Bleaker House

by Nell Stevens

  —

  My writing sessions at the dressing table become fitful and disjointed in this mood. I take run-ups at the beginning, trying it from several different angles. I cast my line, over and over, into the water, waiting for something to bite.

  In front of me, my reflection is scowling in the mirror, sulky lower lip protruding. I exaggerate the frown and stick my tongue out. It’s just a story. Just words in one order or another. It’s supposed to be fun.

  I meet my own eye and then blink, in the hope that this might dismiss the petulant, self-pitying thoughts that are almost obscuring the novel from view.

  Bleaker House: SITUATION

  Alsop Graves was a master of fucking. The English girl was under him, sweating and moaning and urging him on. They had barely left the bedroom in a week.

  He bellowed as he came, then rolled off her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. As he sank back onto sheets patterned with roses and stared at the low, white ceiling overhead, he felt his body tingling with confidence. He was still the same Alsop Graves in England as he was at home. He could still impress and dominate and feel masterly; he was still a hero. His future, his new life in this foreign land, stretched ahead of him full of glorious possibility.

  A short while later, the girl went out to buy milk and suggested Alsop make toast, gesturing at a small, boxy contraption on the kitchen counter. Alsop applied himself to the task with full attention, peeling apart bread someone had already cut, compressing the lever and scrutinizing the machine’s hellish interior glow. It smelled at once familiar—the stove in the Graveses’ house burning early in the morning, his mother leaning the weight of her body onto the knife as she sliced a loaf, the suggestion of warmth—and unnerving. It emitted a strange, unearthly hum. Alsop waited and imagined the return of the English girl, how he would present her with the peculiar, mechanical toast. They would eat it together and afterwards do again what they had already done so many times upstairs on the floral sheets. In a week or so, or a month or so, they’d marry. He’d buy a farm.

  He prodded the appliance with a knife the way he might stoke a fire at home, and when the electric current shot through the metal into his body, his only feeling was of anticipation.

  A Very Short Employment History

  I am having difficulty breathing. It starts about three months into my first real job.

  I have graduated from university and moved to London. I have a place to live and a cat. I work for a human-rights organization, which strikes me as, if not interesting in the day-to-day sense, at least an interesting thing to tell people at parties. I am pleased to be doing something that sounds significant and adult, and since it is 2009, in the midst of the recession, I’m lucky to have a job at all. But, still, I am having difficulty breathing.

  One morning I come into work to find four photographs of a woman being stoned to death on my desk. She is buried up to her neck. The side of her head is bleeding. Her mouth is wide open and you can tell she is wailing. Someone has stuck a yellow Post-it note onto the last image: “Press Release!!!”

  A doctor listens to my symptoms—shortness of breath, a feeling that I can’t fill my lungs, compulsive yawning, occasional panic—and prescribes Valium. I spend a week floating through work on a gentle, sunny high, writing press releases about torture, harassment of lawyers and arbitrary detention with giggly flourishes. Then I decide that clear-headed panic is preferable to vapid fuzziness and dump the pills.

  I write fiction in the bodies of emails and spreadsheets so that anyone passing my screen will think I’m working. When I get home I have to decipher charts and disconnected paragraphs in which figures and budgets are dispersed between lines of a novel about an amateur Van Gogh scholar who is dying of lung cancer.

  Somewhere in the world, someone does something terrible. Someone else reports it to their government, or to an NGO, or to a journalist, and the news eventually travels to a minor human-rights organization in London, where, before long, it arrives on my desk. I write a press release about it. The next day, somewhere else in the world, or in the same place, someone else or the same person does some other terrible thing. I write a press release about that, too. It strikes me that the day people stop doing terrible things, I’ll be out of a job.

