by Nell Stevens
Up ahead: Long Gulch. Before I see the crevice itself, I notice plumes of water rising up where it looks as though there should be solid land. It snows and hails in fits and starts, stinging. I pull the cord of my hood tight around my face so I have only a small tunnel to see out of. My feet are sliding around on the mud as though I’m learning how to skate. When I get to the gulch, my muscles are burning, the skin around my lips is stinging in the cold, and the waves are raging.
I stumble down into a small cranny out of the wind and crouch there, panting, to watch the ocean. The waves are wild, smashing against the rocks and sending up walls of spray. The whole gully is filled with thick, foamy water that looks like churning whipped cream. It oozes and folds back on itself, sucking kelp under its surface, then spitting it back up. I am transfixed. I barely notice the gradual loss of sensation in my feet and hands. There is a comforting fascination in witnessing from nearby something that could kill you in a second: the black water turning white as it hurls itself against the rocks.
As I stare at the water and boulders and the birds that, thanks to Alison, I now know are night herons nestling in the nooks, I have an unsettling idea about the novel, and in a strange way about Bleak House, too—something so huge it makes my stomach clench—and before I know it, I have stood up into the blast of the wind, and am scrambling to get back home. My feet are numb and I’m walking oddly, tripping over my own boots. I need to think about this huge, bizarre, alarming thing in peace, away from the waves.
I try to focus on my location for a moment, plotting out a map of the route I’ve traced in my head: I have walked two sides of a triangle to get to Long Gulch, so if I head away from the coast across the thin central strip of the island I will complete the third. This is the quickest, most direct route. I’m freezing and tired, but it should only take twenty minutes to get back, I tell myself. Before I know it I’ll be warm again, and sitting in front of my laptop in the sunroom. I’m nearly home. I’m nearly home. The wind is pounding my back as though it too wants me to hurry, is pushing me onwards. I stride and slither over mud.
When I reach the place where I expect the house to be, I find instead a sheer cliff. The ground stops suddenly, and beneath is a long, abrupt drop into dark water. I was so certain of my route, but here, where I thought I’d find not only solid ground, but the comfort of the house, dry clothes and my book, there is only thin air.
I back away from the edge. The sun is sinking, and it is beginning to snow hard again and what I thought were the sheep that habitually graze near the settlement reveal themselves to be, now, nothing but white patches of ice-coated tussac. I do not know where I am, I think. I don’t know how to get back to the house, I think. More than anything, I think how incredibly embarrassing it is to get lost on an island this small.
I know there are cliffs on only one of the coasts; I know the wind was against me when I left and is now at my back; I know I can be at most two miles from the house and that I should be able to navigate from the position of the sun if nothing else, but somehow I can’t see anything familiar, and the snow makes everything look different anyway. A fog is descending that cuts off my vision after a few feet. I wander in circles, recalling those passages from the Falkland Islands Magazine reporting local deaths in the nineteenth century. It seemed so ludicrous, when I first read those articles, that so many people would get stuck in bogs and wander off cliffs and get lost, alone, on small islands. Now, I compose an article about myself: “Foolhardy Writer Loses Way, Is Pecked to Death by Caracaras.”
Then, suddenly, the wind changes. Instead of pelting snow at the back of my head, it now pummels the side of my face, and carries with it the pungent, unmistakable odour of penguins.
I don’t think I’ve ever been, or ever will be, more delighted by the smell of rotting fish. I rush towards it, praying it won’t change direction again, following the scent. Eventually, over the crest of the hill, the colony of gentoos appears, nestled at the far end of the white curve of the beach. From here it is only a thirty-minute walk home, on my usual path, and by the time I get back it has stopped snowing for the first time in days. I watch the last of the sun vanish into water that looks oddly calm.
—
Here’s the thought that struck me at Long Gulch: I could sort out Ollie’s character; I could make him more rounded, less goofy and introspective. I could change the language, too—go back and write it in first or even second person, switch up the tense, adopt a cleaner style. I could prune out all those contorted, grammatically distorting, seemingly never-ending sentences. I could do all that, but there would still be a problem, something unfixable, and that is the original premise, which will never, ever be believable. It is a fairy tale asking to be taken at face value. There is no way that a character like Ollie, being who he is, would ever end up in a place like Bleaker in search of his father. It would never happen. It is too far, and too random, and too ridiculous, and too strange. He wouldn’t even make it to Stanley.
The only person who would end up on Bleaker Island, I think, is me. The only reason anyone would come here alone, and stay for so long with nothing to do, is to write about it.
I scroll upwards through pages and pages of the novel, then turn back through the notebooks. My mind is still full of the swirling chaos at Long Gulch, and instead of my unfathomable Bleak House charts, what catches my eye now are the scribbled diary entries that appear between attempts to draw Ollie’s family tree: the daily attempts I made to write, by hand, about the island. There are pages and pages and pages of these notes.
· Monday 2nd September: Snow has come back to the mainland; white hillsides creased like bed sheets. Sun sinking into it.
