An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of death, including the death of a child
• Descriptions of life in a war zone
• Sound effects mimicking distant gunfire (quiet)
• Depictions of mourning
• Depictions of lasting trauma
• Mention of potential people-trafficking (vague, non-specific)

Transcript

SIR 
Apprentice? 

Where did you go? 

Apprentice?! 

You were right here. I had you!

Apprentice! Apprentice?!

Oh no. What have I done?! 

I am a fool, I have misunderstood, somehow, this power, in me. What it means. I thought I was supposed to guide, to protect. Is that not the meaning of our names? Am I not Sir, and he my Apprentice? Should my role not be to keep him safe?! To make him rest, when he needs it but cannot see, does not know?!

Something else is different, too. Something else is gone. All those things, those glimmering edges, dust made solid into shapes and things. Shelves on which the remnants stand. Blankets in which the Apprentice can be wrapped. A crackling fire. A window, and the moon. 

It is gone, I think. I cannot tell. I do not see. But it feels like it is gone. Gone with him. 

Apprentice?!

Where to look, how to look. This place is me, he says. Then why is it I do not know where he is gone?! Where I seem to have sent him, without intention?! What have I done. 

Perhaps I am no protector. Perhaps I something else. Something worse. A prison warden. A crypt-keeper. Something to run away from. 

Is that why he feels that burning need, that desperation to escape? Am I the thing from which he is running? Is he too polite to say? 

No. He is not polite. Perhaps he does not understand it. He is missing memories too. When I look at him, gleaming bones of dust and determination, I see through him voids that gape and ache. The gaps, they leech things from me, somehow. I get too close, and there is less of me than there was before. Am I disappearing into him, iota by iota?

And yet still I am whole. 

A whole what? I do not know. And I fear. I fear somehow that though I am whole I used to be something else. Something larger. There are ragged edges of me. But from what have I been torn? 

The Apprentice spoke of a veil, said that I spoke of a veil. A veil which covers what? And is that from what I have been torn? 

Some things are clearer now. But not all. The more I understand of this place the more clear it is that it has no end or beginning. The First and Last Place. The First and Last of what? 

[DUST MOVES] 

What is this, a shadow, hiding stars? 

He called you a statue. But that’s not what you are, is it? You are something else. When I peer close, I see it. The edges of you burn, shadow. Was it me who set that note alight, or was it you? 

[WHOOSH] 

I see him. My Apprentice. But not, all at once. I see him wash his bleeding hands. I see him thrust them into the ocean, eyes watering from the pain, salt in his wounds. 

I see him duck under his aunt’s arm, into the city, not once looking over his shoulder. I see him hungry on the street. I see him watching people sort through the rubble of houses. I see him climb into one himself. 

I feel the earth shake, taste brick dust in his mouth, before everything turned black. He wakes in the hospital, bandages over his eyes. He thinks he has gone blind. Both his legs are broken. One of his wrists. It is months whilst he recovers. 

The people at his bedside, they call him Edward, but that is not his name. He does not mind it, not so much, because whoever Edward is, he is loved. People feed him pudding, wipe his chin when he can’t eat more. They help him stand, splints on his legs, crutches under his arms. When he takes a step, they catch him, and their arms, he’s Edward, because there is nobody else for him to be, and Edward is so loved, and that is all he has ever wanted. To be held. To be loved. To be known. 

Years pass and he forgets somedays that he was ever someone else. The scars on his palms, the ones across the backs of his legs, they remind him of the truth. His past is marked into his skin. He thinks on his old name. Edwin Peterson. So close to Edward Pocket and yet a million miles away. This boy whose initials he’d shared, whose family now loves him. The guilt eats at his mind. What if the real Edward is out there, alive, living his old life? Suffering as he once did? He is a wicked changeling made of dirt and scars, left in place of a real child who was loved. He eats that love, feasts on it, but it cannot fill the holes inside him, the ones still echoed on his scarred flesh. 

He must find him, he must give him back this life that he has stolen. But when he does, there is no child. There is only a grave. 

