Dear Esther Script

Dear Esther
Audio trigger script
Dan Pinchbeck Dec '07
http://www.moddb.com/mods/dear-esther/downloads/dear-esther-script

Jetty

Dear Esther. I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island. Somewhere,
between the longitude and latitude a split opened up and it beached remotely here.
No matter how hard I correlate, it remains a singularity, an alpha point in my life that
refuses all hypothesis. I return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full
glare of my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim.

Dear Esther. The gulls do not land here anymore; I’ve noticed that this year, they
seem to shun the place. Maybe it’s the depletion of the fishing stock driving them
away. Perhaps it’s me. When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds
were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate
these Hebridean islands. Three hundred years later, even they have departed.

Dear Esther. I have lost track of how long I have been here, and how many visits I
have made overall. Certainly, the landmarks are now so familiar to me that I have to
remind myself to actually see the forms and shapes in front of me. I could stumble
blind across these rocks, the edges of these precipices, without fear of missing my
step and plummeting down to sea. Besides, I have always considered that if one is to
fall, it is critical to keep one’s eyes firmly open.

First climb

Donnelly reported the legend of the hermit; a holy man who sought solitude in its
most pure form. Allegedly, he rowed here from the mainland in a boat without a
bottom, so all the creatures of the sea could rise at night to converse with him. How
disappointed he must have been with their chatter. Perhaps now, when all that
haunts the ocean is the rubbish dumped from the tankers, he’d find more peace.
They say he threw his arms wide in a valley on the south side and the cliff opened up
to provide him shelter; they say he died of fever one hundred and sixteen years later.
The shepherds left gifts for him at the mouth of the cave, but Donnelly records they
never claimed to have seen him. I have visited the cave and I have left my gifts, but
like them, I appear to be an unworthy subject of his solitude.

First Beach

At night you can see the lights sometimes from a passing tanker or trawler. From up
on the cliffs they are mundane, but down here they fugue into ambiguity. For
instance, I cannot readily tell if they belong above or below the waves. The distinction
now seems mundane; why not everything and all at once! There’s nothing better to
do here than indulge in contradictions, whilst waiting for the fabric of life to unravel.

There was once talk of a wind farm out here, away from the rage and the intolerance
of the masses. The sea, they said, is too rough for the turbines to stand: they clearly
never came here to experience the becalming for themselves. Personally, I would
have supported it; turbines would be a fitting contemporary refuge for a hermit: the
revolution and the permanence

When you were born, you mother told me, a hush fell over the delivery room. A great
red birthmark covered the left side of your face. No one knew what to say, so you
cried to fill the vacuum. I always admired you for that; that you cried to fill whatever
vacuum you found. I began to manufacture vacuums, just to enable you to deploy
your talent. The birthmark faded by the time you were six, and had gone completely
by the time we met, but your fascination with the empty, and its cure, remained.

Cliff Path

Reading Donnelly by the weak afternoon sunlight. He landed on the south side of the
island, followed the path to bay and climbed the mount. He did not find the caves and
he did not chart the north side. I think this is why his understanding of the island is
flawed, incomplete. He stood on the mount and only wondered momentarily how to
descend. But then, he didn’t have my reasons.

Donnelly’s book had not been taken out from the library since 1974. I decided it
would never be missed as I slipped it under my coat and avoided the librarian’s gaze
on the way out. If the subject matter is obscure, the writer’s literary style is even more
so, it is not the text of a stable or trustworthy reporter. Perhaps it is fitting that my only
companion in these last days should be a stolen book written by a dying man.

The mount is clearly the focal point of this landscape; it almost appears so well
placed as to be artificial. I find myself easily slipping into the delusional state of
ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything here. Was this island formed
during the moment of impact; when we were torn loose from our moorings and the
seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders, did it first break surface
then?

White Lines

When someone had died or was dying or was so ill they gave up what little hope they
could sacrifice, they cut parallel lines into the cliff, exposing the white chalk beneath.
With the right eyes you could see them from the mainland or the fishing boats and
know to send aid or impose a cordon of protection, and wait a generation until
whatever pestilence stalked the cliff paths died along with its hosts. My lines are just
for this: to keep any would-be rescuers at bay. The infection is not simply of the
flesh.

Valley Top

They were godfearing people those shepherds. There was no love in the relationship.
Donnelly tells me that they had one bible that was passed around in strict rotation. It
was stolen by a visiting monk in 1776, two years before the island was abandoned
altogether. In the interim, I wonder, did they assign chapter and verse to the stones
and grasses, marking the geography with a superimposed significance; that they
could actually walk the bible and inhabit its contradictions?

We are not like Lot’s wife, you and I; we feel no particular need to turn back. There’s
nothing to be seen if we did. No tired old man parting the cliffs with his arms; no gifts
or bibles laid out on the sand for the taking. No tides turning or the shrieking gulls
overhead. The bones of the hermit are no longer laid out for the taking: I have stolen
them away to the guts of this island where the passages all run to black and there we
can light each others faces by their strange luminescence.

I quote directly: “A motley lot with little to recommend them. I have now spent three
days in their company that is, I fear, enough for any man not born amongst them.
Despite their tedious inclination to quote scripture, they seem to me the most
godforsaken of all the inhabitants of the outer isles. Indeed, in this case, the very
gravity of that term – forsaken by god – seems to find its very apex.” It appears to me
that Donnelly too found those who wander this shoreline to be adrift from any chance
of redemption. Did he include himself in that, I wonder?

Paul #1

Dear Esther. I met Paul. I made my own little pilgrimage. My Damascus a small
semi-detached on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. We drank coffee in his kitchen
and tried to connect to one another. Although he knew I hadn’t come in search of an
apology, reason or retribution, he still spiralled in panic, thrown high and lucid by his
own dented bonnet. Responsibility had made him old; like us, he had already passed
beyond any conceivable boundary of life.

Hermit

I threw my arms wide and the cliff opened out before me, making this rough home. I
transferred my belongings from the bothy on the mount and tried to live here instead.
It was cold at night and the sea lapped at the entrance at high tide. To climb the
peak, I must first venture even deeper into veins of the island, where the signals are
blocked altogether. Only then will I understand them, when I stand on the summit and
they flow into me, uncorrupted.

I would leave you presents, outside your retreat, in this interim space between cliff
and beach. I would leave you loaves and fishes, but the fish stocks have been
depleted and I have run out of bread. I would row you back to your homeland in a
bottomless boat but I fear we would both be driven mad by the chatter of the sea
creatures.

I find myself increasingly unable to find that point where the hermit ends and Paul
and I begin. We are woven into a sodden blanket, stuffed into the bottom of a boat to
stop the leak and hold back the ocean. My neck aches from staring up at the aerial; it
mirrors the dull throb in my gut where I am sure I have begun to form another stone.
In my dreams, it forms into a perfect representation of Lot’s wife, head over her
shoulder, staring along the motorway at the approaching traffic, in a vacuum of
fatalistic calm.

Valley Return

He still maintains he wasn’t drunk but tired. I can’t make the judgement or the
distinction anymore. I was drunk when I landed here, and tired too. I walked up the
cliff path in near darkness and camped in the bay where the trawler lies beached. It
was only at dawn that I saw the bothy and decided to make my temporary lodgings
there. I was expecting just the aerial and a transmitter stashed in a weatherproof box
somewhere on the mount. It had an air of uneasy permanence to it, like all the other
buildings here; erosion seems to have evaded it completely.

The vegetation here has fossilized from the roots up. To think they once grazed
animals here, the remnants of occupation being evidence to that. It is all sick to
death: the water is too polluted for the fish, the sky is too thin for the birds and the
soil is cut with the bones of hermits and shepherds. I have heard it said that human
ashes make great fertilizer, that we could sow a great forest from all that is left of
your hips and ribcage, with enough left over to thicken the air and repopulate the bay.

I dreamt I stood in the centre of the sun and the solar radiation cooked my heart from
the inside. My teeth will curl and my fingernails fall off into my pockets like loose
change. If I could stomach, I’d eat, but all I seem capable of is saltwater. Were the
livestock still here, I could turn feral and gorge. I’m as emaciated as a body on a slab,
opened up for a premature source of death. I’ve rowed to this island in a heart
without a bottom; all the bacteria of my gut rising up to sing to me.

Entry

Dear Esther. I have now driven the stretch of the M5 between Exeter and Bristol over
twenty-one times, but although I have all the reports and all the witnesses and have
cross-referenced them within a millimetre using my ordnance survey maps, I simply
cannot find the location. You’d think there would be marks, to serve as some
evidence. Its somewhere between the turn off for Sandford and the Wellcome Break
services. But although I can always see it in my rear view mirror, I have as yet been
unable to pull ashore.

Second Beach

Dear Esther. This will be my last letter. Do they pile up even now on the doormat of
our empty house? Why do I still post them home to you? Perhaps I can imagine
myself picking them up on the return I will not make, to find you waiting with daytime
television and all its comforts. They must form a pile four feet high now, my own little
ziggurat; a megalith of foolscap and manila. They will fossilise over the centuries to
follow; an uneasy time capsule from a lost island. Postmarked Oban: it must have
been sent during the final ascent.

Dear Esther. Whilst they catalogued the damage, I found myself afraid you’d
suddenly sit up, stretch, and fail to recognise me, I orbited you like a sullen comet,
our history trailing behind me in the solar wind from the fluorescent tubes. Your hair
had not been brushed yet, your make-up not reapplied. You were all the world like a
beach to me, laid out for investigation, your geography telling one story, but hinting at
the geology hidden behind the cuts and bruises.

Dear Esther. I have found myself to be as featureless as this ocean, as shallow and
unoccupied as this bay, a listless wreck without identification. My rocks are these
bones and a careful fence to keep the precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my
forehead a mount, this aerial will transmit into me so. All over exposed, the nervous
system, where Donnelly’s boots and yours and mine still trample. I will carry a torch
for you; I will leave it at the foot of my headstone. You will need it for the tunnels that
carry me under.

Boat

There must be a hole in the bottom of the boat. How else could new hermits have
arrived?

Buoy

It’s only at night that this place makes any sluggish effort at life. You can see the
buoy and the aerial. I’ve been taking to sleeping through the day in an attempt to
resurrect myself. I can feel the last days drawing upon me – there’s little point now in
continuation. There must be something new to find here – some nook or some
cranny that offers a perspective worth clinging to. I’ve burnt my bridges; I have sunk
my boats and watched them go to water.

All night the buoy has kept me lucid. I sat, when I was at the very edge of despair,
when I thought I would never unlock the secret of the island, I sat at the edge and I
watched the idiot buoy blink through the night. He is mute and he is retarded and he
has no thought in his metal head but to blink each wave and each minute aside until
the morning comes and renders him blind as well as deaf-mute. In many ways, we
have much in common.

I’ve begun to wonder if Donnelly’s voyage here was as prosaic as it was presented.
How disappointed not to have found the bones of the holy man! No wonder he hated
the inhabitants so. To him, they must have seemed like barnacles mindlessly clinging
to a mercy seat. Why cling so hard to the rock? Because it is the only thing that stops
us from sliding into the ocean. Into oblivion.

Wreck

I don’t know the name of the wreck in the bay; it seems to have been here for several
years but has not yet subsided. I don’t know if anyone was killed; if so, I certainly
haven’t seen them myself. Perhaps when the helicopter came to lift them home, their
ascent scared the birds away. I shall search for eggs along the north shore, for any
evidence that life is marking this place out as its own again. Perhaps it is us that
keeps them at bay.

I remember running through the sands of Cromer; there was none of the shipwreck I
find here. I have spent days cataloguing the garbage that washes ashore here and I
have begun to assemble a collection in the deepest recess I could find. What a
strange museum it would make. And what of the corpse of its curator? Shall I find a
glass coffin and pretend to make snow white of us both?

Why is the sea so becalmed? It beckons you to walk upon its surface; but I know all
too well how it would shatter under my feet and drag me under. The rocks here have
withstood centuries of storms and now, robbed of the tides, they stand muted and
lame, temples without cause. One day, I will attempt to climb them, hunt among their
peaks for the eggs, the nests, that the gulls have clearly abandoned

Lower Valley #1

I had kidney stones, and you visited me in the hospital. After the operation, when I
was still half submerged in anaesthetic, your outline and your speech both blurred.
Now my stones have grown into an island and made their escape and you have
been rendered opaque by the car of a drunk.

Lower Valley #2

I have begun my ascent on the green slope of the western side. I have looked deep
into the mountain from the shaft and understood that I must go up and then find a
way under. I will stash the last vestiges of my civilisation in the stone walls and work
deeper from there. I am drawn by the aerial and the cliff edge: there is some form of
rebirth waiting for me there.

I have begun my ascent on the windless slope of the western side. The setting sun
was an inflamed eye squeezing shut against the light shone in by the doctors. My
neck is aching through constantly craning my head up to track the light of the aerial. I
must look downwards, follow the path under the island to a new beginning.

I have begun to climb, away from the sea and towards the centre. It is a straight line
to the summit, where the evening begins to coil around the aerial and squeeze the
signals into early silence. The bothy squats against the mount to avoid the gaze of
the aerial; I too will creep under the island like an animal and approach it from the
northern shore.

Shaft

When I first looked into the shaft, I swear I felt the stones in my stomach shift in
recognition.

What charnel house lies at the foot of this abyss? How many dead shepherds could
fill this hole?

Is this what Paul saw through his windscreen? Not Lot’s wife, looking over her
shoulder, but a scar in the hillside, falling away to black, forever.

Goatshed

When they graze their animals here, Donnelly writes, it is always raining. There’s no
evidence of that rain has been here recently. The foliage is all static, like a radio
signal returning from another star.

In the hold of the wrecked trawler I have found what must amount to several tons of
gloss paint. Perhaps they were importing it. Instead, I will put it to use, and decorate
this island in the icons and symbols of our disaster.

Cromer in the rain; a school trip. We took shelter en masse in a bus stop, herded in
like cattle, the teachers dull shepherds. The sand in my pocket becoming damper by
the second.

Upper Valley

The bothy was constructed originally in the early 1700s. By then, shepherding had
formalised into a career. The first habitual shepherd was a man called Jacobson,
from a lineage of migratory Scandinavians. He was not considered a man of
breeding by the mainlanders. He came here every summer whilst building the bothy,
hoping, eventually, that becoming a man of property would secure him a wife and a
lineage. Donnelly records that it did not work: he caught some disease from his
malcontented goats and died two years after completing it. There was no one to
carve white lines into the cliff for him either.

