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:

Gambling (specifically, poker)

Depiction of a parent with a terminal illness

Loss of a parent

Description of painful, undignified death

Mentions of drinking as a coping mechanism

Misogyny, including some internalised misogyny

Mentions of an unsafe abortion with complications, after recovering from this

Threatening behaviour

Murder

Transcript

THE APPRENTICE STARTS AWAKE

APPRENTICE
Huh? Hello?

THE APPRENTICE MOVES, MAKING SMALL SOUNDS OF COMPLAINT AS HE DOES SO

APPRENTICE
(very softly)
Ah, my head.

THE APPRENTICE GETS TO HIS FEET, SNIFFLING.

APPRENTICE
What’s this in my pocket?

RUSTLING FABRIC, THEN PAPER

APPRENTICE
An envelope. There’s a key in it?

APPRENTICE GASPS SOFTLY

APPRENTICE
Wait.

HE GETS UP. FOOTSTEPS. THE KEY SLIDES INTO THE LOCK

APPRENTICE
Ah, yes!

THE DOOR UNLOCKS. HE OPENS IT. THE DOOR SQUEAKS.

APPRENTICE
Sh!

A DISTANT WIND IS BLOWING

APPRENTICE
Hello?

THERE IS NO REPLY. HE WALKS A FEW STEPS.

APPRENTICE
Oh thank god, food! Oh– oh no–

SPLUTTERING

APPRENTICE
(spluttering and spitting)
It’s— it’s just crumbling. It’s– it’s dust. It’s all dust.

SOMETHING SCUTTLES

APPRENTICE
What’s that sound?

HE KEEPS WALKING TOWARDS THE HOWLING SOUND OF THE WIND. IT GETS LOUDER AND LOUDER AS HE APPROACHES.

SIR
Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
Oh! Sir?! I– I didn’t– I didn’t see you there.

SIR
What are you doing?

APPRENTICE
Oh, I was, I was hungr– I didn’t mean to–

SIR
(perplexed)
Hungry?

APPRENTICE
Yes.

SIR
How bizarre.

APPRENTICE
Right.

SIR
There is a… corridor now, I see?

APPRENTICE
(nervous)
I can go back to the, to the room now–

SIR
How do you feel?

APPRENTICE
(perplexed)
What do you mean?

SIR
Before, when things have changed about the way this place appears to you, it has signalled some shift in you. The bigger the change, the bigger the shift. A whole corridor attached to what was once just a room? This is significant.

APPRENTICE
I feel— I’m fine, I was just hungry, I told you.

SIR
Hmmm

APPRENTICE
I–is that all, cause I—I can go back.

SIR
Would you like to go back?

APPRENTICE
(quickly)
No.

SIR
Very well. I will need your help, regardless.

APPRENTICE
That’s okay.

SIR
Are you sure you would not like to go back?

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t…

SIR
Perhaps you might feel… safer, in there.

APPRENTICE
Uf. What?

SIR
I don’t know. That was where you woke, wasn’t it?

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
So it must be here for a reason. I do not see as you see. My perception of what you perceive is… not always a good approximation. But if I was to make a suggestion it would be that you will feel better if we return to the room.

APPRENTICE
Okay.

FOOTSTEPS. THE SOUND OF WIND GETTING QUIETER, QUIETER.

SIR
Here we are.

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
Go on then.

THE DOOR OPENS.

APPRENTICE
Oh – oh it’s– it wasn’t like this, before?

SIR
Like what?

APPRENTICE
The walls were bare, there was just the table, the chairs, but now. Now it’s… uh.

SIR
What is it?

APPRENTICE
Safe.

SIR
Oh. Good. You feel better, then?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know.

SIR
I see.

APPRENTICE
You’re going to make me look at something else, aren’t you? Another one of those things.

SIR
I’m afraid so.

APPRENTICE
Okay. Just– I– I want to sit, this time.

SIR
Very wise.

FABRIC MOVES, A COUCH CREAKS.

APPRENTICE
This reminds me of… hmm, what does it remind me of?

SIR
You have nothing to be reminded of.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Never mind. Here, this is what I would like you to look at today.

