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:

Abstract references to colonialism in India

Minor injuries

Depiction of a character experiencing a psychotic break and inadvertently (not deliberately) self-injuring, with blood

References to mistreatment of people with mental illness

References to misuse of alcohol

Abstract references to negative relationships with a father figure

Depiction of a character in late stages of illness experiencing side effects of strong pain relief

Very coarse language

Discussions of death and grief

Transcript

SIR
The silver ring made you sad. Why?

APPRENTICE
Because it– they loved each other so much, and they kept it with them their whole lives, and they never knew.

SIR
Simeon died and thought of Gerald, and Gerald of Simeon. What more is there of love than that? What more is there to know of it?

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t. I don’t know.

SIR
Apologies. I find myself… fraught, this time.

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
Hmm.

APPRENTICE
Why are you showing these to me?

SIR
So that you will pass judgement on them. That is your purpose here.

APPRENTICE
And what’s yours?

SIR
The same.

APPRENTICE
Am I… are we the same?

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
Why?

APPRENTICE
Because I… never mind.

SIR
No. Out with it.

APPRENTICE
I feel so much less than you.

SIR
I feel nothing.

APPRENTICE
Is that why you’re asking me to choose– I– I mean. Read the remnants?

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
Sorry! I just— I’m trying to understand.

SIR
That won’t do you any good.

APPRENTICE
Why not? What happens if I understand?

PAUSE

SIR
I don’t know.

APPRENTICE
Are you… lying to me?

SIR
I am not sure I like this side of you.

APPRENTICE
What side?

SIR
This one.

APPRENTICE
What other side is there than this?

SIR
I– no. You are antagonising me, aren’t you?

APPRENTICE
I told you. I just want to understand.

SIR
A dangerous way to think.

APPRENTICE
Maybe I like thinking dangerously.

SIR
There can be no doubt about that.

APPRENTICE
Right.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
What. What was I like. When you saw my other sides?

LONG PAUSE

SIR
Different.

APPRENTICE
Okay. Different how?

SIR
You see? Dangerous thinking. Now, let’s look at what we have. I have brought some choices for you.

APPRENTICE
Won’t you– can’t I rest?

SIR
No!

APPRENTICE
Oh, I– sorry. I’m just so tired.

SIR
Apologies, again. There is no time to rest.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
There just isn’t.

APPRENTICE
You’re frightening me.

SIR
That is not my intent.

APPRENTICE
So what is!

SIR
I want you to read the remnants.

APPRENTICE
What for?

SIR
So I know how you will judge them.

APPRENTICE
How I will judge them.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Me, specifically?

SIR
This again? I am not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
Oh don’t give me that! That’s not answer! You’re doing this, why? What’s the point? There’s got to be one, hasn’t there, or…

SIR
Or what?

APPRENTICE
That’s what you want, isn’t it. To play this out over and over. Again and again.

SIR
I am not a thing that wants.

APPRENTICE
But you’re a thing that is!

SIR
I am more than you can comprehend.

APPRENTICE
Try me!

SIR
Oh, believe me I have!

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
It is not of import.

APPRENTICE
Yes it is, what do you mean you’ve tried to make me comprehend?

SIR
I said it was not important.

APPRENTICE
Seems pretty important to me! What happens when I understand, huh? What happens?!

SIR
I LOSE YOU.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Nothing.

APPRENTICE
That’s not nothing.

SIR
It is. And so are you. Please, will you read another remnant now so that we might end this infernal conversation?

APPRENTICE
You want to keep me here.

SIR
Read the remnant.

APPRENTICE
You want to keep me here, that’s the answer, and you really don’t know why do you?

SIR
READ THE REMNANT!

APPRENTICE
You’ve not given me one!

SIR
Oh.

APPRENTICE
Not so all-powerful now, are you?

SIR
I have never been all-powerful. There are limits to what I can do, to what I can be. There always have been, Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
I’ve upset you.

SIR
I am not a thing which can be upset.

APPRENTICE
Liar.

SIR
Here. Hold out your hand.

APPRENTICE
Will this one hurt?

SIR
Are you asking because you want it to, or because you don’t?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know.

SIR
Neither do I. There you are.

APPRENTICE
Oh, it’s a– Hmm. It’s a handful of wildflowers. I can smell them, they smell like summer, and– oh.

THE APPRENTICE LIFTS THE CROP FROM THE TABLE AND PATS IT GENTLY AGAINST THE HEEL OF HIS HAND.

