An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Descriptions of nude bodies
• Discussions of past fascist occupation
• References to alcohol use and abuse
• References to use and abuse of illegal drugs
• Scenes of a sexual nature
• Descriptions of unhealthy use of sex as a coping mechanism
• Discussions of death, including sudden, violent death

Transcript

[WIND BLOWS. FEET TRUDGE. THE APPRENTICE’S TEETH CHATTER] 

APPRENTICE

What…? Where. Where. 

I was… we were somewhere. I was reading a remnant, and then I— I knew. I understood what I was. A wretched thing. I tried to explain, but Sir, he… 

Sir? 

Hello? 

Sir?!

[HE TAKES A FEW MORE STEPS, GASPS.] 

The statue. Again. What are you holding, now? Not a note, this time. 

[A COUPLE OF STEPS] 

A paintbrush? It’s— the bristles are clean, but the wood part, it’s covered in old paint. And it’s snapped, right in two. Right in the middle. I can see the wood, this warm, honey colour peeking through, and— oh. 

WHOOSH

Benoit sits behind his tiny easel. He’s trying to paint his teddy bear, but the shapes aren’t coming out right. His mother is painting, too. She has maybe a hundred photographs of the same painting all up on the wall, scraps of fabric and paper with swatches of paint. It’s a kind of miracle, Benoit thinks, how she manages to pull whole buildings and people out of the canvas. 

She’s moving fast now, sketching with colours, a paintbrush behind each ear, another in her teeth, as well as the one in her hand. She switches between them, shifting between browns and greys and blues and greens without even pausing to rinse off the brush. 

This is Benoit’s favourite part, when the whole thing looks mad and ghostly on the wet base colour, this time a rich purple-grey. The paintings transform the more she works, look more and more like the ones in her photographs, but at this part, they look like anywhere, everywhere. Pouring out of his mother’s paintbrush. 

He’s so absorbed in the process of the work that he doesn’t notice she’s glanced over at him. 

‘Don’t let that paint dry on your brush.’

’Sorry, mother.’

His mother chuckles. ‘It’s alright. I never knew painting was a spectator sport until I had you. It’s very charming.’ 

‘What’s spectator?’ asks Benoit. 

‘A spectator is a person who watches,’ his mother explains. 

WHOOSH

Benoit licks his thumb, smears the wet pad of it across the cheek of his messy, half-formed creation. It doesn’t look right. Nothing like the man in the photograph on his mother’s mirror. Rene Favre has a bigger nose, sharper cheekbones. His forehead is different in a way Benoit can’t articulate. He wants to be able to reach into the photograph and map the man’s face with his fingers, as he would if he were blind. But can’t, and not just because it’s a photograph. Because the man who is in it is dead.

His mother says Rene Favre is his father. If that’s so, maybe there’s something of him in the shape of Benoit’s face. He can’t get his hands at the right angle to feel if it’s right, and he’s getting clay in his hair. 

He moves, stands behind the blobby sculpture’s head, moves his hands over its soft cheeks the way he’d fumbled across his own, making adjustments. 

When he’s done, he sits in front of the head again. It doesn’t look like a man, it looks like a boy. And nothing like Rene Favre. 

The door of their apartment opens. His mother walks in, her heels click-clacking, her perfume like an aura of musk and vanilla. He glances at her as she unwinds her silk scarf from over her hair.

‘I like your self-portrait,’ she says, nodding at the blobby head.

‘It’s supposed to be him,’ says Benoit, pointing at the photograph. As he does, he sees his hands are completely covered in clay, almost like he’s made of the stuff himself from the wrists out. 

‘I’m not sure about the face-paint,’ says his mother. ‘But I’ve never been on top of fashion trends, I suppose.’ 

She tucks the scarf into her pocket, kisses Benoit’s cheek. When she pulls away, smiling, there are flakes of clay stuck to her lipstick. The way the sun hits her face, it’s as though the paintwork has come away, and he can see the rough materials underneath. 