APPRENTICE
What is it?

SIR
It is a wristwatch made of gold. Hold out your hand.

A WHOOSH

GASP

APPRENTICE
It’s cold!

SIR
Yes. That makes sense.

APPRENTICE
Um. It’s big, heavy, the face is— it’s like it’s meant for a man, but the band is sized down, like it’s for a woman, and oh, oh—

WHOOSH

Sid’s father hoists her onto his hip.

‘Ah, shall I deal her in, Charlie-boy?’ says the man across the table.

‘I don’t know. What do you think, Sid? You want to play poker with daddy and the boys?’

Sid looks at the spread of cards on the table. She nods.

Her father laughs. ‘The lady of the house has spoken. Deal her in, Bevans.’

The men around the table jeer. Sid smiles, blushing at their attention.

Sid’s father explains the rules to her, bouncing her on his knee.

‘So how can you tell if someone is lying about the cards?’ Sid asks. The men chortle.

‘You have to study them, darling,’ says her father.

‘How?’ asks Sid.

Her father grins and makes an exaggerated squint, narrowing his eyes so they were almost closed, furrowing his brow. Sid laughs.

‘You try,’ he tells her.

Sid scowls, copying her father. The men around the table grin under her scrutiny.

They play a couple of hands. Sid does not win, but she does not do terribly either. Her father, on the other hand, rakes the pile of money, watches and jewellery from the centre of the table towards himself.

‘Another hand, anyone?’ he asks.

The others at the table sigh as though they’ve just eaten a hearty meal, and one by one, head out of the house.

Sid’s father sets her down so he can see them off at the doorway.

Sid sits on the couch under the window in the smoking room, right next to the fire. She nods off to the sound of tyres crunching the gravel on the drive, and the spluttering rumbles of engines stirring into movement.

WHOOSH

Sid and her father arrive back at the house just after midnight. ‘You swept the floor with them, my girl,’ says her father, petting Sid’s head.

‘There was a moment I thought I’d misjudged Bevans, but he was wrong.’

Her father chuckles, the stops to cough into his handkerchief. He’s been doing this for weeks. Sid isn’t sure if he thinks she hasn’t noticed, or whether he’s waiting for her to call his bluff. She doesn’t.

‘You were the best at the table tonight,’ her father says, thinly.

‘Thank you,’ says Sid.’

‘You need to watch your back, you know. At some point they’re going to stop underestimating you. Then what happens?’

Sid shrugs. ‘I’ll have bought enough pretty dresses with what used to be their money that it won’t matter.’

Her father laughs. He takes her coat, and tosses it next to his own on the small chair in the corner. He walks over to the wooden globe beside his desk. It has a tiny knob on the side, which he grabs and pushes the whole top of the globe back, revealing a little table set up with a crystal decanter and several over turned classes. ‘Brandy for madame?’ he asks.

Sid sits up straight. Her father sometimes lets her drink at Christmas or on her birthday, and she’ll have a glass of wine with dinner before they play cards, but this feels different. Grown up.

Sid nods, trying not to seem too eager.

Her father pours them both a glass and comes and sits in the other armchair, opposite Sid.

The fire is burning low, the embers a violent orange-red amidst the dark of the fireplace.

‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ says her father.

‘Oh?’

‘You’re growing up now. Fourteen next month.’

‘So?’ says Sid, with a shrug.

‘Well,’ says her father. ‘I’ve noticed you don’t seem to talk very much about the boys at school.’

Sid shifts in her seat, unsure what to say. The boys at school are awfully dull. They hardly know cards at all. They think they’re big and clever because they sneak cigarettes out of their nanny’s purses. And bizarrely they seem to think Sidney is stupid because she is pretty.

Sid just shrugs in the end. ‘They’re boring, why would I?’

Her father chuckles. ‘Yes. Well. When we’ve been to the pictures, you don’t seem to talk much about the actors, either.’

Sid shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

‘You don’t very much mention the actresses either,’ says her father. There is no scorn or judgement on her father’s face, just openness.