Bothy

Inventory: a trestle table we spread wallpaper on in our first home. A folding chair; I
laughed at you for bringing camping in the lakes. I was uncomfortable later and you
laughed then. This diary; the bed with the broken springs – once asleep, you have to
remember not to dream. A change of clothes. Donnelly’s book, stolen from Edinburgh
library on the way here. I will burn them all on the last morning and make an aerial of
my own.

When the oil lamps ran out I didn’t pick up a torch but used the moonlight to read by.
When I have pulled the last shreds of sense from it, I will throw Donnelly’s book from
the cliffs and perhaps myself with it. Maybe it will wash back up through the caves
and erupt from the spring when the rain comes, making its return to the hermits cave.
Perhaps it will be back on the table when I wake. I think I may have thrown it into the
sea several times before.

Three cormorants seen at dusk; they did not land. This house, built of stone, built by
a long-dead shepherd. Contents: my campbed, a stove, a table, chairs. My clothes,
my books. The caves that score out the belly of this island, leaving it famished. My
limbs and belly, famished. This skin, these organs, this failing eyesight. When the
battery runs out in my torch, I will descend into the caves and follow only the
phosphorescence home.

Top Path

In a footnote, the editor comments that at this point, Donnelly was going insane as
syphilis tore through his system like a drunk driver. He is not to be trusted – many of
his claims are unsubstantiated and although he does paint a colourful picture, much
of what he says may have been derived directly from his fever. But I have been here
and I know, as Donnelly did, that this place is always half-imagined. Even the rocks
and caves will shimmer and blur, with the right eyes.

He left his body to the medical school and was duly opened out for a crowd of
students twenty-one days after his passing. The report is included in my edition of his
book. The syphilis had torn through his guts like a drunk driver, scrambling his
organs like eggs on a plate. But enough definition remained for a cursory
examination and, as I suspected, they found clear evidence of kidney stones. He is
likely to have spent the last years of his life in considerable pain: perhaps this is the
root of his laudanum habit. Although its use makes him an unreliable witness, I find
myself increasingly drawn into his orbit.

What to make of Donnelly? The laudanum and the syphilis? It is clearly not how he
began, but I have been unable to discover if the former was a result of his visiting the
island or the force that drove him here. For the syphilis, a drunk driver smashing his
insides into a pulp as he stumbled these paths, I can only offer my empathy. We are
all victims of our age. My disease is the internal combustion engine and the cheap
fermentation of yeast.

Middle Path

They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d
been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves
and had not even begun to decompose. He’d struggled halfway down the cliff path,
perhaps looking for some lost goat, or perhaps in a delirium and expired, curled into
a claw, right under the winter moon. Even the animals shunned his corpse; the
mainlanders thought to bring it home unlucky. Donnelly claims they dragged it to the
caves to thaw out and rot, but he is proving an unreliable witness.

They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d
been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves
and had not even begun to decompose. His fingernails were raw and bitten to the
quick; they found the phosphorescent moss that grows in the caves deep under the
nails. Whatever he’d been doing under the island when his strength began to fail is
lost. He’d struggled halfway up the cliff again, perhaps in a delirium, perhaps trying to
reach the bothy’s fire, before curling into a stone and expiring.

They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d
been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves
and had not even begun to decompose. All around him, small flowers were reaching
for the weak sun, the goats had adjusted happily to life without a shepherd and were
grazing freely about the valley. Donnelly reports they hurled the body in fear and
disgust down the shaft, but I cannot corroborate this story.

Third Beach

I will become a torch for you, an aerial. I will fall from the sky like ancient radio waves
of flawed concrete. Through underground springs and freezing subterranean rivers.
Through the bacteria of my gut and heart. Through the bottomless boat and forgotten
trawlers where nobody has died. Like the hermit and Lot’s wife, I will fossilise and
open a hole in the rock to admit me through.

To explore here is to become passive, to internalise the journey and not to attempt to
break the confines. Since I burnt my boats and contracted my sickness, this has
become easier for me. It will take a number of expeditions to traverse this
microcontinent; it will take the death of a million neurons, a cornucopia of prime
numbers, countless service stations and bypasses to arrive at the point of final
departure.

This beach is no place to end a life. Jacobson understood that, so did Donnelly.
Jacobson made it halfway back up the cliff. Donnelly lost faith and went home to die.
I have the benefit of history, of progress. Someone has erected an aerial to guide me
through these black waves, a beacon that shines through the rocks like
phosphorescent moss.

Caves Entrance

Climbing down to the caves I slipped and fell and have injured my leg. I think the
femur is broken. It is clearly infected: the skin has turned a bright, tight pink and the
pain is crashing in on waves, winter tides against my shoreline, drowning out the
ache of my stones. I struggled back to the bothy to rest, but it has become clear that
there is only one way this is likely to end. The medical supplies I looted from the
trawler have suddenly found their purpose: they will keep me lucid for my final
ascent.

Tunnel

From here, this last time, I have understood there is no turning back. The torch is
failing along with my resolve. I can hear the singing of the sea creatures from the
passages above me and they are promising the return of the gulls.

Did Jacobson crawl this far? Can I identify the scratches his nails ruined into the
rocks? Am I following him cell for cell, inch for inch? Why did he turn back on himself
and not carry through to the ascent?

Donnelly did not pass through the caves. From here on in, his guidance, unreliable
as it is, is gone from me. I understand now that it is between the two of us, and
whatever correspondence can be drawn from the wet rocks.

Deep cave

It was as if someone had taken the car and shaken it like a cocktail. The glove
compartment had been opened and emptied with the ashtrays and the boot; it made
for a crumpled museum, a shattered exhibition.

I first saw him sat by the side of the road. I was waiting for you to be cut out of the
wreckage. The car looked like it had been dropped from a great height. The guts of
the engine spilled over the tarmac. Like water underground.

They had stopped the traffic back as far as the Sandford junction and come up the
hard shoulder like radio signals from another star. It took twenty-one minutes for
them to arrive. I watched Paul time it, to the second, on his watch.

River

I’m traversing my own death throes. The infection in my leg is an oilrig that dredges
black muck up from deep inside my bones. I swallow fistfuls of diazepam and
paracetamol to stay conscious. The pain flows through me like an underground sea.

If the caves are my guts, this must be the place where the stones are first formed.
The bacteria phosphoresce and rise, singing, through the tunnels. Everything here is
bound by the rise and fall like a tide. Perhaps, the whole island is actually
underwater.

I am travelling through my own body, following the line of infection from the shattered
femur towards the heart. I swallow fistfuls of painkillers to stay lucid. In my delirium, I
see the twin lights of the moon and the aerial, shining to me through the rocks.

Chimney

When I was coming round from the operation, I remember the light they shone in my
eyes to check for pupil contraction. It was like staring up at a moonlit sky from the
bottom of well. People moved at the summit but I could not tell if you were one of
them.

This cannot be the shaft they threw the goats into. It cannot be the landfill where the
parts of your life that would not burn ended up. It cannot be the chimney that
delivered you to the skies. It cannot be the place where you rained back down again
to fertilise the soil and make small flowers in the rocks.

I will hold the hand you offer to me; from the summit down to this well, into the dark
waters where the small flowers creep for the sun. Headlights are reflected in your
retinas, moonlit in the shadow of the crematorium chimney.

Emergence

The moon over the Sandford junction, headlights in your retinas. Donnelly drove a
grey hatchback without a bottom, all the creatures of the tarmac rose to sing to him.
All manner of symbols crudely scrawled across the cliff face of my unrest. My life
reduced to an electrical diagram. All my gulls have taken flight; they will no longer
roost on these outcrops. The lure of the moon over the Sandford junction is too
strong.

I wish I could have know Donnelly in this place – we would have had so much to
debate. Did he paint these stones, or did I? Who left the pots in the hut by the jetty?
Who formed the museum under the sea? Who fell silently to his death, into the frozen
waters? Who erected this godforsaken aerial in the first place? Did this whole island
rise to the surface of my stomach, forcing the gulls to take flight?

I sat here and watched two jets carve parallel white lines into the sky. They charted
their course and I followed them for twenty-one minutes until they turned off near
Sandford and were lost. If I were a gull, I would abandon my nest and join them. I
would starve my brain of oxygen and suffer delusions of transcendence. I would tear
the bottom from my boat and sail across the motorways until I reached this island
once again.

Rocks

Of fire and soil, I chose fire. It seemed the more contemporary of the options, the
more sanitary. I could not bear the thought of the reassembly of such a ruins.
Stitching arm to shoulder and femur to hip, charting a line of thread like traffic stilled
on a motorway. Making it all acceptable for tearful aunts and traumatised uncles
flown in specially for the occasion. Reduce to ash, mix with water, make a
phosphorescent paint for these rocks and ceilings.

We shall begin to assemble our own version of the north shore. We will scrawl in
dead languages and electrical diagrams and hide them away for future theologians to
muse and mumble over. We will send a letter to Esther Donnelly and demand her
answer. We will mix the paint with ashes and tarmac and the glow from our
infections. We paint a moon over the Sandford junction and blue lights falling like
stars along the hard shoulder.

I returned home with a pocket full of stolen ash. Half of it fell out of my coat and
vanished into the car’s upholstery. But the rest I carefully stowed away in a box I kept
in a drawer by the side of my bed. It was never intended as a meaningful act but over
the years it became a kind of talisman. I’d sit still, quite still, for hours just holding the
diminishing powder in my palm and noting its smoothness. In time, we will all be worn
down into granules, washed into the sea and dispersed.

Lost Beach

From here I can see my armada. I collected all the letters I’d ever meant to send to
you, if I’d have ever made it to the mainland but had instead collected at the bottom
of my rucksack, and I spread them out along the lost beach. Then I took each and
every one and I folded them into boats. I folded you into the creases and then, as the
sun was setting, I set the fleet to sail. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned
you to the Atlantic, and I sat here until I’d watched all of you sink

Paul #2

There were chemical diagrams on the mug he gave me coffee in; sticky at the handle
where his hands shook. He worked for a pharmaceutical company with an office
based on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. He’d been travelling back from a sales
conference in Exeter: forming a strategic vision for the pedalling of antacid yoghurt to
the European market. You could trace the connections with your finger, join the dots
and whole new compounds would be summoned into activity.

There were chemical diagrams on the posters on the walls on the waiting room. It
seemed appropriate at the time; still-life abstractions of the processes which had
already begun to break down your nerves and your muscles in the next room. I cram
diazepam as I once crammed for chemistry examinations. I am revising my options
for a long and happy life.

There were chemical stains on the tarmac: the leak of air conditioning, brake fluid
and petrol. He kept sniffing at his fingers as he sat by the roadside waiting as if he
couldn’t quite understand or recognise their smell. He said he’d been travelling back
from a sales conference in Exeter; he’d stopped for farewell drinks earlier, but had
kept a careful eye on his intake. You could hear the sirens above the idling traffic.

North Path

When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they resuscitated him by
hitting him in the chest with stones gathered by the roadside. He was lifeless for
twenty-one minutes, certainly long enough for the oxygen levels in his brain to have
decreased and caused hallucinations and delusions of transcendence. I am running
out of painkillers and the moon has become almost unbearably bright.

The pain in my leg sent me blind for a few minutes as I struggled up the cliff path: I
swallowed another handful of painkillers and now I feel almost lucid. The island
around me has retreated to a hazed distance, whilst the moon appears to have
descended into my palm to guide me. I can see a thick black line of infection
reaching for my heart from the waistband of my trousers. Through the fugue, it is all
the world like the path I have cut from the lowlands towards the aerial.

I will drag my leg behind me; I will drag it like a crumpled hatchback, tyres blown and
sparking across the dimming lights of my vision. I am running out of painkillers and
am following the flicker of the moon home. When Paul keeled over dead on the road
to Damascus, they restarted his heart with the jump leads from a crumpled
hatchback; it took twenty-one attempts to convince it to wake up.

Overlook

I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I
have been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now,
you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the
ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become
waterlogged, and the cage disintergrates, we will intermingle. When this paper
aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will
come together.

Channel

If only Donnelly had experienced this, he would have realised he was his own
shoreline, as am I. Just as I am becoming this island, so he became his syphilis,
retreating into the burning synapses, the stones, the infection.

Ascent #1

Returning to my car afterwards, hands still shaking and a head split open by the
impact. Goodbye to tearful aunts and traumatised uncles, goodbye to the
phenomenal, goodbye to the tangible, goodbye Wolverhampton, goodbye Sandford,
goodbye Cromer, goodbye Damascus. This cliff path is slippery in the dew; it is hard
to climb with such an infection. I must carve out the bad flesh and sling it from the
aerial. I must become infused with the very air.

There are headlights reflected in these retinas, too long in the tunnels of my island
without a bottom. The sea creatures have risen to the surface, but the gulls are not
here to carry them back to their nests. I have become fixed: open and staring, an eye
turned on itself. I have become an infected leg, whose tracking lines form a perfect
map of the junctions of the M5. I will take the exit at mid-thigh and plummet to my
Esther.

The stones in my stomach will weigh me down and ensure my descent is true and
straight. I will break through the fog of these godforsaken pills and achieve clarity. All
my functions are clogged, all my veins are choked. If my leg doesn’t rot off before I
reach the summit, it will be a miracle. There are twenty-one connections in the circuit
diagram of the anti-lock brakes, there are twenty-one species of gull inhabiting these
islands , it is twenty-one miles between the Sandford junction and the turn off for
home. All these things cannot, will not, be a co-incidence.

Ascent #2

He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all. He had not drunk with Donnelly or
spat Jacobson back at the sea; he had not careered across the lost shores and
terminal beaches of this nascent archipelago. He did not intend his bonnet to be
crumpled like a spent tissue by the impact. His windscreen was not star-studded all
over like a map of the heavens. His paintwork etched with circuit diagrams, strange
fish to call the gulls away. The phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the M5 all
the way from Exeter to Damascus.

Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped on the road to
Damascus, Paul, sat at the roadside hunched up like a gull, like a bloody gull. As
useless and as doomed as a syphilitic cartographer, a dying goatherd, an infected
leg, a kidney stone blocking the traffic bound for Sandford and Exeter. He was not
drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all; all his roads and his tunnels and his paths led
inevitably to this moment of impact. This is not a recorded natural condition: he
should not be sat there with his chemicals and his circuit diagrams, he should not be
sat there at all.

