Burning Down George Orwell's House, page 8
“No she didn’t.”
“I’m serious.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you’re gay.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I did, actually, and I got us some whiskies.”
As if summoned, Lily returned with two glasses of scotch.
“I’m not gay,” Ray said.
“Excuse me?”
“Bud said he told you I was gay.”
“He said you were in the middle of a ‘marital schism.’ Is that what you called it? He also said that your wife is about to divorce your mopey ass. Your being gay is news to me. Not that I have any problem with that. Enjoy your whiskies—they’re on me.”
“I’d like to be on her,” Bud said.
Before it occurred to him that perhaps he shouldn’t be drinking hard alcohol in the middle of the day, Ray took a long sip. It tasted like a generic highland, ten or twelve years old. He fished a few ice cubes from a rocks glass and dropped them into his whisky with a tiny splash.
The bar filled up as the game progressed. The sports-star millionaires representing Chicago were in the process of losing to those representing Detroit. When Ray was a kid, the heated Detroit versus Chicago rivalry had reached epic proportions in his imagination. The gruesome fascination he once had for the hockey fights was now derived from the commercial interruptions. Those thirty-second spots were relics of a previous era, a halcyon time when the advertisements remained separate from the entertainment. Now, there were ads painted onto the ice and superimposed over the action on the screen.
The programs were the commercials. The programs had always been the commercials.
“Give me one of those napkins,” Ray said. He took a pen from the bar and tried to calculate the number of barrels of crude oil he was personally responsible for converting into greenhouse gases. He couldn’t do it. The mathematics were beyond him. He drank some more scotch that he did or didn’t order and then woke up the next morning on a bed with no sheets.
The smell of re-reheated coffee arose from a machine programmed to begin brewing at six A.M. and it roused him from another disturbing dream. Action movies of his own subconscious invention still flickered on his mind. Details gelled into focus. A foreign army had occupied his hometown. Some faceless regiment had appeared by rail in steaming sixty-foot-tall locomotive behemoths as streamlined and fearsome as the Italian futurists’ protofascist visions. The entire town had been conquered, the women raped and children forced into slavery. Smoke rose from what had been the church he had attended as a kid and where he and Helen got married.
His dreams were getting worse. The late-night alcohol wasn’t helping, but neither was its occasional absence. A full month of sleep: that was what he needed. A self-induced coma free from his own imagination.
His eardrums pounded hard enough to drive a galley of rowing, half-naked slaves over the horizon of the flat earth. He spent an hour adrift, clinging to the bare mattress for dear life while the coffee burned again.
III.
He woke up around dawn, or he thought he did. From inside a cloudbank it was impossible to guess the time of day. It felt like early morning, but it was just as likely four in the afternoon. Maybe it didn’t matter. Ray had no need to go anywhere or do anything and so spent his first morning at Barnhill in bed. The house creaked and moaned around him. Waves of rain splashed against the windows. He fell back to sleep for another hour. His thoughts turned again to that putrefying animal on his doorstep. He pictured it starting to move and squirm back to life. At some point, he pulled himself out of the dirty sheets and padded downstairs. The curtains were open, but the house remained dark. He balled up some newspaper, got a fire going again, and put a pan of tap water on top of the stove.
He filled a big stew pot with water at the kitchen sink and put it on the fireplace. It would take a while. In the meantime, he went upstairs and turned the bathtub faucets all the way on. If he could carry the boiling water from the sitting room to the bathroom fast enough, he might be able to get a decent bath. He slugged back a dram of scotch while the water boiled. Then he drank another one and carried the pot upstairs. The bath was hot enough to set his blisters blazing, but it felt so good to scrape off some of the dry earth.
