An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of discrimination against blind people
• Mentions of healed, violent injury
• Discussions of war
• Discussions of severely injured soldiers
• Implications of torture (not to the remnant-giver)

Transcript

SIR
Apprentice?

[A SOFT, SLEEPY SOUND]

It’s okay. No need to wake. I just need to know you can.

APPRENTICE
Okay.

SIR
Yes. It is.

[FABRIC STIRS]

APPRENTICE
You read a remnant.

SIR
I did.

APPRENTICE
I thought you couldn’t, not like that.

SIR
Why?

APPRENTICE
You said it hurt you. And you don’t see stuff the way I do.

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
But you did it.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
I’m not sure.

[QUIET]

SIR
You can sleep. It’s alright.

APPRENTICE
Yeah.

SIR
I won’t go anywhere.

APPRENTICE
You promise?

SIR
I promise

APPRENTICE
Thanks.

[ANOTHER LONG MOMENT OF QUIET]

SIR
You’re not sleeping.

APPRENTICE
No.

SIR
You’re looking at me.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. You’re different again.

SIR
How?

APPRENTICE
More real. More here.

SIR
Ah.

APPRENTICE
Before I lost you—

SIR
You cannot lose me. Surely what just happened is a testament to that.

APPRENTICE
But you weren’t there.

SIR
And then I was.

APPRENTICE
Well, whatever you want to call it, you weren’t there, and right before that, you were scared.

SIR
I am.

APPRENTICE
You say I keep running and you’re scared you won’t be able to follow if I find a way out of here.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
But you still helped me finish reading Raida’s remnant, even though reading the remnants is the only thing that makes things change. Even though it’s my best theory for how to get out.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
And you’re still afraid.

SIR
Of course I am afraid.

APPRENTICE
And you still helped.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
When you say you’re not a thing that knows… maybe you’re a thing that tries.

SIR
Tries to what?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. Help?

SIR
And you are a thing that tries to leave?

APPRENTICE
Am I. I don’t know. I think I might be a thing that wants. I think maybe Amelie is right. I am a void. A thing that other things are pulled into. Maybe that’s why you’re stuck with me. Maybe that’s why you chose me.

SIR
I wonder if I truly did.

APPRENTICE
No, you did. Before, when you still had your memories, you said you couldn’t put me down. You read me over and over and made me real so you could try to make sense of it all.

SIR
I don’t think I ever remembered. Not the way you remembered. I think I began as you began. I think I didn’t know why I was here.

APPRENTICE
But you were a part of something else. I see it when I look at you. I can see the ragged edges you were torn from. I see it.

SIR
Yes. But I don’t know what that thing was. I sense it sometimes but I cannot touch it. It is lost to me. You tore me from it as much as I chose you.

APPRENTICE
You think we made each other.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
If I go. What if you go back to what you were before. If you can be a part of it again.

SIR
There is no way to know that would happen, but even if I did, would I still be myself? I don’t know that thing, whatever it is. I don’t know it. I know nothing of how it feels this place, this dream we’re both dreaming. Without you, the shape of everything would be gone, and I would be… I do not know what I would be.

APPRENTICE
You’re afraid of oblivion.

SIR
And you want it more than anything.

APPRENTICE
No. I don’t want oblivion. I just. I want this to be over.

SIR
You run because you want to stop running?

APPRENTICE
Yeah. I want there to be an end. Don’t you?

SIR
I don’t know what I want.

APPRENTICE
Liar.

SIR
Perhaps.

APPRENTICE
I can’t stay here. I can’t be this with you forever. You know that. You have to know that.

SIR
I am not a thing that knows.

APPRENTICE
Yeah you are. You just don’t want to.

SIR
Tell me what I know.

APPRENTICE
You know that I can’t stay. You know we can’t be this way forever.

SIR
Why not?

APPRENTICE
We just can’t.

SIR
But why?!

APPRENTICE
I just— it’s enough, isn’t it? Haven’t you had enough?

SIR
No.

