The Outrun Read Online Free Page A

ballerinas and landlocked urban sailors on the grass. Each girl in the park had taken time to consider her outfit: fifties housewives in gingham dresses and headscarves, eighties aerobics teachers in leotards and leggings, aristocratic hippies. The boys looked like mods, skateboarders or underweight lumberjacks. It was hotter than it had ever been in Orkney. I was in a foreign country.
    When I moved to London, I threw myself in. I arrived in a flurry, with no certainties apart from some sort of self-belief. Several nights a week I would get on the bus to the Soho and Shoreditch nightclubs that I’d read about in magazines. I would try out colouring in my fair eyebrows with red eyeliner or slashing the back of a dress with scissors, and go down to the bus stop with a bottle. I met a lot of people in that first year, characters I identified from online message-boards and introduced myself to while waiting for the band to come on. ‘I’m a penniless newcomer, can I write for your blog?’; ‘I’ve seen you on Friendster’; ‘I’ve read your online column.’
    It was a relief when the first person from our picnicking group suggested going to buy booze. Banknotes were thrust towards them with requests for cider and wine. The rest of us waited, the girls making daisy chains and plaiting each other’s hair, and the boys taking turns on someone’s bike. We were overgrown children, not men and women, searching headlong for a good time. Text messages invited more people to join us, the next party, promising something better or more. Each weekend was more messed up than the last. We were careering around, taking taxis and buying drinks we couldn’t afford.
    Next to us a circle of wide-eyed club kids, who hadn’t slept the night before, one in a lion’s headdress, were taking photos of each other and laughing.
    Our conversation was about work opportunities, whether the internship might result in some paid work, name-dropping fashion designers, magazine houses or record labels. Someone dressed in leggings, like an eighteenth-century lord, was complaining loudly about how the budget for his project was only ten thousand pounds. I heard a girl asking around for LSD, and it felt like the perpetual last day of a festival. A guy on a phone said, ‘Someone could make a killing here.’
    As the afternoon turned into evening, we moved with the sun until all the groups of people were crowded onto one corner of grass covered with cigarette butts and empty cans. Nearby, men drinking cans of strong lager from thin blue plastic bags were selling odd selections of books and ornaments laid out on the footpath: a pink plastic telephone and a book about fondue cookery, a pair of children’s rollerskates and a kettlewith no lid. You could get a bag of weed if you asked the right person.
    It was Gloria’s birthday and someone had a bottle of poppers. We were dismissive, recalling teenage headaches, but passed it around, sniffing between swigs from bottles of pink fizzy wine.
    Meg was wearing tiny shorts, a halter-neck top and Lolita sunglasses, and had one foot hooked around her boyfriend’s thigh, although her body was pointing away. Someone in a full suit too hot for the weather came up and asked if he could take her picture. ‘It’s for a street-style website.’ She gave an exasperated look, then complied, posing expertly.
    A group of parents and pushchairs walked by, an alien species, and Meg said to act normal. ‘But I don’t want to be normal,’ said Gloria. She was wearing a bright turquoise jumpsuit. Meg smeared the honey we were using to mix sickly cocktails over her slender ankle, above her cork wedge shoes, and ants began to crawl onto her. We tipsily watched the tiny animals rush to their sugary doom as Gloria blew bubbles from a bottle. Someone said it was cruel but Meg insisted the insects were having fun. She was so beautiful and I wanted to shake her.
    The trips to the off-licence grew more frequent, the shrieks louder,