by Nell Stevens
I look around: there is no movement except for the swerving of birds. A neat V-formation slides above the water. Back at the settlement, George and Alison will be at home, cooking, talking to each other, living their normal life. Tomorrow, I will have left the island and they will remain. Nothing will have changed for them at all.
For now, though, the place stills feels as though it is mine. Nobody is here. Nobody can see me. And what that makes me want to do is—dance.
I am ridiculous, twirling and swooping and jumping between little mounds of grass that poke up from the snow, the way I would have done when I was little. I laugh at myself, and then feel very serious, and leap as high as I possibly can in the air.
I am alone, and can do anything. I am alone and not lonely. I have come to the end of my time on the island without writing what I set out to write, with an unfinished failure of a novel, a mass of incoherent diary entries and only the vaguest sense of what to do with them; and yet I feel, more now than ever before, that I am a writer. I land with a thud, sending mud and guano flying.
“Character Study”
You knew him as a man first, and a character in a poetry book second. You had seen him at the school gates, waiting for Mrs. Grant, your English teacher. Sometimes you even acknowledged him. You said, “Hello, Mr. Grant,” in a voice you knew—you had studied and perfected it—combined insolence and politeness in perfect balance, so that he was flummoxed, unsure whether to be angry, or embarrassed, or to return the greeting in good faith. You trailed your fingers along the school railings and stalked off. You imagined his gaze following you down the road—but when you swung around with a gasp and “Gotcha” eyes, he was looking the other way.
It wasn’t you who found the poems. It was a girl in your class called Victoria Collins, who ran into the classroom and slowed to a knowing swagger before dropping the book on the desk in front of everyone. The hands of the clock were edging towards eight-thirty, when your form tutor would appear to take the register.
“What is that?” you asked. You often spoke like this, on behalf of the group. People allowed you to.
Victoria paused for effect and the room, which had been filled with drowsy early-morning chatter and the shuffle of books and homework being unpacked, was quiet. “Mrs. Grant,” she said. She stopped. Then, “Mrs. Grant is a poet. I found her book in the library.”
There was an air of immediate disappointment. Victoria had oversold the news; it was nothing interesting. Your social worlds already included poets. Your parents and their friends, academics at the university for the most part, or publishing people at the university press, had made poets commonplace to you all. You had suffered through dinner parties with poets. Poets had bored you.
The news was, at best, vaguely embarrassing for Mrs. Grant. It was awkward for her that she had been found out this way. If she had wanted her students to know about the book, she would have told you herself. There was an additional though minor thrill in discovering the thing your teachers had wanted to be before they became teachers; a badge of failure suddenly unveiled.
But you felt it was a defeat for you personally, too, since you hadn’t known about it until now, and the book had been sitting in the library all along. This was the sort of thing you usually made it your business to discover. You turned your back and began rummaging in your rucksack for chewing gum.
Victoria knew she was losing the crowd. She had clearly expected more interest. “Sex poems,” she blurted out. “The book. It’s full of poems about her and Mr. Grant having sex.”
You looked up, and smiled, and Victoria’s face flushed. A triumph.
“Give that to me,” you said. She slid the book across the desk to your waiting hand.
—
You read it that afternoon after school, sitting on top of a line of garages at the end of your road. You could climb up via a low wall and a tree, and smoke undisturbed. People passing by on the pavement below had no idea you were there; when you were younger you had entertained yourself by throwing flecks of gravel down at them and watching their bemused faces turn to look up at the sky. Now, you preferred to keep an absolute distance from the rest of the world.
You kept a box of private things tucked behind the drainpipe, things you didn’t want your mother to find when she searched your room: condoms; a little bag of weed you bought from someone’s older brother; a razor blade you had confiscated from a girl at school called Natalie Price, who was always threatening to kill herself. There were some pills you had ordered from the back of a magazine that promised to dissolve your fat, and torn-out, glossy articles listing tips for giving blow jobs, or getting a beach body in two weeks. These were the kinds of secrets you expected yourself to have. Mrs. Grant’s poetry book was different and surprising to you, because you wanted it for yourself, and it felt too private even for the drainpipe box.
Its cover was an expanse of blank, dark blue, interrupted in the bottom-left corner by a honeycomb pattern of hexagons in pink. The title and her name were spelled in white letters: Tessellations, by Bethany Grant.
At first you skimmed the pages for the sex bits. You found lines about Mr. Grant’s penis, about rippling orgasms, about sweat and semen and screams, and a list of “love items” that included his “cut-out buttocks, rising like dust up beyond the window.” None of it rhymed, which was a relief. You had studied Sylvia Plath in Mrs. Grant’s class that year and understood that poems could either rhyme, or be interesting, but never both. “We two, heat-hunched and folded so we fell,” the verse continued, “stripped pink like worms in dirt.”
