46. Leash

An Episode of Remnants.
Content Warnings
  • Implications of child abuse, verbal
  • Implications of medical abuse
  • Descriptions of a person in extreme ill health, including being very underweight
  • Discussions of parental loss
  • Discussions of war, including violent deaths
  • Implications of murder
  • Mentions of PTSD
  • Implications of sexual assault
  • Descriptions of a scene of intense abuse or torture
  • Descriptions of violent death

Transcript


[GASP] 

APPRENTICE
Sir? 

SIR
I am still here. 

APPRENTICE
But things are different. 

SIR
It does feel different. But I’m not sure it is.

APPRENTICE
Right. But we were in the dust and the wind, before and now it’s… 

SIR
Tell me what you see. 

APPRENTICE
You first. 

SIR
I have told you that I don’t. I sense. I perceive. 

APPRENTICE
And what is it that you perceive here, then? 

SIR
A great net in many directions. It shifts like fabric. We coalesce along the threads. 

APPRENTICE
I feel like there’d need to be more than two of us for it to count as coalescing. 

SIR
There are. 

APPRENTICE
You mean the remnants?

SIR
Yes. 

APPRENTICE
Right. Well to me it looks like shelves, but I can see… it’s like string connecting them all up together. Except… I can’t actually touch the threads. I can only see them because of the light. 

Th— there’s light. Above us I can see… i-is it the sun?

 But it can’t be. 

There’s no sun here. But where the light falls, I can see these strings, connecting stuff. They’re dust, I think, dust flowing slowly back and forth between all of them. Some of them are more defined. Others, they’re like…. 

[THE APPRENTICE GASPS AGAIN]

SIR
What? 

APPRENTICE
I just looked at you. 

SIR
And?

APPRENTICE
You’re… it’s all moving. The surface of you is just. Moving. Like the threads. Like…

[FOOTSTEPS]

APPRENTICE
Like dust. Like you’re made of dust. 

SIR
What do you see when you look at yourself? 

APPRENTICE
I can’t do that. When I look it’s like. Tied to me? I see things from where I am. It’s not like what happens for you where it’s all. Everywhere. You know?

SIR
Not everywhere. There are places I do not look. 

APPRENTICE
Yeah, I know. Do you know why? 

SIR
No. 

APPRENTICE
Okay. Weird. Alright. I can see my arms. There’s. Glass, in me. I can see right through myself. And I think I look like a person but I. I’m not sure. 

SIR
If only we were in the room with the mirrors. 

APPRENTICE
I’m glad we’re not. 

SIR
Okay. 

APPRENTICE
Right. Anyway. Let’s. Let’s look at something. You said you think that’s the way we get out, right? We look at the remnants and judge them, like we did at the start. We decided whether they’re shelved or discarded. 

SIR
Yes. 

APPRENTICE
Right. Okay. I’m just going to pick one and look, alright? 

SIR
Alright. 

APPRENTICE
Um. Yes. Don’t think about it, just take one and… it’s a strip of leather. There’s a loop at one end, a clasp at the other. A leash? For a dog? It’s old, there’s cracks in the finish. The threads that close the loop are loose at the ends, and when I. Ah. 

[WHOOSH] 

Alice is sitting in her quietest spot at the bottom of the garden, reading her book. The book is about a girl called Alice, but she’s not very much like Alice at all. Alice in the book is very clever, but in real life, Alice’s mother say’s she’s vague and drippy. She supposes her mother is right; after all, she doesn’t know half the things that book-Alice talks about and she has had to ask her dad about what the words mean so many times that he’s got tired of it. He sent her out into the garden with a pencil and paper so she could write down everything she did understand and he could answer all of it in one go. 

Still, the book about Alice is better than the last book Alice read. The Secret Garden was a book about a spoiled little girl who didn’t know how to do anything for herself and expected the maids in the house to dress her every morning like she was a princess. Alice only gets help to be dressed when she’s going to a party, or if she’s wearing her grey boots. The laces are too short and she can never tie them up by herself. 

Alice’s mother said The Secret Garden was her most favourite book when she was a little girl. She didn’t have maids at all for a long time, she said, and they had to depend on the kindness of others to get by. Now, her mother gets the maids to dress her whenever she can. She never pours her own water at the table. Alice’s grandmother is the same. You have to let the staff do their job, her grandmother says. 

