Alone on a small island

Text 1: Tuesday, Weather Permitting, by Isla Cormack

An original contemporary travel writing.

The boat dropped me at the jetty at four in the afternoon, and the skipper, who had said perhaps nine words during the crossing, added two more: Tuesday, weather permitting. Then the engine coughed, the boat swung round, and I watched it shrink across the grey water until it was a white speck, and then not even that.

The island is a mile long and half a mile wide. It has one building, a stone bothy with a tin roof, a fireplace and a sleeping platform, and no other human being. It has eleven thousand puffins, at a rough estimate, all of whom regarded me as they might regard a dropped crisp packet: something new, faintly interesting, and almost certainly not worth bothering about.

I had wanted this. For two years I had been living in a city flat where the walls were thin enough to hear my neighbour’s kettle, and I had come here for silence. What I had not understood is that silence on a small island is not silent at all. The wind never stops. It hums in the chimney, rattles the door on its latch, drags at the roof until the tin groans like a ship. Under it, all the time, is the sea: a long, slow breathing against the rocks, in, and out, and in.

By nightfall I had lit a fire of driftwood and eaten a tin of beans and was beginning to feel rather pleased with myself. Then I went outside to brush my teeth and looked up, and stopped. There was no moon. There were no streetlights within forty miles. And the sky was not black but white, white with stars, so thick and so bright that they seemed less like lights than like frost on glass.

I stood there with my toothbrush in my mouth until the cold drove me in. Then I lay on the platform in my sleeping bag, listening to the sea breathe, and I was not lonely at all. Not yet. That came on the second night.

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