Burning Down George Orwell's House Read online

  “Look out!” Molly screamed and Pitcairn pressed the brake pedal hard enough to send the truck sliding to a halt. The left side of Ray’s head banged into the dashboard. A family of deer scampered off unawares toward the shore.

  “Fucking red deer,” Pitcairn said. “We need to do something about them.”

  “They were here before we were,” Molly said.

  “They’re a fucking menace all the same is what they are.”

  Pitcairn stepped on the gas again. An ugly warehouse provided the first indication that they were approaching Craighouse. The truck gained more speed down the steep hill leading to the town—but perhaps the word town was too generous. Craighouse appeared to be a tranquil little village overlooking the sea and dedicated to the fine art of making single-malt scotch. The hills and open water made the huge distillery buildings and the hotel look like parts of a fortress built at the edge of paradise to keep the unwashed heathens at bay.

  Ray was still rubbing the pain from his face when Pitcairn jerked the truck to a stop in the gravel parking lot of the Jura Hotel and switched off the ignition to euthanize the bagpiper. The hotel resembled a small palace surrounded by—of all things—palm trees. He could not at that moment articulate what he had expected to find on the Isle of Jura, but a restored nineteenth-century mansion and thriving palm trees never appeared within the realm of possibility. The burning peat and salty air soothed Ray’s frazzled, travel-achy bones. The distillery stood directly across the street. He could almost taste it.

  “Here you are, Chappie. Once you get settled in I’ll see you in the lounge for that whisky.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “What whisky is that?”

  “The one you owe me for driving your Yank arse here. What did you think—that I’m some kind of taxi service?”

  “Sure,” he said. That sounded fair enough and he couldn’t wait for a drink. “I’ll meet you at the lounge after I check in. Where is it?”

  “Where is it? It’s in the fucking hotel, where do you think?”

  Pitcairn went inside and Molly moped after him. Ray lifted his suitcase off the back of the truck. It had grown heavier throughout the day and fell to the ground with a thud. His face still hurt and he was coming down with a cold, if not something worse. The sun had set and a mean chill settled into the atmosphere, but it felt good somehow. In the corner of the parking lot stood a red telephone booth and next to it was a port-a-potty painted to look like a second telephone booth.

  SIX OR SEVEN PAIRS of tall rubber wellingtons, all coated in mud, stood sentry on the porch. Ray sat on the wooden bench to unlace his own boots, the exorbitant price of which still embarrassed him; they were the kind of boots that millionaires wore on guided package tours of Kilimanjaro or Everest. They had seemed like a good idea at the time. The interior of the hotel wasn’t much warmer than the exterior. His socks squeegeed water onto the wooden floor and left a trail to the vacant reception desk. The antique floor lamps did their best to rid the lobby of its dusty gloom. A seating area of overstuffed chairs looked like it had been recently occupied: a teapot and some cups and saucers remained scattered on the side tables and armrests. A whiff of cigarette smoke lingered with the scent of peat burning in an enormous stone fireplace. A chorus of drunken laughter called from deeper inside the hotel.

  He tapped his fingers on the counter to draw someone’s attention. No luck. He cleared his throat and tapped louder. Somebody had to be on duty—they were expecting him, right? He rang the service bell and a woman emerged from the back room. She might have been sixty years old. Her hair was a hornet’s nest held in place with a pulley system of ribbons and ivory chopsticks. She wore multiple layers of long, flapping clothes.

  “Welcome to Jura, Mr. Welter,” she said. “We trust you had a miserable journey.”

  “Do I look that tired?”

  “Don’t let it worry you. It happens to everybody. Your room is ready. We expect that you’ll be wanting a bath.”

  “Actually, yeah, a shower would be right on time.”

  “We don’t have showers, only baths. It’ll be straight into the tub with you. There’s a kettle in the room. We’ll have Mr. Fuller stay on in the kitchen until you’re ready. We have venison stew on this evening.”

  “Stew sounds perfect, but I think I’d like to have a bite first. I’m starving.”

  “It might be best if you were to get into the bath straight away. Yours is room number eleven. First floor, top of the stairs. On your left. We’ll have Mr. Fuller stay on in the kitchen until you’re ready.”

