Burning Down George Orwell's House (14 page)

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.

R
AY 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.

The sun!

He opened the window to welcome the warm air in, but the smoky smell from his dream didn't dissipate. Something was on fire.

A dozen possibilities ran through his mind: he had forgotten to blow out a candle and it had ignited the spilled whisky on the counter. Or a red ember had flown up the chimney and torched the bushes outside. A milk cow had kicked over a lantern. Whatever had started it, the odor was unmistakable. He was going to be responsible for burning down George Orwell's house.

The smell of burning grease originated in the kitchen. He ran through the dining room with his socked feet sliding on the wooden floor. There were no signs yet of smoke, but the fire crackled and sizzled. Water. He needed a bucket of water. No! Not for a grease fire. For a grease fire, he needed … what? Baking soda? The odor grew stronger, more pungent. That pile of charcoaled bodies flickered again through his mind. If he didn't know better he would've sworn that it smelled exactly like—

“Coffee's on,” Molly said. She stood at the sink looking out
the window and watching the sheep amble around the sunny garden. Their bells usually relaxed Ray, but this morning they sounded like a fleet of screaming fire trucks careening through the yard. The light pounded into his eyes. “Mind you, I can't imagine how you Yanks drink this stuff.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like?” Her voice cracked the tiniest bit. “I'm making breakfast. I hope you don't mind,” she said, and turned to face him.

It was called a black eye, but her face appeared more orange and purple: a horrendous masterpiece of secondary colors. A strawberry-sized lump protruded from her forehead.

“Would you mind if I stayed here for a little while?” she asked.

“Sure, definitely. I mean—no. I don't mind.”

If he wanted to be honest with himself, Ray would have admitted that his very first thought was about the loss of his solitude. The idea of looking after an abused teenager didn't carry much appeal considering that her murderous dad would be looking for her any minute, but under no circumstances could he turn away a girl who was getting beat up at home. “Does your father know you're here?”

“You're having a laugh, right? He was out drinking all night, so I made a break for it.”

“How'd you get all the way up here?”

“On my mountain bike. I brought as much as I could carry.”

“I'm not sure this is a great idea, but you can make yourself
one hundred percent at home,” he said. “Take the room upstairs at—”

“At the end of the hall, aye. My things are already up there. You were still sleeping and, I should add, you snore like a beast. Now have some of this coffee before it gets cold. It's better than that instant shite you've been drinking, and far tastier than Fuller's. I swear he makes it that way on purpose.”

She almost smiled.

Sure enough, it was the best coffee Ray had tasted since leaving Chicago. Over his own moans of pleasure, he heard a sound like the release of springs in a metal can. Two pieces of white bread leapt from the toaster and poked their crusty heads out as if to see their shadows and determine how much longer he had to wait for a decent meal. She must have brought some food with her.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“I pushed this lever down.”

“No, how did you turn on the electricity?”

“I switched on the generator out the back, dummy.”

“There's a generator?”

“One of those silent ones at that. It's in the stables. Are you telling me you've lived in this house for a month without electricity or gas? You didn't notice the big, white propane tank outside?”

He had noticed it, sure, but it never occurred to him that it might work.

“You haven't had any hot water?”

“I heated some pots and pans up a few times in the fireplace.”

“Are you positively deranged?”

He gestured toward her face. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“About the hot water?”

“About your eye.”

She sized him up for a moment. “No, not really. Also, and I don't mean to be insensitive or in any way appear less than grateful for your hospitality, but could I trouble you to put on some trousers?”

Oh hell.

He was wearing only a pair of boxers and black dress socks with gold toes. Cold pinpricks dotted his arms and legs. At least he wasn't completely naked this time.

Ray went upstairs to put on some clean-ish jeans and a black “Oil Hogg” T-shirt. Living with a female again would take some getting used to. Wearing pants. No more pissing out back in the garden. No more drying his naked body by the fire.

Molly had breakfast ready by the time he got downstairs again: full Scottish, minus the haggis. The blazing sunlight illuminated the kitchen but also exposed a layer of grime on the counters and in the sink. He made the decision to ignore it. They sat and without delay Molly tore in to her food. Bacon, eggs, toast, tomatoes. Real coffee. She shoveled it all in with two hands. She slurped at her tea and belched into the crook of her elbow. “Have some tomato,” she said,
sending bits of egg hurtling onto his shirt. Ray could've gone on eating for days, except that she sucked up everything in sight before he could get his fill. He would need to be quicker. Crumbs stuck to her cheek and wouldn't budge even when she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, the fingers of which still grasped a triangle of toasted and buttered and jellied bread. She looked like a half-domesticated animal set loose on a feeding trough. Her gluttony was mesmerizing, yet also endearing. It was sweet in a strange and disgusting way. He envied her. She appeared so … 
healthy
.

