An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of death
• Discussions of war and the effects of war
• Vivid description of violent injury
• Repeated descriptions of blood and dried blood
• Descriptions of smoke and fire
• Implications of misogyny
• Smoking during pregnancy
• Brief reference to difficult birth with caesarian (with a positive outcome)
• Discussions of sex

Transcript

[FOOTSTEPS ON DUST]

APPRENTICE
Ah.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
We’ve been walking.

SIR
It would seem so.

APPRENTICE
Wonder how long for.

SIR
Just now. Or, maybe longer.

APPRENTICE
Funny how these things work.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
What does it feel like for you? When we’re going along like this?

SIR
I don’t know. What does it feel like for you?

APPRENTICE
Like I’m walking. Like I’m… putting one foot in front of the other. The dust, it’s like fine sand, or dry snow. It gives a little under my feet, but not much.

SIR
It does not feel like that for me.

APPRENTICE
So what does it feel like?

SIR
Going.

APPRENTICE
That’s it?

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Hmm.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
I wonder…

[FOOTSTEPS SPEED UP]

APPRENTICE
(Slightly breathless)
And now?

SIR
Now what?

APPRENTICE
(Still breathless)
Feel any different to you?

SIR
We are still going.

[THE APPRENTICE LAUGHS, AND STOPS RUNNING]

SIR
Oh.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
You are laughing.

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
That’s nice.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
I said it’s nice.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Well. I wonder where we’re going.

[FOOTSTEPS START AGAIN]

SIR
We were going the moment we arrived, so I suppose it is somewhere.

APPRENTICE
Yeah, that’d be nice.

SIR
Hmm. You seem different.

APPRENTICE
Nope. Just going. Same as you.

SIR
I see.

APPRENTICE
No you don’t.

SIR
Apprentice…

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
You were upset.

APPRENTICE
When?

SIR
Before we were going.

APPRENTICE
Oh. Yeah.

SIR
But you are not upset now.

APPRENTICE
I don’t know what I feel. I just— ah.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
There, sticking out of the dust. I see something.

SIR
It is a remnant.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Finally.

[FOOTSTEPS]

SIR
What does it look like to you?

APPRENTICE
It’s a bottle there’s something inside it. What does it look like to you?

SIR
The same as everything. Dust. Moths. Moving lights. But not those things. I do not see.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Well. Only one thing to do, I suppose.

[THE BOTTLE IS PULLED FROM THE DUST]

APPRENTICE
Yep. Message in a bottle. It’s an old bottle, I think, the glass is all wobbly. I don’t think it’s just one message inside. I think it’s— many— I— oh.

[WHOOSH]

The sun shines between the sheets drying on the line, a row of captured ghosts. Mia runs between them. Her mother follows, sheet over her head. ‘I’m haunting you!’
‘No!’ Mia squeals, delighted, as her mother catches her in her arms. The sheet smells like the wind and soft soap as it folds over her head. Her mother plants tiny kisses through the cotton. Plane engines stutter above them.
When Mia’s fought herself free, they’re inside the house. Her father is sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a bottle, tweezers in hand.
‘Was that more planes I heard?’ asks Mia’s father.
‘Yes. Again. I’m not sure why, they’ll only come down.’
‘Yes. I don’t know why they insist on trying to involve us in their petty squabbles,’ says Mia’s father.
‘You’ve not finished yet?’ says her mother.
‘Almost. I just need to raise the sails.’
‘Can I do it?!’ asks Mia.
Her father holds Mia in his lap, whispering instructions in her ear. His hand over hers is huge and steady as she grasps the tweezers, their tiny needle-like edges fastened around the miniature rope that’s attached to the sails. Together, they pull, and those sails slowly rise. They’re no bigger than Mia’s palm.
Her father keeps the string steady as forces a stopper into the bottle’s neck. ‘There we are. Perfect.’
He sets the bottle on the shelf with the others.

