The Unremembered Places

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

We were five kilometres offshore, and the sea was eerily calm. Beneath my kayak the water felt supple, gently flexing in fat swells, its surface unbroken and quartzy. It was mid-morning, but the day was already exceptionally warm. Clouds as transparent as dandelion clocks hung immobile in the sky. Small flies hovered and whirled near my paddle blades, gyrating around each other in tiny airborne clusters. A cormorant crossed noiseless above us, its black wings sleek in the sunlight. Ahead of me, and beyond my companions, I could see the island’s outline: a long hump of rock skimming the horizon, the edges hazy and moving in the heat, giving the impression it had somehow been set adrift.

It had taken a long time to make this journey. For the 20 years that I had lived in Edinburgh, the thought of it had always been there. A venture, permanently half intended that would appear in my peripheral vision again and again like the island itself, constantly visible but so familiar as to be ignored. Occasionally, though, I would catch glimpses of the island framed in ways that would stun me with sudden, unerring interest. The sight of it from high on Arthur’s Seat, its remote shape, black and brooding in the Firth of Forth. Or bordered perfectly between a gap in the stands at Easter Road Stadium, an island vignette, seen curiously out of context at a football match.

I had also flown over it many times. On homeward-bound planes which banked low over the coast, I would get a gull’s eye view of the island. It would give me the chance to survey its complex, postapocalyptic townscape: deserted roads and decaying buildings, greenery threading through concrete, shrubs emerging from the rubble. It was a contradictory but compelling mix. A strange scene of urban dereliction in an elemental and unconnected place. ■