· Saturday 24th August: Wide, wide sky tonight, still glowing where the light was, that luminous blue, orange at the edge, faint stars and a large one, brighter than the others. Found a can of tinned pears in the cupboard and tried melting a Ferrero Rocher onto the fruit in the microwave. Ruined both chocolate and pear so will not repeat.
· Wednesday 7th August: Today my eyes are heavy and tight, and I’m listless, and suddenly so frustrated to find myself on a small island, surrounded by snow, cut off from all of the rest of life. I got up and did my exercises just the same, and sat in the sunroom and stared at the patch of world outside—snow, geese, red-roofed sheds—and imagined all the things I want to do next, all the places I want to go: London; New York; increasingly, passionately, Rome. Perhaps this. Perhaps that. Plans plans plans. But then I look up and I find I am still on a cold island in the South Atlantic.
—
Next, I turn to Bleak House, which has sat like a talisman beside my laptop all this time. I skim the pages of Esther’s narrative, noticing in a way I never have before the persistence of the personal pronoun: “I,” says Esther. “I, I, I. I thought. I felt. I wished.”
Bleak House isn’t only court cases, scrap paper, the search for lost family. It is also about the awkward surrealness of attempting to narrate one’s own life. Somehow, until now, I didn’t see that.
“It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about myself!” says Esther. “As if this narrative were the narrative of MY life!” But so much of Bleak House is the narrative of her life. Even when she doesn’t know it, the story she is telling is her own.
What if the book I thought I was writing is not the book that I have really written? What if I have spent my time on the island thinking I was writing about Ollie, while accidentally, almost incidentally, between the pages if not between the lines, I have been putting together a different book altogether? What if the story of Bleaker House is the narrative of MY life?
—
When the snow begins to melt, giant petrels circle and descend on the carcases of sheep lost in the storm. They feast on the corpses until there is nothing left but fleece and bones, and they are too bloated and heavy to fly. I watch them struggling on the ground, hopping and flapping hopelessly, lurching over rocks as they try and fail to take off.
/> Bleaker House: RESOLUTION
Loneliness Is a City You Don’t Know
This is not a voyage of self-discovery. This is not a healing process. This is not one woman’s search for everything, or a journey from lost to found.
I did not come to Bleaker Island to find myself.
I came here to work—to write a book.
Except didn’t I also, really, come for those other things? To learn how to be alone? To discover the authentic core of myself? The idea of this makes me cringe. But what should I think of myself, now, as the end of my exile on Bleaker arrives and I have not done what I ostensibly set out to do? There is no finished novel. Instead there is this strange, surprising, amorphous thing, this other kind of story I have accidentally, fragmentarily, told. I feel as though I have pulled a rabbit from a hat I was about to put on.
I think back to my fellowship proposal, that optimistic pitch about concentration and solitude. There was so much more I wanted to accomplish here than the one thing I have failed, it transpires, to do. I was scared of being alone. I was scared that I would always be alone. I was scared that this fear, this boring, ordinary fear of loneliness, would obstruct my writing by making me weak. And so, I thought, if I could handle all this time by myself on Bleaker Island, it would mean I could handle being alone in real life. It was supposed to be a kind of home-made immersion therapy.
—
After Will, I went out with a poet who, on a Friday night, took me to a poetry reading in Farringdon, across the road from a strip club. After drinking to the point of silliness at the reading, we staggered across to the club and spent the rest of the night with the strippers.
“Get a dance,” the poet said. “Get a dance from one of the girls.”
I had come out straight from work. I was wearing a light grey woollen dress and tights. This seemed acceptable attire for a poetry reading, but next to the semi-naked woman crawling across the table towards me, I felt laughable. She looked awkward, too, but tried to do her job as best she could, while I attempted to make small talk. “Where do you come from? How long have you worked here for? Do you like your job?”
She stopped writhing. “Do you want me to tell you stories, or do you want me to dance?”
The poet and I didn’t see each other again after that night.
A year or so later, I googled him and ordered a copy of his book. It arrived: a shiny black cover, his name in bold letters that made it look distant and unfamiliar. I flicked through the contents until I reached a poem that made me pause. I read and re-read the first line: “Not every love leaves. Some tarry, ever visceral; every nerve singing.” I stared. Then I saw it. The first letter of each word lined up: “N E L L S T E V E N S.”
I felt uncomfortable, exposed, as though something had been taken from me without my permission. It was not true, what he had written. Our love definitely left. He could have got the same effect with “Not every love lasts.” He didn’t have to lie about it.
Reading something that has been written about you is like looking into a mirror and seeing another person’s face.
All along, you thought those people understood who you really are, and it turns out they were seeing someone else entirely.
—
In Boston, I was invited to a dinner party in the middle of a snowstorm. The host was a woman in my fiction workshop. The city had shut down in the blizzard and the woman lived across town. I was at home, curled up on my bed in tracksuit bottoms and slippers, reading and watching snow gradually blot out the view through my windowpane. It was warm inside. I was drowsy and comfortable. I began to craft a delicate negative response to the invite, citing the weather along with a deadline I had for a story the coming week, but before I had time to send it, she texted, “OK, well, forget it,” and somehow, in a rush to appease her, I ended up replying that of course I’d be there, would love to be there, would bring wine and arrive for eight.
