by Nell Stevens
The plane begins its descent into the airport, a high-fenced, khaki-coloured military base, and my stomach drops. I fold up the itinerary and tuck it back into my bag. Life is not how it looks in spreadsheets. This does not feel like a short jaunt. I am not jolly.
—
As I wait for my case to appear on the carousel that snakes through the small, boxy arrivals terminal, it hits me that I have never been more alone, and never further from home. The fishermen are in high spirits, talking and laughing as they shoulder their bags, present their documents to be stamped, and vanish through a door at the far end of the room. I am the last passenger remaining. After ten minutes, my case arrives, wobbling along on the conveyor belt, and for a second it looks so lonely on its precarious journey around the room that I want to cry.
Outside the terminal at Mount Pleasant, I am met by Eleanor, the owner of the guest house in Darwin where I’ll spend my first nights in the Falklands. She is holding a sign that says, unpromisingly, “Mel Stevens.”
In the jeep with Eleanor, I am shy and confused. She seems, in her breezy Englishness, entirely familiar—the sort of person you might run into at a farmers’ market in, say, Hereford—and yet outside the car is a landscape so weird that the word I come back to over and over is alien. The ground is flat and beige and unchanging, a rolling scene of mud and grass and gorse. There is nothing I can see that distinguishes one mile from the next: no buildings, monuments, trees, hills. It feels as though we are at sea, surrounded by water with no sight of land, and might sink at any moment without a trace. The road cuts through space like a line across a blank page, and either side of it are wire-laced fences festooned with red signs that say “DANGER” and “MINES” under images of skulls and crossbones. The sky arching over us is the widest I’ve ever seen, turning pink to lilac to dark red as we drive into a blinding sunset. We are at the bottom of the world, I think. This is the bottom of the world.
Things Eleanor tells me as we drive: that she is, in fact, English, but emigrated here with her husband just after the war in 1982; that her husband is currently away competing in the Island Games, an international sporting competition for island nations that is the Falklands equivalent of the Olympics; that man-made climate change is a myth created by people who would like to see rural communities forced into cities and that if I don’t believe her I should look up the mini ice-age that occurred during the reign of Henry VIII; that although she used to accept Argentinian guests at the hotel and personally has no problem with Argentinians—does, in fact, treat all nationalities equally—some people in the Darwin settlement found their presence disconcerting, and some people found their rudeness and insensitivities distressing, so she had to stop hosting them; that the only people Falkland Islanders trust less than Argentinians are writers, but that she, Eleanor, writes romantic fiction in secret.
“What do you do?” she asks, and the question hangs in the air as the sun ahead of us drops out of sight. Suddenly, it is dark, and there is nothing to puncture the blackness except for our headlights, illuminating the rubble-ridden track ahead of us and, once, the disgruntled face of a seal rolling in a stream by the road. Beyond the muddy-gold beams of the jeep, I see nothing.
“I’m a teacher,” I tell her.
“What do you teach?” she asks.
“Writing.”
Darwin, when we arrive, is so dark that at first I don’t know why Eleanor has stopped the car. She pulls out a torch and flashes it over the settlement: three black-windowed houses, none of them apparently inhabited. One belongs to her and her husband, she says, and one to a couple who only stay during the warmer months; the last, and largest, is the hotel in which I will be the only resident. All I can make out is an impression of rows of windows with nothing behind them, and the sound of the wind sliding over the roof.
Minutes later I find myself deposited in a room in the otherwise guestless guest house, looking out from the other side of a window that now frames the expanse of blackness where I stood looking in. I hear the crunch and splatter of stones and mud under the wheels of the jeep as Eleanor drives off. I am alone.
Thoughtlessly, I pull out my phone to send a text to my family—I’m here!—but there’s no phone service. There is supposed to be an Internet connection, but Eleanor, after explaining in detail a system involving scratch cards that reveal special codes, told me as she dropped me off that it wasn’t working, and she had run out of cards in any case. From the window, I see the lights come on in one of the other houses: a sudden burst of electric gold that illuminates a patch of shoreline, churning water and rock. I sit on the edge of the bed and think: I am here. Time stretches ahead into the darkness. When I close my eyes I am back in the jeep on the black road, the headlight beams illuminating nothing.
