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shopping centre – getting my eyelashes tinted in a salon and having an allergic reaction. I had four job interviews and four rejections.
    I remember swigging expensive vodka from the bottle in a suite at a fashionable hotel before falling asleep at a bus stop, climbing over fences and being dragged angrily around a polished floor by my ankles in a silk party dress, trying to go to an AA meeting but ending up in a ‘spirituality workshop’, surrounded by middle-aged ladies in long skirts with bells sewn to the hems.
    I spent eight days in southern Spain, with Mum, unsuccessfully trying to get the sun to bleach my mind, writing pages of distress in my diary in red biro, drinking one-euro beers, watching the Eurovision Song Contest in an Andalusian bar, convinced I was having a proper conversation even though I couldn’t speak Spanish.
    Trying to make an afternoon pass by spending my dole money on an unsustainable pose of iced coffees and political magazines, I had a dish of Turkish stew delivered to my solitary table where, with papers, diary and phone spread out, I looked like someone with things to do. At the next table six silent women were munching joylessly through fried breakfasts. They were all wearing bunny ears.
    I scanned the internet blank-eyed for a solution that was not forthcoming, I cycled round east London aimlessly, with a bag full of confusion. I was drinking more than I was eating.
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    In Orcadian, ‘flitting’ means ‘moving house’. I can hear it spoken with a tinge of disapproval or pity: the air-headed English couple who couldn’t settle, the family who had to ‘do a flit’ quickly due to money problems. In London I was always flitting but was too battered to see it as an opportunity. I wanted to flit quickly so that no one noticed, slipping from one shadow to the next.
    I boxed up my things and moved them to a storage unit, then went to stay with my brother, who was living with his girlfriend in Dalston. He helped me move my belongings but he didn’t know how to help with my bottomless pain and increasingly out-of-control behaviour.
    Tom is twenty months younger than I, and as toddlers we were zipped into jackets and shod in wellies, and rode in the tractor cab together. As children, we made dens at the top of the hay barns, above the bales in the eaves, where it smelt sweet and dusty, and mice would dart out. We played in the barley store, the grain like quicksand. In summer we swam in the rock pools with friends, the water always bracingly cold. We reared caddy lambs with bottles before they were put back with the main flock – always a bit different, smaller and misshapen.
    In the rafters of the big shed, raised from the ground, there is a hut made from half caravan, half wheelhouse-from-a-fishing-boat, and from there we would jump onto woolsacks at shearing time, soft and oily. When we were teenagers I often shouted at him to get out of my room but sometimes we rode the horses along the Bay of Skaill, galloping across the sand and in the sea as tourists at Skara Brae took our picture. I could never do impersonations but he could and I’d ask him to perform Orcadiancharacters: our grumpy primary-school bus driver, who swerved to hit rabbits and in his spare time ran an abattoir; the dinner lady who called out, ‘Plenty o’ seconds!’; the man who read the mart report on Radio Orkney.
    Tom followed me to university, where we went to raves together and then to London, where we had many of the same friends. Later, he watched me drunkenly posting on the internet and answered when I phoned, distressed, late at night. It was Tom who came and got me from the hospital the night I was attacked by a stranger.
    Sleeping on Tom’s sofa was a temporary arrangement. I knew I had to find somewhere to live, and looked at adverts online for flatshares. The adverts described households as ‘chilled’ or ‘creative’, perhaps euphemisms for their choice of drugs. Sitting in the