[WHOOSH]

‘This strapping young man must be your son,’ says the man who owns the apartment. 

‘Indeed it is,’ says Benoit’s mother. ‘Benoit, this is Harry. Harry, Benoit.’ 

‘Pleased to meet you,’ says Benoit. 

Harry shakes his hand. His grip is firm, but his hands are incredibly soft. So is his smile. 

‘You couldn’t hide that he’s yours, Celine; he’s like you, if you were a man,’ says Harry. 

‘Yes, I’m sure he’ll be very popular,’ says Benoit’s mother. ‘But he’s just fifteen, aren’t you darling?’ 

‘Yeah, but I’ll be sixteen in a few weeks, actually,’ says Benoit. 

Harry raises an eyebrow, shoots Benoit’s mother a particular glance before he says ‘is that so?’ 

Celine scoffs, bats Harry’s nose with her gloves. ‘Stop it, you fiend,’ she says. ‘You wanted this one in your bathroom, was it? Benoit will hang it for you. Just show us where you were thinking and we’ll test it for placement.’ 

‘Ah, delightful. I was so pleased when you said you’d found a little Manet for me; I don’t know how you find these things. You truly are the best art dealer in Europe, Celine. What is your secret?’ 

Benoit’s mother bats her eyelashes. ‘There is no secret, darling. Just good business.’ 

Harry explains where he wants the painting hung, and as Benoit tests the spot, adds the hooks, and hangs the painting in place, he thinks about watching his mother paint this piece, bringing it to life bit by bit. Of course, he’s always known his mother painted what she sold, but it’s only been in the last few years that he’d understood exactly what that meant. She isn’t the best art dealer in Europe; she isn’t an art dealer at all. She’s the best forger in the world. 

They’d never spoken of it, but then, they rarely spoke of much besides art. 

‘Ah, perfect,’ Harry sighs. ‘It’s just perfect. Champagne, to celebrate, perhaps?’ 

‘Delightful,’ says Benoit’s mother. 

Harry leads them through his vast, luxurious apartment. Benoit peers at the walls, wonders how many of the paintings are real or fake. In the small parlour, Harry pours them all a glass of champagne. As they speak business, of acquisitions Benoit’s mother is hoping to ‘acquire’, Benoit inspects the paintings covering almost every inch of this room’s walls.

One in particular draws his eye. A man, nude, rendered in an almost romantic style. His hand coyly half covers his genitalia as he stretches across the red-draped couch he’s been posed on. His posture oozes ease. There’s something in the brushstrokes, too, something fierce that screams of desire. It’s the precise placement of every freckle on his soft body, the shadows in the creases at his elbow, down the slope of his throat. 

‘This one’s not signed,’ said Benoit. 

‘No. I don’t believe it was ever actually finished,’ says Harry. He draws Benoit’s attention to the curtains in the man’s backdrop, flat and lacklustre in comparison to the glorious figure of the man. 

‘It’s a shame, really. Chap who painted it was a war veteran and sadly went quite mad. Took his own life with a palette knife, would you believe.’ 

‘Lucio,’ says Benoit’s mother. ‘I’ve seen some of his other work. You’re right; it is a shame. He had a lot of promise.’ 

‘Yes. So few works actually completed, and so much of it was lost in all that nonsense with the Chatterly woman. such a Shame.’ 

‘Oh yes,’ says Benoit’s mother. 

Benoit studies the painting more closely. ‘I feel as though I know him,’ he says. 

‘He reminds me of an old friend,’ says his mother. 

In his reflection in the painting’s glass, Benoit watches Harry double take. ‘You don’t think…?’ 

‘Surely not,’ says Benoit’s mother. ‘Perry wouldn’t sit for a portrait like this.’

[WHOOSH] 

Benoit fumbles with his keys. They fall to the tiled floor with a peel of bells. He stoops to pick them up, wobbles on his loose knees, and knocks his head against the door. 

