Burning Down George Orwell's House, page 10
“Well that is peculiar, isn’t it?”
“I talked to Farkas about it.”
“He wants you to believe he’s a werewolf, I suppose?”
“It’s the fact that he believes it that interests me.”
“He’s mad, of course,” Miriam said, “but there’s little accounting for the beliefs of others.” She lifted the spool again and waited for him to do the same. They arrived at the far end and spun the line around the post a few times at the spot she had marked, a few inches off the ground, then continued along the final open side of the enclosure. When they got to the last post, she cut the wire and the end jumped, biting into her sweater. “Almost got me that time,” she said. She pulled a hammer from her waistband and used the claw side to pull in the slack, wrapped the loose end around the pole, and then twisted the end around the wire she had already connected. “There’s another one down. If you won’t take a cup, how about a wee dram?”
That was not something Ray was about to refuse. “I would love that,” he said. “Then we’ll finish this off.”
The notches on the wooden pole and the two completed sections indicated that they had four more lines to run. It would be an all-day job, and the rain showed no signs of letting up. The dog watched them go into the house.
Pelts and furs and unidentifiable animal skulls decorated the walls and covered the chairs and sofa. A chandelier made from deer antlers hung from the low ceiling. The smell of simmering stew wafted from the kitchen, where Miriam went and then returned with a tray on which she balanced a plate of scones, a bottle of the local whisky, and two empty jelly jars. “Oh do sit down,” she said. She poured two large drams. “Welcome to the Isle of Jura,” she said.
“Slàinte,” Ray said.
“Well, well,” she said. She sounded impressed. “Slàinte.” She took a long drink and he did the same. It tasted like French kissing a leather-clad supermodel, and felt like someone had turned the thermometer in his stomach back up to a reasonable temperature. He couldn’t get a good look at the bottle. “If you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Welter, I—”
“Please call me Ray.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, Ray, what fair wind has cast you upon our humble shore?”
“Excuse me?
“What in the name of our Heavenly Father are you doing on Jura?”
“You’re the third person to ask me that and I’m still not sure I have a good answer. I guess I needed to get away from civilization and think.”
She laughed a little bit. “You guess? It’s quite a drastic step to take based upon a guess. You may find yet that we Diurachs are quite civilized,” she said. “Most of us are, at any rate, our Mr. Pitcairn respectfully excluded.”
“No, I don’t mean it that way. Back in Chicago I felt like Big Brother had come true, and that if I didn’t get away from it I was going to lose my mind. I guess … I mean, I’m trying to figure out how to live my life in a way that doesn’t adversely affect others.” He gulped down some more scotch. “I always wondered why Orwell went to the least populated place he could find in order to write about living with an omnipresent government that watches our every move. It seems like a contradiction.”
“Yet it’s difficult to argue with his results, is it not? One thing you’ll need to know is that there was no George Orwell here.”
“What do you mean?”
“My auntie knew him quite well, and he visited this very house on many occasions, but he was always Eric Blair on Jura. No one called him George Orwell. It seems a bit daft that a man who took so many others to task for the slightest offense to his rigid sense of British integrity would spend his career hiding behind a pseudonym.”
“I never thought of it like that.” Ray finished his scotch and felt like a better person because of it.
“Why would you? There was none of that here, I’ll tell you: no, he was Eric Blair and when people such as yourself begin poking around looking for George Orwell, I tell them there was no one here by that name.”
“Do you know what I’d like to do?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to finish that fence. I feel like I’ve spent the past decade trapped indoors and now I’m dying to be outside. Thank you so much for the whisky.”
“Well take a scone with you,” Miriam said. She pulled her gloves on again and they got back to work. The rain felt pretty good, actually. “Like this—now pull this bit along, that’s it,” she said, and showed him how to better manage the unspooling line with his free hand. “You need to remember to give yourself enough slack to work with, but too much and you’ll soon find yourself entangled and bleeding.”
Ray stopped. That was so true—she was right.