Flora is dancing in the flowers in front of her parents house with her friends. They’re older than her, better at it, more confident in the stamps of their feet and the waves of their arms. Flora’s father is away for the weekend so she’s not worried they’ll be caught and told to stop playing together. Her father doesn’t like Flora and Matine dancing with the staff’s children, even though they’re friends and tell stories and bring sweets and toys to play with.

The gardener, Mandeep, comes closer with his pump action watering can, spraying the girls with artificial rain. They squeak with delight, running through the flowers, towards the terraces.

Flora’s toe catches on the edge of the top stone step and she tumbles down, trying to break her fall with her hands, succeeding only in scraping the skin off them. She sits, staring at her palms.

‘Are you okay?!’ Priya asks, taking Flora’s hands in her own.

Flora’s eyes are welling with tears.

Mandeep hurries over, looks at Flora’s hands, calls for Rishabh, her mother’s manservant.

Flora is crying as Rishabh crouches into frame. He scoops Flora up into his arms and carries her inside. He sits her on the counter.

‘Poor little Flora,’ he says. ‘Show me.’

Flora holds out her hands, sniffling.

‘Hmm, four fingers on each hand. That seem right to you?’

Flora giggles through her tears. ‘No! Five fingers.’

‘Ah,’ says Rishabh. He counts his own. ‘I only have four, and a thumb. Perhaps I should go to a doctor.’

Flora giggles harder. ‘You’re silly.’

Rishabh gently swipes a cloth over Flora’s hands. It stings and she hisses through her teeth.

‘Careful, or the cat will think you’re angry at her,’ he says.

Flora scoffs. ‘There’s no cat in here!’

‘No, but she can still hear you from out there. Have you not seen how big their ears are?’

Flora laughs. Rishabh carefully binds strips of gauze over the heels of Flora’s hands.

‘Okay. Just make sure you don’t dance right over the edge of the terraces this time or I’ll have to put you in the stables with Minty for safekeeping.’

‘No!’ Flora squeals. Rishabh slides Flora from the counter and onto the ground. She runs back out into the early sunlight.

WHOOSH

Flora taps her heels against her pony’s sides, calling as loud as she can after Matine, begging her to wait.

Matine isn’t listening; she’s laughing too loud over the thunder of her own pony’s hooves. Matine’s pony is like her; fast; reckless; without abandon. Flora worries the one she’s borrowed is like her, too. Her nanny was always ragging on at her about how long it takes her to get going in the mornings.

Her pony slows from a trot to a walk, and then finally comes to a complete stop to nibble at the buttercups.

It’s an exquisite day, that’s what Flora’s mother would have said if she were there, but Flora’s come to see Matine on her way to England. Mother has stayed India with father, for business.

Flora has never been away from them before, not even for a night. Now she’s being shipped off to school in England. It’s hideous. The stop at Matine’s summer home in the French countryside is the only perk of the whole ordeal. Flora has not seen Matine for two summers. The ache had been immeasurable.

Throughout the war, Matine had lived with Flora. They were only six months apart in age, but Matine was so fabulously strange, glamorous and articulate that to Flora she seemed much older. With her abundant blonde curls, her dreamy smile, and her skill for telling stories, Flora adored her. It’s how she imagined she’d feel about having a sister, except somehow fiercer.

Matine’s pony burst back out of the treeline. Matine’s hair had shaken free of its loose bun, catching on the summer breeze. ‘Hurry up!’ she called to Flora.

‘He’s not listening to me!’ Flora complained, kicking her heels against her pony’s side, to no avail.

Matine howls with laughter. She slipped out her saddle. The flowers in the meadow came up to her waist. She let her pony’s rein’s trail over its neck, and then crouched to the ground.

‘Matine, what are you doing?’ asked Flora, worriedly.

Matine has completely disappeared into the flowers. Over the rustle of the leaves in the breeze, the buzzing of nearby bees and dragonflies, and the babbling of the nearby stream, Flora can’t even locate her by sound.

She hears something whoosh through the air, and a dull thud as it strikes her pony’s rear end.

The pony shrieked, rearing where he stood. It took all of Flora’s might not to be flung from the saddle. The pony dashes forwards, moving faster than should have been possible, running down the trail, through the trees, and stopping only when he reaches the water’s edge.

He stood, pawing the earth, breathing heavily. Flora breathes heavily too, clinging to the saddle, shaking.

Matine’s pony trots in. Matine sits tall and proud in the saddle. ‘It’s about time,’ she says, grinning until she saw Flora’s face.