  “Don’t I need a key?”

  Behind the reception desk, twenty room keys hung suspended from a series of iron nails.

  “Oh no,” she said, not at all amused. “We don’t lock our doors on Jura.”

  Ray lugged his suitcase up the creaky stairs. The drunken laughter resumed in the lounge.

  The austerity of his room came as a welcome surprise. There were no potpourri baskets or reproductions of impressionist gardens. It was a plain, square room with some wooden furniture pushed against the white walls. The chair moaned under his weight. He was scared to look at his feet; the longer he could ignore the blisters the better. Mrs. Campbell had turned up the heat high enough to roast a duck on the iron radiator, which chimed and hissed. He filled the electric kettle in the bathroom even though he despised the entire concept of dunking a bag of weeds into a mug and drinking it, but he was in Scotland now.

  A contraption of pipes connected the bathtub’s brass faucet to the bathroom wall. The showerhead was attached to a flexible tube and it sat cradled atop the spout like an old-fashioned telephone receiver. He made the mistake of looking at himself in the mirror while the tub filled and his entire life came crashing down. His face attested to the crushing weight of the past few weeks, months, years. The already tenuous grasp on his well-being grew even looser. Tears he couldn’t feel covered his face. What he needed was so goddamn simple: Ray wanted to know again, to be able to delineate right and wrong in an un-deconstructed world of certainty. He wanted to feel the security of binary opposition. Good and bad. He needed to get out of the watchful eye of Big Brother. His time at Barnhill would be his last chance to put himself back together. Failing that, there would be little incentive to care about his continued existence on such a rapidly self-destructing planet.

  The water rose around him. He scrubbed at himself with a bar of gritty soap until his hunger and the pruning of his extremities chased him from the tub and into the water that now covered the floor of the bathroom. Every step sent ripples skirting along the tiles. He hoped the water wasn’t leaking through to the lobby. There was only one small and rough towel, which he used to dry himself and then soak up what little he could from the floor. He wrung it out several times into the tub, which now boasted a ring of filth that if chemically tested would reveal traces of his exact route from Chicago to Craighouse.

  He took the quilt from the foot of the bed and used it to blot the remaining moisture from his body. It didn’t feel right to dry his bare ass on someone’s hand-sewn blanket, but there was no avoiding it. A musty odor escaped from his suitcase. All of Ray’s clothes were wet, as were his books. Even if he could eventually get the paperbacks dry they might never be readable again. The only dry thing he owned was, thankfully, his first edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He had quadruple-wrapped it in plastic.

  He hung some clothes over the radiator and despite his hunger felt an overwhelming desire to sleep, if only for a minute, but they were waiting for him downstairs. He pulled a damp T-shirt over his grumbling belly. The clammy boxer shorts made his entire body shiver all over again. He climbed back inside his new sweater, some tube socks, and a pair of not-entirely-soaked blue jeans. The clothes felt eel-like against his skin.

  The hollering and cigarette stink assaulted Ray before he got downstairs. Pitcairn was the loudest of the bunch by far: “So I says to him, ‘What do I look like? Some kind of taxi service?’ For a so-called genius he sure i
s a simple fucker.”

  “Actually, you are a taxi service,” someone else said, and that sent the others into convulsions of breathless laughter, which mutated into the kind of coughing made possible by lifelong smoking habits.

  “Aye, but he doesn’t know that, does he?”

  “Here he is now, then,” said a man of impossible hairiness. He was the hairiest person Ray had ever seen. It was unreal. Five people occupied the lounge, six including Molly, who sat behind the bar reading. The crinkled book resembled his own paperbacks upstairs. The lounge had another fire that roared but gave off little heat. A pile of peat bricks sat on a browning newspaper next to the hearth and a cirrocumulus cloud of cigarette smoke clung to the ceiling.

  “So nice of you to join us, Chappie.”

  “Hello, gentlemen, I’m Ray.”

  The hairy man stood up and shook his hand. Everyone else remained seated. “The name’s Farkas,” he said. “This here’s Pete, Sponge, Fuller, and you’ve met Gavin and Molly Pitcairn.”

  “Watch out for Farkas, eh?” Pete said. “He bites.”

