Bleaker House

by Nell Stevens

  Bleaker House is a work of both memoir and fiction. The memoir sections are based on the author’s recollections; however, she has changed the names and certain features of some of the individuals about whom she has written, and has amended chronologies and details of some of the events described. The fiction sections of Bleaker House are just that: fiction. They are works of the author’s imagination.

  Copyright © 2017 by Nell Stevens

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover images: penguin © De Agostini Picture Library; background © Alis Photo/Shutterstock

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Stevens, Nell, author.

  Title: Bleaker house : chasing my novel to the end of the world / Nell Stevens.

  Description: New York : Doubleday, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016041607 (print) | LCCN 2016056564 (ebook) ISBN 9780385541558 (hardback) | ISBN 9780385541565 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Stevens, Nell, 1985- | Authors, English—21st century—Biography. | Fiction—Authorship. | Falkland Islands—Description and travel. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | TRAVEL / South America / General. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women.

  Classification: LCC PR6119.T478 Z46 2017 (print) | LCC PR6119.T478 (ebook) | DC 823/.92 [B]–DC23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016041607

  Ebook ISBN 9780385541565

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Any Idiot Can Write a Book

  Boston University Global Fellowship Proposal Excerpts: Text and Subtext

  Closed to All Vehicles and Pedestrians

  You Make It All Up

  A Tiger on Camden High Street

  Bleaker House: SITUATION

  A Stringent Anti-Five-O’clock-Tea Law

  On the Other Side

  Spies

  Alternative Openings

  A Very Short Employment History

  A Perfect Formula

  “The Personal Assistant”

  Spinning a Yarn

  Bleaker House: COMPLICATION

  Things to Do on Bleaker Island

  Bleaker House: FURTHER COMPLICATION

  Two, Not One

  A List of Everything I’m Ashamed Of

  “Misadventure”

  Four Photographs of My Face

  A Thirty-Minute Window

  Apples

  Putting the Girls Through

  Fantasy Fiction

  Bleaker House: CLIMAX

  Lost Plot, Long Gulch

  Bleaker House: RESOLUTION

  Loneliness Is a City You Don’t Know

  “Character Study”

  Punchline

  Afterwards

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  To Margaret and Richard

  Prologue

  A generous donor has made it possible for us to send most of our students abroad after they complete their degree requirements. Global Fellows in Fiction may go to any country and do there what they wish, for a typical stay of up to three months. The Global Fellowship adventure is not only intended to help Boston University’s MFA candidates grow as writers, but also to widen eyes, minds, and hearts—from which better writing might eventually flow.

  —BOSTON UNIVERSITY CREATIVE WRITING DEPARTMENT

  This is a landscape an art-therapy patient might paint to represent depression: grey sky and a sweep of featureless peat rising out of the sea. The water is the same colour as the clouds; it is flecked by white-capped waves, spikes of black rock, and, intermittently, the silvery spines of dolphins. I pace from room to room in the empty house, testing out the silence with occasional noises: “Hi! Ha! Who! How!” My fingers are stiff with cold. When I open my notebook, I fumble with the pages; I struggle to grip the pen. I write the title of a journal entry: “Bleaker Island, Day One.” Beneath it, an attempt at a beginning: “I am living alone on an island.”

  I spell it out to myself. I try to make sense of where I, astonishingly, am. What I’ve written sounds like a metaphor, so I clarify: “This is not a metaphor.” I am living alone on an island, a real island in the Antarctic waters of the South Atlantic, and the name of the island is Bleaker.

  I have been cold since the moment I woke up, stiff and groggy, fleetingly confused and turning over in my mind all the places I might be: at home, in London; in my student apartment in Boston; at my parents’ house; my best friend’s place; the hotel on Exmoor where I stayed—How long ago? Days? Weeks?—to be a bridesmaid at a wedding. The final option that occurred to me, least plausible, true, is that I was where I in fact was. I dressed in the chill—sweatpants over jeans over tights, woolly hiking socks pulled halfway up my calves—and scurried to the window. Behind the curtain, there it was: the island and, all around it, the sea.

  I flew here yesterday, from Stanley, capital of the Falkland Islands, in a tiny plane. We juddered over the sea and over a blot of lumpy islands, then past a white beach crowded with penguins, before landing, softly, on grass. I stepped down from the plane to face a little hut and a sign that read, in crooked letters: “Welcome to Bleaker Island.”

  Now, I am the sole resident of a large, dark house. When I first arrived, I stood in the doorway to watch the sun drop out of the sky into the grey water, listening to the thick silence of this empty corner of the world.

  I set about trying to make the place feel less empty, or at least, to revise the emptiness into something that feels as though it belongs to me. I unpack the few items of warm clothing I am not already wearing and take my food supplies to the kitchen, lining them up beside the microwave, each day’s rations weighed out and counted in advance. Doors to unoccupied bedrooms I decide to keep closed. In the living room, there is a table large enough to host a dinner party for ten, and deep, bouncy sofas strewn with sheepskins: it is a room made for entertaining and company. It should be full of people, and it makes me panicky to be in there by myself, like a host awaiting guests who will never arrive.

