by Nell Stevens
Fat grey circles spatter across the paper. A dark curtain of rain is heading my way. I tuck the new possessions inside my coat and begin to move back towards the settlement.
As I walk, I entertain ludicrous fantasies about what might be inside the parcel: pasta, maybe, or rice. Part of me wants to linger, to draw out the novelty of not knowing what has suddenly arrived on the island. It could be something useful, like fresh notebooks, free from the messy scribbles I’ve dashed across the ones I brought. It could be something gloriously indulgent and pointless: a scented candle, a pair of earrings. Each of these successive thoughts delights me more than the last.
Back at the house, I manage to delay opening the package by insisting to myself that I need to shower first. Once clean, I take out the apples one by one and arrange them beside the potato. Then I make coffee, using tomorrow’s ration since I’ve already had my day’s share. I take the cup to the sunroom, where I sit, parcel in my lap, and prepare myself to be amazed.
Inside: an encouraging card from my novelist friend depicting an elderly woman flying a tiny plane and quoting Helen Keller—“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing”—and sheaths of CDs which glint and reflect the light in clear white rings. I slide a disc out and run my finger around its edge. Each one is like a whole new parcel: blank packaging and no hint as to what is inside. I have been sent a series of mysteries.
The house has a CD player, thankfully, and I feed it a disc at random. Outside, it has started to snow in broad, damp flakes that splatter on the roof of the sunroom, blocking out the last of the light. Then, from the speakers, the sound of an audience clapping. “This is a story,” says a voice, twangy, American, “of the first time I hung out with Kanye West.” It is Aziz Ansari, I realize, doing stand-up. There is laughter in the auditorium.
I glance around the room, searching for someone to thank. I don’t know exactly what I am feeling, but I know that right now I wish there were a person here to share this surging, singing, surprised sensation.
“Thank you,” I say, to the emptiness in the house.
Was it only a few hours ago that I almost-but-not-quite thought that awful thought about not being able to finish the book? Since then, the plane has arrived, and I met the pilot and the doctor and the sea-lion scientist, and Aziz Ansari has appeared in the sunroom and so much has happened in one day—The wind is in the west! The caracaras have eaten one of the hens! And a parcel! And apples!—that an unsettling and entirely new concern flits into my mind: what if, after all this time spent worrying about if and how I’m coping on the island, the reverse problem occurs? After these silent, windswept weeks alone, how will I readjust to the constant happenings and variousness of normal life? What will I make, now, of a London street, where thousands of people will do thousands of things, and the view will change, and buses will go by?
Putting the Girls Through
Three days later, Alison and George are back. I hear the sound of the plane approaching the island, its strange juddering, and a quarter of an hour later see the jeep they left at the airstrip rolling over the crest of the hill towards the settlement, past my house to theirs.
For some reason, my heart is pounding. I feel suddenly self-conscious and invaded. Whatever might have gone on since I last shared the island with other people, whatever difficulties I might have had with myself, with the book, it has all been private. Nobody has witnessed any of it and that has made it feel, if not less real, then at least less consequential. Now, I am faced with the prospect of having to account for how I have spent the past few weeks to the two people who know the island better than anyone. They have made it their home. It is completely ordinary to them. Any attempt on my part to explain my struggles with caracaras and dry heel skin and achieving the straightforward daily task of doing my words will surely strike George and Alison as melodramatic.
I have a week left on the island. By now, according to the original plan, I should have completed a draft and be luxuriating in the comparatively easy task of editing it. Instead, there are thousands of words more to write, and, worse, as I endeavour to get to the end of it, there will now be witnesses.
When Alison arrives outside the house, pulling up in her four-by-four and waving through the window, I find I am grateful for the brief exchange I had with the pilot days before, stilted as it might have been. I feel less rusty now than I otherwise would have. He reminded me what it was like to speak to another human being. I go out to greet Alison feeling moderately confident that I can at least hold my own in a conversation.
I try to look self-assured, breezy, as though I have nothing to hide. It takes me a moment to realize that I don’t actually have anything to hide.
“Hop in,” says Alison, with no preamble. “I’ll take you to have a look at the North End.”
The North End. I think at once of Boston, suddenly seeing, quite clearly, its narrow streets and Italian restaurants and the line of people stretching out of the door of Mike’s pastry shop, waiting for cannoli. In Boston it is summer, and hot, and people will be eating seafood by open windows and drinking cold beer. The nostalgia is like a punch, and it takes a second for me to recover, to set my face into a smile.
She means the north end of the island, beyond the beach and the penguins, beyond even Big Pond, where I have sometimes gone to watch the black swans drift over the black water. The North End is far enough away that I have never reached it. We drive together into new territory, stopping occasionally so that Alison can jump out and plant tufts of tussac she has brought with her. The island gets so battered by the wind, she explains, that it is at risk of being blown away entirely: the more tussac she plants, the better chance the ground stands of holding together. We drive over flat, dark soil, not like the muddy, mossy ground of most of the island; it looks like the site of a huge fire. Alison points to flaking tubes of dark rock on the ground: these are the fossils of trees. Thousands of years ago, there was a forest on Bleaker.
