An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Description of a failed heart transplant
• Discussions of death and grief
• Discussion of adoption (well intentioned and considered)

Transcript

[MOTHS CONVERGE AND SETTLE. IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SOUND OF THEIR WINGS, A LOW, OMINOUS HUM]

[THE APPRENTICE SPLUTTERS]

APPRENTICE
It’s wet, everything is wet. Ugh.

The Reading Room. I think… yeah.

It was the moths that brought me here, I think. Yeah. It was him, Sir. Or maybe not Sir, maybe the thing he was a part of that he’s not a part of anymore. Every time I think I’m getting close to an answer it just slips away.

[DEEP BREATH. FOOTSTEPS]

Sir kept things here. Things he didn’t want me to look at. But I can’t see anything now. It’s like the walls have got… thicker?

[SQUELCH]

They’re warm. Soft. Wet but not… not in a bad way. Like they’re alive. Like he’s here, even if he’s not looking. If he won’t. If he can’t.
I wonder what it means, that there are parts of this place that he won’t examine. If it says anything about the fact that there are things he actively doesn’t want me to look at. I suppose it’s easier, in a way, if you don’t have to look too close. If you can just move past something and let it be what it is, you know? But I can’t. I need to look, to see, to… read.
Maybe that’s my problem.
Hey, are you listening? Whatever you are? Is that the thing you want me to find out? Huh? You want me to not look at stuff? To stop going over and over things?
But if that’s true why is this the thing I do here, then? Reading the remnants? Why is that the only thing that ever makes things change? The thing Sir always wants me to do? How can it be that that’s what I’m not— I don’t understand.
Maybe I’m not supposed to. Maybe I’m supposed to just do it and not think about it. Maybe that’s why the judgements don’t make any fucking sense. Shelve or discard or whatever, whatever, does it do anything?! Does it mean anything at all?! I…
Yeah. I know. In the thousands of times he made me wake up and read things he’d bring back remnants I’d already told him to discard. That means they don’t go anywhere, they just… I can’t— I can’t stand it anymore, I—

[SQUELCHING, TEARING SOUND]

What was— ah!

[THUD]

[WHOOSH]

Raida’s mother stands at the front of the bookshop, her own book held in her hands. She reads loudly but somehow small, like she is whispering in the ears of everyone sitting in front of her. She feels the air shift as they gasp in time at the end of some of the lines.
‘When I think of you,’ Raida’s mother reads. ‘It is how an empty frame thinks of the glass shattered on the street below,
Return to me, it thinks
But if you did
You would be a window no more
You would be a thing of cracks and jagged edges
That would tear apart the soft wood that was meant to hold you
And turn curious fingers bloody.’
Raida does not understand this poem. Her mother says it’s because she is seven, but she said before her birthday it was because she is six. She thinks maybe what her mother is trying to say is that it’s because she is not a grown up. Even though she can’t explain why, it makes her throat feel like someone is squeezing it and sometimes when her mother reads it out just right, Raida’s eyes start to prickle.
The funny thing is that she likes it. She likes the squeezed throat feeling and the stinging in her eyes and the funny mixed up confusion in her tummy, like when she had nervous butterflies inside her before she had to do her piano recital. They didn’t feel much like butterflies to Raida, more like big moths with wings the size of excercise books, getting that funny dust off their wings on the insides of all her organs.
But then she played the piano and it was okay.
Raida’s mother turns the pages. Raida knows what poem is coming next. It’s the one about her grandfather, who her mother otherwise will not talk about. She sits forward in her chair, watches the way her mother stirs the air with her hand as she swallows, looking at the words.
‘You are a part of me
Though I cannot fathom how.
Technically, it must be true, I know.
A child is the work of collaboration
Two bodies entwined to make a third, or more.
It cannot be done alone.
One half of this puzzle, I know,
In hazy memories of soft hands,
Tiny kisses
Frightened cries
A child’s dream of a place I have not seen since.
But she was real.
Present, breathing, real.
And when she lay dead,
She was a thing cut from pale stone,
A golden crown of hair upon her head,
Paint over the bruises on her neck,
From where she’d hung,
So I could not see them.
But you
My other half
A gaping void.
I am half person, half hole.
Your eyes, your smile, I know,
Your name, I know.
I recognise you in my nose, the shape of my eyes,
If I saw you, I would know you, I am sure.
As two estranged relatives know each other across a translation platform.
But I know that I won’t.’
Raida’s mother stands still, staring at the page. It is the most beautiful she has ever looked to Raida, and the most sad. She wishes she knew how to ask about it, but she doesn’t, so when her mother has read two more poems and signed copies of her book for the little crowd who’d listened and applauded, Raida just asks if they can get some ice-cream instead.

