Burning Down George Orwell's House

I

Even standing still, finally, Ray Welter’s body remained in motion and subject to inner tidal forces beyond his control. The rain felt more like the idea of wetness than anything resembling drops and it made its way inside his coat and new boots. Everything ached. He struggled to recall with any certainty what the word dry referred to. The rain fell upward. He wanted to cry.

The journey had been a thirty-six-hour nightmare spent suffocating in an airplane seat, riding in a bus on the wrong side of the road, sailing, and hitchhiking — and he still had to wait for what looked like a five-minute ride over to the Isle of Jura. A talkative, red-faced woman had dropped him off at the ferry terminal. “You might as well give me that fancy wristwatch of yours,” she had said. “You certainly won’t be needing it out here.” At least that was what he thought she said. The accent would take some getting used to. “And you just wait till you get ahold of these paps.”

Ray could discern two of Jura’s three mountains through the fog and rain and from the eastern side of Islay, the Paps of Jura looked exactly like a woman’s breasts. There was no mistaking it. The entire island resembled a naked girl lying on her back.

He stood at the very precipice of the wired world. The air tasted fresher than anything he had ever sucked into his Chicago-polluted lungs. His pores worked to rid themselves of the poisons of his previous life and he shivered from the sweaty underclothes, yet some source of heat rose to his face. Across the sound, a ferryman attended to his duties on the deck of a blue-green boat big enough to tote maybe a dozen cars. Jura was so close. Overheated and shivering at the same time, Ray now understood why that island was among the least populated of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. No direct, public connection existed from the mainland. He carried with him only an elaborate backpack and a suitcase that contained the sum of his worldly possessions.

He wandered along the waterfront and awaited the next-to-last leg of the journey. One of Islay’s six whisky distilleries loomed over the ferry port, but he couldn’t discern the presence inside of bodies or spirits. It looked deserted, without as much as a gift shop where he could buy a carryout bottle. A sip of scotch would have tasted so fucking perfect. Over on the inert boat, the ferryman moved slowly and without demonstrable purpose or motivation, oblivious to the weather.

A row of squat houses boasted the greenest lawns on the gods’ green earth. Swing sets and seesaws of molded plastic punctuated the grass with happy colors. All of Scotland was green, even greener than the springtime prairie back home. Back at his former home. Out here, Ray discovered a new shade of green. Not quite celadon or vert or even snotgreen, it was the color to which he would forever compare every other green. He already thought of it as Jura green. The acrid smell of burning peat from the chimneys taunted him with the promise of warmth. The hardened mud substitute they used for heat on the islands gave off a strange scent, almost like wood smoke, but more earthy and bitter.

He sat against the empty whisky casks stacked on the stone embankment. The seat of his jeans was already soaked through. He unpeeled the last of his bananas and found it impossible to believe that he had purchased the bunch just that morning. The fluorescence of the supermarket in Oban and the colors of the brightly packaged goods in endless rows glowed in his memory as if from a distant universe.

Ray dropped the peel into the outer pocket of his pack and took a long drink of mineral water that tasted like sidewalk chalk. A blue van approached, its windows clouded inside, and pulled to a stop a few yards from where he sat. The driver flashed his high beams and in reply the ferryman brought the motor to life. A sad-looking girl emerged from the van. She opened an umbrella and buried her face in a paperback, the title of which he couldn’t make out. The vehicle reversed course and retreated toward Bowmore. The rear lights glistened red in the wet pavement and only then, and with some regret, did Ray realize how quiet it had been.

Other than the wind and rain, he hadn’t heard a sound. No cars, no airplanes, no loud cell phone conversations. It had never before occurred to him that real silence might be possible. He hadn’t even recognized it until it disappeared, the victim of the ferry’s mechanical roar ricocheting between those Paps. They really did look like breasts. His mind wasn’t right.

Man-made noise was one of many new absences that he hoped would define his stay out here. There would be no more bullshit, no more alienation from his own thought processes. He was now officially in absentia from his previous life and ready to begin a new one. The freedom was daunting, but he was up to it. He had to be.

He stood and the ground rolled beneath him like a choppy, concrete sea. Exhaustion had crept into his thighs and lower back. His throat remained parched from the dry airplane and the miles of hiking. That first whisky was going to taste so goddamn good. The girl hiding inside the hood of her raincoat didn’t hear him approach, so when he asked, “What are you reading?” she flinched and her book landed in a puddle.

“Don’t fucking do that,” she said. It was difficult to get a look at her through the layers of rain gear and wool, but she had round cheeks that accentuated her frown. She might have been fifteen or sixteen. “It’s none of your business, is it?” She held the book by the spine and shook the water from its pages, then wiped the cover on her skirt, smearing it with dirt.

“I’m so sorry — I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Then perhaps stalking up on people isn’t your best plan of action.”

“I said I was sorry. I’ll be happy to buy you a new copy.”

“Where do you plan to do that, then?”

“I don’t know. How about in Bowmore?”

She mocked his American accent: “How about you leave me alone?”

“Fine, sure. Sorry.”

