a rainbow-striped blanket. It was one of the first truly hot days of the year and the sun on my bare feet felt luxurious. I ran my hands up and down my legs under my long skirt.
    In London, with our commutes and travel cards and high rents, we could be isolated and had to find new ways to make a community. Each weekend when the sun shone we went down to the park, to London Fields. There was an unspoken rule that all the kids who thought they were cool went to this bit of dirty grass near the pubs, off-licences and cash machines, while the families and dog walkers were over by the play-park.
    This was where suburban-bedroom fashion-magazine daydreams could almost come true. Looking for my friends, with electronic music on my headphones, I walked past lolling groups of Gothic