Edward Pocket is dead. His family had mourned him, and his parents. Placed his bones in this hole in the dirt, covered him up. So why had they thought Edwin was Edward? How could they have thought it? The real Edward was dead. Dead and buried. 

‘It was a miracle,’ his grandfather tells him. ‘Who knows what poor soul we put in that grave. But we found you. So weak, so frail, but alive. Who knows what happened to you in those weeks we thought you were gone, how you managed to survive, what poor boy we lay in that grave. But you lived, Edward, and we are so grateful. You are a gift. The most precious of all.’ 

And then he tells him of how he came to the Pocket family. How Edward’s parents had tried and tried for a baby but all they got was grief. He was so beautiful, when they brought him home, and you could have sworn he’d meant to be there. Such a happy little thing. Baby Edward Pocket. 

So, the old Edward Pocket had been someone else before, just as this new one had. Perhaps then the name did not matter. It did not say who he was, only what. 

And to be Edward Pocket was to be loved. 

APPRENTICE
(Distantly)
Sir!

SIR
Apprentice?!

[WHOOSH] 

SIR
Apprentice! Where did you go?! What happened to you?! 

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. It was like I stopped being, just for a moment. All that’s left were dreams. 

SIR
I tried to make you sleep.

APPRENTICE
Maybe that’s what it was, but I don’t know. Maybe I’m not a thing that sleeps anymore. 

SIR
I think I am a thing to fear. 

APPRENTICE
I’m not afraid of you. 

SIR
You were afraid of me before.

APPRENTICE
I was; I didn’t understand. Maybe that’s why you made me forget. But then I dreamed. 

SIR
Oh. 

APPRENTICE 
I dreamed that I woke a thousand times. I dreamed that I was made of dust and stars. I dreamed that I was nothing, and you forced me to be. 

SIR
I wanted to protect you. 

APPRENTICE
From what? 

SIR
I don’t know. But I felt that I should. 

APPRENTICE
But you still showed me a remnant when I woke up. 

SIR
Yes. 

APPRENTICE
Why? 

SIR
You were looking for them. We could not find them for so long. And there were so many. I thought it was right, that you should look. That you should see. 

APPRENTICE
And then you stopped me. 

SIR
Yes. 

APPRENTICE
You were trying to stop it from hurting. 

SIR
I wanted to spare you pain. 

APPRENTICE
But it always hurts. You’ve looked at one the way I do, or maybe not exactly, but pretty close. Do you understand that it always hurts? 

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Sometimes more, sometimes less. But it always, always hurts. 

SIR
You remember? 

APPRENTICE
Not exactly. But I know. 

SIR
It hurts to see. It hurts to feel it. To know. 

APPRENTICE
You need to let me see the rest. 

SIR
The rest of what? 

APPRENTICE
Lucie’s story, I need to see it. I need to know what happens to her. 

SIR
Why? 

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. I just. I need to understand. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why I need to read them but I think I have to.  I need to. 

SIR
Alright. 

[THE APPRENTICE SIGHS] 

APPRENTICE
It’s here on the shelf again, as though I never picked it up. But something is different. I don’t know. I can smell the oil inside it, almost. Rich, heavy, warm, and— oh. 

[WHOOSH] 

Lucie wakes with a start. For a moment, she was fleeing the de Vallée house again. Hearing Claude’s voice on the wind, telling her to keep going. Smelling the gunpowder from the guns. Hearing tree trunks splinter in the dark. 

But she’s not running from the de Vallée house, and she has not seen Claude for weeks. The best she can hope for him is that he has been shot, rather sent to the camps. She has heard they do horrible things to members of the resistance, there. 

Lucie peels herself from her little mattress and heads downstairs. Paris is nearly silent beyond the de Vallée’s Paris apartment. Most of the family is in India, the older Monsier de Vallée, his wife, and their little girl. But Mr de Vallée’s brother is here, in the city. 

Lucie had run for days through the woods, stopping only when her legs burned too much to carry her further. She did not get close to the train tracks, but veered within sight of them now and then, just to make sure she was headed in the right direction. 

