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:

Violence and cruelty to animals

References to parental loss

Implications of suicide

Discussions of life during a time of war

Mentions of dead by gunshots

Mentions of sex with dubious consent (identity fraud)

Threatening/harassing behaviour

Detailed description of heart attack symptoms

Transcript

APPRENTICE
Mmfffnn.

HUMMING AND WHISPERING STOPS. THE ONLY SOUND IS A QUIET HUM, AND THE DISTANT SOUND OF THE SEA.

CLOTHES RUSTLE

APPRENTICE
Wh– what. Where am I? Hello?! Let me out, let me–

SIR
Ah! Finally! You are properly awake! Good.

APPRENTICE
…what?

SIR
I’m glad to hear you speak. For a moment, as things settled into place, I began to worry.

APPRENTICE
I– oh. Okay.

SIR
No matter. You are here to help. That is why you are here.

APPRENTICE
Okay. What do you need?

SIR
Very good.

SIR
Do you recognise these?

APPRENTICE
Are those… glasses?

SIR
Yes. Here. Look at them, if you like.

THE GLASSES FALL TO THE TABLE

APPRENTICE
Am I in some kind of trouble?

SIR
Why would you be?

APPRENTICE
This is… the table, the small room. I… it makes me think…

SIR
I wonder, of what?

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry. I don’t know.

SIR
Hmm. You seem different.

APPRENTICE
Different from what?

SIR
Before. No matter.

The spectacles. Do you recognise them?

APPRENTICE
Um… They’re kind of crooked? Hmm. What if I put them on? Oh. They don’t change what things look like, I think that means the person they belonged to didn’t need them? But, wait. Wait…?

A FEW FOOTSTEPS

SIR
Apprentice?

APPRENTICE
This wasn’t here before. It’s like tent flaps, and when I touch it, I—

THE APPRENTICE GASPS

WHOOSH

Basil is sitting on the edge of his seat. For weeks, he’s been begging his mother to let him go to see the magician at the travelling carnival down the road. This is the very last day the carnival will be in town, and tickets were just two pence, half the price they had been all week, so his mother finally relents.

Basil enters the tent practically bouncing with enthusiasm, almost half an hour before the start of the show. He sits on a little stool, sitting, staring, at the small wooden stage where the magician will perform his show.

The Amazing Atticus will perform feats of wonder hereto unseen, the sign outside the little tent promised. Every day Basil has been coming past, trying to peer through the tent flaps, hearing the crowd inside ooing and ahing at the Amazing Atticus’ tricks. Now he’s here. He’s clutching his notebook and pencil in his hand.

The Amazing Atticus emerges. He’s a short, portly man dressed in a purple suit with a blue velvet shoulder cape. He bows for his entrance applause, does a brief introduction, and then produces a small canary in a cage.

He shows it to everyone, the bird fluttering its wings anxiously.

And then! Ah! A puff of smoke! A flash of light.

The cage sitting on the magician’s hand is empty.

The crowd, Basil included, gives an astonished gasp.

‘Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ says the Amazing Atticus. He reaches into his jacket, and pulls the fluttering yellow bird out of his inside pocket, to uproarious cheering and applause. ‘She’s perfectly safe.’

The bird flutters, jumping from the magician’s hand and into a small cage he has placed on an angled table in the middle of the stage.

Basil pushes his glasses up his nose.

The Amazing Atticus is talking, but Basil isn’t listening. Before it had disappeared, the canary had been perfectly yellow. Now, the edges of some of its feathers seemed white.

Perhaps it is a trick of the light, Basil thinks.

The Amazing Atticus comes to the front of the stage. He examines the audience, and asks, ‘would any of this delightful audience be brave enough to volunteer?’

Basil shoots his hand into the sky. The Amazing Atticus glances at him, but passes him over. He chooses a little girl from the third row. She bounces to the stage to a smattering of applause.

The Amazing Atticus appears to pull a deck of cards from the girl’s ear. The crowd laughs. He shuffles the cards with great showmanship, then holds them out in a fan before himself.

‘Pick a card, any card!’ he says. The little girl chooses a card, goes to hand it back to the magician.

‘No! Don’t show me!’ he says. ‘Show them.’

The girl turns her card around. She holds it out, looking nervous. It’s the seven of hearts.

‘Now, my dear,’ says the magician. ‘Place it back into my deck.’