—
The North End, when we get there, is a sharp, craggy point, black cliffs over kelp-slimed caves. There are wide holes in the rocks that give a view of the ocean churning underneath us; it makes me feel sick to look down, as though I am peering into an open stomach. Overhead, birds swerve across clouds; they are everywhere around us: in crannies, long grasses, squawking as they launch from the rocks. Alison points and names them as we scramble down to a stony beach littered with driftwood, and I nod as though I’ve heard of them before: variable hawk, giant petrel, black-crowned night heron. As the afternoon wears on, words gradually come back to me and I begin to participate in the conversation, the wind blowing gulps of salt into my mouth as I speak.
Alison asks how my novel is going, and I try to think of a reply that is honest without sounding forlorn: I haven’t got as far with it as I’d like, I say. Sometimes it has been a little hard to do all my words. But still, I’ve nearly finished it now.
At the end of the beach, where mossy whale bones jut out of the ground, we climb back up the rocks to reach the very tip of Bleaker Island. East Falkland is ahead of us, disrupting the sweep of the horizon, vast and far away. I try to picture it as it is shown on the map—Bleaker a tiny comma off the coast of the mainland, itself a full stop marking the end of South America, the beginning of Antarctica—and feel suddenly dizzy, as though at any moment this flimsy little island might give way, and Alison and George and I, and the jeep and the houses and all the carefully planted little clumps of tussac, will slide helplessly through the ice towards the South Pole.
“On the way back,” Alison says, as we set off again in the car, “we just need to put the girls through.” I nod as though I know what this means, wondering who the girls are and what it is, exactly, they need putting through. (Their paces? Hell?) As we near a herd of cattle, it dawns on me that our task is to get eighteen pregnant cows through a gate into an area near the settlement.
Alison and I approach them, shouting and flapping our arms, and they look astonished and offen
ded for a while and then veer away from us, usually in the wrong direction. I run to stop them, still flapping, trying to turn them around, and they shoot me glares that seem to say, Well, you are just being impossible, and then wander the right way for a while, before losing focus and meandering sideways. At one point, all eighteen of them are moving, together, towards the gate, their enormous bellies swaying under them. Then, instead of going through the opening, half of them walk right past it. When we try to reverse them they get skittish and scatter and we have to start again with the shouting and the flapping until, eventually, the last cow is through and the gate is shut.
I feel a huge sense of accomplishment when this is done. I consider trying to explain to Alison the pleasure of achieving something challenging and concrete and physically strenuous and patently useful. It’s the opposite of writing, I would tell her, which leaves me mentally exhausted but physically unfit, which is rarely completed with any sense of certainty, and which is of unspecified and doubtful use to anyone. But in the end I don’t say anything, and we drive on to the settlement in tired, satisfied silence.
—
Back in the house, I sit down to resume work on the book. I feel newly motivated, energized. I am so close to the end now. I have worked nearly all the way through the outline I made in my second week in Stanley, a neat diagram labelled with reassuring section headings: Situation, Complication, Climax, Resolution. It has continued to comfort and make sense to me long after the strange charts and graphs plotting Bleaker House against Bleak House have been discarded.
I have taken Ollie from his original situation through a series of complications according to this plan. Since coming up with it at the beginning of the trip, my day-to-day writing has been concerned not with what happens, but with how to express what I have already decided is going to happen. All I need to do, now I have reached the fourth and final sections of the narrative, is remind myself what I need to write next. I flick backwards through the pages of the notebooks, through sentences of description about the island interspersed with notes about word counts, weather, accidentally eating five more raisins than I was supposed to one day. I reach the plan. I find the following:
CLIMAX & RESOLUTION
Work this out! Everything comes together and all the questions are answered.
—
There is no other guidance. I close my laptop. I wander through the house, through the empty guest rooms where nobody else has stayed and then back to the sunroom, from where I can see the girls across the hillside. They are standing with their backs to the wind, heads bent to the ground, grazing and chewing and flicking their tails and looking as though they haven’t been put through anything at all.
Fantasy Fiction
An idea arrives and you take it. Then, later, it takes you: to places, to people, and on this occasion to the basement Starbucks at Kenmore Square, where I am meeting a man who says his name is Chris. Later, he’ll admit that this is not his real name.
This idea started as a dare. After Will, and Hong Kong, and Deptford, I left London and moved to Boston to study for my MFA in Fiction. I am ecstatic to be here: in America, writing, earning enough money through fellowships and teaching undergraduate classes to support myself. It is only when, at the end of my first semester, Leslie spreads out my first three stories in front of him on his desk and diagnoses me with “a failure of invention,” that I begin to question myself again. I have produced a series of narratives about neurotic Londoners who worry about themselves and their lives and their health and their work. “A little more bravery,” Leslie suggests.
My classmates and I get drunk in a bar near school and talk about each other with a frankness normally reserved for the latter stages of a workshop. We brainstorm our weaknesses. We are brutal. I learn about my predictable endings, unconvincing female characters, prudish avoidance of sex scenes, and reliance on implausibly intellectual protagonists.
