An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of death
• Discussion of death
• Description of corpses
• Child labour
• Gaslightlighting
• Descriptions of sex
• Violent death

Transcript

APPRENTICE
You said it wasn’t far. 

SIR
Oh. Is this far? 

APPRENTICE
Yeah, we’ve been walking for… I don’t know. What’s time like here? Who knows. Maybe you’re right and it’s not far. 

SIR
You’re confusing me. 

APPRENTICE
Ha! Well. That makes two of us. 

SIR
Is that what we are? 

APPRENTICE
I… do not even know how to begin to answer that question. 

SIR
Oh. I did not realise it was particularly complex. 

APPRENTICE
Well, it is. Because you’re… you’re not a thing, I guess? I don’t know. Why am I explaining this to you? You’re the one that’s not. 

SIR
Not what? 

APPRENTICE
Exactly. 

SIR
The remnants. Are they? 

APPRENTICE
Yeah. I think so. 

SIR
You said they are here because they’re dead. 

APPRENTICE
Well. I’m not sure that’s why, really. But they are. Dead, I mean. That’s how the reading works. The stories all end the same. Everyone dies at the end. 

SIR

I see. 

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Only. You don’t really get the whole story, somehow? Just pieces, and they tend to link together. Like there’s a theme to what’s being told. A particular reason that these are the pieces of the story I’m seeing. Like something is holding them together that way, for me to read them. 

SIR
Like the spine of a book. 

APPRENTICE
What do you know about books? 

SIR
They are for reading. 

APPRENTICE
Yeah. They are. 

SIR
Like you. 

APPRENTICE
What? 

SIR
You are for reading. 

APPRENTICE
I— no. I. I’m just stuck here. Because of you, because you ripped out all my… pages. 

SIR
So you are the spine of a book?

APPRENTICE
No. Or maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know. 

SIR
Perhaps that is what you are for. 

APPRENTICE
What, not knowing? Yeah. Sometimes it feels like it. 

SIR
And the remnants? What are they for? 

APPRENTICE
You never got around to telling me. You know how you can’t remember things? I can’t remember them either. But I have bits. You know. Little scraps. 

SIR
Remnants. 

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Yeah I suppose. 

SIR
They’re all gone now, though. 

APPRENTICE
No, I wasn’t talking about the remnants, I was talking about my memories. Most of them are gone. And I mean, thank god, because… 

SIR
What is it? 

APPRENTICE
I shouldn’t say that. ‘Thank god.’ Not when you’re here. 

SIR
Why not? 

APPRENTICE
Doesn’t matter. Right. Anyway. Is that it there? Sticking out of the dust?

SIR
Yes. 

APPRENTICE
You’ve stopped moving. 

SIR
Yes. I don’t want to get close. 

APPRENTICE
Because the last one hurt you? 

SIR
Yes. 

APPRENTICE
Okay.

SIR
I’d like to see. 

APPRENTICE
I don’t even know if reading them’s a good idea. Not when we don’t really know why you were having me do it in the first place. It could be. I don’t know. Upsetting things. 

SIR
Last time, you said you were supposed to make a judgement. Is it not a sort of judgement to choose to leave this one behind? 

APPRENTICE
So?

SIR
Should you not read it, before you make that judgement? Just in case? 

APPRENTICE
You swear you don’t remember? 

SIR
I imagine all of this would be easier, if I could. 

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Yeah probably. 

SIR

I would read it. If it did not burn. 

APPRENTICE
Fine, fine. I’ll read it. Happy now? 

SIR
I don’t know what that means. 

APPRENTICE
Right. Whatever. It’s… a tiny figure of a horse, I think? But it’s broken. It’s missing an ear, and half of one leg and— oh. 

[WHOOSH] 

Victoria’s voice is whisked away on the wind as Elsie hurtles across the gardens, back up towards the house. She barely notices the low berm at the edge of the drive, launching off the heaped dirt towards the dining room of Brakemere. 

In her fist, she clutches her tiny wooden horse, Speckles. They’d been playing at riding through the gardens, Victoria with her hobbyhorse, Elsie with Speckles. Victoria has real ponies, but they’re at the summer house in Cornwall, which they’d returned from some weeks ago.

One of the large French doors which open out onto the huge patio in the summer is cracked wide; Mr Johnson has been polishing the furniture ahead of next week’s party and he likes to let in fresh air. It helps the polish cure, he says, and stops the smell making him so dizzy.

