One year ago today I was watching the last 75% of the Shaw Shank Redemption for the first time. There was a small part of me that was thinking of the friend who had given me a list of movies that I absolutely needed to watch. However, neither that nor the movie (which was excellent) was the reason for the stupid grin that I couldn't seem to wipe off my face. That morning had changed everything.
Dr. Rader wants to go to Maes Howe. I can feel myself exhale a breath in defeat. So far as I'm concerned, it's £5 that we'll never see again. But it's one of the things you go see when in Orkney, just like you should climb the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and so they were insistent about going.
20 September 2014
Peedie Hostel, Kirkwall, Orkney
9:24 AM
Dr. Rader wants to go to Maes Howe. I can feel myself exhale a breath in defeat. So far as I'm concerned, it's £5 that we'll never see again. But it's one of the things you go see when in Orkney, just like you should climb the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and so they were insistent about going.
We pull into the parking lot at 10:01. Dr. Rader, who is not used to driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road with a manual, has a bit of trouble. He somehow manages to back into the brick wall in the visitor centre car park.
Tours of Maeshowe start every hour on the hour... and we've missed the 10:00 but all the same I go into the visitor centre to see when we can get a tour while the group lags behind and assesses the damage. Two nights ago we nearly lost the passenger side rear view mirror to a stone wall and so I hear muttering towards the benefits of insurance, as I make my way into the old mill house that doubles as a visitor centre.
I walk in and there are two women by the counter, a taller brunette and a shorter blonde. The instant I see the blonde woman something tingles in the back of my brain, just a small flicker of recognition and then she talks and I don't need to look at her name tag to know it's Rachael, the Rachael, a person that as far as I'm concerned existed in my mythology, the female protagonist in the story of the best day of my life.
So what do I say? "Hi Rachael, you probably don't remember me but I went on a tour with you in Skara Brae about a year and a half ago and you totally changed my life." No, that would be creepy. She’s probably given thousands of tours. Why would she remember me? So I don't say anything about that, and instead I put on a mask of cool charisma and pleasantly discuss what I came into discuss... taking a tour of Maes Howe. My companions have arrived in the visitor centre now and so I’m really not going to say anything in front of them. I’d never hear the end of it.
We've more or less agreed on a tour time, when Rachael's expression becomes a tad bit hesitant...
“Have you ever… been to Skara Brae?”
“Yes,” I say, surprised at how level my voice sounds.
“I remember you. You’re the Archaeoastronomer,” she says and I’m stunned. No one has ever remembered my obscure occupation, at least not by name. Hell, my own mother can’t remember what I do, but she did a year and a half later.
I nod my stunned agreement as she asks, “And didn’t you find a message in a bottle?”
“I swear I’m not stalking you…” she hastens to add.
“Of course,” I say but I’m smiling now. “Yeah that was me.”
“Can I get your surname?” She asks turning down to her calendar, reminding me that she is working. This is just small talk. I’m a customer.
I tell her. She hesitates and I begin to spell it. After 21 years with a last name like mine, you get used to it. She writes:
TUMBERELLO (x5) 1 CAR
She’s spelt it wrong, but I’m not about to correct her. Even though I’m the youngest in my party, I feel strangely grown up to have my name on the reservation. Unfortunately, we collectively don't have a good reason to stick around. My group is starting to eye me suspiciously.
“Will you be here later?” I ask, my voice nervous. I don’t know if I’m crossing a line, but she’s the Rachael. If March 15th 2013 is going to get an epilogue, I want it to be longer than this.
She stutters a: “Yes, I’ll be here all day.”
“Good. See ya later!” I say as I walk out the door.
“That was a bit creepy,” Dr. Rader says to me as we’re walking to the car. Thankfully, it seems to have sustained only minimal damage from its encounter with the wall.
“No it wasn’t,” I say, but I can see how it looks from his perspective. He doesn’t know my Skara Brae story… I can’t believe I hadn’t told them. Well, we’re headed there now. There never would be a better time to tell the story. It occurs to me that I would have told them the tale anyway, but seeing her again changes everything. So I tell them about the amazing girl who gave me a private tour of the Neolithic village on my first day in Orkney.
“You should ask her out to coffee,” Ashley says after I’ve concluded my story.
It takes the whole group insisting I ask her out to coffee at a minimum, before I’m convinced it’s a good idea. It’s not that I don’t want to; trust me, I do. I just can’t believe that Rachael would want to go out to coffee with me. I’ve spent the past year and a half building her into this goddess, a goddess with a boyfriend. But I rationalise: if I just ask her to coffee then it’s not necessarily a date. I’m probably worth a chat, even if no amount of peer pressure in the world could convince me to ask her out for a drink.
We arrive at Skara Brae. It strikes me that I’ve only been here twice before: the first time with Rachael and the second with my friends from the hostel. Now that I’m slightly removed from the situation, my brain is reeling at the sheer implausibility of this all.