Tessellations was not disappointing, even when you reached the last page. Then you went back, reading more slowly, filling in the bits between the sex scenes; there was a narrative to it, you discovered, about the two of them meeting, the relationship developing, Mr. Grant playing love songs on his piano, then the vitiligo that spread across his skin like clouds and the wedding that took place on the anniversary of the death of his twin brother. You were good at English, good at reading and understanding and imagining things; when you reached the end a second time, you found that you still weren’t finished with it, and started all over again. “Piano goes and goes and I love you,” it said, on the final page, “over-exposed in front of the sun, and so—whiter in parts than even you are.”
It was late, and you were hungry. The smells of other people’s evening meals drifted from the nearby houses up to the garage roofs: roast chicken, garlic. You shuffled backwards down from the ledge, scuffing the leather of your shoes against the bark of the tree and landing with a thud that jolted your knees.
At dinner, your mother and father sat and talked civilly, and you realized for the first time that they didn’t dislike each other as much as you used to think; they just weren’t in love the way Mr. and Mrs. Grant were in love.
—
Mrs. Grant taught a class about control and mastery in The Tempest. She talked about the power of language, about Caliban and Prospero and the relationship between emotion and the ability to articulate emotion. As she spoke, you scrutinized her. It was hard to tell how old she was—younger than most of the other teachers, certainly, but ages blurred into each other once you got past twenty or so. They looked like adults to you, and all the same.
It occurred to you for the first time that Mrs. Grant might be pretty. She had dark black hair that she flipped from one side of her head to the other when she spoke; she wore the kinds of shoes you yourself imagined you would wear when you were older. You tried to picture her taking off her clothes. You thought about the naked body underneath them: a real woman’s body that was unlike yours or your friends’, but also unlike your mother’s or the crumpled, pillowy shapes of the women in the locker room at the swimming pool. You tried to hear the way her voice would soften when she was with Mr. Grant, see the expression on her face when he was playing music for her, or when she was admiring his cut-out buttocks. You had never felt jealous of a teacher before, but this sudden vision of a wh
ole world occupied by Mrs. Grant outside the classroom was shocking, and wonderful. She snapped her fingers in front of you.
“Hey, Emma, Daydreamer, I asked you a question,” she said.
“I don’t know,” you said. You were careful to give your voice no inflection, your face no expression.
—
Because you were bored by school, and by your best friend, Caroline, and by the week, which was the last of the academic year. Because soon the summer holidays would begin and the prospect, which normally seemed so full of opportunity, now struck you as unbearably empty and sad. Because the way you felt when you were reading Tessellations, the concentration, breathlessness, the heat between your legs, was a form of joy and not boring. Because you were curious. Because it would be scandalous. Because you, too, would be scandalized if you actually went through with it.
Because Mrs. Grant’s poems made something happen in your mind—made you feel both identified and unfamiliar, made you feel hungry. Because you understood, suddenly, that there were people all around you living different kinds of lives, and Mrs. Grant’s was only one of them, and truly you wanted more than that, you wanted to learn and feel all sorts of other things, but you had to start somewhere. Because you were sick of being yourself, of being sixteen, of not being touched by anyone but boys from the boys’ school, who always told everyone everything afterwards and got cum in your hair, or on your clothes.
—
Mr. Grant wasn’t waiting at the gate that day, or the next day, which was the end of term. You looked him up in the phone book. You didn’t really know what you wanted. You thought you’d just call the number to check it was the right Grant.
Answering machine: Liam and Bethany, leave a message after the beep. You weren’t planning on saying anything, but when the moment came, you blurted out a line from one of the poems in Tessellations and then hung up, heart thudding.
Five minutes later, the house phone rang, and you had already forgotten about the call you’d made. You answered as you normally would, hoping it would be one of your friends. When you heard a man’s voice on the end of the line, you assumed it was someone for your parents.
“Did you just call this number?” he said. “I got a weird message on the answering machine—something about a dark park?”
“It’s from one of her poems,” you said.
“Who is this?”
You did not want to lie. “Emma James.”
“Who?”
“From school.” You often lied, but sensed that doing so now would take the giddy joy out of what was happening.
“So,” he sounded baffled, but pressed on, “you wanted to speak to Bethany?”
In the spirit of this new adrenalin-fuelled honesty, you were about to say “No,” but he continued to speak.
“You’re out of luck,” he said. “She’s away for the whole summer on her fellowship. She left this morning.”
“What fellowship?”
“The writing fellowship. She left today. Didn’t she tell—haven’t you—wait, who is this?”
“Emma James,” you said again.
He exhaled so loudly the receiver crackled. “I assumed you were a friend of Beth’s from work.”
“No,” you said. “I’m not her friend. I didn’t know about the fellowship.”
He sighed again, and you thought you could hear his tongue moving through spit in his mouth. You wondered what you should say next—whether you should ask him about his vitiligo, or his dead twin, or apologize for everything. Before you made up your mind, he hung up.
—
You were ashamed of the phone call. You knew it had been odd behaviour, and you didn’t like to think, now, of Mrs. Grant hearing about it. Perhaps, though, since she was away, he wouldn’t remember to tell her. Perhaps by the time she got back he’d have forgotten it happened, or at least forgotten your name.