[WHOOSH]

Mia marches over the field behind her house. They’re playing soldiers, her and the boys. Paul thinks he could get into the French resistance if only he could make it to the border. ‘They’d have me, I think. All the French want the Swiss to join the war.’
‘Paul, I think they want the whole country to join the war, not just one little boy,’ says Mia.
‘I’m not little. I’m actually very tall for my age,’ Paul pouts.
‘Yes, but your age is eleven.’
‘I could get a beer if I went to the pub,’ says Paul.
‘No you couldn’t,’ Mia scoffs.
A plane careens overhead, but the engine isn’t purring like it should be. It’s stuttering and coughing like a sick dog. They look for it over the trees. It’s barely clearing the top branches, spewing smoke like a chimney stack. They all shriek and squat in the grass as it passes over them. The smoke tastes bitter and foul on Mia’s tongue.
When the plane hits the ground, it trembles under their feet.
Mia peers through the grass at the smoking hulk in front of them.
‘It think it’s a bomber,’ says Paul.
‘German or American?’ asks Noah.
‘I don’t know, there’s too much smoke.’
‘If there’s too much smoke, how can you tell it’s a bomber?’ asks Mia, dusting off her hands on her dress.
‘It’s big,’ Paul mutters.
Mia rolls her eyes and begins to wade through the grass. The plane does indeed look big. The grass around it has caught alight in places, bright orange flames flickering through the smoke. It’s not just black now, it’s grey too, rising in thin clouds towards the blue sky.
Mia turns to ask if Paul can tell what kind of plane it is yet, but he and Noah are still squatting in the grass far behind her.
‘What are you doing?’ Mia asks.
‘We should go home,’ says Noah.
‘Why?’
‘The grass is on fire!’
‘Only a bit. It’s fresh grass, not hay, it won’t catch much more than this. Will it Paul?’
Still hunkered close to the ground, Paul only shrugs.
Mia clucks her tongue. ‘You two are so boring.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Noah calls.
‘I want to have a look.’
‘Mia, it’s on fire!’
‘I won’t get that close, just close enough to—‘
There’s a big thud and Mia squats down again. Through the smoke, the plane looks wider.
‘I told you it was a bomber!’ Paul cries.
‘It wasn’t a bomb, Paul, it’s the door opening,’ Mia hisses.
A shape is emerging from the door. She thinks it might be a leg.
‘Hello?’ she calls out, in German first, then English. There’s no response. Mia creeps closer. The smoke is making her eyes water. She calls out again. Nothing, except a long, strange whine, like an injured dog.
The plane is hot, now Mia is close to it. She doesn’t touch the door for fear it would burn her. She holds the collar of her dress over her nose and mouth so she doesn’t get too much smoke in them as she peers around.
What she’d taken for a leg is actually an arm. There is a man hanging down from the inside of the plane. There is so much blood on his face, so much smoke and dirt stuck to it, that all she can make out of him is his eyes. It’s no wonder there’s so much blood. There’s a tear through the soldier’s clothes and it keeps going, all the way into him. Squinting her eyes, Mia can see something like raw sausages peeking out of the hole.
The man says something, but Mia doesn’t know what it is. He reaches out, grabs Mia’s dress. Mia stares at his filthy fingers. His other hand is holding something out towards her. She takes it.
‘What is it?’ Mia asks.
The soldier tries to speak again but the only thing that comes out of his mouth is blood. His grip tightens on Mia’s dress, and then his arm goes limp. His eyes are wide, blood and soot are slowly running into them. He doesn’t blink it away.
Mia stands there staring for another long moment before she walks back to the boys.
‘Is that blood?’ Noah squeaks from his hiding spot.
‘Yes,’ says Mia.
‘Was it German or American?’ asks Paul.
‘Doesn’t matter. They’re all dead.’

