by Nell Stevens
“I don’t know.” You pulled your hands into your sleeves.
“Of course you do.”
“I read Mrs. Grant’s book.”
“Right. So did I.”
“I’m going now.”
“Are you?”
You felt as though you were pushing on a door, expecting at every moment that it would slam shut in your face, and instead it was opening wider, and behind it was an unexpected room.
“What happened to your brother?” you asked.
“What brother?”
“The brother who died.”
“I don’t have a brother,” he said.
You sat down again.
—
He gave you another beer, and when you had finished that, he poured you a tumbler of whisky. You hated the taste, but swallowed anyway, because you were curious about what would happen next. Mr. Grant was still drunker than you were. He was slurring his words. He touched your knee in a way that made your skin prickle. When you told him he was more handsome with stubble than without (a kind of experiment, to see what he would do), he didn’t seem awkward, and instead took your hand and lifted it to his lips.
“Why are you here?” he said again. “What do you want?”
You wriggled back from him to give yourself time to think, then decided not to think after all. You were drunk and so was he, and if he even remembered it he’d know you’d probably only said it because he had plied you with alcohol.
You said, “I want to be in love like you and Mrs. Grant.”
He took hold of your hand again and squeezed it. He looked as though he might be about to laugh. He stared into your face, narrowing his eyes with a half-smile, and said, “You know, don’t you, that the poems aren’t real? They’re just poems. She made that stuff up.”
“But some of it is real,” you said. “It’s poetry. It’s supposed to be real.”
“I don’t have a brother.”
“Do you have vitiligo?”
“I’m not sure what that is—vitiligo.”
“So it’s not about you,” you said. “It’s not real.”
He continued to squint at you. When you tried to focus on him, he had two heads, and the longer you looked, the more different they seemed: one was golden and hazy and splintered; the other like a shadow, sharper but still somehow harder to keep in focus. You wondered if you seemed the same way to him.
“I think some of it was sort of me,” he said. “But it’s not real life. You understand that? She made stuff up. I’m not sure she’s a very good poet.”
You wondered then whether you were going to vomit. You hauled yourself onto your feet and looked around for a bathroom, but your eyes were so blurry that all you could see was the dark black screen of the television. It looked like a trapdoor you could fall through.
“Hey.” Mr. Grant grabbed your hand. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go,” you said.
“Don’t.”
“I want to go,” you said. Your stomach began to contract. There was a bitter taste in your mouth.
“Please,” he said. He yanked your arm until you crumpled back down onto the couch. You retched, but clenched your teeth and swallowed hard before anything came up. “Don’t go.”
He leaned over as though he were going to kiss you, but instead wrapped his arms around your shoulders and sank down. When you tried to breathe you couldn’t fill your lungs, and you wanted to yell or punch him or pinch the leg that was crushing your hand, except that you realized he had gone slack on top of you, and where his face pressed against your neck, your skin was wet, from his sweat or breath or possibly even tears, you weren’t sure.
His breathing was irregular and strained. “I think she’s leaving me,” he whispered into your collarbone. “I don’t think she’s coming back from the island.”
—
You ran home, the soles of your shoes clapping against the pavement. You went so fast you almost tripped over your own feet and sent yourself hurtling into the road, but you caught your balance at the last minute.
After a long, uncomfortable silence, Mr. Grant had fallen asleep on top of you. You had taken a full, gasping breath, which had coated your throat with the smell of his sweat and the chemical tinge of some kind of cologne. It made you cough but that didn’t seem to wake him. Moments later, you managed to slide out from underneath his weight and creep across the room to the front door. He had stirred as you had turned the handle and you froze, waiting for his sighs to settle back into their wheezing rhythm, almost snores.
Later, in your bedroom, you sat with your back to the wall and your knees pulled into your chest. You called Caroline.
You, keeping your voice low so that your parents downstairs wouldn’t hear: I kissed him but he was a bad kisser.
You: I feel so sorry for Mrs. Grant that she has to kiss him for the rest of her life!
You: He wanted me to stay, but I wasn’t into it.
Caroline: That is so funny. That is so crazy.
You: He said Mrs. Grant is a bad poet.
—
At the end of the summer, you stood on the doorstep of Mr. and Mrs. Grant’s house, and rang the doorbell. You had had an unexpected growth spurt in July, and were an inch taller than the last time you were there. You had been on holiday to Normandy with your parents, aunts, and cousins, and were brown-skinned, and freckled. You had been swimming a lot, and smoking less, and had already read the set texts for the next school year: Middlemarch, The Merchant of Venice, Chaucer and Louis MacNeice, who rhymed some of his poems and not others. You had re-read Tessellations too and were coming round to Mr. Grant’s way of thinking: Mrs. Grant was not, in fact, a very good poet. You were bored by the book. Her marriage was not as interesting as she seemed to think it was. Why did she imagine her life merited so much scrutiny, so much attention? It was an ordinary life. You set your sights higher than that for yourself.
From inside the house, you could hear footsteps approaching. The blurred outline of Mr. Grant was visible through frosted-glass panels.