You told Caroline about it, making it sound as funny as possible. He was a heavy breather, you said. He asked what you were wearing. He asked you to go round there and keep him company while Mrs. Grant was away on her fellowship. He was touching himself while you were speaking, you could tell. She gasped and laughed and asked if you really would do it—go round there—and you said you would and she said you were crazy, but crazy in a fun way, not crazy like Natalie Price.
—
He answered the door in his pyjamas, which took you aback, because it was only six p.m., and a Tuesday. He looked different from how he did at the school gates, when he had always seemed so neat, clean-shaven, wearing chinos and button-down shirts. Now, he had a dark shadow of stubble across his cheeks and chin, and bare feet. You peered at them, scanning for the pale blotches of skin like clouds, but saw only thick toenails, calluses and a surprising amount of hair.
“Can I help you?”
You had come there straight from the garage roof, where you had smoked a joint and determined to make no plan whatsoever for what would happen—but still your mind had raced ahead and told stories about how it would be: he would yell at you, probably, and you’d run off; he’d ask if you were OK, and you’d say you were, and run off.
“I’m Emma,” you said. “Emma James.”
He looked blank. “Sorry, who?”
“Can I come in?”
You waited for him to tell you to leave. You waited for him to threaten you, to say he would contact your parents, or the school. Instead, still looking dazed, he stepped aside.
—
You sat on a sagging couch while he went to the kitchen to get you a drink. You looked around. You tried to picture Mrs. Grant living in the house with him. It seemed small, and oddly dark. You had imagined she would live somewhere airy, floral, feminine. You had imagined the whole house would smell like she did, of the perfume that Caroline had confidently identified as Allure by Chanel, because her stepmother wore the same one. Instead, the place smelled almost of nothing, and slightly of toast.
There was a photograph of Mrs. Grant on the wall, riding a horse. Books on a shelf. An upright piano with the lid down. There was a TV in a corner of the room, squatting in a nest of cables and wires. On the screen was an image of a soldier carrying a gun, swaying and shuffling, waiting for the game to resume.
You hadn’t specified what you’d like to drink, but still, you were surprised when Mr. Grant came back with two cans of lager. He handed one to you, then sat down next to you so heavily that you bounced upwards.
“Is that your piano?” you asked, nodding towards it.
“Yup,” said Mr. Grant.
He picked up the Xbox controls and began to move the gunman forward on the screen. He fired the weapon and dodged and jumped over obstacles. You watched. A soundtrack of gunfire and gruff-voiced clips of speech filled a silence you nonetheless felt was strained. You waited for him to say something.
“How old are you?” you asked.
“Forty,” he said.
“Is Mrs. Grant forty, too?”
He paused the game and looked across at you. “You’re that girl who says hello to me outside the school.”
“I say hello to everyone.”
“She’s forty, too,” he said.
“Where is she?”
He cracked open his beer and took a long drink. You could hear the liquid in his throat, the glug of his swallowing. “She’s gone. On her writing fellowship.”
“Where?”
“Some island. Some unpopulated island. It’s somewhere off the bottom of South America.”
“Why?”
“Almost in Antarctica.”
“But why?”
He drank again. “She said she wanted to concentrate. She wants to be a writer.”
From the conversation on the phone, you hadn’t imagined he would be this way. He had seemed softer, then, and kinder. Now, surveying him as he turned his attention back to the game, you realized that he was very drunk. His eyes were red. His thumbs were slipping off the controls.
You opened your beer and took a sip.
“You don’t mind that she left you behind?”
He shrugged.
“What’s the matter with you?” you asked.
—
You weren’t sure how much time had passed since you arrived. You had done a thorough survey of the living room—had scanned the bookshelf for titles you recognized and found both The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and the copy of The Tempest Mrs. Grant taught from in class, had noted the pale shade of blue on the walls, the fact that you no longer smelled toast, had felt bored—and you had thought a little about your parents and whether they had been like this when they were forty. You had begun to sketch out the account of the visit you’d tell to Caroline and your other friends, in which you kissed Mr. Grant on the doorstep, and he hurried you inside to take your clothes off, and either you did have sex with him, or didn’t and ran off leaving him begging you to stay. They wouldn’t believe it completely but they’d want to, and nobody would dare suggest you had made it up, because the most outrageous part, really, was the fact that you had come at all, and that bit was true.
You realized then that part of you had thought, before you arrived, that you might actually have sex with Mr. Grant. You had taken a condom out of the drainpipe box and slid it into your pocket, without quite acknowledging to yourself that you were doing it. Now, you understood that nothing was going to happen, that the poems in Tessellations would be your only insight into the feelings Mr. Grant was capable of inspiring and the kinds of lives people like Mrs. Grant lived. It was deflating. You ran a hand across your pocket and felt the wrapper crinkle inside.
Mr. Grant’s character had died in the game, and he was hunched forward, staring at the screen with no expression. He had finished his beer. He hiccupped and the back of his ribcage swelled, then fell.
There was no point waiting. Nothing else interesting was going to happen. You stood up to leave.
He lounged back on the sofa and looked up at you. “Why are you here?”