[THE APPRENTICE SIGHS]

SIR
It’s not fair.

APPRENTICE
Nobody ever said it would be.

SIR
I wish it were. I wish I could make it so.

APPRENTICE
But you can’t.

SIR
I can try.

APPRENTICE
You see? You’re a thing that tries.

SIR
And it hurts me.

APPRENTICE
And it hurts you.

[QUIET]

APPRENTICE
Do you hear that?

SIR
The ticking? Yes.

APPRENTICE
I think it’s a remnant.

SIR
Yes. It is.

APPRENTICE
Where is it?

[MOVEMENT]

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
Is that why you wanted me to sleep? So I wouldn’t read it?

SIR
So much is changing.

APPRENTICE
I know. Let me see.

SIR
Alright.

APPRENTICE
Okay. It’s a little watch on a clip. The face is upside down, looking at it flat on my hand, but it— I think it’s meant to be seen from—

SIR
Wait.

APPRENTICE
I don’t know if I— if I can.

SIR
Give it to me.

APPRENTICE
I—

[WHOOSH]

SIR
It belonged to a girl named Damson. She felt a watch like this but not quite when she was small, hung upon her mother’s breast, the sharp cool of the metal and glass against the warm cotton of her apron. The metal warmed faster under her fingers. It ticked but she could only hear it when she pressed her ear against her mother’s chest. How strange to hear how differently paced her heart was, compared to the ticking of the watch, slow and steady.
Her father lends her his stethoscope and she listens to her own pulse and the sound of her breaths, made massive in her ears, waves against the tide, until the sun sets outside and the cool light of the day recedes, replaced by the gentle glow of the lamp at her bedside.
She runs her fingers over the spines of the books in her father’s study. Some have embossed titles. She learns the shapes of the letters with her finger tips. Her mother brings her another book, bigger, heavier. There are no letters here, just dots. Her mother tells her this is Braille, and with it, she might learn to read on her own.
The trouble is, neither of her parents know how to read Braille, so the book is just a book of dots she runs her fingers over, dreaming of their meanings, making vast, epic stories in her head. Her father reads the morning papers aloud as Damson makes him tea and toast for breakfast. When he’s gone, she sits by the radio and listens to it there until her nanny, Jessica, tells her to go and play outside a while. She stays in her little garden and draws pictures in the mud, sculpts soft fur for a dog in the dirt, is scolded for dirtying her dress when she comes back inside.
Damson’s mother clutches her hand tight as they walk down the halls of the school. The hallways are dark, loud with children’s chatter drifting in from the playground. The schoolmaster is stern and speaks firm and loud. He can see, but he knows how to read braille, and many of the teachers and the other staff in the school are blind.
It takes a long time to get home on the bus, and Damson wonders aloud how early she will have to get up in the mornings to make it there on time. The children next door go to school across the street and their alarm clocks go off at seven so they can go to school at nine. Damson’s mother tells her that her school is different. She’ll spend the night there in the week and come home on Friday night. Her father will drive her back; what a treat!
‘So I won’t come home?’ Damson asks.
‘You will, of course you will. Every weekend and for the whole of the holidays.’
‘Then I don’t want to go.’
Damson’s mother sighs. She says it will be good for her. She’ll learn to read and she’ll get to spend time with other children just like her, who won’t get impatient because she doesn’t know how to play their games right.
‘But I want to come home,’ says Damson.
‘And you will. Every weekend!’ says her mother.