He wakes up when he falls flat onto the doormat. 

‘Where have you been?’ His mother asks. 

‘Pierre,’ says Benoit. 

His mother scoffs. ‘Well, are you going to come in, or do I have to drag you?’ 

Benoit tries to stand, but can’t manage it. Everything is very spinny. The hotel room is an impressionists’ vision of itself. Benoit tries to articulate this to his mother, but the worlds come out like marbles bursting from a dropped bag, loud and nonsensical and everywhere. 

‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ His mother despairs. 

‘Drink,’ says Benoit. 

‘Oh, that’s all, is it?’ His mother asks. She reaches into his coat, pulls out the little tin where he keeps his cocaine. ‘You’ll be dead if you’re not careful.’ 

‘Everyone dies,’ says Benoit. 

‘Not so pointlessly and uselessly as this! You snort that stuff so you can down more drinks. It’s wretched. If you keep this up, I’ll have to cut your allowance.’ 

‘Nooo, don’t do that,’ says Benoit, incapable of the far more sophisticated and persuasive argument he’s sure is right there in his head, somewhere. If he could just find it. What comes out instead is: ‘Pierre’s dad’s dead.’ 

‘I beg your pardon?’ says Benoit’s mother. 

‘His dad. Dead. Kicked the bucket.’ 

‘Yes, I’d assumed so or you’d not have been invited to attend his wake, would you?’ 

‘Pierre’s staying in Paris. To study and shit.’ 

‘The two great Parisian pastimes, indeed,’ his mother snaps. ‘Get up off the floor.’ 

‘I like it down here. Too spinny up there.’ 

‘I’m afraid your head will spin whatever location you choose to loll in. At least drag your carcass out of the hallway. Whatever will the maids think if they find you passed out there when they come in to bring us our breakfast?’ 

Benoit considers this for a moment. ‘Interesting rug?’ He suggests. 

His mother sighs, but can’t wholly keep herself from laughing. 

‘Ha. You laughed,’ says Benoit. ‘I’m not in trouble anymore.’ 

‘Yes you are, young man. If you don’t get up off the floor, I might have you actually skinned to turn you into a better rug than you’re already being.’ 

‘Is my dad dead?’ Benoit asks. 

His mother is quiet for a moment. ‘Yes.’ 

‘He’s not Rene Favre. I know. I don’t look like him.’ 

This quiet is even longer than the last. ‘Your father is dead all the same, Benoit. Now go to bed. We’re going to the Louvre tomorrow however wretched your head is.’  

[WHOOSH]

Benoit has come back to Paris, but it is wrong, now. In his memory, Paris smelled of bread and you could see the Eiffel Tower from every street corner. In fact, the city is busy, industrious, and if you come too close to the Seine, it smells like old seafood and sweat. 

More than the memory of this place, he’d hoped to find something of his mother, here. This is where she was from. Surely there’d be pieces of her between the cobbles on the street, in the mortar of the bricks. He looked for her in the Louvre and in every bar he walked past. But she was nowhere. 

Of course, he knows where she actually is. In a coffin, six feet below the ground, just outside of Milan. He could barely stand to look at her in that satin-lined box. Her hands, so quick and nimble, still and stiff around a sprig of flowers. There was not a single fleck or smear of paint upon her anywhere. Not one. It was eery, unnatural. Wrong. 

And so is Paris, just like all the places Benoit has wandered to before he reached it. The world rendered in dull colours, a smudge of grey peeking through the glorious blue sky.

He busies himself however he can. In drugs and drinks and music. He makes friends in all places. Drinking friends, smoking friends, crying friends, kissing friends. Friends he wants to bite on the neck, friends who bite him back. Women who leave lipstick stains on his chest, men who leave motor oil on the small of his back. Women with rough palms, men who smell like fresh daisies. 

And then there’s Billy. 