Alice’s dad seems to think it’s all a bit daft, just like Alice does. He dresses himself and encourages Alice to do the same. ‘We’re not Louis XIV,’ he tells her. ‘The staff are important, and we do let them do our jobs, but we’re not useless, are we, my girl?’

Alice is glad to think she is not useless. But then, her mother says her father is useless too. Perhaps useless is exactly what Alice is, then, and maybe it’s exactly what she wants to be. 

[WHOOSH] 

Alice washes her hands very carefully, scrubbing between her fingers. The doctors say everyone has to wash their hands before they see her father, even Alice, and she’s not to bring him flowers from the garden anymore. It’s summer and his room is swelteringly hot even with all the curtains drawn. He can’t have the windows open; there are too many germs in the air. 

He is sitting in bed, propped up on his pillows, but his eyes are closed. He has a big rubber mask over his nose and mouth, fastened with leather straps that make his hair stick up all over the place. His pyjama shirt gapes around his neck. His skin is shiny with sweat, and sort of grey. Alice can see his ribs. 

She creeps up to his bedside and takes his hand. His fingers are cold and bony as she clutches them. ‘Papa,’ she says, softly. 

Her father’s eyes flutter open, creasing around the edges so she knows that under his mask, he’s smiling. He reaches up, pulls the mask down to show her his blue lips. 

‘Hello, my girl,’ he says. 

‘It’s my birthday.’ 

Her father’s eyes sparkle. ‘You don’t say?’ 

Alice nods. 

‘What a pretty dress you have on.’ 

‘Mother bought it for me. It’s a bit itchy.’ 

‘It looks lovely on you, all the same.’ 

Alice chews her lip. 

‘I had hoped to take tea with you today, Alice, but the doctor says I am not well enough. I’m sorry.’ 

‘That’s okay,’ says Alice.

Her father sighs. 

‘Have you had a lot of treatments today?’ 

‘Yes. How can you tell?’ 

‘You always look more tired after your treatments.’ 

’You’re such a clever girl, Alice.’ 

‘No I’m not.’ 

‘You are, though. The treatments do make me very, very tired.’ 

‘I hope they start to make you better soon.’ 

‘Me too, my girl. Me too. I have got you a present. I hope it’s alright; I haven’t been able to see it myself. ‘ 

‘Oh?’ 

‘It’s in the parlour, I believe.’ 

‘Okay.’ 

‘Give me a kiss before you go?’ 

‘The doctor says I’m not supposed to.’ 

‘But it is your birthday, after all. I think we can risk it just this once.’ 

Alice leans forward, places a kiss on her father’s cold, damp cheek. When she steps back, his eyes are closed, but he’s smiling. She helps him put his mask back on and leaves him to rest.

Outside his room there is a basket of laundry. White sheets stained with blood. 

Alice bounds through the house to the parlour. Jane the Cook is sitting on the floor with one of the maids. They beam as Alice comes in. Between them, a little puppy with the fur the colour of honey. There’s a ribbon round her throat. The tag hanging from it says ‘to my girl, from your Papa.’ 

[WHOOSH] 

Alice snuffles into Honey’s fur. She sits very patiently as she always does, wagging her tail in a very small, restrained kind of way that suggests to Alice that she understands today is not a day for being too happy. She’s glad Honey is pleased to see her all the same. It has been a very, very long day. 

The funeral itself was quite short. An hour in church whilst people said nice things about her father, in between the priest telling everyone that he was dead, as though they did not all already know this. Her father’s casket was made of honey-coloured wood. It was sealed. By the time he’d died, he had looked like a wax-work of himself. None of the doctors ever figured out what was wrong with him and Alice’s grandparents are convinced their treatments were the thing that did him in in the end. 

They’d taken Alice and her father to their big country house three weeks before he died. They let her father sit out in the gardens in a big wicker chair. Alice’s grandfather had to lift him into it every morning. Her father didn’t talk very much, but he did smile a lot when they were all outside, and the longer they were at her grandparent’s house, the more colour Alice began to see in his cheeks. He even started opening his eyes a little more. There was less blood on the bandages wrapped around his bottom half when she helped the maids change them in the mornings. 

But then Alice’s mother and her other grandmother came to visit. They insisted on bringing her father’s old doctor with them. He forced Alice’s father to do more of his treatments and it was wretched. There was nowhere in the house where you could not hear him scream. 