What a hideous child. The ferry pulled to a stop long enough for Ray to follow her aboard. Up close, the ferryman looked older than time itself. “How was school today?” he yelled over the motor.

“Great,” she whined.

“I should make you swim home. That’d get you some exercise. You must be our Mr. Welter. Right on time too, I’d say.” He pointed to the back of his wrist, but he wasn’t wearing a watch.

The girl looked up from her book — it was Freud on the cover — long enough to flash Ray the evil eye.

He gave the ferryman the fare and regretted that he had not brought an obol to pay him with. “Call me Ray,” he said and shook the man’s hand. No cars or other passengers climbed aboard.

“The name’s Singer. We get a lot of people out here looking for Orwell. Sounds like you’re serious though.”

“I don’t know about that. I hope so.”

“I understand you’re staying at the hotel this evening.”

“In Craigshouse?”

“Craighouse. No s in there. It’s the only hotel we have, so I suppose that would be the one. Let me take care of business here if you’re going to make it in time for supper.”

The boat coughed black smoke into the mist. The motors surged and the ferry — powered by some combination of crowbars, buzz saws, and garbage can lids — backed away from Islay. The motion mimicked Ray’s vertiginous balance and the volume of the engines dislodged some bile from the back of his throat. A slave driver down in the galley kept time with a pair of monkey wrenches he banged on a kettledrum full of rusty screws. The vibration found its way to Ray’s backbone. The stink of diesel fuel filled his sinus cavity. He would never be still, or dry, ever again. Only motion existed now.

O Argo!

O Pequod!

O Eilean Dhiura!

The boat moved, and Ray was carried by a series of systemic forces: he paced in circles, port to starboard, starboard to port while the boat defied the sound’s pull, itself directed by the moon; gravity held him and the ferry and the captain and the sea fast to the spinning earth, which carried all of them around a sun, the existence of which was now speculative; a rivulet of mineral water curled its way through his digestive tract and into his circulatory and respiratory processes, while the pouring rain sought every millimeter of exposed flesh.

Even with the ferry nearing the shore, or the shore nearing the ferry, Ray still felt like he might never make it to Jura. Zeno’s paradox would take over. He would continue to travel half the distance, and then half of that, and half of that, and … The closer he got, the more he felt his body shutting down. Famine, dehydration, and fatigue nipped at his heels. Marshmallow-like mucus colonized his chest and bits of it escaped up his throat every time he coughed. The Paps loomed larger. He held on to the railing to maintain what remained of his balance. The motion of the boat felt too familiar now, as did the wind, which reminded him of Chicago. The brat schoolgirl kept her eyes buried in her wet copy of Civilization and Its Discontents.

The ferry stopped and there became here. He had made it. Singer lowered the plank and Ray stepped foot upon the Isle of Jura.

“I’ll be seeing you at the hotel just as soon as I’ve tightened her down here,” the ferryman said. “You’ve come at a good time.”

“Great,” Ray told him.

“Great,” the girl said, making fun of his American accent again.

“Don’t mind her,” Singer said. “She’s not a bad kid once you get to know her. Too smart for her own good, that’s her problem.”

The air was rich and clean, but he still had to hoof it several miles. He had received the directions via email: from the ferry port, Jura’s only paved road curled around the southern butt of the island and then ran two-thirds of the way up the eastern coastline to Craighouse, which sat in the mouth of a bay and faced the Scottish mainland. The caretaker of the hotel there, Mrs. Campbell, was expecting him. He had a reservation for one night.

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.

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 is 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.

The hands of the bedside clock didn’t budge and Ray realized that the batteries had gone dead or the cord had come unplugged. The bed grew less comfortable by the minute. Hard lumps in the mattress familiarized themselves with the tenderest parts of his back. He heard noises — not necessarily in the room, but not necessarily outside either. Then there was some commotion down in the parking lot. Car doors slamming. Something that sounded like a gunshot followed by a lot of laughter. There might have been a party going on. The noise got to be too much. He threw the covers off and crept to the window. It looked as if the entire population of the island had gathered. They formed a rowdy convoy of rusted trucks with squeaky axles and drove off into the night. Ray put a pillow over his head.

After another hour, or maybe two or three, he threw the blanket off and got up. The noise outside had stopped. He found the driest of his clothes and slipped down the stairs, which creaked enough to wake the other hotel guests, if there were any.

A voice asked from the lounge, “Is that you, Ray?”

It took a moment to discern the hirsute shape sitting next to the dying fire. Spilt or drooled whisky glimmered in Farkas’s beard. Only a few small embers remained in the fireplace.

“What are you doing up?”

“Oh just enjoying a wee dram. Pour yourself one.”

Ray went to the bar and grabbed the first bottle within reach. It opened with a corky pop. He picked up two glasses that smelled mostly clean.

“Just a wee bit for me. Do you see that slip of paper that says ‘Wolfman’ on it?”

“Not really.”

“That’s my tab. Put two tick marks on it.”

“Is that your nickname?”

“Gavin’s idea of a joke,” he said, “not that I find it all that humorous. You might have noticed that he’s what you might call unhinged, especially when it comes to outsiders. I’ll ask you to stay on his good side, if you can find it.”

