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:

Discussions of death and grief

A teenage girl in a relationship with an adult man

Underage sex Implications of violent sex with dubious consent

Discussion of bodily fluids, including phlegm and ejaculate

Allusions to unsafe abortions

Emotional manipulation

Extremely traumatic birth

Death in childbirth (potentially preventable)

Complicated discussions about grief

Discussions of a lack of sense of self

Amnesia

Transcript

WHIRRING. TICKING. FOOTSTEPS.

APPRENTICE WAKES WITH A GASP

APPRENTICE
I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed I was going to fly away, but someone caught me.

Sir? Are you there?

MOVEMENT. FOOTSTEPS.

THE DUST SHIFTS.

APPRENTICE
I’ve been here before. I don’t remember, exactly, but I know it. Look how vast this place is. How huge. Shelves climbing up and up, dust pouring from them, down, down, down, into the dark below. A dark, twinkling with stars. A mirror of what I see when I look up.

Wait.

Those aren’t stars.

They’re pieces of dust, catching the light.

DUST SHIFTS

APPRENTICE
I don’t understand. Sometimes it feels like you’re trying to show me something but I just don’t understand. I’m sorry.

DUST SHIFTS

THE APPRENTICE SIGHS.

APPRENTICE
Right.

HE WALKS, THE SOUNDS OF THE PLACE SHIFTING.

APPRENTICE
An arrow, on the floor.Huh.

MORE PURPOSEFUL WALKING.

APPRENTICE
‘Processing Room’. Hmm.

THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN EASILY

THE APPRENTICE WALKS IN. HIS FOOTSTEPS ON THE GROUND ECHO.

APPRENTICE
(voice echoing)
The shape of this space… it’s off. I don’t… hmm. The walls are. Hmm.

FOOTSTEPS.

APPRENTICE
They’re like, curtains. They’re kind of soft, like cloth, almost but not quite. There’s dust on my fingers when I pull them away. And there’s… there’s things inside them. and I can feel them, under there. Hard edges. Like, here, it feels almost like a pen? And here, a– a book?

A WET SOUND

APPRENTICE
Ugh. It is a book. A leather pocket book.

HE OPENS IT.

APPRENTICE
Property of Harry Dhairya Standish Coombes. I know that name.

DUST SHIFTS AND MOVES

APPRENTICE
You want something. Something that’s in there?

DUST SHIFTS.

MORE FOOTSTEPS

ANOTHER WET SOUND.

APPRENTICE
It’s… I think it’s a jar. But it’s so. It’s almost like only part of it is here, I don’t– I can see it but I can’t. I don’t understand.

DUST SHIFTS.

APPRENTICE
No, wait– it’s getting less distinct, stop, stop doing that! I need to– it’s a jar, it’s got a brass lid, and there’s something inside it– something, I– buttons! Buttons, a jar of buttons, and it’s – oh.

WHOOSH

Light, sunshine, rabbits on the lawn. Her sister is laughing, laughing as Eliza picks up her buttons from between the blades of grass. They glisten like jewels in the sun, shine like flowers amidst the green.

WHOOSH

Turning, spinning. She feels so alive when she dances. She wants to be a ballerina. Her mother cries, gives her a little button with a ballerina painted on it. It clunks into the jar with the others.

WHOOSH

Raised voices, she listens at the door. ‘If you would show affection for my daughter for once—’ shouts her father. ‘They are both your daughters!’ screams her mother. A crack; hand against cheek, like a small roll of thunder. It shudders through Eliza. She runs back to her bedroom, where Pearl lies awake, eyes catching the light in the hallway as Eliza darts inside.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Nothing,’ says Eliza, shoving herself as deep as she can under the covers.

‘Liar,’ says Pearl.

WHOOSH

They picked her, they picked her! She gets to dance on the stage. She could dance right now, she’s do excited. But there is Pearl, watching. Her expression is not sad, it’s something else. That night she dreams her sister is throttling her, wakes up to find Pearl squished onto the mattress beside her. Eliza twirls her hair around her finger, the dream burned behind her eyes; Pearl squatting on her chest, eyes on fire, grinning. When she wakes up again in the morning Pearl is gone, and so is the ballerina button from Eliza’s collection.