The next morning, he was dead. 

Alice’s mother had cried and cried, but when Alice tried to borrow one of her handkerchiefs, it smelled like lemon juice and when she put it near her face, her eyes stung.

Alice’s mother did not stay after the funeral. If she had, perhaps the day would not have felt so long, and all the people who wanted to shake her hand and tell her what a lovely man her father was would have been able to be split between the two of them. Instead, she’d had to stand for hours and hours and try only to cry a little bit so it seemed like she was handling it well. She’d clearly managed this task; so many people had complimented her composure. 

Now, with Honey, there was no need to be composed. She could cry and cry and cry. People had spoken about her father and what a great man he was but nobody had talked about blackberry picking or playing in the garden or reading in the evenings. Nobody had talked about even when he was so frail he could not lift his arms, her father had managed a smile for anyone who came in to see him, even when he was crying with pain. These were the things that made him not just a good man, but a great one. And now, he was dead. 

But at least Alice had Honey. She buries her nose in her fur, soft and warm.

[WHOOSH] 

Alice’s mother fastens her necklace around her neck. It’s heavy against Alice’s collarbones, jewels glimmering in the low light of Alice’s bedroom. 

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit much?’ Alice asks. 

‘Not at all. It’s your society debut. You are a jewel and should make no apologies for it.’ 

‘Alright,’ says Alice. 

’Don’t say that; such colloquialisms are ill-befitting for a girl of your stature. Do you know what I’d have done to have a proper society debut like this, Alice? Do you understand how important this is?’ 

Alice sighs. ‘Yes, mother,’ she says, but in truth the point of it all is lost on her. She understands the tradition, of course, and the significance placed on such a day as this. But it’s broader importance? No, it does not make sense. Most girls do not have society debuts. Most girls are not in high society. And personally, to Alice, it all seems like a load of old nonsense. She’s sure if her father was alive he’d have allowed her not to do it. 

Alas, all she has is her mother and her three grandparents, and all of them think this is something she should do. 

Her mother’s latest potential husband thinks it’s a good idea, too. He likes to talk, this new potential husband, mostly about war. He was a general in the Great War, he says, and he’d fought in a good many before that. ‘You should have seen the troops faces,’ he laughs, ‘when they first saw a tank advancing towards them over No Man’s Land.’ He tells this story again and again, as though it is the first time anyone has ever heard it, probably because he’s old enough that he likely grew up eating boiled tyrannosaurus eggs for breakfast.

Still, he’s better than her mother’s last husband, who Alice met only briefly on the day of the wedding. She’d not wanted to go at all. She didn’t like the idea of her mother attempting to replace her father, particularly not with such a pig of a man with such an odious reputation. Her grandmother had shown up and impressed upon Alice the absolute importance that her mother remarry, however. It was important for Alice, she had said, that her mother appear to be a reputable and desirable woman.

It all seems absurd to Alice. She doesn’t want to get married, and if she did, it certainly wouldn’t be to the kind of men her mother seems to favour. The last one was at least twice her mother’s age and this one she’s courting looks twice that again. How could she find them handsome, or even tolerable? 

Of course, Alice knows her mother’s marriages are about something besides love. They have to be; Alice has long concluded her mother incapable of loving anyone or anything. Besides, perhaps, her own mother. Certainly not any of the men whose arms she hangs off. Certainly not Alice’s father. Certainly not Alice herself. Love is not the point of these matches then. The point is to project an idea, of the illustrious Lady Chatterley. 

Alice finds it all preposterous. 

It feels especially preposterous right now, when there are reports on the radio every day of how many young men are dying, when so recently London itself was under siege, when they are recruiting more and more boys to feed to the cannon fire. 

Not that the army uses cannons anymore. It’s all guns and tanks and bombs, Alice’s mother’s fiancé likes to say. He resents it, Alice thinks, as though to die on a sword within sight of your enemies eyes was any less bloody and tragic than to die a thousand feet from the muzzle of his rifle. 

‘You are thinking too hard,’ says Alice’s mother. ‘You’re going to get wrinkles if you keep frowning like that.’ 

‘I shall get wrinkles either way, provided I survive the evening.’ 