The rest of the morning or afternoon or whatever was spent drinking whisky and staring out the windows. That woman who had given him a ride on Islay was right: he didn’t need his wristwatch anymore. Time operated differently on the Hebrides. It didn’t matter what time it was. Every so often the wind would push the clouds aside long enough to offer a view of the sheep that grazed around the house and were impervious to the weather. It felt so … so … right to not be at work. Ray could picture the flocks of businessmen and bicycle messengers and nannies back in Chicago racing in straight lines in adherence to the tight ant-farm grid of those claustrophobic city blocks and reporting their precise whereabouts every five minutes to concentric circles of online friends they had never met. He was free of it now. He had sold his truck and everything else he owned—furniture, flat-screen, turntable, everything. What he couldn’t sell, he donated. What he couldn’t donate, he hurled into the dumpster behind the dry cleaner’s. His smartphone was at that moment leaking persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals into Lake Michigan.
A shelf in the kitchen contained a row of guidebooks, histories, pamphlets, and a detailed survey map of Jura. The island looked to be about five miles wide and was shaped like a long, skinny oval of volcanic rock that had been bitten nearly in half by Loch Tarbert, the gaping mouth of which opened into the sound over on the Islay/Colonsay side. A previous tenant had circled Barnhill, but he couldn’t reconcile that name on the map with his presence here. It was too good to believe. All Ray wanted to do was curl up under a blanket and read Nineteen Eighty-Four yet again, here at the source, to see what new insights revealed themselves. He wanted to think. He wanted to do nothing at all. Other than that, his only goal was to see every square foot of Jura, to find the remaining wild goats and catch a lobster to eat. He wanted to drink gallons of scotch and climb the Paps. He would get to all of it soon, but first he needed to unpack before it got dark.
He placed his water-damaged books on a bedroom shelf and pulled a chair up to a window. The mist obscured the view of the sound and mainland and he couldn’t see any farther than the garden. He was so happy to find his copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four intact.
Ray checked the bolts on the front and back doors and fixed a bite to eat while he could see. He was still acclimating to life without electricity or gas. It was a hassle, but that was the whole point. He dropped some more peat bricks onto the fire and put a pot on the stove to warm a can of soup. It all felt so primitive—and that was wonderful and intimidating at the same time, but if bony and wheezy old Orwell could live this way so could he.
Over the next few days, Ray managed to convince himself that he was staying out of the rain in order to avoid some nascent flu symptoms creeping into his musculature. That he was simply collecting his wits after the awful events of the past few weeks and months. In reality, however, or in what passed for reality, he was scared shitless. He heard noises from the attic crawl space, the chimney, from the bushes surrounding the house. The floorboards groaned upstairs. Wind growled at him through the windows. Pacing-the-floorboards boredom became preferable to venturing outside and confronting the dead animal at the door, which in his imagination had grown to the size of the red deer that sailed past the kitchen windows. He tried not to think about what had left it there.
The weather was so dismal that he ended up spending his entire first week on Jura holed up indoors and drinking as much whisky as he could pour down his gullet. He did some reading now and then, but was distracted by the blank wall of fog and mist out the window. His attention span had shrunk so much that he couldn’t make it through more than a page or two of Orwell at a time. Unable to focus on anything for more than a few minutes, he grew restless. Even out in the middle of nowhere he felt trapped and hemmed in on all sides, but he did manage to settle into a daily routine.
Every morning, he gathered old newspapers and peat bricks and built a fire to warm a pan of water up for some instant coffee. Then he would spend several hours upstairs in his reading chair, from which he could watch the rain and allow the day’s hangover to withdraw. He stopped shaving because heating the water was such a pain. Sometimes he would attempt to get through a few pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four or some selections of Orwell’s collected letters or the tedious Diaries where he had recorded the minutiae of his farming and gardening, the amount of oil he used every day. None of it offered any insight into Winston Smith or Nineteen Eighty-Four.
When, around midday, he finished reading or not reading, Ray would head downstairs to scavenge some organic cookies or, if he was feeling ambitious, a canned good. The days were long. Before the sun could set—not that he ever saw the sun—he arranged some candles and a bottle of scotch so that he could find them in the dark. He longed for a hike, but the rain wouldn’t let up. In the evenings, he sat next to the fire and drank whisky again until sleep tugged him down into the cushions. He had neglected to bring pornography. During those late hours, drunk enough to make turning back impossible, his thoughts again began to grow dark and more sinister.