“That’s very well put,” he said. Over the past few years, had he given himself too much slack or not enough? It was something he would have to think more about.
“I once heard someone say that on the radio.”
“To answer your question, what I want to do is leave the earth a slightly better place when I die. In the meantime, I want to be able to sleep at night. That’s all. If I can’t do that here, away from the world, it may never happen.”
“Your problem is, and I hope that you don’t mind me saying so, is that our little isle is just as much a part of the world as London or Paris or your Chicago, maybe more so because—and Mr. Pitcairn is right about this point—although we may be remote, and that’s by choice, particularly up here in Kinuachdrachd, God bless us, we still like being connected on our own terms.”
“And what terms are those?”
“It’s true that God’s green earth provides us with but one path to Craighouse and beyond, but I might ask you to consider other avenues. The seas also contain roads, there are paths over the water and even highways that sailors have traveled for millennia. If Jura is indeed remote, and I’m not so sure that it is, that’s only because the relatively recent invention of the automobile has made us forget our traditional travel routes, and that’s the only thing keeping us at arm’s length from what you call civilization. You seem like a decent young man, Ray. Troubled, to be sure, and I do hope you find whatever it is you’ve come looking for, but you don’t yet seem to see the full grace and glory of the world that exists before your eyes.”
“Maybe not,” he said.
Finishing the pen took the rest of the afternoon, until the setting sun turned the westerly sky a pinkish shade of grey. The breeze picked up and the birds in the trees and shrubs sang their plaintive goodnights. Ray’s body still thought it was on Central Time and it should be the early afternoon. He stifled a yawn. “It has been very nice to meet you, Miriam, but I suppose I’ll be heading back.”
“Can I tempt you with one more wee dram?”
“No thanks, I can’t keep my eyes open as it is.”
“Suit yourself. I suppose I’ll be seeing you around now that we’re neighbors.” She whistled for the dog and let her into the new pen, where she would be safe from the wolf or Farkas or whatever it was that wanted to slice her open and eat her for a late-night snack. Speaking of which—Ray needed to hurry home. What little brightness the clouds contained had all but faded and it wasn’t like there were streetlights to guide him back.
He found the path and oriented himself southward before the utter darkness took over. He saw no moonlight, no stars, no boats lit up on the water. He quickened his pace. The wind made noises in the trees. Every wave crashing onto the shore sounded like the breath of the monster out here with him. Ray took off running. He ran all the way to Barnhill and groped his way around the exterior of the house to the front door, and got into the mudroom without being mauled. His heartbeat throbbed in his neck. A knot of pain filled the center of his chest. He didn’t have the energy to start a fire and warm up some much-needed bathwater, and he began to snore before he flopped onto the bed.
THE NEXT MORNING, RAY picked up the Diaries again and read three pages without absorbing a single goddamn thing. The letters had aligned themselves into words and the words into sentences and paragraphs, but none of them made any sense. It might as well have been in another language. Orwell had written something about shooting rabbits and skinning them. He had liked eggs. Ray put the book down and looked out the window. Nothing had changed. Swirling shapes presented themselves in the mist and then went away. The drizzle spoke to him of mathematical and spiritual concepts. At that moment, he came to understand what infinity was.
Pouring a glass of whisky felt less like the right thing to do and more like the only thing to do. What remained of his supply stood sentry on the kitchen counter. Seven bottles, two of which were still sealed. The five open bottles contained various amounts of liquid, so he pulled the corks from all of them, practiced his embouchure with some kissy faces in the window, then whistled a jug-band rendition of the Ode to Joy over the necks of the bottles. When a note didn’t sound right, he chugged that scotch—a twelve-year old, a twenty-one—until it did. Freude, schöner Götterfunken my ass, he thought.
His boredom had morphed from a meditative state to an emotional liability. He belched up a cloud of single-malt scotch, ate a few crackers from a tin, and put some clothes on. Ray needed to get out of the house again before he hurt himself. The blue jeans and sweater felt cumbersome after so much time spent in sweatpants. He no longer wondered if it was raining or not—the rain was a constant, a given. It wasn’t even rain any longer, but something immutable and permanent. Something inestimable. The atmosphere of the Inner Hebrides was made not for him but for the sheep and colorful lichens that sprouted from every surface.