“That’s good to know — I’ll stay out of his way.”

“Aye, please do. I once watched him pummel a tourist senseless in the hotel parking lot for no reason anyone could see. They had to airlift the poor sod to a hospital.” Ray took the chair next to Farkas’s and handed him the glass, which he held to his nose. “A bit of the cask strength, then? A good choice.”

“Cask strength?”

“Not watered down, like we do. This is the pure thing. Slàinte.”

“Is that Gaelic?”

“Aye. ‘To your health.’ ”

“Slàinte.”

The whisky was stronger than anything Ray had ever tasted. It felt like molten lead in his windpipe. The pain felt great.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Farkas said, “but I would be remiss if I didn’t ask what you’re doing here. You’re obviously a clever man — we’ve all read about your advertising awards.”

“Thanks,” Ray said, but heard more sarcasm in his voice than he might have preferred. “It’s hard to explain. I knew I needed to get out of Chicago. I considered Nova Scotia, but that didn’t feel authentic or something. I’m kind of obsessed with George Orwell, so I decided I wanted to see — I needed to see — where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

“I can respect that, I suppose. But most sensible people might have come for a short holiday, a couple of days at most, but six months?”

“For starters. Maybe I’ll stay longer. Who knows?”

“Who knows? ‘Nobody knows,’ ” Farkas sang. “ ‘No-body knows.’ Cheers, Ray.”

“Cheers, Farkas.”

“So how do you find the local malt?” Farkas asked.

“Delicious. I drink quite a bit of it back in Chicago. I drank quite a bit, I should say.”

“And you know that we keep the best of it for ourselves, don’t you?”

“That would make sense.”

“Sense, aye — that’s precisely what it makes! We make scents at the distillery. You’ll have to let me show you around one day.”

“You work at the distillery? I’d love to see it,” Ray said, and meant it. “I’m going to pour one more of these and call it a day.”

“Jet lag is it?”

“Among other things. One more for you too?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

Ray poured two more drams and with his eyes now fully adjusted to the low light was able to find his own tab. It said “Chappie” at the top and had more tick marks on it than he could count.

“Cheers, Farkas.”

“Cheers, Ray. Down the hatch!”

Farkas drank the entire glass in one long gulp and against his better judgment Ray did the same.

“Okay, I’m going to get some sleep. Or try to.”

“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.

“Checking out? Already?”

“They’re expecting you over at The Stores and Mr. Pitcairn is to meet you there after he’s dropped Molly at the ferry.”

“Now?”

“After he’s dropped Molly at the ferry. Have you packed your things?”

“I was still hoping to take a shower — a bath, I mean.”

“At this time of the day? You took one last night if we’re not mistaken. We hear everything that goes on in this hotel.” If not on the entire island. “Now you collect your things and don’t worry yourself over that mess on the floor. We’ll tally up your bill. It looks like you had yourself quite a bit of whisky last night.”

Ray had forgotten about all the tick marks added to his bar tab after he went to bed the first time, but he wasn’t prepared to argue with her about that. He would get Pitcairn and the rest of those deadbeats to pay him back another time. What on earth had happened to the world-famous Highlands hospitality? “I’ll pack my bag and be right down, Mrs. Campbell,” he said.

Ray folded his damp clothes back into the suitcase and resigned himself to spending his first two weeks at Barnhill catching up on lost sleep. The jet lag had hit harder than he thought possible. Maybe that’s all it was — the constant shaking, the nausea — maybe it was all just the stress of travelling. Mrs. Campbell stood waiting for him behind the reception desk. No evidence suggested the presence of other guests. “We trust you had a pleasant stay, Mr. Welter,” she said.

He didn’t know how to respond. He had only just arrived and she was expelling him into the cold and rainy morning. Ray did what anyone would do in his position: he lied. “Great, thank you. The room was very comfortable.”

“We are glad to hear it. That’s one night, plus supper and breakfast and your lounge bill. One hundred sixty pounds, fifty pence please.” She slid a slip of paper across the dusty counter.

Given the state of the US dollar, the bill came to something like two hundred and fifty dollars for a bed and two meals he didn’t eat. The homeless people back in Chicago were accustomed to better cuisine. “A hundred and sixty pounds?” he asked.

“And fifty pence, please. It looks to us like you had yourself quite a bit of whisky last night,” she said again. “Perhaps that’s why you look so peaky this morning.”

That was when he snapped.

“I looked peaked because I didn’t get any goddamn sleep. That … that so-called stew kept me up half the night on the shitter. I didn’t even drink that whisky. Okay, maybe four or five of them, but Pitcairn and Pete and Sponge, or whatever his name is, they put them on my tab after I went to bed.”

“Mr. Welter!” she said. “We are appalled. We are terribly sorry if our food does not conform to your standards, but we will not stand here and listen to your abusive language. Perhaps that’s appropriate in your America, but not here and certainly not in our hotel. As for the bill, if you are so distraught by our service we will tear it up.”