 As Elsie sticks her head inside, the air is thick with the scent of the polish. It stings the inside of her nose, but she likes it. 

Mr Johnson must have finished his polishing because the dining room is empty. Elsie creeps across the parquet floor. The dirt on her shoes muffles her footsteps. 

She just wants to put Speckles where he belongs, under her bed. It was a mistake to take him outside. He’s not a proper toy; mama tells Elsie that all the time. He’s supposed to hang on a Christmas tree. Mr Craven gave him to Elsie a few years ago; a present from his trip to Austria. 

Elsie’s aiming for the downstairs hall. There’s a secret part of the woodpanelling that pops open if you press the top corner. It leads to the steep servant’s stairs. It’s a risk to go that way, Elsie knows; she might end up running into Daisy or Margaret. But in the afternoon they wouldn’t be carrying tea, so it wouldn’t be so bad. 

Elsie’s plan is scuppered, however, by the large number of people in the hallway. 

Workmen in dirty boots have set a large crate next to the entrance of the drawing room. They’re working it open with crooked iron sticks. Elsie can smell the splintering wood. 

Finally, the front of the crate comes free. Mr Craven, Victoria’s father, scolds the workmen when it lands on the tiles instead of the carefully spread sheets which were meant to protect them. Inside the crate is a good deal of paper. Through a tear, Elsie can see the corner of a gilt frame. The edge of a face that looks remarkably like Victoria’s. Or maybe Elsie’s own. 

‘Elsie!’ 

Elsie jumps at Mrs Craven’s stern voice.

‘Where have you been? You’re supposed to be helping Daisy polish the silverware.’ 

Elsie tears her eyes from the half-visible portrait. 

‘Sorry ma’am,’ says Elsie, with a little curtsey. 

Victoria bursts into the dining room behind her mother. She’s breathing heavily. Her eyes snap straight to Elsie. 

‘Mama, mama! She took my toy! She took him.’ 

‘What?’ Mrs Craven asks, glowering at Elsie. 

Elsie’s fist tightens around Speckles. 

‘What do you have behind your back?’ Mrs Craven demands. 

Cheeks burning, Elsie holds out Speckles. The raw wood showing through the paint on his broken leg is splintering. 

‘Oh no, what have you done to him?’ asks Victoria innocently, as though she did not know exactly what had happened, as though she had not thrown Speckles into the rock garden so he could ‘go on a mountain trek’. 

Elsie hears the crack of Mrs Craven’s palm across her face before she feels it. Victoria looks as though she’s been slapped too, her mouth hanging open in a round little ‘o’. 

‘Ungrateful brat. I’ve half a mind to turn you onto the street, you and your harlot mother.’ 

‘Mama, please don’t,’ Victoria squeaks. ‘It was only a game. It was just an accident.’ 

Mrs Craven glowers at Elsie. ‘Return my daughter’s belongings to her at once.’ 

Elsie holds out Speckles. Victoria takes him, sniffling. 

‘Now, girl. Back to the kitchen with you.’ 

Elsie runs, eyes streaming with tears, before Mrs Craven can strike her again. 

[WHOOSH] 

‘Why they insist on all this absurd pageantry, I’ll never understand,’ says Victoria as Elsie unpins the back of her dress. ‘What’s another birthday except a reminder of one’s slow march towards the inevitable doldrum of married life?’ 

Elsie chuckles. ‘Did you not have a nice time?’

Victoria sighs as Elsie lifts her skirt away. ‘It’s all absurd. My father taking me around the room on his arm, talking to his army friends about me like I’m a prized cow. At least I got to play piano in front of someone besides my tutor. I spend so much time learning skills with the exclusive notion that I might occasionally show off at parties. I’d much rather have spent the day out riding with you.’

Elsie smiles. Never mind that Elsie had not been out riding with Victoria for several years, and that she’d spent the duration of the party upstairs nursing her mother. She hoped that if she stayed up there in the servants quarters, she’d be able to keep her quiet enough that the guests wouldn’t hear. 

Elsie clears her throat. ‘Your father is still agreeing to let you go to Belgium in the summer as your present?’ 

‘No. That’s what the new piano was about; Daddy says Belgium’s too much of a risk. There’s going a war on or something.’ 