[WHOOSH]

The blood on the pilot’s letter has dried brown. The stains on her dress are long gone, fabric bleached back to white without too much trouble. Mia only knows which dress it was she had on that day because of the pattern in the lace on the shoulder cuffs. She is really too tall to keep wearing it now, and she’s had to put panels in the sides so it will fit around her chest and open up the arms so they’ll still fit neatly, but she doesn’t want to stop wearing. She likes that once a week she comes to get dressed and all there is to put on is the same thing she had on the day she saw a man die.
She has not opened his letter. She traces her fingers along the seal. It tells her very little about who the pilot was, as it is addressed on the outside only to Evelina, a name which Mia thinks might be American, or German
It hardly matters now. The war is long over now, anyway. Switzerland is not a stick in the mud, now. Certainly with the way her father speaks of it, there’s an air of wisdom about it. Clever, sensible Switzerland who chose to be above it all. Who would not debase itself to engage in that violence.
Mia thinks about the downed plane and the guttering smoke and the spilling-out insides of the pilot as he hung out of the door. She thinks about the obvious holes in the plane’s tail end when they went back days later when the fire had stopped. She half expected to find the pilots still insides, meat turned dark from the smoke, like preserved sausages. He was gone, though, and so was all the smoke-stained cargo. All that was left was the plane’s blackened shell, proudly bearing evidence of the violence that brought it down. Neutrality could look violent, too.
Though Paul and Noah have grown tall and started to lose their boyish roundness from their faces they talk about it all just the same as they always have, as though it is so straightforward. For Paul now he claims it’s so clear they should never have fought, and Noah will not forgive the fact that they didn’t. He speaks loudly and boldly and condemns Germany and its allies, even though when the war first began he was sure they ought to be fighting with Germans because German is what they speak.
Mia only overhears these conversations. Paul and Noah wouldn’t dare have them with her directly anymore. Now they are grown Paul and Noah won’t speak to Mia like they used to. Like she has anything to say. When she sits with them they garble their words and act like she’s a flower, as though they weren’t the ones who hid in the grass when she went up to that smoking, choking wreck and saw the dying man inside of it.
Mia pretends she doesn’t care. She reads her books and helps her mother with her chores. She builds ships in bottles with her father. She wears the dress she had on the day she saw a man die, tells nobody, and does not open his letter. She feeds it through the neck of a bottle. She could pull it out with tweezers, if she liked, but she won’t.

[WHOOSH]

Mia sits in the window of Noah’s bedroom, smoke curling up towards the stars. She checks there’s nobody below her then flicks ash down into the street below.
‘Should you be smoking like that when you’re so pregnant?’ Noah asks, stirring in his sheets.
‘Clears my head,’ says Mia.
‘Paul doesn’t mind?’
Mia laughs. ‘Mind? He doesn’t notice.’
Noah hums. He sits up. His cheeks are not flushed red anymore but there’s a pliancy lingering in his expression. Mia isn’t sure why she likes to fuck him, only that she does. She also knows that he’s torn up about it, that he both wants more from Mia than this, but at once loves that Mia is Paul’s wife. He would like her less, Mia thinks, if she had chosen him. Just as Paul would like her less if she stopped fucking Noah behind his back. She wonders if they’d get on worse if they didn’t both have her the way they do, if it they would stop meeting at the beer house every night of the week if she would stop taking off all their clothes. She shoves all their letters into the same bottle, all of them unread.
She keeps the bottle on her nightstand, the only one that sits upright amongst her many tiny ships. She has not made one since her father died and she doubts she ever will.
Noah kisses the back of Mia’s neck, hands roaming down her sides. One comes to rest on the dome of her belly. Mia lets him map out this vast topography. She thinks of him reaching inside her, pulling strings to raise tiny masts.
The boat inside of Mia moves on miniature tides, bow and stern knocking her ribs and spine. All babies must be born with sea legs, she thinks, from the tiny storms they turn inside their mothers.
‘Do you think it’s his or mine?’ Noah asks.
‘Does it matter? It’s certainly mine, so it’s all the same to me.’
Noah goes still. ‘You know, you really are something, Mia.’
‘Yes,’ says Mia. ‘I wonder what it is.’