And she did. She snatched the paper from the counter and tore it into tiny pieces, which she placed into the pocket of her outermost dress.

“Good day, Mr. Welter,” she said and turned to fiddle with the unused keys hanging behind the counter.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Campbell,” Ray said. “I was out of line.” She faced him, and he struggled to come up with something to say, some way to explain his outburst, but nothing came to mind. “It’s the jet lag. I … I … no, that’s not it. I have no excuse. Take the money and please forgive me. I’m so sorry.” Without counting the wad of pound notes, nor returning his change, she slipped them into the same dress pocket. “I haven’t slept in days, but it’s more than that.” He could hear the rain tapping against the windows, the sizzle of peat bricks in the fireplace. “I can’t even think straight anymore. I’ve quit my job. My wife is divorcing me.”

“Little wonder too,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Given your attitude.”

“The tragic part is that I know you’re right. My attitude is the problem. That’s why I’m here. Now the only thing I have left in the world is a rented house I can’t totally afford. This island is my final hope. If I don’t get myself together I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I’m already in the process of sabotaging my stay here too. I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Campbell. You have a beautiful hotel.”

“There, there, Mr. Welter,” she said. He didn’t know which of them was more embarrassed. “Let’s not worry. These misunderstandings happen. We’ll see if Mr. Fuller has some tea on. A spot of tea — that’s all you need. You just sit next to the fire and we’ll be right back. We’ll forget all about this nonsense, what do you say?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Campbell. I’m so sorry.”

“Not at all. You take a seat and try to dry those wet clothes. You’ll catch your death on Jura dressed like that.”

For one of the few times in his life, Ray did what he was told. The leather chair felt like an enormous, broken-in baseball mitt. Mrs. Campbell hadn’t deserved that kind of abuse. He had made the worst possible first impression and now word would spread across the island about what an asshole that Ray Welter was. He vowed to make himself inconspicuous. He would blend into the scenery, go native. “Fuck are you doing, Chappie?” Pitcairn demanded and Ray snapped awake. “Sitting on your arse?”

“I’m not feeling so good. Mrs. Campbell went to—”

“Oh, I’m not feeling so good. Is that a reason to keep me waiting outside? I got better things to do than look after the likes of you. Get your twee little boots on. They’re expecting you over at The Stores. I’m in a fucking hurry.”

“Just one minute. I’ll tell Mrs. Campbell I’m leaving.”

“You haven’t even paid your bill yet?”

“In fact, I meant to speak to you about that bar tab.”

“Oh, right. That was just a bit of fun, Chappie. An initiation, if you please. Welcome to Jura and all that. Come on now, let’s go. I have a suspicion that Mrs. Campbell will realize you’ve left when she comes out here and sees that you’re gone. She’s sharp that way.”

“She’s making me some tea.”

“Well why didn’t you say so? I could do with a cup myself. Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Did Mrs. Pitcairn have you up late?”

Pitcairn seemed like the kind of man who would appreciate some lascivious humor.

“I was out on the hunt all bloody night. Besides, I’ll have you know that Mrs. Pitcairn is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Ray said for the twentieth time that day.

Pitcairn tracked mud across the lobby and took the chair next to Ray’s. “Here she is now.”

Mrs. Campbell had reappeared from the kitchen carrying a wooden tray on which she balanced a large teapot, milk, sugar, and two dainty, ceramic mugs. “We weren’t expecting you, Mr. Pitcairn. We’ll fetch another cup.”

“He was expecting me,” Pitcairn said, tilting his head in Ray’s direction. “You sit down, Mrs. Campbell. I got feet on my legs same as you.” Pitcairn stood with an exaggerated groan and went into the lounge.

She put the tray on a side table and sat on a footstool, sweeping her dresses beneath herself. “We’ll have you clean up this mud,” she called after Pitcairn.

“Mrs. Campbell,” Ray said. “I’d like to apologize again. I feel terrible.”

“We won’t hear another word of it. How do you take your tea?”

“Milk and sugar, please.”

She poured two cups. “This will chase away the chill from your bones,” she said.

“Thank you. About that bar tab—”

“Uh oh,” Pitcairn said, sitting down. Mrs. Campbell filled his cup.

“What did you do, Mr. Pitcairn?”

“We were just having a little fun at Chappie’s expense.”

“Quite literally, as it turns out.”

“You did no such thing,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Were those your beverages on Mr. Welter’s bill?”

“I’d prefer not to think about whisky at this moment,” Pitcairn said, holding his head.

“You didn’t drink that whisky at all, did you, Mr. Welter?”

“Well, I had a few drams,” he admitted.

“My head!”

“A few drams?”

“Five or six.”

“Can we discuss this later?” Pitcairn pleaded, slurping at his tea.

“Five or six? Why you’re as bad as the rest of those boys!”

“Could we please—”

“Yet I believe I paid for upwards of twenty. Didn’t I?”

“—talk about something else? Anything.”

“Mr. Pitcairn! We are appalled that you—”

“We were just having a bit of fun with ole Chappie, weren’t we? I’ll make it up to you. It all comes out in the wash. Besides, you owe me for driving your arse up and down the island.”