She passed farmhouses with slaughtered cows lying in fields, swarms of flies about their heads. She passed burned cottages, ruined mills. The closer she came to the city the more machinery of war she saw. Hastily thrown up fences with barbed wire tops, set up around old barns now filled with cars and tanks instead of cattle. 

She knew where she was headed; a little house in a small town. She arrived after four days of running, walking, stumbling. It was the middle of the night. She knocked on the door. A harried young woman let her slip inside. 

Lucie woke hours later with bandages on her feet, wrapped in a warm blanket. But these people couldn’t host her for long. They had not heard from Alain or Claude or any of the others who had been with Lucie when the de Vallée house was raided. 

The next day, Lucie was smuggled into Paris under sacks of grains, delivered to a bakery. She sat in their outhouse from dawn until dark, watching mice grow bolder in her presence, skittering closer and closer. 

When the door finally opened, long after dark, Lucie’s body seized with fear. But the man who stood over her with a small, old fashioned lantern looked half familiar. Olivier de Vallée. He took Lucie by the hand, wrapped her in a patterned shawl, and took her to his home. 

She had been there since. Washing his dishes, making his beds, and fielding those who come to his door. 

‘Good morning, Lucie,’ he says, appearing at his bedroom door. ‘We are expecting some callers today.’ 

‘Will they have the password?’ 

‘They should, but it has changed. You should ask them now if they have heard about the foxes.’ 

‘And what will they say?’ 

‘That they run in packs like wolves on the streets.’ 

Lucie nods. ‘What do they need?’ 

‘Clothes, food if we can spare it. It’s man and a woman, and two little girls.’ 

Lucie’s stomach knots. ‘I’ll see that they have everything they need.’ 

Olivier smiles. ‘You always do.’

[WHOOSH] 

Lucie is running, running again. She can hear gunfire in the distance. She knows that she is crying, but she cannot tell if it is tears or sweat streaking down her cheeks. 

They had been betrayed. Thirty-five young men gunned down by the Gestapo. Lucie had been in the building nearby, waiting for a report on their meeting. 

The fight for Paris’s liberation began weeks ago, but so far nobody is coming to help, even though there are rumours on the wireless every day. The British had promised them they’d come but they think it is too soon to take Paris, as though she has not been imprisoned for years already. She has to do something. Something vicious. 

Her footsteps echoed on the street around her. She’s never wished more that she had a gun. But she doesn’t. She just has a radio. A radio she’d be shot for carrying. 

She takes a long route back to Olivier’s, lets herself in at the back of the building. The women employed to do laundry in the basement glance up as she passes, but then return their focus to their work, breathing a little faster than before. 

Someone reaches out of the dark on the second floor landing, smothers Lucie’s cry with a hand. 

‘It’s me,’ Olivier whispers into her ear. He pulls her backwards into one of the second floor apartments. They’re smaller than Olivier’s, but no less lavish. In the gloom cast by the lights on the street, Lucie stares at the uncovered furniture, gathering dust. She wonders if the people who lived here are dead. 

‘Come,’ says Olivier, beckoning Lucie to the window. ‘You see, across the street?’ 

Lucie stares over at the darkened windows. She and Olivier breathe in time. Then, a flash of light.

‘They’re watching us?’ Lucie whispers. 

‘I spotted them just after supper. Didier has put himself to bed in my pyjamas.’ 

‘Jaques and the others, they’ve been shot,’ Lucie whispers.

‘I assumed we had been uncovered.’

‘We can’t leave,’ Lucie hisses, shaking her head. ‘The Germans have been planting bombs all over the city. They’d rather burn Paris down than see it free again.’ 

‘We won’t let them have it,’ Olivier whispers back. ‘I heard from Paula just after you left; the strike on the train lines is still holding; they think it’s going to escalate. The Germans have not been able to ship out any captives for days; that’s probably why they shot everyone. They can’t risk taking prisoners.’ 