[WHOOSH]

The wound across Mia’s still-swollen stomach makes her think of the pilot’s insides. If he had lived, which of course he couldn’t have, they would have had scars that matched. His came from being stopped as he pressed on towards killing. Hers was from being helped as she pushed out new life.
The babies lie in their basket, one boy, one girl. She calls them Paul and Nora, after her husband and her friend, either and both who might be their father.
She wants to get up and hold them, but she’s still too weak from blood loss. The massacre of birth has been mopped up with sheets, stained with bright red that Mia knows will fade to brown, indistinguishable from dried hot chocolate.
Mia thinks of the bottle on her nightstand at home, all the letters compacted inside it. It’s been a long time since she’s held the pilot’s letter in her hands but sometimes she glimpses the edge of it as she swirls the paper around with a knitting needle, making space for more.

[WHOOSH]

There are two men at the door and they’re asking about Mia’s pilot, or at least about his plane. One is taller, olive skinned. The fairer one has a frantic edge to him. They tell Mia they are brothers, but they are lying. Apart from their eyes, which are not even the same shade of brown, they look nothing alike, and the tall one is Italian. The other has an accent Mia cannot quite place but she thinks it might be English. They speak to her in German but to each other in a mongrel mix of Italian, French, and English, set around a complex dance of eyebrow raises and almost nonexistent shakes of their heads.
They both keep looking at Mia, noticing her the way people tend to. Eyes drifting from her face down to her chest. It makes her feel pretty, to be looked at this way, the way that Paul and Noah used to look at her.
As they talk, Mia catches something else, too. They keep noticing each other. Hands lingering on arms a moment too long, gazes held with a constance that can only be bigger than friendship. They’re not brothers, they’re something else.
Mia sends the children down the road into town to find Paul and Noah, and leads the men down the field at the back of the house. The grass is long, but it’s full of flowers. The rusted hulk of the plane’s remains is wreathed in them, sea foam through a whale’s ribcage.
‘He laid here,’ Mia explains, standing in the frame of what was once a door. ‘His stomach was torn. I saw the inside of him.’
The men exchange a glance with their near-matching brown eyes.
‘Do you know much about the plane?’ Mia asks. ‘Was it German or American?’
‘Neither, it was a plane used by the Italian resistance,’ says the Italian.
‘Why was it over Switzerland, then?’
‘The last communications were poor and the notes even poorer, but we assume there was a failure of navigation. The plane was old and hadn’t been used for a long time since the resistance started using it. He was supposed to go to England.’
‘The Swiss army would shoot down anything unresponsive that violated our airspace,’ Mia tells them.
The Italian and the other exchange a few short words. Mia does not speak enough of their languages to grasp what they say entirely, but she recognises the French word for hope, the English for easier.
‘Do you know what they’d have done with the bodies?’ asks the fair one, speaking to Mia directly for the first time since the men arrived.
‘I don’t, but my husband might. His father worked for the council.’
‘If you’d find out, we’d be grateful.’
‘Alright. I’ll call them from the house.’
The men exchange a glance, a silent conversation. ‘We’ll stay a little longer.’
In the house, Mia’s heart pounds. She calls Paul’s house on the phone in the hall, but his secretary says he’s out of town all afternoon. The children will be with Noah, then. She telephones him to check. He says he’ll watch them until the men go home, unless Mia is frightened.
‘You sound a little breathless,’ Noah tells her.
Mia is breathless. But it’s not fear. She hangs up the phone, puts together a tray of beer and cheese and bread to take down to the plane. Half way to the plane, she stops. The men are standing by what’s left of the plane’s tail. The Italian leans against the rusted metal, in a cage made of the other’s arms. The other man is kissing him, his throat, his cheeks, his ears. The Italian throws back his head, mouth open, and then he sees Mia through the grass. He pushes the other man aside. They stare at Mia. She swallows, comes closer with her tray of things.
‘I couldn’t reach my husband. He won’t be home until gone six, but I’m sure he’ll talk with you then. I brought some lunch for you in case you were hungry.’
The men are quiet, sheepish, wide-eyed.
‘Don’t stop on my account,’ says Mia. She settles on the grass and begins to butter a slice of bread.
After a few moments, the men sit down opposite Mia. They eat and drink, talk about why they’re there. When the plane went down it was carrying a passenger, an American soldier who’d been shot down over the Italian countryside.
‘My sister helped get him out,’ says the Italian.
‘Our sister,’ the other man corrects.
‘So she’s the one who sent you looking?’asks Mia.
‘No. She’s dead,’ says the Italian.
‘Oh. I’m sorry. Was she shot in the war? I know there were women in the resistance in France, but I know less about Italy.’
‘No, she didn’t fight, it was a seizure,’ says the Italian, voice soft and low. The other man watches him, reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder. He looks at Mia as he trails his hand down the Italian’s spine. Mia swallows her beer and looks back.
‘You should hold him,’ says Mia. ‘He needs to be held.’
The Italian looks up, eyes wide, fearful.
‘What was the downed pilot’s name?’ Mia asks.
‘Michael Davidson.’
Mia repeats him, turning the word around in her mouth. ‘Poor Michael. Tragic to have survived the first crash, but to be claimed by the second right as he was getting away.’
‘Death has a way of catching up with people,’ says the other man.
‘Eddie,’ the Italian chastises.
‘I thought you weren’t telling me your names,’ says Mia.
The both stare at her. Mia finishes her beer and dusts off her hands. Shifting up onto her knees, she pulls her dress up over her head and throws it into the grass. She slips between them, touches their cheeks, brings them together. It does not take much coaxing. With the Italian buried deep inside her, and Eddie, the other, pressed against her back, they kiss over her shoulder, Mia caught between them like a gasp. She thinks of Paul and Noah, wonders if maybe they might be happier if their love could be more direct, instead of sending her between them like a ship between ports.
Nine months later, Mia’s third child is born. She names him Michael.