“Let’s just forget about it,” Ray said, “and move on with our lives.”

“You hear that, Mrs. Campbell? We’re to move on with our lives. Believe me, I’d love to.” He slurped at his tea some more. “Drink up and we’ll get you over to The Stores. Mrs. Bennett’s already got your things packed up.”

“What things?”

“The supplies you’ll be needing at Barnhill. There isn’t exactly a convenience store up there. Is there, Mrs. Campbell?”

“No, there very well is not.”

“Now hurry the fuck up, Chappie — excuse me, Mrs. Campbell. She doesn’t care for that kind of language.”

“We’ll expect you back to clean up this mud,” Mrs. Campbell said.

Ray gulped down his tea and closed his eyes for a moment. The fire radiated orange and red through his eyelids and he began to drift into the weight of the seat cushions. “Now hurry the fuck up,” Pitcairn said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

HIS LAST STOP BEFORE going to Barnhill involved a tactical, tail-between-his-legs retreat to the role of passive consumer. According to the website of the Jura Stores, the proprietors had arrived from the mainland a decade earlier to sell organic vegetables, fairly traded and shade-grown coffee, and free-range meat no doubt slaughtered with the utmost humanity and compassion. All at obscene prices. The Bennetts struck Ray as that breed of idealistic entrepreneurs eager to make their fortune in some environmentally or spiritually sound way, perhaps even according to some sad misunderstanding of sammā ājīva, but were greedy as any slumlords.

Mrs. Bennett had a long face and a toothy, equine smile that caused her to whistle as she spoke. It threw Ray off at first. He thought she was summoning an animal, but she said, “You’ll be wanting a pair of wellieth, I take it?”

“That won’t be necessary. In fact, I just bought these boots.”

Her husband was nowhere to be seen, but the distorted noise of a radio came from another room. Pitcairn, having already exhausted the harmonic range of his truck’s horn hurrying Ray along, now stood in the doorway smoking a cigarette. “I told him his boots were for shite,” he said.

“These are some of the best boots money can buy,” Ray said. He planned to do a ton of hiking. “I’m sure they’ll be great.”

“Just hurry the fuck up, would you? I have places I need to be.”

“No you don’t,” Mrs. Bennett said.

“Maybe I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I want to be standing around here all day waiting for the likes of him to buy his brie and sweeties. Those American shite kickers won’t help you on Jura, Chappie.”

“I’m afraid he’th right, Mr. Welter. The mud really ith extraordinary here. I do recommend thome wellieth.”

“They’re French I’ll have you know, not American,” Ray said. He heard himself playing along with Pitcairn’s games.

“I do hope you’ve brought a thatellite phone in cathe of an emergenthy.”

“No, I didn’t. That would’ve been smart.”

“If you do encounter a problem, there’th a thettlement up the road from Barnhill. Thomeone there can help you, I’m thure.”

“Aye, Chappie, go see Mr. Harris. He’s the real friendly sort and loves company.”

“Don’t lithen to him, Mr. Welter. Mr. Harrith preferth to keep to himthelf, but Mith Wayward ith quite charming.”

“That old witch? Stay well clear of her. I’m sure he’ll be fine, Mrs. Bennett. Won’t you, Chappie? Now hurry the fuck up.”

Hundreds of pounds’ worth of food and supplies formed a pyramid in the front of the shop. He went over the countless mental lists, yet knew he was forgetting something. He was always forgetting something. He bought a mixed case of scotch — different ages and strengths — and made arrangements for the distillery to deliver a fresh supply on the first day of every month. His plan was to read Orwell and drink himself silly.

Pitcairn watched from the doorway while Ray carried all the boxes to the truck. The rain fell harder than it had the day before; everything got wet before he could get it onto the flatbed.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bennett.”

“Tho long, Mr. Welter.”

Pitcairn climbed into the cab and started the engine, which made a horrible grinding noise that the devastating volume of the bagpipe cassette couldn’t overpower. Exhaust formed a cloud over Ray’s head. He already detested this man in a way he had never detested anyone before, except for maybe that fat piece of shit Walter Pentode. As with Pentode, however, he recognized the need to keep relations cordial, which was to say phony. He climbed into the passenger seat and the truck lunged into gear. “Truck’s not sounding so hot,” he said.

“And what do you know about it, Chappie? I suppose you include auto mechanic among your infinite talents?”

“I don’t know a thing about cars, but I do know that your truck sounds like it’s on the brink of death.”

“I don’t see how it’s any concern of yours.”

“Only until you get me to Barnhill.”

“Only until you get me to Barnhill. I’ll get you to your precious Barnhill, Chappie, don’t you worry. I want you as far away as possible.”

Driving on the wrong side of the road didn’t bother Ray this time because there was only one lane. If someone came from the other direction he would have to pull to the shoulder to let Pitcairn pass. It was tough to see much of the scenery through the mist. In his exhaustion, it felt like driving through the world’s longest car wash. The road followed the coastline north, over stony hills and glens, through small thickets of dense forest and across bog lands and rickety bridges. The road doglegged through the Ardlussa estate, a holdover from a previous and wealthier era. The manor house looked like the set of an old, black-and-white murder mystery. Now it was advertised online as a bed-and-breakfast.