WHOOSH

Christian offers Eliza another glass of champagne. He asks who she is, laughs when she tells him. She doesn’t look as young as that; she looks like a woman, he says. Eliza feels beautiful in ways she didn’t know she could. Christian brushes her hair behind her ear. She feels the line his finger marked across her skin as though it’s glowing like a firebrand.

WHOOSH

Christian is in the bathroom of their little hotel room. He’s blowing his noise, trying dislodge something from his throat. Eliza hurts. SHe’s trying not to cry. When he comes back to the bed, Christian gathers Eliza in his arms and tells her that she did a great job He calls her ‘Lily’. She asks why. ‘You’ve just bloomed,’ he says.

The next day when she she gets home, she takes a bath and she finds bruises on the insides of her thighs where he held her down. That afternoon, flowers arrive at the house. For Eliza, from your secret Admirer, they say. Lilies. Eliza shoves the note into her button jar with the others, shaking it to hide them.

WHOOSH

Eliza runs from the house breathing ragged, her shoes in her hands. It’s an hour’s walk to the train station but she can’t stay here, not a moment longer. There’s no way she can go to Christian’s house; his wife is there. But he’s got a place in London. He took her there the weekend before Easter, when Eliza said she was going to the museums with her friends. She cries the whole train ride away, weeps and weeps. She has only her satchel with a few changes of clothes, and her jar of buttons.

WHOOSH

Christian comes in, drunk. He drinks a lot, when he stays with her. He’s been different since she started living here. Reticent.

Christian fucks her and leaves, puts money on the table in the hall before he goes, still fastening his belt. Eliza always spends half, and puts the rest in her button jar.

Most days she feels disgusting. She sits in the bath, washing the residue he leaves on her skin. He always pulls out, right before he finishes. She’s started thinking mad things. Mad things to make him stay. Wrap her legs around his hips, make it so he finishes inside her. Then she’ll be pregnant and he’ll have to leave his wife. He’ll have to. And they’d be so happy together.

She doesn’t do it, though.

WHOOSH

Eliza wakes across the sea. There is a moment where the unfamiliarity scares her, but it’s replaced at once by happy butterflies.

It was mad of her to go away with Harry, but no more mad than running away with Christian had been. Harry hates Christian, but he’s gentle about it with Eliza, she can tell. He smokes a lot, and she’s picking it up the more time they spend together.

Harry takes her to the opera, to the ballet, to the theatre. They drink in hotel bars until the early hours. He brings home whole companies of ballerinas. Eliza loves talking with them, loves when they invite her back stage. She folds herself into their rows of costumes, lets herself be laced into the White Swan’s feather-covered dress. She pirouettes and the dancers are delighted, but whenever Eliza dances now she feels out of breath so fast. It’s been years since she was doing it regularly. She finds more and more that she prefers to watch.

She watches Harry too, watches him with women on his arms. He denies Eliza’s advances in private but shows her off in society. It makes her proud, but she feels a little lonely. She wants to be touched.

She watches through a gap in the door as Harry takes the clothes from the man who’d danced Romeo just hours before. There is a beautiful symmetry to their bodies, a poetry in the movement.

The next night, giddy on champagne, Eliza kisses one of the ballerinas. Eliza drinks this woman in, shy with every touch. She catches their reflections in the mirror, two matching parts of a set.

WHOOSH

Harry remarks on Eliza’s appetite. On her smoking, her taste for fine champagne, the way she moves indiscriminately between women and men. He speaks with a kind of admiration. Eliza feels like someone else, wholly separated from whatever little girl she’d been when she fell for Christian Bevan. She feels foolish for falling in love at all, she tells Harry. Harry seems stung by this, but he does not tell her why. ‘You’re collecting them like the buttons in your jar,’ Harry says, with a laugh. Eliza laughs too.

All that makes her sad is that Pearl is not there to relay her developments to. Eliza thinks a lot about the day she left. The fight they had. But Pearl was always her best friend. Always. And her parents were always so kind. Eliza feels bitter that Christian drove this wedge between her and her family, though she can’t really regret all that happened because it led her here. And here, she is free.