  The biggest space in the house was described in the online brochure I read before my arrival as a “sunroom,” a conservatory tacked on to the front of the building. Hail is pelting the glass roof with a metallic-sounding din. Through rivulets of melting ice running down the windowpanes, the sunroom offers a panoramic view of the island to the north: waves chewing the edge of the settlement, farm buildings on the other side of a small bay, looming clouds interrupted by wheeling birds of prey. This is where I will write.

  I convert a coffee table into a writing station, loaded with the tools I imagined in advance I’d need to build a novel: laptop, notebooks, tatty copy of Bleak House, pencil, pens. I position everything neatly, then worry that the orderliness will seem oppressive. I disarrange the objects, as though I had tossed them down without much thought. Still, somehow, the table feels like a set, the sunroom like a stage, and the island beyond like a gaping, vacant auditorium.

  Later, I set out to begin my exploration of Bleaker. The house is on a narrow section, in the relative shelter of a hill, which I climb, bent into the wind and small shards of freezing rain. From the top, you can see the whole curve of the island: cliffs on the west side and a beach on the east, speckled with black-and-white dots that, when you walk towards them, bloom into penguins. They waddle and slither into the waves and run out again like deligh
ted toddlers. Caracaras cluster overhead, eyeing anything that shines. I walk for hours and see only monosyllables: cliffs, birds, waves, sand, sheep, rock, moss.

  —

  A dream: You can see, on an island near yours, a plane. You watch yourself, on that other island, boarding the aircraft. But you know the person you are watching is not really you, because you are here, alone, on an island with no plane. You yell. You try to get the attention of the other you, or the pilot, and explain the mistake, but the wind swallows your voice and throws specks of saliva back into your mouth. The plane takes off and vanishes amongst clouds and circling albatrosses. The other you will get home, be welcomed back by family and friends, marry your future husband and write your novel, and nobody will ever know that you, the real you, are in fact still here, alone. Beside you on the beach, an elephant seal emits a long and fart-like groan.

  —

  In the applications I send out to Creative Writing MFA programmes in the States, two years before I find myself on the island, I quote Ted Hughes: “For me, successful writing has usually been a case of having found good conditions for real, effortless concentration.” I want to do an MFA because I desperately want to concentrate, because it will mean I won’t have to work in my draining, unrewarding office job, and because it will take me away from my friends and family in the UK to a place where I will know nobody from whom to demand distraction—but of course it doesn’t. I am accepted into the one-year, intensive Fiction MFA at Boston University, where, as in London, life gets in the way. I make new friends, develop crushes, go on dates, and spend more time than I could possibly have imagined on the phone to Bank of America and Verizon and the BU International Students & Scholars Office. I worry about rent money and my tax return and my hair and my visa and whether the thing I said to my room-mate about the way her voice carries came out wrong.

  At the end of the year, however, there is a chance of redemption. The programme ends in what it calls a “global fellowship”: students are sent out into the world, wherever they choose to go, to spend three months living, exploring, writing. In March, there is an information session, which outlines the application process and exactly how much money we can expect to cover our trips; I become preoccupied with thoughts and plans and schemes for my fellowship. I don’t want to waste it. I want to do it right. The absorbing vision of “effortless concentration” appears before me again, and I find myself pining for empty, remote places: snow plains, broad lakes, oceans, wherever there is more nothing than there is something and where, I imagine, I will finally do the thing I have spent my adult life hankering after, attempting, and interrupting: write a novel.

  I wonder how productive, how focused, how effective I can be. On the phone to my mother I tell her, “I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions.” After a long Boston winter, it is finally spring, and I am walking down Commonwealth Avenue in bright sunlight. Around me the city is busy and shiny and diverting.

  “And where is that, exactly?” she asks.

  “The Falklands,” I say. “I think it’s the Falklands.”

  Even as I make this statement—I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions—I question it. I wonder how naive I am being. Surely by now I should know that wherever I am, wherever I go, however determined, I can find ways to distract myself, to procrastinate, to put off the real labour of creating something with words.

  It turns out, though, that I am not being naive. As I stand in the sunshine talking on the phone to my mother, watching cars and buses and students with cups of frozen yogurt go past, I cannot begin to conceive of how few distractions there will be on Bleaker Island.

  —

  “I’m going to the Falklands,” I tell my friend Laura, who is a poet. “I’m going to live alone on an island and write a novel.”

  It is now April of the MFA year, and we are still in the process of putting together our fellowship applications. Laura and I are sitting in a seminar room, high up in one of the towers of Boston University, after a class on Arabic translations of Dickens. The windows frame the silver curve of the Charles sliding between brownstones and glassy office blocks. It is dusk and everything looks pink.