He opened the door. He was wearing proper clothes this time: jeans and a blue shirt. He stared at you and said nothing.
“Hello, Mr. Grant. It’s Emma. From before.” You had worked out a whole speech on the way over. Your message had seemed clear then, and direct. Now, looking at Mr. Grant and the view of the house behind him, a glimpse through a doorway of the arm of the couch where he had fallen asleep on top of you, clarity abandoned you. “I just came to say,” you began, “that I—” but he had already turned and walked away from the door, leaving it ajar. You hesitated, then followed him into the living room.
He sat on the sofa with the console controls in his hand. You stood, uncertain, beside him and looked around. It was barer even than the previous time you’d been there: the books had gone from the shelf, and in their place were a few tattered magazines and a small statue of Buddha. The piano was still there, but the picture of Mrs. Grant on the horse was no longer hanging by the window. Mr. Grant moved a stack of newspapers that had been next to him on the sofa. He dropped them onto the floor with a thud and you sat in the place where they had been.
He handed you a second Xbox control. “Want to play?” he asked. “You have to choose a character.”
You scrolled through the avatars on the screen: tiny men and women, different shapes and colours, and you picked one.
Punchline
I don’t know how it is, I seem to be always writing about myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, “Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn’t!” but it is all of no use. I hope any one who may read what I write, will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do with them, and can’t be kept out.
—ESTHER’S NARRATIVE, BLEAK HOUSE<
br />
Soon, a plane will arrive on the island and take me back to Stanley. From there I will retrace the steps of my original journey: to the airbase at Mount Pleasant, and from Mount Pleasant to Santiago. A ten-hour overnight layover, brief enough to make Annabel’s suggestion that I “get it on” in Chile seem somewhat overambitious. A final flight that will deposit me, dazed, in London. There, I will have to fit back into the world, to find a place to live and a way to make a living, to write.
And I will have to work on this book, this new, unexpected book, in which I seem to have become the protagonist rather than Ollie.
—
I pack up the writing station, transforming it back into the plain, blank coffee table I had almost forgotten it originally was, so entirely consumed did it seem by the purpose I assigned it. Beneath the books, the laptop, Bleak House—beneath all of that writing—there was a plank of birch wood all along. I barely recognize the sunroom without my usual things there. It looks suddenly fit for purpose, with its wicker chairs and clean tables: it is waiting for guests to fill it with conversation and laughter and smells; it is waiting for the sun.
It takes no time at all to pack, and when I’m done my suitcase still looks empty: gone are the bags of food that occupied most of the space on the way here. They have vanished into me. Gone, too, is the BU sweatshirt that I last saw clinging, sodden, to the tussac by Long Gulch. The CDs I have acquired do little to restore balance.
Like the case, I too am lighter. My jeans have been held up with a piece of string for the past couple of weeks. At the airport in Stanley, forty-one days ago, the woman who checked me in weighed me with my luggage, and then asked me to estimate how much lighter my bag would be on the return journey. I gave what I thought was a perfectly accurate answer, since I knew the exact weight of the food I was carrying, and that it would be gone by the time I left. But I hadn’t considered, in that calculation, that I would be lighter too. Bits of me—the layers of fat on my stomach, hips and thighs—have disappeared on the island.
Other things that no longer exist: my wild determination to write the Ollie novel; my belief that it can be a success.
These losses, and the accompanying sensation of lightness, strike me, now, as positive changes. I have freed myself of a bad book. I will write a better book now. I don’t know when, or how, but I know I will write it.
I set my notebooks down on top of the remaining clothes and think how strange it is that they don’t take up more room, or at the very least, that they don’t weigh more now that they’re full of words.
—
I walk up the hill to George and Alison’s house to say goodbye. I thank them for their hospitality, their generosity, their good humour. I thank them for teaching me the names of birds, and how to herd pregnant cows through a gate. I promise to send them a copy of my book when it’s finished, and don’t mention that it won’t be quite what I told them it would be.
Just before I leave, I give Alison back the potato. It is wrinkled. It has begun to sprout green tentacles. I am embarrassed—I considered at first walking over to the cliffs, or to Long Gulch, and hurling it into the water, but it seemed such a shame to waste it, when vegetables are so precious here, when I know Alison will be able to turn it into something edible. Fortunately, she is amused, rather than offended.
“You don’t like potatoes?” she asks.
“I just didn’t need it,” I say.
—
The plane that takes me away from Bleaker is full—which means there are three other people on board—and I sit up front, next to the pilot, as I did on my way here. The controls are right in front of me, and I have to wear an enormous headset with a microphone. I wonder what useful comments I can be expected to offer as we fly.
The pilot asks me to refrain from pushing either of two pedals, pulling this lever, or pressing that button. I feel certain that something is going to possess me to do all of these things as soon as we take off, and sit on my hands.
From above, Bleaker looks disconcertingly tame. Long Gulch is a cranny; Big Pond a puddle; the North End a neat grey cap that sits atop the green tip of the island. The red-roofed buildings of the settlement look like Monopoly hotels: flimsy. I peer out of the window and think that inside one of them George and Alison are likely standing at the window, waving. The beach curves like an open parenthesis, its ends reaching towards the Antarctic. I crane my neck around as we fly, but soon all I can see is grey rock and grey water and I know that, if I am honest, I can’t tell which is which.
