An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Ableism and specifically discrimination against d/Deaf and HoH people, and people with epilepsy

Mid-century medical and and religious interventions for people with epilepsy

Mentions of fascism

Implications of sex Descriptions of life at the edge of an active warzone, including lack of resources, displacement, and distant observations of bombings

Depiction of a secondary character with PTSD

Medical neglect resulting in death

Transcript

DISTANT SOUNDS OF MECHANISMS MOVING AND WHIRRING

SIR
(softly)
Apprentice?

THE APPRENTICE GASPS AWAKE

APPRENTICE
Sir?

SIR
You slept.

APPRENTICE
I… yeah.

SIR
Did you dream?

APPRENTICE
Um. Yes?

SIR
Very good. You do not need to tell me what you dreamed of. Are you well?

APPRENTICE
What do you…? Fine, I think.

SIR
Very good. Where do your feet lead you?

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
You walk the path and then?

APPRENTICE
I– I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

SIR
Good, very good. Too much, too fast, I think. Perhaps the problem is me. You do not last very long at all.

APPRENTICE
Oh. The last remnant.

SIR
Yes, the mistake must be mine. What happened, when you finished reading?

APPRENTICE
I don’t… his death. The guy, he was shot, it was fast, it was. But Harry, Dhairya. He lingered.

SIR
After you set the remnant down?

APPRENTICE
He lingered.

SIR
Do you need to sleep more?

APPRENTICE
I don’t think so?

SIR
Very good.

APPRENTICE
I dreamed of you.

SIR
Ah. I see.

APPRENTICE
In my dream, I wasn’t scared of you.

SIR
Are you still scared of me, now you’re awake?

APPRENTICE
Yes.

SIR
Ah. I am. Unsure how I feel about that.

APPRENTICE
So you admit that you feel things, then.

SIR
You are not usually afraid.

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t know what you mean by that.

SIR
No matter. Mistakes, I am making many of them. No sense in wasting our time together, though, even if it will inevitably be brief. For you, at least. One thing I am sure of is that you can bend and bend, but will not break. I brought this for you.

APPRENTICE
What is it?

SIR
A remnant.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
That is all there is here, in the First and Last Place.

APPRENTICE
First and Last of what?

SIR
Oh. I. Do not know.

APPRENTICE
Right. Figures.

SIR
Does it?

APPRENTICE
Yes.

SIR
Take it.

APPRENTICE
I don’t want to.

SIR
Nevertheless, you must.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
That is your purpose.

APPRENTICE
But why?

SIR
It has to be.

APPRENTICE
What’s that supposed to mean?

SIR
What indeed. Now, tell me what you see.

APPRENTICE
Um. It’s a… pipe? Yeah. You put tobacco in the end. And you put it in your mouth. Yeah. This one is made of polished wood. It’s really quite beautiful, it’s so smooth, under my fingers, I– oh.

WHOOSH.

Evelina sprints down the beach after her brother. He clambers up the rocks, stopping to grin back at her now and then. She steps forwards, laying her hands on the cold stone, slick with something green and slippery.

It is the first time she’s been here that she cannot hear the waves, or the wind, or Elio’s voice as he’s calling down to her. All morning, digging ditches, running through the shallows, she has not thought of it. But now, this moment, where Elio is on the rocks and out of sight and she is still standing there below, no way of hearing him call down to her, it’s all that she can about.

Elio’s hand reaches into her eyeline. There’s dirt on his palm. Evelina pulls a face at him. He rolls his eyes, gesturing for her to follow, then holds his hand out for her to take again. This time, she grabs it.

Elio hoists her up, she clings to the rocks with her toes, walking up them, gripping Elio’s hand with both of of hers. At the top, she stumbles forwards into him. Elio steadies her by her shoulders.

She starts to turn away, but Elio holds her still, forcing his face into her eyeline so she can see his mouth when he speaks. ‘Are you okay?’

