The sky is not blue

On abandonings, of place and self and sky

I was on one of the most remote of the Orkney islands, standing in an abandoned house that had been left to rot on the northern shore, silent except for the song of the seals, empty except for sparrow and starling.

The house looked over a wide, rocky cove, and I was inside it for no reason other than that I am a nosy sort of person, and the house had beckoned to me from where I’d set up camp on the other side of the bay.

It had obviously been abandoned for a long time; it had no roof and nature was reclaiming its insides. Nettles growing around the aga. Dandelions sprouting in the larder. Fuchsias reaching through the windows. Birds scattered as I walked inside – starlings flashing beetle-blue over my head, sparrows cocking their heads from the windowsill.

It was a space rewilding, a space relearning what it was, but still it held the memory of what had come before. The walls retained echoes of the blues and greens they had once been. On the shelves, almost empty, stood an oil lamp and a jar of marmite. The cushion on the one remaining chair looked as if it held the imprint of the last person who had used it. In the bedroom, a hairbrush rested on top of a chest of drawers.

I stood inside that house for a long time. It felt almost holy, like I was stood inside a church or perhaps a body. Places can feel alive, sometimes, I think. Almost as if they are embodied by memory.

That house became a familiar presence during my week camping at the cove. It felt like more than stone and mortar. It felt almost like a friend. On the long evenings sat on the beach, I often wondered about the people who had once lived there; what they spoke about as they cooked dinner in the kitchen, if they ever came down to the cove and watched the water, if they had smiled as seal-song swept across the bay, if they had watched the winter storms from the warmth of their fireside.

I imagined them laughing, the sound of their laughter echoing across the bay.

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About a year before my trip to this island, in an old farmhouse on mainland Orkney, I heard a story that made its way into my marrow. In the low light of a peat fire, smoke hanging like a gauze between the audience and the storyteller, I listened to the ancient Orkney folk tale of the selkie who went back to the sea.

I won’t retell it here, not properly – I would not be able to do it justice – but in essence it went like this:

A man walked by the sea each day. One day he saw a seal come right out of the ocean, strip off her seal skin and leave it on the shore. Without the seal skin he could see she was a woman. Beautiful and wild. A selkie. He stole the skin so the selkie could not return to the water, and he married her. He never told her that he had stolen her skin, or that he had hidden it. They moved into a house together, had children. She was a housewife and a mother and she was not unhappy, not really, but she yearned for the water. When her daughter found the seal skin in the attic, she told her mother where it was. The selkie did not hesitate, not for an instant. She took back her skin, went down to the water, put it on and swam into the Atlantic. She never returned to the land. She abandoned the life she had built and the people she loved because she could not resist the call of the wild. I do not believe in selkies, but I do believe in women seeking wilderness, in women abandoning everything society has demanded of them in order to taste freedom. I have often wondered if the story was based on a real woman. Who she was. What she was running from and what she was running towards.

I was thinking about that story while I camped at the cove, because there were seals everywhere I looked. One evening I counted almost twenty of them, their heads bobbing just above the surface, their big moon eyes blinking their blackness towards the shore. One misty afternoon, when it felt as if the sky had descended into the sea and swallowed up the horizon, I could hear only the gentle lapping of the water and the haunting song of the seals wailing somewhere far out, somewhere that I could not see.

Each evening I waded into the sea and met the gaze of the seals. Sometimes they swam towards me, the silhouette of their underwater bodies like dancers just out of reach.

There, in the water, watching the seals watching me, I could imagine abandoning my human form to become some wilder version of myself. I felt a kinship with the selkie woman. With the yearning for abandonment; for the spaces it leaves, for the spaces it fills.

By some act of what some might call fate but I would call coincidence, I learnt from an islander that the house in the folk story was the abandoned house I had stood inside, and the cove where the selkie had both adopted and abandoned the land was the same cove I was swimming in each day.

It gives me goosebumps to think about this. But it is a coincidence. At least that is what I think right now.

After learning this, the house became something a little magical to me.

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Later, I learnt something else from that islander: the reason the house had been abandoned.

There had been an accident. Some young people had been killed, in a terrible way, right outside the house. The owner had left, unable to bear the weight of what had happened. That is why is was abandoned. Because of something dreadful. Because the owner was outrunning a nightmare.

It made me think of something I’d read recently: that the sky is not really blue.

I am a little obsessed with blue. It is a fascinating colour. The physics of it. The illusion of it. But that is not the point here. The point is that the sky is not actually blue, it is violet. Physically, quantifiably violet. Some other animals probably see it as violet, but we do not because of the biology of our eyes. Our retinas are especially sensitive to blue light, and we don’t really know the purpose of this – it may just be a quirk of our imperfect, animal bodies – but it means that we perceive the sky as blue even though it is not.

When I learnt this, I felt like the axis of my world shifted slightly. I had to abandon my reality, just a little, just enough to accept that my perception of reality is not always, actually, real.

I felt the same when I learnt why this magical house had been abandoned.

It is funny, isn’t it, how we create realities based on assumptions, and how we become attached to those realities. I had fallen in love with the house, but only with the version of it I had constructed. A place of love and laughter and light. Of a long-ago selkie, or at least a woman who had saltwater on her lips and wildness on her tongue. Knowing the truth, I had to abandon the reality I had constructed and add a darkness to the story, a layer of shadow and grief and horror.

I am fascinated with this; the way memory and history and language and perception interact and intersect and weave in and out of one another. Of the way we must abandon versions of the reality we have built for ourselves over and over again.

Learn, unlearn, learn.

There is something beautiful in it, isn’t there? In abandonment. In letting go. Nettles growing around the aga. Starlings swirling through the roof. A woman going back to the wild. Light becoming fringed with darkness. Looking to the sky and thinking: I wonder what shade of violet you are today.

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