The flight takes a long route all around the islands and West Falkland before heading back to town. There are deliveries to make: food, post, news. Below us the landscape is murky and strange and soon, as we reach West Falkland, immense. There is so much more here than my tiny island, than the view from the sunroom of the bay and the whale skeleton and the circling caracaras. We fly low over jagged rock formations and land on muddy airstrips; people amble out from houses enclosed for miles by nothing but hills and water. They collect their mail and freight, then vanish back into private wildernesses. While I was fretting and analysing my isolation on Bleaker, I was surrounded by other people who seem to take these conditions entirely in their stride. For each island, an inhabitant, or maybe two or three. For me, it was an experiment. For them, it is the fact and material of their lives.
—
At the very end of “Tips for Writing and Life,” Leslie throws in a new rule: “Do not look into your own heart and write; look into someone else’s.” This comes back to me, now, as we thud down beside another settlement, and a new cast of strange faces appears and make its way towards the plane.
No matter where we land, however desolate and remote it appears, the people we meet know exactly who I am. Word of the American authoress on Bleaker has spread throughout the Falklands. These red-faced, rough-handed, mysterious strangers ask, each time, about the progress of my history book.
“It’s coming along nicely,” I say. “Yes, it was, it was very relaxing on Bleaker. I got a lot done.”
I had such good intentions of following Leslie’s last rule. I was so certain I was looking into someone else’s heart.
Now if truth be told, I violate a good many of these rules (for example, I’m always saying, “Do not look into your own heart and write; look into someone else’s”—this from a man who recently wrote an autobiographical novel). So may you. But you ought at least to be aware that you are doing so and be able to justify each such decision. It’s possible to take everything I’ve said both with a grain of salt and not lightly. That’s the kind of balancing act all good writing consists of. (Note how I’ve just begun one sentence with a conjunction and used a preposition to end another, and thrown in parentheses to boot—none of them good ideas.) I wish you luck upon the high wire.
—“Tips for Writing and Life,” Leslie Epstein
—
We are heading back to Stanley now. I can see, ahead of us, the lighthouse on the tip of East Falkland, and beyond it, a disturbance of the beige sweep of land: the crinkled rooftops of the town. My mind is darting all over the place—to what I’m going to eat first, to who I’m going to call first, to the clothes I can now wear that aren’t rigorously practical—and I don’t immediately notice that the pilot is trying to attract my attention.
“Nell! Nell!”
His voice is buzzing in my headphones. After multiple descents and ascents in the plane, my ears have popped and I am almost deaf.
“Nell,” he says again, once I’ve turned to look at him. “Tell me something.”
He has one hand on the controls. The other is unwrapping a ham sandwich from tinfoil.
“Sure,” I say.
“What’s the punchline?”
“The punchline?”
“You know,” he says, taking a bite of his sandwich. “The punchline of the book.”
I adjust my microphone to buy myself time as I consider the idea that the entirety of my book should hinge on a single line, an
d then I say, “I wish I knew.”
The pilot roars with laughter and slaps his thigh; the plane wobbles in the air. He wipes his eyes. He’s still chuckling to himself and shaking his head as we begin our final descent. “All that time by herself on an island,” he says, “and she don’t even know the punchline.”
Afterwards
I dream and dream of Bleaker Island. I dream I am still there, that I never left and am sitting on the beach waiting for a plane that doesn’t come. Or I dream that I’m being sent back, because I didn’t finish the novel; I am scared of the weather and the hunger and I don’t have time to pack the right things before I leave. I dream that I take my friends there to show them around, only to find that everything has changed: a city has grown up beside the cliffs; there are roads now, and trains, and tower blocks, and my friends say, “Oh, this isn’t how you described it at all.”
—
It is four hundred and ninety-eight days since I left Bleaker. I am sitting in the kitchen of a small flat in South London, which is where I live now—alone, surrounded by the city. I have a fridge stacked with food, a fruit bowl full of mottled bananas. There are wine glasses by the sink with discs of Malbec crusting in the bottom, left over from a dinner party two nights ago. All around me are the noises of people nearby living lives: music seeping from car windows, doors slamming, babies crying and a single, clear cough on the other side of a wall. I have continuous access to the Internet now; I can google anything that pops into my mind. I have a functioning phone. If I want to speak to someone, all I have to do is tap the screen.
The island is half a world away and feels further. It is hard to hold it all in my mind at once—that I was there, am now here—and I worry sometimes that it is slipping from my reach. What if, after the initial shock of the hubbub of the rest of the world, after a few days of gluttony when I ate my weight in carbohydrates, after learning to restrain the urge to talk to myself in public places—what if after that, not much is left from those weeks I spent at the bottom of the world? What if the reason my dreams keep dragging me back there is that I didn’t get enough out of it, didn’t do enough, didn’t take enough away? What was the point of it all?