Damson cries. She cries and cries until her head hurts and her throat aches. She cannot eat her supper and in the morning she doesn’t want to get out of bed. Even though it’s bright outside everything feels dark, like it’s the middle of the night and the power’s cut. She wants nothing and does nothing, and still her parents say she has to go.
It is horrible at school; she doesn’t know where anything is and there are people around her always. She shares a bedroom with three other girls and they natter and chatter all hours and play stupid games with bells and ribbons. The school yard is paved over and there’s no dirt for Damson to draw in. She finds tiny flecks of stone from the pebbledashed wall and makes pictures with those instead.
The first weekend, she begs her parents not to send her back. Her father is close to relenting but her mother insists; ‘she loves stories, Karl. We can’t deny her books. That’s what we’d be doing if we didn’t send her back.’
‘I should learn Braille and teach her myself,’ says Karl.
‘When would you have time?!’ Asks her mother.
Damson wilts and sends herself to bed without supper.
The next week is almost as hard, made easier only by the fact that Damson has begun to learn her way around the place and no longer needs to trail her hands down every hallway to feel safe. Still, the other girls are too loud in her bedroom. Still, her lessons make her feel stupid and small. Still, during break time in the yard, she sits on the ground and makes patterns with the gravel and does her very best not to cry.
Someone calls Damson’s name. Miss Libby, the librarian. She asks if Damson is okay and she does not answer. It is a stupid question she will not dignify with a response. The next day, when Damson and the others have finished eating and they’re about to be turned out into the yard, Libby finds Damson again. She invites her to the library. She shows her all the books, guiding her hand to the dotted spines. ‘One of the largest collections of Braille books in all of England,’ Libby tells her.
‘They’re no use to me,’ Damson says, ‘I can’t read Braille.’
‘Then maybe you should learn,’ says Libby.
That is how she spends her lunch breaks, after that. The alphabet, at first, and then short stories meant for children much younger and far less clever than Damson. It frustrates her that it takes her so long to read them. She does, though, and each page she reads, she gets faster, until finally her reading catches up with her voice and when she reads aloud her fingers and tongue are paced in perfect harmony.
Damson reads to her parents whenever she goes home for the weekend. Sometimes she chooses not to, because the girls in her dorm room are loud and funny and silly and they’ve taught her how to play their game with the ribbons and the bells and it’s not so difficult when you get the hang of it.
There is a new boy at school and he does not know how to be blind. He’s older than Damson, seventeen to her fourteen, but he seems like a little boy the way he cries and shouts with frustration. She cannot imagine what it would be like to see, and even less what it would be like to have seen once and not be able to do so any longer. He smells like sweat and salt and hot fury. He sits with Damson and Libby in the library and stubbornly refuses to try to read.
One afternoon, Damson heaves out the typewriter. ‘It’s just the same as the ones you’ve used before, except the keys are marked with Braille, too,’ she says. ‘Did you do much typing before?’
’Not much,’ says the boy, Ricky, ‘I preferred to write longhand.’
‘Did you type enough to know where all the letters were on the keyboard?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good,’ says Damson. ‘Write me a letter and tell me what you think of me.’
The first letter Libby reads aloud is a mess of typos and errors, but Ricky has at least made coherent sentences. She makes him try… she makes him try.