Evelina nods. Elio nods too. He takes a deep breath, puffing out his cheeks, then leads Evelina along the line of rocks. He stops, lets go of her hand.

The sea breeze is cool, salty. It smells alive the way the sea always does, a freshness and a dampness that clings to her hair when she gets home.

Elio beckons Evelina again. She takes a few cautious steps and looks down near where he’s squatting. It’s a rock pool. Elio’s hands are in the water, swirling the surface. He pulls a starfish from a rock, holding it delicately across his palms. Evelina strokes her fingers across the bumpy surface of its skin. Elio lifts its arm, showing her the strange, alien surface underneath.

He puts the fish back under the water, turns it on its back, gently strokes the bottom of one of the arms. Evelina copies him. She can feel dozens of tiny points of contact.

She yelps, pulling her hand away.

Elio is laughing, his eyes crinkled. He tumbles out of his crouch and lands on his backside, steadying himself with his hands on the rocks.

Evelina scoops up a handful of the cold water and splashes it at him in retaliation. Elio laughs harder. He scrambles too his feet, hops down off the rocks, and starts to run away.

Evelina takes a few tentative steps to follow him, and then halts. It’s higher up than she noticed as Elio pulled her up. The wind blows a little stronger. Her hands are freezing where she touched the water. The tears on her cheeks start out hot but get colder as they reach her chin. She grips her arms tight around her chest.

Elio is running across the sand, under the grey sky. Evelina calls his name. He stops. He turns, looks behind himself, then up at Evelina. Even at this distance she can read the confusion on his face. Why hasn’t she followed? She used to jump and bound after him without a thought. They are twins, halves of a whole, their mother says. Little mirrors.

Not anymore.

Elio says something but he’s too far away for Evelina to see what it is. He walks back over, holds up his hands, helps her jump down. He cradles her to his chest, her face pressed up against the damp, sandy linen of his shirt. Through the thin fabric, she can feel the thud of his heart inside his chest.

WHOOSH.

Evelina jumps when a package lands on the table in front of her. Elio is standing behind her, and his grinning. He crosses the kitchen, kisses their mother on the cheek as she washes the dishes. She waves him off.

Evelina picks up the package, running her fingers first along the soft, fine twine, then the stiff brown paper it’s wrapped in. She weighs it in her hands.

‘A book?’ she says, when Elio turns around again.

He nods. ‘For you,’ he says. ‘I got it in the village.’

Evelina feels a sharp pang in her chest. Evelina swallows the bitterness as soon as it comes. She knows why she can’t go out. She cannot hear trucks and carts on the road, and there are lots of people, lots of traffic. Even if they could keep her safe, mama says, someone would notice she can’t hear. And if anyone finds out, they’ll send her away.

Evelina clutches the book to her chest. Elio kisses her head as he heads out of the kitchen again, eating a tomato.

A moment later, their mother reaches for that tomato and finds it gone. She says something, but she’s half facing the doorway and Evelina can’t make it out.

She and Elio are arguing about something again. They keep doing this, they’ll fight right in front of her, but they behave as though because she cannot hear the words, she has no idea it’s happening.

She turns around, scowling. ‘What’s that?’

‘Present from Elio.’

‘But what is it?’ says their mother.

Evelina shrugs. She unknots the string, unwraps the paper. Inside is a battered paperback, a picture of a dog on the front, ‘the Hound of the Baskervilles’, in Italian, is the title, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Evelina holds it up for her mother to see. She shrugs. ‘Why has he got you a book about dogs?’ she says.

Evelina shrugs too. She finishes her lunch and walks out of the house down the little path to the cliff that looks out over the sea. Evelina finds a large, smooth rock which has been warmed by the sun all morning and sits down on it, opening the book in her lap. She’s unsure in the first pages, but the more she reads, the deeper into the story she falls. The characters, the story, the world, the mystery. She’s reading a description of the hound itself, a great mastiff leering in the darkness, when!

A hand grabs her shoulder! She jumps, dropping the book into her lap.