Matine helps Flora down from the saddle and squeezes her to her chest. Matine smells like lavender and clean laundry and very faintly of sweat.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Matine.

Flora shakes her head. She clung to Matine as tightly as she could.

WHOOSH

Flora spends every summer with Matine, now. Her parents are too busy trying to find a way to keep running their business in India despite the new constitution. Though India has been independent since just after the war, things are only now seeming to making her parents’ business practices more difficult. Flora doesn’t know the specifics, and in honesty, she doesn’t care. She misses her big house, she misses the sticky heat, she misses her friends, especially Priya.

Flora is abstractly aware that the reason her parents are finding things difficult is because they’re colonisers. The idea behind independence was to give India its control back. So it makes sense that people like Flora’s parents would be having a difficult time. Though she knows no specifics and makes a point not to learn them, she’s aware of where her money comes from. It’s just easier not to think about it.

Either way, Flora has not visited in years, and now she spends every summer with Matine

Though this is not straightforwardly a benefit the way she once thought it would be.

Matine always liked to tell stories. She was always big and bold and excitable. Through a combination of her bold personality, golden hair, the fact they lived together in India through the war, and now spent every summer together, Flora thinks of Matine as being like the sun. She’s so warm and fierce and beautiful.

This summer, though, she does not seem like the sun. She seems like a raincloud. No matter what Flora says to entice her to come with her into the city, Matine does not listen. She barely comes out into the grounds. She spends a lot of time alone in her room, drawing.

Flora knocks on Matine’s door, calls her name. No answer. She knocks again. Still nothing.

Flora wanders downstairs. ‘Has Matine taken her breakfast, yet?’ she asks the cook.

‘No, ma’am,’ the cook says.

Flora wanders around the house. Matine’s parents are at their apartment in Paris for the weekend, it’s just the servants, so whenever she encounters one of them she asks if they’ve seen her. Each one says no, they haven’t and Matine isn’t in the salon, the dining room, the orangery, the library. She’s not out in the gardens, and her pony, Blanc, is still grazing in the paddock. She’s not in Flora’s room, or her parents’, or any of the spare rooms.

So she must be in her bedroom.

Flora goes back to the door. She has a sudden feeling of apprehension. She presses her ear to the painted wood. Faintly, she can hear the scratch of charcoal against paper.

Flora knocks again. ‘Matine? Are you okay in there?’

No reply. Flora takes a short breath and pushes open the door.

It was not the sound of charcoal on paper. It was Matine’s nails on the floor. All her fingers are bleeding, her nightdress streaked with blood, her hair sticking together with tendrils of it. Her eyes are in shadows like she’s not slept, the whites turned pink like she’s been crying. She’s breathing open mouthed.

‘Matine?’ Flora squeaks.

Matine stops scratching the floor. She claps her hands over her ears and starts to sob. ‘I can’t fix it,’ she says. ‘I can’t fix it!’

WHOOSH

It is the first summer after finishing school. Flora sips champagne on the lawn of a great party just outside of London. People fold her briefly into conversations. She does her best to seem charming, casual, fun. The great benefit of soirees such as this are that nobody asks too many questions, nobody pries too deeply. They ask who her parents are, though she has not seen them for almost seven years and doesn’t even know what their business is in. They try to talk to her about politics, about relations between Britain and India. When it’s clear she doesn’t know anything about it, they drop it quickly.

Mostly people just ask where she went to school and seem impressed with she tells them.

It’s good, Flora tells herself, that nobody really cares who she is beyond these details. What matters is where she stands on the ladder. And her parents and her school mean she’s on a high enough rung that they’ll overlook her anxious laugh, the way she clings too tight to her champagne flute, and how she’s drinking just a little too much to be sociable.

As the sun begins to fade, Flora takes a moment alone. She wanders down the side of the manor house. She can’t even remember whose party this is or why she was invited. She has a great, aching need in her chest to go home, though she’s not sure where that would be. The new flat, in London? She’s only spent three nights there so far. School then? But she’s graduated, now, and she has no desire to teach, nor the disposition for it. India, maybe? Where her parents are? But she’s not visited since she left.

Flora’s detour brings her to a row of stables. A tall, chestnut mare is picking hay from a hay net hung just outside her stall. She chuffs, flicking her ears when she gets too small a mouthful.

Flora holds her hand out flat to the mare. She mouths at Flora’s flat, open palm a moment, hopeful that there’s a treat. She blows hot air angrily when she discovers there is not, then goes back to picking at her hay net.

‘She’s ran me into a ditch last week,’ says a voice from behind Flora. She startles.