‘Father. I wouldn’t talk to you about that sort of thing.’’ says Sidney.

Sid takes a bigger gulp of her drink and splutters.

‘Slow down,’ her father encourages.

‘Sorry.’

Her father shakes his head. ‘You know, after I took you in when your mother died, they told me it’d be bad for you. That a girl needs a woman’s influence. I laughed, at the time. They mock me for not being man enough, and suddenly I’m too much a man? Preposterous. But I do wonder, you know, if they were right. I worry I’ve done you a disservice.’

‘You haven’t,’ saysSid.

‘Well,’ says her father. ‘My friend, he suggested I send you to finishing school, so that—’

‘Please father, I would die if you sent me there. I cannot think of anything worse.’

Her father hums thoughtfully. Then splutters into his handkerchief.

‘Father…’ says Sid, quietly.

‘Don’t,’ he says back. ‘Please don’t.’

Sid shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

‘I worry I’ve let you be too reliant on me, Sid, that I have not built enough for you to stand on when I’m gone.’

‘So you want to send me away?!’ says Sid.

‘No!’ her father snaps.

He coughs again, worse this time, deep hacking chokes that sound like they’re tearing him up inside. He normally only coughs like this at night. Sid hears it echoing down the hall to her bedroom.

‘Should I call a doctor?’ Sid asks, her voice like a mouse.

‘There’s nothing they can do for me. You know that.’ Her father’s expression is one of utter exhaustion. There is blood at the corner of his mouth.

Sid nods. She hangs her head.

For a moment, they sit in silence, but for the crackling wheeze of her father’s chest.

‘Pour me another glass would you, my girl?’ Sid’s father whispers.

Sid smiles. ‘Of course, father,’ she says.

In his chair, he looks suddenly frightfully small. ‘I love you, Sidney,’ he says.

Sidney’s grip on the glasses in her hands tightens. She feels her eyes prickle, threatening tears. But her father has taught her well. Her bluff is imperceptible, her tell invisible even to herself.

‘I love you too,’ she says back, without so much as a quiver in her voice.

WHOOSH

The maid takes Sid’s coat out of her hands. ‘Anything you need, miss? Tea? Coffee?’

‘There’s brandy in the study,’ says Sidney.

‘Something to eat, then? Biscuits? A small sandwich?’

Sidney shakes her head. ‘No. No thank you.’

‘Are you sure? I’d just hate to think that—’

‘Thank you, Louise, but I’m alright. You can go home. It’s past your hours, anyway.’

Louise clutches Sidney’s coat tighter, her expression stricken. ‘Miss. Are you sure you want to be alone?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Louise! He’s been dead two weeks already, putting him in the dirt doesn’t make him any deader! Go home!’ Sidney snaps.

Louise is taken aback for a moment. She adjusts her grip on the coat and nods, tersely. Her eyes are swimming with tears. ‘Right, miss.’

Sidney sighs. ‘I’m just very tired.’

‘I can draw a bath for you, before I go? So you’re warm before bed?’

Sidney sighs again. ‘Alright. Thank you, Louise.’

Louise nods. ‘Very good, miss.’

She hurries away up the stairs.

Father hired her two summers ago when his sickness started to get worse. He’d always been fastidious at managing his own house. Being a bachelor was no excuse for slovenliness, he’d say, especially not when there’s a young lady about the place. And then he was too sick to keep on top of it, and the dust set off his coughing whenever he tried.

Sid tried to help, but the gasping. She couldn’t stand it.

She pours herself a glass of brandy. All day people have been talking to her as though she is a little girl and not on the threshold of turning eighteen. They brought each other glasses of wine and gave her elderflower cordial or orange juice. ‘Oh Sid,’ they sighed, and they stuck out their lower lips.

She maintained her expression. She had no tells. She let it slide off her, like water off a duck’s back. She checked her watch, waiting for the wake to be over, and she smiled, and shook hands, and kissed cheeks, and listened to all these people – who laughed in her father’s face – pretend like they had been the best of friends with him all along.

The poker lot were the most honest about it all. Either that, or their masks were so firmly fixed to their faces that it was impossible for them to take them off.

