Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's 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.