The Instant Read online

  I look at uninhabited islands, close enough to make out the shapes and shadows of seals hauled out on the rocks. There are digital glitches. Different layers were photographed at different dates and I’m flipping between 2008 and 2010, now 2006, uncovering layers of digital archaeology. I cross a field and I’ve gone back two years. Always resetting, inside a constantly iterating map, it is all time travel.

  Every photograph is of the past. I’m not looking at the island as it is now – with a new season of crops, another year’s growth – but at the moment the satellite took the pictures. This is the wave that was captured to stand in place of all future waves.

  I zoom in tightly on the steps down to the sea where I had my first kiss. I pan over the turquoise bay where we swam at 2 a.m. one midsummer when it was already getting light. My memories are digitised: draggable, zoomable, pannable. The boy on the beach, face blurred out, fading in my memory. Here we are, above a farm track where I fell to my knees, following roads I drove with my eyes full of tears. With a click I can revisit all the text messages and re-read emails.

  A text message brings me out of the maps and back to the train. B says she’ll meet me at King’s Cross. I zoom out again – there is more world than just the island. The blue dot shows my current location nearing London. I’ll soon be among the crowds, warm air and tall buildings, and I begin to pack my books and papers back into my bag.

  But, with a flick of my finger, I could be pinging into the Atlantic, as if pushed by an easterly wind, navigating the weather systems of the internet.

  Google Maps allows me to access places I never would otherwise, without travel, disturbance, emissions. Google Maps has one billion users. Pictures taken by Google’s satellites are used for planning holidays and hovering over memories.

  I’ve stuck paper maps to my walls wherever I’ve lived, always of somewhere I’m not. In the city, I missed the islands; in my most recent flat, the London streets. Although I like to lay paper maps on the floor, I appreciate more the functions of digital mapping. My mind fizzes and swells with the possibilities of the technology.

  The digital maps offer new opportunities to be elsewhere. I sometimes get a feeling I can step into the maps on my screen. Recently, my interest, Streetview-enabled, has returned to cities and I virtually walk the streets of Porto, Prague and Berlin, thinking about where I might go next.

  The satellite pictures enter my dreams, making me scroll and search in my unconscious and waking life. In a new city I feel as if I have become the orange Streetview figure, clicked and dropped into strange surroundings.

  I’m leaving for another stretch. I don’t know quite where I will go. In a London bedroom or a Berlin café or on a different island, distant in a warm sea, everywhere else is closer than ever. I can return instantly at the swipe of a finger. My home will always be there. It is here in my phone and in my heart, the Google Maps icon holding its promise between Facebook and email, fighting for its territory between the Atlantic and the North Sea.

  HIGH LONDON

  September

  Harvest Moon

  B MEETS ME WHEN I GET off the train at King’s Cross. She has finished work for the day and come to help me with my bags back to her place, another hour east across London by tube and train and on foot. She has a spare room in her flat, usually let via Airbnb, and I can stay for a month, paying rent. We first met through her ex. They split up but we remained friends. She knows the best skips to find fresh food dumped by high-end delis. She knows that getting up early is often worth it.

  I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with whoever is with me. The friend opposite me at the table changes but the thread remains the same. In Andy Warhol’s diaries, he refers to himself, Andy, as A, and whoever is with him, a shifting rota of assistants and friends, as B.

  B is with me in the art-gallery café, in the passenger seat of my car, standing beside me as I smoke a cigarette outside the swimming pool, walking ahead on a footpath through the woods. I met B when we both wrote for the same magazine, when we lived on the same island, when we posted on the same messageboard and went to certain nightclubs. We meet one-to-one, which I prefer to group situations since I’ve been sober. We like to eat sushi, go swimming, sit on a bench, go to an AA meeting.

  Then there are the digital friends. I have a group message with two girlfriends, a duo of Bs, ongoing for a decade. B pops up in my chat window. B texts. B doesn’t reply directly to the question I have asked via email but answers another more obscure question in a comment on a year-old photo. I read B’s posts daily but rarely communicate directly.