Elsie folds Victoria’s skirts and lays them over the back of the fainting couch in the middle of the dressing room. Elsie’s certain that if a war were coming, she’d have heard. The wireless has been on pretty much constantly up in hers and her mother’s room in the attic. The sound helps calm her, and it drowns out the whimpers of her pain. Mrs Craven was threatening to have her carted out of the house the other day because of all the noise. 

‘What are you doing?’ asks Victoria. ‘Help me with this ridiculous hairdo, I’ve had a headache for hours.’ 

Elsie rolls her eyes but follows Victoria to her mirrored dressing table and helps tease her hair out of its carefully arranged coils. The whole thing took Elsie several hours to complete, styled around a portrait Victoria had seen of the late Empress Sisi of Austria when she visited Belgium last year. 

Victoria fishes the diamond star the princess of Belgium had gifted her; one of Sisi’s own, hands it to Elsie to be put away in its little silver box. Speckles sits beside it, a silver ring hooked over his remaining ear. Elsie touches him lightly with her finger. 

‘Oh that old thing?’ Victoria laughs. ‘Remember when you tried to steal him from me? Mother was livid.’ 

Elsie’s stomach drops. ‘Right, miss.’ 

‘Oh, don’t call me miss, Elsie, you know how I hate that. And I simply cannot stand all these airs and graces. One’s birthday ought to be about oneself, don’t you agree?’ 

‘I suppose,’ Elsie replies. It’s easier to go along with things than to resist when Victoria is on one of her rants. 

Victoria glances at Elsie in her reflection. ‘Suppose nobody ever imposes their own agendas on your birthday. You get the day off work and you can do with it as you please.’

Elsie dips her head. It won’t be her birthday for some days yet. She had planned to take the bus into London with her mother, but there’s no chance of that now. 

‘Father’s still sending me away for summer, of course. Only to Cornwall. God knows what we’re to do there.’ 

‘I imagine there’ll be plenty of opportunities to go riding in Cornwall, too,’ says Elsie.

‘It’s just not the same as the Belgian hills. And I doubt the pastries as good.’ 

‘Maybe not,’ Elsie concedes.

‘I know,’ says Victoria, with a conspiratorial smile. ‘In the carriage on the way there, we’ll swap our clothes. You look enough like my portraits that we could get away with it.’ 

Elsie chews her lip. ‘No, Victoria. I can’t.’ 

Victoria’s smile fades. ‘I don’t want to go. I suspect the whole reason for it is that we’ll be close enough that Mr Ronson can come over for tea. I have no interest in him, however rich he is. I don’t want to marry him. I don’t want to get married at all.’ 

‘I know,’ says Elsie.

Victoria turns to Elsie, glares at her. ‘No you don’t. You don’t know the first thing about it. You can do anything you like and nobody would say anything about it. You have no idea what it’s like.’

Elsie takes a step back from Victoria. Anger is hot in her chest, but she knows better than to say anything. Instead, she leaves the dressing room and starts peeling back the heavy covers of Victoria’s bed. The fabric is like butter under Elsie’s fingers. She thinks about the scratchy blankets her mother is sweating under up in the attic, too sick to work, too sick to even drink. Elsie has been ringing flannels of water into her mouth for three days. 

‘I’m sorry,’ Victoria says. 

Elsie shakes her head. A tear works itself loose from Elsie’s chin and falls onto Victoria’s bedsheets, staining the pale cotton a darker shade of blue. 

[WHOOSH] 

Elsie hears the postboy’s cycle as she’s hanging laundry in the garden of the Craven’s second home in Cornwall. She and Victoria had only been meant to stay a few months, but it’s creeping into autumn now and as the war in Europe wages on, Mr Craven has made it abundantly clear to Victoria that she should not return to the London suburbs. 

Elsie wouldn’t mind if it weren’t for her mother. Away from the Brakemere, things felt a little more ordinary than they had in a while. She and Victoria spent long days out riding in the woods, sometimes taking the horses down to the beach. They would hitch them up on a wooden post and go for a picnic on the dunes. It’d have been idyllic if Elsie didn’t keep getting letters from Daisy about her mother’s worsening health. She’d taken the train to London several times to see her, but it was expensive and she’d used almost all her time off already. 

Everyone on the wireless said the war would be over by Christmas. They’d all be back in Brakemere by then. Elsie just hoped her mother could hold on that long. 

