by Nell Stevens
It’s encouraging to think of this as I sit down to commence my 2,500 daily words. It is easy to be a Book Machine, I tell myself. It is easy to be a spinning wheel. I am simply converting the things I have consumed—food, yes, but more importantly the stories I have read, dreams I’ve had, people I’ve met and conversations I’ve overheard—into a different form. My lanolin-coated fingers begin to type a sentence, then another.
It surprises me, that first day, to find the words coming so easily. It feels painless to put them down on the page. With nothing but the weather happening around me, Ollie and his adventures seem more vibrant and absorbing. From the sunroom, the grey view of the bay and muddy fields makes the story I am telling seem brighter in my mind. In less than two hours I check the word count and discover that I’ve already met my goal. I am a strange combination of exhausted and, perversely, a little disappointed. I have done military exercises, devised a master plan for my island time, spun wool with George and Alison and written 2,500 words, and it is only mid-afternoon.
My stomach rumbles suddenly and painfully. The rations I have set out for the rest of the day will at best take the edge off the hunger, rather than satisfy it. In less than a week, George and Alison will be leaving for Stanley and I will be truly and utterly alone.
There is a lot of time ahead of me and perhaps not much to fill it.
—
Bleaker is not large, but feels that way as I struggle against the wind. I have been trying to get my bearings. The northernmost and southernmost points are hard to reach by foot, so my early explorations cover the middle section, where the landmarks have reassuringly literal, solid names: Big Pond, Rocky Gulch, Pebbly Bay. I learn the route between my house and the beach where the aquamarine water looks, in rare glimmers of sunshine, discordantly tropical. As I cross the white sand, my footprints are the only ones. It is like walking on fresh snow. Bright sunlight followed by dark cloud-shadows. Wind. Bleached pieces of bone underfoot.
At the far end of the beach, a penguin colony is forming. The birds cluster together facing the ocean, from which others emerge in threes and fours. When I get too close to them they slide onto their stomachs, waggle their heads from side to side and gargle distractedly; if I keep my distance, though, they seem happy to ignore me, and continue to gaze out to sea unfazed.
On these early expeditions, I reach places that, for the remainder of my stay, I never find again: a dark, slimy cave half hidden in the cliff face; a patch of coastline off which a huge pillar of rock stands upright in the ocean, waves frothing at its base. Later, I spend days searching for these spots with no success. They begin to take on a mythic quality in my mind. I plough through mud and hail, certain that if I cover enough ground I will surely come across them again, but I never do. Instead I find animals: a sea lion whose disturbed roar sends me scurrying backwards, stumbling over my own feet and mounds of tussac, heart pounding; fur seals sprawled like sunbathers on the rocks; giant wheeling birds above me.
—
Alison creates a phrase for my writing process. She calls it “doing my words.” She pulls up outside the house each day around eleven and cheerfully calls over the roar of the wind, “Have you done your words today, Nell? Do you want to come for a drive?” I respond, “Yes, I’ve done my words,” or “No, I haven’t done my words yet.”
You’d better stay in and do your words.
Get your words done so you can go for your walk before the storm hits.
Pop over for a biscuit when you’ve finished doing your words.
There are several days, early on, when the process does not go as smoothly as it did on my first attempt. Sometimes it takes me an hour, two hours, to settle on a single sentence. I am stuck on the outside of the story, blindly guessing what its real author would write. On those occasions it feels as though I am dragging the pages out of myself, letter by letter, and that each one is flat and dry and dead and weighty.
In these episodes of uncertainty, I cling to Alison’s idea of “doing words” like a life raft, even after she and George have left the island, taking off in a little red plane that wobbles over the settlement before it disappears. “Doing words” is a much less daunting activity than writing. It feels matter-of-fact, as though each single word is a small, inevitable, finite, quotidian task. I do sit-ups and push-ups from the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plan. I do my daily walk to the beach and back. I do my words.