Behind her is a young man. He’s holding two glasses of champagne. He hands one to Flora.

‘She’s on stall-rest until I’m sure she’s not damaged anything,’ the man continues. ‘And she’s already eaten half her weight in hay as protest.’

Flora laughs. The man reaches up to the horse, pulling her head gently towards his so he can kiss the soft, velvety fur between her nostrils.

‘Poor thing,’ says Flora.

‘Me, or the horse?’ asks the man.

‘The horse,’ says Flora, smiling. ‘You’re not confined to a stall in this glorious weather.’

‘I suppose not,’ says the man. ‘You’re Flora Bradshaw?’

‘Yes,’ says Flora. She pats the horse’s snout. ‘And who is this?’

‘Ginger,’ says the man. ‘I mean, properly speaking she’s called Jung’s High Dancer or something, I forget what, exactly, but she’s a pleasure horse, not a show horse. So I suppose properly speaking she’s just Ginger.’

Flora feels an odd pang of jealousy. She pats Ginger’s nose again. With a sting, she realises that the home she’s longing for is the de Vallee’s summer estate, long, languid days in Paris, even longer ones stretched out by the stream with Matine. But Matine has been unwell for over a year, now. Her parents don’t want Flora to see her like this. So Flora hasn’t.

‘You don’t seem to be having a good time,’ says the man.

Flora blushes. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, I’m not having a good time either,’ says the man, with a laugh. ‘Terrible thing, really, given it’s my own birthday party.’

Flora blushes again. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I– I didn’t—’

The man shakes his head. ‘Please, no offence taken. It doesn’t feel very birthday party to me, either. My uncle Floris arranged it all, actually, I had no say whatsoever. Frankly there is only one decision I’m happy about.’

‘What’s that?’

The man smiles. ‘Oh, well, two decisions, I suppose. The first is that my uncle had the good sense to invite you. The second is that I followed you out to the stables.’

Flora is blushing more deeply again.

The man sighs. ‘Fancy leading her around the paddock with me? It’ll do her some good.’

‘You’re sure?’ asks Flora.

‘Never surer.’

WHOOSH

‘Jonny,’ Flora says, softly. ‘Please speak to me.’

Jonny scrubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘I thought he’d come back. I’m his only legitimate child. It’s my wedding, I thought he’d come back.’

He’s talking about his father.

Flora bites her lip and sits down beside Jonny on the bed. He’s shaking as he weeps, his head in his hands.

‘It hurts, I know. You wanted to include him you made the effort to try, and it didn’t matter.’ Flora’s words waver at the end. She’s thinking of the letter Matine’s parents sent her, locked in her drawer downstairs. Matine was not well enough to write back herself, they said. They were thinking of sending her away again.

‘I understood why he didn’t come to mum’s funeral,’ Jonny goes on. ‘But I’m his son. His heir.’

Flora presses her eyes shut, thinking of all the horrible deeds Jonny has told Flora that his father committed. ‘Darling. Did you really want him here?’

Jonny looks at her, his eyes wild. ‘I don’t know. He’s my father. Shouldn’t he be?’

‘Maybe it’s a kindness that he stayed away. Your uncle Floris was here; he made a speech.’

Jonny scoffs. ‘Bloody uncle Floris.’

Flora narrows her eyes. ‘Don’t be unkind.’

‘He has no idea who I am! He spent a fortune, it was absurd, and I—’

‘Jonathan,’ says Flora, firmly. ‘We’re grateful to him.’

Jonny nods, sighing. ‘Yes. Yes we are.’

‘I’m sorry your father is awful. If it helps, I’m sincerely glad my mother’s manservant was the one who walked me down the isle. Frankly, Rishabh has showed me more kindness than my father ever did. If only my mother could have stayed away too.’

Flora chuckles. She lies back on the bed, puts her hands over her stomach. She’s still in her beaded wedding dress, though it’s unfastened now. She’s certain she’s not showing yet. She’s always been very slight, and if anything the slight rise over her stomach makes her look more filled in. Eight weeks pregnant on her own wedding day. What a scandal if anybody had noticed.

‘Is it alright?’ Jonny asks, covering Flora’s hands with his own. ‘I’m sorry I’m being so selfish.’

Flora sighs. ‘You’re allowed a moment of selfishness. Scum or no, he’s your father. It makes sense that he would be on your mind, now of all times.’

Jonny leans back next to Flora on the bed. ‘I love you,’ he says.

Flora smiles. ‘I know.’

They kiss, slow and tender.