The magician splits the deck in half. And as he does so, for a fraction of a second, so fast that Basil almost misses it, he glances at the card on the bottom of the top half of the split.

The girl slides her card into the deck. The magician hands the deck to her.

‘Hey,’ says Basil, but his voice is drowned up by the rest of the crowd, laughing at some quip the magician just made.

‘Go ahead and shuffle them,’ says the magician. The girl does, splitting the deck once, twice, three times before handing it back to the magician. He gives the cards a flourish, and then lays them face up on his angled table, so the audience can all see.

He plucks out the seven of hearts. ‘Young lady, was this your card?’

Basil stands up as everyone around him begins to applaud. ‘That’s not magic!’ he shouts.

This time, the magician notices him, casts him a look of consternation.

‘You’re a fake!’ Basil shouts.

The clapping around Basil peters a little.

The Amazing Atticus’ smile falters, but only a little.

‘Basil, sit down,’ says his mother.

‘No! His a lying liar!’ Basil shouts. He storms forward before his mother can catch his arm. He reaches under the Amazing Atticus’ cape and pulls, from a pocket on his side, a flattened cage. Inside, a crushed, dead canary.

The crowd gasps in horror.

Basil drops the cage to the floor. He glares at the Amazing Atticus. ‘You’re a fraud.’

‘It’s just a show, kid,’ says the Amazing Atticus.

Basil spits in his face. He turns and bolts out of the tent, his eyes stinging. He runs and runs, out of the carnival, down the road, all the way to their little cottage on the sea front.

His mother arrives home not long after him.

‘Basil!’ she chastises, softly.

‘I thought he could do real magic!’ Basil shouts, so loud it tears his throat as it comes out of him. His eyes are streaming tears. He takes off his glasses to scrub at them furiously.

‘Oh, Bas, sweetheart.’

‘How will I ever get dad back?’ he asks, horrified.

Basil’s mother’s expression cracks. She pulls him tight into a hug. ‘I– I’m so sorry! I should have told you. He’s not coming back, Basil.’

‘But he wrote me letters!’ says Basil. ‘I got one last week!’

His mother sobs, holding him close. She whispers into his hair, between kisses, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’

Basil cries and cries, until his eyes and head are throbbing. He falls asleep in his mother’s arms.

WHOOSH

Basil slings his jacket over his shoulder. His friend, Michael, is lugging his trunk down the awkward, narrow staircase of their dormitory.

‘Let me help,’ says Basil, ineffectively. He knows Michael won’t let him.

Michael ignores him, as predicted.

‘I can’t believe you’re dropping out of Cambridge to be a fighter pilot,’ Basil scoffs.

Michael laughs awkwardly. ‘Yeah, well. Haven’t you heard, Bas? There’s a war on.’

‘I am so sure that when your brother told you he wanted you to fly planes, this isn’t what he meant,’ says Basil.

‘You’ve never even met my brother,’ says Michael, rolling his eyes.

‘No, but I’ve read all your letters from him.’

Michael balks. ‘You have not.’

Basil shrugs. ‘What’s the point, anyway? The US isn’t even fighting. They’re just selling weapons. It’s kind of repugnant, actually.’

‘Oh, so you’re a pacifist, now?’ says Michael. ‘Try telling that to the guy you punched the teeth out of at the pub on Friday.’

‘He was rude,’ says Basil.

A little of the humour leeches out of him. The man at the pub had been ranting and raving about madness, about how they should march the mentally ill to the front lines to absorb the gunfire. He had no way of knowing about Basil’s father, of course. That he’d gone mad when Basil was a toddler. They’d had to come and take him away. He died in the hospital. Basil doesn’t know how. His mother won’t tell him. But he’s pretty certain he knows what happened, anyway.

Basil does not take mocking the mentally unwell lightly.

‘He got what was coming to him, Bas, don’t get me wrong,’ says Michael. ‘I just mean you’re the last one who could claim to be a pacifist.’

Basil shrugs. ‘For all you know, maybe I object to war on principle, but I’m comfortable with every day, common or garden variety violence.’

‘I might believe you, if I didn’t know for a fact the army turned you down on account of you being blind as a bloody bat without your glasses on,’ says Michael. He leans against the wall. ‘Thanks for keeping me company while I packed up. I appreciate it.’

Basil shrugs. He rubs at his elbows. ‘You think you’ll come back?’

Michael shrugs too. ‘Who can say? Maybe, when the war’s done, if they’ll have me.’