WHOOSH

Andriy is a curiosity to Eliza. Shy, talented, he seems younger than he likely is.

He’s afraid when she undresses in front of him, she can tell. He’s never done this before, and he tells her so. There is a beauty in that honesty which softens Eliza, and she does not feel as she usually does, when she is standing naked next to someone, not like a predator, not like a conquerer, she feels like something else.

Andriy preens under her hands, he seems shocked at the pleasure it is possible for her to eke out of him. She teaches him to be careful. She holds him afterwards as the shock of it rolls over him.

She strokes his hair and whispers in his ear. She thinks of herself on the hotel bed as Christian pissed and dislodged phlegm from his throat, and she lay there trembling, crying and trying to hide it.

She draws circles on Andriy’s chest. ‘You’ve not done anything wrong,’ she promises him. ‘You are not bad for this.’

Andriy says nothing back, but she hopes that she has helped.

WHOOSH

Harry holds Eliza’s hair back from her face. She has been sick, again. ‘You’re sure you want to keep it?’ he says.

‘No, honestly,’ she says, swilling her mouth with water and spitting it in the sink.

‘Maybe we should get married,’ says Harry.

Eliza freezes, meets his gaze in the mirror. ‘You’d do that for me?’

Harry shrugs; of course.

Eliza drinks more water. ‘My parents would only come out of the woodwork then. They probably know where I am already, with all the parties we’ve been at. I’m sure there have been mutual friends there somewhere.’

‘I just worry about sending you back to England.’

‘Christian means nothing to me now,’ says Eliza, and she means it.

‘But I’ll miss you,’ says Harry.

Eliza smiles. ‘I’ll miss you too.’

‘You should have family with you, when this happens, I understand why you want that,’ says Harry. ‘But I still want you to stay.’

Eliza touches her stomach. There is no sign of the baby growing inside her yet that you can see from the outside, but its in there. Keeping it terrifies her. The other possibilities terrify her more. She’s heard horror stories, about the other option. They’d have to travel quite far to go to a doctor who could perform the procedure somewhat safely. But, perhaps irrationally, Eliza is scared. Scared this is the only chance she would have to have a child at all.

She didn’t know that mattered to her at all until she thought about it not being possible. She does not intend to marry anyone, not for love nor for convenience. But she wants a child. And this is the one she’s got.

She’s pretty sure it belongs to Andriy. Maybe she’ll write to him, but he’s a dancer at the birth of his career; he doesn’t need that. He’s penniless, anyway; she’d just be presenting a problem for him. A complication.

Eliza does not want this child to be a complication.

So, she will go home. Where there are people who love her and care for her. She will have the baby. And it will be complicated. But her parents love her, and so does Pearl, and they will be thrilled that there’s a child. Eliza’s mother had always wanted more of her own.

It will be fine. This baby will be born and grow up surrounded by love. And it will all be fine.

WHOOSH

Pearl is different. Her whole family is different, though it’s only Pearl she’s seen. It’s funny; in her mind they remained as they were before she left, with no consequences beyond her absence. But Eliza has been missing for years, to them. Missing and mourned, almost as much as they’d mourned her older brother, who died before Eliza was born. Their mother commissioned a new portrait of him every year, and artists re-imagining of what Stephen would have been. And on that wall in her study, Eliza is horrified to find her mother has had portraits of her painted too.

Eliza has been dead to them, these years she’s been gone. Whilst she’s been free, learning herself, to her family she has been dead! She’d forgotten that she’d disappeared herself completely, that their lives were not on pause. She’d forgotten about the portraits. She’d forgotten what Pearl was like, when things did not go her way.

As the birth gets closer, Eliza suspects that Pearl wants to give the baby away. She keeps calls the baby ‘the situation’, refuses to write to their parents or share with Eliza where they’re staying across the pond. Pearl wants the baby gone before they’re back. So that their life can be as they always pictured it when they were younger, married off, with children.

‘Why aren’t you married yet, Pearl?’ Eliza asks.

Pearl is furious in a way Eliza has not seen before, throws her chair onto the ground, storms out of the room.

