by Nell Stevens
I have a thought that seems irrational, but which is hard to suppress, that this might be the last happy moment of my life. I might be about to discover that something terrible has happened. The world, elsewhere, could have ended. Everyone I love could have died. More plausibly, one person I love could have died. Why this is any more likely to have happened since I’ve been offline than at times when I’ve been able to receive the news in a timely fashion is unclear—and yet. I worry.
I log on. Achingly, cringingly slowly, the BBC news page loads. George Zimmerman has been acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Edward Snowden denies that he is a Chinese secret agent. The Vatican announces that followers of the Pope’s Twitter account will get time off Purgatory.
There are a few emails from my family and friends. An invitation to a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to celebrate the summer solstice in a few days’ time. A message from my old room-mate about an outstanding electric bill we need to pay.
Everyone I love is still alive.
A Tiger on Camden High Street
I am prepared. I have packed a bag with enough clothes and books to get me through the next two weeks. I have arranged to stay the night with my best friend. I have taken the following day off work in case I need time to compose myself after it’s done, and I have rehearsed, meticulously, the conversation I will have with Will when he gets home. I am confident I have arranged the cleanest, most orderly break-up possible.
What I am not prepared for is that when Will arrives to find me in nervous tears on the sofa, he rushes to comfort me.
“Hey,” he says. He drops his rucksack and bends over me. “Hey, what’s wrong?” He tries to push my hair back from my face. He wants to look me in the eye. He strokes my head, and shoulder, and knee. “It’s OK,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
A moment later, he notices my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. He makes one more attempt to hold me, and when I still can’t look at him, pulls away. I am too thrown by his concern, his kindness, by the staggering experience of being looked after by Will rather than looking after him, to give the speech I have prepared. Instead, I stare helplessly at the wall.
“We can work things out,” he says.
—
We have been working things out for over two years. Ever since we graduated, I’ve been working a day job to pay the overpriced rent for our flat—a rickety, pretty, falling-apart loft that I love and can’t really afford. After agonizing and editing and rewriting and doubt, I sent a new novel to an agent, who responded a day later saying, “I’m halfway through and I love it!” and then, the following week, “I’ve finished it and don’t think it works.” I wrote back asking to meet her, promising that I could change it, make it better; whatever she wanted me to do, I would do it. A month later, she resigned from the agency and moved to Scotland to live on a farm—her parting shot, “I found the premise fundamentally unconvincing.”
I am left with Will, another novel that doesn’t work, and no agent. Will is gigging with his band, a multifarious group of eccentrics with ridiculous nicknames for each other like “Dave the Bass” and “Rat.” He isn’t sleeping enough; he’s earning too little; he’s succumbing to depression and jittery anxiety—at first gradually, then all at once. Unlike others in his circle, Will refuses to self-medicate with drink or drugs, and so, for the last few months, I have been helping him to get out of bed, into the shower, to feed and dress himself. We have wide-ranging, circular discussions about whatever is consuming his mind, so that his obsessions become mine, too.
On the morning of his twenty-fifth birthday, I come downstairs to find him in his pyjamas, staring at a breakfast show on the television. It is National Anxiety and Depression Awareness Week. A Depressed Person is sitting on the sofa next to the show’s host. “I would never advise anyone to have a relationship with someone suffering from depression,” she is saying. “You wouldn’t be a partner, you’d just be a carer.”
“We can talk about this,” says Will, whenever I suggest that things aren’t working quite the way they should be. “I can change. I’ll get better. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Whatever it takes.”
I feel desperately, achingly sorry for Will. More than that, I am terrified about what will happen to him when I leave. Fear has kept me here, in an intolerable stasis, until this moment. Now, what will happen to him if I leave seems less appalling than what will happen to me if I stay.
In the end he is placid about it, accepting the new terms of his life passively, as though on behalf of someone else, whom he didn’t know well, or didn’t care about. He sighs, sinks back into the couch and stares at his knees. His calmness makes me nauseous. I know that once I’ve gone, he will continue to sit there, just as he is now, and eventually he’ll tap the power button on the TV remote and watch until dawn whichever channel comes on first.
To get away from him, and to delay the finality of leaving the house, I go back upstairs and gaze at our tiny bedroom, filled almost entirely with the bed, and at the study where I wrote the novel that didn’t work, and at the roof terrace with its views down into gardens of people wealthier than we will ever be. A cat is winding between pot plants in the courtyard below. It strikes me that it is these things I will miss: the study and the bed and the roof terrace. They are things that have been solid and mine and reassuring. They have formed a stage set for the kind of life I thought I wanted to live.
I run back down the stairs, past Will on the sofa, and drag my suitcase out of the flat, down the stairway that runs through the building to the ground floor, and out towards the Tube station.
At first I don’t notice anything strange about the street. As I cross the road, the wheels of my case catch in the gutter and it tumbles over. I have to pause to set it upright again. Gradually, I become aware of an eerie quietness, a silence that has no place in central London in the early evening, and then, as I move off again, growing gradually louder, a murmur, rumble, noise. I hear chants, shouts, breaking glass, car horns. Even when sirens are wailing and screeching in my ears, I don’t fully understand that these are sounds from the real world, and not the by-products of my own confusion.
