Bleaker House

by Nell Stevens

  —

  She dressed carefully, gazing at herself in the mirror of her hotel room. She had looked at online photographs of the restaurant David had chosen. It was all light and surface and reflection, like a half-hearted vision of the future.

  She hadn’t realized, when she had packed for the Hong Kong trip, that it would involve evenings out. She had only brought her work clothes: grey dresses and skirts that made her look, she thought, like someone pretending to be the sort of person who went on business trips to Hong Kong, and ate dinner in the highest restaurant in the world. She knew, staring at the image she presented in the mirror, that David would see through it. She had begun to feel that he could tell with a glance across a table or a desk or the seat of a taxi, what was inside her. He could tell that she had dreams about him; that she thought about him when she masturbated; that she had started deliberately matching her bra to her underwear, even though she didn’t look good naked, even though she had several tattoos from her teenage years that she regretted, even though she knew that he would never see any of it anyway, not ever, and that she didn’t understand why she wanted him to. He could tell, that she had been reduced by him to someone she would once have pitied.

  She wore the loosest fitting of the grey dresses. She tied the waist with the sash she found crumpled in her bag.

  In the hotel lobby, waiting for him, she paced between groups of people sitting in low, swivelling chairs. She kept catching sight of herself in the mirrored surfaces of the walls and ceiling and desks. When she sat down, her dress ran up her thigh; she thought about fixing it but decided, in the end, to leave it as it was. She was being stupid. It would be a night similar to the one before. It would not end with her and David in the same room, in the same bed, or balanced on a windowsill, naked and exposed.

  “Em?”

  He was standing in front of her, wearing a dark jacket.

  “Did you get a haircut?” she asked.

  He ran a hand over his head. “No.”

  “You look different.”

  He shrugged, but his face was tense. He was holding his phone in one hand, and fiddling with it.

  “Car here?”

  She nodded. He looked flushed, as though he had run there.

  “Listen, Em, something’s come up. I offered to take one of the professors from the university to dinner.”

  “I’m sure they can change the reservation,” she said, “to three people. Do I need to arrange transport for him? Or her?”

  David glanced at her exposed thigh, and Emily’s hand twitched to cover it.

  “Actually, Em, I think it might be better for me to handle this one alone. Saves you the trouble of calling them again, anyway.”

  She tried to keep her breathing steady, and her face expressionless. She knew that if she spoke at once her voice might tremble, so she looked away, as though something dull and irrelevant had just occurred to her. In the corner of her eye she could see David’s feet shifting on the marble floor as he transferred weight from one to the other.

  When she turned to him, she smiled. “I can use the extra time to sort out your schedule for next week.”

  David didn’t miss a beat. “That’s why I love you.” His face relaxed a fraction. She thought perhaps he looked grateful.

  When he was gone, she sat very still in the chair.

  A man in a grey suit approached her with an extended hand saying, “Ms. Francis?”

  She stared at him blankly before remembering to speak. “No, sorry.” She felt as though he had woken her up.

  The man backed off as though she had snarled at him. She watched him cross the floor and greet someone else. The woman smiled and shook his hand and he sat down beside her. By the lifts, a couple were kissing. Everywhere, there were people who had come to meet each other.

  Emily slid her laptop out of her bag and logged onto David’s email.

  She had made daily resolutions not to check the “Personal etc.” folder. It had become a sort of addiction, and she would begin each morning with a resolve that wore off, like her make-up, as time passed. By five o’clock she would be reading a string of emails planning George’s stag party and an update from David’s mother listing the possible dates she might visit his new flat, while rubbing at the smudged mascara over and beneath her eyes. She watched David’s life like a soap opera. She would open the messages, highlight and copy them into a Word document, then mark them as unread again in David’s inbox. The process took about four seconds per message, and still she would sweat as she did it, and jump at small noises nearby; it seemed to her inevitable that she would get caught out at some point, and yet it was impossible to stop.

  She opened the folder. There were a couple of new messages from Amazon, and one from a friend who was travelling in Uganda. And then she saw it, between a Facebook alert and a request for seller feedback from eBay: an email from Carla L. Blakey. “Re; Re; Re; Re: Delete this!” was the subject line. The message body read, “OK. But just for dinner. I mean it. Just dinner. You’re going to try and make me drink but I’m not going to.”

  Outside the hotel, a doorman ushered her into a taxi. The car moved off and joined the oozing traffic on the roads. She could see, for most of the journey, the top of the ICC towering over the buildings on the other side of the water. It was typical, she thought, that David had chosen to meet that girl in a building she couldn’t ignore. She would see it everywhere; it would remind her over and over again of him and Carla.

  She wondered if he were already there. She wondered if Carla would be waiting for him, wearing a dress that was appropriate for the venue, and underwear that matched. When the car slowed behind a line of vehicles in the tunnel to Kowloon, she gripped the door handle so tightly her knuckles bulged, to prevent herself from punching the back of the driver’s seat. They would be sitting opposite each other in the highest restaurant in the world; David would pour her a glass of wine that she would refuse to touch; he would lean forwards and she would be able to smell him. She would let her hand fall on the table, almost in the centre of it, and David would stare at her fingers, and make sure she knew that he was staring, before lifting them to his lips. The car edged forwards.