WHOOSH

Eliza is woken by a sharp pain in her stomach. She paces around the house, hoping it will fade. The baby is big; sometimes it feels like he’s kicking her organs, bruising them as he moves around. Its not his fault. There’s just not a lot of room in there.

She’s named him Stephen, after her brother. She’s fairly certain it’s a boy though nobody can be sure yet; she won’t know until she meets him.

The pain comes again, crushing, all consuming, knocking the wind from Eliza’s chest and almost her knees out from under her. She holds onto the back of the chair in her mother’s study, and then feels a most curious feeling like she’s wet herself. How embarrassing. It happened last week, but only a little bit, not like this. It’s pouring and pouring, splattering onto the floor.

Eliza looks down; the bottom of her nightdress is stained copper-red. Liquid is still coming out of her, but it’s darker now, flowing slower. Blood.

Eliza screams, the pain rolling over her again. This time when it recedes it does not do so entirely. Eliza is on the floor, on her knees. Pearl comes in, eyes wide. ‘I’ll call the doctor.’

It feels like hours, hours Eliza is lying there waiting. She has never been tired like this before. She is certain there should not be this much blood, and also that she should be able to see.

Stephen is writhing inside of her, like he’s afraid. She tries to speak to him, but she can’t find the words.

The final moments are a flourish. She does not feel them, does not hear her own screams.

Pearl’s bare feet, blood splattered. A polished pair of men’s shoes. The light from the hall, catching on the edges of the portraits, making them shine like buttons spilled on the lawn.

‘What are you looking at?’ says Harry, from the balcony.

‘Oh, nothing,’ says Eliza, and she walks back out into the night.

WHOOSH

THERE IS WIND NOW. WIND AND SOME KIND OF CREAKING.

APPRENTICE
Oh I– I—

DUST SHIFTS

APPRENTICE
She’s gone. It’s just dust. Wow.

DUST SHIFTS, MORE QUIETLY NOW.

APPRENTICE
Stephen Grenville. You are not your mother’s son. Or your father’s. If only she’d written to him, if only you’d grown up with him, and not with Pearl, then– ah.

Ah. Oh, my head. My head.

Ah. God. Years of looking for the courage in myself to go looking, knowing I had more family out there and, oh god, god it hurts, it hurts.

Sitting across from Simeon, hearing his story about Gerald as his family moved about the house, the love in that place despite the pain of everything, the way they held each other. The way he held me when he thought I was a stranger. He just held me.

Fuck, fuck. There’s nothing, ARGH. There’s nothing and it– oh god it hurts.

A HISS, QUIET AT FIRST, BUT GETTING LOUDER. LIKE TONS UPON TONS OF SHIFTING DUST.

APPRENTICE
This room, this room. All these remnants in the walls. They’re connected to me. AH, fuck. Fuck. He built this, he built this. This is how he keeps me, this is how he–

Oh my god, my head, my head.

Stephen Grenville, he was hunting me. He wanted me dead. I had barely thought about him, I was on the run, I was on the run because they—

I was a liar, a liar, they could never let me be, I’d never be free of them, not really, I would always be hunted, however fast my tongue, however clever my wit, careful my mask. They would come for me.

Ach. Ugh. Fuck.

Sick with fever on my bed, unable to stand from the belt strikes across my backside. My aunt standing over me, telling my cousins: this is what happens when you misbehave.

A DEEP, STRANGE RUMBLE.

Running out into the dark, breath hot in my chest, the streets were half-familiar, the bricks cold under my fingers, bombs shaking the earth under my feet, hunkering down behind some bins, shaking in cold and fear.

THE APPRENTICE SOBS DRY

APPRENTICE
Where’s the rest?! Where’s the rest! Why are there— fuck. It hurts, it hurts and I—

THE WIND AND THE POURING, STATIC-LIKE DUST HAVE BEEN GROWING, LOUDER, THEN–

A MUFFLED BOOM.

THE WIND IS GONE.

THE DUST POURS ON A MOMENT.

PAPER FLUTTERS ON THE WIND. AND TINY, DUSTY WINGS.