It’s Elio. He flops down onto the grass in front of her. ‘Sorry!’ he says.

Evelina shakes her head, rolling her eyes.

‘You like the book, then?’

Evelina nods. She dusts off the worn pages, flicks through to the part she’d just been reading, and hands Elio the book, pointing at the passage she’d read.

‘Wow. No wonder you’re—’ says Elio, but she doesn’t see the last word.

Frustrated, Evelina sighs. ‘Say the last part again?’

‘Sorry, I said you’re jumpy,’ he repeats, exaggerating the movements of his mouth. ‘I’m glad you like it.’

Evelina shoves him lightly in the ribs. ‘I really do! Now go away so I can finish it.’

Elio grins, stretching out like a cat. He gets up, ruffles her hair as he walks away.

Evelina sighs and returns to her book. As she reads, the world around her melts away. Her jealousy about Elio, her worries about him, it all evaporates.

By the time she finishes, the sky is turning pink with sunset. Her mother is sitting at the piano. Evelina slams her hand onto the end keys, making her mother jump.

‘What?!’ says her mother.

‘Where’s Elio?’ says Evelina.

‘Upstairs, listening to the radio.’

Evelina runs up the stairs, bursting into her brothers room. He sits bolt upright on his bed, reaching for the radio. When he sees it’s her, he doesn’t bother to turn it off. ‘What?’ he says.

‘Look,’ she says, showing him the first few pages of the book.

‘The publication date?’ says Elio.

‘No!’ says Evelina. ‘Look a list of titles! There are more! You must find them! I need them!’

Elio grins. He turns off the radio. ‘Okay. I’ll try.’

WHOOSH.

Evelina is walking on the beach when she starts to feel strange.

She glances up from the pages of her book, peers over her shoulder.

Nobody is there.

It’s not a good beach for visitors and it’s miles away from anything interesting. She looks up at the sky; clear blue. There’s a chill on the early spring air. She pulls her cardigan more closely around herself and turns her attention back to the page.

She takes a few more steps, but the feeling lingers.

The next thing she knows is her face is in the sand, then that’s gone too.

Evelina wakes in her bed. Elio is asleep next to her, slumped forwards onto the mattress, his fingers loosely tangled in hers. There is a book under his arm; A Study in Scarlet. Maybe he was reading to her, though she wouldn’t have heard it.

They walk to the hospital as soon as she’s well enough. They stick electrodes on her head. The doctor keeps turning away as he’s talking, so she has no idea what he’s saying.

She looks to Elio for help but he is focused entirely on their mother. She speaks behind her hand.

Elio’s expression is increasingly furious. He stands up fast and his chair slams into the wall. Evelina feels the impact resonate through the floor. Elio’s face is red, filled with rage. She has never seen him so angry.

He looks at her. Something about her makes the anger dissolve right before her eyes. He stands there, breathing heavily. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you to be scared.’

‘What’s happening?’

Elio runs a hand over his face. ‘They won’t give you medicine.’

‘Why not?’

The door opens. An orderly takes Elio by the arm, but he yanks it away.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again.

‘Where are you going, Elio?’

The orderly leads him out of the room.

The doctor and Evelina’s mother and speaking intently, as though Elio was never even there at all.

‘Where did they take him?’ Evelina says. The doctor’s gaze flickers over to her, just barely. Her mother doesn’t even glance at her.

Evelina stands up. ‘Look at me!’ she shouts, stomping her foot. The doctor and her mother turn to her, both looking utterly bemused. ‘Just because I can’t hear you doesn’t mean I am stupid.’

‘You’re my daughter,’ says her mother. ‘It is up to me to decide what’s good for you!’

‘I’m nearly an adult!’ Evelina shouts.

‘You are fourteen years old, you’re a child!’ says her mother. And then she bursts into tears.

Evelina blinks in confusion. ‘Mother?’

Her mother shakes her head, burying her face in her hands.

‘Look at me when you talk to me,’ she says, directly to the doctor.

