by Nell Stevens
To distract myself, I sit down to work on the story my classmates suggested, in which a stripper becomes a prostitute. I think of Chris, and feel sorry for him and disgusted by him and angry with him, and I try to write a character who is like him in some ways and not in others. I start the story over and over, and each time it doesn’t ring true: I do not know if Chris is a good man or a bad man; I do not know if he is a victim or a predator; I do not know whether I am the one who should feel guilty.
In the evening, the newscasters announce that we are now allowed to leave our houses and it is as though someone has pressed play on a film. Everything begins to move. Traffic starts up on the high street nearby; people open their windows and music drifts out into the evening. This lasts for a few minutes and then we are all told to go back inside. The windows are slammed shut. Sirens wail. I check my messages.
Chris is upset. It’s been a crazy week, he writes. So much has happened, and this whole time, he has been wondering about me. What’s going on with me? That day in Starbucks, we had a connection, didn’t we? There was a spark. When he touched my knee, he felt it, and he knows I felt it too—the way I kissed him on the street when we parted. How can I say, after everything that has happened, after everything we have shared, after feeling attraction the way we did—how can I say that I don’t actually want to fuck him? Is this about the money?
I don’t reply.
—
Three miles west of my apartment, on the other side of the river, the surviving bomber is discovered hiding in a boat in someone’s back yard.
That evening everyone is restless. After a day spent cooped up inside, it feels daring and joyful to walk down the street. I meet friends in a bar, where the music is too loud for proper conversation, and instead we just smile and shout pointlessly and drink. The experience of being near each other, surrounded by people and movement and noise, is exhilarating.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, but instead of opening the new email, I remove Lisa’s account. I never check it again.
I wonder whether Chris will keep writing to Lisa every day. I have accidentally, in my search for a character for my story, created a character who has invaded a real life. Perhaps Lisa will continue to exist for Chris, even after the idea for the story I wanted to write has faded in my mind. Or perhaps he will come to realize that she was never real, that he too had been writing a kind of story, had been searching for a character to use.
Bleaker House: CLIMAX
Despite himself, Ollie had imagined it would be warm inside the house. As the girl had led him towards the building, its corrugated-iron roof glowing slightly in the last of the moonlight, he had allowed himself to think that once they reached it, once they got inside, his situation would become bearable. Instead, when the door had shut out the weather and he had prised off his soaking boots, his shivering became so violent that at first he couldn’t make out the words his companion was saying. The air around them was icy and still.
“What?” he said, through trembling lips. “What?”
The girl lit a match, and then a candle, which cast a halo of light on their surroundings. They were in a kitchen, with a small, uneven-looking table in the middle of the room and an empty tin bath occupying one corner. She moved around, lighting more candles until the space was so bright it gave the faintest suggestion of heat, and Ollie’s breathing began to return to normal. She gestured to him to take a seat.
“I said, this is Bleaker House.”
Apart from the wind whistling through cracks in the windowpanes and the gap under the door, the place was silent. Ollie sat at the table, which wobbled as he leaned his elbows on it, and surveyed the room: a grease-slimed stove, the rusting bath, overwhelming clutter. Crumbs, cutlery, cooking utensils, and scraps of food were spread out on the counters, the stove, the tabletop, and the floor. A half-plucked bird, its eyes glazed, lay in a pile of its own feathers on a counter. There was no sign of any electricity, no gas; it was as though he had stepped back in time—as though the plane had dropped him off, all those hours earlier, in a different century.
The things the girl had told him on the walk to the house—casually, as though she were recapping rather than revealing anything—seemed unreal, still. He realized he was tense, sitting on the edge of his seat, braced for a punchline that had yet to come.
“He’s really here?” he said, eventually. “My father—you mean he really is alive?”
The girl nodded and sighed, seeming irritated by the question. “You knew that before you got here, Oliver, otherwise you never would have bothered to make the journey.”
“And you—you really are my sister? You’ve been here all along?”
“Were you not listening when I told you before?”
In his defence, Ollie thought, it had been hard to hear, as they had stomped through the mud, following the trembling dot of the girl’s torch, and she had told him as though it were a reasonable situation that her name was Cressida; that she was his half-sister; that she had been six months old when Alsop, their father, had left to make his fortune in England; that after the humiliation of his accident at the hands of the toaster he had returned in secret to the Falklands and lived out his life as a recluse on Bleaker Island. Over the combined roar of waves hitting the cliffs and wind punching in from the ocean, her voice had seemed faint and unconvincing.
“And you really have lived here with him in secret all this time?”
She shrugged. “Evidently. Well, when Mummy was alive she was here too, obviously. She and I arranged for everything—for food and fuel and animal feed and such—with help from a few people on the other islands who agreed not to ask too many questions. Sometimes I take the boat across to the mainland and sneak into Stanley—I’m good at not being noticed—to use the Internet and things like that. That’s how I found out about you, in fact—I found your picture and I just knew you were Daddy’s son. Of course Daddy didn’t want anyone to know we were here. He loved being dead. But now he really is dying, Oliver, and I want him to see you. You took your sweet time getting here—it could have been too late, you know.”
