“I know who you are. You’ll be wanting to sit in the back.”
The passenger seat was empty. The cabin looked so warm, but the driver motioned for Ray to climb into the truck bed. He walked around the side of the vehicle and saw that three inches of black mud lined the back. It squeezed between his toes. The truck started moving again and he had to crouch and hold on to the side to balance. That was when he smelled it. He was squatting in a truckload of fresh fertilizer. The morning’s scotch clawed up the back of his throat. Pig shit coated his feet and his clothes and all Ray could do was laugh. When the truck stopped at Barnhill he was still cracking up.
He hopped out and went to invite his savior in for a wee dram, if only to postpone his own boredom a few more minutes, but the man drove off without as much as a wave. Ray waited for him to get out of sight, then stripped off all his clothes and allowed the rain to wash the shit off and then shoveled the new animal corpse into the overgrowth.
It took no time at all to get a fire raging. Ray’s pyromaniacal skills had improved in a short amount of time. For the evening’s scotch he chose a lovely ten-year-old the color of blond wood that had very recently sang bass in his rendition of Beethoven. He poured a short dram and inhaled the fumes deep into his nose. If shoe polish could smell delectable, that’s what the ten-year-old smelled like. Shoe polish and salt water. The first sip felt soothing in his chest, the second in his shoulders. The afternoon faded to evening.
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.
RAY 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.”