  I’ve moved job and city and house often and have accumulated Bs with whom I can keep in touch online for ever. We don’t have regular contact, so if we meet, it’s for an update on everything that has happened in our lives over several months or years.

  B told me that in the last week he’s spent fifty-five hours playing an online empire-building game. He’s been building harbours and skinning deer.

  B told me that she’s written fifty poems about eggs.

  B told me how once, following an impulse, he threw his brand-new digital SLR camera off a bridge into the sea.

  B told me about how her family history has made her unable to consider marriage.

  And sometimes I forget what I’ve told you and which city we’re in and who you know and how we intersect.

  I stand on the balcony of B’s twenty-first-floor flat, looking out over London. What I first thought was a shooting star is a cigarette flicked from a balcony above.

  I hear traffic, children and swearing below. I see trains passing on a raised track in front of the towers at Canary Wharf. New skyscrapers have been built in the city since B moved in here three years ago: distinctive silhouettes on the western horizon.

  The sun is setting behind central London. A screeching herring gull passes, travelling south, then a passenger plane. I look down onto a pigeon, broken aerials and lost balls on the roofs of lower buildings. Lights are turning on as people get home from work.

  The building is in need of redecoration but is clean and well ordered. There are notices in the lobby for exercise classes and art exhibitions. The nearby market is cheap, bowls of fruits and vegetables for a pound.

  My bedroom looks east. The tower marks the eastern extent of inner London and beyond us are the things that service a city: an Amazon warehouse, gas towers, a lorry park.

  I’m thrilled by the planes taking off or coming into land at City Airport. They seem so close up here. I hear them coming and I look them up on my Flight Radar app: they come from Milan or Dublin.

  I spend the month trying to make the most of being back in London. I meet old friends, go to poetry readings, join the Climate March along Whitehall shouting for Green Energy Now. I’m looking out for any work or money where I can.

  A friend who works at a training hospital appeals for breast models for reconstructive plastic-surgery training and I reply. Standing in a hospital ward, naked from the waist up, breasts marked with felt-tip pen, surrounded by male trainee surgeons, I am suddenly dizzy and faint and have to be helped to sit down, brought a glass of water. What a situation to put myself in for forty quid. Maybe I’m not as tough and liberated as I thought.

  Out there, the city is lit up and huge and still noisy with traffic. I’m staying up until the island results comes in.

  A week ago, I put my postal vote into a letterbox in Poplar. This afternoon, it was sunny and hot and I went for a bike ride, but I was thinking about home. In the shopping centre under Canary Wharf, my YES badge got some glares. Now, I’m sitting in the dark with the internet on my lap, trying to reconcile my decision to leave Scotland with my desire to have a say in its future.

  Mist is coming down over the Shard and Primrose Hill and Tower Hamlets. In the gloom, the flashing light on top of One Canada Square is like a lighthouse. I think about helicopters and boats speeding through the night, carrying ballot boxes from islands and outlying areas up north.

  I start to get ready for bed but, just after the island results, voting no to Scottish independence, there is a flash to the west, the beginning of a thunderstorm that will pass over London for the next couple of hours. It is loud and wakes people all across the city, forcing us to stay up for the referendum results.

  At 3 a.m., I have a sudden flurry of messages on the dating website I joined a few days earlier. All of us, awakened by the storm and the politics, sit up in bed and, with sudden perspective, realise we’re lonely. We reach for our phones, reach out for each other.

  As it becomes clearer that the national result is going to be no, the storm rages. It passes easterly over the tower. I stand out on the balcony watching, in sudden heavy rain, feeling like a powerful conductor of the city.

  I try to sleep. The wind rattles in the tower’s rubbish chutes. Above me, five more layers of people. Below me, twenty more floors, and below that the earth riddled with basements, subways and train tunnels. The number of Wi-Fi networks scrolls off the screen.