‘Don’t be absurd. It’s a ball, not a battle ground. You put on your gloves. I shall head downstairs and tell everyone to prepare for your grand entrance.’  

Once her mother leaves the room, Alice stoops to scratch Honey behind the ear. She’s snoozing in her little bed as set up at the foot of Alice’s. She’d rather have Honey sleep in there with her but her grandparents haven’t allowed that since her father’s passing. They call Honey a filthy animal, even though she gets baths twice a week. 

As always, Honey thumps her golden tail as Alice pets her, rolling onto her back to expose the creamy, curly fur on her belly. Alice it rubs it for her for as long as she thinks she can get away with. She washes her hands and spritzes herself with perfume so her mother cannot accuse her of smelling like a dog, and then leaves her room to face the absurd and unnecessary music. 

[WHOOSH] 

Alice knocks upon her mother’s door. 

She should have just gone home, she knows. Her mother will be furious to hear she’s turned down yet another suitor. It’s the dogs, her mother says. The dogs put the men off. Of course, that insinuation had only made Alice more insistent on bringing at least one of her darlings with her whenever she went to meet a potential husband. 

Dogs are a good test of people, she thinks. Honey never liked her mother and her mother never liked Honey, and so this trend has continued with all of Alice’s pets. Dogs do have a sense of smell far superior to a human’s. Perhaps they can sniff out and fend off the bad ones. 

Of course, this test does not always seem to work. 

This last one Alice met, she was so sure he was going to be good. Her little Papillon, Pepper, had seemed to adore him, and he’d seemed to adore Pepper right back. Stephen had even suggested they meet in the park so that Pepper could have a bit of a run around. He’d brought her a little ball with her name onto it in pretty gold letters. 

Alice was especially impressed because he was so many years younger than her. She’s frightfully close to thirty, so old that she would not even be considered a spinster, if such terms were still in use outside of her mother’s parlour. 

Alice does not feel old. In fact, she feels as though her life is just beginning. That’s why it was so exciting to meet Stephen, who is so young and full of excitement for the future. So young, in fact, that for him the war is a childhood memory he thinks on with nostalgia, rather than a looming shadow in the back of his mind, as it has been for many of them men whom Alice has courted. 

It was not so much that they were odious or terrible but that they leeched a misery and pain Alice could not bear to be around. So many of them carry a darkness in their hearts. So many of them had fought, seen others die. 

Her mother said this was ridiculous. The most important thing was that they had a title and a working downstairs, so that they could put a little lord or lady inside of Alice’s belly. 

The thought made Alice feel sick. 

She had to admit though, she had wondered for a moment if perhaps she could tolerate a child with Stephen. As he’d thrown Pepper’s monogrammed ball in Regent’s Park, she’d imagined him playing with a little golden-haired child. Maybe she’d name her Mary.

She wishes she’d brought Pepper with her tonight. Maybe then none of it would have happened. But Pepper likes the opera too much; she always tries to sing along. It’s Alice’s fault; when they listen to records at home she encourages this behaviour. Either way, she left Pepper at home, and then, in the dark of the box, as the music had reached its crescendo, Stephen had grabbed her. 

Alice knocks again. No answer. Perhaps it’s for the best. It’s not as though her mother would have comforted her. She’d say Stephen’s advances that night were compliment, in fact. That the soreness of her throat where his hand had pressed were a sign of her power over him, not the other way round. ‘You like to train dogs,’ her mother had told her once. ‘Men are not wholly different from them. Once you understand that, you shall have no qualms with stepping out with them.’ 

Still,it unnerves her to think Stephen is still abound in the darkness of the London evening, somewhere. It was a long walk back to Alice’s home across the city. She’d like to wash the make up which has surely streaked down her cheeks with tears, and maybe have a little glass of brandy to steady her nerves. 

Alice pats her cheeks with her handkerchief and tried the doorhandle. It clicks and swings open. Of course her mother has not locked the door.

‘Hello?’ Alice calls. No answer. No sign of any staff, even. How peculiar. Alice steps inside. She washes her face in the powder room and heads to the kitchen. As she passes the bottom of the stairs, though, she hears a sound. A faint whine. A dog? But her mother hates them. 

Alice climbs the stairs, calling out for her mother and anyone else who might be waiting for her at the top of them. All of the bedroom doors stand ajar except one. Her hand hovers over the doorknob a moment before she dares to turn and open it.  