“You should write something different,” someone says. “Write a character who, you know, isn’t from London. Write a character with responsibilities—with a child.”
“Write about a stripper,” someone says. “Or a prostitute.”
“Write about a stripper who becomes a prostitute.”
And so, three weeks later I am sitting opposite Chris in Starbucks, pretending my name is Lisa and that I want to have sex with him for money.
I have trawled Craigslist for options. There are many. It is like learning a new language. Young, thin and willing? Contact me.—m4w—40 (Boston). Gentleman Benefactor Seeks…—34 (Boston). Schoolgirl? Young and Athletic? Discreet Daddy Here! (i can host today.)
The men are “benefactors” and “generous.” They will “make donations’ and “help with gas money.” The ads are funny, and tragic, and disturbing, and specific: Toilet Time!!! Girlfriend into WWE? Looking for a girl with killer legs who loves sushi!
For most, I don’t meet the criteria, and I suspect nobody does. Others are the ramblings of psychopaths. I scroll through Boston’s sexual wish list seeking—What? A victim? A test subject? I am looking for a man who sounds unlikely to murder me, but unpleasant enough that I don’t feel bad lying to him. I identify some possibilities and send off responses:
Hi! Just saw your ad on craigslist!
I am a twenty-seven-year-old grad student in Boston and I would love to hear more about what you are looking for. I’m originally from the UK, brunette, open-minded, and looking for some extra cash.
Lisa x
—
Of the men who get back to me, Chris is the only one who doesn’t demand naked photos, so he’s the one I pick.
—
In Starbucks, Chris says, “I thought this was a hoax.”
When I lean my elbow on the edge of the table, trying to look relaxed, it tilts towards me and his coffee splashes over the surface.
He mops up the spill with napkins and goes on. “When I got your email, I mean. I really thought it was a hoax. I didn’t think there’d be anyone here today.”
He is in late middle age, and very short. The skin of his cheeks has started to droop. The description he gave of himself before we met—athletic build, full head of hair, blue eyes—is not inaccurate, but still in no way resembles the man in front of me. When I first noticed him, sitting in the corner of the room looking around expectantly, drumming his fingers on the blue book he said he’d be reading, my first thought was, Please let that not be him. It’s not that I was hoping to meet someone attractive; it’s just that he looks sad, more vulnerable, and also somehow meaner than I expected. Perhaps, really, the problem is that he looks, and is, real.
Before I have said a word, he reaches down and places a hand firmly on my knee. A wedding band glints under the table.
“Hi,” I say.
He leans his head in towards mine. His lips are very close to my ear. “I want to bend you over this table and fuck your brains out,” he whispers.
It is ten in the morning and the cafe is full of college students bent over their laptops. I realize immediately that I should have picked a meeting place further from the university. I pull back a little and say, “Do you?” I try to smile in a way that both shuts the conversation down and suggests it could be opened again later.
Chris has a stay-at-home wife and cannot “host.” He is looking for someone who can be extremely discreet, about two or three mornings a week. He loves my accent, he says, and he would be keen to start the “arrangement” as soon as possible. He wonders if I live nearby. I do, but tell him I don’t, and he suggests we go for a drink instead. I make an elaborate show of googling bars in the vicinity, and try to act disappointed when I find that none are open yet. His grip on my knee never loosens.
“Let’s wait until next time,” I say.
We stand awkwardly out on the street saying goodbye. I am glancing around me, scared I’ll be spotted by someone I know and anxious to get away. When I turn to leave, Chris grabs my wrist and leans in. I pull back but he still catches my lip
s with his and leaves wet saliva on my skin. I spend the rest of the day compulsively wiping my mouth.
When I next check the email account I have created for Lisa, there is already a message from Chris. It contains a story in which a character called Lisa does things to a character called Chris, and he does things to her, and the whole thing is so extravagant and far-fetched that it is more comic than erotic. It is like watching a puppet show operating at high speed. I don’t reply.
Chris emails me laying out the details of his financial offer. In return for two or three hours of my time and attention, he is willing to pay me two hundred dollars. I have no idea if this is a fair amount or not. I ask one of my MFA classmates and she tells me I should be offended.
Chris emails to check I got his last message, and to update me on how horny he is feeling. I don’t reply.
Chris emails to express surprise that I haven’t replied.
There are explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The news is full of pictures of the sidewalk wet with blood and the faces of people whose limbs have been blown off. That night, the bombers shoot a cop at MIT. One of the attackers is killed, the other gets away.
Chris emails to ask if I’m OK. Was I at the marathon? I don’t reply.
—
A few days later, the whole city goes into lockdown and I spend the hours at home with a soundtrack of news, false news, recantations of false news, more news, and sirens. Police are searching basements for the missing bomber. Nobody is allowed to go outside. For a few minutes, I stand out on the back deck and listen to the sound of the dead city: a deep, unnatural silence. Through the windows of other houses, I can see the flicker of television screens. Then, from somewhere underneath me, there is a thud. A moment later: a series of scratches. The sounds are coming from the cellar, and I am briefly convinced that there is a terrorist hiding by the washing machine; then my neighbour emerges, carrying a basket of laundry.