Andrew Ervin: Burning Down George Orwell's House

“You’re in the right part of the world for counting sheep, I’ll tell you that much. And if I don’t see you at breakfast I’ll pop up to Barnhill one of these days to say hello.”

“I’d like that.”

Farkas pulled on his coat. “Now let me see what kind of havoc those boys have wrought this time. Good night, Ray.”

“Good night, Farkas.”

Back in bed, if sleep ever arrived Ray didn’t recognize it as such. Rain pounded against the glass. He stayed under the covers, more than a little drunk, eventually watching the hazy morning light creep across the ceiling to signal the start of his first day on Jura.

THE BANGING AT THE door came as a relief. Ray leapt from bed fully naked and, he soon realized, with his penis more or less erect. He bent over for his pants just as Molly stuck her face into the room. She screamed, and then she laughed. He tried to cover himself, but with one foot wedged halfway into a pant leg he fell over and landed on his sore back. His dick stood up like a half-inflated balloon animal. Molly didn’t move or even avert her eyes. “Up and at ’em, Mr. Welter,” she said. “So to speak.”

It wasn’t funny. “Would you please close the door?” he asked.

Molly did just that, though with herself inside the room. She delighted in his embarrassment. Her smile made her look like a different person.

“What are you doing? Turn around!”

“You act like I’ve never seen a naked man before,” she said.

He pulled his pants up under the blanket. They were still wet. “ Have you?”

“Well … no. But you didn’t know that!”

He buttoned his jeans. “What do you want?”

“Mrs. Campbell told me to knock you up and fetch you for breakfast.”

“Breakfast? What time is it?”

“It’s nearly half past six. I can’t help it if you’re going to sleep all day. What’s it going to be?”

“What’s what going to be?”

“ Breakfast . Jesus.”

He needed to urinate.

“What do you have?”

“Eggs, bacon, potatoes—”

“That sounds perfect.” He would’ve agreed to anything at that moment so long as it meant getting rid of her. “Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I really need to—”

“The full Scottish then?”

“Great, I’ll be right down, I promise.”

“I’m supposed to wait for you.”

“Wait for me?”

“That’s what Mrs. Campbell said. ‘Wait for him.’ ”

He pushed past Molly to get to the bathroom, where, without closing the door or lifting the seat, he found just enough time to get his dick out again before unleashing a flash flood. She watched him from the doorway without any sense of shame. “That’s it — take your sweet time,” she said. “It’s not like I have a ferry to catch.”

There was no rushing him. He stood there for what felt like ten minutes, until the muscles in his shoulders slackened. He washed his hands and tried to dry them with the damp towel. Deep black lines had formed beneath his eyes. Soreness had taken charge of every muscle.

Molly sat next to him on the end of the bed while he pulled on a pair of socks. “Do you have school today or something?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve finished every class the school offers. Now I tutor some of the other kids, if you must know. Hurry up.”

She marched him down the steps like a prison guard escorting him to his execution. The lounge was empty except for Pitcairn, who sat next to the fireplace slurping at his tea. “You up at last, Chappie?”

“No.”

Pitcairn looked like a man who slept even less than Ray did, someone beset on all sides by trouble. Some of it by his own design, to be sure. Given what Farkas had said about Pitcairn’s temper, Ray really hoped that Molly wouldn’t tell him what had transpired upstairs, that she had been sexually harassed — however inadvertently — by a hungover American.

“He wants the full Scottish,” she yelled into the swinging kitchen doors. “How do you take your tea?” she asked.

“Do you have any coffee?”

Pitcairn snorted into his newspaper. “You won’t like the coffee,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you’re a fucking Yank,” he said. “Because you come here and you expect everything to be precisely like you have it back home. Only you’re not back home, are you? So why do you bother traveling in the first place? Save us both the trouble.”

“Actually, Jura is my home now,” he said. “I don’t have any place else to go, so you’re just going to have to deal with having me around.”

“You listen to me, Chappie. There’s no dealing with seeing our ancestral land taken over by foreigners, do you hear? Making too much noise and disrupting the natural order of things. Nobody invited you here — you remember that!”

“That’s enough, Gavin,” Fuller said. He stood in the kitchen’s doorway and brandished an iron skillet. He had a rag wrapped around the handle, like it was hot from the oven.

“Enough fucking foreigners, I say.”

“Get used to it,” Ray told him. Not exactly his wittiest retort of all time, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“I won’t be getting used to any such thing,” Pitcairn said.

“Any coffee you have will be great,” Ray told Molly.

“Coming right up,” Fuller said. “One word of advice: don’t let Gavin bother you. He’s a little bit of an arsehole to everybody at first.”

“Later he becomes a complete arsehole,” Molly said.

“Mind your language, Molly,” Fuller said, and retreated to the kitchen.

“Aye, mind your fucking language, girlie,” Pitcairn said, and returned to his newspaper.

Molly went into the kitchen and returned with a cup of lukewarm tar into which someone had spooned four packets of artificial sugar. Ray did everything in his power to swallow a sip. Determined to enjoy every drop, he steeled himself, but the second taste brought the previous night’s nausea out for an encore. “You know something?” he asked Pitcairn.

“What’s that?”

“You were right — I don’t like the coffee. In fact, it tastes like shit.”

Molly, who was busy packing her school bag, released a laugh.

“I told you so, Chappie,” Pitcairn said. “But in all fairness, there’s not a man, woman, or child who can finish an entire cup of Fuller’s coffee. In the future, however, I would appreciate it if you’d watch your language around my Molly.”

“How old are you anyway, Molly?”

“Almost eighteen, why?”

He had exposed himself to a seventeen-year-old.

“Seventeen and sharp as a whip,” Pitcairn said. “She’s got her mother’s brains, God bless her.”

“She’s got your looks though,” Fuller said, “the poor thing. Full Scottish breakfast, Mr. Welter.” He placed an enormous plate of food in front of Ray, along with a cup of tea.

“Thank you. But please call me Ray. There’s absolutely no reason to — what the hell is that ?” On his plate sat a possum that had puked up its own guts.

“That,” Pitcairn said, standing up, “is haggis. You ask for the full Scottish, that’s what you get. Come on, girlie. Old Singer doesn’t like to wait, you know that.”

Ray had thought of haggis — the heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep cooked inside its own stomach — as a national myth, like the Loch Ness monster or the tradition of not wearing underwear beneath a kilt. He waited for Pitcairn and Molly to leave, picked at his food, then pushed the plate away and headed back to his room to catch a few more hours of sleep. Mrs. Campbell caught him before he got to the stairs. She wore the same assortment of black dresses she had on yesterday.

“I suppose you’ll be checking out, then, Mr. Welter?” she asked.