Jonny breaks away, touches the tips of their noses together instead. ‘I won’t be like him.’

‘I know you won’t.’

‘I mean it,’ says Jonny, fiercely. ‘I’ll be there. I won’t hurt you like he hurt my mother. I love you more than life, you understand me?’

They lie together on the bed, Jonny curled up against Flora’s side, his breathing slowing, slowing, until he’s asleep.

Flora plays with his hair. She thinks about Matine. Along with the invite, Flora had sent a letter asking Matine’s parents if it might be a good idea for her to visit. They told her no.

WHOOSH

Flora looks up at the battered, painted woodwork over her mother’s bed. In her memories, this house was grand, opulent. The gardens reached on and on forever. As time has gone on her parents had to sell more and more of the land. Now there are big houses on the old lawns, and the courtyard and the terraces and the building itself are all that’s left.

The feeling it brings to Flora is complex. She has known the money was dwindling for a long time, that her father’s steadfast, headstrong desire to try to continue as he always had, exploiting this place, behaving as though he had a right to it, was killing his business, and it’s what put him in an early grave.

Flora’s mother is about to follow him to it.

‘You know you’re lucky he died when he did, or he’d have wasted every penny trying to conquer this place,’ Flora’s mother says.

Flora doesn’t know how to respond. A nurse adjusts her mother’s pillows and doses her with more pain relief. A maid comes to the door. She speaks to the nurse in Punjabi. Flora catches every third word, maybe less. She used to be fluent. Something in her aches.

‘You were always a good girl,’ her mother tells her, voice muffled through the mask on her face. ‘Such a good little girl.’

Flora forces out a little laugh. ‘Thank you.’

‘I should have paid attention to you, honestly. But I never wanted a baby. I was so relieved, you know, when your father found out his pecker was faulty. Years he’d been insisting it was something to do with my equipment. So many humiliating tests. Then, he ejaculates into one little pot, and voila, there is our answer.’

‘Mother,’ says Flora, sternly.

Her mother shrugs. ‘It’s the truth,’ she says. ‘I’d had peoples fingers prodding around in there, speculums holding me open, blood tests, biopsies, the lot. One cup of sperm-less jism and we’d solved the problem. But he’d insisted it couldn’t be him. I swear that man thought his cock had magical properties.’

‘Mother!’ says Flora, again.

‘It’s the medication,’ says the nurse, softly. ‘It can make patients a little more… candid than usual.’

‘Good thing too,’ says Flora’s mother. ‘Anyway. Back then that was it, you see. Found out his pecker’s faulty and it’s all one and done, unless we wanted to adopt, all hush hush. But adopting a white baby in India? It would have been really expensive, especially with the rising tension, the place the business was in at the time. There was simply no way. But I was glad, as I say, as I never wanted children.’

Flora sighs. ‘Maybe I should let you rest.’

‘I’ll be doing plenty of that soon enough,’ says Flora’s mother. ‘But I need to ask. You think everyone’s manservants offer to walk their mistresses’ daughters down the aisle? You think many of those daughters have connection enough with such manservants that they’d agree?’

‘I mean, it’s unusual, but—’

‘Suffice it to say, Flora, you weren’t squirted out of your father’s pointless pecker. No.’

Flora shakes her head. ‘But, mother. Rishabh was—’

‘Punjabi, yes,’ says her mother.

The room feels very far away.

Flora tries to feel something. Anything.

She can hear Jonny, desperately trying to reason with their babies. Their wails sound less and less desperate and more like replies.

She thinks of Rishabh, the way he’d beamed at her as she’d looped her arm through his the moments before they’d walked down the aisle. ‘Don’t dance right over the edge,’ he’d whispered to her.

She thinks of Jonny, head in his hands, that his own father had not come to the wedding at all.

Flora looks up at the peeling paint on the walls. When her mother’s dead they’ll sell this place, and she’ll never have to think about this again.

WHOOSH

Flora wipes her brow with the back of her hand. It’s a blisteringly hot day. They’re in Sicily for the summer. She can’t convince Jonny to sell the house, but she has managed to convince him to spend two months travelling across Italy with her and the girls. It’ll be good for them to get some culture, she says, and Flora has never had a chance to go to much of Europe herself.

So far, Jonny’s participation in their trip has been spotty, but this afternoon, he’s taken the girls out riding across the hills.

Flora had thought about joining them. She does love to ride, and the blistering summer heat feels like home to her. But a deep, quiet part of her wants to be alone, so when Jonny offered her a moment by herself in their pretty guest house, she happily agrees.