DUST IS MOVING. THE APPRENTICE IS CLAWING HIS WAY OUT OF IT, CHOKING, GASPING FOR BREATH

SIR
I forbade myself from coming here.

APPRENTICE
(breathless)
What?

SIR
When I realised what was happening. Dust caught here. More and more of it, gathering. It makes sense, of course. You are having experiences here after all. It makes sense that in time there would be more and more of you.

APPRENTICE
What are you talking about?

SIR
This. All of this. It’s you. You alive, some of it, yes, but mostly, from after. Thousands of iterations, disintegrating at the edges. From when you’ve been here, here with me.

APPRENTICE
I’ve been here before. I’ve— I’ve seen it before. There’s a vent, near the furnaces, it’s–

SIR
–Furnaces. Interesting that’s what you dream to be there, at one of my farthest edges. A place to send those remnants which need to come apart at once.

APPRENTICE
Turning them to ash.

SIR
It’s all the stuff of dreams and metaphors. Sometimes I see it, like a picture, if I concentrate hard enough. The shape shifts and changes, as you shift and change and the things you notice change with it.

You could not look at this place as it is. It cannot be looked at. It is not a place that you see.

APPRENTICE
It’s not a thing that knows.

SIR
No. It isn’t.

APPRENTICE
It’s all you, isn’t it. This place. All of it is you.

SIR
Yes. Yes it is.

APPRENTICE
And this stuff, this stuff you say is me, it’s. It’s happening because you won’t let me go. All these remnants you’re getting me to read, they’re all connecting me, like they’re a web, and you’re the spider that’s weaving it. Keeping me here.

SIR
No. I am no spider, dear Apprentice. It’s not a web to catch you like prey. It’s a net, to stop you from falling.

APPRENTICE
But I– I’m meant to fall. We all are. That’s what this place does, isn’t it, the dust comes in, and it— ah, AH. God. It hurts.

SIR
It hurts because such a little thing as you should not have so many experiences. You are disintegrating, and disintegrating and going and going. All things do, here. So if I want to keep you, I have to make more.

APPRENTICE
Am I even– am I even a person anymore? What have you done to me?!

SIR
I left you too long. I kept you with me, showed you this place, and you saw what it was, understood as best that you could.

APPRENTICE
But hy?! Why me?!

SIR
I don’t know. A mistake.

APPRENTICE
How can you not know?!

SIR
I DO NOT KNOW.

SIR
Always watching and observing. You were in such pain, dear Apprentice. Trying to find yourself in others’ opinions of you.

You always tried to disappear, even when you took people into your bed, always you made yourself as smooth as you could. But you don’t know who you are, Apprentice. Vulnerability only ever hurt you. First when you were a child of a dead mother, abandoned by his father, beaten by his aunt so badly it scarred you forever. And ten you were a street orphan, running for your life, desperate to shed your own past like a snake sheds its skin, eager to be loved and cared for, terrified someone would find out who you were at your core.

Even then, you believed yourself bad, wrong, evil. The thing at the core of you, the thing that defined you, it must be so twisted for the world to have treated you as it did. So, you buried yourself and did all you could to keep anyone from finding the grave.

It frightened you to be known, so you made sure you never were.

I cannot explain to you why you caught my eye. Only that I am not a thing that knows. And it is such a strange thing, to find a creature so enamoured with the idea of hollowness as a kind of beauty.

APPRENTICE
But you’re not hollow. I’ve seen you. You’re– you’re this whole PLACE.

SIR
Vast, endless. Mostly empty.

APPRENTICE
But so full of so much stuff. I– don’t.

SIR
I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
Stop it.

SIR
I am sorry, though.

APPRENTICE
What if I don’t care?! Because I don’t! I don’t care that you’re sorry! You– it’s GONE. Who I was is gone. It’s gone. I feel like I’m BLEEDING. Don’t you understand? I can feel the places where the rest of me should be and they ache.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
You can’t fix this.

SIR
It is my worst and most irretrievable mistake.

APPRENTICE
No it is NOT. Your worst mistake was holding on when you should have let me go! I am not supposed to, ah. I’m not supposed to be like this! I can’t, ah.

