Burning Down George Orwell's House (16 page)

“Gypsies. Of course.”

“It's true. Forty or fifty years ago, however old Farkas is, Mrs. Campbell found him on the front porch of the hotel. There was no note or any indication of where he came from, but back then there used to be a pack of Gypsies that came over from the Continent every seven years and camped out on the western side, where the caves are. I'll take you there sometime. They would catch a ton of fish and lobster, kill some deer, poach a few sheep, then move on.”

She spoke with such conviction that Ray wanted to believe her. “You can't be serious,” he said. They continued walking.

“They had been migrating back and forth across the Continent since World War II, until one year when Baby Farkas appeared at the hotel. After that, much to the collective relief of our more or less racist and intolerant population, they never returned. Mrs. Campbell says that he was covered in hair even as a wee baby. He looked like a teddy bear. That's how we ended up with a lycanthropic distiller.”

“And Mrs. Campbell adopted him?”

“The whole island adopted him. As my da puts it, he was more like a pet than another child. We're not exactly wealthy on Jura, at least no one was back then, so people shared the responsibility of raising him. He lived here and there. The story gets funny peculiar. It was around the time Farkas turned thirteen that sheep and cattle on the island started turning up slaughtered every so often.”

That did it. Ray couldn't hide his disbelief any longer. “Now I know you're messing with me.”

“It's true, I swear to you. Even now when he drinks too much, which is, oh, every bloody day by my calculation—and you might know something about that yourself—whenever he has too much to drink he boasts that he's responsible for killing all these animals. It's like he's proud of it. He gets quite wound up. That's why he doesn't join the hunting parties. Don't laugh, Ray—I'm absolutely serious.”

“You're as crazy as he is.”

“I know for a fact that he has been researching laser hair removal systems online.”

“How do you know that?”

“There are no secrets on Jura. That's a big reason I can't wait to leave.”

They reached the cylindrical tower where he had once stopped to attend to his blisters. It turned out to be a trig point, which, before the advent of global positioning satellites, was used for accurate surveying of the land. It felt reassuring that people had gotten along very well for thousands of years without electronic technology; the earth would continue to spin long after the digital revolution ended and civilization crumbled. They stopped for a bite to eat before turning around.

Molly had so many stories of hidden pirate treasure, arsonist rock stars, visiting authors staying in Craighouse on the government's dime and causing veterinarian-summoning
scandals with sheep. It was in those days of long walks out on the heather moors that the morass of his thinking showed the first clear signs of disentangling; those deep, mental knots started to unravel and Ray began to feel like his old, pre-Logos self again. He was able to concentrate on his reading for longer periods of time and some days Molly would have to physically drag him from his chair in order to point out another trail or beachhead or standing stone.

In the evenings, they would retreat to Barnhill tired and sunburned. She would bathe and then return to her painting. He would read until they both grew hungry, at which point she heated up various combinations from the dwindling supply of canned goods. After dinner, Ray would light a fire and sip on some scotch. With more food in his belly those days, the quantities of nighttime whisky didn't affect him quite as badly. Most nights they traded stories about their childhoods or made them up entirely. Ray had been an astronaut and a professional llama wrangler. Molly was actually from Egypt and her real name was Queen Nothinginkhamun. His laughter returned—it sounded strange at first. Only once in a while did he pass out in a sitting-room chair, at which time Molly would help him up the stairs and dump him onto his mattress.

Ray was sound asleep one night when the bed began to shake. It felt like one of the rare earthquakes they would get back on the Illinois prairie. The room rumbled beneath
him for four or five seconds and then stopped. A distant voice addressed him. “Would you wake up already?” it asked.

It sounded like Flora. No—it sounded like Molly. The room shook some more. Molly sat in her pajamas at the foot of his bed.

“What's the matter?” he asked. A faint light in another part of the house bled through the door. He hoped he had clothes on under the sheets. “Are you okay?”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.