The post boy hands a pile of letters to Elsie by the gate. 

‘There’s a package from Mr Christoph for Miss Victoria,’ says James, grinning. 

‘I’m sure she’ll be irritated— I mean delighted,’ says Elsie. 

James laughs. ‘What would it take to impress her if Christoph Ronson can’t?! He’s so nice. Gives me a pound at Christmas. Real generous of him.’ 

‘That is generous,’ says Elsie, raising her eyebrows. 

James shrugs. ‘I knew his brother, way back when. Used to help him with things round the house.’ 

‘I didn’t know he had a brother.’ 

‘Not anymore,’ says James. ‘He had some kind of condition. Not like mine, something real bad. He died a few years ago.’ 

‘How tragic,’ says Elsie. 

James shrugs. ‘Christoph, being the second son, I reckon he’s been funny about the money since he inherited it. Doesn’t feel he ever should have, but who else would it go to? He’s no other siblings and his brother were never married.’ 

From inside the house, Victoria shouts Elsie’s name. ‘Stop flirting and come help me with this ridiculous dress,’ she calls.

James smothers a laugh with his hand. Elsie rolls her eyes. 

‘I suppose I ought to go. Duty calls,’ says Elsie. 

James grins. ‘Aye, Miss Elsie. Right you are. Personally, I don’t know what Christoph sees in her, not with you around.’ 

Elsie scoffs. ‘Don’t be absurd. I’m a scullery maid.’ 

’Nah, you’re much more than that,’ says James.

‘Is that so?’ 

James swings his leg over his bike. ‘Aye, Miss Elsie. You’re a very pretty scullery maid!’ 

Elsie laughs, waving James off as he bikes down the street. She sifts through the post as she goes until she reaches the letter with her name on it. Daisy’s handwriting. She tears it open, right there by the gate. The letter opens with the words ‘I am so sorry’. 

Elsie sits down on the chip stone path. She’s vaguely aware of Victoria shouting from the house, increasingly furious; of the other letters scattered on the ground around her; of the hideous, wretched sobs tearing through her chest. But she doesn’t care about any of that. Her mother is dead. 

[WHOOSH] 

Elsie starts awake. It’s the middle off the night. Sisi, Victoria’s three week old daughter, is fast asleep in her lap. 

Elsie must have drifted off too. She gets up from the rocking chair in the corner of the room and delicately sets Sisi into her crib. She screws up her small, pink face and balls her fists, but otherwise doesn’t stir. Elsie sighs with relief. 

‘You’ve a gift for that.’ 

Christoph’s voice makes Elsie jump; it’s only practice that keeps her from crying out and disturbing the sleeping baby. 

Christoph is leaning against the doorframe. He’s in his velvet housecoat, and from the gaping collar and the bareness of his legs, Elsie can tell he has nothing on underneath. 

‘It’s just practice,’ Elsie whispers. She leans over the crib, smoothes Sisi’s soft, dark hair. 

Christoph’s hand lightly touches the side of Elsie’s neck. She stands up, turns to him, steps back towards the wall. Her heart his hammering. 

‘Did you like your present?’ Christoph asks. He’d left a small vase of wildflowers on the desk beside. Elsie nods. 

‘I saw them and I thought of you. So pretty and so ardent.’ 

Elsie’s glad of the dark; it hides her blushing. 

It had started shortly after Victoria fell pregnant. Elsie had gone down to the study and found him there, scowling and drinking whiskey. To her surprise, when he looked up, there were tears streaked down his cheeks. He’d confessed his unhappiness to her. His dissatisfaction with how the war had ended; with his hurried marriage to Victoria, inspired by a fear for his life after seeing so many of his own men fall dead. If he’d only known better. If he’d only had more experience with war. Perhaps he might have saved them. 

Their kiss had been brief, almost chaste. 

The one Christoph gives Elsie now is far from that. 

She can taste whiskey and tobacco smoke on his tongue as it tasted the inside of her mouth. His hands were hot through her thin summer nightgown as they roamed the curves of her body. Cristoph breaks their mouths apart just a little to gasp, guiding Elsie back towards the little window seat, overlooking the street below. 

Christoph kisses Elsie’s collarbones, sinks to his knees, parts her legs. Elsie grips the curtains to keep from crying out as he disappears under her night dress, but it’s not enough. He covers her mouth with his hand, emerging for a moment. 

The baby doesn’t stir. 