—
A dream: You are in a place that looks like England. You are with your friends. They say, Come to a party with us! And you say you’ll go. And then you look around and realize that you are in fact 8,000 miles away from them, and completely by yourself.
—
Breakfast: a sachet of instant porridge made with water. A glass of gelatinous fibre drink. Instant coffee (no milk). This is the best meal of the day, and I eat it at the window, looking out to sea.
Eleven o’clock: twenty-five raisins and ten almonds. I count them out deliberately, obsessively, knowing that if I accidentally take more, I risk hungry days later on.
Lunch: powdered soup, a granola bar, instant coffee.
Four o’clock: twenty-five raisins, ten almonds. Sometimes in the afternoons I forage for extra supplies in the house: half a bag of pasta at the back of a cupboard, a tin of peach slices, a jar of chutney.
Dinner: powdered soup.
Just before bed: a single Ferrero Rocher, which I eat so slowly that it lasts a full hour. I lick the chocolate shell as though it were ice cream and nibble at the wafer beneath. It is the pinnacle of luxury, a reward for making it through another day. It is a nightly celebration that my return to civilization, to warmth and conversations and company and a variety of views from a variety of windows, is inching closer. In my notebook, I muse on confectionery: “You never really want the hazelnut—but imagine how it would taste without it and the whole project of the Ferrero Rocher would fall flat. It would be bland and empty. It simply has to have the nut.”
The day that George and Alison left for the mainland, Alison came to the house and gave me a potato. “I had one spare,” she said, as she held it out to me. In my hands, it was weighty, earthy, large—the opposite of powdered soups and fibre gel and painstakingly counted raisins. I took it to the kitchen and placed it, like a kind of trophy, on the counter.
It is still there. I am saving it for an emergency. It squats by the kettle, full of promise and reassurance, waiting to be called upon, and I spend a lot of time staring at it. I try to imagine the moment in the coming days or weeks when I will be so desolate and lonely that I will make the decision to eat it. What will have changed by then? Who will I be when I turn on the oven, pierce the brown skin, and bake the potato?
Bleaker House: COMPLICATION
Installed in the Harbourside Hotel, where pastel-coloured bunting sagged from the lobby ceiling and a surly waitress served him instant coffee with UHT milk, Ollie tried to convince himself he was on holiday. From his room he had a view of the bay and the grey hillside beyond it. When, on the morning of his second day in the Falklands, sunlight briefly burst through the clouds, the water looked blue, almost as though it might be warm.
It was a week of his life, that was all. The flight back to England would be leaving the following Saturday, and in the meantime, all he needed to do was make a few enquiries about the identity of the letter-writer on Bleaker Island, pop over to see him or her, pop back, perhaps take a look at the museum he had passed on his search for accommodation, and then be on his way back to Oxford, and reality, and Mei. If he somehow managed to put a hundred pounds a month towards his credit-card bill, he could pay off the cost of this—What? Eccentric jaunt?—in just over eighteen months.
The lingering questions regarding who exactly he was popping to Bleaker Island to see, and how exactly one did pop to Bleaker, and what on earth he’d find once he did so, would be answered in due course, he was sure.
—
The proprietor of the Triumph Inn looked Ollie up a
nd down with an expression somewhere between astonishment and disgust. It was dimly lit inside the pub, but Ollie could still make out the sheen on the man’s forehead and the deep red hue of his sunburned skin. The man chewed his bottom lip and squinted, as though Ollie were a question on a quiz show. Behind him, shelves of sticky-looking bottles were decorated with faded streamers in red, blue and a colour that had once been white. A small notice was pinned to the wood; it showed a Union Jack, a silhouetted soldier and the words “Heroes Welcome in the Falkland Islands.” Ollie had the distinct impression that the barman did not consider him a hero.
“Bleaker Island?” Ollie repeated.
“I heard you.”
“Oh, good.” Ollie tried a smile, which was ignored.