The plan for the day was to walk to the source of Loch Tarbert, about halfway down the length of the island. From the map, hiking there looked doable in a few hours. Every place was in walking distance if one had enough time.
He left without locking the door, went a mile, maybe two, before he couldn’t ignore the pain in his feet any longer. His boots proved to be useless. No, they were worse than useless—they were harmful. The extent of their utility was to cause pain. After so many miles the leather remained as stiff and unforgiving as the day he bought them. Every step sent waves of battery acid splashing into the blisters on his heels and soles. Each puddle he stepped in—and the path was nothing if not one long puddle—found its way to his bloody socks. He tried to distract himself from the pain tingling up to his knees, to enjoy the scenery and the fresh air, but there were several agonizing miles to go before he reached the road.
He stopped to watch a fleet of dolphins skipping across the surface of the sound. There were said to be seals nearby too, and puffins over on the far side of Islay. He would need to find a better way to get around. All this walking sucked, but he kept going. The blisters felt like hateful marshmallows stuck in his socks. The pain became disorienting. It was inconceivable that such small wounds could inflict so much suffering. He spotted a cylindrical tower at the top of a hill—a bunker of some sort—and decided to stop there to assess the state of his feet. Even the slight incline caused his Achilles heels to rub harder against the backs of the boots. Up close, the structure resembled a standing stone made of concrete, manmade but more monolithic than Neolithic. It could have been an elaborate marker for a barrow of some sort, but that seemed unlikely. The object served no purpose that he could see—it just was. He sat against it and removed his boots to squeeze the water from his socks. It wasn’t so terribly cold out; he could walk home barefoot. Whatever it took to avoid putting those boots back on. He tied the laces together to make them easier to carry.
If by some miracle the rains stopped and clouds parted, this spot would have granted a great view of the entire island, but, as usual, Ray had to imagine all that the mists concealed. To the south, Loch Tarbert divided the land in half and, beyond that, the Paps loomed over everything around them. A few long, blistered miles west toward Colonsay would put him on the seaboard. That part of Jura, north of the lake, remained uninhabited and untamed. The coastal cliffs on the western shore were said to be home to a series of caves that he wanted to explore; over the years, they had been occupied by pirates, gypsies, even bootleggers who were said to have produced Jura’s first whisky, which they shipped to prohibition-era America.
The attraction of living on a small island—which was not so small after all, as both Farkas and his own feet attested—was the belief, mistaken to be sure, that he might get to know it in its entirety, that there existed one place on the planet that he could fully understand. So far, however, he had seen so little and what he had seen made him want to see and learn more. The natural world was inexhaustible and at the moment he faced the impossible decision of where to go next. He could pick any direction, but the number of choices terrified him. Maybe there was such a thing as too much freedom. Every decision, big or small, eliminated as many possibilities as it opened up. He could go anywhere. Or he could make his way back to Barnhill and stay indoors to drink himself senseless. It was a tough call, but he preferred the disappointment and self-hatred he would feel after another solitary bender in the sitting room over the fiery ache in his feet. He had made it as far as he could and hadn’t reached the public road, much less Loch Tarbert. The water mocked him in the distance. Hiking to the Paps would be unthinkable. The day was an abject failure. His life was an abject failure. He never should have come to Jura.
The rocks and sticks jabbed at his bare feet, just as they had so long ago back on his parents’ farm. He was going to pull his boots back on when the headlights of a truck came bouncing up the path from Craighouse. If it was Pitcairn, Ray planned to ignore him. Let him drive right by. Anyone else, he would flag him down and beg—down on his knees in the mud like an animal if he had to—for a ride back to Barnhill.