[WHOOSH]

Mia and Nora feed the chickens as Little Paul helps Michael collect their eggs. Nora is recounting a book she has read at school, and Mia nods and hums affirmatively as required. When they come back inside, Paul is holding up the phone in the hallway. His face is as white as a sheet, lips turned grey, eyes wide. A ghost.
‘What is it?’ Mia asks.
’It’s Noah. He’s dead.’

[WHOOSH]

Paul is dead too. It is easier for Mia to think of it this way. She sets out food for her husband’s ghost three times a day and goes about her life as usual. There are chickens to feed, sheets to clean, children to raise.
The twins tease each other but act like Michael’s parents. Mia watches them, a tiny functional unit as Little Paul washes the dishes, hands them to Michael who scrubs them dry before passing them on the Nora for her to put them away.
Soon the twins will be grown and they’ll fledge the nest. Michael will be here a little longer, but only five years. By then it will just be Mia and her husband’s ghost.
She walks down to the plane wreck in the field. The steel is so consumed by rust it has mostly collapsed, a heap of twisted metal almost entirely hidden by the foliage, the colour not a million yards from dried blood.

[WHOOSH]

Michael, in his little suit, sits at the kitchen table. He has a steaming mug of tea fastened between his palms as he watches Mia cleaning the dishes, putting them away. Nora and Little Paul are in the other room with their guests.
‘Won’t you sit down, Mum?’
‘I’d rather get this done,’ says Mia. ‘I don’t want to wake up in the morning to a pile of dishes.’
‘I’d have done them for you. Anyone would have.’
‘It’s alright, I don’t mind.’
‘It’s the middle of the wake,’ says Michael.
Mia laughs. ‘Everyone has finished with their sandwiches. I’m sure they don’t mind.’
‘They don’t mind about the plates. They mind about you.’
‘What do you want from me, Michael? You’d like me to sit and reminisce about your father, is that it? To weep prettily in a handkerchief behind a black veil, as though I’d not finished my grieving years ago? No. I shan’t sit down. The dishes must be done.’
‘What if I’d like to reminisce?’
‘Then by all means go ahead, I’m not sure why you followed me in here in the first place.’
Michael tightens his grip around the mug. ‘Can’t you just for once let your guard down?’
Mia blinks at her son. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You act like nothing affects you, but you don’t need to do that. Your husband of thirty years just died and you’re polishing the china as though nothing has happened. You don’t have to be strong all the time.’
‘I’m not strong,’ says Mia, returning to the dishes. ‘This is just the way I am.’
‘And what way is that?’
Mia considers this for a moment. ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me.’
‘Mum…’ says Michael, pained and exhausted.
‘I’m certainly that, at least to you and your siblings,’ says Mia.