[WHOOSH]

Raida drags her feet on her way home from the school, glad of the scarf on her head, keeping the sun off her scalp. Her mother is writing a new book and she’s barely left her study for weeks. It’s something to do with the man who came to the house a few weeks ago. Raida’s heart had skipped in her chest when she opened the door and saw him there, this strange European man she did not know. In the seconds before he spoke, her mind ran away with her. Could this be her grandfather on her mother’s side, the key to this part of her family hundreds, thousands of miles away that her mother would not speak about, except in poems?
But then the man spoke. His Arabic was broken, and his French was not great. If this was her mother’s father, his French would be better than that, surely? She’s not sure he actually was French. There are a couple of hints Raida has noticed which make her suspect he was from somewhere else, though she can’t be certain. What she is certain of is that he would be able to speak French as fluidly as her mother, because he’d lived there so long. And this man can’t.
Raida’s had father ushered her upstairs. She sat on the landing, straining her ears to listen. She’s not sure what language her mother spoke to the man in. Spanish, maybe, she thinks, but she doesn’t speak more than a handful of words in Spanish so she can’t really know. She wishes they’d switch to French again, or at least to English, so she could make out at least some of the words. But then they retreated into her mother’s study and did not emerge for hours. Every time Raida’s gaze wandered to the door as she ate dinner, her father called her attention back.
The man stayed until after Raida had been sent to bed. She heard her parents arguing. Something about money. She doesn’t know for sure. And then the next day, her mother started writing.
It’s been three weeks now and her mother’s not finished. She likely won’t be done for months.
Raida passes a group of women at the bus stop. She’d intentionally got off one stop early so she would have longer before she got home. Most of the women are dressed hijab, but a couple wear niqab. When Raida smiles at them, their returning smiles are visible only in the creases around their eyes. It has always seemed romantic to Raida, the way their flowing gowns and veils force attention on their gaze. Eyes are the window to the soul, and niqab compels you to look right into them.
Raida lets herself into the house and carefully unpins the scarf from her head. Her father is in the kitchen, humming to himself as he chops vegetables ready for dinner. The door to her mother’s study is closed. Raida creeps close, presses her ear to the wood. On the other side, she hears nothing at all. Not the scratch of a pen nor the turn of a page, not even the creak of a chair.
‘School alright?’ her father calls from the kitchen.
‘Yes,’ Raida answers. ‘It was fine.’

[WHOOSH]

Raida sips her coffee and looks out across the river. She’d always hoped she and her mother would make this trip together, that she would be able to see France through her mother’s eyes. Maybe it would open up some kind of understanding between them. That she’d finally find the words to ask her mother all the questions looping around her head, and her mother would finally find the words to answer them.
Instead, she’s here in Paris alone on her spring break. Today, she will finish her coffee and walk along the Seine, then maybe go to some museums. Tomorrow, she will go to the opera. All the while she wonders if her mother had stood in the places where she now stands, and what she looked like when she did. She was barely sixteen when she left France, Raida knows, and she grew up very different from Raida. Blonde and white and taller than her, no scarf covering her hair unless it was too windy. She’d wanted to be an actress.
Raida doesn’t know what she wants to be. As she wanders around the Louvre she wonders if she’d like to be a painter. Last night at the theatre, she’d dreamed of a life on the stage. In Oxford, where she’s studying literature, she wonders if she’d like to be an academic. When she sees her mother read aloud, she thinks she could be a poet.
Raida’s mother tells her the world is her oyster. Her father says so too. The trouble with that is that oysters are very difficult to get into, actually. It was Shakespeare that coined the phrase, like so many others that have their origins in the English language, and when he wrote it, it didn’t mean the world was open to you. The character Falstaff was actually talking about prising the world open by force; it was an oyster he’d need a sword to pull open because nothing had been handed to him.
If the world is Raida’s oyster, she thinks she might be stuck inside of it. Her hope, then, is that eventually it will lay enough shimmering layers over her that she will eventually become a pearl.

