by Nell Stevens
Ollie is a PhD student who grew up in Oxford and at twenty-five is surprised, embarrassed and yet simultaneously relieved to find that he has somehow never moved away from the city of his birth. I know people like this. I grew up with people like this. If one or two things about my life had worked out differently perhaps I would be like this, and my starting point for the character—that awkward, anxious, guilty sense of underachievement—feels as central to my own nature as it is to his. Ollie is sheltered, nervous, pointlessly intelligent, ambitious within narrow confines. The world he occupies is the dusty, hushed Bodleian Library, the loneliness of research, the intimacy of knowing great literature very well, the frustrations of knowing little else.
Ollie has been raised by his mother to believe that his father, who she met when he was visiting England from the Falkland Islands, died a week after she met him. The novel opens with a letter arriving at Ollie’s shabby student flat. Ollie’s father is not dead, the anonymous writer says; Ollie should know the truth, and he should come to the Falklands to discover it.
I take Ollie out of Oxford and I put him in the Falklands: first I take him to Stanley, like me, and then both of us will travel onwards to Bleaker Island. The incongruity between his tame, obdurate persona and the weirdness of his new surroundings is supposed to be funny. The whole set-up is supposed to be funny. It is so nonsensical for someone like Ollie, and for someone like me, to be where we are that the reasoning behind it can’t help but seem far-fetched. I want to write a novel. I am looking for my father.
—
In Stanley’s government archives, I search for stories I could incorporate into Ollie’s, but it is Annabel, the archivist, who yields the most telling information.
“They did a family-tree project at the primary school,” she says, “and found out that every single child was related. So now I keep tabs on it in a database. In case anyone falls in love with the wrong person.” She pats a large, whirring computer monitor on her desk. “Sometimes the families are so mixed up with each other that the program asks me if I’m really sure about the data,” she adds.
I leaf through copies of Falkland Islands Magazine from the 1890s, which is a catalogue of unusual ways to die: shot in the head when embracing a friend out hunting; over-exposure while stuck in a peat bog; entangled in kelp while swimming away from a shipwreck; trapped on a boat crushed between two icebergs. And drowning after drowning after drowning. People kept falling off cliffs in the dark.
February 1891. On the health of the Falkland Islanders: “Never was there such a race of dyspeptic mortals….The causes are said to be the fondness of the islanders for strong tea and coffee, which they consume in vast quantities….The remedy is obvious. The Governor must get a stringent anti-five-o’clock-tea law passed.”
—
There is so much weather here that sometimes it can be several things at once. When I reach the guest house after a day in the archives, the sun is setting over the bay, sending streaks of yellow and red into a crisp blue sky to the west. Overhead, hailstones are plummeting from a thunderous grey cloud like seeds being sown, and an angry wind is picking them up and hurling them sidelong against the windowpane.
—
In the West Store, teenage girls are shoplifting make-up. They wear hoodies that say “British & Fabulous,” which they must have ordered from a catalogue. “It’s easy,” one of them whispers. “No one’s looking. No one cares.” Outside, seagulls hover over the road, dropping mussels from a height to break the shells.
On the Other Side
At the edge of Stanley, there is a cattle grid. It marks a boundary: on one side is the town, and on the other is “camp,” a term that covers every part of the Falklands that is not Stanley. This cattle grid is the site of frequent car crashes. There are three reasons for this.
First: Maura explains that after the war, when they built the road that led out of town, there were instructions for a drainage ditch on either side. An overenthusiastic digging team mistook the annual rainfall figure for the monthly one, and created deep, gaping ditches into which cars now slide off the icy road.
Second: There is no cinema, no theatre, no evening entertainment in Stanley, but there are seven pubs. As everyone I meet wants to tell me, “It’s a drinking culture, here.” By ten o’clock most nights, everyone is exceedingly drunk. Then they get into their Land Rovers and drive home.
Third: It is against the law to drive drunk in Stanley, but legal in camp. Drunk drivers who have caught the attention of the police are routinely pursued through town until they reach the grid, at which point the chase ends and the fleeing driver hurtles across and straight into the ditch. When I express a degree of surprise that people so frequently risk their lives in this manner, Maura shrugs and says, “If you’re going to crash your car blind drunk, it’s better to do it on the other side.”
Spies
As time passes in Stanley, I begin to feel I am failing at my mother’s directive to “meet some people.” I have been here for a fortnight and, other than Maura, and Annabel in the archives, have not exactly made any friends.
Over breakfast, Maura tells me stories about her early life, when she kept cows on West Falkland and put milk in the well to keep it cool; when she made butter by hand and pickled it in winter; when she carried her babies around in panniers across the back of her horse. She talks in a low, agitated voice about the arrival of Argentinian soldiers in her house, how they pointed their guns at her son and “spoke foreign” to her, and how she had never felt the same way about strangers after that. But before the war, before the tracks and roads were built, she used to ride between settlements, she says, “and everyone was pleased to see you. Not like now when people are always suspicious. Even if they’d never seen you before, in the old days, you were treated like a friend.”
It is time, I decide, to meet some people, and the place to meet them, Maura says, is in the pub. “Go to the Globe. People will tell you stories in the Globe.”