Alice hears the whine again. This close she can tell the sound is not a dog, not an animal at all. It is a person. There is someone on the other side of this door and they are hurting. 

Alice thinks of her father, screaming through the house as the doctor pumped milk and medicine into his body to try to stop the blood that kept oozing out of his guts. She thinks of his paper skin, so delicately placed over his bones, so thin she could see his veins twitching as his heart thudded on and on inside of him.

She opens the door. 

On the bed is a man. 

He’s younger than Alice. Barely more than a boy. He’s naked, a sheet thrown loose over his waist, so soaked with sweat the white cotton has become translucent. His chest is working erratically. She can hear his lungs crackle, the sound like flame consuming a log. 

Around him, the accoutrements of medical treatment. A rubber tube snakes out from between the man’s legs, connected to a glass bottle of golden liquid that sits on the floor. His hands are bound in cloth restraints, pulling his arms out flat across the mattress. His eyes are half open, brown, peering from under his eyelashes. He moans through the cloth in his mouth, tied at the back of his head. 

Alice pulls the gag aside, her hands shaking. The man gulps the air, his lips dry and chapped. His eyes flutter closed. 

‘Did my mother do this to you?’ Alice whispers. ‘Are you sick?’ 

The man does not answer. He lies there, breathing fast, open mouthed. Alice touches his throat and he gasps, flinching, too weak to pull away. His pulse is weak under Alice’s fingers.  

A doctor. He needs a doctor right away. She hurries down the stairs, finds the phone in the hall. But there is no tone when she lifts it from its cradle. She looks; the cord has been cut. Her mother has orchestrated this, she realises. Holding this man captive and preventing him from calling anyone should he escape his bindings. 

The police. She needs to go to the police. 

Alice thinks she knows where the police station is. She grabs her coat, flees the house, feet pounding the pavement as she hurries as fast she can in what she hopes is the right direction, but then—

A hand over her mouth. She feels heat in her side. She looks down; the side of her dress is turning red. She is dragged backwards into a car, onto the backseat. The inside of the roof is red. She thinks of the bloody cloths outside her father’s bedroom. She thinks of the blackberries they’d picked together, how they stained her fingers as they pulled them from the bushes. Her father lifts her and holds her up next to the sun. ‘My girl,’ he says. ‘My girl.’ 

[WHOOSH] 

[THE APPRENTICE BREATHES HEAVILY] 

SIR
Are you alright?

APPRENTICE
Yeah. I— yeah. Yeah. It’s just worse when it’s like that. You know. 

SIR
Yes. You have explained it before. 

APPRENTICE
You saw how I chose that. I just plucked it off the shelf. It wasn’t on purpose. I chose at random and she died right after she saw… me. That’s who it was, on the bed. Me. Or at least, whoever I used to be. 

SIR
Yes. I believe it was. 

APPRENTICE
If she’d just stayed in the house.

SIR
He was coming for her already. 

APPRENTICE
Stephen Grenville. 

SIR
Yes, Stephen Grenville. 

APPRENTICE
Did he— he didn’t know me. He didn’t. I… ah. He said I’d— he said I’d stolen from him, though. That’s what he told Sisi before he killed her. That I’d stolen from him.

SIR
Yes. That is what he said. 

APPRENTICE
That’s what he told Alice’s mother, too. Charlotte Chatterley. He told her I’d conned him out of his inheritance. Fuck. 

SIR
I’m sorry it pains you so much to think about these things. 

APPRENTICE
It does, but that’s not… Charlotte’s remnant. I’ve read it and she— she didn’t say anything about her daughter dying or going missing or anything. When Stephen Grenville found her, it didn’t even seem to strike her that this was the man who had been stepping out with her daughter when she must have vanished. It didn’t even register to her. It wasn’t important to. 

SIR
No. I don’t believe it was. 

APPRENTICE
Well, fuck. That’s so… it’s so. Fucked. 

SIR
Yes. It is.

APPRENTICE
I think I— ah. I remember. I escaped her. I think it was because… because of this. Because of Alice. 

SIR
Are you proposing your freedom came at the price of her life? 

APPRENTICE
I don’t— I don’t know. I don’t know. Her dogs. Her dogs. Would someone have known to look after her dogs?