Elsie and Christoph’s gazes meet again. Christoph grins. Muffled by his hand, Elsie giggles.

When he stands up, his housecoat has fallen wide. A sluice of streetlight pours in through a gap that Elsie has made in the curtains with all her enthusiasm. It turns Christoph’s skin pale gold. 

‘Like what you see?’ he asks. 

Elsie nods. 

Christoph strokes her cheek. ‘My god, you’re beautiful.’ 

They kiss again. He doesn’t taste of whiskey and tobacco anymore. 

Christoph walks from the room, tying the belt of his house coat as he goes. 

Elsie gathers herself up from the window seat. She rights her nightgown, fusses with her hair. She glances over Sisi’s crib again to check she’s sleeping soundly. She is. 

Elsie creeps out of the baby’s room. As she heads across the hall to the stairs, something catches her eye. 

Victoria is sitting on the end of the bed in the guest room. She’s almost entirely engulfed by the dark, except for her eyes, which stare right at Elsie.

[WHOOSH] 

James bursts loudly into the cottage and sends baby Queenie into hysterics. 

‘Sorry!’ James bleats. 

‘How many times?!’ Elsie hisses, fetching her daughter out of her crib and shushing her. 

The reason for James’ cacophony is apparent as soon as Elsie looks at him. He’s carrying a huge, brown box. 

‘What on earth?!’

‘No idea,’ says James. ‘It’s for you, though.’ 

Elsie rests the still-crying baby against her chest, supporting her tiny weight with one arm. She reaches for the package. 

‘For me? But what—’ 

‘Well, I presume it’s from her,’ says James. 

This is how they’ve taken to referring to Victoria, after she summarily dismissed Elsie and turned her out onto the streets. She’d come back to Cornwall, having no idea where else to go, what else to do. After a few weeks of staying with James and his parents, she’d discovered she was pregnant. 

James, bless his heart, knew the child could not be his. But he did right by Elsie anyway. They were married two months before Queenie was born. When James took her to bed for the first time that night, he’d undressed her, and he promised to try his best, but warned he likely would not be as skilled as a man like Christoph Ronson. 

Elsie had exploded in fits of giggles. James had been embarrassed at first, but then he’d laughed too. 

She opens the box. Inside, dozens of tiny wooden horses, each one exactly like Speckles. 

‘Maybe it’s not from her; maybe it’s from Christoph,’ James suggests. 

‘It’s not,’ says Elsie. 

‘I don’t understand,’ says James. 

‘Nor do I,’ says Elsie. 

[WHOOSH] 

Elsie hangs up her coat by the door. 

‘You’ve seen him again,’ James slurs from his chair by the fire. ‘I can smell him on you.’ 

Elsie laughs. ‘I’ve hardly come through the door.’ 

‘I could smell him on you down the STREET. Everyone could! Everyone knows my wife is a whore!’ 

Elsie sighs. ‘I’m sure whores are better paid.’ 

‘Better than three thousand a year to send your daughter to a fancy school?’ asks James. 

Elsie scoffs. ‘You expect me to turn down an opportunity like that? To deny my daughter a life I never got to have?!’ 

‘What’s wrong with our life?’ asks James. 

Elsie pinches the bridge of her nose. ‘Nothing, I’m grateful for it, but I—‘ 

James is on her before she can finish her sentence. His rough hands slide down her neck, his kiss sloppy and tasting of beer. 

‘James,’ Elsie protests. 

‘Does he make you scream?’ James asks into her neck. 

‘Stop it,’ Elsie hisses. 

James licks a long line from behind Elsie’s ear, down to her collarbone. ‘I bet he does. Bet he looks at you with them big doe eyes and screams when he finishes inside you, doesn’t he?’ 

‘What?’ Elsie says, squirming in James’ grip. 

‘Does he have scars from the war? Does he let you touch them?’ 

Elsie laughs. ‘What are you talking about?!’ 

James moans, pressing against Elsie’s body. She puts her arms around him. 

‘You’re drunk,’ she tells him. ‘You should go to bed.’ 

‘Tell me how he makes love to you,’ James whispers into Elsie’s ear. ‘Tell me what it’s like when you take off his clothes. Or does he leave them on?’ 

Elsie glances at the ceiling, considering for a moment. ‘Mostly he leaves them on.’ 

James gasps. ‘Just unbuttons his trousers?’ 