Ray sat up. “I don't imagine I could stop you,” he said.

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“What?”

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“I heard you. Why would you ask me that? No!”

“Why not? Because I'm ugly?”

“No—you're … you're very pretty.”

“ ‘Pretty' is a pretty vague word. Pretty bad. Pretty ugly. Pretty depressed. Not much of a compliment, is it?”

“You're seventeen years old.”

“Almost eighteen. I'm not saying I want to have sex with you either—I don't, I assure you—I'm just curious, you know, if there's some kind of tension going here that I should be made aware of?”

“And you decided to wait until the middle of the night to ask about it?”

“What better time?”

“Don't you worry your, uh, pretty little head. No, I don't want to have sex with you.”

“You're not in here at night having impure thoughts about me?”

“No!”

“I'm glad to hear it,” she said and lay down next to him on top of the bed. The blankets established a safe, cotton membrane between them. Her hair on the pillow smelled like wet paint. “I saw you bury your wedding ring in the backyard,” she said.

“That felt good, but it had nothing to do with you. How do I explain it? Coming to Jura has given me a new perspective. I can't stand the idea of being fenced in anymore. Being trapped in a symmetrical grid of city blocks. That ring just felt constricting, I guess. I'm still technically married, at least for now. I'm waiting for the divorce papers to come through. That is if my wife's lawyers can find me all the way up here.”

“Are you still in love with her?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I want to know.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

Wind battered at the windows. The sheep bells were unusually quiet out back. Ray pictured the sheep huddled together to wait out the night, to protect their young from whatever was leaving the dead animals at the door. The weakest and slowest among them wouldn't make it. “I haven't thought
about Helen that way recently, no. I'll never not love her, but I respect that she needs to move on and I guess I've realized that I do too.”

“Is that why you're here?”

“In bed?”

“On Jura!”

“Can't we talk about this in the morning?”

“Why are you so miserable?”

“I'm not miserable, I'm tired. You want to know? Okay, I don't really blame her for divorcing me. I haven't been a very good husband, and I think I'm in love with one of my former coworkers, or I was.”

“So that's why you're so miserable.”

“No. Okay, maybe. Yes. But I was miserable before that too.”

“You don't have to be the same person here on Jura that you were in America,” Molly said. “You can be happy if you want to be.”

She kissed him on the side of his head and returned to her room. The lights in the house blinked out. Her paint smell lingered and he couldn't get back to sleep. His mind whirred. He felt somewhat happy, which was really fucking remarkable, but there still existed a source of deep-in-his-bones dread: Molly's father.

Gavin Pitcairn lurked in the back of Ray's thoughts and kept him on constant alert. All the single malt in Scotland wouldn't be enough to make him fully relax. It was only a matter of time before that flatbed came rumbling up the path.

T
HE DAY CAME WHEN
supplies of food, shampoo, and toilet paper dwindled enough to require an expedition to The Stores. Ray dreaded the thought of running into Pitcairn, but he was also expecting some important mail. There was no getting around it. Molly's aluminum-crafted bike had been engineered with an elaborate suspension system capable of withstanding the special variety of abuse dished out by Jura's infrastructure, and he hoped that his spine would prove equally durable. He also hoped no one would recognize it as Molly's. She had tricked out the frame with a stainless-steel rack on the back and some antique leather panniers liberated from her father's long unused five-speed. The fenders would in theory keep the mud off his clothes.

Molly packed him some lunch and placed it in the wicker basket affixed to the handlebars. He hadn't ridden a bike in years and this one took some getting used to. The machine appeared unnecessarily complex. She taunted him for putting on the motorcycle helmet he found in the garage. “You look like a special needs child,” she said. He wore it anyway, which turned out to be fortunate.

He made it all the way to the public road with only minor readjustments to his skeleton, but somewhere beyond Ardlussa the tires slid on an oil slick, probably one left by Pitcairn's truck. Ray squeezed the brakes so hard that the front wheel stopped; the rest of the bicycle however maintained its course and speed and catapulted him from the saddle.