Then he heard it. The sound of the vehicle was unmistakable. That roar. That 6.2 liter V8 engine that combusted petroleum by the barrel and farted climate-changing gases. It couldn’t be. The truck was still far away, but he made out a few scratches in the paint: O … I … L … H …
Ray wiped the rain and sweat from his eyes. When he looked again, the SUV had become a small 4x4 pickup that was getting thrown back and forth by the potholes and puddles. It was the little white truck he heard go past the house from time to time. The revving engine sounded seasick. It stopped and a window rolled down. The driver was a burly man in his fifties. His woolly, fisherman’s sweater matched the color and texture of his beard. “Barefoot, is it? You’ll be wanting a pair of wellies from Mrs. Bennett.”
“I had no idea my feet could hurt this much,” Ray said. “Good to meet you, I’m—”
“I know who you are. You’ll be wanting to sit in the back.”
The passenger seat was empty. The cabin looked so warm, but the driver motioned for Ray to climb into the truck bed. He walked around the side of the vehicle and saw that three inches of black mud lined the back. It squeezed between his toes. The truck started moving again and he had to crouch and hold on to the side to balance. That was when he smelled it. He was squatting in a truckload of fresh fertilizer. The morning’s scotch clawed up the back of his throat. Pig shit coated his feet and his clothes and all Ray could do was laugh. When the truck stopped at Barnhill he was still cracking up.
He hopped out and went to invite his savior in for a wee dram, if only to postpone his own boredom a few more minutes, but the man drove off without as much as a wave. Ray waited for him to get out of sight, then stripped off all his clothes and allowed the rain to wash the shit off and then shoveled the new animal corpse into the overgrowth.
It took no time at all to get a fire raging. Ray’s pyromaniacal skills had improved in a short amount of time. For the evening’s scotch he chose a lovely ten-year-old the color of blond wood that had very recently sang bass in his rendition of Beethoven. He poured a short dram and inhaled the fumes deep into his nose. If shoe polish could smell delectable, that’s what the ten-year-old smelled like. Shoe polish and salt water. The first sip felt soothing in his chest, the second in his shoulders. The afternoon faded to evening.
He was skimming through “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a typescript of which Orwell had mailed to his publisher from Jura around the time he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, when he came to an insight about his own condition. In that essay, Orwell had written about his days at boarding school, where the entire hierarchy of the English class system got distilled to its cruelest possible concentration. The American corporate world now operated in a similar manner.
The young Blair had suffered at the hands of the headmasters and his wealthy classmates, many of whom had estates in Scotland. This country had become the place where people of immense privilege came for shooting parties and to enjoy all the luxuries of upper crust British life—the kind of life that Blair was continually reminded he would never experience. Once Orwell attained some small financial success with Animal Farm he was able to obtain what had so far been out of reach. Barnhill served as his own privileged estate away from the hullabaloo of London’s postwar reconstruction, and in coming here he had achieved the social status denied him as a child. It made perfect sense.
There was a key difference, though, for Orwell. Instead of shooting pheasants and foxes while wearing a tuxedo, he wanted to work the soil with his bare hands. He didn’t have servants or host dinner parties—he planted vegetables and plowed the fields and sweated his tubercular ass off, all while continuing his literary correspondence and writing a masterpiece. He came to Jura in order to show up his classmates, even if only in his own mind, as the stuck-up snobs that they were.
The insight inspired a victory dance in the sitting room.
RAY DOZED OFF TO the sound of rain knocking at the windows. The wind eventually woke him and then punctuated eight and a half hours of eyes-wide-open insomnia before it yielded to a series of early morning dreams about every manner of natural and unnatural disaster. He half heard the sitting-room chair shaking and groaning beneath him while he recoiled from the sounds of automobile accidents, plane crashes, and crumbling skyscrapers. From the sickening crunch of metal against metal, the drip drip drop of broken sewer lines erupting into fountains of diarrheal waste. Naked bodies fueled a mile-high bonfire. He awoke disoriented and with the odors of kerosene and burning human flesh still in his nose. The room was strangely bright. It took a minute to figure out where he was. Outside, the sun shined upon Barnhill’s back garden.