Sidney sips her brandy. She sits in her father’s chair. The smell of him still lingers in the upholstery.

Her father’s last word resonates in her head. He’d been silent for weeks, except for the wheeze and occasional crackling on his chest. The parts of his lungs not filled with growths were riddled with pneumonia. The doctors had told Sid not to sit with him, that she might get sick too, but she didn’t listen. She sat with him all day, all night, holding his sweat-slick hand, watching his eyes dart under his closed eyelids, listening to the hiss of the oxygen tank that the doctor had set up beside his bed.

She’d nodded off, was woken by a sudden, fierce squeeze of her fingers. Her father’s eyes were half open and he was curled in on himself, his body stiff, twitching, lungs gargling. She tried to reassure him. He said one word, muffled by the mask on his face, his voice not his own at all. ‘Drowning,’ he said.

For two days afterwards he thrashed on the mattress, tried to climb out of bed, but was silent, wheezing, whining, awful. And then he was gone.

Sidney downs the rest of her brandy in one, relishing the burn of it in her throat.

She sat in her father’s chair. Louise looked in on her, reminded her about the bath, and then leaves.

The house was silent.

Sidney never thought she’d miss the wheezing. But she does.

WHOOSH

Sidney flicks ash from the end of her cigarette into the little tray set at the edge of the table. Everyone else with a hand of cards is a man. They laughed when Sidney came up to the table. She’s well-groomed and proud of it, wearing a silvery blue dress and her father’s golden wristwatch.

Her father had warned against what would happen if the men she played with ever stopped underestimating her, so Sidney does her best to prevent it. The dress, the over-sized watch, the soft pink of her lipstick, the powdery perfume she’s drenched in, the blonde highlights in her hair. This trap is well constructed and the other players have no idea that it’s even there.

These men are particularly susceptible. They’re young, Oxbridge boys, she’d fancy, from the way their conversation seems mostly designed to applaud each other for their wittiness. She finds it all charming, the same way she finds it charming to watch the rabbits that come into her garden as they hop across the lawns.

On three separate occasions these boys have complimented Sidney on her looks. They’ve played poker with women before, but never one like Sidney. This makes Sidney angry, but she laughs demurely instead, thanks them for what they seem to think is a compliment. She hopes every woman they plays sweeps them under the table. She hopes their fiancees leave them when it turns out they’ve gambled all their money away.

Sidney’s resentments for the men she shares the poker table had started to percolate before her father’s death, but became carved in stone when three men she’d known since she was a toddler offered to marry her just months after he was gone.

There a final moment of quiet, of several looks of consternation. Everyone sets their cards down.

‘Oh my god,’ one man mutters, looking at Sid’s hand.

She smiles. ‘Thank you for playing, gentlemen. I say we call it a night. Unless any one wants to help me expand my real estate portfolio even further?’

There is a ripple of shocked laughter. Sidney lights another cigarette and gets to her feet.

As she’s headed for the door, a young man steps in her way. ‘Good game,’ he says.

Sidney blinks at him. He wasn’t sat at the table with her. He’s not dressed like them, either, none of that well-broken tweed and scholarly softness. He’s sharp at the edges. His eyes are a blisteringly pale shade of blue. Sidney can’t help but stare at them.

The man quirks a half smile. He takes his hand out of his pocket, holds it out to her.

‘Stephen,’ he says. ‘Stephen Grenville.’

Sidney blinks. ‘Sidney Parish.’

‘Oh, I know,’ says Stephen. ‘I’ve heard all about you.’

‘Oh? Pray tell, from who?’

‘My sister, mostly,’ he says. There is something about him. She can’t read him. She can’t spot his tell. It’s oddly entrancing. And unsettling.

‘How charming,’ says Sidney.

Stephen laughs. ‘She’s a canny woman, wit as sharp as a knife. She warned me not to play with you.’

Sidney cannot help but feel a little warmth at this compliment. ‘She’s a wise woman,’ she says.

‘So I have witnessed,’ Stephen agrees.