Basil gives a funny sort of laugh. It makes his stomach flutter. ‘Anyone would have you, Michael.’

Michael grins, dazzling. ‘You flatter me.’

Basil shrugs. He sighs into the morning air. His breath makes a small cloud.

For a moment, he and Michael simply look at each other.

‘Right,’ Michael says, after too long, and nowhere near long enough.

‘Yes,’ Basil agrees.

They step towards each other. There is a pause before they pull each other into a hug, and then Basil is in Michael’s arms, and they’re squeezing each other tight, and Basil has a head full of Michael’s cologne.

At the start of the war, there had been six of them, close friends who’d fallen in with each other almost by accident in their first week at Cambridge. They had wasted so many nights spend drinking whiskey and telling each other nonsense stories they’d come up with on the fly. One by one, after the war was declared, each of them had gone.

Last week, they got word that David, the first of their group to leave, had been shot dead in combat. Nobody has heard from Peter in months. They had a letter from Xander two weeks ago, but there were bloody fingerprints on the edge of the paper.

The hug is over. Michael claps Basil on the shoulder. ‘Write, won’t you?’ he says.

Basil nods profusely. ‘You too.’

WHOOSH

It begins innocently enough. The first one is a joke.

Basil checks his pigeon hole every day, every day finds no responses in it, and one evening as he sits down to pen yet another letter he’s certain will never even make it to Peter, he writes, ‘I imagine if you were to respond, it would be something like this’.

The story comes surprisingly easy to Basil. Piecing the fragments he knows of Peter’s deployment together with the information he has from the war report, Basil speaks of daring acts of courage, of great losses, the honour and the horrors of war.

He doesn’t send the letter. He folds it, puts it in his desk. ‘Dear Peter,’ he writes, on a clean piece of paper. ‘I am going mad for lack of good company.’

The second time he does it, it’s a little indulgence. A goodbye letter from David, words Basil wishes he’d read. It comes out stilted at first, but within half an hour he’s got the gist of it, and there, on the page, an imagined story of David’s last days. ‘If I don’t return, know I was happiest in Cambridge, with you,’ he makes David write. ‘Know it was those heady days I dreamt of, of our stories, and the whiskey, and our laughter. That’s what I was thinking of amidst the mud and the misery of war.’

It starts to get more regular, after that. Basils writes the letters to his friends, and then he pens their responses. Sometimes, he posts them to himself so they’ll arrive in his pigeon hole a few days later. At the pub, chatting to the handful of students who remain, he extols of everyone’s deeds and heroism, forgetting even himself for hours at a time that he has not heard from these friends in months.

One morning, Basil is woken by a knock at the door to his apartment. He opens it to see a young woman on his doorstep. There are circles around her eyes; she clearly has not slept. Her nose is red from rubbing it. She looks at any moment ripe to burst into tears.

She tells Basil that she’s Mary, Peter’s girlfriend. She’s not heard from him in months, but everyone says that Basil has been getting letters from him.

She’s been writing to Peter desperately for so long, she’s not heard from him, she’s so worried, why hasn’t she heard from him, but Basil has?

Basil’s heart clenches. For a moment, he’s filled with dread, and then he’s speaking. He isn’t sure why he answers as he does. The words fall out of him. Another game of storytelling on the fly.

‘Peter mentions you, actually,’ says Basil. ‘He says he was worried he’d offended you, as he’d not had a single letter from you in so long. He was scared to write in case of doing further damage.’

Fat tears roll down Mary’s cheeks. She shakes her head. ‘But I’ve been writing three times a week!’ she says.

Basil fumbles around the occasional table by his front door. He stuffs a handkerchief into Mary’s hand.

‘I’m sure it’s a problem with the post,’ says Basil.

Mary sniffles. She dabs at her nose. ‘Maybe.’

Basil fidgets. ‘As I know my letters are getting to him, perhaps you should send one along with mine? I’ve not finished, but if you leave it with me, I’ll seal it into my envelope, and pass it on. Alright?’

Mary nods. Basil lets her inside. He puts on a pot of tea whilst Mary writes her letter to Peter at his little writing bureau in the corner. She seals it into a little envelope, sets some coins atop it. ‘For postage,’ she explains. She blows her nose on Basil’s handkerchief.

‘Don’t worry, Mary,’ says Basil, softly. ‘I’m sure you’ll hear from him soon.’