[WHOOSH]

Raida’s mother is small upon her bed. She has not woken for days. Not since they cut out her heart and put in a new one. She’d been ill before that, Raida knew. Oxygen to ease the strain on her lungs. Pills to help the pain in her chest from her heart, swollen twice its usual size. Raida would lie next to her and imagine her own heart swelling, pressing on her windpipe, making her choke. Her mother said it was not like that. Not directly, of course. In tiny scraps of poetry scattered all over her sheets. She felt like she was drowning inside herself.
She’d been on the waiting list for a new heart for so long that when they got the call it felt like a miracle. When she came out of surgery, it felt like another. But then, complication after complication. Her mother’s body rejecting the heart.
Now she is so close to death that Raida can smell it over the disinfectant and the bleach on the hospital floors. Death is sickly sweet but wrong. Rotten honeysuckles.
If they lifted her sedation, she would still not be able to breathe. Infection has spread from her heart into her lungs. Even without the tube in her mouth she would not be able to speak. She would just be confused and afraid. Better it be like this, to let her sleep, and maybe dream, until it’s over.
Raida’s father cannot stand to be in the room. He sits downstairs in the hospital cafe, checks in from the doorway, expression dour and frightened. He looks like a tiny child and an old man, all at once.
Raida reads poetry. Some of it her mother’s own, some her favourites. She reads books, too. Le Guin and Satrapi, though the latter is wasted without the cartoons that accompany the words. She reads and reads and reads, and her father comes in and asks if she’s alright, and the doctors come in and ask if she is ready.
Raida does not know that she will ever be ready. In circumstances like these, it is usually the husband who would decide when to end treatment, but Raida’s mother had a special clause in her medical directives. Raida’s father would make all decisions about her care, except this one. She did not trust him to make the right one. It was not there, on the document, the implied other part of that. Her mother did not trust her father to let her die, but she trusted Raida. She trusted her with this.
In the early hours of the morning, Raida wakes with her face in her mother’s latest collection. It’s her own copy, marked up with fierce annotations and criticisms. She was cruel to herself, Raida thought. Her mother just said she could not grow as a writer without pushing herself to be more.
Raida goes over the words and reads out every criticism. At the end of the book, she has run out of things to read. She looks at the clock. It is just after five in the morning. She calls for a doctor. It’s time. She’s ready.

[WHOOSH]

Raida’s father calls through to ask if she wants anything from the shop.
‘Dad, you’re supposed to be taking it easy.’
‘I’m going for a walk, how much easier can I take it?’ He counters. ‘Besides, it’s my collarbone I’ve hurt, not my legs.’
Raida rolls her eyes. She asks for a chocolate bar and a can of coke, and then carries on with her sorting. The rest of the house is done, all that’s left is her mother’s study. It’s the biggest job and the one thing her father has not even made an attempt at. There are so many books and notebooks, loose sheets of paper tucked between the covers. There’s files and important documents in drawers of sellotape and birthday cards. Nothing is organised.
Several times, Raida has wondered if it wouldn’t be better to bin it all, or at least just shove into boxes and put them in storage. But no. If she does that, she’ll never sort through them, and there might be things in here she wants to keep.
Well, no. That’s not the problem. The problem is finding things she wants to consciously let go of. Every scribbled note is something her mother is saying, across time. So what if they’re meaningless now in all this disorganisation? These are her mother’s words, her mother who she will never speak to again. It feels reckless and wanton to throw away a single one, at least without reading it.
There are twin urges in Raida. Don’t look at any of it and act like it doesn’t matter, or read every single one. And since her father has sold the house and is moving somewhere smaller, it has to be the latter, or accept that she’ll never see these words again.
So Raida sits on her mother’s study floor and pulls box after box towards herself. She eats her chocolate and drinks her coke and she unfurls every scrap, turns every page. She finds poems she’s never seen before, many struck through with lines, sandwiched between grocery lists and receipts for furniture that was gotten rid of years ago. And there, at the bottom of a stack, is a box without a lid.
The cardboard is pretty and stiff, pattern faded on one side where it’s been exposed to the sun. Inside, photographs of a woman who looks like Raida’s mother, but also doesn’t. She smiles at a chalet by a lake. She laughs on the back of a horse next to her friend. She wears a beautiful white dress, standing next a man with piercing blue eyes. On the back, a handwritten note: ‘Lord and Lady du Perier on their wedding day, April 14th, 1956.’
There are other things in the box as well. Their wedding certificate. Her mother’s birth certificate, listing an Edward du Perier as her father. And then, a final document. This one’s a copy, not an original. It’s a death certificate for Edward du Perier. He’s been dead for ten years. Raida thinks back. The man who came to the house who spoke a language Raida didn’t know. How her mother had shut herself in her room for days afterwards. The bin bags of discarded drafts of the same poem behind her. A poem about death which her mother could never quite compose.
Under the box is a small binder. It’s crammed full of news paper clippings. Murders, disappearances, forged paintings. A man who fell from a window. A old woman drowned in her bathtub. A boy pulled out of rubble at the end of the Blitz, pictured with all his limbs in plaster, his face covered in bruises. Then another, ‘Blitz Miracle Boy is Heir to Fortune’. There he is, Edward du Perier, except in the photo of him in the hospital, when he was pulled out of the dirt, she could have sworn his eyes were dark. Why are they pale here? There are more clippings. Dozens more. It must all be about him. About Edward. About Raida’s grandfather whose name she’d never known until now.
Right at the bottom of the pouch, a card, printed in English. Elio Sarracino, Private Investigator. There’s a phone number underneath. Raida goes to the phone and dials the number immediately. She does not expect someone on the other end of the line to pick up at all; the card is clearly years old and whoever Elio is, he must be old now. But he does pick up, and after only one ring. He answers first in Italian, and then in English, in which Raida responds. ‘Hello, I’m Raida Hamidi. Amelie Hamidi’s—‘
Elio cuts her off with a gasp. ‘You are Eddy’s granddaughter. Hello. I’m Elio.’