‘It did not stop them from clearing everyone out of Pantin.’ 

‘I’ve heard rumours there will be another bomb on the train lines, but only rumours.’ 

‘Olivier. I am not leaving the city. I am not running again. I would rather die than run.’ 

‘I understand. But it will be war. Not the kind of war we have been seeing, wars of secrets and hiding and helping people out of the city. Real war, with guns and bloodshed.’

Lucie thinks of José, the calm, easy smile he had on his face the last time she saw it. She thinks of her mother, a scared child spirited away from war to safety, at the cost of everything she knew. She thinks of her father’s blood on the cobblestone streets of their hometown. She thinks of the faces of every intelligence officer she’s found a place to stay; every family she has helped out of the city; every child she has promised things will be okay to. 

She steels herself.  

‘Olivier. If there is going to be a real war, I shall need a gun.’ 

[WHOOSH] 

A cool breeze trembles the rushes growing out of the sand dunes. The sky is the colour of the sea, flat and grey. The debris of war stains the sand, streaks of rust like blood where they sit too far to be washed away by the water. 

There are children hanging from parts of the wreckage, using them like climbing frames, shrieking with laughter. The wounds of war have not yet sealed, but Lucie thinks this is as close to peace as things could ever feel; children born after the war ended, playing on its scars without a care in the world. 

Lucie walks further along the dunes. She’ll get a train back into Paris before sundown, be back in the city in time for a later supper. For now, though, she wanders. 

She is not sure why she came to Normandy for this day. Perhaps it would have made more sense to go home. José loved trains. It made sense to travel for his birthday. But she couldn’t face going to a place where he’d really been. 

She wonders what his life would be like, if he’d lived. If he would stay in her spare room, if he’d have got a job at the Paris train station. If he’d have been happy. 

This feels like the greatest burden, to Lucie. She goes to every dinner she is invited to, takes on every research job she is set at Monsieur Olivier’s legal company with zeal. She goes out dancing. She tries to fall in love at least three nights a week. She is supposed to be happy; she has to be. She has to be. For José, for mama, for her father.

But when she smiles, it feels like a mask. Her laughter is a pantomime, her nights between the sheets of dozens of people are two-person operas. She does not know what she wants. Her friends are having babies and getting married. Lucie acts like it’s a mistake that she is not yet a mother or a wife, but it’s not. She cannot imagine surrendering the time she spends alone. The only time she does not have to put on a show. 

She has Olivier, she supposes. Sometimes they sleep together, but it is pleasantly meaningless. He does not expect Lucie to pretend she is having a better time than she is. He is not shy about telling her exactly what she needs, nor listening to her requests in turn. He never expects anything after, and they often speak of work as soon as they are done. 

Lucie thinks of Claude, her bewilderment of him, why she kept seeing him even though she knew he would not love her. Whilst now she is angry with herself for giving such privileges to a man who fetishised her body the way he did, she has begun to understand that this was part of his appeal. Claude did not want her to be his girlfriend. This was because he was racist, yes, in that strange, fetishising way, but it was also convenient, because Lucie did not want to be a girlfriend. 

When she was young and had imagine her future, she had always lived alone, or with José, or with her mother when she was still alive. Whilst she knows that future may never have come to be, war or not, cancer or not, it brings a quiet, desperate ache into every day of Lucie’s life. 

Maybe that’s why she came here. Because Normandy is where the war began to turn. it’s the place where hope got in. Stained with rust and blood. She had heard stories that so many men died on the beach that the sea turned red. 

A small dog runs through the shallows. A little boy follows him, maybe five or six years old. His skin is darker than Lucie’s. She sees his parents up the shore, watching him. A man with skin like her mother’s. He leans on a crutch, one leg of his trousers stitched under his knee. Maybe a soldier. Next to him, a woman who looks just like Lucie, but she’s smiling. Smiling and laughing as her son throws a ball for their little dog and it yaps as it leaps into the water after him, the same water where hundreds of men died. 