Mary is gone by ten o’clock in the morning.

Basil sits down at his bureau. He moves Mary’s coins aside, tears into her envelope, his heart thrumming in his chest. Mary says she’s missed him terribly, details a sickness with her mother, worries about Peter, thanks Basil profusely. She tells Peter that she was worried he’d make a widow of her before they’re even officially engaged. Then she signs the letter off with all her love.

Basil sits, staring at the words for a moment.

He takes off his glasses, polishes them on his shirt sleeve, and then he gets out his pen.

‘Dear Mary,’ he writes. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t write for so long. I was dreadfully worried something had happened to you, and afraid I’d somehow caused offence, so I didn’t want to press.’

WHOOSH

By the end of the war, the letters have seeped their way into Basil’s life. He has his hair cut, military style. He travels into London, spends time in bars. He introduces himself as Peter; as Michael; as David.

Each name is like shrugging into a different coat. Peter is from London, he was an officer in the RAF. He saw Bastogne. He’s gentle, he’s funny. His fiance was killed in the Blitz. David is an army Lieutenant. He’s frightfully brave, but changed by the experiences of what he saw overseas. His squadron found one of the camps. Basil stares into his glass when he recounts this. Michael is Basil’s favourite. An American fighter pilot – he’s lived in the UK for years, that’s why his accent is so spotty, but he went back to be part of the fight, and was instrumental in forming a good relationship between American and British airmen.

The stories that Basil gives these characters barely resemble his friends at all. He has not heard from them in years. He assumes, then, that they’re dead. What else can he assume?

Though it’s not a healthy pastime, nor is it perhaps a tasteful one, it is harmless, Basil reasons. It’s an escape. A few moments where his friends are alive.

And over time, Basil has become good at this. In the evenings, when he is pulling the stockings of some grateful girl from the West End who is sleeping with him to thank him for his service, it feels like he’s a part of some play, not engaging in real life at all. These women would not have slept with Basil; they would not have looked at Basil twice. He’s not dependable like Peter, serious and clever like David, sharp and witty and good-looking like Michael.

He stays with the girls until they fall asleep. Silently, he puts on his clothes, and leaves as quietly as he can. When he steps out into the streets, in the cold light of the morning, he takes his glasses out of his pocket and puts them on. He gets on the train, and heads to work, Basil again.

WHOOSH

Basil is in a bar, talking to a young woman who is wearing a deep blue dress. She’s had perhaps a little too much to drink and keeps laughing breathlessly at Basil’s old war stories. ‘Oh, Peter,’ she gushes. She chuckles into her glass, the sound echoing.

She excuses herself to go the bathroom, and Basil straightens up on his barstool.

There’s a newspaper a foot or so down the bar. He can’t read it without his glasses on, but he pulls it towards himself anyway. Peter has perfect vision; he needs it to be able to fly.

‘Basil?’

The sound of his own name is like a bucket of cold water over Basil’s head. He looks up from the paper. There is a woman standing there in an expensive fur coat. For a moment, he doesn’t recognise her, and he’s scrambling through his mind, tearing through every memory he has of girls he’s slept with in the last few years.

But this woman is none of them. She’s not his type. She’s taller, mousier, more expensive.

‘Mary,’ says Basil, a little breathlessly.

Mary’s eyes are welling with tears.

‘Oh, Peter, did you get bored already?’ asks the drunk girl Basil has been chatting with.

‘Sorry, this is just an old—’ Basil begins.

‘Peter?’ Mary asks, incredulous.

There is a transparent moment, like a window through time. On one side of it, Mary does not understand, and on the other, she does, and Basil watches it happen on her face.

One of her hands raises to cover her mouth. A tear spills over her eyelashes.

‘All this time, I felt sorry for you,’ she whispers. ‘I’d always wondered, I thought, it’s coincidence, the letters. They never really responded to things I’d said, so I thought… they must be old. They must be delayed. And when they kept coming even after we were sure Peter was dead, I was so certain that’s what it was. I thought it had been happening to you too.’

Basil feels hollow inside, like an empty underground station. ‘Mary, I’m so sorry,’ Basil whispers.

Mary slaps him once, hard across the face.

Basil raises his hand to cover the stinging flesh.

‘What’s going on?’ asks the drunk girl sat next to them, whose name Basil cannot remember.

Mary slaps her, too.

‘Hey!’ the girl protests.