  That drew a big laugh.

  “And that Pete’s a real salt of the earth type.”

  “We’ve got some stew on for you,” Fuller said. “I hope you’re hungry?”

  “You have no idea. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

  “Well I’m afraid the menu’s limited to venison this evening, Mr. Welter.”

  “I suppose that’ll work. Now who do I have to talk to in order to get a whisky around here?”

  “Salt of the earth? Peat? Get it?”

  Dozens of bottles—brands Ray had never heard of—covered the three-tiered counter behind the bar. They twinkled in gold and bronze in the firelight. The sight made him feel a little better about his life.

  “You like your malts, do you?” Pete asked.

  “Maybe a bit too much.”

  “What’ll it be, then, Chappie?” Pitcairn asked. “A dram of the local?”

  “That sounds perfect, in fact.”

  “You heard the man, Molly. Six of the local.”

  She put her book down with a sigh and slid from her stool. After pulling the cork from the cello-shaped bottle, she poured six healthy drams of the scotch distilled here in Craighouse. Ray wondered if it would taste different so close to the source. He couldn’t wait to find out.

  “Should I charge these to your room?” she asked.

  “Sure, I’ll pick up this round. Room—”

  “Room eleven, I know.”

  Molly distributed the whiskies. The men diluted them with water poured from small pitchers the way some people put milk in their coffee.

  “Thank you, Welter, eh?” Pete said. He looked to be about fifty with prematurely wrinkled skin and thinning hair. If Ray didn’t know better, he would’ve thought the man possessed a deep and permanent sunburn.

  “Please call me Ray.”

  “Or Chappie!”

  The first sip tasted like the sweet ambrosia of the gods. It came as a revelation, a divine benediction, and it immediately washed away the hunger and exhaustion of his journey. Ray had drunk from the River Lethe. The second swallow tasted even better. The world began to feel stable. The voices around him grew vague and indistinct. Some moments later, Pitcairn’s coughing fit shook him from his swoon. “Goddamn that’s good,” Ray said.

  “A man who likes his malt, now there’s a good sign, eh?” Pete said. He wore a tracksuit so out of fashion that were it dry cleaned and disinfected it would fetch hundreds of dollars at one of the boutiques back in Ray’s old neighborhood.

  Two of them—Pitcairn and Fuller—were approximately his age, maybe four or five years older. It was hard to get a good look at Farkas beneath all that hair. Sponge appeared to be in his eighties. He sported a wool jacket and a stained tartan tie and sat silently at the head of the table, content to listen to the others. “What kind of name is Sponge?” Ray asked.

  “One word of advice,” Fuller said, placing an enormous bowl of stew and a basket of bread in front of him. “Don’t take your eye off your whisky for one instant whilst that man is present. Good appetite.”

  “Thank you. This smells … interesting.”

  When Fuller retook his seat he found that his dram had been drained. Only an empty glass remained. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Sponge.”

  “Please excuse me,” Ray said and moved his bowl and the bread to a table next to the fire. He wondered how many fireplaces the hotel possessed. “All my clothes are wet, I’m freezing.”

  “That stew will warm you right up,” Fuller said.

  “Not to mention the malt, eh? Best thing for you on an evening such as this.”

  Upon closer inspection in the firelight, the chunks of animal material—meat would’ve been a generous exaggeration—appeared half-cooked at best. The severed white tendons gaped open and one of them winked at him from amid the gristly pool. A blue oil spill floated atop the broth. His hiking boots might have been added to the pot for additional flavor, but Ray had an audience and so he forced himself to lift the spoon to his mouth. The texture resisted his attempts at mastication. He ground every tooth he owned against it, but the chunk of meat would not disintegrate. Fortunately, the eye-watering amount of salt came close to masking the rotten meat flavor. If he wasn’t being watched, and if he had possessed a napkin, he would’ve spat the chunk out. Swallowing the meat proved to be a separate ordeal. The whisky chaser helped. He finished his dram and asked for another, and then another, which Molly brought over, each time complaining the entire way. The men watched him with obvious amusement. He hoped they didn’t see how repulsed he felt.

  “Not bad, is it?” Fuller wanted to know.