—
Being without the Internet feels like free-floating in outer space. I cast my mind back to my childhood and early teenage years: I remember quite well how it was before the Internet became the spine of life, and yet, now, in this flat, cold, dark, empty place, not having that connection makes me feel as though I’m suffocating. I find myself horrified by the prospect of days that begin, proceed, and end in one uninterrupted whole; of the long, relentless evening ahead of me, and other evenings after that. I am appalled by the idea of missing out on the minutiae and chatter that my friends and people I used to know see fit to share online (although never before has this information seemed particularly interesting or important). I am scared that people will try to reach me with something vital, or even something fun, and I won’t receive the message.
I tell myself to grow up; that this, here, is what real life is like; that this is how people lived for centuries until about five minutes ago. In a matter of days I will be in Stanley, which is, I’m sure, a citadel of cyber cafes and high-speed connections.
But still I find myself gripping the mattress, staring at the window, and feeling as though I am drifting out into the black sky untethered.
There is nothing to interrupt me here, and nothing to distract me. “Effortless concentration” seems less far-fetched at once. No Internet. No noises. Nobody passing by or updating a status or texting to suggest that we go out tonight. I am away—from my life and my friends and my family—and therefore I have arrived, suddenly and unannounced, at myself.
At nine o’clock the generator outside turns off. The comforting thrum of the machine, which I hadn’t noticed until it stopped, is replaced by a shrill silence. Gradually, the heaving of waves along the shore becomes audible, and a little later, the din of my own heart. I lie in bed but can’t sleep: my breath is distracting. I become aware of a constant jangling in my ears: a tinnitus too mild to notice anywhere but here.
—
Habits I am being forced to break:
· Wondering, “What year was so-and-so born?” or “When was such-and-such-a-thing invented?” or any other general, non-urgent but niggling question, and looking it up at once. Instead, I start a Word document listing all the things I’d google if I could: a sprawling, eclectic list of idle curiosity.
· Thinking, “I fancy Thai/Indian/Chinese food,” and ordering it online.
· Thinking, “I fancy Thai/Indian/Chinese food,” and texting someone saying, “Do you want to go out for Thai/Indian/Chinese?”
· Texting someone saying, “Do you want to go for a drink later?” and then going for a drink later.
· Texting anyone saying anything.
· Going out for coffee.
· Going out for anything other than a windy, icy walk.
—
A dream: You are standing on the beach. An enormous wave rises out of the sea. You know that you are going to be swept away. When the wave breaks, you roll it up, the way you would a yoga mat. You turn the crest of it over and over until your forearms ache, and you have somehow got it so tight it is solid, a bar you can cling to. You ride it out across the ocean. Hours later, you are washed up on a new island even more remote, somewhere in Antarctica. Here, you ar
e greeted without surprise by an old friend, an actor, who is waving a sabre and trying to learn how to fence. “I’ve got the lunge,” she tells you, demonstrating, “but I haven’t got the thrust right yet.”
—
On my first full day in the Falklands, I walk to the world’s southernmost suspension bridge. It takes two hours to reach from Darwin, on a muddy track littered with animal carcasses in various stages of decomposition. En route, I pass two men, one on a motorcycle, the other coming across the fields on a quad bike laden with dogs. Both assume I have broken down and left my vehicle somewhere; they offer me lifts. When I tell one of them that I am walking “because I want to” he crows with laughter and says, “Ye must do! Ye must do!” His accent is something like British West Country, but every now and then sounds both Irish and Australian. I ask how far it is to the bridge. He says, “Oh, it’s a way yet, a way yet,” then laughs again and says, “No, just there in the next valley.” Further on, things I expect to be people in the distance are not in fact people: an inflatable ring hanging on a pole, a windswept shrub, a gravestone.