WHOOSH

In the beginning, he’s just showing up to her games, sitting to the side, watching, refusing to play. When he’s not there, she asks about him with the other few brave enough to play with her semi-regularly.

‘The Grenvilles have been out of the social circuit for years,’ they explain. ‘Some humungous scandal, apparently. Late Mr Grenville was fumbling around with someone’s daughter whilst his wife was grieving the death of their first son, or something? Mrs Grenville got pretty sour about it.

‘They might’ve been able to come back from it if it weren’t for the rumours about their other Stephen. Surprise pregnancy! The mother was quite old, going grey, even, when she had him. Surprise pregnancy. Of course they were delighted, they finally had an heir, after so long without one I think it must have been a relief. But there were rumours.’

‘What about?’

‘Well, some people say hat Stephen isn’t actually Mr and Mrs Grenville’s son, that he actually belongs to one of the daughters. Nobody is sure which he’d come from, either, which adds to the mystique. There’s the plain one, Pearl, she never married, still lives at her parent’s place. The other one disappeared years ago.’

‘Disappeared?’ says Sidney.

‘Oh yeah! She was off galavanting around Europe, but nobody’s heard from her in years. Last seen with Harry Standish-Coombes, no less.’

Sidney recognises this name from rumours about her father. ‘Standish-Coombes is the one that people suspect has… particular tastes?

‘Oh yes, his tastes are quite particular, I assure you,’ says another man at the table.

Someone else laughs. ‘He knew your dad, Sid. Pretty well by all accounts.’

Sidney feels her cheeks colouring. She clears her throat and sits up a little straighter and allows the conversation to move on.

The following week, Stephen Grenville is sitting and waiting at the club’s bar before Sidney goes to the back room to play.

‘You’ve been asking about me,’ he says.

Sidney shrugs. ‘You intrigue me.’

‘I’m flattered,’ says Stephen. His tone is indecipherable, his expression blank, and then he grins.

Sidney narrows her eyes. ‘Well then,’ she says.

‘I’ll join you at the table tonight, if you don’t mind,’ he says.

Sidney laughs. ‘Won’t your sister be angry?’

Stephen shrugs. ‘I know your tell.’

Sidney blinks rapidly. ‘Oh, I have a tell?’

Stephen dips his gaze and smiles, a small thing. ‘Yes, you do.’

Sidney can’t help but smile back. ‘Alright. I’ll see you at the table.’

Three hours later, Sidney has experienced the greatest loss she’s had in years. Her heart is fluttering in her chest.

Stephen Grenville rakes the chips towards himself, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

Sidney sits on the other side the table, stunned, for almost twenty minutes.

She gets to her feet, rushes out of the club. Stephen has the door of a car open. He’s about to slip inside.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘What?’ asks Stephen.

‘My tell, what is it?’

Stephen smiles. ‘Your watch.’

‘What?’

‘You look at your watch. It’s subtle; you check it so regularly that it’s hard to spot. But you check your watch when you’re lying.’

She hadn’t even noticed that herself.

Sidney feels a jolt, almost exactly like that sensation when you’re falling asleep and your body panics and starts you awake. It’s a plunge in her lower stomach, a seizing of the chest.

‘Would you like a ride home?’ asks Stephen.

Sidney blinks at him, perplexed. ‘No, I’ll drive myself, thanks. Goodnight.’

WHOOSH

There is a poker game on boxing day at Jonny Bevans’ place. It’s small, loud, raucous. Some of the men have brought their wives. They all gush over Sidney. She has had good, meaningful conversations with all of these women in the corners at big parties, but when they’re together like this, it gets challenging. In very much the same vein as people getting angry when someone else chooses not to drink, when they’re together the women seem to find it personally offensive that Sidney has chosen not to marry anyone.

‘Don’t you worry you’ll be lonely, when you get old?’

‘I have a great number of friends,’ Sidney assures them, though she isn’t sure that’s true. What she is sure of is that she has money. She could move to a nice home if she makes it into her old age and feels a need for company. Why on earth would one produce a child simply to have someone obligated to visit them in their old age? What an awful reason to bring a whole breathing, thinking, alive person into the world.