  On 1 October, I will take a one-way flight to Berlin. I have to go, motivated by loneliness. I think the most important part of the story must be coming next.

  HOODED CROWS

  October

  Hunter’s Moon

  WHEN I ARRIVE AT SCHÖNEFELD Airport, there are gangs of hooded crows hustling around the runway. They are a common bird on the island but I haven’t seen them elsewhere in the UK. They were on the harbour town rooftops, and now they’re here in Berlin to meet me. The hooded crows make me feel at home.

  In Scotland we call them ‘hoodies’. In German, their name is ‘mist crow’, Nebelkrähe. In London, the crows are all black: they are carrion crows (Corvus corone), found in England and the south of Scotland. But in other places, with colder winters and higher latitudes, the north of Scotland, Scandinavia, central and eastern Europe, the crows wear waistcoats of grey: these are hooded crows (Corvus cornix). Both call with similar ‘kraa kraas’, but the hoodies are more often found in flocks. Berlin and my island are both just within the hooded crow’s range, which opens into the wilder, more sparsely populated regions of Norway and Poland beyond.

  The ranges of the carrion crows and hooded crows overlap in what are known as ‘hybrid zones’, where both species are present. The hybrid zones are moving slowly north-west, and this is a marker of climate change. As temperatures increase, many species of bird and insect are tending to move towards the poles and up slopes.

  I am attracted to the northern places that are ‘hoodie territory’. The areas pushed ever northwards and constrained as the climate warms are the places I want to visit.

  I continue to see hoodies all over Berlin. Crows are generally unpopular birds but must be admired for their tenacity and intelligence. Crows know what is going on in their territory and their behaviour often alerts me to other things, like the presence of birds of prey. If the crows are making a commotion, I know that a buzzard, kestrel or even a goshawk could be nearby.

  Birdwatching is the ideal antidote to screen fatigue. Our eyes grow weary looking at closely held phones and computers. Our long-distance vision is underused and blurry. Spending time scanning a distant horizon or treeline gives my eyes a change and, after a while, I feel my vision clarifying. Objects become clearer. I’m coming to my senses, sharpening my eyes.

  BERLIN FOR BEGINNERS

  November

  Hunter’s Moon

  THERE’S ALWAYS A SENSE OF arriving in Berlin just a little too late. Five years ago, people say, that’s when it was really happening. I’d visited once for a weekend, a decade ago. We’d ridden bikes and stayed up all night with friends-of-friends in their large, airy apartment, which they could afford to rent even though they worked only part-time, selling ice cream.

  I wanted to come back to a city because I’m not done yet. I want another throw of the dice. People back home seem so sure our little island is the best place to live, when they haven’t tried anywhere else. I’m also here because a good way to get over a hopeless crush is to move to another country, where there are new people to get hopeless crushes on.

  I didn’t choose Berlin for a particular reason: no job, no study, no lover. I’m just here for a change. I know one person here, an acquaintance from London I once had a seizure with, and he encouraged me to come. I booked a one-way flight and a temporary place to stay. I appealed online for friends, asking on Twitter for any Berlin contacts, people I could follow, ask for advice or meet up with. I signed up to Duolingo.

  You are free to invent your identity in a new city. I want to act like I’m still in my twenties, maybe get a nose-piercing and an undercut, start being polyamorous, making sculptures. I’m attracted to what I think of as Berlin style: Cabaret-via-Cold War, bicycles, minimal techno, black clothes.

  I have enough money to survive for a couple of months before I have to get a job, a freeing position I’ve never been in before. But I have to be careful and live cheaply. If you are poor, Berlin is a better place than most to be. I have scruffy clothes because I’m a broke artist, not because I’m trying to look like one.

  I slice off my thumbprint with a bread knife. I get a German phone number.