[WHOOSH]

Mia’s grandson takes the bottle carefully in his hands, rapt concentration knitting his small blonde brows together. Mia will have to polish his finger prints from the glass later, but she hardly minds. Jonny is the first of the children to take interest in the ships at all, at least in their current form. Paul, Nora and Michael all wanted to liberate them from their containers, misunderstanding the nature of them. Jonny holds them reverantly. Mia tells him about the real vessels each was based on, what years each one sailed, stories connected to each one.
‘You never told me any of that,’ says Nora, later, when Jonny has fallen asleep on the sofa.
‘You never seemed interested,’ says Mia.
‘Nor did you.’
Mia shrugs and sips her beer. ‘Not much to say.’
Nora bites her lip. ‘And the bottle with the letters in it?’
‘What about it?’
‘Who are they from?’
‘From your father, mostly, and the other one. One is from a pilot who died in the field behind our house in the war.’
Nora’s mouth drops open. ‘From who?’
‘Oh, you know, the wreck in the field you used to play on when you were a child. It was shot down during the war. I was only seven or eight at the time. We were right there in the field when it landed. One of the people inside survived the crash, but not for long. Paul and Noah were too scared to get close, but I did. His intestines looked like raw sausages in red gravy, hanging down over his ribs.’
‘Mum,’ Nora whispers. ‘You saw that when you were so young?’
‘Oh yes. And there’s a letter in there he gave me. I think he meant for me to pass it along to someone, but I was so young then, I had no idea what I was meant to do with it. It felt wrong to open it, so I never did. It was addressed to someone named Evelina. I assume that she was the Italian resistance girl whose brother came looking for him, but I didn’t know that at the time.’
‘Someone came looking for the dead pilot?’
‘Oh, two of them, yes. Said they were brothers, but they were lying. One was Italian, and I think the other was English, but I can’t be certain. The Italian’s name I never caught, but the other one was named Eddie.’
Nora is very still. ‘You’ve never talked about any of this.’
‘You never asked.’
‘I didn’t know to.’ Nora sips her wine, something odd in her expression. ‘Do I know you at all?’
‘I’m your mother,’ says Mia. ‘Is that not enough?’
Nora shakes her head minutely. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, what would you like to know?’
‘I don’t know, all of it? Everything?’
Mia sighs. ‘Goodness, I think that would take a frightfully long time, dear, don’t you?’
Nora laughs. ‘I suppose it would.’
They drink and talk about nothing until the sun has gone down. Nora carries Jonny against her chest out to her little car.
‘Did you tell anyone you saw that pilot?’ Nora asks, once Jonny is safely bundled onto the back seat.
‘Besides Paul and Noah? No, I don’t think so. Why?’
‘So you never told your parents?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just thought they wouldn’t be interested.’
‘It must have upset you.’
‘I don’t think it did. I do dream of him sometimes, still. The blood running over his face. I can smell the smoke coming off the plane whenever I burn toast and I see him in my head then, too, the raw sausages inside him, the sounds he made as he tried to speak.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Is it?’ asks Mia. ‘I don’t know.’
Nora wraps her arms around her mother. Mia stands there, allows herself to be held.
When Nora is gone, Mia goes back inside. She polishes her father’s bottled ships, lifts the one crammed full of letters, all of them unread. She uncorks and upends it, shakes it around. The paper is so tightly packed it does not even budge.
Mia sighs and climbs into bed, and falls asleep.

[WHOOSH]

[THE APPRENTICE SIGHS]

APPRENTICE
I… I don’t know what to say.

SIR
It was you and Elio who she saw. The boy, Michael, Elio’s son.

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
You are troubled.

APPRENTICE
She didn’t… she didn’t think about any of it. She just was.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
…shelve.

SIR
You’re sure?

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Shelve.

SIR
Alright.

APPRENTICE
Nothing’s happening.

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
Okay. Let’s go. We’ll find another one.

[FOOTSTEPS]

[END]