But it’s not the same water. That water will have washed away, breathed agian and again through fishes’ gills, evaporated in the sun, rained down in every corner of the world. 

A bigger wave crashes into the boy’s legs and he falls. The little dog runs over to him, and so does his mother. Lucie watches as he helps him to his feet and he sets off running again. 

[WHOOSH] 

There is a package on Lucie’s doorstep. She frowns at it. It’s large, cumbersome when she lifts it up. She shuffles back into her apartment. Inside the brown paper packaging, an old, battered carpet bag. On top, there is a note. Found this in the house, thought you may wish to have it back. M.

Lucie opens the bag. It’s stuffed with clothes; stockings; socks; knickers; blouses. This was Lucie’s go-bag. The one she took to the de Vallée house. 

Lucie runs into the hall, picks up the phone, calls Olivier. 

‘Did you visit your brother?’ 

‘God no. You know I can’t stand the sight of him.’ 

‘He’s sent me something, I think.’ 

‘What?’ 

‘My bag, from when we ran there after José blew up the Paris train, right before I met you.’ 

‘When you were using the place as a hideout?!’ 

‘Yes, yes. We kept all our things behind some loose panelling.’ 

‘They’ve been doing some renovations, I think. Matine is going to get married there soon.’ 

‘Matine? But I thought—’ 

‘Yes, my brother had been making a public show of her for years, but clearly she’s become enough of a burden to him that he’s willing to farm her out to the highest bidder. Some English Lord, I believe. He’s got his own scandals attached but I haven’t the heart to look into it yet, the poor girl.’ 

‘Did you give Marcel my address?’ 

’No, but he’s always has ways to get hold of these things.’ 

Lucie nods. Olivier changes the subject, talks about work. Lucie answers, trying to let him distract her, but she can’t quite fully let him. She keeps staring at the bag. 

‘Listen, Olivier, I love you, but I have to go.’ 

‘Alright. Well, you just call if you want something, okay?’ 

‘Of course.’ 

Lucie sets the phone back in its cradle, walks back over to the bag. 

She takes out each item, one by one, lays them on the dining table. They have not been washed, but they don’t smell like unwashed clothes. They smell of mould and dust. At the very bottom of the bag, a pair of socks is balled into the bottom corner. This pair is clean. When Lucie unwraps them from themselves, the old cotton is still soft, not stiff like the others. 

Inside, a small perfume bottle. The ribbon is pale pink. Lucie’s mother’s. 

Lucie laughs with delight. She had forgotten she had thrust it into her sock drawer those many years ago, had never known she had packed those socks she’d wrapped it in into the bag she ran with to the de Vallée house. 

Lucie unscrews the lid. The smell is full of memories; her hair being combed; her mother singing lullabies; her parents dancing in the living room as she José danced beside. 

Lucie holds the bottle to her chest. She does not pray, has never prayed in her life, but in that moment she finds herself thanking something for this gift, be it some manner of god, or fate, or the universe itself. Whatever led chance to return this to her, she doesn’t care. She’s grateful either way. 

[WHOOSH] 

Lucie leans against the window frame, looking out across Entebbe. 

Uganda is not what she had expected. In her mind, Africa was all deserts, but Entebbe is lush and green and beautiful. 

The place her mother grew up is far from here, but Lucie is not sure exactly where. Though her mother had spoken at length about her childhood, the specifics were thin. Or at least, the kind of specifics that Lucie might need to find her mother’s old home. She did not even know her family name, only the name her mother had before she came to France and became Cassie; Kasumba. It has the same meaning as Lucie’s middle name; Bénédicte. Blessing. 

This was not much to go on. Before she made this trip, Lucie had been looking for her mother’s family for years, without much luck. To her surprise, it seemed her mother had been brought to France illegally. That she might not have been rescued from the war so much as she was kidnapped amidst the horror of it. 

She wondered if her mother knew what had happened to her, if her retellings had softened deliberately to keep Lucie from the truth. In the end, there is no way to know. 