I spent thirty minutes shuffling around my neighbourhood in the storm, looking for a cab willing to make the trip, and eventually reached her apartment nearly an hour late. I walked in full of apologies, expecting dinner to be under way, to be squeezed in at the end of a table of busily eating, laughing guests. But nobody else was there. The room was silent. The woman had laid the table for two.
“Nobody else could make it,” she said.
We ate sitting opposite each other, and drank her bottle of wine, and then the one that I had brought, and then whisky. At some point after dinner, she suggested we go snowshoeing, and with only one pair between us, this meant waddling about, falling over a lot, picking each other up, holding hands. Around two, I told her I should get a cab. She shrugged. When I called the taxi companies, I found that none of them was operating because of the blizzard.
“So, you’ll have to stay,” the woman said. She reached across, moved hair back from my face and leaned in to kiss me.
I should not have stayed, of course—because the weather was no better the next morning and I still had to walk across the city in snow that was, at times, waist-high; because I then spent the rest of the academic year screening her calls and trying to avoid her because I didn’t know how to explain why I did stay that night; and because in our final workshop she submitted a story in which an insecure, unknown artist has a passionate one-night stand with a successful painter, then flees and never answers his calls because she fears she doesn’t deserve the happiness that a relationship with him would inevitably bring. The woman read excerpts aloud to the group, fixing her eyes on me over the top of the paper.
I was, again, indignant. Her portrayal was inaccurate. It was self-aggrandizing and unfair. I was full of remonstrance—I suddenly wanted to speak to this person I had been studiously avoiding, just to say, The reason I have been studiously avoiding you is not because I am uncomfortable with happiness, or with my sexuality, but because I am uncomfortable around you. I didn’t say anything. Instead, I resolved to take the high ground and never, ever write about her.
Months later, her story came out in a magazine. The title had changed, and the couple got together at the end, which is what Leslie had suggested in class.
—
It seems clear, now, that I have been alone in my relationships. When people I have dated write about me, I see it that way. When I write about them, they must see, too, that I was not there with them, but with some other person, a kind of shallow twin of theirs. It is hard to love someone, if you are in the habit of taking every experience you have as material for your work. It has surely been doubly hard when both partners are in it for the same thing: a kind of mutual excavation, digging rather than caring.
Is the life of a writer necessarily a lonely one? Part of my decision to come to Bleaker Island came from a place of pessimism: I feared that this was the case. I have been in training for loneliness.
The problem with this idea, though, is that, as I turn through the pages and pages of diary entries, it does not seem to me that I have been truly lonely on the island. I have been a lot of other things—bored, hungry, frustrated, and lately, disappointed in myself—but not really, specifically lonely.
It occurs to me that if you want to be completely alone, the place to go would be a city you don’t know. On Bleaker, where company is scarce, my own has become by comparison quite fascinating. I have been on excellent speaking terms with myself, happily narrating my thoughts and days as I stride up to the beach, or around the pond, arguing points, and asking myself questions. I don’t even notice I’m doing it until another sound—a birdcall or a particularly loud gust of wind—draws my attention away from my own voice. I have been working my way through the CDs sent by my novelist friend, and sometimes, when an unexpected track comes on, it makes me look up from whatever I am doing, and it feels as though he is suddenly in the room with me, smiling and saying, “Yes, what about this?” When George and Alison returned from their time away and resumed their daily mid-morning visits, the company felt almost overwhelming.
In Ho
ng Kong, I understand now, I was lonely. When I moved to Boston for the very first time and knew nobody, I would go on long, solitary walks by the Charles past couples arm in arm and groups of teenagers smoking on the benches; then, I was lonely. Sometimes in London, too, when my friends were away and I hadn’t seen anyone for a few days, I’d sit on the 68 bus going over Waterloo Bridge and feel the ache developing. Surrounded by people, it is very easy to feel alone. Surrounded by penguins, less so.
—
For a few weeks, I dated a composer. After we broke up, he set some of my writing to music. I went to see it performed by a Dutch baritone and Spanish guitar at Wigmore Hall. It was an atonal, arrhythmic blur of sound, and I didn’t know enough about new music to work out whether or not I should be offended.
—
On my final night on Bleaker, I go walking at dusk in the last of the light. Snow on the mainland makes the curves and dips of small hills on the horizon look like a distant mountain range: the beginning of the wide other world that I will soon return to.
On the beach, the colony of penguins is growing. They appear in the water, diving in arcs through the waves in groups of three or four, then reach the sand and waddle, wings outstretched, to join the waiting cluster. Spring is coming. They are gathering to breed.
On the other side of the island, the sun is drooping and then gone from sight. Suddenly the wind dies, and stays dead. It is strange, the silence now, with only the birdcalls to break it. The water is still and silvery, paler than the sky, as though it remembers the light that has faded.