[FLUTTERING WINGS]

APPRENTICE
Sir? Sir. Sir, it’s alright.

SIR
You interrupted me.

APPRENTICE
Feels funny, doesn’t it? Pulls you out of their life. Reminds you that you’re someone else.

SIR
Am I?

APPRENTICE
I think so. Looks that way to me.

SIR
Why did you stop me?

APPRENTICE
You got stuck. She made him try, and you got stuck.

SIR
I… yes. Yes I did.

APPRENTICE
You have to finish. It’s worse if you don’t.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
I can try, if you want. I can read the rest.

SIR
No. You can’t.

APPRENTICE
I can.

SIR
No! No.

APPRENTICE
Okay. So tell me. What happened after she made him try?

SIR
She keeps making him try.

APPRENTICE
Tell me.

SIR
She makes him try again and again. They do this every lunch time until he has memorised the shape of the Braille on the keys, and then he’s ready to move on to some books. Short ones, the same ones Damson hated when she first came to school, but which gave her the keys to rammed library shelves.
One afternoon as she listens to him stumbling through a poem, he stops mid-line, and asks ‘what do you look like?’
‘Would you like to see?’ she offers. He hesitates as she pulls his hand to her face. She sits quiet and patient as he explores the contours of her cheeks, brushes a finger along her eyelashes, then he ungainly pokes her in the mouth. She splutters with laughter.
‘Oh god, I’m so sorry!’ Ricky says.
‘No, it’s alright! It happens.’
Ricky sighs. Damson worries he’ll start crying again, but instead he just sits quietly.
‘May I see you, too?’ Damson asks. There is a long quiet.
‘Oh, yeah, sorry, I nodded yes, yes, you can.’
Damson laughs again. As she reaches for him, though, he stops her. ‘It’s not nice,’ he says.
‘What isn’t?’
‘My face.’
Damson sighs. ‘I’d like to know what it’s like, all the same.’
Damson runs her well-practiced fingers along his jaw. The wispy beginnings of a beard and moustache, hairs tickling the top of his mouth. Cheekbones dotted with spots she gently skims over, the patterns like irregular words. Then, the skin is different. Raised and smooth and slightly hard. Scars. No eyelashes, just one eyebrow.
‘There was an accident in the kitchen I worked in,’ says Ricky. ‘Hot oil. It’s on my chest, too.’
‘Gosh, how awful,’ says Damson.
Ricky says nothing at all. Damson folds her hands back into her lap. ‘You’re almost at the end of the poem,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow I think I’d like to show you one of my favourite books.’
Ricky progresses in leaps and bounds, and Damson swells with pride. ‘Maybe you should be a teacher when you’ve finished school here,’ Libby tells her.
‘Well, then I’d never really leave, would I?’ Damson says.
As Damson’s studies draw to a close, she hears things outside are changing. Blind children studying in ordinary schools up and down the country. New canes painted white that turn a simple aid into a symbol of something else. It lights a fire under Damson. She has fallen in love with books and literature through her long hours in the library and decides that if she will teach, she will teach books at one of the great institutions of England. Her father is a renowned surgeon, her mother a highly trained and skilled nurse; she is breaking tradition in some senses but not all. She will be an academic.
She puts in applications at all the best universities in England. One by one, they reject her. Though most do not say why, some state that it’s because they do not have the facilities to accommodate a blind person. Others imply, but don’t state outright, that they especially cannot accommodate a blind woman. Damson is enraged. Is this the world she has grown up in? Is this how it works outside this place?
When the last letter arrives, Damson is furious before she even opens it, so furious that she does not notice the response has been sent in Braille until she’s halfway through reading it. ‘We would be delighted to have you on our program, though we do not have a full collection of set texts in Braille we could assign an assistant to help you with the rest.’
Damson leaps so high it’s a wonder her head does not burst through the ceiling of her dormitory. She squeals and runs so fast down the halls that she almost trips on the steps down to the library, though she’s been walking this way eight years. Libby is almost as delighted as Damson. She writes to Ricky, who is working as a cobbler in Brighton. His response is as delighted as she could have dreamed.
It is a chore to learn this new place. Bangor is remote and far away, four trains and seven hours from her parents place. She is late to every lecture in the first two weeks. In part it’s because she cannot find her way around, but it’s also because her brailler is heavy and she has to wheel it around in a little case on castors everywhere she goes, so she can’t use her cane to help. The lectures themselves are fabulous, though. She is falling fast and hard in love with this place, with learning, even when her set texts must be read aloud to her by her assistant. She is so absorbed in her studies she stops listening to the radio news, and so when the rumours that a war is coming in Europe, she hears them over breakfast in the hushed tones of her fellow students and not on the BBC.