  This dream of her mother’s life had defined so much of Lucie’s own. Lucie had thought maybe she would try to find a way to work out where, exactly, her mother might be from, but the country is settling into its new status, now a republic, just like France. The old kingdoms are gone. It feels foolish, somehow, to try to step back through time to find a village which may no longer exist. In all her mother’s stories, it sounded as though the place as good as burned down. 

Lucie had thought maybe here, she might feel a sense of coming home that has been robbed from her France. But she didn’t. She thought she might be upset about this, spent days waiting for the pain and tears to come. But they never did. 

Instead, Lucie has spent her days learning the place, trying to pick up a little more of the languages. Some speak French, but not many. Many people speak English, many speak Swahili, but there are a good number of people who speak Indian languages too, and dozens upon dozens more.

What settles over Lucie is a quiet sort of peace. She is glad she spent so much money to travel here, glad of the long boat journey and the seasickness. She is glad she could come back here, to this place where her mother was born, even though it is not the exact place, even though she can only ever a be a tourist. This place is a part of her, but only a part. There is peace and beauty in that, somehow, though she cannot quite parse out why.

She will stay another week. Tomorrow, she will go to the Botanical Gardens. She will take photographs on the large, cumbersome camera Olivier leant her for her trip, and when she gets back to Paris she will show him all the things she saw. They will drink wine and laugh. They won’t talk about the war, and Lucie won’t tell him about her mother, and life will go on. 

[WHOOSH] 

Lucie finishes her brandy. ‘Alright,’ she says loudly over her guests. ‘That’s it for me, I think.’ 

Her friends groan, but it’s well-meaning. 

‘No need to go to bed on my account!’ she tells them. 

‘Want me to tuck you in?’ asks Olivier. 

Lucie laughs. 

Olivier groans as he gets to his feet. 

Around them, Lucie’s guests are still dancing. Friends, the children of friends, the grandchildren of friends. Lucie slips her arm through Olivier’s and he helps her up the stairs, both of them giggling as they go. He fumbles with the back of her dress, apologising for his clumsiness between laughter. 

Lucie laughs too. ‘Silly old man,’ she says. 

‘You have different perfume on, tonight.’ 

Lucie smiles. ‘It was my mother’s. There’s not much of it left, now. I like to keep it for special occasions.’ 

‘Sixty five years young is certainly one of those.’ 

Lucie chuckles. Finally, she’s stripped down to her slip. Olivier pulls back her blankets. A warm evening breeze drifts through the open bedroom window, catching the gauzy curtains. 

‘Do you remember when you turned twenty-five?’ asks Olivier.

‘The day before V-day,’ says Lucie. ‘What a gift, the liberation of the city.’ 

‘We drank that awful champagne, remember?’ 

‘How could I forget. It had definitely gone bad. Like sparkling vinegar.’ 

Olivier laughs. ‘We thought we would die before morning.’ 

‘But we didn’t.’ 

‘No,’ Olivier sighs. ‘Forty years ago now.’ 

‘Long ones.’ 

‘Ah, not so long,’ says Olivier, smiling. ‘Do you want me to stay with you?’ 

‘Oh, no. there’s much too much food and wine left over. See to it that it’s finished before you let the others go home, will you?’ 

‘Of course,’ says Olivier. 

‘Thank you.’ 

Olivier bids Lucie goodnight. 

Lucie settles against her pillow. She can hear laughter drifting up through the floorboards. She thinks of her parents dancing, José spinning in her arms. She thinks of Olivier under the stars, the day Paris was theirs again. She thinks of the lush green fields of Entebbe, of a little boy playing in the sea with his dog. What a life, full of people, full of moments, good and bad. And all of them, leading up to this. 

[WHOOSH] 

[THE APPRENTICE GASPS] 

APPRENTICE
Thank you.

SIR
Oh, did she hurt you?

APPRENTICE
It’s alright,  it hurts, but it’s alright. Thank you. 

SIR
But it still hurt.

APPRENTICE
Yes.

SIR
I want to help. Let me help you. 

APPRENTICE
Okay.

[WHOOSH]

[END]