Things grew a bit fuzzy after that.

When Ray arrived at the hotel he was covered in wet peat and had misplaced a sliver of a front tooth. He marched into the deserted lobby. The newly hewn edge of his incisor scraped against his tongue. A dull ache pulsed in his temples and he felt very sleepy. There wasn't a soul in sight. He stood at the reception desk for some amount of time—there was no telling how long—until Mrs. Campbell emerged from the depths of the building.

“We've been expecting you, Mr. Welter. You've received quite a bit of correspondence. My goodness—you're a mess. What happened to your face?”

“I feel a little woozy. May I sit down?”

“By all means,” she said. She came around the reception desk and latched her fingers into his arm, leading Ray to a chair next to the dormant fireplace. The remains of a charred log sat on the iron grate like a turd that wouldn't flush. “You're bleeding, Mr. Welter,” she said, as if it was news. “Stay put and we'll fetch Mr. Fuller.”

Ray attempted to reconstruct the events of his ride, but the headache made linear thought difficult. He had fallen off the bike somewhere between Ardlussa and Craighouse. Images came back to him as if from a slideshow in random order …

Wet pavement four feet below him and somehow moving parallel to his body.

Up close eyes of a sheep staring at him as he regained consciousness.

A cheese and onion sandwich freed from its wax paper and seasoned with gravel and motor oil.

He had hit his head—that was it. Even with the helmet, he had taken a good knock to the cranium. In his daze he had carried the twisted frame of Molly's bike the rest of the way. He stood to find the washroom and inspect the extent of the damage, but Mrs. Campbell and Mr. Fuller came rushing in.

“We did tell you to stay put, Mr. Welter. Let us have a look at you.”

“I fell off my bike,” he told them.

“Now why would you go and do that?” Fuller wanted to know.

“I didn't mean to. It was—”

“An accident, aye. One word of advice: try walking next time. This is going to sting a little bit,” he said. He held a dirty kitchen rag to the top of a plastic bottle and drenched it in what smelled like bleach. He held Ray's head and patted the rag against his scalp. The electric current carried down to his gut, where it would stay for the remainder of the day.

“If you do that again I am going to punch you,” Ray told him. He meant it.

“Do sit still, Mr. Welter,” Mrs. Campbell said. “It must have been quite a spill. While we have your attention, and you must forgive us for inquiring, you haven't by any chance seen Molly, have you?”

“Molly? No, why? Is she missing?” he managed to ask. “I do hope she's okay. Have you called the authorities?”

“I wouldn't say missing,” Mr. Fuller said.

“No, not missing, just … unaccounted for at the moment,” Mrs. Campbell said. “She has a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time. Not to worry. At any rate, you should sit here for a few moments. He's a bit concussed,” she told Fuller.

“He's just had his bell wrung a wee bit, haven't you, Mr. Welter? Now drink this.”

The odor of the tea stung his eyes before he sipped it. It tasted like rotten fish parts. He would've preferred a hot cup of the disinfectant sizzling on his scalp. Mr. Fuller wrapped a large bandage all the way around his head. “This'll stop the bleeding. One word of advice: you might do well to sit still for a moment. If you don't mind, I need to get back to my kitchen. The haggis won't cook itself, will it?”

“Perhaps this isn't the best time, Mr. Welter, but we do have some correspondence for you. From America, from the looks of it. Also, a number of emails addressed to you have arrived via our hotel website. We've taken the liberty of printing them. Normally we don't accept email for guests, but these appeared to have some urgency about them. Now let us see where we put them.”

She wandered off.

Mrs. Campbell had read his personal correspondence and then left it lying around the hotel for all to see. These fucking people.

“Here you go, Mr. Welter,” she said when she returned, and handed over a stack of papers. She lingered for a moment like she wanted to read over his shoulder, so he held them to his chest until she stomped away.