Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

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.

THE 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.