I have dredged these waters for the bones of the hermit, for the traces of Donnelly,
for any sign of Jacobson’s flock, for the empty bottle that would incriminate him. I
have scoured this stretch of motorway twenty-one times attempting to recreate his
trajectory, the point when his heart stopped dead and all he saw was the moon over
the Sandford junction. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all, and it was
not his fault, it was the converging lines that doomed him. This is not a recorded
natural condition, the gulls do not fly so low over the motorway and cause him to
swerve. The paint scored away from his car in lines, like an infection, making directly
for the heart.

Summit

I have run out of places to climb. I will abandon this body and take to the air.
We will leave twin vapour trails in the air, white lines etched into these rocks.
I am the aerial. In my passing, I will send news to each and every star.

Ascension

Dear Esther. I have burnt my belongings, my books, this death certificate. Mine will
be written all across this island. Who was Jacobson, who remembers him? Donnelly
has written of him, but who was Donnelly, who remembers him? I have painted,
carved, hewn, scored into this space all that I could draw from him. There will be
another to these shores to remember me. I will rise from the ocean like an island
without bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon that they will
not forget you. We have always been drawn here: one day the gulls will return and
nest in our bones and our history. I will look to my left and see Esther Donnelly, flying
beside me. I will look to my right and see Paul Jacobson, flying beside me. They will
leave white lines carved into the air to reach the mainland, where help will be sent..
My ascent is predetermined and forever begun.
























DEAR ESTHER 2012 Script
http://dearesther.wikia.com/wiki/Dear_Esther_Script
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/704796/dear_esther_script_2012.pdf

	Opening

Dear Esther. I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island.
Somewhere, between the longitude and latitude a split opened up and it
beached remotely here. No matter how hard I correlate, it remains a
singularity, an alpha point in my life that refuses all hypothesis. I
return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full glare of
my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim.

Dear Esther. The gulls do not land here anymore; I’ve noticed that this
year, they seem to shun the place. Maybe it’s the depletion of the
fishing stock driving them away. Perhaps it’s me. When he first landed
here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the
lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands.
Three hundred years later, even they have departed.

Dear Esther. I have lost track of how long I have been here, and how many
visits I have made overall. Certainly, the landmarks are now so familiar
to me that I have to remind myself to actually see the forms and shapes
in front of me. I could stumble blind across these rocks, the edges of
these precipices, without fear of missing my step and plummeting down to
sea. Besides, I have always considered that if one is to fall, it is
critical to keep one’s eyes firmly open.

Dear Esther. The morning after I was washed ashore, salt in my ears, sand
in my mouth and the waves always at my ankles, I felt as though
everything had conspired to this one last shipwreck. I remembered nothing
but water, stones in my belly and my shoes threatening to drag me under
to where only the most listless of creatures swim.

	1. The Lighthouse (Donnelly)

Donnelly reported the legend of the hermit; a holy man who sought
solitude in its most pure form. Allegedly, he rowed here from the
mainland in a boat without a bottom, so all the creatures of the sea
could rise at night to converse with him. How disappointed he must have
been with their chatter. Perhaps now, when all that haunts the ocean is
the rubbish dumped from the tankers, he’d find more peace. They say he
threw his arms wide in a valley on the south side and the cliff opened up
to provide him shelter; they say he died of fever one hundred and sixteen
years later. The shepherds left gifts for him at the mouth of the cave,
but Donnelly records they never claimed to have seen him. I have visited
the cave and I have left my gifts, but like them, I appear to be an
unworthy subject of his solitude.

At night you can see the lights sometimes from a passing tanker or
trawler. From up on the cliffs they are mundane, but down here they fugue
into ambiguity. For instance, I cannot readily tell if they belong above
or below the waves. The distinction now seems mundane; why not everything
and all at once! There’s nothing better to do here than indulge in
contradictions, whilst waiting for the fabric of life to unravel.

There was once talk of a wind farm out here, away from the rage and the
intolerance of the masses. The sea, they said, is too rough for the
turbines to stand: they clearly never came here to experience the
becalming for themselves. Personally, I would have supported it; turbines
would be a fitting contemporary refuge for a hermit: the revolution and
the permanence.

When you were born, you mother told me, a hush fell over the delivery
room. A great red birthmark covered the left side of your face. No one
knew what to say, so you cried to fill the vacuum. I always admired you
for that; that you cried to fill whatever vacuum you found. I began to
manufacture vacuums, just to enable you to deploy your talent. The
birthmark faded by the time you were six, and had gone completely by the
time we met, but your fascination with the empty, and its cure, remained.

Those islands in the distance, I am sure, are nothing more than relics of
another time, sleeping giants, somnambulist gods laid down for a final
dreaming. I wash the sand from my lips and grip my wrist ever more
tightly, my shaking arms will not support my fading diaries.

Reading Donnelly by the weak afternoon sunlight. He landed on the south
side of the island, followed the path to bay and climbed the mount. He
did not find the caves and he did not chart the north side. I think this
is why his understanding of the island is flawed, incomplete. He stood on
the mount and only wondered momentarily how to descend. But then, he
didn’t have my reasons.

Donnelly’s book had not been taken out from the library since 1974. I
decided it would never be missed as I slipped it under my coat and
avoided the librarian’s gaze on the way out. If the subject matter is
obscure, the writer’s literary style is even more so, it is not the text
of a stable or trustworthy reporter. Perhaps it is fitting that my only
companion in these last days should be a stolen book written by a dying
man.

The mount is clearly the focal point of this landscape; it almost appears
so well placed as to be artificial. I find myself easily slipping into
the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to
everything here. Was this island formed during the moment of impact; when
we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes
into our chests and shoulders, did it first break surface then?

A wonderful sight. The moon cresting the junction between the cliff path
and the stone circle. It cast a shadow of the ridge across the beach, all
the world as if you had signed your name across the sand in untidy
handwriting.

When someone had died or was dying or was so ill they gave up what little
hope they could sacrifice, they cut parallel lines into the cliff,
exposing the white chalk beneath. With the right eyes you could see them
from the mainland or the fishing boats and know to send aid or impose a
cordon of protection, and wait a generation until whatever pestilence
stalked the cliff paths died along with its hosts. My lines are just for
this: to keep any would-be rescuers at bay. The infection is not simply
of the flesh.

They were godfearing people those shepherds. There was no love in the
relationship. Donnelly tells me that they had one bible that was passed
around in strict rotation. It was stolen by a visiting monk in 1776, two
years before the island was abandoned altogether. In the interim, I
wonder, did they assign chapter and verse to the stones and grasses,
marking the geography with a superimposed significance; that they could
actually walk the bible and inhabit its contradictions?

We are not like Lot’s wife, you and I; we feel no particular need to turn
back. There’s nothing to be seen if we did. No tired old man parting the
cliffs with his arms; no gifts or bibles laid out on the sand for the
taking. No tides turning or the shrieking gulls overhead. The bones of
the hermit are no longer laid out for the taking: I have stolen them away
to the guts of this island where the passages all run to black and there
we can light each others faces by their strange luminescence.

I quote directly: “A motley lot with little to recommend them. I have now
spent three days in their company that is, I fear, enough for any man not
born amongst them. Despite their tedious inclination to quote scripture,
they seem to me the most godforsaken of all the inhabitants of the outer
isles. Indeed, in this case, the very gravity of that term – forsaken by
god – seems to find its very apex.” It appears to me that Donnelly too
found those who wander this shoreline to be adrift from any chance of
redemption. Did he include himself in that, I wonder?

Dear Esther. I met Paul. I made my own little pilgrimage. My Damascus a
small semi-detached on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. We drank coffee in
his kitchen and tried to connect to one another. Although he knew I
hadn’t come in search of an apology, reason or retribution, he still
spiralled in panic, thrown high and lucid by his own dented bonnet.
Responsibility had made him old; like us, he had already passed beyond
any conceivable boundary of life.

I threw my arms wide and the cliff opened out before me, making this
rough home. I transferred my belongings from the bothy on the mount and
tried to live here instead. It was cold at night and the sea lapped at
the entrance at high tide. To climb the peak, I must first venture even
deeper into veins of the island, where the signals are blocked
altogether. Only then will I understand them, when I stand on the summit
and they flow into me, uncorrupted.

I would leave you presents, outside your retreat, in this interim space
between cliff and beach. I would leave you loaves and fishes, but the
fish stocks have been depleted and I have run out of bread. I would row
you back to your homeland in a bottomless boat but I fear we would both
be driven mad by the chatter of the sea creatures.

I find myself increasingly unable to find that point where the hermit
ends and Paul and I begin. We are woven into a sodden blanket, stuffed
into the bottom of a boat to stop the leak and hold back the ocean. My
neck aches from staring up at the aerial; it mirrors the dull throb in my
gut where I am sure I have begun to form another stone. In my dreams, it
forms into a perfect representation of Lot’s wife, head over her
shoulder, staring along the motorway at the approaching traffic, in a
vacuum of fatalistic calm.

This hermit, this seer, this distant historian of bones and old bread,
where did he vanish to? Why, asked the farmers, why asked Jakobson, why
bother with your visions at all, if you are just to throw your arms up at
the cliff and let it close in behind you, seal you into the belly of the
island, a museum shut to all but the most devoted.

He still maintains he wasn’t drunk but tired. I can’t make the judgement
or the distinction anymore. I was drunk when I landed here, and tired
too. I walked up the cliff path in near darkness and camped in the bay
where the trawler lies beached. It was only at dawn that I saw the bothy
and decided to make my temporary lodgings there. I was expecting just the
aerial and a transmitter stashed in a weatherproof box somewhere on the
mount. It had an air of uneasy permanence to it, like all the other
buildings here; erosion seems to have evaded it completely.

The vegetation here has fossilized from the roots up. To think they once
grazed animals here, the remnants of occupation being evidence to that.
It is all sick to death: the water is too polluted for the fish, the sky
is too thin for the birds and the soil is cut with the bones of hermits
and shepherds. I have heard it said that human ashes make great
fertilizer, that we could sow a great forest from all that is left of
your hips and ribcage, with enough left over to thicken the air and
repopulate the bay.

I dreamt I stood in the centre of the sun and the solar radiation cooked
my heart from the inside. My teeth will curl and my fingernails fall off
into my pockets like loose change. If I could stomach, I’d eat, but all I
seem capable of is saltwater. Were the livestock still here, I could turn
feral and gorge. I’m as emaciated as a body on a slab, opened up for a
premature source of death. I’ve rowed to this island in a heart without a
bottom; all the bacteria of my gut rising up to sing to me.

I have become convinced I am not alone here, even though I am equally
sure it is simply a delusion brought upon by circumstance. I do not, for
instance, remember where I found the candles, or why I took it upon
myself to light such a strange pathway. Perhaps it is only for those who
are bound to follow.

	2. The Buoy (Jakobson)

Dear Esther. I have now driven the stretch of the M5 between Exeter and
Bristol over twenty-one times, but although I have all the reports and
all the witnesses and have cross-referenced them within a millimetre
using my ordnance survey maps, I simply cannot find the location. You’d
think there would be marks, to serve as some evidence. Its somewhere
between the turn off for Sandford and the Welcome Break services. But
although I can always see it in my rear view mirror, I have as yet been
unable to pull ashore.

Dear Esther. This will be my last letter. Do they pile up even now on the
doormat of our empty house? Why do I still post them home to you? Perhaps
I can imagine myself picking them up on the return I will not make, to
find you waiting with daytime television and all its comforts. They must
form a pile four feet high now, my own little ziggurat; a megalith of
foolscap and manila. They will fossilise over the centuries to follow; an
uneasy time capsule from a lost island. Postmarked Oban: it must have
been sent during the final ascent.

Dear Esther. I have found myself to be as featureless as this ocean, as
shallow and unoccupied as this bay, a listless wreck without
identification. My rocks are these bones and a careful fence to keep the
precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my forehead a mount, this aerial
will transmit into me so. All over exposed, the nervous system, where
Donnelly’s boots and yours and mine still trample. I will carry a torch
for you; I will leave it at the foot of my headstone. You will need it
for the tunnels that carry me under.

Dear Esther. Whilst they catalogued the damage, I found myself afraid
you’d suddenly sit up, stretch, and fail to recognise me, I orbited you
like a sullen comet, our history trailing behind me in the solar wind
from the fluorescent tubes. Your hair had not been brushed yet, your
make-up not reapplied. You were all the world like a beach to me, laid
out for investigation, your geography telling one story, but hinting at
the geology hidden behind the cuts and bruises.

I have found the ship’s manifest, crumpled and waterlogged, under a stash
of paint cans. It tells me that along with this present cargo, there was
a large quantity of antacid yoghurt, bound for the European market. It
must have washed out to see, God knows there are no longer gulls or goats
here to eat it.

There must be a hole in the bottom of the boat. How else could new
hermits have arrived?

It’s only at night that this place makes any sluggish effort at life. You
can see the buoy and the aerial. I’ve been taking to sleeping through the
day in an attempt to resurrect myself. I can feel the last days drawing
upon me – there’s little point now in continuation. There must be
something new to find here – some nook or some cranny that offers a
perspective worth clinging to. I’ve burnt my bridges; I have sunk my
boats and watched them go to water.

All night the buoy has kept me lucid. I sat, when I was at the very edge
of despair, when I thought I would never unlock the secret of the island,
I sat at the edge and I watched the idiot buoy blink through the night.
He is mute and he is retarded and he has no thought in his metal head but
to blink each wave and each minute aside until the morning comes and
renders him blind as well as deaf-mute. In many ways, we have much in
common.

I’ve begun to wonder if Donnelly’s voyage here was as prosaic as it was
presented. How disappointed not to have found the bones of the holy man!
No wonder he hated the inhabitants so. To him, they must have seemed like
barnacles mindlessly clinging to a mercy seat. Why cling so hard to the
rock? Because it is the only thing that stops us from sliding into the
ocean. Into oblivion.

An imagined answerphone message. The tires are flat, the wheel spins
loosely, and the brake fluid has run like ink over this map, staining the
landmarks and rendering the coastline mute, compromised. Where you saw
galaxies, I only saw bruises, cut into the cliff by my lack of sobriety.

I don’t know the name of the wreck in the bay; it seems to have been here
for several years but has not yet subsided. I don’t know if anyone was
killed; if so, I certainly haven’t seen them myself. Perhaps when the
helicopter came to lift them home, their ascent scared the birds away. I
shall search for eggs along the north shore, for any evidence that life
is marking this place out as its own again. Perhaps it is us that keeps
them at bay.

I remember running through the sands of Cromer; there was none of the
shipwreck I find here. I have spent days cataloguing the garbage that
washes ashore here and I have begun to assemble a collection in the
deepest recess I could find. What a strange museum it would make. And
what of the corpse of its curator? Shall I find a glass coffin and
pretend to make snow white of us both?