After she finished every morsel on her plate and then on his, she leaned back in her chair. “Okay, then,” she said. “A few ground rules. In exchange for the use of the room upstairs, I will do the cooking.”

She had clearly been rehearsing this conversation. “Terrific,” Ray said.

“Second, I will stay out of your way. I don't want to interfere with your work and I don't want you interfering with mine.”

“Fair enough,” he told her. Everything was happening so fast: in the span of twenty minutes he had gone from hermit to chaperone for an abused teenager. Also, what work could a seventeen-year-old girl have at a place like Barnhill?

“Most importantly, and I wouldn't be here if I thought this would be an issue, but I want to make it clear that nothing is going to happen between us. Our relationship will be purely, strictly, and chastely platonic. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“You promise?”

“You have my solemn oath. Nothing will happen. No thing.”

She shook his hand with much ado, leaving a globule of jelly on it. “Now, while you do the washing up, I'm going to unpack my things. We'll reconvene for lunch. Until then, I will appreciate very much having some privacy. Also, you stink—take a bath. Mind you, I do like your beard.”

The possibility of a physical relationship with Molly hadn't even occurred to him. It wasn't even within the realm of possibility. “Sure,” he said. “You'll have all the privacy your heart desires. Can I help with your bags?”

“No, but you could get rid of the dead fox at the front door. You need to bury it or it will attract carrion and they attack the lambs.”

Indeed, another animal sat prostrate and disemboweled at the doorstep, surrounded by a miniature Stonehenge of gooey fur. The stench was unbearable. He squinted at it in the sun. A pair of crows was enjoying a feast and they dared him to chase them away. “Yah!” he said and stomped a foot in their general direction. They looked at him with disdain then continued to peck and pull at their brunch. He went to the garage to fetch the shovel. The generator now powering the house purred almost inaudibly, much unlike the petroleum-spewing models he would see on the neighbors' farms as a kid or powering gigantic TVs and PA systems at Saturday tailgate parties.

Shovel in hand, he scraped the mess into a burlap sack and
carried it to the garden, where he chose a dead tree as a grave marker. The blade of the shovel carved cleanly through the layer of heather and into the soft, peaty soil, but the job would still take half an hour. He got to digging. Molly's uninvited presence got him thinking about Flora and the way his time in Chicago had ended. Flora had asked him once what he feared most and since then he had given the question a great deal of thought. Not rats. Not bad gin. He feared that he would never regain the certainty he had possessed when first reading Orwell.

He brushed the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the new grave. It was a beautiful thing to be in Scotland and to dig a hole on a sunny day. He kicked the sack into the hole and leaned on the handle of the shovel to catch his breath. His fingers grew calloused, but it was strange how easily he could slip off his wedding ring. Without giving it much further thought, he dropped it on top of the burlap sack and threw a pile of black dirt on top until the island itself swallowed the band of gold. That was when he caught Molly watching him from an upstairs window. He smiled at her, but the curtain flittered closed. Ray got down on the ground and reached for the ring. The putrid odor rose to greet him. The burlap squished beneath his fingers. He thought about putting it back on, but allowed the fox to carry it with him into the next world.

He ruled out searching for the other dead animals he had tossed into the bushes and refilled the hole and stowed the shovel back in the garage. The muscles in his shoulders ached
and he wanted nothing more than to take a hot bath, but Molly had beaten him to it. She was in the bathroom singing something like a lullaby or children's rhyme, albeit a profane one. He took the opportunity to poke his head into what had become her bedroom. The door creaked open.

Three folding easels stood sentry in a semicircle facing the northern window. A wooden bucket from the garage held a bouquet of paintbrushes and palette knives. White sheets covered the three paintings in progress. The bath was still running, so he tiptoed in and lifted the corner of one.

The painting was a self-portrait, but her hands and feet had yet to be painted. She was completely nude, her belly and big boobs protruding, and looking at the viewer as if to say,
This is who I am. Take it or leave it
. She had laid herself bare and in vivid detail. It was beautiful—she was an
amazing
painter. He couldn't stop staring. Something operating inside his respiratory system came to a halt. His heart was no longer beating. Then the bath water stopped.

Ray covered the painting again and crept back into the hallway. The floorboards whined beneath his feet. Molly surely knew what he was up to. She would be livid. Before she could emerge, he fled to his room and closed the door. The image of Molly had imprinted itself onto his imagination. Her gaze challenged him to look away, but he didn't want to.

In the painting, she had given herself a black eye.

During the days that followed they settled into a pleasant enough routine. Each morning after breakfast they retired
to their respective rooms so that Molly could paint and he could read. She asked him a few times about his obsession with
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and he was unable to come up with a sensible explanation. It had something to do with the fact that Winston Smith had suffered every manner of torture before he surrendered to the system. Big Brother threatened him with starving rats in a cage they placed over his head. The fear got to be too much and by the end he stopped rebelling. Winston came to love his oppressor and in doing so found some semblance of contentment.