“So he knows who I am?” Ollie asked. “I mean, he knows I exist?”
For the first time, Cressida paused and seemed to give his question thought. She sat down opposite him and planted her elbows so forcefully on the table that the piles of crockery that covered it clattered and shifted. She opened her mouth to answer, and then closed it again. In the candlelight, her whole face seemed unearthly. Blue veins shone from her temples. Ollie had the impression of sitting down to talk with a ghost.
“I’ve told him.”
“He knows I’m here?”
She gave a slight nod. “He will have heard the plane arriving, same as I did.”
“And how come it was you who wrote the letter, and not him?”
She bit her lip and fixed her eyes on Ollie’s hands. With her gaze averted, he took the chance to study her again. He considered her pale brittleness and the way her life story—this secret existence on an island in the middle of an angry, wide ocean—seemed writ large on her body. She looked not quite human, he thought. She looked like a different species.
“I think he’s embarrassed, Oliver.”
“Embarrassed of what?”
Cressida stood, abruptly. “It’s late. You should get some sleep. I’ll take you to him in the morning.”
She picked up a candle and handed another to Ollie. He followed her out of the kitchen, down a narrow corridor, and into a small, empty room with a mattress on the floor. “Will this be OK? I’ll bring you blankets.”
Ollie watched the flickering of her light grow dimmer down the corridor, then dropped his bag on the floor and placed his candle in one corner of the room. The mattress was lumpy, and when he got close to it he saw it was made of sacking sewn together over some kind of dry grass. When he sat down, it made a loud crunch.
“Here.” Cressida was in the doorway. She dropped some heavy, woollen blankets at his feet.
“Thanks.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
She was lingering still. The light was too dim to make out her expression. Ollie wondered whether he was expected to say something else, whether he had disappointed her in some way.
“He thinks,” she said, after a while, “that if you’ve come halfway around the world to find him, he has to be good enough. He sets great store by the idea of being…manly. Strong.”
A phrase, “the fracturing of the patriarchal ideal,” appeared in Ollie’s mind, and it took him a moment to recognize it as a chapter heading from his own thesis. The thought was jarring, like a recovered memory from a previous life. “I see,” he said. He knew nothing about masculinity. What had he written in his thesis? What had all those words amounted to? He knew nothing about being manly.
Cressida walked away.
—
Ollie woke disoriented and so cold he couldn’t move. Rigid on the mattress, he put together the events of the previous day, recalling the strange and unlikely information Cressida had relayed to him, and finally realizing, almost for the first time, that he had made it—that he was really there, on Bleaker Island. He was about to meet a person who for the majority of his life had not existed, and who, since he first left Oxford for the Falklands, had seemed like an embarrassing fantasy rather than a plausible destination.
He was about to meet his father.
After several failed attempts, he managed to sit up, and then stand. He walked shakily to the window and regarded the island in the dawn light. He had seen some of it from the plane, and for thirty minutes or so after landing before the sun had set, but now, the view from the house was startling. He was looking out over a bay filled with dark, rough water that was pummelling the shore so violently it made him sway. Overhead, clouds pressed down as though hoping to crush the island back into the water. Ollie leaned against the glass.
He was about to meet his father.
More than nerves, more than excitement, more than anything, what he felt now was satisfaction. He was about to be vindicated. This long journey—its indignities and ridiculousness and doubt, loneliness, hardship—was about to be proved worthwhile. His instincts and curiosity had led him, eventually, to the right place, and now he would collect his reward. He felt, then, at the window, trying to curl and straighten his numb fingers against the glass, that it almost didn’t matter who his father was or what he was like. The point was that his father existed, was alive, and that he, Ollie, had tracked him down. The point was that he would go home having gained something real.
Somewhere behind him in the house, footsteps were shuffling and thudding. A door slammed. Ollie turned and took a step across the mattress towards it when he heard Cressida’s voice.
“Oliver?” she was calling. “Oliver!”
He trotted out of the room, down the corridor, and into the kitchen, where his sister was standing barefoot on the floor, glancing about her as though she were hallucinating. She was clutching her white-blond hair so tightly he thought it would come out in her fists.
“Oliver,” she said breathily, when she saw him. “You have to help me.”
“What? What’s happened?”
“It’s Daddy,” she said. “He’s not here. I can’t find him. He’s gone.”
Lost Plot, Long Gulch
I am ashamed of my book. My book is no good. I am ashamed of myself for writing this bad book.
—
My final days on Bleaker Island are full of snowstorms. Amid flurries and blizzards and sleet, I write and delete paragraphs over and over. I am restless and dissatisfied with myself. The resolution of the novel—the point up to which everything I have written so far has been building—eludes me. I have brought Ollie from Oxford to the Falklands; I have led him on a dance all around Stanley and finally got him to Bleaker; and now that he is here, he should be confronting the person who makes his journey worthwhile—his and the reader’s, too—and I can’t find a way to write it.