Why is the sea so becalmed? It beckons you to walk upon its surface; but
I know all too well how it would shatter under my feet and drag me under.
The rocks here have withstood centuries of storms and now, robbed of the
tides, they stand muted and lame, temples without cause. One day, I will
attempt to climb them, hunt among their peaks for the eggs, the nests,
that the gulls have clearly abandoned.

I had kidney stones, and you visited me in the hospital. After the
operation, when I was still half submerged in anaesthetic, your outline
and your speech both blurred. Now my stones have grown into an island and
made their escape and you have been rendered opaque by the car of a
drunk.

I have begun my ascent on the green slope of the western side. I have
looked deep into the mountain from the shaft and understood that I must
go up and then find a way under. I will stash the last vestiges of my
civilisation in the stone walls and work deeper from there. I am drawn by
the aerial and the cliff edge: there is some form of rebirth waiting for
me there.

I have begun my ascent on the windless slope of the western side. The
setting sun was an inflamed eye squeezing shut against the light shone in
by the doctors. My neck is aching through constantly craning my head up
to track the light of the aerial. I must look downwards, follow the path
under the island to a new beginning.

I have begun to climb, away from the sea and towards the centre. It is a
straight line to the summit, where the evening begins to coil around the
aerial and squeeze the signals into early silence. The bothy squats
against the mount to avoid the gaze of the aerial; I too will creep under
the island like an animal and approach it from the northern shore.

When I first looked into the shaft, I swear I felt the stones in my
stomach shift in recognition.

What charnel house lies at the foot of this abyss? How many dead
shepherds could fill this hole?

Is this what Paul saw through his windscreen? Not Lot’s wife, looking
over her shoulder, but a scar in the hillside, falling away to black,
forever.

When they graze their animals here, Donnelly writes, it is always
raining. There’s no evidence of that rain has been here recently. The
foliage is all static, like a radio signal returning from another star.

In the hold of the wrecked trawler I have found what must amount to
several tons of gloss paint. Perhaps they were importing it. Instead, I
will put it to use, and decorate this island in the icons and symbols of
our disaster.

Cromer in the rain; a school trip. We took shelter en masse in a bus
stop, herded in like cattle, the teachers dull shepherds. The sand in my
pocket becoming damper by the second.

The bothy was constructed originally in the early 1700s. By then,
shepherding had formalised into a career. The first habitual shepherd was
a man called Jacobson, from a lineage of migratory Scandinavians. He was
not considered a man of breeding by the mainlanders. He came here every
summer whilst building the bothy, hoping, eventually, that becoming a man
of property would secure him a wife and a lineage. Donnelly records that
it did not work: he caught some disease from his malcontented goats and
died two years after completing it. There was no one to carve white lines
into the cliff for him either.

Inventory: a trestle table we spread wallpaper on in our first home. A
folding chair; I laughed at you for bringing camping in the lakes. I was
uncomfortable later and you laughed then. This diary; the bed with the
broken springs – once asleep, you have to remember not to dream. A change
of clothes. Donnelly’s book, stolen from Edinburgh library on the way
here. I will burn them all on the last morning and make an aerial of my
own.

When the oil lamps ran out I didn’t pick up a torch but used the
moonlight to read by. When I have pulled the last shreds of sense from
it, I will throw Donnelly’s book from the cliffs and perhaps myself with
it. Maybe it will wash back up through the caves and erupt from the
spring when the rain comes, making its return to the hermits cave.
Perhaps it will be back on the table when I wake. I think I may have
thrown it into the sea several times before.

Three cormorants seen at dusk; they did not land. This house, built of
stone, built by a long-dead shepherd. Contents: my campbed, a stove, a
table, chairs. My clothes, my books. The caves that score out the belly
of this island, leaving it famished. My limbs and belly, famished. This
skin, these organs, this failing eyesight. When the battery runs out in
my torch, I will descend into the caves and follow only the
phosphorescence home.

My heart is landfill, these false dawns waking into whilst it is still
never light. I sweat for you in the small hours and wrap my blankets into
a mass. I have always heard the waves break on these lost shores, always
the gulls forgotten. I can lift this bottle to my ear, and all there ever
is for me is this hebridean music.

In a footnote, the editor comments that at this point, Donnelly was going
insane as syphilis tore through his system like a drunk driver. He is not
to be trusted – many of his claims are unsubstantiated and although he
does paint a colourful picture, much of what he says may have been
derived directly from his fever. But I have been here and I know, as
Donnelly did, that this place is always half-imagined. Even the rocks and
caves will shimmer and blur, with the right eyes.

He left his body to the medical school and was duly opened out for a
crowd of students twenty-one days after his passing. The report is
included in my edition of his book. The syphilis had torn through his
guts like a drunk driver, scrambling his organs like eggs on a plate. But
enough definition remained for a cursory examination and, as I suspected,
they found clear evidence of kidney stones. He is likely to have spent
the last years of his life in considerable pain: perhaps this is the root
of his laudanum habit. Although its use makes him an unreliable witness,
I find myself increasingly drawn into his orbit.

What to make of Donnelly? The laudanum and the syphilis? It is clearly
not how he began, but I have been unable to discover if the former was a
result of his visiting the island or the force that drove him here. For
the syphilis, a drunk driver smashing his insides into a pulp as he
stumbled these paths, I can only offer my empathy. We are all victims of
our age. My disease is the internal combustion engine and the cheap
fermentation of yeast.

Jakobson’s ribcage, they told Donnelly, was deformed, the result of some
birth defect or perhaps a traumatic injury as a child. Brittle and
overblown it was, and desperately light. Perhaps it was this that finally
did for him, unable to contain the shattering of his heart. In halflight,
his skeleton a discarded prop, a false and calcified seabird.

They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even
though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right
down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. He’d struggled
halfway down the cliff path, perhaps looking for some lost goat, or
perhaps in a delirium and expired, curled into a claw, right under the
winter moon. Even the animals shunned his corpse; the mainlanders thought
to bring it home unlucky. Donnelly claims they dragged it to the caves to
thaw out and rot, but he is proving an unreliable witness.

They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even
though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right
down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. His fingernails
were raw and bitten to the quick; they found the phosphorescent moss that
grows in the caves deep under the nails. Whatever he’d been doing under
the island when his strength began to fail is lost. He’d struggled
halfway up the cliff again, perhaps in a delirium, perhaps trying to
reach the bothy’s fire, before curling into a stone and expiring.

They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even
though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right
down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. All around him,
small flowers were reaching for the weak sun, the goats had adjusted
happily to life without a shepherd and were grazing freely about the
valley. Donnelly reports they hurled the body in fear and disgust down
the shaft, but I cannot corroborate this story.

I will become a torch for you, an aerial. I will fall from the sky like
ancient radio waves of flawed concrete. Through underground springs and
freezing subterranean rivers. Through the bacteria of my gut and heart.
Through the bottomless boat and forgotten trawlers where nobody has died.
Like the hermit and Lot’s wife, I will fossilise and open a hole in the
rock to admit me through.

To explore here is to become passive, to internalise the journey and not
to attempt to break the confines. Since I burnt my boats and contracted
my sickness, this has become easier for me. It will take a number of
expeditions to traverse this microcontinent; it will take the death of a
million neurons, a cornucopia of prime numbers, countless service
stations and bypasses to arrive at the point of final departure.

This beach is no place to end a life. Jacobson understood that, so did
Donnelly. Jacobson made it halfway back up the cliff. Donnelly lost faith
and went home to die. I have the benefit of history, of progress. Someone
has erected an aerial to guide me through these black waves, a beacon
that shines through the rocks like phosphorescent moss.

Climbing down to the caves I slipped and fell and have injured my leg. I
think the femur is broken. It is clearly infected: the skin has turned a
bright, tight pink and the pain is crashing in on waves, winter tides
against my shoreline, drowning out the ache of my stones. I struggled
back to the bothy to rest, but it has become clear that there is only one
way this is likely to end. The medical supplies I looted from the trawler
have suddenly found their purpose: they will keep me lucid for my final
ascent.

From here, this last time, I have understood there is no turning back.
The torch is failing along with my resolve. I can hear the singing of the
sea creatures from the passages above me and they are promising the
return of the gulls.

	3. The Caves (Esther)

Did Jacobson crawl this far? Can I identify the scratches his nails
ruined into the rocks? Am I following him cell for cell, inch for inch?
Why did he turn back on himself and not carry through to the ascent?

Donnelly did not pass through the caves. From here on in, his guidance,
unreliable as it is, is gone from me. I understand now that it is between
the two of us, and whatever correspondence can be drawn from the wet
rocks.

Donnelly’s addiction is my one true constant. Even though I wake in false
dawns and find the landscape changed, flowing inconstantly through my
tears, I know his reaching is always upon me.

It was as if someone had taken the car and shaken it like a cocktail. The
glove compartment had been opened and emptied with the ashtrays and the
boot; it made for a crumpled museum, a shattered exhibition.

I first saw him sat by the side of the road. I was waiting for you to be
cut out of the wreckage. The car looked like it had been dropped from a
great height. The guts of the engine spilled over the tarmac. Like water
underground.

They had stopped the traffic back as far as the Sandford junction and
come up the hard shoulder like radio signals from another star. It took
twenty-one minutes for them to arrive. I watched Paul time it, to the
second, on his watch.

There is no other direction, no other exit from this motorway. Speeding
past this junction, I saw you waiting at the roadside, a one last drink
in your trembled hands.

I’m traversing my own death throes. The infection in my leg is an oilrig
that dredges black muck up from deep inside my bones. I swallow fistfuls
of diazepam and paracetamol to stay conscious. The pain flows through me
like an underground sea.

If the caves are my guts, this must be the place where the stones are
first formed. The bacteria phosphoresce and rise, singing, through the
tunnels. Everything here is bound by the rise and fall like a tide.
Perhaps, the whole island is actually underwater.

I am travelling through my own body, following the line of infection from
the shattered femur towards the heart. I swallow fistfuls of painkillers
to stay lucid. In my delirium, I see the twin lights of the moon and the
aerial, shining to me through the rocks.

In my final dream, I sat at peace with Jakobson and watched the moon over
the Sandford junction, goats grazing on the hard shoulder, a world gone
to weed and redemption. He showed me his fever scars, and I mine, between
each shoulder the nascency of flight.

When I was coming round from the operation, I remember the light they
shone in my eyes to check for pupil contraction. It was like staring up
at a moonlit sky from the bottom of well. People moved at the summit but
I could not tell if you were one of them.

This cannot be the shaft they threw the goats into. It cannot be the
landfill where the parts of your life that would not burn ended up. It
cannot be the chimney that delivered you to the skies. It cannot be the
place where you rained back down again to fertilise the soil and make
small flowers in the rocks.

I will hold the hand you offer to me; from the summit down to this well,
into the dark waters where the small flowers creep for the sun.
Headlights are reflected in your retinas, moonlit in the shadow of the
crematorium chimney.

This is a drowned man’s face reflected in the moonlit waters. It can only
be a dead shepherd who has come to drunk drive you home.

	4. The Beacon (Paul)

The moon over the Sandford junction, headlights in your retinas. Donnelly
drove a grey hatchback without a bottom, all the creatures of the tarmac
rose to sing to him. All manner of symbols crudely scrawled across the
cliff face of my unrest. My life reduced to an electrical diagram. All my
gulls have taken flight; they will no longer roost on these outcrops. The
lure of the moon over the Sandford junction is too strong.

I wish I could have know Donnelly in this place – we would have had so
much to debate. Did he paint these stones, or did I? Who left the pots in
the hut by the jetty? Who formed the museum under the sea? Who fell
silently to his death, into the frozen waters? Who erected this
godforsaken aerial in the first place? Did this whole island rise to the
surface of my stomach, forcing the gulls to take flight?

I sat here and watched two jets carve parallel white lines into the sky.
They charted their course and I followed them for twenty-one minutes
until they turned off near Sandford and were lost. If I were a gull, I
would abandon my nest and join them. I would starve my brain of oxygen
and suffer delusions of transcendence. I would tear the bottom from my
boat and sail across the motorways until I reached this island once
again.

Of fire and soil, I chose fire. It seemed the more contemporary of the
options, the more sanitary. I could not bear the thought of the
reassembly of such a ruins. Stitching arm to shoulder and femur to hip,
charting a line of thread like traffic stilled on a motorway. Making it
all acceptable for tearful aunts and traumatised uncles flown in
specially for the occasion. Reduce to ash, mix with water, make a
phosphorescent paint for these rocks and ceilings.

We shall begin to assemble our own version of the north shore. We will
scrawl in dead languages and electrical diagrams and hide them away for
future theologians to muse and mumble over. We will send a letter to
Esther Donnelly and demand her answer. We will mix the paint with ashes
and tarmac and the glow from our infections. We paint a moon over the
Sandford junction and blue lights falling like stars along the hard
shoulder.

I returned home with a pocket full of stolen ash. Half of it fell out of
my coat and vanished into the car’s upholstery. But the rest I carefully
stowed away in a box I kept in a drawer by the side of my bed. It was
never intended as a meaningful act but over the years it became a kind of
talisman. I’d sit still, quite still, for hours just holding the
diminishing powder in my palm and noting its smoothness. In time, we will
all be worn down into granules, washed into the sea and dispersed.

Dear Esther. I find each step harder and heavier. I drag Donnelly’s
corpse on my back across these rocks, and all I hear are his whispers of
guilt, his reminders, his burnt letters, his neatly folded clothes. He
tells me I was not drunk at all.

From here I can see my armada. I collected all the letters I’d ever meant
to send to you, if I’d have ever made it to the mainland but had instead
collected at the bottom of my rucksack, and I spread them out along the
lost beach. Then I took each and every one and I folded them into boats.
I folded you into the creases and then, as the sun was setting, I set the
fleet to sail. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned you to the
Atlantic, and I sat here until I’d watched all of you sink.

There were chemical diagrams on the mug he gave me coffee in; sticky at
the handle where his hands shook. He worked for a pharmaceutical company
with an office based on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. He’d been
travelling back from a sales conference in Exeter: forming a strategic
vision for the pedalling of antacid yoghurt to the European market. You
could trace the connections with your finger, join the dots and whole new
compounds would be summoned into activity.

There were chemical diagrams on the posters on the walls on the waiting
room. It seemed appropriate at the time; still-life abstractions of the
processes which had already begun to break down your nerves and your
muscles in the next room. I cram diazepam as I once crammed for chemistry
examinations. I am revising my options for a long and happy life.