  “No—not bad. But I’m stuffed.”

  “I bet you are,” Pitcairn said and the other men laughed.

  He tried to soak up some of the salt and gasoline in his gut with a slice of bread, but it was so stale that he thought it might be toasted. He snapped off a piece, dipped it in the broth, and tried not to wince when he put it in his mouth. “Well, that was great,” Ray said. He pushed the bowl away from his body. “But I need to get some sleep, gentlemen.”

  “How about one more wee dram?”

  His mouth filled with rancid saliva, which he forced back down his gullet with an audible gulp. “Next time. It’s been a long day.”

  “Aye, you must be exhausted,” Farkas said. His hairiness was remarkable. His eyes blinked from within a forest of bristly beard and eyebrow.

  “One word of advice,” Fuller said. “However hot Mrs. Campbell has your room, keep your windows closed tonight. The birds down at the beach make a terrible racket in the morning.”

  “Not to mention the festivities this evening,” Molly said.

  The adults shot her nasty looks.

  “Festivities?” Ray asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Pitcairn told him. “Some old Jura superstition. That’s all it is.”

  “That’s all it is, eh?” Pete said.

  Any other night, Ray might have pressed the issue.

  “Tonight’s the equinox,” Molly said. “Not that you seem like the kind of guy who’d enjoy watching fat men dance naked around a fire and shoot off guns.”

  “Dance around a fire?”

  “Naked men?” Fuller asked.

  “Where do you get these ideas, eh? Where does she get these ideas, Pitcairn?”

  “It’s that fucking school over there putting ideas in her head.”

  “Fuckin’ Islay,” Sponge said: the first words he had spoken all evening.

  Ray stood and tried to put as much distance between himself and that stew as possible, but he felt drunker than he had realized and had to grip the table for support. The men chuckled at his clumsiness. Molly rolled her eyes in embarrassment.

  “Not much of a drinker, are you, Chappie?”

  “I do all right. It’s just been a long day. Enjoy your nude fire dance or whatever it is you have planned.”

  “Just
a little expedition, that’s all, eh?”

  “Thanks for the dram,” Farkas said. He was by far the friendliest of the bunch.

  “What time will you be needing a ride up to Barnhill, then?” Pitcairn asked.

  “A ride?”

  “It’s over twenty miles, isn’t it? And there are your supplies from The Stores. What are you going to do, carry them on your back?”

  “I—”

  The other men were laughing at him now.

  “I’ll come pick you up after breakfast, how does that sound?”

  “Nine o’clock?”

  “Six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock. I don’t know. Jesus. After breakfast.”

  “One word of advice,” Fuller said, “you won’t be needing your watch any longer, not here.”

  “Not unless you’re hoping to catch old Singer down at the ferry,” Farkas said.

  “Fuckin’ Islay,” Sponge said.

  “Where is Singer? That codger said he’d be here.”

  “Doing some preparations, I imagine, eh?”

  “Trying to shoot a nonexistent animal, I imagine,” Molly said.

  Pitcairn slapped the table with both palms. “Would you kindly shut the fuck up, girlie?” he yelled.

  “Be a good girl now,” Farkas said.

  “Okay, I’ll see you after breakfast,” Ray said. He needed to lie down. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” Farkas said.

  Pitcairn’s angry whispers followed him to the lobby and up the stairs. Ray stopped at the landing to eavesdrop but couldn’t make out what the men were saying. He was curious about what they had planned but felt way too exhausted to care.

  Then it hit him. He raced his legs back up the stairs, pushed through the unlocked door, and tore off his damp pants just in time to relieve his bowels of that stew. It poured out of him in torrents. He expelled what felt like a lifetime’s accumulation of poison, then crawled naked under the damp quilt and closed his eyes. Sleep—that was all he required now. Eight uninterrupted, unmoving hours.

  They did not arrive.

  Sleep and Ray Welter had never learned to play well together. Every night, as long as he could remember, he had always looked forward to morning. He hoped things would be different here, where he wouldn’t need to wake up at any certain time to get to a job he hated. He no longer had to do anything. Yet he remained awake for hours with his eyes propped open by excitement, alcohol, jet lag, anxiety.