  On my first night in town, I eat alone in a Turkish restaurant, watch attractive men walking past and think I’ve made the right decision. I calculate that my opportunities for romance here will be better than on the island.

  On my first day exploring the city, I try to order in German in a café and they answer in English. I seldom try again. I’ve had German described to me as both easy and difficult to learn. People have told me it’s cheap to live here, then complained that rent is too expensive. Berliners, I’m told, are relaxed and stern, both open-minded and aloof. I’m unsure where I stand.

  I do know that Berlin has a high water table, an abnormal aquatic altitude. The city is built on sinking, shifting ground and rising groundwater. I walk to look at a lump of concrete: the Schwerbelastungskörper, the ‘heavy loading body’, a huge 12-tonne concrete cylinder built in 1941 by Hitler’s regime to test the site by seeing how much of it would sink into Berlin’s swampy, unstable ground.

  For the first month I rent a room in an apartment in Neukölln in the south-east of the city, one of the most multicultural, and poorest, areas of Berlin. The room has a loft bed: I’m sleeping close to the ceiling. The landlord lives here too. He’s always there, in a side room filled with plants.

  In the early weeks, I don’t have a routine or friends. I try to fill my days meaningfully and wonder if I’ve done the right thing by coming here. I’m trying to allow the unexpected, to give space for something magic. I read books about the history of the city. I walk for miles with a strange language around me, investigating new types of corner-shop snacks, watching people. There’s a relaxed easy communal atmosphere to everyday life here, at odds with stereotypes of German punctuality, discipline and order. The city is rich in public space – parks, pavements, squares, riversides – where people can linger without being a customer. It’s a good place to be underemployed.

  Often this freedom – this lack of responsibility – is an asset, this lightness. I can keep myself well, be selfish and spontaneous. But, oh, so often I worry that the loneliness has grown overripe when my day has been long and my lips taste like glue and I’ve been silent and am not sure I exist at all, and I’m looking for something or someone to weigh me down.

  We are far from the sea: bikes don’t rust here. I am queasy and dumb.

  I start to meet strangers I’ve been put in touch with by mutual friends.

  B, a Brit, is studying for a master’s, taking advantage of Germany’s lack of tuition fees. She works part-time, like a number of her friends, on a helpline tracking down lost food takeaway orders. She is a pizza detective.

  B, an American, has got a job as a nanny and is learning German from the young children.

  B lives in a large Marxist houseshare where each week they have a plenum to discuss bread and cleaning.

  B moved here to be a DJ but has recently spent less time at clubs and more training to be a life coach.

  I call B when I’m near a café he mentioned. He’s not there but is friendly and suggests meeting up another day soon. When I hang up the phone, I surprise myself by crying. I acted casual but it means a lot to me. Asking for new friendship is hard. Hearts and futures can turn on a single afternoon or an accepted invitation – but more often lead to nothing but themselves. My stomach churns. I am so open and my hope has remained airborne for so long but I don’t know how much longer I can manage.

  I find a good falafel place, where I can watch the orange sun setting down Oranienstrasse. Sitting outside, I feel the winter that will soon be closing in. At the end of the road, over the crossing, a mosque is busy. The U1 train passes and blows the ash from the ashtrays. I watch the punks under the bridge.

  A strange woman walks past. I’ve seen her a few times now. She has rolls of fabric fastened around her body. She is upholstered.

  I check my space updates. Today a NASA spacecraft reached Pluto for the first time, after a nine-year journey. It has travelled five billion miles from Earth. The flyby, transmitting photographs and information, could see Pluto restored to planet status. It calms me to read the names of Pluto’s moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. Our solar system keeps operating, celestial dynamics at huge scales of time and distance, keeping us all safely in place.

  I go for long walks, across Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Mitte, in a skirt made of cobwebs and a bag of red suede. Every ninth conversation I overhear is in English.

  I come to a nightclub, open, strangely, in the afternoon. I walk in, no one stops me, and briefly dance alone under the disco ball.