  What should a writer do, if she can’t support herself by writing? I am a jumble of aspirations and overlapping motivations: I want to have a normal job, to live in the real world, to get on the train every morning and go to the pub after work, because that is what life is like, and I want to know all about life. I am twenty-three and I am learning what it is to work. If I won the lottery right now, I tell myself, I wouldn’t quit, because how could anyone write from outside the realm of normal existence, of commuting and leaves on the line and birthday cake in the third-floor kitchen and departmental meetings in which people use action and impact as verbs? And besides, I have not won the lottery. I don’t even buy tickets. The value of showing up at the office each morning is therefore not up for debate: I have rent to pay; I have a living to make.

  And—but?—I have stories to write.

  —

  Approach One: The writer takes a job that contrasts with her literary work, that uses entirely different mental and/or physical muscles. She becomes a builder, landscape gardener, personal trainer, postal worker, traffic warden. When her formal working day is done, the writer sits down at her desk and finds her creative faculties replete, untouched, raring to go. Examples of Approach One: James Kelman, bus driver; T. S. Eliot, bank clerk; William S. Burroughs, exterminator.

  Approach Two: The writer is employed in an area related to writing. She works in education, publishing, theatre, advertising, and hopes that the content of her days will filter into the content of her books, that the skills practised, lessons learned and contacts made at work will enable her to further her own alternative career. Examples of Approach Two: F. Scott Fitzgerald, copywriter; Robert Frost, English teacher; Toni Morrison, editor.

  The human-rights job is, I think, an attempt at Approach Two, which I am now histrionically resenting for not being more like Approach One. The result: chronic shortness of breath, a disjointed, piecemeal novel and a string of decidedly lacklustre appraisals from my boss.

  After a year in human rights, I attempt a transition towards Approach One by applying for a position in event management that is only four days a week. Despite my best efforts to explain the logic of my decision to end my human-rights career, the email circulated to all staff by the office manager reads, “Nell Stevens is taking an early retirement.”

  —

  When I start my new job, Mondays are for writing. Every other day is a blur of photocopying and name-badge printing and travel bookings and canapé orders. It also becomes apparent that while Mondays are, technically, my day off, I’m still expected to be available by email and phone, and so they are better classified as working-from-home days. I set myself up in the little study at the top of the North London flat that I now share with Will, and then spend the day staring obsessively at my mobile, dreading the moment when it rings.

  When the director asks me to run a series of conferences in Hong Kong, which will mean being away for weeks on end, I agree, partly because I’ve never been to Hong Kong, partly because it will be time away from Will, who by now has begun his descent into listless depression, and partly because it will give me an excuse not to come into the office.

  The subject of the conferences I will be running is “Suicide Prevention in Asian Cities.” Years later, when I put this detail into a short story called “The Personal Assistant,” for a fiction workshop at BU, Leslie says I should replace it with something less far-fetched. “I just don’t believe that job exists,” he says. “Come up with something normal—something someone would actually do.”

  —

  In Hong Kong I am so solitary and disorientated that I develop a relationship with Google. I type the beginnings of questions into the browser. It finishes them for me by supplying the c
oncerns of other people. It is almost like having a conversation with someone:

  Is it stupid to—

  Is it stupid to buy a new car

  Is it stupid to quit my job

  Is it stupid to wear boots in summer

  Is it stupid to wear fake glasses

  —

  My phone rings. A man wants to speak to Neil Stevens.

  “I think you must mean me. Nell. Nell Stevens.”

  “No,” he says, “no. I want to speak to your husband, Neil.”

  Thirty floors below my hotel window, cars are streaming along the road in bands of white and red. Light floods up the sides of the buildings: advertisements that coat the city in a permanent glow that feels almost audible. There’s a balcony on the other side of the glass, but the door to it has been sealed for years, ever since a local singer jumped from one of the adjacent rooms and fell twenty-four floors to his death. The man on the phone hangs up.

  Is it stupid to believe in god

  Is it stupid to get back with your ex

  Is it stupid to get a tattoo in another language

  —

  The only thing that really changes in Hong Kong is that now I can hyperventilate on the thirtieth floor of buildings instead of the third. Approach One is not working out any better than Approach Two. At this point it seems necessary to admit that the problem is not with the approaches. The problem must be with me.