[WHOOSH]

There are butterflies in Raida’s stomach as she walks towards the beach. It’s a bright, sunny day, nothing like Raida had imagined England could be capable of, and there’s a cool, salty breeze sweeping in across the water. It’s just strong enough that Raida feels a need to keep checking her scarf is still secure on her head and keeps a hand on the skirt of her summer dress. She checks the address Elio had texted her again before she leaves the carpark, glancing at the sign nailed on the wall, but she already knows this is the place.
There is a small family on the sand, children digging and building castles. Elio is sitting on a bench on the promenade above, hands clasped over the stick he holds in front of his knees. His hands are bronze, thick veins showing through his papery skin.
‘You look nervous,’ he tells her.
Raida laughs. ‘That’s because I am.’
‘You don’t have to meet them. They will understand.’
Raida shakes her head minutely. ‘I want too.’
Elio smiles, deepening the wrinkles around his eyes. ‘Come on then.’
Raida offers him her arm and they make their way slowly down the stone stairs onto the sand. There, Elio pauses, takes off his shoes and socks and holds them under his arm. Raida copies him, toes sinking into the damp sand. There’s a layer on top that’s been warmed by the sun, but underneath it’s cool.
A woman peers up under her wide-brimmed sun hat. ‘Elio?!’ she says, delighted.
The children stop their digging and turn their attention to Elio and Raida. They swamp Elio in hugs, clinging to his legs, crowing about moats and castles and crabs they found in the rock pools. One little boy stands in front of Raida, staring at her intently. ‘Who are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m Raida,’ she says.
The boy’s grandmother takes his shoulders in her hands. ‘Raida is your cousin, Erwin,’ she says, gently.
‘But she’s all grown up,’ Erwin replies.
His mother laughs. ‘Yes, she’s not a first cousin, she’s a…’ the woman trails up, tilting her head sidewards as she takes Raida in. ‘Well. A long time ago, in the war, your grandma’s sister had a baby. It was very sad; he got lost and sent away and nobody knew what happened to him for years and years and years.’
‘Yeah!’ says Erwin. ‘And then one day something magical happened and that boy growed up and brought us Uncle Gerald.’
‘That’s right! But we didn’t know he was the lost baby then! We thought he was a stranger, so we let him go! He grew up and had a beautiful daughter of his own, and then she had a daughter too. And that’s who Raida is.’
‘So her grandad is the lost baby I’m named after?’ Says Erwin.
‘That’s right, my love.’
Erwin frowns, then gives Raida a hesitant hug. She drops a hand onto his head.
‘I’m Rachel,’ says his grandmother, warm and soft. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come.’

[ A CHILD AND WOMAN’S LAUGHTER BEGINS TO ECHO]

I’m so glad. I’m so glad. I—
I…

[THE WAVES GET LOUDER, AND WIND BLOWS AS THE LAUGHTER GETS LOUDER AND LOUDER]

You are the gaps between paragraphs;
The spaces between words;
Unresolvable
Necessary
Void.

I recognised
You in shadows and hollow trees
Places crying out for what was there before
But isn’t now.

You were in every absence
I had ever felt.
I did not know
I was grieving
You.

[THE APPRENTICE SOBS]

SIR
Apprentice, have I found you?

[THE APPRENTICE SOBS AND THE POEM LOOPS AND THE LAUGHTER LOOPS]

SIR
Do you want to stop?

APPRENTICE
No, but I— I can’t I can’t.

SIR
Then let me.

APPRENTICE
But it hurts you.

SIR
It hurts you too. So let me. Just let me.

APPRENTICE
Alright.