I am trying to keep certain thoughts at bay, in particular the horrifying, devastating idea that this thing I have been writing, all the thousands and thousands and thousands of words of it, is a failure. Not only will I not finish it before I leave the island, but maybe I won’t finish it at all, ever. I find myself shaking my head a lot, as though I could dislodge this fear from my brain the way the sheep outside twitch snow off their backs. It doesn’t work, though—not for me, and not, ultimately, for the sheep either, who wander around with saddles of compacted snow, getting stuck in deep drifts. George tells me that they suffocate if he can’t pull them out in time. They get disorientated. They stumble off the edges of cliffs.
If the novel is a failure, if I truly cannot write it, then all this has been for nothing. I have been sitting alone on a small snowy island for weeks and weeks—for nothing. I have been hungry and alone and cold—for nothing.
Through the window and the curtain of weather, I see George setting off across the hills in his jeep, searching for lost livestock, hoping to drag them out of the ditches before it’s too late.
In four days’ time, I will be leaving Bleaker. There are four Ferrero Rochers left in the final box, four granola bars, and now, four apples in their neat line in the kitchen. I have anticipated my departure with such fervour for so long now that I can’t bear to look at the date on the itinerary. All that excitement I had about leaving was not just because it meant a return to food, and different clothes, and company; it was because by then I thought I’d have a completed novel that would validate everything I’d put myself through. I knew it would be a rough draft, and that I would need to work on it and rewrite it and adjust it when I got home. But it never once crossed my mind that what I would produce on the island would be bad, or somehow un-finish-able. Now, in these final days, I find myself in the unnerving position of wanting to stay longer, because the thought of more isolation and hunger and chill is not nearly as appalling as the thought of going home with nothing to show for my time here.
I have been foolish. How could I have thought that sitting down to write a set number of words each day was the recipe for good writing? Of course it doesn’t work like that. Amassing thousands of words together in a single Word document is no achievement at all if the words are poorly chosen, or in the wrong order, or both. How did I expect to write well with nobody to discuss it with, and while my stomach was crying out constantly for solid food?
I make a pilgrimage to the kitchen to visit the potato. If there ever was a time for it, I think, it’s now. Except that now, when I need it most, I feel I least deserve it. The potato would feel like a celebration of my failure, and I refuse to celebrate my failure.
—
What is the problem with the novel? I stare at the screen and the words on the white pages. It is as though a spell has been broken. There were days—I know there were, I remember them—when the words came easily. I was convinced by the story I was telling, by Ollie himself and the world in which I had placed him. I believed in him. There were those times when I was so caught up in what I’d written that I would feel nervous, as though I were being watched, and I’d close the curtains because it felt possible that things could come to life, that having written what I’d written, I was no longer really alone.
Now, it feels as though I have woken from a dream. Ollie is not real. He is, in fact, a silly character—flat, caricatured, clownish. He is always falling over, I realize. He is always doing things that make him blush. The reader is in a constant state of feeling smarter than him, of knowing more about his life and situation than he does. What was it Leslie told us? It is particularly unbecoming for a young person to look down his nose at his characters—too easy, too slack, a stance that has almost certainly not been earned through one’s experience of life.
The plot calls on me now to deliver a long-lost father to Ollie. My protagonist has travelled halfway around the world on a quest that I myself established for him, and it is now my re
sponsibility to resolve it, and I can’t. The scenarios I come up with become increasingly ludicrous. It strikes me as no coincidence that, when it comes down to it, Ollie’s father is running away from him: I do not know how to write a convincing reconciliation.
In a moment of grim, self-hating anti-humour I delete three attempts at paragraphs and write in their place, “And he woke up and it was all a dream,” even though it is me, and not Ollie, who has woken up.
—
I have not left the house since the storms began three days ago, and this, paired with a longer-than-usual Internet failure, is surely contributing to my increasing anguish. It’s still snowing outside, and the wind is shrieking, but going out seems more inviting than staying at home with my anxieties. I put on almost every item of clothing I have, including two hats and an extra scarf wrapped around my waist as a kind of girdle, and step outside. The flat force of the wind hits me like a slap.
There is a place called Long Gulch that I’ve seen on the map of the island hanging in the sunroom. It is a long thin crack in the side of the island, as though the rock has begun to split, and in all my wanderings I’ve never seen it. I have it in my mind to get there now—a vague sense that it is not far from the settlement and that reaching it will therefore be a quick, neat excursion, long enough to distract me from my worries, not so long that I will catch hypothermia.
I stagger along my normal route towards the beach, then south along the coast, bending sideways into the gale. The sky is filled with so many birds that they look like a new kind of weather: seagulls emerging from waves like an extension of the spray, grey wings overhead dripping down from the clouds.
Something large and black flies past and dives into the ground behind me. I assume it is the caracara again, but when I look back I realize it’s a hooded sweatshirt of mine, emblazoned with the letters “BU,” mud-soaked and now plastered flat against a tuft of tussac. I washed it days ago, hung it up outside with the rest of my laundry and somehow didn’t notice it had blown away when I brought the other things in. I suppose it has been on a frenzied journey ever since, whirling around the island, dipping into bogs and up again. I dither about whether or not to pick it up, then, when I inspect it more closely, see that it is covered in cow dung; I leave it where it is. I set off again, wondering what else I have lost here, whether there are odd socks swimming alongside the swans in Big Pond, bras setting sail towards Antarctica.