The truck rocked and creaked like a wooden ship on stormy seas. Pitcairn yanked the wheel back and forth in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to smash into every pothole in the road. He grunted each time he hit one. They crossed vast stretches of desolate moorland and cut through groves of woodland straight out of the grimmest fairy tales. Ray’s stomach bounced inside his abdomen. Acid rose in his chest. The unsecured boxes knocked against each other on the back of the truck — and after twenty minutes, the road ended. A painted sign indicated that cars weren’t permitted any farther, but Pitcairn kept going.

“Is this legal?”

“That’s just a warning for the bloody tourists. I’m sick and tired of towing out those ungrateful arseholes.”

They continued on what appeared to be a rutted goat track with a median of waist-high weeds that followed on a ridge above the water. Across the Sound of Jura, not quite visible through the rain, the Scottish mainland beckoned with all the conveniences Ray had left behind. His lower back throbbed, his stomach waged war with his nervous system, the pipes — the fucking pipes — screeched at him from the speakers like a state-fair show pig headed to the slaughter, but the little scenery the mist didn’t hide was dreamlike. The motion of the truck allowed his hangover to gain momentum in the pit of his roiling belly.

“How much farther is it?”

“Almost there now, Chappie, and I’ll be done with you and you’ll see what you got your sorry self into. I bet Fuller twenty quid you’ll come crawling back to the hotel before the full moon.”

“The smart money’s on Fuller,” Ray said.

Pitcairn hit a hole as wide around as his tires. “Fuck! I know for a fact that some of these are so deep they’ll take you all the way down to Australia.”

“Stop the car,” Ray said. He hoped, one last time, to lighten the mood and improve relations before they got any worse. Maybe he could establish some kind of rapport with Pitcairn. It would be a mistake to make enemies on an island this small, particularly dangerous ones. “I could go for some grilled shrimp on the barbie.”

“I bet you could, Chappie. I don’t go for all that foreign shite myself. We had some of that Chinese ping-pang ching-chong shite in Glasgow years ago around the time of my boy’s wedding. The old lady wanted to try it. I don’t know why I agreed. ‘Those chinkies will eat dogs,’ I told her. It’s true.”

“It’s hard to imagine that you were ever married.”

“What did you think, that Molly came in the post? That I bought her from Mrs. Bennett? Fucking hell,” he said. The front wheel bounded out of another hole. “They almost caught us that time, Chappie. ‘You never know what they’re feeding you,’ I told the missus. I asked the waiter, ‘Is there dog in here?’ I did, I tell you. She’s dead six years now bless her soul.”

“Molly seems like a very bright girl.”

“Aye, and that’s precisely what worries me, Chappie. She’ll want to get off of Jura one of these days. You’re to stay well clear of her, you understand?”

“You have my word.”

“Your word, huh? And what’s that worth coming from a man who tricks people into buying shite they bloody well can’t afford. Don’t look so surprised. We can read on Jura, Chappie. As soon as the rental agent rang up Mrs. Bennett, she and Mrs. Campbell learned everything we needed to know about you and your sport utility vehicles.”

“I’m glad to hear I was able to provide you with so much entertainment,” he said.

They reached a bend in the track and Barnhill came into view. It was glorious. The size of the house might have justified the rental price. Even painted brilliant white, it did not in any way disrupt the natural splendor of the rolling hills and exposed rock faces, but instead blended in among the curvatures of the ground. It looked cozy.

“I’m glad that you’ll be all the way the fuck up here. What were you thinking?”

It would be an eight-hour walk back to The Stores for any additional supplies.

“I’m thinking I’m home,” Ray said.

A trail led down a little embankment to the house, which sat nestled in a pocket of lower ground between the ridge and a series of hills along the shoreline. The structure had been built on a protrusion into the Sound of Jura, and water surrounded it on three sides; the property included a two-story house with a long garage and a set of stables extending out back to form a U. The hills protected the house from the direct blast of gales from the coast, and a rustic stone wall at the base of the hills appeared to run the entire length of the island. There were no other dwellings in sight. His only neighbors were the countless sheep whose wet wool floated in puffy clouds over the mud. Jura had more of them than the nighttime sky had stars — there had to be hundreds of them clustering in packs large and small.

The front door was on the south side of the property. Ray carried two boxes of supplies down to the stoop before it occurred to him that he didn’t have a key. That was what he had been forgetting. Goddamn it.

Pitcairn’s truck sat idling at the road, the bagpiper wheezing away, and Ray had to march up there and ask him for a ride all the way back to Craighouse. How could he have been so stupid? Did Pitcairn know he had forgotten it? He had brought Ray all the way up here just so he could gloat. He could already hear it: Not so smart now, Chappie, are you? He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Pitcairn was watching him, and any second now he would lean on the horn.