It is odd to me that I feel adventurous enough to travel halfway around the world by myself, but terrified by the prospect of walking, alone, into a pub on a Friday night. But Maura has made it clear, first in hints and then overtly, that it is considered unacceptable, rude, to stay in Stanley without doing this; I brace myself to make my debut.
—
The Globe bar looks like all the other whitewashed shacks in Stanley from the outside, but inside it is a high-ceilinged, open space that feels as though it has been perfectly preserved from decades ago. Flags cover the rafters. Tables and chairs are strewn haphazardly across the floor. Surfaces are a disconcerting combination of dusty and sticky. There’s no white wine. There’s no rosé. I order red.
When I arrive, around nine p.m., it is quiet. There are a couple of men playing pool, and a drunken group of women at the bar. One of them turns as I sit down in a corner; she stares blearily, as though she can’t quite focus, then shouts, “Excuse you!” I don’t know what it is that I’m being excused for, and worry I have unwittingly committed a Falklands faux pas. Perhaps I have taken a seat reserved for a particularly venerated regular, and news of this transgression is going to spread around town. I switch to a different table, just to be sure.
An elderly woman is sitting by herself and saying, to nobody in particular, “It’s my birthday. Will you buy me a drink? It’s my birthday.” When I go back to the bar to get her something, the man serving me says, “It’s not her birthday,” but by that point I’ve already paid.
I sit alone for about an hour, working through successive glasses of dust-flecked red wine that go straight to my head but nonetheless fail to stifle my self-consciousness. And then I look up to find that the place is, suddenly, full of boys. They look like high-school students to me, and I am certain they are all underage. A few moments later I hear their voices and realize they are British, and a beat or so after that I realize they aren’t in fact children at all. They are soldiers.
The locals in the Globe exhibit a
n avuncular fondness for them, smiling indulgently as the young men drink and shout. They fill every corner of the room, including mine, and slur their words as they ask me, several times over, what I’m doing there all by myself. This is their night off, they say. They have come from the military base at Mount Pleasant, and will be heading back there first thing in the morning; tonight they are crashing at the barracks in town and are taking the opportunity to drink as much as they possibly can. To deflect their bemused questions—What brought me here? How long have I been here? Why?—I ask them about themselves. A tall Scottish squaddie slides heavily into the chair beside me and knocks the table with his knees so that all the drinks sway in their glasses.
“In Afghanistan, I shot a fourteen-year-old boy in the chest,” he says. “It opened him right up.” He makes a gesture with his hands bursting out from his heart as though he were releasing a dove.
I don’t know whether he’s telling the truth, a macabre lie, or something in between.
“Was that the first time you shot someone?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “First time, there was this old man with a stick hobbling up to the checkpoint. They’re not supposed to approach the checkpoint and he doesn’t stop when we fire warning shots, and it’s my job to kill him if he keeps on walking. But I panic and I shoot him in the leg instead. So we take him in, patch him up, and he tells us that Allah came to him in a dream and ordered him to commit suicide by walking to the checkpoint. “Anytime you want to try that again,” I tell him, “you’re welcome. Come on down. Just try it.” Before we sent him packing the guys took his walking stick off him. Later they gave it back to me in a frame as a memento.”
“They framed his walking stick?”
“Shall I come back with you to your place?” the soldier asks.
“No,” I say. “That’s OK.” I put on my coat and blurrily check that I have my purse.
He looks nonplussed at my departure, and helps himself to my unfinished wine. “Goodnight, wee woman,” he says.
—
Though I am strange in Stanley, to the locals and increasingly to myself, it turns out that I am not in fact the only oddball who has washed up on the islands in search of something. A few days after my excursion to the Globe, I learn that there is another foreigner in town. I spot him walking up and down the waterfront, taking selfies in front of the church, the whale-bone arch, the governor’s house. The first time he speaks to me, it is to ask me to photograph him next to a flock of upland geese. As I line up the shot, he tells me, in a rush of over-enunciated words, that he is an American currently living in Japan, a linguist, an expert in pronunciation and dialect. He has come to the Falklands to study speech patterns, but nobody will speak to him.
He pulls out his iPhone and shows me an app he has created, designed to teach Japanese people to speak English in a variety of accents. The options are: America, America (Southern), Canada, England, England (Northern), Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. He wants to add the Falklands accent to his collection, but first, he needs to master it himself. He needs people to speak to him.
He looks me in the eye as though he suspects I don’t believe him and says, “How are you? My name is Tony!” in each of the accents offered on the app, with the panache of a magician performing a trick. He expects me to be amazed. For the most part, he is unconvincing. The attempt at Welsh is particularly bad. He is unable to confirm, when I ask, whether there is much demand in Japan for tuition in speaking English with a Falklands accent.
It’s freezing on the waterfront. The spattering of rain is solidifying into hail. I interrupt Tony long enough to gesture at the weather as an excuse to leave, and hurry away. As I jog back home, bent into the wind, I figure that he is an eccentric, a little unhinged, a little weird, essentially harmless.