Flora spent the first hour picking at the lunch she’d shared with Jonny and the girls before they’d left, sitting out on the small patio at the back of the house. The table and chairs out there were made of olive wood. The smell of them in the summer heat was incredible, making everything Flora ate taste richer, deeper, making her wine taste somehow more luxurious. She opens a third bottle of it, pours herself a glass, and stands up from the table.

Flora wanders through the small, unruly gardens. She lets her hands trail over the plants as she passes them. The house is on a hill, and at the edge of the garden, Flora can see miles down the hillside to the huge, glittering lake.

At the water’s edge, she sees a grey horse and two ponies, grazing on the sparse shrubbery. She can just about make out Paige and Annie, their skirts hitched up at their waists, paddling in the water. Jonny is near to them. She can’t tell, this far away, but she thinks he might be teaching them to skip stones.

Flora sips her wine. She closes her eyes.

It’s been a year, now, since she heard Matine had died. She’d known Matine had got married, but had no idea she’d had a daughter who would be around the same age as her own twins. Maybe they’d have played together, if Flora and Matine had stayed friends. She can almost picture it, now. Jonny and Matine’s husband, whoever he was, down by the lakeside skipping stones with their daughters. Flora and Matine up here in the garden, drinking wine amidst the flowers.

Flora turns to wander back to the house. A light breeze catches her hat and sends it swooping from her head. Flora reaches to grab it, stumbling sideways on the brick steps of the terraced garden.

She hears her wineglass shatter.

The sun hangs like a great jewel in the sky.

She hears laughter on the breeze. Her friends are dancing in the gardens. Her daughters squeal as their father turns them under his arm. Matine emerges from the woods at the edge of the meadow, sweat-sticky and glorious in the summer sun.

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
Missed opportunities.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
Andriy, Gerald, Simeon, Flora. None of them lived the lives they were supposed to live. Andriy’s career was cut off by the war, Simeon never had a chance to love Gerald, Gerald no chance to love Simeon, and Flora? She just— she just kind of bumbled along. She never knew the truth about who she was, she never learned anything more about her parents, she never formed an opinion about anything, she let other people decide things for her, where she lived what she did, who she saw. And then she just. Died.

SIR
Yes?

She never did anything and she still managed to hurt people and she still had a load of regrets.

SIR
Is what she had ‘regret’?

APPRENTICE
What else would you call it, daydreaming about a friend she hadn’t seen since they were teenagers on her wedding day? As she watched her children play with their father? At every moment?

SIR
Do you not think it might perhaps be a kind of grief?

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Rather than regret, perhaps what marks her is not her inertia, but a mourning for what might have been.

APPRENTICE
So I’m right! That’s why you’re showing me these. They’re all connected.

SIR
Yes, they are connected. But the threads you have pulled out for them are your own. Observation changes the observed, and the observer brings their own eyes to their observations.

APPRENTICE
Which means, what?

SIR
It means that despite my best efforts you will only ever be able to see these remnants as yourself. You can experience their feelings, process their lives as they in turn may have done so, but they are coloured by you. That is where we differ.

APPRENTICE
So, what? You just, switch off your personality whenever you read them?

SIR
No. I don’t process the remnants the way that you do. It is a different experience for me, because I am a different sort of thing. I do not observe. I do not read. I only process. And then I judge.

APPRENTICE
Oh. Yeah. That’s…! You haven’t asked me to judge them.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
Oh, um, I mean. These remnants, you say you judge them, but you haven’t asked me to.

SIR
No. I suppose I have not.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
Well. In honestly, I wonder if it is in the judging that I will discover my mistake.

APPRENTICE
What mistake?

SIR
All of them, dear Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
Right.

SIR
How is it that you know about the judging?

APPRENTICE
I– you said, when I woke up, and just now, and—

SIR
Ah, yes. So I did.

APPRENTICE
It’s so much. So much at once.

SIR
Yes. I understand that, or at least, I am beginning to.

I will let you rest, for now.

Goodnight, dear Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
Goodnight, Sir.

SIR
Sweet dreams.

APPRENTICE
And you.

SIR
I don’t.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Dream.

APPRENTICE
Oh. Why?

SIR
I am not a think that dreams.

APPRENTICE
Yeah well. You’re also not a thing that understands, apparently, but you seem to be getting there. Maybe you should give dreaming a try too.

SIR
I fear what I might unveil.

APPRENTICE
Ominous.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Well, goodnight.

SIR
Goodnight.

END

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