The barman didn’t move, but continued to stare, blinking occasionally as though to ascertain whether or not he were dreaming. Eventually, he fixed his eyes on a point somewhere beyond Ollie’s head, and said, “It’s winter now. It’s June.”
“Yes,” Ollie said, “I know. It’s backwards here. I mean—not backwards, of course, just the opposite way round to, you know, England.”
The barman held a glass up to the light, which revealed a pattern of smudges and encrusted dirt across its surface. He passed the sleeve of his shirt across it and moved to the pump, releasing a trickle of watery-looking beer.
“We don’t get visitors in winter,” he said.
“No, I suppose not.”
“Not at this time of year we don’t.”
“No. Well, just me, I guess.”
Ollie’s investigations around Stanley had not yet yielded any useful information. The waitress at the Harbourside Hotel had given no appearance of understanding him when he had made his first tentative enquiry about the best way to get to Bleaker Island; neither had the woman at the West Store from whom he had attempted to buy a sausage roll; and now, at the Triumph Inn, it appeared he would have the same result.
The barman finished pulling the pint and slammed the glass down so that the beer sloshed against the sides and spilled. Ollie fumbled with his wallet, put money down, and turned to face the clusters of drinkers who had been watching him in silence since he had entered the pub. In the dim light it was hard to make out specifics. His gaze seemed to have a repellent quality, turning the onlookers away from him and back to their conversations. He had an impression of general, widespread sunburn and pairs of squinting eyes that didn’t seem convinced they belonged together. Dartboards, gaping like open mouths, hung from the walls.
It was only when Ollie had downed his pint and resolved to leave that the barman grunted, “Ain’t nobody on Bleaker Island no more. Not for years. Ain’t nobody writing no letters from Bleaker Island.”
—
“Oxford, you say?”
Nancy Fletcher, archivist, was standing in the doorway of the Falkland Islands National Government Archives, surveying Ollie with an expression that suggested both scepticism and sympathy. Her eyes slid from his shoes, which were still mud-coated from his trek into town from the airport, to the ID card he was holding out to her. She yanked it from his hand and scrutinized it, raising it to the light as though she were checking for a fraudulent twenty-pound note.
“ ‘Balliol College, Oxford,’ ” she read.
“Yes.”
“I read a book about Oxford,” she said, showing no signs of being prepared to move from her position guarding the entrance. “Stuffy place, the book said. A lot of murders.”
She was in her mid-forties, smartly dressed in a way that didn’t seem to fit with her surroundings: the lumpy white block in which the archives were housed; a grassy bank, slippery with goose droppings, that led up to the building from the road; and a view of a decaying shipwreck in the shallows that looked as though it were gradually melting into the water.
“It’s that way,” the waitress at the Harbourside Hotel had grudgingly told him, waving a limp hand down the road. “There’s a sign. It says, ‘Government Archives,’ so you’ll not miss it.”
The “sign,” when he eventually found it, was about the size of his palm, beside a doorbell labelled “Ring for Archivist.”
“We get people here,” Nancy said, frowning. “Journalists, who just want to dig around and turn up a stink.”
“Right. I’m sure.”
“It does nobody any good.”
“I’m not a journalist.”
“No Argentinian connections?”
He shook his head.
She was still holding his Oxford ID, turning it over in her hands. She glanced at the small print on the back, as though it might offer further insight into Ollie’s motives.
“Normally the researchers write to me ahead of time. They ask me about the documents they want to see. They check what I have. They don’t just turn up. It’s appointment only. You can’t just turn up, you know, out of the blue.”
“Right, sorry,” said Ollie. He was unsure whether to mention his family connections or not. He had resisted in his earlier enquiries, unclear what response it might provoke, and worried that friendliness might prove more awkward than the mistrustful hostility he had so far received. “Well, can I make an appointment?”
“I suppose so.”
“Great. When can I come? When would suit you?”
Nancy considered him, tilting her head and staring at his face as though he were a watch. “Twenty minutes.” She stepped back and closed the door sharply in his face.