Ray stood at the door, on the very threshold, but he had to turn around. That had been the story of his life. Out of desperation, he tried the knob — and it turned. The door pushed open and led to a small mudroom. The smell of mildew and garbage punched him in the gut. He put off touring the premises and instead made several trips back up to the truck, where Pitcairn sat smoking a cigarette and reading his newspaper. The boxes of supplies filled the small mudroom and half of the foyer. The whole house stank. After Ray had carried the last of his things inside, he leaned out the door and waved goodbye to Pitcairn, who rolled down his window and whistled. “What do you think you’re doing, Chappie?” he yelled.

Ray walked halfway to the truck. “I’m moving in. Why, what do you think I’m doing?”

“You owe me twenty-five quid for the ride, yesterday and today. Do you imagine that I drove all the way the fuck up here for a joyride?”

“Oh of course,” Ray said. “I owe you twenty-five pounds and you owe me a hundred something for the bar tab last night. We’ll call it an even hundred. So that’s seventy-five pounds you owe me, in fact.”

“Now, Chappie, we talked about that.”

“We talked about that,” Ray said, mimicking Pitcairn’s brogue. “Thanks for the ride — let’s call it even.”

“Even? The next time you need help,” Pitcairn said, rolling up the window, “don’t come crying to me. I’ll expect you tomorrow down at the lounge. ‘Oh I miss my soda pop and telly programs, boo hoo.’ ” He turned the truck around and drove off, kicking up a rainbow of mud. He left a cloud of noxious exhaust behind. The bagpipes died a slow and painful death until, like that, Ray was alone. The wind stirred the trees. The water splashed gently against the rocks down at the water. There existed no human noise whatsoever. Unseen birds welcomed him from the hedges. Wind rippled in waves through the high grasses. The wet peat sucked at the treads of his boots as he fled out of the rain and into George Orwell’s house.

HE PAUSED FOR A moment at the threshold and then removed his boots in the mudroom. Ray was actually in George Orwell’s house. It was difficult to imagine, but Orwell had lived and had written Nineteen Eighty-Four right here. He had paced these very floorboards, watched the sound absorb the rain through these same windows. Going into the sitting room was like stepping back in time. The technological world didn’t exist here yet. It was glorious, but Ray had work to do.

Some kids had broken in — or more likely had let themselves in through the unlocked front door — and thrown a vomitive party in the sitting room. The stench was unbearable. The hardwood floor sparkled with broken wine bottles. Candy wrappers, beer cans, and old newspapers were strewn everywhere. The two fireplaces at either end of the house would provide his only heat, but no amount of peat could warm even the downstairs, where he also found a dining room, kitchen, and water closet. More unlocked doors led to the garage and stables.

The physical reality of Barnhill immediately taught Ray something extraordinary about Nineteen Eighty-Four. He now understood the psyche of the novel’s hero Winston Smith, who would eventually give up his resistance and fall in line with Big Brother. Ray had never before appreciated what a cold and murky world Smith lived in; he was oppressed just as much by his material conditions as by any direct interaction with the authorities. The faulty Victory cigarettes and tear-inducing Victory gin were as destructive to one’s well-being as the threat of a visit from the Thought Police. Were Smith’s bathroom tiles as devoutly stained as these? Did the toilet tank in his apartment gurgle constantly like this one did?

Eric Arthur Blair — known to the reading public as George Orwell — had moved to Jura in May of 1946 and lived here on and off until January of 1949. He arrived shortly after his wife Eileen and beloved sister Marjorie had both passed away. It was a time of food shortages and strict rationing that required real sacrifice and patience of the British working class. London had been scarred by German bombs; even in peacetime he couldn’t walk down the street without reliving the endless nights of hiding underground during the air raids. Rather than fighting for government-handout scraps, Orwell escaped the entire system in order to fend for himself and begin work on what would become the greatest novel in the history of the English language. He caught his own fish and crabs, grew his own vegetables — and Ray would do the same. Only after Orwell finished writing his masterpiece did he agree to seek treatment in Glasgow for the tuberculosis that would kill him just six months after its publication. It had all happened right here.

The upstairs hallway connected three bedrooms and a large bathroom with a claw-foot tub. For his room Ray chose the largest one, over the kitchen, that had windows on three sides and afforded north, east, and south views of the water. The house had come furnished but not very furnished. A few token watercolors hung on the walls. A closet contained sheets and blankets and towels. Coming to live in Orwell’s house was supposed to provide Ray with some clarity, with the wherewithal to mend the fault lines that had appeared in his personality. In doing something as simple as rifling through the closets he felt like he might learn more about how Orwell had lived. Ray wasn’t superstitious enough to believe that he could feel the presence of Orwell’s ghost or anything like that, but there was no mistaking that something intangible remained. The grin on his face felt so foreign.

The initial step toward making Barnhill livable involved trying to get a fire started downstairs. A door from the kitchen led to an uninsulated well room, now used for storage. It contained what appeared to be several metric tons of peat, which someone had gone to the trouble of cutting into bricks and stacking in a crisscross pattern. Depending on how fast it burned, and how cold the house would get at night, it might be enough to warm one room for the duration of his stay. In the corner, a shotgun sat propped up against the wall.