The doctor looks perplexed for a moment. And then he starts to speak. As he does, Evelina sits back down and watches intently. They had thought her seizures had stopped when she was a child, but now they think they’re still a problem. There are medications, but not in Naples; they’d have to travel. It already took them half a day to get from their little house down the coast into the city.

Afterwards, Elio is waiting for them outside. He holds Evelina tight. ‘We’ll go to Milan,’ he promises her. ‘I swear we’ll get this to work. Okay?’

Evelina nods and lets him hold her. But she doesn’t believe him.

WHOOSH

Evelina has seizures every few weeks, after that. Most of them are small, isolated to parts of her body, or just feels like she’s lost track of what she’s doing. Some of them are bigger, though, frightening. Evelina forgets them, but Elio and their mother don’t. She sees the fear in their faces when she wakes up on the floor. She does not know what to say to them about it.

Increasingly, though, Evelina doesn’t know what to say to Elio about anything at all. There is a simmering anger that bubbles out of him. Their mother will not help Evelina understand and Elio won’t explain himself. He storms from the house every day, worked into a fury. Their mother pretends she does not notice, but it’s driving Evelina mad.

It’s something to do with the war, she thinks. When she goes to the beach, or to her reading spot on the cliffs, she can see smoke rising down the coast, from Naples. The bombs started falling just weeks after they’d last gone to the hospital there. No wonder there was no medicine for Evelina. Now there wouldn’t be medicine for anyone.

Every day their mother makes Evelina pray to end the war. She used to make Elio pray too, but now she doesn’t even bother trying. He still carries his rosary, though. Evelina has seen him clutching it when he thinks nobody is looking.

Evelina throws herself into reading, and, in secret, she has begun to write. There are no more new Holmes tales for her to read and as much as she enjoys Poirot and other Christie stories, none of them quite chime the same in her mind.

She spends endless hours writing her own little Holmes stories, sometimes writing in herself in place of Watson who has been kidnapped or injured or otherwise neatly excised from the narrative. Holmes is excited to learn Evelina is deaf; she can read lips through windows and across crowded restaurants and on noisy train carriages, a fabulous help for his deductive reasoning.

Sometimes – when she can bear it – she writes in Elio, too. More and more, in fact. In the stories he’s much as he is in life; angry; aloof; increasingly distant.

One morning she wakes to find him sitting at the end of her bed. ‘I’ve got you a present,’ he says, in a mix of words and the sign language they’ve come up with together over the years.

Evelina rubs her eyes. ‘A present?’

Elio nods. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a polished wooden pipe. He pantomimes smoking it. ‘Elementary!’ he says, between mimed puffs.

Evelina laughs. ‘Is it really for me?’

‘Yes,’ says Elio. ‘Though, probably don’t let mother see. She’d be furious with me.’

Evelina takes the pipe. The wood is smooth, almost buttery under her fingers.

When she looks at him again, Elio is crying. She touches his cheek.

‘Elio, what is it?’

‘I’m leaving,’ he says, rubbing his nose. ‘I’m sorry.’

Nausea hits Evelina like a tidal wave. ‘No.’

‘I have to. I need to do something, I can’t live like this, I—’

‘Aren’t we good enough for you?’ says Evelina

Elio recoils as though he’s been slapped. ‘How can you ask that? Don’t you have any idea what I’ve been doing? For you, for me, for us?!’

Evelina shakes her head.

Elio sighs. ‘It’s better that you don’t know.’

‘I don’t want you to go,’ says Evelina.

‘I know,’ says Elio. ‘But I have to.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Elio smiles, but there are still tears on his cheeks. ‘One day you will, when things are better. Even if I don’t come back—’

‘Why wouldn’t you come back?’ Evelina interrupts, horrified.

Elio squeezes his eyes shut. ‘I will. I will come back. And everything will be better then, I promise.’

He kisses Evelina’s forehead and stand up.

‘Elio!’

‘I need to go.’