The day is much more similar to my more recent visit to the village so luckily I get more flashbacks of Rai’s antics and Eoin’s questions than I do of that late afternoon walk around and inside the village. Matt and I go down by the beach and we tour Skaill house, because why not?
We have lunch in the famous (at least to me) Skara Brae Café, before driving off to Yesnaby. I’d never been before, and I really do enjoy a good cliff, but I’ll be lying if I say my mind was all the way here. I’m eager to get back to Maes Howe and preoccupied about knowing my phone number.
I think the others sense this, because we leave Yesnaby earlier than we needed to. When I walk into the visitor centre, she's putting things on shelves. We have a stunted, semi awkward, conversation. It's partly my fault. I'm not certain she wants to talk to me, or if she's just being polite. So I let the conversation die a few times to see if she'll pick it back up. She does every time. I’m immensely nervous, but my brain is working well enough to casually slip in the fact that I’ll be in Orkney for a few weeks. This way after the tour, I’ll be able to ask her to coffee, even though my gut twists with anxiety at the thought. Luckily it turns out not to matter, she beats me to it.
I’m so excited that I practically throw my mobile at her. At this point I’m not wholly convinced that my mobile is a reliable form of communication, so I insist I get her number as well so I would be able to reach her if she couldn’t reach me. I ask her when she’d be free, but she glances at her co-worker behind the desk and says she should probably be working.
Anthony 20.09.2014 @ 14:46
Testing
Well, I’ve sent her a message. That’s about as business-like of a first text as I possibly could have sent. I meet her at the bottom of the stairs where she says, “I should be free next Wednesday.”
We chat more easily at the bottom of the stairs, maybe it’s because I’m less nervous now that we’ve set a date (and we’re going on one) or maybe because she’s not being watched by her co-workers. She asks if it’s alright to call on me for input during her tour and I can’t help but smile. I was hoping she’d ask that, but certainly not expecting it.
The two of us take up the rear of the tour group with an elderly woman. I’m totally committed to my job as “assistant tour guide” so I’m really concerned with making this a good experience for the elderly woman. She’s cold from the wind and tired from the walk, and Rachael suggests that we skip the part of the tour outside the tomb. I was just about to suggest the same thing. Rachael explains the change of plan to the crowd, before heading into the tomb first. She doesn’t ask me to, but I take up the rear making sure everyone else makes it inside and that the gate is shut.
I feel a spark of electricity run down my spine as she puts her hand on my shoulder when I enter the tomb. It’s to make sure I don’t stand up too quickly and hit my head. She did it for everyone. That doesn’t seem to matter.
I think she feels it too because when I shakily say, “I’m the last one and I’ve closed the gate.”
Her “Okay, good.” is almost as shaky.
All and all the tour goes pretty well. I mean it's her tour and I certainly make no move to steal the show, but we kind of worked together. We were in sync, like we'd done it a thousand times. She’s every bit as knowledgeable and interesting as I remembered. Until the tour started, it hadn’t really occurred to me that maybe I had imagined Rachael into a person who was better than the real Rachael (or anyone) could ever be. So I’m surprised by the relief I feel that my memory has done her justice.
The tour runs a bit late because of two, tall, leather clad, troublesome, Scotsmen. They kind of hijacked the tour, or at least tried to. I think Rachael handled it very well, but Dr. Rader is a bit miffed by them. They corner me and bombard me with questions on the way back to the visitor centre, which under normal circumstances would have been good fun. However, I really just want to be with Rachael and I can’t come up with a satisfactory reason to ditch them and walk with her.
“See you Wednesday!” I say when I get close to her, but she doesn’t really respond other than a wave. I try hard not to be too dejected about that. Maybe she doesn’t want to see me on Wednesday after all… bugger me… Well I have her number. If I don’t hear from her I suppose I can always try again.
When we get back to the car, I tell my friends we’re going out of coffee and I show the sticky-note with her name and mobile number. I’m met with a round of congratulations and we make our way to South Ronaldsay and tomb of the Eagles.
Here we are given a sub-par tour of a lesser cairn and honestly my group has more fun being delinquents than we do with the educational portion of the tour. The woman who owns the place actually snapped at Matt for cracking his knuckles. We were all uniformly tempted to crack our knuckles in retaliation.
We stop at Tesco to buy some supplies before returning to the Peedie Hostel to make dinner. I make my home made alfredo and garlic bread supplemented by a salad by Dr. Rader and chicken Kiev by Ashley.
The meal turned out fantastic. I couldn’t be more chuffed. I’m always nervous when I cook for people the first time, especially people who know good food. Wine is passed around and someone else does the dishes. It's the perfect end to this amazing day.
⁂
I think I had some small sense that that would be the day everything changed. Oleka is the realisation of how few days are actually memorable. So many moments lost to obscurity by routine and monotony. However, that day, one year ago, was the antonym of oleka. It was the day that altered the course of my life irreversibly.