Unlike his former colleagues at Logos, Ray had grown up around guns. He wasn’t one of those fringe lunatics sitting at home crocheting the Second Amendment into throw pillows, but guns didn’t bother him either. Chasing predators from the crops had been one of his chores as a teenager. Considering that he now lived alone at the end of the grid, miles from civilization, it made sense to have one around. He left it where it was and carried an armful of peat bricks back to the sitting room. He fed the least toxic pieces of the partygoers’ leftover garbage to the potbellied stove that filled the fireplace, placed three peat bricks on top, and lit the newspaper with a match — and the room filled with black smoke. It bellowed out from the stove in waves. When his panic subsided, he opened the windows to welcome the fresh air in. He flapped his arms to cajole the smoke outside like an uninvited nun who had come seeking a donation for the local parish. Then he remembered the flue. A metal crank on the side of the stove turned with some reluctance. The smoke rose from the fire and went up the chimney, only to displace a nest of birds that had settled in the stovepipe but were now rendered homeless. Orwell had rubbed his own hands warm by this fireplace. Ray could just picture it.

He swept the swirling dust storms out the door and dumped the contents of his suitcase and backpack onto the sitting-room floor. The clothes smelled like they wanted nothing more than to provide a loving home for some colorful mold. He threw the shirts he would need right away over some dining-room chairs, which he dragged, scraping across the floor, closer to the dancing fire. The smell of the peat made its way into his sinuses and hair. He ripped the new shirts and shorts from their packages and threw the cardboard inserts into the fire.

Once some warmth returned to his fingers and toes, Ray took a walk outside to inspect the property before it got any darker. The garage contained a number of unusual tools and implements, all neatly arranged. He found pumps, motors, a roll of barbed wire. A sealed oil drum filled with some kind of liquid. Sheets of plastic and canvas tarps. He couldn’t even speculate about the purposes of the long poles with angular, medieval blades. A wooden crate contained a length of rope, along with a set of frayed jumper cables and the largest spider outside of an atomic-age monster movie.

On one side of the house sat a small garden suitable for planting vegetables, if he could keep the wandering sheep away from them. The animals had the run of the island. They had bells around their necks and jingled as they walked. There were also fruit and nut trees he couldn’t identify — maybe Orwell had planted them! Ray fastened a rope between two of them and draped an armful of wet shirts and pants over it. Then he peeled off everything he had on and hung his sweaty clothes on the line.

He stood there, naked and fully exposed to the wilderness and the weather. The cold air and steady mist no longer bothered him and he started to laugh and then he kept laughing until he couldn’t breathe. The water in the distance looked so inviting. Some day soon he would go for a swim. More water fell from the sky. He stomped his feet in the mud. Some tense beast inside his belly spotted an exit and went tear-assing for it; his body felt completely relaxed and at ease. He jumped up and down in the biggest puddles he could find, still laughing, splashing, shouting.

For a full hour Ray ran in circles around the garden. He danced and sang and wiggled his arms in the air above his head. He ran to the top of a hill and rolled — literally rolled — back down toward the house, the hair on his chest and groin picking up burrs along the way. Then he jogged back up and did it again. He rubbed wet earth into the new cuts and scrapes that found their way onto his arms and legs and ass cheeks. The mud soon camouflaged every inch, but he piled more onto his head, into his hair. He was transformed. The rain ran down his chest in brown rivers. He stayed outside until the faintest sunlight reflected on the Paps and then set over Colonsay, an island north of Islay and due west of Jura. The wind picked up even further and made gentle sweeping noises in the trees. His clothes flapped like a series of personal flags. He had declared independence.

When the coldness found his skin, he wiped some of the filth from around his eyes. He was eager to pour a whisky and warm up again by the fire. He headed back to the house, but stopped at the front door. A dead animal sat crumpled on the stoop where a welcome mat might go. It could have been a squirrel or a small possum. Impossible to say. It was more than dead: it had been eviscerated. Its exposed entrails sat coiled in a greasy pile on the top step, still steaming. Some larger creature had moments ago sliced this thing open, crept up to the house, and left it at the door as a kind of offering or threat.

It was at that moment that Ray felt something watching him. Maybe it was just the exhaustion or whatever, but he felt some thing, a palpable, animal presence denser than the bushes in which it stirred. Two glossy eyes flickered at him, close to the ground, and then were gone.

Back in the house, he locked the door behind him. Screw local custom. The fire had died and the interior was pitch black. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. Navigating to the kitchen would require an understanding of the domestic layout he did not yet possess. He had found a box of matches, but to get them again he needed to traverse a thousand miles through the dining room and then to the windowsill above the sink. He shuffled his feet across the dusty floor, reaching blindly for walls, chairs, tables. That creature was lurking outside. He was naked and blind, cocooned in mud and in a strange house in a foreign nation whose language he understood so well yet which remained incomprehensible. Twenty paces took twenty minutes.

He found a drawer full of candles and had just enough light to drink a long gulp from a bottle of scotch and get upstairs. He pulled a musty quilt from the closet, and — still muddy and terrified — climbed into bed and slept for fourteen hours.