Another wave of sickness. ‘Now? Today?!’

Elio nods. He leaves the room.

Evelina throws back her blankets and runs after him. He’s picking up his bag from the kitchen table when she gets downstairs.

‘Elio!’ says Evelina.

Elio ignores her. She starts to run towards him, but her mother grabs her arm.

‘Stop him!’ she says.

‘No,’ says their mother. ‘Let him go.’

The door opens. Elio steps through. The door falls back against the frame.

WHOOSH

The bombs continue to fall on Naples, first all through the night, but then in the day, too. Her mother says she can hear them, sometimes.

One afternoon, Evelina is walking along the cliffs, when she smells something. Smoke, not woodsmoke from someone heating their home. Something strange and unfamiliar; acrid. She goes to her reading spot, the highest point along the coast, and peers around.

About half a mile in land, she can see a column of smoke. For a horrible moment, Evelina is frozen with fear. Perhaps the war has come to them, and all of their praying has been for nothing.

Evelina looks down at the book in her hands, strokes the soft wood of the pipe in her pocket. It was only their house for two miles in any direction, and even then, their neighbours were other farmers. It would not make sense for them to bomb a little farm house with hardly more than a handful of chickens.

The nearest village had barely a thousand people in it. They’d have to have missed their target by an impressive margin.

In that case, it might be a house fire. It smells strange so she’s not confident in that conclusion, but it might be. And that means people might need help. Evelina takes a steadying breath. She starts to walk towards the column of smoke.

It’s coming from the middle of a field. Evelina hops over the low wall. In the middle of a patch of scorched earth is a downed plane.

Evelina walks through the swaying young wheat, barely reaching her knees.

There is a man laying face down a few feet from the plane. She taps his shoulder. No response. She reaches around his head. His neck is sweaty and warm. She jabs her fingers under his jaw. He has a pulse.

It takes a huge amount of effort to roll the man onto his back. His face is grubby, sweat cutting clean lines through the grime. Evelina taps his cheek, lightly at first, but then harder and harder. Finally, she slaps him.

The man gasps awake, his eyes a bright shock of blue amidst the grey smeared onto his skin. He sits up, spluttering, and Evelina falls back and away from him.

He says something. She can’t understand his words. Evelina shakes her head.

The pilot laughs. ‘Italian,’ he says pointing at her. ‘American,’ he says, pointing at himself. ‘Do you speak English?’ says the man.

Evelina takes a moment to understand these words. Elio only speaks a handful of English words, so she barely knows the shapes of it. She shakes her head. She pulls her book out of her pocket, taps the cover. ‘I read it,’ she says.

The man nods. He pats down his coat, produces a pen. He takes Evelina’s paperback and on the inside cover he writes; ‘shelter?’

Evelina nods too. She gets to her feet. The man follows her across the field to a small barn.

She just broke the law. She’s a traitor to her country. She could be shot, for this.

Evelina waits until he’s gone inside, then she bolts back across the field, her heart racing. She runs all the way home.

She goes to take out her pipe. But it isn’t there. Horror fills her. It must have fallen out in the wheat field when she was helping the American.

WHOOSH

Evelina returns to the wheat field the next morning, just after sunrise. She left the house before her mother was awake. The remains to the plane are still smoking, but the acrid smell from the day before is gone.

Evelina walks a small circle around the plane, but she can’t find her pipe anywhere. She puts her face in her hands, sniffling. She sinks down to her knees, feels her tears seeping through her fingers.

After a while, a hand on her back. She looks up; it’s the American. His face is clean, now, or at least mostly clean. He’s saying something; she can’t understand him. She just stares at him. Then, he reaches into his pocket and he hands her her pipe.

Evelina snatches the pipe back. She holds it to her chest.

He says some words. Only the last one she understands. ‘Papa.’ He points at the pipe.

Evelina shakes her head. ‘Brother,’ she says, in Italian first, then again in English, or what she hopes the English word would sound like. She doesn’t know as she had never heard it spoken.