‘Yes?’ Elsie whispers. ‘He sets me up on the counter in the hall and he—’ 

‘In the hall,’ James breathes. He’s struggling with his belt. Elsie helps him. ‘God, I bet he’s beautiful.’ 

Elsie laughs. James pulls back in their embrace. His face his bright red, his eyes wide. 

‘Have I said too much?’ he asks. 

‘No,’ Elsie whispers. She kisses him deep and hard. ‘Can you taste him on my lips?’

[WHOOSH] 

The front door closes behind Elsie. She checks her reflection in the dark window of a car parked by the front railings. She looks alright for four o’clock in the morning. She feels guilty for leaving Christoph alone in bed, but she needs to get back to Cornwall as early as she can. It’s James’ birthday. He’d practically begged her to go to London the night before. She can’t pretend she fully understands it, but she does find it amusing, and James seems far happier now that Elsie’s affair is out in the open. Even if they do only talk about it during the act.

As Elsie hurries down the street towards the train station, she runs through her list of errands in her head. She’ll grab a paper from the stand at the station to read on the train as she finished her book on the journey into the city. She’ll take the long route home through the village so she can get a fresh loaf of bread and a carton of eggs for James’ birthday breakfast. 

Elsie is about to reach the corner of the street when someone grabs her. 

It’s Victoria. Her eyes are wide, set in deep circles. 

‘I knew it,’ she hisses. 

Elsie tries to drag her arm free of Victoria’s grip. ‘Knew what?!’ 

‘You were always jealous of me. Of course you’d want to steal my husband, too! I knew he was having an affair. I’d imagined it was you, after I caught you in the parlour with him. But it couldn’t be, I thought. She has her own life in Cornwall with that sickly post-boy. But then I found out about the money.’ 

‘What money?!’ Elsie demands. 

‘Don’t play coy with me. You’ve always been a wretched liar.’ 

‘Victoria, I swear,’ says Elsie, but she doesn’t know what to swear. She has been having an affair with Christoph for years, of course, but she knows nothing about any money. 

‘He’ll never leave me,’ says Victoria, livid. 

‘I wouldn’t ask him to.’ 

‘I should write to your husband.’ 

Elsie laughs. ‘Go ahead! He’d love that.’

Victoria lets go of Elsie’s arm and she staggers back from her. She smooths her dress. 

‘I don’t know about any money,’ Elsie insists. ‘I swear it.’ 

Victoria shakes her head. ‘You’re lying.’ 

‘I’m not! What use would there be in that now?’ 

Victoria’s eyes go wide. ‘Elsie! Get out of the road!’ 

Elsie turns in time to see a car hurtling towards her, but not in time to step out of its path. 

[WHOOSH] 

[APPRENTICE GASPS] 

SIR
You feel it. 

APPRENTICE
What? 

SIR
You feel it when they die. 

APPRENTICE 
What the hell am I supposed to say to that? 

SIR
Nothing. 

APPRENTICE
It’s worse when it’s sudden, like that. When they’re not ready for it. 

SIR
I see. 

APPRENTICE
Sorry. I’m alright. I’ll… I’ll be alright. 

SIR
Was this one like the ones before, too? 

APPRENTICE
Oh. Um. Yeah. It was. someone’s story, but I don’t see how it… 

SIR
What? 

APPRENTICE
They all link up somehow, I think. But you can’t always see how. George, Frieda. I think they might be my parents. And the rosary, it… Elio’s mother. Elio. I know Elio. 

SIR
You do? 

APPRENTICE
I think so? That statue. The paper in its hand, I think it was part of… it doesn’t matter. But I knew him. Elio. I’ve seen him in remnants before. 

SIR
You have? 

APPRENTICE
Yes. But it’s hard to get a sense of him. 

SIR
Where are you going? 

APPRENTICE
I just need to— I need to walk for a bit. You stay here, keep an eye on that— not literally!

SIR
Oh, good. 

APPRENTICE
Just. Watch it. If it turns to dust then… well. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do about it to be honest. Just tell me if it does. 

SIR
You want it to stay? 

APPRENTICE
Yes I do. That’s my, ah, judgement. Shelve it. 

SIR
Alright. Though there are no shelves. 

APPRENTICE
I know. It’s a figure of speech. 

SIR
Is it? 

APPRENTICE
Well it bloody well is now. 

[END]