Burning Down George Orwell's House (2 page)

After a good night of sleep he would pick some supplies up at the Jura Stores, which was owned by the same couple who would serve as his landlords for the next six months. Then he would hitchhike twenty-five miles up toward the northern tip to Barnhill, the estate where George Orwell wrote
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. That was where Ray would begin his new life. It was still difficult to believe.

Before donating his laptop to a Buddhist temple on the North Side, he had searched online for rental properties on Jura, but never imagined that Orwell's very own house would be available. The rental agent he reached in Glasgow said he was very lucky that he phoned when he did. Just that morning a young couple from London had made serious inquiries about buying the property or perhaps renting it as a summer cottage. Barnhill was fully furnished, she had said, and would comfortably sleep eight. The rental had cost him every last dollar that remained in his own name, but getting off the grid for half a year would be worth any expense and hassle from Helen and her junta of divorce attorneys, even with the knowledge that when the lease expired he would be flat broke and have no place to live.

The girl pushed past Ray and climbed into the cab of an old flatbed truck. Bagpipe music blared from the radio and he couldn't figure out if the effect was meant to be ironic. The driver leaned toward the passenger-side door and rolled down the window. He had a perfectly round head with a bulbous nose and slack double chin, his hair buzzed down to a military-style flattop. “You Welter?” he yelled.

“Yeah?”

“Then get the fuck in here.”

His legs would not have made it to Craighouse. “Great, I'd love a ride, thank you. I'm going to—”

“To the hotel, aye.”

“Look what he did to my book,” the girl said.

“You don't need to be reading that shite anyway. You may have noticed that it's raining, Chappie, so would you please get the fuck in here?”

The girl squeezed over so Ray could climb inside. The bagpipes might have been used for interrogational purposes. “Ray Welter,” he said, holding out his hand. The cab smelled of rancid meat and whisky
—exceptional
whisky.

The man wiped his fingers on his oily pants before shaking his hand. “I can see you met my Molly.”

“Charming girl.”

“She's a little bitch. Aren't you, Molly? Smartest person on Jura is why. Or she was before
you
graced us with your presence.” He laughed until spittle landed on the inside of the windshield. “Hey close the fucking door, Chappie.”

“And your name is?”

“You can call me Mr. Pitcairn.”

“It sounds like the whole island was expecting me, Mr. Pitcairn.”

“The whole island? Who do you think you are, the king? Did you think we're one big happy family? That we were going to throw you a parade?”

“Dysfunctional family is more like it,” Molly said.

“Dysfunctional, eh. How do you like that? That's my Molly for you. Do you think maybe I could be the famous advertising executive and you could drive my truck?”

“How do you know about that?”

Pitcairn made typing motions with his fingers. “We have the Internet here too, you know.”

“I'm far from famous, in fact,” Ray said, “but I'll give the proposal some thought.”

“I'll give the proposal some thought,” Pitcairn said, making fun of his American accent just like his daughter had done.

He couldn't believe that this guy had looked him up online. It felt so … 
intrusive
. One night in Craighouse, then he would be on his own and free—free from all the bullshit and hassle, from the meaningless social rituals and phony smiles, from the technological gadgets that had ruined his attention span and fucked up his very thinking.

“Okay, I've thought about it,” he said. “No way in hell.”

Pitcairn stepped on the accelerator. Ray rubbed his elbow on the window in order to see out, but that was a mistake.
The narrow road adhered to the coastline and snaked its way between a series of cliffs and the shoreline. The slightest skid on the wet pavement would send them hurtling into the icy water. Pitcairn fumbled with a pack of cigarettes and took every treacherous bend at full speed. Ray bounced in his seat. The tires squealed with each blind turn.

They crossed a small bridge, and the road bent away from Islay and up a hill. Jura appeared to be little more than a collection of craggy mountains protruding from the sea. The shade of green was something else. The terrain was covered in patchy grass and weeds and exposed stone surfaces. Innumerous valleys housed depthless lakes. Blue-white boulders had been strewn everywhere and organized by forces beyond human understanding. The island looked desolate and windswept and raw—in other words, ideal.

The road—now too narrow for more than one car—climbed to a peak but the mist made it difficult to get much of a view.

“There's a standing stone coming up,” Molly said. “One of the best preserved examples in the Inner Hebrides.”

“If you can fight past the fucking tourists to get at it.”

“You can't miss it from the road, and we only get a couple of hundred fucking tourists a year.”

“Aye, and it's a couple of hundred too many! Mind your fucking mouth.”

They drove through an area of farmland and past a few old houses, then ascended to another bend in the road, which
Pitcairn again took at full speed. Ray had read about the enormity of the island's sheep population, but the statistics did little justice to the reality. They were everywhere. Jura belonged to the sheep, not to the humans.

The road curled to the left to put them parallel with Jura's eastern seaboard. They approached a small forest with a shag carpet of brown and green moss. Clusters of small pines and what appeared to be gnarly beech or birch or something like that sprouted up all over the place. The fog moving in looked like spools of insulation covering the ground as if to protect it from the rain.

Here he was. This was his life now. He could already feel his—

“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.

S
IX 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.