More guests arrive, saving Sidney from the wives’ inquisition.

Sidney checks the time; three minutes they’s been talking and already they’ were trying to eat her. She supposes it’s to be expected. She’s been away so long, you see. She’s bound to be a novelty.

There are probably all sorts of rumours about where Sid has been. Some of them are probably true. She tries not to let them bother her.

Sidney’s abortion had left her bedridden for almost three months. In the end, she’d had to call a private doctor and pay extra to keep him quiet. Something had gone wrong in her procedure and she’d got a terrible infection. She had antibiotics, but the infection was so severe it’d made her thin, weak and hardly able to stand for long periods. She had eventually begun to feel well again. Bit by bit, she returned to herself. And how she was playing poker again. Not quite as devastatingly as before, but well enough.

Sidney sips her brandy and she thinks about her own mother, who she does not remember. There are rumours, she knows, and about her father. Sidney did not care if he was her ‘true’ father or not. He had raised her, and loved her, and cherished her. They did not look very alike, but they thought alike, and that made her proud.

If she had a child, she would like to think she’d come by that child the way her father had; out of a great act of love and sacrifice, in a moment where she had the time and space to give it, rather than out of some misguided idea that she needed to breed her own nurses to tend her in her old age.

It’s not that she thinks the wives foolish, and she certainly doesn’t pity them. She just wishes they would not pity her. She wouldn’t think their lives sad at all if she could be sure they had all chosen them. If another possibility were presented to any of them, an alternative way to be, to exist in the world as a woman but not as a wife, how many of them would have take that path, she wonders?

Of all the great privileges her father has impressed upon her, this one is the biggest, she thinks. The possibility of another life, and the funds to achieve it.

Sidney and the husbands move to the other room, then, to play poker. It’s an odd feeling, as the door closes on the wives. She wonders what they think of her, really. Is it the camaraderie they show her in the moments she spends with them one on one? Sidney supposes there is no way to tell.

WHOOSH

There’s a chill in the air as Sidney heads out of the club to drive herself home. She’d played well that evening, a busy night, as they always are, filled with laughter and booze and cigarettes. They’d finished the evening with a lengthy game of Go Fish – that was why it was so much later than usual when she’d headed out. It was nice, sometimes, to play something different. She’s not superstitious about the cards most of the time, but it does seem like if you only play the same game over and over, the deck starts to get frustrated with you.

It’s funny, it always seems to bring out a different side to her friends when they’re not playing poker. So much of poker is about the mask, you see, and because poker is so much of what makes them close, it is their poker faces which they wear in conversations. At parties and soirees, as the wives weave between them, Sidney her friends are talking to each other as though they have a hand of cards in front of them.

‘You’re back,’ Stephen Grenville says.

Sidney hadn’t noticed him standing there, hadn’t spotted him in the club at all. She’s been playing again for a few weeks.

She smiles at him. ‘I was sorry to hear about your sister,’ says Sidney.

Stephen laughs, but there’s no joy in it. ‘Yes. She wasn’t that old, all things considered.’

‘Will you join as at the table again soon?’ asks Sidney.

Stephen laughs again, even more bitter this time. ‘Can’t afford it.’

‘That’s hard to believe. You swept me across the floor last time.’

Stephen presses his mouth into a thin line. ‘Believe it,’ he says.

Sidney is reminded, sharply, of her first impression of Stephen. Of something being just slightly off about him in a way she can’t place. She deals with many people who are socially odd and awkward, and considers herself to be so, especially in conversations that aren’t happening around a card table. With Stephen, though, it’s something else. She can’t place it.

‘I ought to head home,’ says Sidney.

‘Are you well?’ asks Stephen, quickly.

‘Yes, thank you,’ says Sidney.

‘You’re certain?’ asks Stephen.

‘Yes, thank you,’ says Sidney. She starts to walk towards her car.

‘It’s just that there are rumours,’ he says.

Sidney pauses, her hand on the door handle. She closes her eyes for a moment. There is a part of her that wants to scream. Another part which longs to turn around and spit the rumours about Stephen himself back into his face.