Ollie stared at the barred entrance for a moment before turning and shuffling back down to the road. The shipwreck was straight ahead of him, and on the pavement, a small, damp bench, which seemed to have been placed to enable sustained perusal of the rotting carcass of the boat. Its helm had fallen away completely, and the remaining structure looked skeletal: an uncovered ribcage with nothing inside except birds and loose, waterlogged wood. The wind roaring in across the water was sharp and cold. Ollie began to shiver.
By the time the twenty-minute wait was over, he had lost feeling in his fingers. He fumbled with the “Ring for Archivist” bell again. Nancy appeared and showed him into a small cloakroom, where he reluctantly took off his jacket.
“No phones, no filming equipment, no pens,” she said, when he emerged, still shivering, from the room.
He shook his head and held out his arms. “Nothing.” When she continued to scrutinize him, he wondered whether he should turn out his pockets.
“All right,” she said, eventually. She turned on her heel. “You can follow me into the Reading Room now.”
The Reading Room turned out to be directly behind her, so it took only three steps for Ollie to follow her inside. It was small, almost entirely filled with a large, empty table. The walls were lined with shelves of documents labelled, variously, “1890s etc.” and “A, B, C” followed by “U, V” and on the opposite side, “D, E.” In one corner there was a desk that looked slightly bowed under the weight of an enormous, grey computer, which gave off a low, strained hum, as though it were over-heating.
Nancy sat down at the wide table, folding her arms. Ollie pulled out a chair and did the same.
“So, what is it you were looking for, Oliver?”
Ollie took a breath. “Well, as I said, my name is Oliver Graves. I’ve come to look for my father.”
“And what would your father be doing in my archives?”
“My father’s name is—was—Alsop Graves.”
—
Once Nancy had recovered from her incredulity, and then from her excitement, her prevailing emotion appeared to be irritation.
“Alsop Graves had a son! He had a son! Why on earth didn’t you say?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Mad as a hatter, Alsop Graves. Mad as a box of frogs.”
“Right,” said Ollie. “Yes. Right.”
She stood up and crossed the room to the computer, clicking the mouse several times and saying, “Wake up! Damn this machine. Wake up!” Eventually it whirred into life; the white screen
lit up her face as she peered at it, typing rapidly.
“Is everything OK?” Ollie asked after a few moments.
She didn’t look up at him, but continued to click and tap at the keyboard. Eventually, still without turning her gaze from the computer, she said, “What’s your full name?”
“Oliver Graves.”
“No, your full name. Middle name, too.”
“Oh, er, Oliver Andrew Graves.”
“Date of birth?”
“11th March 1983.”
“Siblings?”
“Sorry?”
She glared at him. “Mother’s maiden name?”
“I’m not sure I understand what—what this is for.”
Nancy sighed and swung her legs out from under the desk. “I like to keep full records of the genealogy of all the families here, and I don’t currently have an item for any surviving members of the Graves family. I’m trying to piece it together.” She began tapping loudly at the keyboard. “This is a turn-up for the books. I’m not sure we’ve ever been completely missing a record like this before.”
“Could you explain why it’s so important to have everyone’s family tree?”
When she had finished typing, she turned back to him. “Well, Oliver, in a community like this one—we’re a close-knit bunch, and there’s not many of us—it helps to know who is related to whom.” She raised a suggestive eyebrow. “Sometimes when you see two young people getting together, you know, it’s useful to have a quiet word, to point out certain things they already have in common.”
“Right. It’s just that I don’t intend on ‘getting together’ with anyone.”
“You’re very like your father, you know,” said Nancy, without looking up at Ollie. “I can see the resemblance now.” She gave the keyboard a few more emphatic prods and then returned to the table, resuming her position opposite him, re-folding her arms. “So you’ve come to find out about your roots, have you?”
“Something like that. I was planning on going to Bleaker Island, actually.”