  I turn, again, to Google and search for “Creative Writing MFA programmes with financial aid.”

  How can I—

  How can I make money

  How can I lose weight

  How can I keep from singing

  How can I stop snoring

  How can I help Gaza

  How can I stop sweating

  How can I be happy

  How can I tell which ipad I have

  A Perfect Formula

  In early scenes of Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, Julia Roberts gets up in the middle of the night and prays to God to tell her what to do. She is unhappily married and wants to travel the world. Her husband doesn’t understand her. She is stifled by her successful life in New York. On her knees, she clasps her hands together so tightly her knuckles turn white. She says, Hello, God…nice to finally meet you. I’m sorry I’ve never spoken directly to you before, but I hope I’ve expressed my ample gratitude for all the blessings you’ve given [pause] to me in my life.

  I know every single word of this scene by heart.

  I know this not because I am a fan of Julia Roberts, or Ryan Murphy, or Elizabeth Gilbert. Rather, it’s because Eat Pray Love is the only film I watch in the Falklands.

  I didn’t plan to spend my fellowship studying, intensely, the story of “one woman’s search for everything,” but before I left home, I was incapable of imagining a world without Netflix, and so didn’t think to prepare a supply of entertainment. Eat Pray Love happens, by complete coincidence, to be the only film I have on my computer—a lightweight laptop with no DVD drive. The idea that there would be no way to stream video in the Falklands did not cross my mind before I left—let alone the thought of no high-speed Wi-Fi, let alone the spluttering, extortionate Internet connection that only works 10 per cent of the time, and even then, barely manages to load text-only emails, or the topmost slice of a digital photograph.

  When I realize my mistake, I panic. I make plaintive calls to my family, and send pleas to friends for suggestions. In Stanley there are places I can buy DVDs, but without a way to play them on my computer, they’ll be useless on Bleaker. I investigate the option of ordering a DVD drive online, but delivery to the Falklands would take weeks; not even Amazon can get to this remote corner of the South Atlantic in time. I optimistically buy The Graduate from iTunes, and get through scratch card after scratch card of Internet time before giving up, the film 2.3 per cent downloaded, an estimated eighty-nine hours remaining until completion.

  This is frustrating because I know it should not be as troubling to me as it is. I did not travel to the bottom of the world to watch films. I did not travel to the bottom of the world to spend a lot of time and money trying to acquire films to watch. I came here to write, and should therefore accept that for the duration of my stay on Bleaker Island, if I don’t want to write (or read, or sleep, or venture out for a walk in sub-zero temperatures along the shoreline), the thing I will be doing is watching Eat Pray Love.

  —

  “It’s the only film I have with me,” I tell Annabel, the archivist, a few days before I am due to leave for Bleaker.

  “That’s wonderful,” she says. “It’s a perfect formula. You can write your own version.”

  There’s a man in the archive reading room who is trying to research his family history. He has flown to Stanley from an island off West Falkland specifically for this task, and is filling the room with a distinctly agricultural smell. He looks up now in a way that suggests he’d prefer silence, but Annabel overrules him. She is familiar, it turns out, with the film’s plot. She wants to help me craft a kind of sequel.

  “Make sure you’ve left someone behind who is heartbroken over you,” she says, “but tell him this is something you just have to do—for your art. Then, now, in Stanley, you’re in the eating phase. You have to stuff yourself for the next few days.”

  I consider Stanley’s gastronomic offerings. Cans of out-of-date soup. UHT milk. Bread that arrives already mouldy. Everything is shipped around the world from England, except for the “fresh” produce, which comes battered and withered after a sea journey from Chile. I paid six pounds for a saggy, sad lettuce, before learning to do as the locals do: stick to vitamin tablets and artificial-fibre gel.

  “What about on Bleaker Island?” I ask.