[WHOOSH, AND THE LAUGHTER FINALLY FADES]

SIR
And they take her back to the house for dinner, and they eat and talk and tell stories. The children take turns playing piano for Raida, common songs and classic compositions, and one short, sweet piece written by Simeon, so sweet it makes Raida’s eyes sting. They eat and talk and share stories. They talk about their different faiths and the ways they all grew up, among many siblings, Raida an only child. Elio joins in and dozes and leaves just after eight. Raida stays late, drinks orange tea on the porch with Rachel, her face pretty and gorgeously lined as she reaches the end of her forties.
When Raida gets home, nothing has changed, but everything has. She goes back to France the next summer, takes her father with her. They visit the house where her mother was born, where her grandmother died. They find secret messages stuffed into the wall panelling, some of it as old as the Second World War, secrets left behind by members of the French resistance.
Raida feels connected to everything and everyone and has never felt more or less like herself. She picks up a pen and begins to write. She thinks at first it is a poem, but it isn’t, it’s something else. A winding, twisting epic novel about people and places she’s never known or seen. An imagined life of half-imagined people whose paths cross and part and cross again, a beautiful web that reaches out over everything. She writes by hand in dozens of notebooks, writes so much her hand cramps up and she has to rest it in a sling for weeks. And then the thing is done.
Raida puts the books into boxes and puts the boxes on her shelf. One day she’ll type them up, she thinks, one day, but not now. Not yet. There’s too much to see, to do, to learn. She’s in her forties when she realises she has never fallen in love and has no desire to, but that she might like to have a family of her own. It takes weeks of discussion and research and years of working out if she’s sure, and then it happens all at once, two siblings without parents or other relatives able to care for them, six and nine years old. Two girls, Heba and Kiya. Raida frets and worries and does what she can. She hangs framed photographs of the girls parents on her living room walls alongside the dozens of the rest of her family.
At first Raida is afraid she will not be enough, and the girls are unsure about her too. It is hesitant and difficult and awkward, and there is sadness and complication and pain. These are two little girls who have lost the two people who meant the most to them in the whole wide world, and they are grieving, and Raida cannot remember these people along with them. Instead, she remembers her own mother, tells them about her, too. ‘Tell me about them,’ she whispers to Kiya, the eldest. ‘I want to understand this part of my family, too.’ Kiya is hesitant, but then she starts to speak, and things begin to change.
Raida takes the girls to England to meet the Rachel’s grandchildren. They are younger than Raida’s girls but they play and dance and sing, and Kiya helps give the littlest one her bottles and beams when baby Miriam falls asleep in her arms.
Days tick on, time ekes by, and day by day, Raida’s life is so full. She sees more of Egypt than she ever had before, and takes the girls to Europe and India and America, all these places, all these paths, crossing and uncrossing. When Raida’s father dies, Heba curls up with Raida on her bed and smooths her hair and whispers stories about her own father, as Raida had whispered stories of her mother to them when they were small.
Kiya moves to France and meets a young woman there, Alienor, and they buy a small house in the countryside. Heba stays in Cairo, following the family tradition in working at the museum there, holding history in her hands every day, showing young children the past as it remains in the present.
Finally, finally, Raida takes her notebooks down from the top of her wardrobe. She goes through them, laughing at her own jokes, fond of her own stories. It’s better than she remembers it being, her massive, meandering book. It takes months to type it up, but finally, finally, it’s done. Heba tells her it’s good enough to publish. Raida is not so sure.
Heba has three children. Auntie Nashwa lives to hold the first two, but not the third. Auntie Rachel visits when the youngest is starting school, an old woman now. Raida doesn’t feel so far behind her.
And then one evening when Heba’s children are all grown up, and Kiya and Alienor have just moved to Crete, Raida is tidying up her bedroom, and she finds the binder stuffed with newspaper clippings that led her to Elio, who’s long since been buried in the ground. Next to it, a volume of her mother’s poetry, annotated in angry red pen. Raida chuckles as she reads through it in bed, then turns out the light.
It is a cool, quiet night in the city, nothing but a friendly hum of traffic beyond the window. Across continents, Raida’s family is settling into bed, or just getting out of it, or going about their day. She knows some of them, but not all. That is the nature of these things. Paths that cross and part and cross again. A great, vast net of people, bound together invisibly, by blood or chance or circumstance.
As she drifts off to sleep, and deeper, Raida knows those threads will remain long after she is gone. So long as there are people, some part of everyone is remembered. Not the whole, just a little remnant, so small it might at first seem to be just a speck of dust. But it’s someone. Someone who lived and loved and died, as all things die, from moss to the very sun itself.

[WHOOSH]

[QUIET]

APPRENTICE
Thank you.

SIR
Was that alright?

APPRENTICE
Shut up.

SIR
Alright.

APPRENTICE
Thank you.

SIR
Alright.

[END]