Billy drinks Benoit’s sweat as though it’s ambrosia, whispers his name like a prayer. An angry thing that spits and fizzes, who believes in a better, brighter world which Benoit tries to see, but fails and fails and fails. Every time they fuck, it feels like an apocalypse. Billy holds him and Benoit can see the flames of the world still burning down around them. 

Billy looks at Benoit and smiles like he’s the whole world, and it tears Benoit to pieces, because he has nothing to give this man, who treats him like a fine work of art. 

Benoit isn’t an artwork. an open wound. All he can do is bleed. Billy sees him rose-tinted only because the blood in his eyes, blood that Benoit has put there. 

So he rations what he has, of Billy. What he’ll let himself take. Buries the rest with drugs and drink and other people. It’s easier that way. For everyone. 

[WHOOSH] 

Benoit is dizzy with wine and stronger things. Music and lights paint the ceiling of the house he’s found himself in. He’s not sure who it belongs to. There are marble tiles on the bathroom floor, cold under his hands as he retches over the toilet. He lies flat on them, after, lets the cold stone pull the heat out of his body. 

He feels his way out of the bathroom along the wall, fingers meeting wood panels and damasked wall paper. He can feel music and conversation through the floorboards. He’s in the library, books everywhere. A man he doesn’t know stands in the v of a woman’s legs. His belt buckle jingles like a bell, the cheeks of his arse clenching and unclenching as he thrusts in time with soft grunts. The woman on the desk moans, but over his shoulder, her face is disinterested. She meets Benoit’s eye. 

Benoit finds his way outside, drinks the cool night air, fumbles with his lighter. Someone catches his hand, fingers cold, palms rough, but not from work. In the warm light of the lighter’s flame, there are scars criss-crossed over them, pearlescent lines like tributaries. 

Benoit looks up, and he’s a painting. It’s not just that he’s beautiful; he is literally a man Benoit has seen in a painting. He’s met him elsewhere, too, in a park in Vienna, before his mother died. Perry, his mother called him. 

‘You,’ Benoit says. 

Perry looks stricken. There are circles round his eyes, lack of sleep so deep it’s bruised him. ‘Benoit,’ he says, in horror. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Perry touches Benoit’s cheek. ‘You look so much like her.’ 

‘She’s dead, you know. My mother.’

‘I know. I— I’m sorry…’ he shakes his head. ‘I shouldn’t have left. But I was a coward.’ 

‘Left?’ Benoit echoes. ‘It was your house, in Valencia. That’s where she died.’ 

Perry finishes his cigarette, lights another. ‘If there was something I could do, I would do it.’ 

‘No you wouldn’t,’ says Benoit. 

Perry recoils as though slapped. He brings his fresh cigarette back to his mouth, hands shaking.

‘Are you my father?’ Benoit asks. 

Perry frowns. ‘No.’ 

‘But my mother loved you.’ 

‘No she didn’t. Nobody does.’ 

‘She died for you.’ 

‘Not for me. Because of me. It’s my fault, not her sacrifice. There was no point in any of it. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ 

‘No point,’ Benoit echoes. 

Benoit turns away, looks at the sky. The stars are spinning. When he looks back, Perry is gone. 

[WHOOSH]

Benoit sits on the edge of his bed. His hotel room in Saint-Cyr-Sur-Mer is small, comfortable, but unglamorous. When he’d pictured his mother as a young girl, she was skipping through the Louvre, not living in a place like this, a sleepy sea-side town, without even many tourists. 

Meeting Perry had cracked something open inside of Benoit. If Perry was not his father, and Rene Favre couldn’t be because he’d died years before Benoit was born, then who? He had no way to find answers. So he dug in the only spot where the ground was soft; his mother’s past. 

He had known she was an art forger, had grown up knowing this. But he hadn’t realised she was a forger in all aspects of her life. Her fabricated past in Paris, her mentorship with Rene Favre. None of it was true. She was born here, in this little town on the French coast. In the war she’d collaborated with Nazis. That was why she left Paris; nothing to do with heartbreak about Favre’s death, which had happened so long before she said it had. He didn’t pass away quietly in his sleep because the stress of the war; he was shot by Nazi officers. 