SIR
I don’t know, Apprentice. I am not a thing that knows. 

APPRENTICE
I wish she’d— she should have stayed. I wish I’d not. 

SIR
I am curious as to how you might construe this as being your fault. You had been trapped by Charlotte Chatterley. There was nothing you could do about your being there that night. In fact, it seems to me that you had tried a great deal to escape by then or else the phones might still have been connected. 

APPRENTICE
So I should have just let her? Let her— I— should have let her? I… 

SIR
No. That is not what I am attempting to communicate to you. The opposite, in fact. You are blameless in this, it seems clear to me. 

APPRENTICE 
But it was Stephen Grenville that hurt her. 

SIR
You think he knew you by then?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know but. I don’t know when I made Pearl Grenville change her will because— ah. God. My head. Ugh. Jesus wept, my head. 

SIR
Because I stopped you from reading the rest of her remnant. 

APPRENTICE
You remember?

SIR
Not exactly. But the sense of it is there, I think. The impression of what happened. 

APPRENTICE
It’s like that for me until I get close to remembering it and then it— it’s like lightning inside me. It hurts to think of them. Just like it hurts to touch the remnants. 

SIR
Yes. And I am too weak to push through the pain. 

APPRENTICE
You think that’s why you— no. I don’t believe you’re weak. 

SIR
Why not?

APPRENTICE
I mean. Look at you.

SIR
I am made of dust, the same as you are. 

APPRENTICE
No but… ah. Never mind. 

SIR
Never mind. 

APPRENTICE
I do wonder if I— Pearl Grenville. She. I don’t… I think once, you asked why I would steal so much from people if I already had a fortune. And I did have a fortune. The du Perier money was mine, and after I married Matine, so was the de Vallée fortune. All of it would come to me. Some of the Pocket’s money, too. They were only lawyers but there must have been money in there somewhere, even if it wasn’t much. I didn’t need money. 

Pearl Grenville. What if I didn’t defraud her, the way Stephen said? And. Ah. 

My head. Fuck. 

But. Ah. Charlotte Chatterley. All her husbands died, she killed them! She kept me prisoner. She followed me. She tracked me down. She wanted me back, because I escaped. But she had that paperwork in a safe that proved I was not Theodore du Perier or Edward Pocket. She could have outed me, ruined me, any time. But she didn’t. She kept it all quiet. 

I— I was running, running away. For years and years. Fake names, hardly letting my head rest, never showing my whole self to anyone, I think I— 

Ah, ah. Fuck. 

I think that I thought it was her. The trail of bodies I was leaving behind. I thought it was her for a long time until. Until. 

SIR
What? 

APPRENTICE
The statue. 

SIR
The presence. It is back. 

APPRENTICE
Yeah. What does it look like, to you? 

SIR
Attention, focused on a singular point. Shimmering. Dust and stars and moths all come together in a fixed point, like sunlight caught in a magnifying glass. 

APPRENTICE
To me, it’s a statue. And it looks like. It looks like Elio. 

Elio. 

He was hunting me, too. But it. Ah. Fuck. He wanted to— I fucked him, he. He cared about me. He told me it wasn’t Charlotte Chatterley who followed me. I was going to jump out of a window but Elio got there before I could and he stopped me and he told me that Charlotte Chatterley was dead and it was Stephen Grenville who was trying to catch me, who was killing all these people, and I— ahh. God it hurts. 

It hurts. 

God. Ah. 

He said that and I thought. Who the fuck is Stephen Grenville?  

SIR
You didn’t even know his name.

APPRENTICE
No. I didn’t know his name. 

SIR
And so. Alice. Shelve, or discard? 

APPRENTICE
Discard. I think I— no. No. Wait. Wait. Shelve. Shelve her. Shelve her.

SIR
Why? 

APPRENTICE
I need to see more of the— oh fuck. I need to understand Stephen Grenville. I need to know why. I need to see more. 

SIR
And you think if you shelve her, you will get more answers? 

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. But maybe it will mean I can follow the threads. I don’t know. 

SIR
Alright. She is re-shelved. 

APPRENTICE
Re-shelved. 

SIR
What? 

APPRENTICE
You said— you said re-shelved, not just shelved. 

SIR
Well. She was on the shelf before, wasn’t she?

APPRENTICE
Yes but— fuck!

[WHOOSH] 

[END]