As long as Ray could remember, since he was a little kid running amok in the endless rows of corn, his mind had contained partitioned rooms he knew not to enter; in them were countless self-perceptions better left un-thought about and which generated moods that later in life—particularly after his career at Logos took off—his personal safety required him to avoid. But left by himself for days on end, half-dozing next to a dying fire, with the large amounts of whisky unable to fight off the constant din of the rain, he couldn’t help himself from picking open those locks and peering inside.
He thought a lot about his sister Becky, who had taken on the responsibility of caring for their mother. She had it so easy, what with her unquestioned acceptance of the status quo. Becky worked forty hours a week, believed in the literal divinity of Jesus Christ, and took pleasure in the hilarity of network television sitcoms. Unlike his father, Ray didn’t care about the failures of a professional sports team or need to insist upon the innate superiority of one soft-drink brand over another. He wished it were otherwise.
Left to his own brooding for too long, Ray came to recognize that nothing in the entire goddamn world meant what it was supposed to. He had just walked away from a high-paying job in order to hide out in a damp house in Scotland. Maybe that was another big fucking mistake. He had been so stupid, but part of him—a big part—no longer cared. Nothing mattered any longer, not really, except for the fact that each gulp of single malt scotch tasted even sweeter than the previous and that remained true down to the very bottom of each bottle.
Every two or three days Ray opened the front door and found another unidentifiable animal carcass on the mudroom stoop. His sightseeing expeditions extended to the edge of the garden, where he hurled the bodies into the bushes with a shovel. Otherwise he stayed indoors. He grew bored and claustrophobic, but some creature was lurking out there waiting for him. His interaction with the locals consisted of peeking out the window when he heard their 4x4s driving past Barnhill. He came to recognize the sounds of five different vehicles that made their way from the Kinuachdrachd settlement down to Craighouse and back again.
Sometimes Ray couldn’t remember why he had come to Jura and other times he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The scotch pooled into a murky, aqueous sense of depression that ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed. Some days were better than others. Some days were not.
He was attempting to read the memoir of one of Orwell’s contemporaries by the last evening light of the kitchen windows when a scraping noise came from the front door. He remained still, but the words “Loneliness began for me now fierce, desperate, taking on an importance out of all proportion to its quality which was that of a boy in his ’teens who” shook in his hands. There came another sound, and it grew louder. He put the book down.
Something rustled in the bushes outside the kitchen, then a monstrous face appeared in the window: an animal covered in mangy wet fur. It looked at Ray with knowing eyes that in a single glance interrogated him and his intrusive presence in this remote place, trapped in an old farmhouse a mile from the closest neighbors. The creature growled as if to speak and Ray screamed, but the hideous face still stared at him, its eyes shining with some fierce purpose, its crooked teeth glistening sharply from amid the soiled fur, until its so-nearly-human expression changed. In some savage and instinctual way, the thing appeared as startled as he was. It motioned as if to communicate with him through the windowpane: “Is everything okay, Ray?” it asked.
“Farkas? You scared the shit out of me.”
“Not literally, I hope. Would you mind letting me in?”
Ray unbolted the front door, where Farkas stood dripping wet. “Come in, come in,” he said. “You’re absolutely soaked.”
“Only on the outside, Ray,” Farkas said. “Only on the outside.” He sat on the mudroom bench and removed his wellingtons. “I could however use a wee dram if you have some on board.”
“I have a bottle I’ve been saving for a special occasion, in fact. You go sit by the fire.”
Farkas pulled a chair up. “I’m terribly sorry to frighten you like that,” he said. “And I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time, as I don’t mean to interrupt what you’re doing up here … what are you doing up here? I would’ve telephoned, but that wasn’t really an option, now was it?”