England finally joins the war not long after the start of Damson’s second year of study. Students arrive from University College London – one of the institutions which rejected Damson – so they can continue to learn despite the bombs falling over the city. Over the phone, Damson’s father says he has treated so many people for injuries from buildings collapsing on top of them that he is beginning to despair that it’s the end of civilisation. Her mother wants to volunteer to nurse overseas, to help the young soldiers injured in the line of fire.
At first, this idea makes Damson’s stomach twist up with anxiety, but once her mother has shipped across to France and her communications come only in letters Damson’s friends have to read aloud to her, the anxiety shifts into something else. A need to do, to be, to help. There is a hospital for injured soldiers not far from Bangor, she knows. She can get there quite easily by train. When she arrives, she offers her services, but the doctors as good as laugh in her face. When she comes back again and again though, she’s given a mop and a bucket. It is a terrible job to have given her; she cannot tell when she’s mopped up all the blood. The whole place reeks of it, a coppery stink under the other stinks, and the floors are too dark for her to distinguish between bloodied ground and clean. ‘Maybe you should read to the soldiers instead,’ one of the doctors suggests.
The next weekend, Damson lugs one of her books on the train with her.
‘Goodness, how many books did you bring?’
‘Just the one,’ says Damson. ‘Braille print takes up more pages than standard.’
The doctor makes a strange, awkward apology, but Damson waves him off, and takes up a station near the bed of a soldier who she is told has almost his whole body sealed into casts. Making no introduction, she takes out the first volume of Dickens’ Hard Times, and begins to read aloud. The soldiers in the other beds talk over her at first, but settle down as she goes on. Between chapters, sometimes they’ll shout out questions. Was it hard to learn Braille? How’d she end up here, reading to them? How come her eyes flit about if she can’t see through them? Damson answers them all briefly and factually, and carries on reading. The more she reads, the quieter the room.
‘You’re damn good at this, miss,’ says one of the soldiers in the nearby beds.
Damson smiles. ‘I’m just doing what I can.’
As Damson reads book after book, soldiers come and go. Some of them get well enough to go home, discharged from the army as the country has no more use for them now they’ve lost limbs or lungs or vision. Others pass away in their small, iron-framed beds, so deep in a haze of morphine she hopes they do not feel it. She writes to her mother, says she hopes that death is like drifting away on a cloud. Her mother’s response is that she tries not to think of it. She has had her hands inside of too many young boys trying to pinch closed spluttering arteries to have any hopes for death beyond the end of suffering.
When the war is over, work in the hospital is not. The nature of the injuries begins to change, though. No longer boys with raggedly sawn off limbs and more breaks than they can stand, they get some who are half-healed from hospitals on the continent, others whose nerves are so shot that the sound of a door shut too abruptly makes them scream and pant and sweat. Some of them are returned to Britain so thin and frail that it’s a wonder their legs don’t snap under them. Damson reads to them all the same, though she’s long finished her degree and is now living in a little cottage not far from the hospital, paid for by her father.
The weekend after her mother has returned to England, Damson has her bags packed ready to visit her, but when she arrives to do her last reading at the hospital she finds a new patient. He has been blinded, but it’s different to most of the other soldiers who’ve lost their vision in the war. Rather than the result of a bullet or a bomb or a bang on the head, his eyes have been burned, deliberately. The scars are only half-formed, hidden beneath a bandage Damson explores with her careful fingers. When she gets back from her heartfelt reunion with her mother, she tells the soldier about Ricky, but he does not speak. Not for weeks and weeks. When he finally does, it is to say that he was supposed to be a sheep farmer. His family has been farming sheep for generations; how on earth is he supposed to do that if he can’t see?
Damson considers a moment. ‘I’ve read a little about sheep farming,’ she tells him. ‘Surely it’s a matter of finding the right dog?’
The soldier is quiet again. Stays quiet a few days. ‘Will you help me find the right dog?’ he asks her.
At first Damson laughs. She’s a literature graduate intending to pursue a career in academia, how on earth could she help this man navigate a route into agriculture? But the desperation is thick in his voice. She is the only person he has spoken more than two words to since he came home. So, she agrees to do what she can.