‘Aren’t there always rumours, Mr Grenville?’ Sidney asks. ‘People talk, they always do. It’s just talk.’

She takes a short breath and gets into her car.

She’s half-way through the drive home when she hears something. A clang of metal. She slows the car a little, and a minute or so later, feels the whole thing wobble unsteadily. She pulls over and gets out. One of the wheels is half off its axel.

‘Bugger,’ she whispers to herself.

Sidney looks around. For a mile in either direction, all there is fields and farm animals. She curses her choice to wear her nice heeled boots to the club, wishes she had a change of footwear besides her wholly inadequate driving slippers to traipse her way down the muddy road back into town.

A pair of headlights glow in the distance, and finally, illuminate the narrow lane Sidney is standing on. She waves, and the car stops.

‘Oh thank goodness!’ she says.

The driver’s door opens. ‘What’s going on?’

Stephen’s voice makes Sidney’s stomach sink.

‘Oh it’s– never mind, I’ll be alright,’ she says.

‘Looks like something’s come loose on your wheel,’ says Stephen. ‘Let me see if I’ve got tools in the boot so I can help you.’

‘I’ll walk into town, it’s fine.’

‘No, really, it’s no problem,’ says Stephen.

Sidney blinks at him. She checks the time.

‘Nervous?’ asks Stephen.

Sidney shakes her head. ‘It’s cold out here.’

‘Yes,’ says Stephen. ‘Very cold.’ He opens his car boot, retrieves a bag of tools and looks at Sidney’s wheel. ‘There’s a nut missing,’ he says. ‘See if you can find it.’

Sidney pulls her arms more tightly around herself, squinting at the mud at the side of the dark road.

There is a sudden crack. It is not pain she feels, exactly, more like a sudden white heat at the back of her neck.

She doesn’t scream. Her pokerface is better than that.

She’s lying on the couch under the window. She can hear tyres on gravel, engines rumbling, the sounds shrinking into nothing as the cars drive away. Soon her father will carry her to bed, and shell wake curled up next him, like a cat.

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
He– he killed her.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
The name… I know the name. Stephen Grenville. The man whose glasses you showed me, he wrote the letter that he read just before he died.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
He– he murdered that woman, and his letter… Basil was reading it as he died.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
You want to find him.

SIR
Ah.

APPRENTICE
That’s what you want help with, isn’t it? To help you stop Stephen Grenville? Before he kills again?

SIR
I am afraid it is rather too late for that.

APPRENTICE
How many people has he killed?

SIR
The precise number does not matter.

APPRENTICE
Stephen Grenville said someone had stolen his life, who was going by the Basil’s name. He— he knows something. I think that– if you find him, if you speak to him, he’ll be able to make it make sense, you know, he’ll be able to– if he stole the guy’s life, he has to understand him, right?

SIR
Would that it were so.

APPRENTICE
What’s that even supposed to– Do you want my help or not?!

SIR
That is the irony in it, I suppose. I am not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
Why have you asked me to come here?

SIR
I didn’t.

APPRENTICE
You did!

SIR
No. I didn’t ask.

APPRENTICE
Something’s changed. Not just the room or the corridor, it’s– I don’t know why but you said I’m different but it’s. It’s something else, isn’t it, it’s not me that’s different, or maybe I am but there’s more than that.

SIR
Perceptive.

APPRENTICE
Why do you say that like it’s a bad thing.

SIR
I don’t.

APPRENTICE
You were angry, last time. You were angry at me. You don’t seem angry, now.

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

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t. I don’t see how that can be true.

SIR
Alas, it is.

APPRENTICE
I don’t think you really want my help at all, do you?

SIR
I cannot be sure if that’s true.

APPRENTICE
Why am I here, then?

SIR
Shelve or discard.

APPRENTICE
The girl? That’s what you want? You want me to judge her?

SIR
Yes. Shelve or discard.

APPRENTICE
Shelve.

SIR
Very well.

APPRENTICE
What happens now?

SIR
The same thing which has always happened, but from a slightly different angle.

APPRENTICE
Okay.

SIR
You should rest, now, let your dust settle. So, rest.

END

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