I don’t notice the noise the wind makes until I stop for a moment in the shelter of the cliffs and feel the sudden silence. The bridge, when I reach it, is horrifying. It spans the water, but panels splinter downwards and a sign nailed to a nearby post says (although the paint is so chipped it’s difficult to read), “Closed to all vehicles and pedestrians.” On the other side of the bay, what looks like a wrecked ship rises out of the water. Waves slap listlessly against the rocks.
It is so desolate, so isolated and so horribly quiet that I have an urge to run, but I know that wherever I run to will be the same: empty, unpopulated, full of sky and bones and water. I don’t know what I am afraid of, staring at the bridge and the shipwreck and listening to the water against the shore, but I am afraid.
That night, Eleanor asks me how long I plan to stay in the Falklands. When I tell her it is nearly three months, she looks visibly shocked, and I feel the stirrings of a now-familiar panic, about how long the days, how long the weeks will be.
You Make It All Up
On my third day, Eleanor drives me from Darwin to Stanley. As we set off from the guest house in the beginnings of snow, I feel my Falklands project is really beginning.
On the way, we stop at the Argentinian cemetery: a square plot of white crosses, staked out on a hillside with nothing but a view of cloud and grey waves crashing against cliffs. The snow has turned to hail, which the wind drives in horizontally. It stings my face. The weather feels deliberately malicious.
Eleanor regards the plot through squinting eyes. “What a bleak place to end up,” she says, shaking her head, and it surprises me that she has noticed how desolate it is. It doesn’t strike me as particularly different from Darwin.
—
From the window of my new room in Stanley I see: a wide grey sky, grey water, and grey-white snow-covered land. The wind howls in off the Atlantic, pelting hail sideways into the glass. Wave after wave pounds the rocks, and splinters and churns. The horizon is cloudy, but I can still make out the silhouette of the Lady Elizabeth, an 1879 shipwreck that squats blackly in the water, masts erect, as though poised to attempt a return voyage. Closer by, geese waddle across the ice in front of a red, double-decker London bus, with a sign that says it’s bound for Piccadilly Circus.
I will spend the next month in this guest house on the outskirts of the town, presided over by Maura, the housekeeper. Since it is the middle of winter, Maura explains, there will probably be no other guests. The owner of the hotel, Jane, is away in England. For the next few weeks, then, it will just be Maura and me.
I ask her about the Internet. “Is there Wi-Fi here?” I know, as I ask, that I sound needy, a little obsessed. I am a little obsessed.
She squints.
“Wi-Fi?” I repeat. “The Internet?”
Maura looks troubled. “The Internet?” Jane would know, she says. She leads me into the hall, and points at a bulky machine squatting on a table by the door. She looks doubtful as she says, “Is that it?”
“No,” I say, “no, that’s a printer.”
“The Internet?” Maura repeats, again. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.”
—
The buildings of Stanley, from the outside, all look the same, with their white walls and coloured roofs. It is only gradually that I learn to tell them apart: this one is a cafe, this is a pub, this is a store that stocks thousands and thousands of toy penguins. On the neat front lawns of the identical houses, whale vertebrae serve as garden furniture.
At the West Store, the biggest “supermarket” in town, I ask for the Internet scratch cards Eleanor mentioned. The lady at the checkout doesn’t understand me, and we get stuck in a horrible loop of me repeating my request and her saying, “Eh?” Eventually she figures out what I’m looking for, repeats the phrase in her own accent, and then says something that, a beat later, I understand to be, “We’ve run out.”
The shelves of the shop are stacked with canned and bottled goods, almost all of which are out of date. At the back is a section of “fresh” produce: battered-looking apples, wilting lettuces, dusty boxes of cherry tomatoes that cost five times what I’d expect to pay at home. Outside, a group of adults, huddled together to talk and smoke in the relative shelter of the eaves, goes silent as I pass.