In the end, it is not much, but not because it’s hopeless. Because Rhys’ family are willing to help him, despite his fears that they’d think him useless. Once he has put enough weight they can take the tube out of his nose, and he can stomach solid food again, his parents fetch him from the hospital and take him home and Damson speaks with him on the phone every month or so, hearing about his progress, and she tells him about her own. The hospital is finally packing up nearly a year after the end of the war, and Damson is to study for a Master’s Degree in London.
Before she leaves, though, the doctor who’d first tried to laugh Damson out of the building gives her a gift; it’s a watch, like her mothers, meant to hang from your breast pocket. But there’s no glass over the face. The numbers are raised, and the hands hardy enough to withstand being touched. ‘I had it made special,’ said the doctor. ‘Thank you for your service.’
Damson wears the watch every day, after that.
Throwing herself back into her studies is a thing of beauty, and though she excels, she finds roadblocks everywhere she turns. She’d thought – perhaps foolishly – that the influx of injured and blinded soldiers after the war would make it easier for people with additional needs to get by in the world. Instead, soldiers are valorised for the work they did, and nothing more. The maimed are wheeled out for special occasions and otherwise treated like the dead.
Damson finds herself in a dozen little groups, all advocating for different pieces of the change she wants to see in the world. Groups for the blind, groups for women, groups for the disabled. Their beliefs are aligned; why can they not find better ways to work together towards their goals? Surely to improve the situations of one group would necessitate the improvement of situations of all?
It is particularly frustrating in the academic circles she moves in, where people are always talking about improving access to education, and yet they are reluctant to hire her. She types three times as fast as other post-doctoral students she knows, but because she types in Braille, they don’t want to know. They’d prefer a boring Old Etonian with an employed secretary to pick up his slack. She’s spitting fire about it to Ricky when he slides a hand along her jaw in such a soft and tender way, so unlike the ways he’d held her face before.
‘I love it when you’re angry,’ he tells her.
‘Is that supposed to be romantic?’ Damson asks. ‘I’m talking about important issues here!’
Ricky is quiet for the rest of her speech, chiming in only when required. At the end of it, though, he touches her cheek again. ‘I think you could change the world,’ he tells her, and she kisses him, still angry, as he smiles against her lips.
Damsons frustrations lead her to the Royal Institute of the Blind. She’d had no idea before how instrumental they’d been in the proliferation of the braille-print books she’d fallen in love with, nor their work with soldiers, none of it. Most importantly to Damson, though, was that they had a library. A vast, beautiful library with hundreds of books. Some braille print, others saved on records to be played whenever she liked. It feels, to Damson, like coming home.
After two years working there, it fuels Damson for decades, through her marriage to Ricky and the births of all three of their children. She hardly takes time away from work to be with them, typing with them bundled on pillows in her lap as the suckle on her chest, brailler raised up so she can still type without disturbing them. All three of the children are sighted and get into all sorts of mischief, but as they grow, they become handy. They can dictate the newspapers before Damson’s secretary arrives, and notice when the fences at the back of the house need repainting. They grow up as clever as their mother and as wily as their father, into a dentist, a solicitor, and a priest.
As Damson ages, her typing gets slower as her fingers get stiff. Damson spends her days dictating work instead, recorded on little cassette tapes she has her assistant, Mary, switch over for her because the buttons are painful to press. When the children visit – though they are grown up now they will always be the children to her – they bring news and cakes and gossip, and they all help around the house, though Ricky gets impatient with them for it.
One evening, she has Mary set up the cassette player for her so she can check her day’s work before she goes to sleep. It’s a dull chemistry textbook she’s committing to tape, but she has no doubt someone somewhere will find it useful. There’s only one more chapter to record after this one. She’s pleased with how good she’s gotten at not stumbling when she reads aloud. She can’t find a single reason to rerecord today’s work over again, which is a relief.
She settles down on her pillows, Ricky already snoring softly beside her. The window is open and she can hear the wind rattling the bushes in the garden. She checks the time on her watch, set on the bedside table with the cassette player. Close to midnight. She ought to get some sleep. Plenty more to do tomorrow.

[WHOOSH]

APPRENTICE
Are you okay?

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Why didn’t you let me help?

SIR
It was meant for me.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
I don’t know how I know, only that I do.

APPRENTICE
I thought you weren’t a thing that knows.

SIR
So did I. So did I.

[END]