There were chemical stains on the tarmac: the leak of air conditioning,
brake fluid and petrol. He kept sniffing at his fingers as he sat by the
roadside waiting as if he couldn’t quite understand or recognise their
smell. He said he’d been travelling back from a sales conference in
Exeter; he’d stopped for farewell drinks earlier, but had kept a careful
eye on his intake. You could hear the sirens above the idling traffic.

Paul, by the roadside, by the exit for Damascus, all ticking and cooled,
all feathers and remorse, all of these signals routed like traffic
through the circuit diagrams of our guts, those badly written boats torn
bottomless in the swells, washing us forever ashore.

When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they resuscitated him
by hitting him in the chest with stones gathered by the roadside. He was
lifeless for twenty-one minutes, certainly long enough for the oxygen
levels in his brain to have decreased and caused hallucinations and
delusions of transcendence. I am running out of painkillers and the moon
has become almost unbearably bright.

The pain in my leg sent me blind for a few minutes as I struggled up the
cliff path: I swallowed another handful of painkillers and now I feel
almost lucid. The island around me has retreated to a hazed distance,
whilst the moon appears to have descended into my palm to guide me. I can
see a thick black line of infection reaching for my heart from the
waistband of my trousers. Through the fugue, it is all the world like the
path I have cut from the lowlands towards the aerial.

I will drag my leg behind me; I will drag it like a crumpled hatchback,
tyres blown and sparking across the dimming lights of my vision. I am
running out of painkillers and am following the flicker of the moon home.
When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they restarted his
heart with the jump leads from a crumpled hatchback; it took twenty-one
attempts to convince it to wake up.

A sound of torn metal, teeth running over the edge of the rocks, a moon
that casts a signal. As I lay pinned beside you, the ticking of the
cooling engine, and the calling from a great height, all my mind as a
bypass.

I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the
moon in it. I have been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the
sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to
me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the
pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage
disintergrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the
cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come
together.

If only Donnelly had experienced this, he would have realised he was his
own shoreline, as am I. Just as I am becoming this island, so he became
his syphilis, retreating into the burning synapses, the stones, the
infection.

Returning to my car afterwards, hands still shaking and a head split open
by the impact. Goodbye to tearful aunts and traumatised uncles, goodbye
to the phenomenal, goodbye to the tangible, goodbye Wolverhampton,
goodbye Sandford, goodbye Cromer, goodbye Damascus. This cliff path is
slippery in the dew; it is hard to climb with such an infection. I must
carve out the bad flesh and sling it from the aerial. I must become
infused with the very air.

There are headlights reflected in these retinas, too long in the tunnels
of my island without a bottom. The sea creatures have risen to the
surface, but the gulls are not here to carry them back to their nests. I
have become fixed: open and staring, an eye turned on itself. I have
become an infected leg, whose tracking lines form a perfect map of the
junctions of the M5. I will take the exit at mid-thigh and plummet to my
Esther.

The stones in my stomach will weigh me down and ensure my descent is true
and straight. I will break through the fog of these godforsaken pills and
achieve clarity. All my functions are clogged, all my veins are choked.
If my leg doesn’t rot off before I reach the summit, it will be a
miracle. There are twenty-one connections in the circuit diagram of the
anti-lock brakes, there are twenty-one species of gull inhabiting these
islands , it is twenty-one miles between the Sandford junction and the
turn off for home. All these things cannot, will not, be a co-incidence.

Bent back like a nail, like a hangnail, like a drowning man clung onto
the wheel, drunk and spiraled, washed onto the lost shore under a moon as
fractured as a shattered wing. We cleave, we are flight and suspended,
these wretched painkillers, this form inconstant. I will take flight.

He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all. He had not drunk with
Donnelly or spat Jacobson back at the sea; he had not careered across the
lost shores and terminal beaches of this nascent archipelago. He did not
intend his bonnet to be crumpled like a spent tissue by the impact. His
windscreen was not star-studded all over like a map of the heavens. His
paintwork etched with circuit diagrams, strange fish to call the gulls
away. The phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the M5 all the way
from Exeter to Damascus.

Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped
on the road to Damascus, Paul, sat at the roadside hunched up like a
gull, like a bloody gull. As useless and as doomed as a syphilitic
cartographer, a dying goatherd, an infected leg, a kidney stone blocking
the traffic bound for Sandford and Exeter. He was not drunk Esther, he
was not drunk at all; all his roads and his tunnels and his paths led
inevitably to this moment of impact. This is not a recorded natural
condition: he should not be sat there with his chemicals and his circuit
diagrams, he should not be sat there at all.

I have dredged these waters for the bones of the hermit, for the traces
of Donnelly, for any sign of Jacobson’s flock, for the empty bottle that
would incriminate him. I have scoured this stretch of motorway twenty-one
times attempting to recreate his trajectory, the point when his heart
stopped dead and all he saw was the moon over the Sandford junction. He
was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all, and it was not his fault,
it was the converging lines that doomed him. This is not a recorded
natural condition, the gulls do not fly so low over the motorway and
cause him to swerve. The paint scored away from his car in lines, like an
infection, making directly for the heart.

A gull perched on a spent bonnet, sideways, whilst the sirens fell
through the middle distance and the metal moaned in grief about us. I am
about this night in walking, old bread and gull bones, old Donnelly at
the bar gripping his drink, old Esther walking with our children, old
Paul, as ever, old Paul he shakes and he shivers and he turns off his
lights alone.

I have run out of places to climb. I will abandon this body and take to
the air.

We will leave twin vapour trails in the air, white lines etched into
these rocks.

I am the aerial. In my passing, I will send news to each and every star.

	Final monologues

Dear Esther. I have burnt my belongings, my books, this death
certificate. Mine will be written all across this island. Who was
Jacobson, who remembers him? Donnelly has written of him, but who was
Donnelly, who remembers him? I have painted, carved, hewn, scored into
this space all that I could draw from him. There will be another to these
shores to remember me. I will rise from the ocean like an island without
bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon that they
will not forget you. We have always been drawn here: one day the gulls
will return and nest in our bones and our history. I will look to my left
and see Esther Donnelly, flying beside me. I will look to my right and
see Paul Jacobson, flying beside me. They will leave white lines carved
into the air to reach the mainland, where help will be sent.

Dear Esther. I have burned the cliffs of Damascus, I have drunk deep of
it. My heart is my leg and a black line etched on the paper all along
this boat without a bottom. You are all the world like a nest to me, in
which eggs unbroken form like fossils, come together, shatter and send
small black flowers to the very air. From this infection, hope.From this
island, flight. From this grief, love.

Come back!

Come back...























SOME OLD DEAR ESTHER ARCHIVE STUFF
September 6, 2013
Dan Pinchbeck  Uncategorized
http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog/blog/some-old-dear-esther-archive-stuff

concept_art_esther
I've been going through my PC scrubbing it ready to hand it over to a new staff member and founds loads of fun old archive stuff, including these notes for Dear Esther translators, which might be interesting for anyone still wondering about parts of the script...

General Notes

1. There’s some odd grammar in the Dear Esther script. This presents quite a challenge for you, I know, but if you can try and preserve it – particularly when two separate tenses are mixed within a single phrase or sentence – please do. It’s part of what add the slightly odd flavour to the VOs, which is important in spooking the player a little.

2. Another thing to watch for is collapsing symbols. Often a symbol or metaphor will be set-up to be collapsed either later on in the VO – usually by shifting the object being talked about into something completely different – or contradicted by a later VO.

3. In the first case, try and follow the logic of the metaphor, rather than trying to accurately tie it to the object (if that makes sense). Things quite deliberately don’t add up as often as not, again, this is part of the process of giving the VOs that slightly weird, otherwordly, sense.

4. In the second case, the key thing is not to try and look backwards or forwards from each particular cue. Don’t try and resolve contradictions, and don’t rely on previous cues for understanding or meaning. Part of the way Dear Esther is written is this idea of “everything is true in that moment, but the moment is all there is” – in other words, the narrator is completely unreliable, but utterly believes in everything in the instant it is being said.

5. The tone throughout remains very subdued and abstract. There are instances where quite concrete ideas are being put out by the script, but more often, the point is more about trying to make these images and symbols compelling, not rational. Think of the whole thing as a fever dream, or a voice coming through the static on a badly tuned radio. Like the script says “a radio signal from another star”.

6. Another thing that might help is thinking about the whole thing as a kind of prayer or spell. One thing that was more evident in the early stages of the mod was the idea that the narrator was literally trying to cast a spell to bring Esther back from the dead, there were lots more magical symbols and numerology in the game. Most of that went, but there’s a quiet idea buried in there about this (all the 21 stuff). Some of the voice-overs have a more explicit sense of this, but many of them do have this idea of an invisible audience. He’s not always talking to himself – but I don’t want to go through this saying “now he’s talking to Esther, now he’s talking to Paul” as it’s not that explicit, but you hopefully get the idea.

7. Who is he? Well, again, it’s deliberately vague. He has no personality, no reality. Or he has several. Don’t try and capture a sense of person – it’s important that this is evasive. You might notice a new thread appearing in the ‘d’ script (the new stuff) that intimates that the narrator actually is Paul and caused the crash himself. We need to keep this soft and subtle.

Overview:

There are really two major interpretations of Dear Esther. The first is quite literal: following the death of his wife in a car crash, the narrator has a nervous breakdown and strands himself on a deserted Hebridean island. The isolation, starvation and an infection following a serious injury cause his mind to deteriorate further, and he begins to hallucinate, projecting symbols, figures and meanings onto the environment. Driven mad with pain and grief, he begins to believe that the only route to redemption is to commit suicide, by climbing and throwing himself off the radio mast at the summit of the island, transmitting the story of Esther's death to the world.

The second opens in a similar way, but around the beginning of the second level, the seed is sown that the island may not actually be a real space. The narrator starts to openly voice his eroded confidence in the reality of the world, and unnatural symbols and events become apparent in the landscape. As we descend into the caves, it becomes clearer that this is not a real space at all, and the island actually appears to be some form of coma-dream, a visualisation of the destroyed interior landscape of the narrator's mind. In this case, everything begins to take on an altered significance: the act of throwing himself from a radio tower – does it mean redemption or waking from the coma, or an act of healing, of closure?

jettya

"Dear Esther. I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island. Somewhere, between the longitude and latitude a split opened up and it beached remotely here. No matter how hard I correlate, it remains a singularity, an alpha point in my life that refuses all hypothesis. I return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full glare of my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim."

	The alpha point refers to the religious idea of god being the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all things, next to the scientific idea of singularity (i.e. black holes and the idea of a point where spacetime collapses into an infinite point).

jettyb

"Dear Esther. The gulls do not land here anymore; I’ve noticed that this year, they seem to shun the place. Maybe it’s the depletion of the fishing stock driving them away. Perhaps it’s me. When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands. Three hundred years later, even they have departed."

jettyc

"Dear Esther. I have lost track of how long I have been here, and how many visits I have made overall. Certainly, the landmarks are now so familiar to me that I have to remind myself to actually see the forms and shapes in front of me. I could stumble blind across these rocks, the edges of these precipices, without fear of missing my step and plummeting down to sea. Besides, I have always considered that if one is to fall, it is critical to keep one’s eyes firmly open."

	The idea of a cycle is important here, that the player is given the sense this is all a repeat.

jettyd

"Dear Esther. The morning after I was washed ashore, salt in my ears, sand in my mouth and the waves always at my ankles, I felt as though everything had conspired to this one last shipwreck. I remembered nothing but water, stones in my belly and my shoes threatening to drag me under to where only the most listless of creatures swim."

	“waves always at my ankles” – in this voice-over, there’s the first real example of the messed-up grammar and tense of the script.

firstclimb

"Donnelly reported the legend of the hermit; a holy man who sought solitude in its most pure form. Allegedly, he rowed here from the mainland in a boat without a bottom, so all the creatures of the sea could rise at night to converse with him. How disappointed he must have been with their chatter. Perhaps now, when all that haunts the ocean is the rubbish dumped from the tankers, he’d find more peace. They say he threw his arms wide in a valley on the south side and the cliff opened up to provide him shelter; they say he died of fever one hundred and sixteen years later. The shepherds left gifts for him at the mouth of the cave, but Donnelly records they never claimed to have seen him. I have visited the cave and I have left my gifts, but like them, I appear to be an unworthy subject of his solitude."

	So this introduces the historical narrative, which is a false clue really. I think you have to assume the Donnelly book really does exist, and does contain much of the information the narrator says it does, and it’s the narrator maybe creating the island from this material he has consumed. There was another plotline originally which I still have in my head, that the island has always had a hermit, someone who comes for the complete solitude. Donnelly became one, and initially, the narrator sets himself up to be one. This is before we find out about the other historical inhabitant of the island – Jakobson. So maybe there's this binary – are you a hermit, or a dead shepherd – which then leads to the question of which one the narrator is, and what these archetypes (they really were deliberately thought of as archetypes) represent – if anything.

firstbeacha

"At night you can see the lights sometimes from a passing tanker or trawler. From up on the cliffs they are mundane, but down here they fugue into ambiguity. For instance, I cannot readily tell if they belong above or below the waves. The distinction now seems mundane; why not everything and all at once! There’s nothing better to do here than indulge in contradictions, whilst waiting for the fabric of life to unravel."

	So there’s this real ambiguity here, about whether the narrator is creating everything he sees. A fugue is a short-term period of amnesia – someone in a fugue can move around, etc, but is not really conscious of their actions and cannot remember them. So we have this idea of the island drifting in and out of reality, of being a dreamlike space.

firstbeachb

"There was once talk of a wind farm out here, away from the rage and the intolerance of the masses. The sea, they said, is too rough for the turbines to stand: they clearly never came here to experience the becalming for themselves. Personally, I would have supported it; turbines would be a fitting contemporary refuge for a hermit: the revolution and the permanence"

	There’s a deliberate double-meaning in revolution, both the idea of a cycle and something being overthrown.

firstbeachc

"When you were born, you mother told me, a hush fell over the delivery room. A great red birthmark covered the left side of your face. No one knew what to say, so you cried to fill the vacuum. I always admired you for that; that you cried to fill whatever vacuum you found. I began to manufacture vacuums, just to enable you to deploy your talent. The birthmark faded by the time you were six, and had gone completely by the time we met, but your fascination with the empty, and its cure, remained."

firstbeachd

"Those islands in the distance, I am sure, are nothing more than relics of another time, sleeping giants, somnambulist gods laid down for a final dreaming. I wash the sand from my lips and grip my wrist ever more tightly, my shaking arms will not support my fading diaries."

cliffpatha

"Reading Donnelly by the weak afternoon sunlight. He landed on the south side of the island, followed the path to bay and climbed the mount. He did not find the caves and he did not chart the north side. I think this is why his understanding of the island is flawed, incomplete. He stood on the mount and only wondered momentarily how to descend. But then, he didn’t have my reasons."