But then I turn onto the main road and fall into a mass of bodies, running, shouting. The window of a bar—a place where Will and I used to drink sometimes—has been smashed. Further off, people are throwing chairs at the front of a shop, trying to break their way in.
Someone runs into my suitcase and falls over. I turn and instinctively blurt out, “Sorry,” to the teenaged boy who is sprawled on the ground. He raises his head to me—his face almost entirely obscured by a low hood—then scrambles to his feet and vanishes into the fray.
When I reach the entrance to the Tube, I find a line of police in yellow jackets staring bemusedly at the crowd, as though it is not much to do with them, as though they are watching it on the news.
“Is the station closed? I need to get into the station.” I realise, as I start to speak, that I am panicking. “I need to get into the station.”
The police say nothing. They don’t seem to register that I am here.
“I need to get out of here,” I say. “I need to get into the station. I have to get to my friend’s house.”
A girl younger than me, who has been jostled into the small space at my elbow, says, “Everything’s closed? They won’t let us through?” She looks shell-shocked. Everything she says sounds like a question. “I’ve been trying for ages and they won’t let me through?”
“I need to leave,” I say.
Finally, the police officer nearest us, whose face is inches from mine, speaks. “You should go home.”
“I can’t go home. I’ve just left home. I can’t go back.”
The girl turns and gazes vaguely back at the crowd. They have broken through the window of the shop, and people are shoving in and out, leaving with hands full of fizzy drinks, chocolate bars, cans of beer. A man emerges, his arms full of toilet rolls.
“I heard there�
��s a tiger on Camden High Street,” the girl says, sounding definite for the first time. “The animals have all escaped from the zoo.”
—
The only thing worse than leaving Will is going back now, dragging my case behind me up the steps and letting myself in to find him exactly as he was before. He looks up at me with an expression of absolute hope. He thinks I’ve changed my mind. He thinks I’ve really come back.
“There’s some sort of riot going on,” I say as quickly as I can. “The station’s closed. Holly’s coming to get me in the car.”
—
The next day, when I wake up on the futon in Holly’s flat in Hackney, the whole thing seems like a fever dream: leaving Will; the riots; driving through dark, unsettlingly quiet streets, and then through crowds of people; and then hitting someone—hitting someone?—who lurched off and away without even looking back at us.
I wander downstairs to find Holly brushing her teeth in the bathroom. She is wearing a suit, about to leave for work.
“Did we run someone over last night?” I ask.
With a mouth full of toothpaste she splutters, “Technically he hit us. He kind of fell into the path of the car.” A fleck of white foam lands on her lapel. “Oh, crap,” she says, and scrubs at it with the inside of her wrist. She spits into the basin and turns on the tap. “He seemed more or less fine.”
All the normal rules, all the things that held life together, have fallen away. I have walked out of my relationship, and my flat, and, as if in a show of solidarity, all of London has gone insane.
—
When, at twenty-three, I met Will at a bar, his appeal struck me as twofold. He was a scruffy, artsy-looking musician who not only wrote me witty emails that broke up my days at the office, but played keyboard in a band and offered access to a world I found appealing, intriguing, the kind of thing I’d want to write about. I liked the idea of the gigs and festivals and disappointment and success. I liked the casual, intimate friendships the bandmates had with one another; their outlandish nicknames. I liked the rusty black van that we spent a day meticulously painting with the band’s name in silver, and which broke down on the way to every event.
But he was also a grown-up human male with whom I could share all the trappings of what seemed to constitute a successful life: relationship, income, home. I wanted to be a Londoner like the other Londoners I knew. I did not want to have to sacrifice any of that, just to be a writer.
It did not strike me, at first, that these two appealing features were by their very nature contradictory. And so, in my relationship with Will, I played at being the sort of person who belonged with him, just to see what it was like, but all the while I wanted it to be real, to be my life, to be solid and comfortable and genuine. I have spent two years chasing stability from an unstable man.
This premise was fundamentally unconvincing.
—
The radio is playing coverage of the riots: burned-down buildings, looted stores, unrest spreading to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham. Holly has gone, and when I turn off the news, the flat is silent. I leave and head, out of habit, to work. Outside the glass tower where I normally spend my days in front of spreadsheets and poorly written reports, I stare up towards the floor where my office is. I’m not sure why I’ve come here. I can’t go in. Instead, I begin a ludicrous, miserable tour of the city, and spend the day crying beside famous landmarks. I call my mother in tears from the London Eye, St. James’s Park, Parliament Square, and the pet emporium at Harrods.
“At first I couldn’t understand why you were so upset,” my mother says. “It was your decision. You’ve wanted to leave for so long. It was only a matter of time.”
I am sitting on the steps of St. Paul’s, featuring in several tourist photos of the cathedral. “I know, but—”
“But then I realized,” she says, “you don’t really have anything left.”
I don’t really have anything left: no Will, no agent, no novel.