The American smiles oddly. He hesitates, taps his ear and shakes his head.

Evelina is surprised. Her heart is beating fast. She’s not supposed to tell strangers but the way her mother tells it, the American will be dead in a matter of days anyway. She nods, in shock.

The American gives her a thumbs up. ‘Thank you,’ he says in Italian, slowly and carefully.

He helps Evelina to her feet. She puts her pipe into her pocket and goes home.

WHOOSH

Evelina visits the American every day. She brings him food, sometimes a little wine, and when he asks, her brother’s old radio.

They exchange notes in a notebook, scribbles in pencils. She tries teaching him Italian. He shares new English words with her.

His name is Michael, like the archangel. He has not read any Sherlock Holmes, but he has seen some films. Evelina is delighted to learn of their existence. Michael tells Evelina what he can about them and she delightedly rings out even more from him, about cinemas, about America, about the war.

At the end of the second week, Evelina takes him a tomato from the garden, some bread and cheese, and after he’s eaten, he asks for her pipe.

He stuffs it with tobacco from a small tin hidden within his heavy leather jacket. He puffs on it, then holds it out towards Evelina.

Evelina takes it. The taste is bitter, sour, hot. It feels like it’s burning her throat. She coughs and splutters.

Michael moves his hands, laughing at her.

‘What are you doing?’ says Evelina.

He picks up their notebook. ‘Sorry, of course you don’t speak ASL.’

Evelina circles the letters, adding question marks. ‘ASL?’

‘American sign language,’ writes Michael. ‘What’s sign language like in Italy?’

Evelina shakes her head and shrugs.

Michael’s expression falters. ‘Nobody taught you?’ he writes

Evelina shakes her head again, biting her lip. ‘Have to stay secret. I stay here. Elio and mama go to town. I stay here.’

Michael’s expression shatters like a dropped glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ he writes. ‘My brother is deaf. He wanted to be a pilot. Army wouldn’t let him. So, I’m a pilot instead.’

‘My brother left,’ Evelina writes.

‘Where?’

Evelina shrugs.

Michael sighs. Evelina looks up at him. There’s a dozen things to say, but it would take too long to write them.

Michael smiles. Evelina smiles back.

Michael reaches out, sweeps her hair from her face, leans close, and kisses her.

The touch of his lips is light and cool against hers. Tentatively, Evelina kisses back.

Michael stops, picks up the notebook. ‘Okay?’ he writes.

Evelina nods.

‘Tap my shoulder three times, if you want me to stop.’

Evelina smiles. She kisses him, hard, open-mouthed. He tastes like tobacco smoke.

WHOOSH

The next time that Evelina visits Michael, there’s a strange energy about him; he’s practically bouncing. He picks up the notebook: ‘I spoke to your brother!’

Evelina sets down the small parcel of food she’s brought down and frowns at him. ‘What? How could you? He’s gone?’

‘On the radio,’ says Michael. ‘He’s in the Resistance. We’ve been supporting them for months. They can help get me out of here!’

Evelina feels like a piece of paper which has been crumpled in his hands.

‘Oh,’ says Evelina.

Michael’s expression falls. ‘You know I can’t live in this shed forever,’ he writes in the notebook.

Evelina snatches herself away from him. Evelina won’t look at him, won’t look at the notebook as he thrusts it into her line of vision. He grabs her shoulder, she brushes him off, burying her face in her hands to hide her tears.

Evelina runs across the field. Michael does not follow her.

She does not visit the barn for three days. When she does, it’s empty.

On one of the bales of hay, she spots something; the notebook, all of their exchanges still scribbled in pencil on the pages. She flicks through to the last thing that Michael had written, the thing he was so desperate for her to see before she ran off: ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he’d written. ‘I promise.’

WHOOSH.

Things get worse. The war does come to the countryside. First, Evelina and her mother take people in who have forced to leave their homes nearby. And then all of them flee for shelter in the village when the fighting comes too close to the house.