	So here we're getting the idea that there is or was a historically real island, but it has been almost psychically overlaid with this new reality; also that the narrator may have been following Donnelly once, but this is not about Donnelly, it's gone beyond that.

cliffpathb

"Donnelly’s book had not been taken out from the library since 1974. I decided it would never be missed as I slipped it under my coat and avoided the librarian’s gaze on the way out. If the subject matter is obscure, the writer’s literary style is even more so, it is not the text of a stable or trustworthy reporter. Perhaps it is fitting that my only companion in these last days should be a stolen book written by a dying man."

	Of course, the irony here is that the narrator could be describing himself, and what the player is hearing and experiencing.

cliffpathc

"The mount is clearly the focal point of this landscape; it almost appears so well placed as to be artificial. I find myself easily slipping into the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything here. Was this island formed during the moment of impact; when we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders, did it first break surface then?"

	First potential mention of the crash, fusion of the white lines (which may be visible) with seatbelt damage. This is the most 'active' of the three cues possible, it actually gives quite a lot away about what is going on. “Torn loose from out moorings…” sets up the running symbol of the bottomless boats, which often refer to the characters.

cliffpathd

"A wonderful sight. The moon cresting the junction between the cliff path and the stone circle. It cast a shadow of the ridge across the beach, all the world as if you had signed your name across the sand in untidy handwriting."

	We actually have seen a carving in the sand at this point, but it was of the golden ratio, so there’s potentially this weird idea here that Esther isn’t actually real at all, but represents something, rather than being a character. This may come back later on too.

whitelines

"When someone had died or was dying or was so ill they gave up what little hope they could sacrifice, they cut parallel lines into the cliff, exposing the white chalk beneath. With the right eyes you could see them from the mainland or the fishing boats and know to send aid or impose a cordon of protection, and wait a generation until whatever pestilence stalked the cliff paths died along with its hosts. My lines are just for this: to keep any would-be rescuers at bay. The infection is not simply of the flesh."

	They really did this – found it in a historical report and just loved it. The idea is that these lines in the first level are actually historical, it’s the ones on the final cliff that the narrator has made himself. And of course, later on, he does get a real infection of the flesh, and is going to die from it, but the key sense here is that it’s not a physical illness but a spiritual one.

valleytopa

"They were godfearing people those shepherds. There was no love in the relationship. Donnelly tells me that they had one bible that was passed around in strict rotation. It was stolen by a visiting monk in 1776, two years before the island was abandoned altogether. In the interim, I wonder, did they assign chapter and verse to the stones and grasses, marking the geography with a superimposed significance; that they could actually walk the bible and inhabit its contradictions?"

	I’m not sure how universal the phrase “godfearing” – hopefully so, but I think the idea holds even so.

valleytopb

"We are not like Lot’s wife, you and I; we feel no particular need to turn back. There’s nothing to be seen if we did. No tired old man parting the cliffs with his arms; no gifts or bibles laid out on the sand for the taking. No tides turning or the shrieking gulls overhead. The bones of the hermit are no longer laid out for the taking: I have stolen them away to the guts of this island where the passages all run to black and there we can light each others faces by their strange luminescence"

	We get this increased image of the island being a body, so it’s important that guts retains this sense, being a body part, rather than a geological feature.

valleytopc

"I quote directly: “A motley lot with little to recommend them. I have now spent three days in their company that is, I fear, enough for any man not born amongst them. Despite their tedious inclination to quote scripture, they seem to me the most godforsaken of all the inhabitants of the outer isles. Indeed, in this case, the very gravity of that term – forsaken by god – seems to find its very apex.” It appears to me that Donnelly too found those who wander this shoreline to be adrift from any chance of redemption. Did he include himself in that, I wonder?"

	Important here to try and capture a more old-fashioned, formal tone to the quote from Donnelly’s book. It’s supposed to have been written in the 18th century…

paul

"Dear Esther. I met Paul. I made my own little pilgrimage. My Damascus a small semi-detached on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. We drank coffee in his kitchen and tried to connect to one another. Although he knew I hadn’t come in search of an apology, reason or retribution, he still spiralled in panic, thrown high and lucid by his own dented bonnet. Responsibility had made him old; like us, he had already passed beyond any conceivable boundary of life."

	Semi-detached is a house type in the UK, in case it’s not universal, where one building is split into two houses down the middle. It’s a very common form of housing in suburban areas. Equally, Wolverhampton is a very ordinary small city in the middle of the UK, so it’s about this juxtaposition of extremely ordinary (dull) reality with this kind of fantastic, religious event. The “spiraled in panic” image is deliberately making this idea that being confronted by the crash and it’s consequences hit him as hard as his car hit Esther’s…

hermita

"I threw my arms wide and the cliff opened out before me, making this rough home. I transferred my belongings from the bothy on the mount and tried to live here instead. It was cold at night and the sea lapped at the entrance at high tide. To climb the peak, I must first venture even deeper into veins of the island, where the signals are blocked altogether. Only then will I understand them, when I stand on the summit and they flow into me, uncorrupted."

	Again, it’s important to keep the body metaphor with “veins”. The “signals” refer to the radio mast, but the “flow” also suggests water, which ties back to the sea lapping at the entrance, which forced the narrator out of the cave. So there’s this idea of the sea standing for corruption.

hermitb

"I would leave you presents, outside your retreat, in this interim space between cliff and beach. I would leave you loaves and fishes, but the fish stocks have been depleted and I have run out of bread. I would row you back to your homeland in a bottomless boat but I fear we would both be driven mad by the chatter of the sea creatures."

	It’s really important to find as poetic a translation phrase as possible for “bottomless boat” (I know that’s probably an impossible or totally diva-ish request) – as it’s such an important, recurring phrase or image. It doesn’t actually mean anything, but it sounds like it means something really important. Which is a bit like the 21 stuff later on – it creates this idea that something is going on, but it’s just this empty idea. But it sounds important/vital/seductive/whatever. Hope that makes sense?!?

hermitc

"I find myself increasingly unable to find that point where the hermit ends and Paul and I begin. We are woven into a sodden blanket, stuffed into the bottom of a boat to stop the leak and hold back the ocean. My neck aches from staring up at the aerial; it mirrors the dull throb in my gut where I am sure I have begun to form another stone. In my dreams, it forms into a perfect representation of Lot’s wife, head over her shoulder, staring along the motorway at the approaching traffic, in a vacuum of fatalistic calm."

	Referring back to the bit earlier where the narrator says he “manufactured vacuums” – a hint that he is in some way responsible for the crash. The “stone” refers to the kidney stones, but also possibly the stone circle at the top of the valley.

hermitd

"This hermit, this seer, this distant historian of bones and old bread, where did he vanish to? Why, asked the farmers, why asked Jakobson, why bother with your visions at all, if you are just to throw your arms up at the cliff and let it close in behind you, seal you into the belly of the island, a museum shut to all but the most devoted."

	“why bother” – directed at the hermit, but also somehow at the narrator himself, and this vision he is currently spinning.

valleyreturna

"He still maintains he wasn’t drunk but tired. I can’t make the judgement or the distinction anymore. I was drunk when I landed here, and tired too. I walked up the cliff path in near darkness and camped in the bay where the trawler lies beached. It was only at dawn that I saw the bothy and decided to make my temporary lodgings there. I was expecting just the aerial and a transmitter stashed in a weatherproof box somewhere on the mount. It had an air of uneasy permanence to it, like all the other buildings here; erosion seems to have evaded it completely."

	“bothy” – this is a traditional Scottish name for a shelter building, which you can find in remote parts of the highlands and other areas. They were open, so anyone can take refuge in them (normally shepherds etc). I don’t think there’s a literal translation. You could use “shepherd’s hut” probably.

valleyreturnb

"The vegetation here has fossilized from the roots up. To think they once grazed animals here, the remnants of occupation being evidence to that. It is all sick to death: the water is too polluted for the fish, the sky is too thin for the birds and the soil is cut with the bones of hermits and shepherds. I have heard it said that human ashes make great fertilizer, that we could sow a great forest from all that is left of your hips and ribcage, with enough left over to thicken the air and repopulate the bay."

	“remants of occupation” – referring to the bothy and the goatshed (which we haven’t seen yet, of course).

valleyreturnc

"I dreamt I stood in the centre of the sun and the solar radiation cooked my heart from the inside. My teeth will curl and my fingernails fall off into my pockets like loose change. If I could stomach, I’d eat, but all I seem capable of is saltwater. Were the livestock still here, I could turn feral and gorge. I’m as emaciated as a body on a slab, opened up for a premature source of death. I’ve rowed to this island in a heart without a bottom; all the bacteria of my gut rising up to sing to me."

	This is the most left-field bit of script so far.The key thing is to take it all literally – everything the narrator says is absolutely real to him, not a metaphor or anything else at all. “all I seem capable of is (drinking) saltwater”  - which of course, turns you mad. “opened up” – a reference to the autopsy we hear about later.

valleyreturnd

"I have become convinced I am not alone here, even though I am equally sure it is simply a delusion brought upon by circumstance. I do not, for instance, remember where I found the candles, or why I took it upon myself to light such a strange pathway. Perhaps it is only for those who are bound to follow."

	The candles are a new feature. You’ll have to wait to see them ;-)

entry

"Dear Esther. I have now driven the stretch of the M5 between Exeter and Bristol over twenty-one times, but although I have all the reports and all the witnesses and have cross-referenced them within a millimetre using my ordnance survey maps, I simply cannot find the location. You’d think there would be marks, to serve as some evidence. Its somewhere between the turn off for Sandford and the Wellcome Break services. But although I can always see it in my rear view mirror, I have as yet been unable to pull ashore."

	“Wellcome Break” is the name of one of the big motorway services companies, so it’s a noun. The narrator is talking about the crash site here.

secondbeacha

"Dear Esther. This will be my last letter. Do they pile up even now on the doormat of our empty house? Why do I still post them home to you? Perhaps I can imagine myself picking them up on the return I will not make, to find you waiting with daytime television and all its comforts. They must form a pile four feet high now, my own little ziggurat; a megalith of foolscap and manila. They will fossilise over the centuries to follow; an uneasy time capsule from a lost island. Postmarked Oban: it must have been sent during the final ascent."

	So there’s a big contradiction in this piece here – we start with the narrator writing the letter and then at the end he talks about it as if it was sent some time ago, after he died, so it’s really ambiguous where he is and what he’s actually talking about. This fucked up time sense really needs to be kept in. Foolscap and manila are paper-types (nouns again) for stationary. Foolscap is slightly larger than A4 and is a size, manila is a cheap beige paper.

secondbeachb

"Dear Esther. I have found myself to be as featureless as this ocean, as shallow and unoccupied as this bay, a listless wreck without identification. My rocks are these bones and a careful fence to keep the precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my forehead a mount, this aerial will transmit into me so. All over exposed, the nervous system, where Donnelly’s boots and yours and mine still trample. I will carry a torch for you; I will leave it at the foot of my headstone. You will need it for the tunnels that carry me under."

	Again, there’s really weird grammar going on in here, as the narrator begins to confuse the island with his own body. Try and avoid translating this into something like “shot through me *are the* caves, my forehead *is* a mount”, etc, as the breakdown in normal grammar is important to create the sense of the narrator’s mind breaking down. And he really does believe that his rocks are these bones (not his bones are like rocks) and that the aerial is transmitting into him. This one could be tricky I guess…

secondbeachc

"Dear Esther. Whilst they catalogued the damage, I found myself afraid you’d suddenly sit up, stretch, and fail to recognise me, I orbited you like a sullen comet, our history trailing behind me in the solar wind from the fluorescent tubes. Your hair had not been brushed yet, your make-up not reapplied. You were all the world like a beach to me, laid out for investigation, your geography telling one story, but hinting at the geology hidden behind the cuts and bruises."

	This refers to Esther’s autopsy, and here the narrator sees her corpse as the island and visa versa. Obviously fluorescent light tubes don’t create solar wind, but this is a literal idea the narrator has – it’s his reality.

secondbeachd

"I have found the ship’s manifest, crumpled and waterlogged, under a stash of paint cans. It tells me that along with this present cargo, there was a large quantity of antacid yoghurt, bound for the European market. It must have washed out to sea, God knows there are no longer gulls or goats here to eat it."

	This is actually pretty literal and straightforward I think, Antacids are chemicals which help with heartburn and stomach acidity, so this links back to both his kidney stones and the fact he sees the caves of the island as his stomach, plus also potentially to his burnt (broken) heart.

boat

"There must be a hole in the bottom of the boat. How else could new hermits have arrived?"

	Which doesn’t actually make any sense when you think about it. But it does to him…

buoya

"It’s only at night that this place makes any sluggish effort at life. You can see the buoy and the aerial. I’ve been taking to sleeping through the day in an attempt to resurrect myself. I can feel the last days drawing upon me – there’s little point now in continuation. There must be something new to find here – some nook or some cranny that offers a perspective worth clinging to. I’ve burnt my bridges; I have sunk my boats and watched them go to water."

	“You can see the buoy…” refers to the lights the player can actually already see. “The last days” most literally refers to the death of the narrator, but is also kind of biblical and may be about the symbolic apocalypse that’s also going on.

buoyb

"All night the buoy has kept me lucid. I sat, when I was at the very edge of despair, when I thought I would never unlock the secret of the island, I sat at the edge and I watched the idiot buoy blink through the night. He is mute and he is retarded and he has no thought in his metal head but to blink each wave and each minute aside until the morning comes and renders him blind as well as deaf-mute. In many ways, we have much in common."

buoyc

"I’ve begun to wonder if Donnelly’s voyage here was as prosaic as it was presented. How disappointed not to have found the bones of the holy man! No wonder he hated the inhabitants so. To him, they must have seemed like barnacles mindlessly clinging to a mercy seat. Why cling so hard to the rock? Because it is the only thing that stops us from sliding into the ocean. Into oblivion."

	“Mercy seat” – the lid of the Ark of the Covenant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_seat) - it’s pretty ambiguous what the narrator means by this. He keep using all this biblical and religious imagery, but it’s deliberately confused, sometimes meaningless, sometimes just plain wrong. The idea that people cling onto the lid of the Ark without ever understanding what it is seems to be a criticism of a lack of understanding, or of blind faith, but then he goes on to say that to do anything else results in oblivion. So it’s another case of don’t try and make it make sense, or try and create the sense that the narrator actually understands what he is talking about!

buoyd

"An imagined answerphone message. The tires are flat, the wheel spins loosely, and the brake fluid has run like ink over this map, staining the landmarks and rendering the coastline mute, compromised. Where you saw galaxies, I only saw bruises, cut into the cliff by my lack of sobriety."