  “You have to have a spiritual awakening. Wander around and pray in splendid isolation. Makes perfect sense.”

  “What about the love part?”

  Annabel stalls. I tell her I have a one-night layover in Santiago airport on my way home and she says, “Well then, there you go. In Santiago, you have to get it on.”

  —

  [Gasping. Tears.] I’m in serious trouble. I don’t know what to do. I need an answer. Please. Tell me what to do. Oh God, help me please. [Tears.] Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. [Pause, then, in a different tone of voice.] Go back to bed, Liz.

  I would like to say that I don’t know why I have Eat Pray Love on my computer, but the truth is that I have a weakness for saccharine Hollywood films in which women with nice hair and no cellulite get all they want at the end, as long as all they want is a husband. This predilection has overridden my strong dislike of anything that resembles “self help,” which Eat Pray Love most definitely does.

  That said, if I were given the chance to choose, consciously, a film to watch repeatedly for weeks on end, I like to think I’d pick something less embarrassing.

  —

  Maura’s prediction that I would be the only guest at the house during my stay in Stanley turns out to be incorrect. On the day before I am due to leave for Bleaker, a Swiss ornithologist arrives. He is staying a few nights only, then heading to a small, outlying island to the west to study the migratory behaviour of caracaras.

  I am back in the large leather chair in the sitting room, reading again, when for a second time I overhear a conversation I’m not supposed to. The ornithologist is with Maura, asking her about thermal clothing, local birdlife experts, and some kind of radio equipment he is trying to track down in Stanley. I suddenly feel horribly underprepared for Bleaker. I have been in a state of anxious denial about my imminent departure.

  “Who’s the girl who’s staying here?” the ornithologist asks.

  So this is it, I think. This is when I find out what Maura thinks of me. I recall the bitter, defensive way she talked about Tony the linguist: a shady character, a spy.

  “Oh, Nell?” says Maura. “She’s a young American authoress. She’s here writing a history of the islands. She works at t
he archives, but she spends most of her time playing on her Game Boy. Anyhow, she’s leaving for Bleaker Island tomorrow.”

  I am amazed by this report, and it takes me a little while to make sense of it. This is what Maura has supplied to fill the gaps I have intentionally left in my accounts of myself. I would have thought the conversation she and I had about my work being fiction, about making things up, would have stayed in her mind, but considering how much time I have spent with Annabel in the archives, it is reasonable enough for her to think I’m working on a history book. “American” is surprising, but perhaps understandable since the fellowship paying for my trip is from Boston University, and my T’s sometimes sound with an American flatness that I struggle and fail to correct. The Game Boy, though, is the real mystery. A few minutes later, when the conversation has moved back to caracaras, I look down at the Kindle in my hands and realize the source of the confusion.

  —

  Later that night, I sit on the floor of my bedroom counting raisins. I have planned carefully for this moment. I have brought supplies with me from England, topped them up from the limited offerings of the West Store, and am now attempting final calculations. The strict baggage limit for the tiny red planes that transport people around the Falklands restricts how much food I can bring with me to the island. At Stanley airport, I will be weighed alongside my luggage; our combined weight will be used to calculate not only who and what is positioned where on the aircraft, but whether I’m allowed to fly at all. I scrutinize myself in the mirror to try to guess how heavy I am, then optimistically add a few more raisins to the pile.

  There is no means of buying food on Bleaker Island. This is a fact both obvious—it’s an island, unpopulated except for the farm manager and the owners, who spend only some of their time there—and confounding. Everything I will eat while I am there must come with me when I leave tomorrow. If I had been better informed, I would have known that I could arrange for provisions to be shipped out to me during my stay, but by the time I learn this it’s too late: the shipping plans are made months in advance. Most visitors to the smaller islands like Bleaker come either in the warm months as part of fully catered organized tours, or are scientists on research trips with the knowledge and expertise of academic colleagues and institutions behind them. Not many—not any?—are writers who looked at a map of the world and thought, whimsically, how about going here?