  I open my laptop to show her a picture of the island, the tiny settlement perched on a narrow patch of land: the farmhouse, the shearing shed, the house by the water I’ll be renting, and surrounding it, a bleak landscape of rocks and mud. I zoom in on satellite images of the cliffs, the beach and caves and empty space: it gives me a kind of vertigo to see it.

  When I look at Laura for a reaction, I can’t quite gauge her expression. She is applying to go to Brittany to translate the poems of Paol Keineg. Her fellowship, I am certain, will be picturesque. When I imagine it, she is eating croissants, drinking good coffee, and riding a blue bicycle around a clifftop village. She has planned a trip that has the potential to be both career-boosting, and actively pleasant.

  “Bleaker Island?” she says. “You can call your novel Bleaker House.”

  When I crow with excitement and tell her, delighted, that yes, I will, that’s wonderful, she frowns and adds, “Nell, that was a joke.”

  —

  Leslie Epstein, Director of Creative Writing at Boston University, is holding my fellowship application and looking at me over the top of it. His eyes are deep-set and reticent, and make me feel as though I have to earn the right to meet his gaze. When I do so, now, there is an amused glint there: not distinct enough to make me certain he is laughing at me, but enough to make me suspect it.

  He reads my proposal back to me, in his creaky, mirthful voice: “There has never been a literary novel set in the Falkland Islands. What literature there is consists of poetry, non-fiction accounts of the war of 1982 between Britain and Argentina, and thrillers that use the conflict as a backdrop. When I discovered the lack of fiction set in these remote islands, it confirmed to me that if I could go anywhere in the world to live, and write, and observe, for an extended period of time, it would be the Falklands.”

  I can feel myself blushing at the sound of my own optimistic pitch. What seemed powerful and utterly convincing when I wrote it is now trite, naive, and arrogant. This is one of Leslie’s great skills as a teacher: sometimes all he needs to do is walk into the room for you to understand where you’ve gone wrong.

  He reads on. “It was their isolation that first drew me to the idea: this tiny colony of sheep farmers, most of whom self-identify as British, which has existed eight thousand miles from the UK for the past two hundred years. It is difficult and expensive to reach them, on an eighteen-hour military flight from a British air base. And at the end of that arduous journey, you arrive to find islands home to more soldiers than civilians, and where sheep outnumber humans by two hundred and fifty to one. Large areas of land are still littered with unexploded mines from the war. The temperature between May and October, winter in the Southern Hemisphere, is rarely above freezing, gales drive in weekly from the Atlantic, power is lost for days at a time. When I try to imagine how it would feel to stay there, I’m not sure whether claustrophobia or agoraphobia springs more pressingly to mind. I imagine the closeness of a community so distant from its purported motherland; the oppressiveness of being stuck on a small, militarized island with limited means of escape. Then I picture the emptiness of it: the unpopulated landscape and deserted minefields; the Antarctic ozone hole that causes extreme sunburn even on cloudy days.”

  Leslie lays the paper flat on the desk and smoothens the edges. “You can go anywhere in the world,” he says. “People like to go to Europe. You could go to Southeast Asia.”

  I am discombobulated. Up until this meeting, I had been completely convinced by my case for the Falklands, and had jealously guarded the idea, worried someone else might steal it. Now, it seems perfectly obvious that I should be going to Rome, or Marrakech, or Cuba. I have a sudden vision of myself on the sunlit balcony of a crumbling old mansion in Havana, drinking mojitos
, gazing down at the street and making occasional scribbles in the kind of notebook that everyone says Hemingway used, but which he actually didn’t: she seems relaxed, this other me, and smug.

  “But in the Falklands –” I start. “On Bleaker—”

  Leslie interrupts. “You want to be alone,” he says, and looks strangely sad.

  —

  “The thing I’m most scared of is getting depressed,” I say.

  I am with friends in London, the night before I begin my journey to the South Atlantic. We are drinking wine in a Hackney flat. I have finished my year in Boston and flown back to the UK to attend a wedding and dump three suitcases of clothes and books on the floor of my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house.

  It’s hot. People are fanning themselves with coasters. My hair is sticking to the sweat on my temples. We take turns squeezing out onto the tiny balcony; over the rooftops of dimly lit estates, the city shines. It strikes me that even this—the heat, the sweat, the electric horizon—will soon be precious.

  Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about what I am about to do.

  The lawyer, who is stressed and overworked, thinks the isolation will be wonderful, a complete escape. “You can do yoga. You can meditate.”

  The ecologist wants to know about the wildlife, wants me to set up a blog.

  The actor says, “It will be a chance to really get to know yourself,” then, doubtfully, “but perhaps you know yourself quite well already?”

  The primary-school teacher is the only one who downs her glass, looks me in the eye, and says, “Of course you’ll get depressed. It’s going to be fucking horrible. It will be cold and you won’t have enough to eat. You got depressed house-sitting alone in Wales for a week.”