  —

  The hostess at the restaurant didn’t want to let Emily through.

  “Reservation?”

  “My boss is here,” Emily said. “I just need to give him something. It’s important. It will take two minutes.”

  When she finally got inside, she felt exposed, and let her hair fall over her face as though it might disguise her. She had no good reason for being there. David would be appalled. The surfaces, the floor, walls, and ceiling, were clean and shimmering; her reflected face followed her from several angles.

  She sat at the bar. She thought about turning around, going back to the hotel, ordering room service and getting drunk by herself. It would be the right thing to do; the mature thing to do. When they got back to London, she would start looking for another job, something more suited to her. She would dig out that stupid list she had made and work through each of the options, if necessary, right down to “Politician” and “Prostitute,” because anything, anything would be better than this.

  And then she saw David, sitting by the gaping glass window, and with him, Carla. David was facing the bar, but hadn’t seen her. Carla, opposite him, had her back to Emily, so all that was visible was the curve of her spine under a sleeveless shirt, her cropped brown hair, an arm draped, perhaps a little awkwardly, over the corner of the table. Between them were the drinks, David’s glass half-empty, Carla’s untouched.

  A waiter brought Emily a menu. She ordered without paying attention, something with whisky and vermouth in it. It felt as though she were watching David in a play, the way he was sitting and the way his face was making expressions she had never seen before: timid flickers between his eyebrows; nervous bites on his lower lip. His forehead and temples were glazed with sweat. There were blotches of red on his neck, blossoming out from under the
collar of his shirt.

  Emily drank four of the whisky cocktails and the room began to twirl and sway. When she stared hard, she could still focus on David. He had taken one of his shoes off, and had his foot on Carla’s chair, between her legs. She had parted them slightly. She was sipping from her drink. Moments later, it was Carla and not David who leaned across the table. They kissed. David lifted a hand to hold the back of her head, and Emily, squinting through her blurred vision, saw that it was shaking like an alcoholic’s.

  When they pulled apart, Carla looked back over her shoulder. For the first time, Emily had a view of her face, and saw that she was old, in her early fifties at least but possibly nearer sixty. The skin around her eyes was loose and tired; her cheeks had begun to sag beneath her jaw. When she waved a hand to get the attention of a waiter, light flashed from the gold band on her ring finger and the flesh underneath her upper arm swayed.

  David looked up and straight into Emily’s eyes. He looked shell-shocked, as though someone had slapped him. Emily didn’t move. He put a hand on the table and seemed to be about to rise and go over to her, but Carla reached out and trailed her fingers over his knuckles. He glanced again at Emily, and she tried to imagine all the things he must be thinking, and how much he must hate her. His eyes returned to Carla, who was talking, quickly, and her head was jerking as she spoke. When David replied, Emily thought perhaps he was speaking deliberately clearly, so she could read his lips.

  “I love you,” he said. “I love you so much.”

  Emily left the restaurant without paying. As the lift plummeted to the ground floor, she imagined she was falling. Outside the building, there was a fish market, with live crabs struggling against each other in shallow trays. The smell of salt and flesh filled her nose as she wandered through it. An elderly man was bent over a low table, decapitating eels. His knife fell rhythmically, like a heartbeat—chop, chop, chop—and the bodies continued to wriggle as they slid, headless, into a bucket by his knees.

  A little way down the street, beyond the market and a line of parked cars, somebody screamed. Emily looked up and saw that something was falling; a body was falling from the sky. She began to run towards where it would land. She had the feeling that if she reached it in time, she might be able to catch it, like a bouquet tossed at a wedding. She tripped over a mat covered in shellfish and they scattered into the road as though they were trying to escape.

  There was a sound, then, unlike any she had ever heard: a thud and a splash that was unmistakably the noise a human body made when it hit solid ground from a height. She felt certain, she somehow knew, that it was David, and when she had pushed through the shocked, silent crowd it took a moment for her to realize that it wasn’t. It was a girl, young, not anyone Emily knew. She had landed, it seemed, feet first. Her bones had pushed through her shoulders. The legs and torso were mangled and bloody, but her head was whole and almost clean. The exposed skeleton was bright white against the red. Emily couldn’t look away.

  People began to call for help, and she joined them, screaming, “Help, help, help.”

  Spinning a Yarn

  Bleaker Island is eight square miles of rock and mud off the south-east coast of an area of the Falklands called Lafonia. The land is owned by a farming couple called George and Alison, who divide their time between Bleaker and Stanley. Sometimes, then, the population of the island will be three, including myself, and sometimes it will be one, including myself. There are also sea lions, a thousand sheep, a small herd of cows, and a colony of gentoo penguins. There is no road. There are no trees.