‘Oh, there you are!’ a man loudly announces. He grabs Basil by the arm. Basil staggers to his feet. He’s still staring at Mary, who is sobbing now, sobbing as the drunk girl at the bar shouts at her.

Basil is near-dragged backwards out of the bar.

In the cool night air, his saviour takes him by the shoulders. ‘You with me?’ he asks.

Basil blinks and nods. ‘What are you—’

‘You need to be more careful,’ the man drops his hands from Basil, to shove two cigarettes into his mouth, lights them both, and hands one to Basil.

‘I don’t smoke,’ Basil says.

‘Who cares?’ says the man.

Basil takes a drag and coughs, splutters.

‘Why did you—’

‘I saw you three times in a week, a couple of months ago, in the same bar using different names. It’s sloppy,’ says the man.

Basil blinks, stunned. ‘I’m sorry, who the hell are you?!’

The man grins. It’s dazzling. His blue eyes catch in the light of the streetlamp above them. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ he says.

‘What are you talking about?’ Basil asks, numbly.

The man shrugs. ‘I thought you were like me, at first, but maybe a few steps behind. So I watched you.’

The man laughs. He reaches into Basil’s coat, pulls out his glasses. He opens the arms and slides them onto Basil’s face. All Basil can do is stand there, letting him.

‘You’re not like me at all, Basil Hayworth,’ says the man. He taps Basil on the cheek, and walks away.

‘What?’ Basil calls after him.

The man does not turn.

WHOOSH

The letters start arriving a few months after the confrontation with Mary, at the bar.

Basil has been being more careful. He keeps lists, now, bars where each of his characters go. David, he decides, ought to wear glasses. He’s an intellectual; he reads. The women like that he’s sensitive. Sometimes, when he goes home with them, he confesses awful deeds he did in the war. The women coo and hold him. Basil scrunches up his face. Nine times out of ten, now, he can make himself cry when he wants to.

One evening he gets in from work, intending to get dressed up and go out as usual, when he spots a letter waiting for him on his doormat. It’s not official post; his name is written in beautiful calligraphy. Nobody has written to Basil since his mother died, so it all feels a little odd. He opens the envelope as he walks through to his apartment’s little kitchen.

‘Dear Basil,’ the letter begins. ‘It’s Janet, from Copenhagen. I’ve thought of almost nothing but our conversation since we had. It is truly incredible to find a man of such incredible military prowess who also possesses such a keen interest in the arts.’

The letter goes on, concluding with a note that Janet will be visiting London in a few months and would love to meet up with him again.

Basil has never been to Copenhagen. He’s never even left England.

The next letter arrives just a few weeks after the first. Again, Basil is praised for his intelligence and interests, though this time, he’s described as an infantryman. Again, the woman the letter is from invites Basil to meet with her when she visits London. Again, Basil doesn’t recognise the name, and has not visited the city the letter was posted from, nor the locations mentioned in the letter.

They come every few months, after that. There are variables; like Basil’s characters, his exact background shifts and cycles between each of these women. The common factors are their great admiration, and the underlying implication that Basil has somehow let on he may be interested in something more serious, so they ought to meet up and have dinner together the moment she’s in London in order to discuss it.

Basil receives the letters with increasing horror. It does not impact him very much after the first, or the second, but by the third, he finds that when he goes to give one of his characters’ names to a pretty young thing at a bar, the words are stuck in his mouth, like toffee in his teeth.

By the end of the first year, he barely leaves his home at all, except for work.

Still, the letters keep coming and coming. Always from different women, from all over the world, all determined to meet with him for dinner. Once, he’s so upset and distraught by it that he decides he will agree. He writes back, names a restaurant, and two months later there he is, meeting a glamorous young woman. She is sat waiting for him but when Basil arrives, she does not recognise him. Why would she, he supposes? They’ve never met!

Embarrassed, Basil returns home without indicating his presence to the woman at all. He sits in the bath, fully clothed, and sobs.

WHOOSH

Basil leans his spade against the wall, just inside the kitchen, and pours himself a glass of water from the jug his wife, Beatrice, keeps in the fridge. She’s outside with their sons, twin boys, clapping as she tries to teach them how to skip rope under the still-bearable morning sunshine. Half an hour out of Perth, it will only be tolerable for a little while before they’ll all have to come inside.