	Again, although he suggests what follows is a message, it’s not at all clear that it actually is. The image shifts from the crash to the map to space to the autopsy to the white lines, and there’s no deeper logic to it or reason, just a chain of images – again, this idea of a TV or radio spluttering signals, all mixed up, in between the static.

wrecka

"I don’t know the name of the wreck in the bay; it seems to have been here for several years but has not yet subsided. I don’t know if anyone was killed; if so, I certainly haven’t seen them myself. Perhaps when the helicopter came to lift them home, their ascent scared the birds away. I shall search for eggs along the north shore, for any evidence that life is marking this place out as its own again. Perhaps it is us that keeps them at bay."

	“haven’t seen them myself” suggests the narrator sees ghosts (the player actually might on a couple of occasions). “perhaps it is us” may refer the player and narrator, or esther, or Donnelly, or Jakobson, or any combination – keep it ambiguous.

wreckb

"I remember running through the sands of Cromer; there was none of the shipwreck I find here. I have spent days cataloguing the garbage that washes ashore here and I have begun to assemble a collection in the deepest recess I could find. What a strange museum it would make. And what of the corpse of its curator? Shall I find a glass coffin and pretend to make snow white of us both?"

	In case you missed it, Snow White is put in a glass coffin in the forest in the fairy tale, although how we get there from creating a museum from rubbish and hiding it in the deep caves (deepest recess) is anyone’s guess. Cromer is a town in East Anglia, one of those dying UK seaside resorts.

wreckc

"Why is the sea so becalmed? It beckons you to walk upon its surface; but I know all too well how it would shatter under my feet and drag me under. The rocks here have withstood centuries of storms and now, robbed of the tides, they stand muted and lame, temples without cause. One day, I will attempt to climb them, hunt among their peaks for the eggs, the nests, that the gulls have clearly abandoned"

lowervalley01

"I had kidney stones, and you visited me in the hospital. After the operation, when I was still half submerged in anaesthetic, your outline and your speech both blurred. Now my stones have grown into an island and made their escape and you have been rendered opaque by the car of a drunk."

	“rendered opaque” i.e. into a substance that light cannot pass through. “stones have grown” – so he might be suggesting here that the island he is on is a product of his own stomach, which is deeply strange but should be taken literally.

lowervalley02a

"I have begun my ascent on the green slope of the western side. I have looked deep into the mountain from the shaft and understood that I must go up and then find a way under. I will stash the last vestiges of my civilisation in the stone walls and work deeper from there. I am drawn by the aerial and the cliff edge: there is some form of rebirth waiting for me there."

	“vestiges” translates not just as a trace, or remnant, but the sign of something which is no longer present.

lowervalley02b

"I have begun my ascent on the windless slope of the western side. The setting sun was an inflamed eye squeezing shut against the light shone in by the doctors. My neck is aching through constantly craning my head up to track the light of the aerial. I must look downwards, follow the path under the island to a new beginning."

	One of those symbol-leaps, where the sun is like an eye which becomes his eye in another literal instance.

lowervalley02c

"I have begun to climb, away from the sea and towards the centre. It is a straight line to the summit, where the evening begins to coil around the aerial and squeeze the signals into early silence. The bothy squats against the mount to avoid the gaze of the aerial; I too will creep under the island like an animal and approach it from the northern shore."

	“the mount” – short-form for the mount, but also referring to the biblical mount (as in the sermon on the mount), so there’s an obscure symbolic thing going on about hiding in the shadow of the mount against an all-seeing gaze there

shafta

"When I first looked into the shaft, I swear I felt the stones in my stomach shift in recognition."

shaftb

"What charnel house lies at the foot of this abyss? How many dead shepherds could fill this hole?"

	“charnel house” is a building used for storing skeletal parts. They are sometimes kept near churches for any loose or odd bones that turn up whilst digging graves, so the idea is it’s as kind of semi-religious closet for the unidentified dead.

shaftc

"Is this what Paul saw through his windscreen? Not Lot’s wife, looking over her shoulder, but a scar in the hillside, falling away to black, forever."

	Assuming you know the story of Lot’s wife? Lot and his family are warned by angels to leave Sodom just before it is destroyed, but warned not to look back. Lot’s wife does, and is turned into a pillar of salt (i.e. becomes like a rock, so there’s a big circular symbolic thing about the kidney stones going on here)

goatsheda

"When they graze their animals here, Donnelly writes, it is always raining. There’s no evidence of that rain has been here recently. The foliage is all static, like a radio signal returning from another star."

goatshedb

"In the hold of the wrecked trawler I have found what must amount to several tons of gloss paint. Perhaps they were importing it. Instead, I will put it to use, and decorate this island in the icons and symbols of our disaster."

goatshedc

"Cromer in the rain; a school trip. We took shelter en masse in a bus stop, herded in like cattle, the teachers dull shepherds. The sand in my pocket becoming damper by the second."

	The sand here is referring to the ash the narrator steals from Esther’s cremation later on in the game.

uppervalley

"The bothy was constructed originally in the early 1700s. By then, shepherding had formalised into a career. The first habitual shepherd was a man called Jacobson, from a lineage of migratory Scandinavians. He was not considered a man of breeding by the mainlanders. He came here every summer whilst building the bothy, hoping, eventually, that becoming a man of property would secure him a wife and a lineage. Donnelly records that it did not work: he caught some disease from his malcontented goats and died two years after completing it. There was no one to carve white lines into the cliff for him either."

	The language here is a bit more complex, but it’s pretty straightforward in meaning, I hope.

bothya

"Inventory: a trestle table we spread wallpaper on in our first home. A folding chair; I laughed at you for bringing camping in the lakes. I was uncomfortable later and you laughed then. This diary; the bed with the broken springs – once asleep, you have to remember not to dream. A change of clothes. Donnelly’s book, stolen from Edinburgh library on the way here. I will burn them all on the last morning and make an aerial of my own."

bothyb

"When the oil lamps ran out I didn’t pick up a torch but used the moonlight to read by. When I have pulled the last shreds of sense from it, I will throw Donnelly’s book from the cliffs and perhaps myself with it. Maybe it will wash back up through the caves and erupt from the spring when the rain comes, making its return to the hermit’s cave. Perhaps it will be back on the table when I wake. I think I may have thrown it into the sea several times before."

bothyc

"Three cormorants seen at dusk; they did not land. This house, built of stone, built by a long-dead shepherd. Contents: my campbed, a stove, a table, chairs. My clothes, my books. The caves that score out the belly of this island, leaving it famished. My limbs and belly, famished. This skin, these organs, this failing eyesight. When the battery runs out in my torch, I will descend into the caves and follow only the phosphorescence home."

bothyd

"My heart is landfill, these false dawns waking into whilst it is still never light. I sweat for you in the small hours and wrap my blankets into a mass. I have always heard the waves break on these lost shores, always the gulls forgotten. I can lift this bottle to my ear, and all there ever is for me is this hebridean music."

	The wording in the first sentence is very odd, but should be preserved. It’s OK that we may not be sure exactly what the narrator means. Also, there’s about three different tenses going on here, and again, we want to keep that. “Hebridean” is a noun-type thing – the island the narrator is on is somewhere in the Outer Hebrides.

toppatha

"In a footnote, the editor comments that at this point, Donnelly was going insane as syphilis tore through his system like a drunk driver. He is not to be trusted – many of his claims are unsubstantiated and although he does paint a colourful picture, much of what he says may have been derived directly from his fever. But I have been here and I know, as Donnelly did, that this place is always half-imagined. Even the rocks and caves will shimmer and blur, with the right eyes."

toppathb

"He left his body to the medical school and was duly opened out for a crowd of students twenty-one days after his passing. The report is included in my edition of his book. The syphilis had torn through his guts like a drunk driver, scrambling his organs like eggs on a plate. But enough definition remained for a cursory examination and, as I suspected, they found clear evidence of kidney stones. He is likely to have spent the last years of his life in considerable pain: perhaps this is the root of his laudanum habit. Although its use makes him an unreliable witness, I find myself increasingly drawn into his orbit."

	“enough definition” meaning that although his guts were a mess, you could work out which organ was which.

toppathc

"What to make of Donnelly? The laudanum and the syphilis? It is clearly not how he began, but I have been unable to discover if the former was a result of his visiting the island or the force that drove him here. For the syphilis, a drunk driver smashing his insides into a pulp as he stumbled these paths, I can only offer my empathy. We are all victims of our age. My disease is the internal combustion engine and the cheap fermentation of yeast."

toppathd

"Jakobson’s ribcage, they told Donnelly, was deformed, the result of some birth defect or perhaps a traumatic injury as a child. Brittle and overblown it was, and desperately light. Perhaps it was this that finally did for him, unable to contain the shattering of his heart. In half-light, his skeleton a discarded prop, a false and calcified seabird."

	The image here is of Jakobson as a kind of bird-man – with light and fragile bones, and the distended ribcage of a gull – that was broken when his heart broke. This contradicts the other accounts of Jakobson’s death.

middlepatha

"They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. He’d struggled halfway down the cliff path, perhaps looking for some lost goat, or perhaps in a delirium and expired, curled into a claw, right under the winter moon. Even the animals shunned his corpse; the mainlanders thought to bring it home unlucky. Donnelly claims they dragged it to the caves to thaw out and rot, but he is proving an unreliable witness."

middlepathb

"They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. His fingernails were raw and bitten to the quick; they found the phosphorescent moss that grows in the caves deep under the nails. Whatever he’d been doing under the island when his strength began to fail is lost. He’d struggled halfway up the cliff again, perhaps in a delirium, perhaps trying to reach the bothy’s fire, before curling into a stone and expiring."

	“the quick” – not sure how this translates, but it refers to the point at which the fingernail stops being dead tissue and becomes live. It’s the line beyond which is really, really bloody hurts if you rip your nail…

middlepathc

"They found Jacobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. All around him, small flowers were reaching for the weak sun, the goats had adjusted happily to life without a shepherd and were grazing freely about the valley. Donnelly reports they hurled the body in fear and disgust down the shaft, but I cannot corroborate this story."

thirdbeacha

"I will become a torch for you, an aerial. I will fall from the sky like ancient radio waves of flawed concrete. Through underground springs and freezing subterranean rivers. Through the bacteria of my gut and heart. Through the bottomless boat and forgotten trawlers where nobody has died. Like the hermit and Lot’s wife, I will fossilise and open a hole in the rock to admit me through."

	The broken-up sentences in the middle of this should be preserved if possible, rather than trying to make them fit normal sentence construction.

thirdbeachb

"To explore here is to become passive, to internalise the journey and not to attempt to break the confines. Since I burnt my boats and contracted my sickness, this has become easier for me. It will take a number of expeditions to traverse this microcontinent; it will take the death of a million neurons, a cornucopia of prime numbers, countless service stations and bypasses to arrive at the point of final departure."

	“microcontinent” is not a real word, but a compound.

thirdbeachc

"This beach is no place to end a life. Jacobson understood that, so did Donnelly. Jacobson made it halfway back up the cliff. Donnelly lost faith and went home to die. I have the benefit of history, of progress. Someone has erected an aerial to guide me through these black waves, a beacon that shines through the rocks like phosphorescent moss."

cavesentrance

"Climbing down to the caves I slipped and fell and have injured my leg. I think the femur is broken. It is clearly infected: the skin has turned a bright, tight pink and the pain is crashing in on waves, winter tides against my shoreline, drowning out the ache of my stones. I struggled back to the bothy to rest, but it has become clear that there is only one way this is likely to end. The medical supplies I looted from the trawler have suddenly found their purpose: they will keep me lucid for my final ascent."

	From this point on, more of the language becomes more fractured and odd, as the narrator starts confusing his body with the island.

tunnela

"From here, this last time, I have understood there is no turning back. The torch is failing along with my resolve. I can hear the singing of the sea creatures from the passages above me and they are promising the return of the gulls."

tunnelb

"Did Jacobson crawl this far? Can I identify the scratches his nails ruined into the rocks? Am I following him cell for cell, inch for inch? Why did he turn back on himself and not carry through to the ascent?"

	“ruined into the rock” – not a normal phrasing, but an extension of “ruin”, so there’s a double-meaning here, that both his nails and the rocks were ruined by the act. “cell for cell” means both prison and biological cells.

tunnelc

"Donnelly did not pass through the caves. From here on in, his guidance, unreliable as it is, is gone from me. I understand now that it is between the two of us, and whatever correspondence can be drawn from the wet rocks."

tunneld

"Donnelly’s addiction is my one true constant. Even though I wake in false dawns and find the landscape changed, flowing inconstantly through my tears, I know his reaching is always upon me."

	Again, this is ambiguous – it seems to suggest it is the landscape that flows inconstantly through the narrator’s tears, but it could also be taken to read that the narrator, waking in false dawns (where he finds the landscape changed) is the one flowing through the tears. If we can preserve the double-meaning, that would be great. “his reaching” refers to Donnelly’s addiction.

deepcavea

"I first saw him sat by the side of the road. I was waiting for you to be cut out of the wreckage. The car looked like it had been dropped from a great height. The guts of the engine spilled over the tarmac. Like water underground."

	The last two sentences would normally be one, but they are broken up here as the narrator’s thought process becomes more fragmented.

deepcaveb

"They had stopped the traffic back as far as the Sandford junction and come up the hard shoulder like radio signals from another star. It took twenty-one minutes for them to arrive. I watched Paul time it, to the second, on his watch."

deepcavec

"It was as if someone had taken the car and shaken it like a cocktail. The glove compartment had been opened and emptied with the ashtrays and the boot; it made for a crumpled museum, a shattered exhibition."

deepcaved

"There is no other direction, no other exit from this motorway. Speeding past this junction, I saw you waiting at the roadside, a one last drink in your trembled hands."

	Grammatically, you wouldn’t normally have “a one last drink” but just “one last drink” but the important thing is that the narrator is obsessing about a single object as the cause of the crash.

rivera

"I’m traversing my own death throes. The infection in my leg is an oilrig that dredges black muck up from deep inside my bones. I swallow fistfuls of diazepam and paracetamol to stay conscious. The pain flows through me like an underground sea."

riverb

"If the caves are my guts, this must be the place where the stones are first formed. The bacteria phosphoresce and rise, singing, through the tunnels. Everything here is bound by the rise and fall, like a tide. Perhaps, the whole island is actually underwater."

riverc

"I am travelling through my own body, following the line of infection from the shattered femur towards the heart. I swallow fistfuls of painkillers to stay lucid. In my delirium, I see the twin lights of the moon and the aerial, shining to me through the rocks."