For a moment, against the odds, it seems like the resistance are going to win, but that victory is snatched away at the last moments.

Evelina and her mother stay in the back bedroom of a small house owned by an elderly couple. Evelina passes the time reading and writing. She writes incredibly small, cramming in as many words onto each page as possible for fear that she’ll never get a new journal. The only other notebook she has is the one from the barn. She tries not to think about it. Every time she does, she gets knots in her stomach.

It feels almost as bad as when she thinks of Elio. Michael said he’d spoken to him on the radio. She should have stayed. She should have told got him to send a message. She should have told Elio to come home. And now they hear so many of the Resistance members who were caught by the government and the Germans have been shot, murdered. Is Elio amongst them?

The fear writhes inside of Evelina. She tries to ignore it. She reads. She writes. She helps around the house, when she is well enough. Her seizures are getting closer together, and more and more violent. She wakes up with bruises on her arms, blood in her mouth from biting her tongue and her cheeks. Her mother weeps and prays about it. So far neither has helped.

They hear no real news for months and months, and then one day, mama comes back to the house weeping. Horror grips Evelina’s throat tight, so visceral it makes it hard to breathe.

‘Elio?’ asks Evelina.

But it’s not news about her brother. It’s news about the war. It’s over. Evelina and her mother cling to each other and weep for what feels like hours.

The elderly couple put on a record for the first time since before the war. The old woman dances with mama, the old man claps from his arm chair, too stiff to stand. Evelina sits by the record player, feeling the music reverberate across the soft pads of her fingers.

WHOOSH

They return to the house in the autumn. Everything upstairs was ransacked, both Elio and Evelina’s bedrooms completely ruined. Evelina and her mother have been sleeping on a mattress in the sitting room.

Evelina is sweeping out the old chicken coop, wondering if they’ll buy new ones in the spring. She turns, and there he is, at the yard gate.

Elio.

She drops the broom and runs to him, flinging her arms around him. He winces, flinching back from her, but he does hug her back.

‘I missed you!’ she says.

Elio smiles. He doesn’t say anything at all.

He doesn’t say anything to mother, either. She kisses his forehead, makes him some of the little food they have in the kitchen.

That night, all three of them lie together, shoulder to shoulder in the dark.

Mother sleeps; Evelina can feel the mattress vibrating with her snoring. But Elio lies awake, staring at the ceiling. Evelina watches him. She takes his hand. His mouth opens in shock, but after a moment, his fingers close around hers.

WHOOSH.

Elio’s been shot, through the chest. The injury is only half healed, the surgical scars around it even fresher. Evelina catches him washing at the water butt outside in the cold morning air, coughing clouds of mist into the chill.

She scolds him, brings him inside, heats water, and cleans his side for him. He twitches in pain whenever her cloth meets his skin, but he says nothing. He doesn’t even cry.

Winter is bitter, cold. There is not enough food, and the hunger seems to make Evelina’s seizures even worse. By January, they’re forced to go to Naples, burnt husk of its former self that it is. The whole city is filled with wandering strays like them. Everyone has this look about them, a quiet horror distilled into numbness.

They find rooms to stay in. They are given food and water. They go to the hospital.

There is still no medicine for Evelina, but they look at Elio’s still unhealed wounds and give him pills, tell him he needs to eat more vegetables. He says nothing, still. Nothing.

Evelina writes. She puts her pipe between her teeth and scribbles into the last pages of her journal. Stories of Sherlock and Watson and Evelina and Elio. She sits beside him as he lies in bed, curled on his good side. She follows the words along with her finger, holding the book in front of his face.

Elio does not say a word.

WHOOSH

Eating regularly, sleeping somewhere warm and dry, with her brother close by, Evelina’s seizures become less intense. They’re still worse than they were before the war, but they are less regular, and every day, she becomes less and less afraid to go out of the house.