The letterbox clatters. Basil wanders from the kitchen into the hall. He puts on his glasses and goes through the post. It’s mostly bills, and early birthday cards for the twins, who will be turning four in a week and a half. At the bottom of the pile is a letter. It is covered with stamps and post marks. It has clearly come a long way.

Basil’s stomach drops for a moment, flashing back to the months he was tormented by letters from women he’d never met. This was the reason he’d fled to Australia in the first place, but the letter is addressed to Michael Pryce, just like all the others, so Basil opens it.

Several items drop out of the envelope as he pulls the letter free.

Basil is about to stoop and pick them up, but stops when he catches the first line of the letter. ‘Dear Basil,’ it begins.

Basil’s stomach drops. He feels hollow, dizzy. He fumbles with the letter, fingers suddenly slack, vision struggling to focus. Basil lowers himself to the ground. Despite the glass of water he’d just drunk, his mouth is suddenly dry, but he does not trust his legs to help him stand to get another.

He starts to read the letter he’s holding in his shaking hands. ‘My name is Stephen Grenville,’ it begins. ‘And I believe that in some capacity you have met the man who ruined my life.’

Basil’s lips are numb. He drops the letter. On his hands and knees, he fumbles for the things that fell out of the envelope. The first thing he lifts is a newspaper clipping. There’s a photograph on it.

Though Basil only met him once, he recognises him instantly. It’s the man he met at the pub, who saved him from his altercation with Mary. The man he met right before the letters started to arrive. He’s standing next to a woman, a bride. Perhaps he just married her, though he looks awfully young. Underneath, it says ‘the Lord and Lady du Perier’.

The next is another photograph of the same man, only this time, in this photograph, his eyes are brown, wide as they stare down the barrel of the camera, his expression severe, his gaze focused and precise. He’s naked in the picture, turning towards whoever is taking the image, lying on a plush bed.

Basil turns the photograph over. On the back, there is a single word. ‘Basil’.

Basil lifts the letter again, but the words are unclear. The paper is shaking too much for him to see. He takes off his glasses, tries to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but the more he tries, worse his vision gets.

All of Basil is shaking.

He feels like there is a vice around his chest. He cannot breathe in enough. The pain is rising and rising, and his vision is darkening at the edges. Distantly, he can hear his wife laughing, his boys asking question that Basil cannot quite work out. Basil’s vision is dark. All he can think is that his wife will find him here dead holding this letter. He had always meant to tell her who he really was. He’d always meant to. But it just got so complicated, and then she had the boys, and now? She’s going to find out like this.

He thinks of his glasses. He thinks of the real Michael, who never bothered to write to him even once. He thinks about Peter, about Mary’s tearful eyes. He thinks of his mother, lying to him that his father would come home. He thinks of the dead canary, crushed in its cage and hidden in the Amazing Atticus’ jacket.

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
So?

APPRENTICE
So what?

SIR
What is this man?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know what you mean.

SIR
What do you think of him?

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t know! It’s a bit sad that it ended up that way, I guess?

SIR
Is that all?

APPRENTICE
Should it not be?!

SIR
You tell me.

APPRENTICE
I– I’m sorry!

SIR
I’m not sure this is going to work.

APPRENTICE
I’m trying my best.

SIR
To what end?

APPRENTICE
You said you needed my help!

SIR
Ah. So I did.

APPRENTICE
Maybe if you just– if you’d explain. Maybe if I understood better I could help you better.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
Sorry, I just– you seem frustrated.

SIR
I should not seem anything. I am not anything.

APPRENTICE
Fine, sure, whatever, it’s just you asked for my help and I can’t help you unless you explain what you need from me.

SIR
Hmm.

APPRENTICE
What?!

SIR
You are very different, now.

APPRENTICE
From what?!

SIR
Let’s not get into that. Look alive, would you? We’ve plenty more to get through. He seems sad, you say?

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
Would you shelve this or discard it?

APPRENTICE
In what… sense…?

SIR
Shelve or discard. Choose one.

APPRENTICE
Discard?

SIR
Very well. It is done.

APPRENTICE
Wait, you’re leaving?! You can’t just– you can’t leave me here!

SIR
I’m afraid it’s all there is. Curious, isn’t it? You seemed like you were reaching to comprehend the vastness of it all before, but now we’re in this one, small room. How fascinating. Why do you suppose that is?

APPRENTICE
Please.

SIR
I won’t listen if you’re going to beg. I’ll be elsewhere, whilst you get on with that, thank you.

APPRENTICE
Wait but–

END

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