I wander through the cemetery. I have to steel myself to go in. In the wind and hail-snow-sleet-rain, the boggy graves look poised to regurgitate their occupants. I move amongst them, reading names and dates. Pre-1900, the deaths are almost all early: people in their thirties or younger. There are rows of unmarked, child-sized plots, and heavy, wooden crosses, weather-worn.
Further off, a hawk is poised between headstones. It is pinning something to the ground with its leg—something grey and fluffy that from a distance looks like a rabbit. The bird takes off. Dangling from its claws: a ragged teddy bear.
—
If my two days in Darwin were a brief introduction to myself, to the self I am when everything else is stripped away, life in Stanley is a lesson in self-consciousness. Wherever I go, I am acutely aware of my strangeness. It is not tourist season; those cruise ships that offload hundreds of passengers in the warmer months are nowhere to be seen. I am an oddity. I am not, immediately, to be trusted.
I turn heads. I provoke scowls. I stop conversations and elicit guarded enquiries: What am I doing here? Where have I come from? What do I want? I answer these questions with varying degrees of truthfulness: I am a teacher of writing. I am from the UK, but have been living in America. I am here because…I want…I’m here to work. No, not to teach. To do my own work. I change the subject.
—
I don’t have a desk in my room at the guest house, but I do have a dressing table. I push toiletries to one side and in their place I put my laptop. When I open it each morning it strikes me as expectant, waiting, like an impatient child, for me to tell a story. Behind it is a wall-mounted mirror that frames my reflection as I type tentative sentences and delete them, draw graphs of possible plots (X axis = time, Y axis = dramatic tension), and flick through the pages of unused notebooks as though they might contain clues.
In Darwin I was content to wander, to be occupied with settling in and looking about me. Now, in Stanley, the preamble is over and I feel increasing pressure to begin writing. The first few days, which slide by without any significant literary achievement, feel like inexcusably wasted opportunities. So: it is time to begin—to begin what? The novel I have come here to write—and what novel is that? I type, “Chapter One.” I stare at the page. The cursor blinks apprehensively.
I look up from my laptop into my own frustrated face. I am battling, I know, with the incompatibility of the twin goals I set myself on this trip: to research and write the book simultaneously, to do it all at once. I don’t want to start too soon, before I’ve really understood anything about the Falklands, or the ch
aracters I want to place here, and therefore risk setting off on the wrong track. But if I wait to start until I feel ecstatically inspired I’ll be in danger of finishing nothing, never having an idea, maybe never even starting. I weigh up contradictory philosophies of creativity—Philip Pullman’s “If you only write when you want to, or when you feel like it, or when it’s easy, you’ll always be an amateur,” versus, say, Wordsworth’s “Good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—and all the while look from my blank laptop to my blank reflection and back again.
It is in this state of meditative panic that it occurs to me to channel that feeling into a character: someone who is similarly paralysed by their own ambiguous ambitions, someone whose creative constipation I can laugh at and, in doing so, relieve my own. On this tentative foundation, I am able to build a person in my mind who feels real, and funny, and, as the hours at the dressing table stretch on, like surprisingly good company. I am so relieved to greet this tardy protagonist that, later that day, when Maura pokes her head around the door of my room to check on me, I forget to pretend not to be a writer and tell her I’m doing fine, because “I’ve finally worked out who my main character is.”
—
Maura, standing in the kitchen over a frying pan loaded with eggs, fiddling with the buttons on her shirtsleeves: “So, you write books about people…?”
“Well, yes, but not real people,” I say. “I write fiction.”
She looks overjoyed. Her whole face seems to relax. “Fiction! How clever! So you make it all up?”
“I do.”
“That’s marvellous,” she says. “That’s clever. That’s right.”
—
When I finally acquire a scratch card that will enable me to connect to the Internet, I get cold feet. In the days since I was last online, I have already in some ways adjusted to this quiet, disconnected life. I scrape away the silver on the back of the card with my thumbnail to reveal a string of numbers. On my computer screen, the browser opens to a window asking for the code.