Evelina gets a job cleaning at the hospital. She hates how people treat her there. They either assume she’s stupid and incapable, or they wholly pretend she does not exist. Evelina prefers the latter. It means she can get on with her work and let her mind wander whilst her body is occupied.

She imagines the hospital is quite a loud place, and feels lucky she’s not forced to listen to it all day long. The smells and sights are enough to be overwhelming on their own. With noises added, she can’t imagine how anyone can bear to be in there at all.

Mother has a job at a small grocers. She brings home produce every day. Elio’s wounds are healing and each day he seems a little bit more alive, if not quite himself.

It begins with reading. Evelina walks in from the market and sees him sitting on his narrow bed, reading her stories. He holds the book close to his face, frowning. She taps his shoulder.

‘Bad?’ she says.

Elio shakes his head. ‘Your writing is just really small,’ he says.

Evelina laughs. Elio almost smiles. He goes back to reading.

Some days he still does not speak, won’t even pick up a book. He just lies there. Sometimes Evelina lies with him. Back to back, she can feel he barely breathes on the side where he was shot. When he lies on his back, only the good side of his chest really rises at all.

WHOOSH

Evelina buys herself a new journal. She sits down, pipe in her mouth.

Elio taps her shoulder. ‘You know these aren’t Holmes stories?’ he says, holding her old journal up.

Evelina feels her cheeks turn pink with fury. ‘Yes they are. I try my best!’

‘They’re good!’ says Elio, holding his hand up in defence. ‘I like them! But they’re not Holmes stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t have written them. They’re your stories.’

Evelina takes the pipe out of her mouth. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

Elio smiles. ‘I think you should write something without Sherlock Holmes in it.’

Evelina blinks rapidly. ‘Why?’

Elio laughs. He shakes his head. ‘You’re really good at this, that’s why! Someone would buy these stories, I’m sure of it. But they can’t if they’re about Sherlock Holmes.’

Evelina studies his face for a long moment. ‘You’re not joking?’

Elio shakes his head.

Evelina puts the pipe back in her mouth. She nods. At the top of her page she crosses out the words ‘A New Sherlock Holmes Adventure’ and writes instead ‘An Evelina Mystery.’

She frowns at the new title. She turns the book around to show Elio.

Elio grins. ‘Yeah, perfect!’

WHOOSH

Evelina is at work when she gets a funny feeling.

She looks up, over her shoulder. There’s nobody there, just the empty hallway that she’s been mopping.

She turns back to work, trying to lose herself in the motions of cleaning, thinking about her story, but the feeling doesn’t dissipate.

It seems as though everything is turning sideways.

How curious, she thinks to herself.

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
Mmmnnhhh.

SIR
Are you alright?

APPRENTICE
What– what happened. She was fine, she was just cleaning and then–

SIR
Death does not always come when expected.

APPRENTICE
But. But she just. She died? Just like that? Why?

SIR
All things die, Apprentice. That it the consequence of living. Sooner or later, it will be over.

APPRENTICE
But she lived through the war, she helped her brother, and Michael, she never saw him again and–!

SIR
Yes, yes, yes.

APPRENTICE
So, why?

SIR
There is no why, Apprentice. There is only this.

APPRENTICE
But she. She was a good writer, she never even got to–

SIR
Is a life only worthy to you if a person accomplishes their full potential?

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t know. How the hell could I possibly answer a question like that?!

SIR
I would hope that you couldn’t.

APPRENTICE
How can you know?

SIR
Know what, in theory?

APPRENTICE
If someone had fulfilled their potential?

SIR
How can we know what that potential truly is?

APPRENTICE
So there’s just… there’s no answer? You won’t help me at all?

SIR
This is the task. You must pass a judgement. That is your purpose.

APPRENTICE
But she never had chance to–

SIR
Shelve or discard?

APPRENTICE
Shelve?

SIR
Very good.

APPRENTICE
So, that was the right answer?

SIR
Not this again.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
It is not a question of right or wrong, Apprentice. I do not have the patience for this. Perhaps you ought to rest.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Go to sleep!

END

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