A couple of days later, I am sitting in a large leather armchair in the sitting room of the guest house, reading, when I overhear a conversation between Maura and Paola, the Chilean woman who does the cleaning. They don’t seem to know I am here; the back of the chair is hiding me from view. They are talking about Tony.
“He is a shady character for sure,” Maura is saying, “coming here, asking questions.”
A murmured assent from Paola.
Maura goes on: “His stories don’t add up, you know.”
“They don’t,” says Paola.
Maura: “Everyone is saying so. When he first comes up to me, in the West Store, he said he was on holiday. Then he made a slip though, didn’t he, and said he was working. What kind of work is he doing that he wants to lie about like that?”
Paola makes a noise that suggests there can be no innocent answer.
“Now he says he wants to talk to people. Wants to come in here and ask me questions. What does he want to go asking people questions for? He looks like an Argentinian. He says he lives in Japan but he looks like an Argentinian, doesn’t he?”
“He looks like an Argentinian,” Paola confirms. “And I hear him speaking Spanish on the telephone.”
“There you are,” says Maura. “He’s an Argentinian. Asking questions. He’s a journalist. He’s writing about us all.”
This overheard outpouring of suspicion, assumption, guesswork and paranoia is the result of an entrenched, long-held, Falklands-wide belief that foreigners who come in and ask questions are bad news. The connections Maura makes between stranger and Argentinian and journalist are almost seamless. There have been journalists, she says, who came and asked questions and then twisted the answers they were given to make the islanders seem backward, or racist, or stupid. Being a journalist in Stanley is tantamount to being a spy.
—
I sink down into the chair and wonder whether they say this kind of thing about me, too. When I say I am a “teacher of writing,” what is it that they think? Is the fact that I have tried to disguise my work, that I have been vague about what it is I’m doing, used against me as evidence of my untrustworthiness? When Maura looks in on me typing away at the dressing table, is she feeling the same dread and hostility that fills her voice as she talks about Tony? For a second, I find myself looking forward to leaving for Bleaker: being entirely alone seems preferable, now, to being surrounded by people who don’t like you.
Am I as unsettling to Maura as the American/Japanese/Argentinian linguist?
I think—I hope—not. The fact that I am relatively young, and female, helps. It makes me appear less of a threat. I have heard people refer to me as “the young girl”; Maura bustles into the house each morning with the question, “How’s my little one today?”
But I do feel awkward, sitting there in the big leather chair, listening to the two women accuse the eccentric linguist of spying and writing about them; because of course it is me who is spying, if only accidentally, and it is me who is writing about them.
You’re looking the wrong way, I think. You’ve got the wrong guy.
Alternative Openings
WARNING: Although this area is believed to be clear of mines, it is possible that a mine may be washed ashore from a nearby minefield.
Is this cabin fever? After three weeks in Stanley, I am suddenly full of ennui. I feel caged, antsy, checking the table of dates on my itinerary and wondering, over and over, how many more days? The answer is, of course, many more days, and that I need to stop counting and keep working. But in this restless, gloomy mood, time seems to have stuttered to a slow, sick crawl.
I know I cannot afford to be so precious. I have to be strict with myself. Read. Take vitamin D in an attempt to compensate for the dismal lack of sunlight. Go for walks (oh, but the walks, the walks, the flat, miserable countryside, with nothing to vary it but the occasional skull-and-crossbones landmine sign and the churn of the Atlantic beyond the scrubby coast). And write. Push your brain. Work.
I get no texts, no calls. My phone no longer buzzes with emails. In the uninterrupted hours, I become aware of my moods changing almost by the minute, and surrounded by the frozen si
lence of the rest of the day, these shifts feel monumental. To counteract this, I devise ways to interrupt myself. I set arbitrary alarms. At 14:45, I tell myself, I’ll stop working and go for a run. At 17:09, I’ll make coffee.
Bleaker House: SITUATION
Ollie’s mother met his father at a farmers’ market in Oxford. His father had looked lost, she said, wandering aimlessly, clutching a potato he didn’t seem to know how to pay for. He had been in the country a few days, and was bemused by it. He knew how nothing worked: buses, streetlights, automatic doors and credit cards were all miraculous and threatening to him.
The way Ollie’s mother told it, the attraction was mutual and instant—his father was wild looking and strong, and before long they were exchanging life stories. He told her tall tales of the Falklands: of storms and waves as high as houses; of a sheep that gave birth to conjoined lambs, one black, one white, both writhing, wet, twitching their shared leg as though to free themselves. He described elephant seals dragging their bulk from the sea and screaming like babies; albatrosses lifting a live foal from its mother’s teat; a beached whale dying loudly and pungently, pounding the sand with its tail. He told her how soldiers had arrived on orange boats, jabbering in Spanish, shivering, gesticulating with dripping guns, how he had let his prize bull loose on them and how they had fled in fear, and all the while Ollie’s mother, who was twenty years old and had never left Oxfordshire, listened and nodded and told him to go on. She was, she reported, putty in his rough, gnarled hands.
Within days of their first meeting, Ollie had been conceived. And within a week, his mother said, waving a hand as though this were an inconsequential detail, his father had, you know, died in a freak accident with a toaster.