	So this is a really good example of those collapsing symbols…

riverd

"In my final dream, I sat at peace with Jakobson and watched the moon over the Sandford junction, goats grazing on the hard shoulder, a world gone to weed and redemption. He showed me his fever scars, and I mine, between each shoulder the nascency of flight."

	The visual image here is that the “fever scars” are actually the stumps of wings “between each shoulder” – so the “nascency of flight” means the growing potential for it – which foreshadows the narrator ‘turning into a gull’ at the climax of the game.

chimneya

"When I was coming round from the operation, I remember the light they shone in my eyes to check for pupil contraction. It was like staring up at a moonlit sky from the bottom of a well. People moved at the summit but I could not tell if you were one of them."

chimneyb

"This cannot be the shaft they threw the goats into. It cannot be the landfill where the parts of your life that would not burn ended up. It cannot be the chimney that delivered you to the skies. It cannot be the place where you rained back down again to fertilise the soil and make small flowers in the rocks."

chimneyc

"I will hold the hand you offer to me; from the summit down to this well, into the dark waters where the small flowers creep for the sun. Headlights are reflected in your retinas, moonlit in the shadow of the crematorium chimney."

chimneyd

"This is a drowned man’s face reflected in the moonlit waters. It can only be a dead shepherd who has come to drunk drive you home."

emergencea

"The moon over the Sandford junction, headlights in your retinas. Donnelly drove a grey hatchback without a bottom, all the creatures of the tarmac rose to sing to him. All manner of symbols crudely scrawled across the cliff face of my unrest. My life reduced to an electrical diagram. All my gulls have taken flight; they will no longer roost on these outcrops. The lure of the moon over the Sandford junction is too strong."

	“hatchback” presumably translates but just in case (!) – it’s a type of car where the boot lifts open (i.e. a 5 door saloon). “unrest” is a made up word, but should be fairly obvious.

emergenceb

"I sat here and watched two jets carve parallel white lines into the sky. They charted their course and I followed them for twenty-one minutes until they turned off near Sandford and were lost. If I were a gull, I would abandon my nest and join them. I would starve my brain of oxygen and suffer delusions of transcendence. I would tear the bottom from my boat and sail across the motorways until I reached this island once again."

emergencec

"I wish I could have know Donnelly in this place – we would have had so much to debate. Did he paint these stones, or did I? Who left the pots in the hut by the jetty? Who formed the museum under the sea? Who fell silently to his death, into the frozen waters? Who erected this godforsaken aerial in the first place? Did this whole island rise to the surface of my stomach, forcing the gulls to take flight?"

	There’s a bit of an odd sense of who the narrator is talking to at this point. I think it’s best to assume the questions are aimed outwards, they are not introspective. The voice-over is quite angry, it’s not like the narrator is searching for answers within themselves, but barking out questions at someone else.

rocksa

"Of fire and soil, I chose fire. It seemed the more contemporary of the options, the more sanitary. I could not bear the thought of the reassembly of such a ruins. Stitching arm to shoulder and femur to hip, charting a line of thread like traffic stilled on a motorway. Making it all acceptable for tearful aunts and traumatised uncles flown in specially for the occasion. Reduce to ash, mix with water, make a phosphorescent paint for these rocks and ceilings."

rocksb

"We shall begin to assemble our own version of the north shore. We will scrawl in dead languages and electrical diagrams and hide them away for future theologians to muse and mumble over. We will send a letter to Esther Donnelly and demand her answer. We will mix the paint with ashes and tarmac and the glow from our infections. We paint a moon over the Sandford junction and blue lights falling like stars along the hard shoulder."

rocksc

"I returned home with a pocket full of stolen ash. Half of it fell out of my coat and vanished into the car’s upholstery. But the rest I carefully stowed away in a box I kept in a drawer by the side of my bed. It was never intended as a meaningful act but over the years it became a kind of talisman. I’d sit still, quite still, for hours just holding the diminishing powder in my palm and noting its smoothness. In time, we will all be worn down into granules, washed into the sea and dispersed"

	The intimation here is that the stolen ash is actually Esther, left over from the cremation. So not only is thing something of a slightly crazy thing to do (carry your dead partner’s ashes around in your pocket to get them home) but it also raises the question of why they would need to be stolen in the first place? Why couldn’t he just take the ashes? Is it because he wasn’t actually welcome there? Was it because he is blamed – or even responsible for the crash?

rocksd

"Dear Esther. I find each step harder and heavier. I drag Donnelly’s corpse on my back across these rocks, and all I hear are his whispers of guilt, his reminders, his burnt letters, his neatly folded clothes. He tells me I was not drunk at all."

	This is completely literal – the narrators actually thinks he is giving a talking corpse a piggy-back around the island.

lostbeach

"From here I can see my armada. I collected all the letters I’d ever meant to send to you, if I’d have ever made it to the mainland but had instead collected at the bottom of my rucksack, and I spread them out along the lost beach. Then I took each and every one and I folded them into boats. I folded you into the creases and then, as the sun was setting, I set the fleet to sail. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned you to the Atlantic, and I sat here until I’d watched all of you sink"

paul2a

"There were chemical diagrams on the mug he gave me coffee in; sticky at the handle where his hands shook. He worked for a pharmaceutical company with an office based on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. He’d been travelling back from a sales conference in Exeter: forming a strategic vision for the pedaling of antacid yoghurt to the European market. You could trace the connections with your finger, join the dots and whole new compounds would be summoned into activity."

	“pedaling” i.e. selling, but with a negative connotation – selling shit to people they neither want nor need. “compounds” – chemical compounds.

paul2b

"There were chemical diagrams on the posters on the walls on the waiting room. It seemed appropriate at the time; still-life abstractions of the processes which had already begun to break down your nerves and your muscles in the next room. I cram diazepam as I once crammed for chemistry examinations. I am revising my options for a long and happy life."

	“I cram diazepam” – play on words between consuming large quantities of drugs with consuming large quantities of information. “Cramming” for exams has a negative connotation of being panicked and slightly out of control. This then connects to “revising my options”, where revision for exams means less ‘thinking about changing’ than ‘practising what I know” – so there’s a double-meaning there.

paul2c

"There were chemical stains on the tarmac: the leak of air conditioning, brake fluid and petrol. He kept sniffing at his fingers as he sat by the roadside waiting as if he couldn’t quite understand or recognise their smell. He said he’d been travelling back from a sales conference in Exeter; he’d stopped for farewell drinks earlier, but had kept a careful eye on his intake. You could hear the sirens above the idling traffic."

	“intake” – normally used to mean part of  jet engine, it’s a bit clumsy, so as long as we’re getting the meaning of ‘he said he’d been careful about how much he’d drunk’. This middle sentence “he said he’d been travelling…” seems to come from a different time – the narrator is mixing up the aftermath of the crash with the conversation he had with Paul at his house (in the cue “Paul”)

paul2d

"Paul, by the roadside, by the exit for Damascus, all ticking and cooled, all feathers and remorse, all of these signals routed like traffic through the circuit diagrams of our guts, those badly written boats torn bottomless in the swells, washing us forever ashore."

northpatha

"When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they resuscitated him by hitting him in the chest with stones gathered by the roadside. He was lifeless for twenty-one minutes, certainly long enough for the oxygen levels in his brain to have decreased and caused hallucinations and delusions of transcendence. I am running out of painkillers and the moon has become almost unbearably bright."

	Should make sense – it’s important though that even if they were “delusions”, the idea of “transcendence “ and it’s religious meaning is clear, as some of the final cues suggest it wasn’t actually a drunk-driving accident at all, but a kind of fit or vision.

northpathb

"The pain in my leg sent me blind for a few minutes as I struggled up the cliff path: I swallowed another handful of painkillers and now I feel almost lucid. The island around me has retreated to a hazed distance, whilst the moon appears to have descended into my palm to guide me. I can see a thick black line of infection reaching for my heart from the waistband of my trousers. Through the fugue, it is all the world like the path I have cut from the lowlands towards the aerial."

northpathc

"I will drag my leg behind me; I will drag it like a crumpled hatchback, tyres blown and sparking across the dimming lights of my vision. I am running out of painkillers and am following the flicker of the moon home. When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they restarted his heart with the jump leads from a crumpled hatchback; it took twenty-one attempts to convince it to wake up."

	“jump leads” – again, just in case the translation is isn’t clear – those cables with big clips on the end you use to start a dead car battery from a running car.

northpathd

"A sound of torn metal, teeth running over the edge of the rocks, a moon that casts a signal. As I lay pinned beside you, the ticking of the cooling engine, and the calling from a great height, all my mind as a bypass."

overlook

"I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I have been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together."

channel

"If only Donnelly had experienced this, he would have realised he was his own shoreline, as am I. Just as I am becoming this island, so he became his syphilis, retreating into the burning synapses, the stones, the infection."

ascent1a

"Returning to my car afterwards, hands still shaking and a head split open by the impact. Goodbye to tearful aunts and traumatised uncles, goodbye to the phenomenal, goodbye to the tangible, goodbye Wolverhampton, goodbye Sandford, goodbye Cromer, goodbye Damascus. This cliff path is slippery in the dew; it is hard to climb with such an infection. I must carve out the bad flesh and sling it from the aerial. I must become infused with the very air."

ascent1b

"There are headlights reflected in these retinas, too long in the tunnels of my island without a bottom. The sea creatures have risen to the surface, but the gulls are not here to carry them back to their nests. I have become fixed: open and staring, an eye turned on itself. I have become an infected leg, whose tracking lines form a perfect map of the junctions of the M5. I will take the exit at mid-thigh and plummet to my Esther."

ascent1c

"The stones in my stomach will weigh me down and ensure my descent is true and straight. I will break through the fog of these godforsaken pills and achieve clarity. All my functions are clogged, all my veins are choked. If my leg doesn’t rot off before I reach the summit, it will be a miracle. There are twenty-one connections in the circuit diagram of the anti-lock brakes, there are twenty-one species of gull inhabiting these islands , it is twenty-one miles between the Sandford junction and the turn off for home. All these things cannot, will not, be a co-incidence."

ascent1d

"Bent back like a nail, like a hangnail, like a drowning man clung onto the wheel, drunk and spiraled, washed onto the lost shore under a moon as fractured as a shattered wing. We cleave, we are flight and suspended, these wretched painkillers, this form inconstant. I will take flight."

	Really important that it’s “we *are* flight” not “we *take* flight”, but “*take* flight” in the last sentence.

ascent2a

"He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all. He had not drunk with Donnelly or spat Jacobson back at the sea; he had not careered across the lost shores and terminal beaches of this nascent archipelago. He did not intend his bonnet to be crumpled like a spent tissue by the impact. His windscreen was not star-studded all over like a map of the heavens. His paintwork etched with circuit diagrams, strange fish to call the gulls away. The phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the M5 all the way from Exeter to Damascus."

	So in this version, there’s a sense that actually it was just an accident, and not Paul’s fault.

ascent2b

"Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped on the road to Damascus, Paul, sat at the roadside hunched up like a gull, like a bloody gull. As useless and as doomed as a syphilitic cartographer, a dying goatherd, an infected leg, a kidney stone blocking the traffic bound for Sandford and Exeter. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all; all his roads and his tunnels and his paths led inevitably to this moment of impact. This is not a recorded natural condition: he should not be sat there with his chemicals and his circuit diagrams, he should not be sat there at all."

	Whereas here, it was, but the narrator says it was fate, rather than his own controlled doing. In both, he seems to be absolving Paul of the guilt – which is interesting if the player has unlocked cues suggesting that actually the narrator and Paul are the same person.

ascent2c

"I have dredged these waters for the bones of the hermit, for the traces of Donnelly, for any sign of Jacobson’s flock, for the empty bottle that would incriminate him. I have scoured this stretch of motorway twenty-one times attempting to recreate his trajectory, the point when his heart stopped dead and all he saw was the moon over the Sandford junction. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all, and it was not his fault, it was the converging lines that doomed him. This is not a recorded natural condition, the gulls do not fly so low over the motorway and cause him to swerve. The paint scored away from his car in lines, like an infection, making directly for the heart."

	And here, a suggestion that a gull crashed into Paul’s windscreen, causing him have a heart attack and to lose control and crash… The last sentence equates the white lines of the island with paint scratched away on the car, and then with the line of blood poisoning on the narrator’s own body that is killing him.

ascent2d

"A gull perched on a spent bonnet, sideways, whilst the sirens fell through the middle distance and the metal moaned in grief about us. I am about this night in walking, old bread and gull bones, old Donnelly at the bar gripping his drink, old Esther walking with our children, old Paul, as ever, old Paul he shakes and he shivers and he turns off his lights alone."

	This is really odd phrasing again, and the only time we really get a sense of all the separate characters in one place. But they are all wrong: Esther dies before she gets old, Donnelly is a historical character and seems to be equated with Paul, and then we have this picture of Paul, wracked with guilt at the end. The idea is to throw the player once more – to question whether Donnelly’s book is real, or whether the narrator is using a person he met, or is (Donnelly has a drug addiction, Paul is an alcoholic) in his fantasy.

summita

"I have run out of places to climb. I will abandon this body and take to the air."

summitb

"We will leave twin vapour trails in the air, white lines etched into these rocks."

summitc

"I am the aerial. In my passing, I will send news to each and every star."

ascension

"Dear Esther. I have burnt my belongings, my books, this death certificate. Mine will be written all across this island. Who was Jacobson, who remembers him? Donnelly has written of him, but who was Donnelly, who remembers him? I have painted, carved, hewn, scored into this space all that I could draw from him. There will be another to these shores to remember me. I will rise from the ocean like an island without bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon that they will not forget you. We have always been drawn here: one day the gulls will return and nest in our bones and our history. I will look to my left and see Esther Donnelly, flying beside me. I will look to my right and see Paul Jacobson, flying beside me. They will leave white lines carved into the air to reach the mainland, where help will be sent."

ascension2

"Dear Esther. I have burned the cliffs of Damascus, I have drunk deep of it. My heart is my leg and a black line etched on the paper all along this boat without a bottom. You are all the world like a nest to me, in which eggs unbroken form like fossils, come together, shatter and send small black flowers to the very air. From this infection, hope. From this island, flight. From this grief, love."