Ray dragged another chair next to Farkas’s. “I’m grateful for the company. I think I’m going a little stir crazy, in fact. Solitude is a lot less restorative than I thought. It turns out that life off the grid actually kind of sucks.”
“You’re not the first man to discover that for himself,” Farkas said. His voice carried a baritone roundness that in a different life might have lent itself to the opera. He lifted the glass to his nose, which was barely visible through his dense mask of mustache, beard, and eyebrow. “Nor I imagine will you be the last. This would be the eighteen-year-old, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You can tell that just from the smell? Slàinte,” Ray said. It was without question the most complex and delectable whisky that had ever crossed his tongue. It tasted the way living on Jura felt, like his humanity could reach a greater richness simply by living in such a rough and untamed land. “You certainly know your whisky. I forgot the water—I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t bother, don’t bother. I can drink water at home. And I believe that I’ve had close to enough of the stuff for one day, and, in any account, malt this good deserves to be taken neat.”
“I didn’t hear a vehicle pull up—did you walk all the way up here?”
“Sometimes I forget how big this little island truly is. I left my car at the public road and walked the last five miles. That path has destroyed sturdier cars than my own.”
“I believe it. But that’s still quite a walk. I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder what Orwell was thinking coming all the way up here. It must have been even more remote back then.”
“The whole world’s shrinking, Ray, at least in one sense, and that’s the truth. As I’ve heard it, however, our Blair didn’t get on very well with the locals. He was liked, as they say, but not well liked. There wasn’t much use on Jura back then for socialist intellectuals,” he said.
“And now?”
“Funny that you mention it. You did manage to upset Gavin. Don’t let it worry you, though. It’s not entirely your fault. He may be holding you to blame for some past crimes. There are some old stories—and the details are murky—there are old stories that suggest our Mr. Blair got himself into some hot water while here on Jura. Gavin swears that Blair was responsible for some unpardonable offense against his mother.”
“Pitcairn’s mother?”
“The very same. Blair was unwell even before he arrived. He suffered from tuberculosis where our climate, as perhaps you’ve noticed, can lean towards the damp. It must have been quite difficult for him, though they say he often took to sleeping outside in an army tent. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that the man needed someone to look after him. He was incapable of preparing himself a simple cup of tea, so he certainly needed someone to do his cooking and washing up.”
“Let me guess. Pitcairn’s mother?”
“Aye, Beatrice Pitcairn herself. A saint of a woman, bless her soul. Blair proposed marriage and, ever the practical Englishman, even offered her a considerable dowry in the form of his estate and future royalties to what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four. Unfortunately, however, he neglected to take into consideration the fact that she was already married quite happily. Our little Gavin was at that point still little more than a gleam in her eye, yet now he has come to believe that—like our Eric Blair—you’re here to split up his family.”
“But that’s absolutely—”
“Hear me out now,” Farkas said. “He knows that Molly plans to leave Jura at her first opportunity and he’s none too chuffed about that fact. He believes that exposure to the likes of you and your so-called intellectual ideas is going to hasten her departure.”
“I came here to get away from people. Please explain it to him—I don’t want to split up anyone’s family.”
“I know that, Ray. Can I trouble you?” he asked, holding aloft his empty glass.
“Sure,” Ray said. “One sec.”
The sky had darkened even further. His reflection stared back at him from the same kitchen window in which Farkas had appeared, and Ray yelped again.
He brought the whole bottle. Farkas was adding some peat bricks to the fire and stoking the ashes. The sitting room grew ten degrees warmer. “Now you can’t take anything Gavin says personally, Ray. He doesn’t care for much of anybody other than himself, but he upholds a special variety of loathing for outsiders—especially the tourists. And although I was born here, he still sees fit to consider me an outsider too, but I do try to get along with him. I can’t imagine what you said to the man, but I’ve never seen him so wound up, and you can trust me when I say that I’ve seen that man well wound up. You should have heard him the time Molly announced she was going off to art school.”