I think you’re lonely.

SIR
No. I am not a thing which—

APPRENTICE
SHUT UP, YOU ARE. You are LONELY. Maybe you used to be something that couldn’t be but you’re not anymore. Maybe it’s all the dust that’s stuck to you. But you’re not what you were. And you’re lonely. And you kept me. Because you’re selfish.

SIR
I am. I am selfish.

APPRENTICE
What have you made me?

SIR
My Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
What does that even mean?!

SIR
I–
I do not know.

THE APPRENTICE SIGHS

APPRENTICE
Did you read me? Before you— you made me into something that could speak to you? Before you made me into whatever I am.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Okay, how many times?

SIR
Thousands. I think.

APPRENTICE SIGHS

APPRENTICE
And what did you see?

SIR
I do not know, I could not judge.

THE APPRENTICE SOBS

APPRENTICE
And then?

SIR
I read you a thousand times more. And I still did not know how to judge you.

APPRENTICE
Sir. Sir, you have to let me go. You have to. I’m sorry.

SIR
I can’t.

APPRENTICE
You have to! You can’t keep doing this. Every time you bring me back, there gets to be less and less of— of what I started as. And more of this! This mountain of dust which is all stuck here, stuck here inside of you. Making me whatever I am. Isn’t this hurting you! Doesn’t this hurt?!

SIR
I’d shelve them all, I told you, but they wouldn’t stay shelved. One by one they vanish and they leave the barest scraps of dust behind and I ache with every absence. The pain of knowing them as I do, feeling them, living them, and then having those pieces of myself disappear. I do not know where they go. I do not know what lives they live. I know when they come back to me I do not know them anymore.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry. But that’s— that’s life! That’s how it is! Why are you even–?! Why are you asking this question at all?! I thought you weren’t a thing that did stuff like that!

SIR
I shouldn’t be. I wasn’t. But I am now. I am something, like you said.

APPRENTICE
Oh. Oh my god I– I am such a monumental cock up I’ve– I’ve broken god.

THE APPRENTICE LAUGHS BITTERLY

SIR
I don’t think that’s what I am.

APPRENTICE
I don’t CARE, I–
No. No. I’m sorry.
Sir, please, I’m begging you, let me go.

SIR
I can’t. I can’t. I cannot.

APPRENTICE
You have to.

SIR
No, I literally do not know how! It is not a thing which I decide! I cannot– I process, I— this is not what I am meant to do!

APPRENTICE
LET GO!!!!

WHOOSH

QUIET.

SOMETHING PULSING.

THE SOUND OF DISTANT WIND

THE APPRENTICE SPLUTTERS. HE GETS UP, HIS MOVEMENTS AND BREATHS ECHOING

APPRENTICE
(hoarse)
Hello? Hello!?!

Where am–

APPRENTICE
Oh, oh no. Sir?! Sir!? Sir can you hear me?! Sir!

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know what happened, I don’t know where we are, maybe we fell but– It’s— everything’s different, all the remnants, I don’t know where, and—

APPRENTICE
Sir?

SIR
What am I doing here?

APPRENTICE
(deadpan)
What?

SIR
Where– where am I?

APPRENTICE
Oh no, oh no, oh no. Look at me, look at me! You know who I am, right?

SIR
Should I?

APPRENTICE
Oh Jesus, oh god. I really wish I thought you were lying. Please be lying.

SIR
I– I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
Oh, christ I’m scaring you, aren’t I? God. I’m sorry. Listen, it’s alright. It’s alright you don’t know. It’s fine. Alright?

SIR
What?.

APPRENTICE
Right. Good. Yeah. Oh god.

APPRENTICE
(shouting into the distance)
Hello?! HELLO?!

DISTANT WINDS. NOTHING ELSE.

APPRENTICE
(close again)
Right. Fine. Right. Fine. It’s fine!

SIR
Is this… dust?

APPRENTICE
Ah, fffff.

SIR
Where are we?

APPRENTICE SIGHS.

APPRENTICE
This is the First and Last Place. And I know I seem freaked out but that’s– it’s alright. Okay?

SIR
Alright.

END

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