I am about to embark on a strange period of semi-existence, though the exact details are hazy at this point. I don’t know that I’m going to spend the next two months living in the Euro Hotel at Clapham Common so I can turn up to do the job I hate and eat three meals a day at Pret a Manger. I don’t know that I’ll move from there to a flat on a council estate in Deptford where the local children will inexplicably nickname me “Princess Diana” and heckle me every time I walk to the bus stop. I don’t know that, in mid-December, my boss will summon me to suggest I focus more on admin and let my male assistant tackle the editorial side of things, nor that this will prompt me to quit in a rage and later turn up drunk and belligerent at the office Christmas party.
I don’t really have anything left. I am not so much back to square one as knocked completely off the board.
A woman approaches me, climbing the steps in twos, holding a camera. “Could you move to the left a bit?” she asks, breathless. “I’m trying to take a picture and you’re in the way.”
Bleaker House: SITUATION
How many hours of his life had he spent in the Bodleian Library? Ollie wondered if the time could be added up, like those stories people told: by the time you die, you’ll have spent five years on the toilet, thirty sleeping, three brushing your teeth, four having sex. How many years would he spend having sex? And how many, sitting, as he was now, in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, staring at but not reading pages from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and listening to the slap and shuffle of the librarian’s shoes as she paced across the uneven wooden floor?
That morning, he had defended his DPhil thesis in front of a pair of experts in eighteenth-century fictions of masculinity. They had listened with frowns of varying severity as he presented an argument about capitalism, the division of labour and the fracturing of the patriarchal ideal. It had been going quite well, he thought—the brows of his examiners had been only lightly creased—and then, mid-sentence, he had fallen apart. He had been saying something about time, about a new narrative sense of chronology and causality evidenced by the writing of…of who? He remembered nothing. He had no ideas. His thesis, sitting neatly bound on the table between hands he knew were his own, looked like a dull book by a stranger; something he hadn’t got around to reading yet. There was simply no way, after that, that they could pronounce him a Doctor of Philosophy.
The summer ahead was a blank—a cloud of unstructured time hovering above him. The thought of staying in the library, of revising and resubmitting the thesis, was oppressive. But if not that, then what else could he do?
—
The next day, in the dawn quiet of the flat he shared with his girlfriend, Mei, the library and the viva seemed both distant and relentlessly present in his mind.
Clutching the post and a cup of tea, he slid out onto the small patch of paving behind the flat that Mei called the back yard, and sat on the step. It was light, but getting warm already. By his feet, terracotta pots held dead shrubs that Mei had planted and briefly nurtured before losing interest. Their crisp leaves rustled in the breeze; around their stalks, cigarette stubs were crushed into the soil.
He had slept badly. His dreams had transported him back to the room where his viva had been held, in which he had experienced a variety of surreal humiliations: giving a lecture naked, performing a play without knowing his lines, attempting to explain the argument of his second chapter to a panel of examiners who all had Mei’s face and who cut him short to explain that they were leaving him for someone called “the Professor.”
Ollie shuddered and turned his attention to the post in his lap. He sifted through the pile: letters from the bank, a leaflet from the Liberal Democrats, a newsletter from his college, several things addressed to the flat’s previous occupants who hadn’t lived there for years, and then, at the bottom, a dog-eared letter with Ollie’s name and address handwritten in black ink. Its stamp depicted two penguins balancing on a block of ice, and was labelled, “Falkland Islands.�
�� Holding it closer to his face, he inhaled something pungent that immediately brought to mind images of mud, cows, fertilizer.
He turned the letter over. When he slid a finger under the envelope’s flap, it crackled as though it had been sealed for years.
Dear Oliver Newman,
This is a letter from your FREND in the FALKLAND ISLANDS. I have informacean to offer regarding your father ALSOP GRAVES, who you believe to be diseased. Please visit me imeadiatly to make arangments for the colection of the urgent informacean regarding your FATHER. You will have to take an airaplain to get here. The airaplain arrives every Saturday. TIME is short so hurry. I will expect you on Saturday. TIME is short.
Regards, a letter and an offer of informacean from,
Your FREND in the FALKLAND ISLANDS.
Bleaker Island
The Falkland Islands
South Atlantic
A Stringent Anti-Five-O’Clock-Tea Law
Whenever Maura is home, the radio is on. It plays a vital role, here, where the Internet is unreliable, and televised news is distributed weekly on a DVD. The first time I listen, the DJs are playing a game called “Guess Who?”: islanders call in and the hosts have to guess who they are from their voices alone. Sometimes, the wind blows so loudly outside that I have to turn up the volume to hear the weather forecast (it’s windy, the DJ says, and snowing) over the roar and bluster.
Now that Ollie has arrived, the shape of my novel unspools as I work at the dressing table. By the end of my second week, I have plotted the bulk of it out, sketching the overall arc of the narrative under section headings: Situation, Complication, Climax, Resolution. These categories are comforting, even the ones that are, at this point, still empty in my mind: they evoke the reassurance of textbooks, and the memory of a student I taught while studying for my MFA in Boston who surveyed the same chalked words on the blackboard with a look of surprised relief and said, “Oh, so it’s kind of like painting by numbers?”