  The settlement in which I live is built on the narrowest strip of the island. This consists of George and Alison’s house, large, positioned on the crest of a small incline, looking down on the other buildings, and a cottage that belongs to the farm manager and his wife, who are both away in England for the duration of my stay. There are two guest houses, which in the summer months will be full of groups on organized wildlife tours of the Falklands, but while I am here both are empty. I stay in the larger, more modern of the two: it has several bedrooms with the same geometric-patterned bed linen and curtains, a kitchen, a living room and the large sunroom, which is where I will write. Also in the settlement: a shearing shed, two other huts that serve unspecified agricultural purposes, and a wind turbine. This is the extent of civilization on the island.

  For hours, I sit in the sunroom, staring at the view from the house: bald hillocks and the pattern of cloud-shadows sliding over them. When the wind drops, there are brief moments of unsettling quiet. Then a storm sets in, pelting hail and rain and snow against the glass roof, and I have the feeling that I am sitting inside the weather itself.

  At night, it feels too dark to sleep. There’s no phone service. The Internet connection comes and goes, sluggish and unreliable. I play music that doesn’t fill the silence so much as sits on top of it.

  I am regimented: I wake early and work my way through Canadian Air Force exercises—sit-ups, push-ups, ridiculous on-the-spot running—from a tattered old pamphlet I found in my parents’ house before I left. I have the idea that the exercises will inspire in me a discipline that will last for the rest of the day, that a kind of military determination might enter me through the dusty pages of the pamphlet.

  From my writing station in the sunroom—carefully disarranged laptop and notebooks, blue pen, black pen, pencil, Bleak House—with a view of the bay and the red-roofed shearing shed beyond it, I drink my whole day’s ration of black instant coffee and make calculations. If a first novel should be 90,000 words (I read this somewhere on the Internet once, and cling to it as absolute, indisputable fact), then after my false starts and archive-digging days in Stanley, which produced only 10,000, I have 80,000 words to go. I am on the island for forty-one days, and will need to leave some time at the end for revisions—a week or so should be enough for that, surely?—so say that leaves me with thirty-two writing days: 80,000 ÷ 32 = 2,500. I will write 2,500 words each day, and by the time I leave Bleaker, I will have drafted and revised a whole novel.

  The figures scribbled down in the notebook are dry, unemotional. They look remarkably similar to the calorie calculations I made on the previous page: the total number of almonds and raisins in the extra-large bags brought from London, divided by the number of days on Bleaker. I am conducting a simple transaction. Over the course of my stay, I will consume a total of 44,485 calories, and convert them into one 90,000-word novel. I will be a Book Machine.

  The less comforting realization following this exercise is that the number of words I am planning to write daily is more than double the number of calories I have budgeted to eat. The conversion that on one level seems so reassuring also appears unsustainable. Is it possible for a Book Machine to operate quite this efficiently? Will I run out of fuel? Will I come to a grinding, spluttering halt out here, alone, in the middle of the South Atlantic, with no hope of repair or rescue?

  —

  Mid-morning, I hear the sound of an engine thrumming alongside the whirr of the wind. Moments later the car appears in front of the house. George is behind the wheel, red-faced, hearty, and like everything else on the island, somewhat windswept. Even though I have only met him once, the day before, when he collected me from the airstrip and drove me to the house, the sight of a familiar face makes me feel jubilant with relief. He waves.

  The passenger door opens and Alison, who is trim and impeccably put together, emerges. She wears make-up. She accessorizes. Her glamour strikes a dissonant note against the backdrop of the storm as she trots up the front steps and stamps crusts of mud from her boots. Her accent is distinctly plummy, with no trace of the Falklands’ Somerset–Ireland–Australia twang when she pokes her head into the sunroom and says, “Hello there!”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Got a spare minute?” she asks.

  I look down at the notebook in my lap, the scribbled numbers, the days stretching ahead and the task that is supposed to fill them. “Yes,” I say. �
�Definitely.”

  “Great.” Alison gestures with her head to the jeep behind her. “Come on then.”

  The wind hits me like a punch when I step outside.

  Alison holds open the car door against the weather’s buffeting and shouts, “Hop in! We’re going to spin some yarn!”

  Unsure if she means this figuratively or literally, I slide into the back seat of the car and the three of us bounce across the uneven ground around the bay towards the shearing shed. Inside, it is dark and echoey and smells of wood and petrol and animals. In one corner are the materials and apparatus for spinning: sacks of lumpy, yellow-grey wool, still pungent, and a wheel that looks like an instrument of torture. Staring at it, I feel a kind of stage fright. This is the sort of straightforward, practical task that seems mysterious and difficult to me, but obvious and easy to people like George and Alison.

  I take the role with the least potential for disaster: positioned beside a sack, I pull knots from the wool, removing twigs and lumps of mud. I pass the de-clumped wool to George at the carder, a contraption that looks like two round-headed hairbrushes side by side. It churns out fluffy, clean fibres like candyfloss. Alison feeds these into the pedal-powered wheel and produces thin strands of wool, ready to be balled and knitted. We work in silence. The machine whirrs. Outside, the wind is howling.

  After several hours of de-clumping, a layer of grease has built up on my palms. Soap and hot water don’t shift it. Back in the house that afternoon my hands still smell of sheep.

  To spin a yarn. To tell a story. You take something amorphous and lumpy and you order it. You twist it into something with a purpose.