There was no heartbreak and likely no relationship. Benoit’s mother had left Paris because it spat her out. 

He feared at first that his father might’ve been a Nazi officer, but the timing of his birth made this unlikely, too. Who, then? There were no answers he could find in Paris, so now here he is, in Saint-Cyr-Sur-Mer. 

So far, he has found nothing. 

He eats dinner at the hotel, then heads back out onto the streets. He wonders which of the little houses he walks by thathis mother grew up in. Wonders if she’d walked on these same paving stones. If she liked it here, with its quaint beauty and provincial charm. There’s no knowing any of this, of course. His mother kept this place a secret from him. Maybe she’d be repulsed, to know he’d gone there, looking for her. 

Benoit wanders up the hill, headed out of town. There’s a Roman villa up this way, and a small museum. It’s after closing, but as Benoit gets close, he can see the lights are on. When Benoit tries the door, he finds it is unlocked. He walks past the exhibits, softly lit. 

There is a man, tending to one of them. When he looks up at Benoit, there’s a quiet sort of hunger in his eyes. He introduces himself as Tommy, follows Benoit outside. Benoit finds himself waffling. Wondering aloud what he’d been thinking on his walk there. Of his mother, of this place, what it might’ve meant to her, and how he’ll never know. 

‘She always said she was from Paris. I don’t know why; this place is beautiful.’ 

Tommy looks out over the bay. ‘Yes, it really is.’ 

‘So are you, Tommy,’ says Benoit. And then Benoit kisses him. He’s not sure why, except that he knows Tommy will let him. He knows nothing of this man, who he is, what he’s doing in this place he is so clearly separate from. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the taste of the underside of Tommy’s tongue, the feel of his ribs under his hands, through his shirt. 

When they pull apart, Tommy offers to drive Benoit back to his hotel. They arrive, sit a moment together, quiet except for the purring engine.

‘Do you want to come up to my room?’ Benoit offers. He is already undressing Tommy in his mind, licking shapes into the hair on his chest. 

‘Oh, no. I’m far too old for that kind of thing,’ says Tommy. 

It hurts Benoit more fiercely than it ought to, but he manages to bite out some retort before he leaves. He marches up to his little room, strips naked, sits on the edge of the bed. He touches himself, thinks of Tommy, at first, but then of Billy. Billy with his rough, craftsman’s hands. Billy who he has not seen for months. 

Benoit makes a mess of his bedsheets, does his best to clean up with towels, downs a bottle of wine, sleeps in a great heap with his feet on the pillows. 

When Benoit wakes, it’s almost the end of the hotel’s serving time for breakfast. He dresses in a hurry, but when he gets there, there’s a frenzied energy to the place. ‘What’s going on?’ Benoit asks a waitress, once he’s found one. 

‘A man has been killed,’ she tells him. ‘Up on the cliffs. Struck over the head. He’s just a blow-in, not from round here.’ 

Benoit’s stomach flips. ‘Not the Englishman who works at the museum?’ 

‘Yes,’ says the waitress. ‘Did you know him?’ 

‘Not well,’ says Benoit. His heart is throbbing in his ears. He leaves the dining room in a daze, slams the door to his room. He picks up the old rotary phone at his bedside, dials the only number he can remember. Billy’s. 

[A CHOKING SOUND]

[WHOOSHING—]

Benoit, don’t!

[WHOOSHING—]

But he’s calling him, arranging to meet, and Billy is agreeing, and he’s— He’s going to die!

[WHOOSHING—]

Ah, Benoit! Don’t do this! Please!

[WHOOSHING—]

Benoit—!

[WHOOSH] 

You’re holding my hand, how are you— you’re made of stone, and— ah! It hurts. 

[STRUGGLING]

You’re hurting me. The paintbrush! Let me go! The splinters, they’re— AH. 

[WHOOSH]

[END]