WHO HERE'S LOST?
Script Extracts
FROM THE OPENING TO THE SHOW
Some of the best lies my mother told me were towards the end, when calling her out on them would have been both painful and pointless. I used some in my paintings.
She told me all her enormous wealth had come from having created the most famous superhero in history – Drinkingfountainheadman – a character whose head was a drinking fountain, and whose power was to shoot – quite weakly – a stream of lukewarm water in the direction of his enemies. She spoke long into the night of her year as a stowaway on HMS Malice, the Royal Navy’s cruellest ship, which would burn well-beloved objects to fuel its high seas rancour. And there was her Nobel Prize-winning PhD, unifying the world of Shakespeare’s work into one internally consistent Shakespearean Theatrical Universe.
Some of the best lies my mother told me were towards the end, when calling her out on them would have been both painful and pointless. I used some in my paintings.
She told me all her enormous wealth had come from having created the most famous superhero in history – Drinkingfountainheadman – a character whose head was a drinking fountain, and whose power was to shoot – quite weakly – a stream of lukewarm water in the direction of his enemies. She spoke long into the night of her year as a stowaway on HMS Malice, the Royal Navy’s cruellest ship, which would burn well-beloved objects to fuel its high seas rancour. And there was her Nobel Prize-winning PhD, unifying the world of Shakespeare’s work into one internally consistent Shakespearean Theatrical Universe.
A text from my ex-wife, Clarity. She wants to ask a favour. I am favourable so I go to ex-ours, now hers. I believe that every act of kindness is a crime against inhumanity, and after what happened, I feel the need to commit one.
Walking had been my only option and, what with the rain and a bad shoe, I now have one wet foot. I watch a thread of cars sew itself into the main road, stitching the night with head and tail lights. On the pavement in front of a Georgian terrace, more peeling than painted, is a muzzled sapling; even the young trees have attitudes round here. Scattered on the pavement are the contents of a don’t-care package – a cigarette packet (empty), a vodka bottle (empty), a yellow polystyrene chicken takeaway box (mostly empty), a copy of the Daily Express (empty). I watch an ant and its buddy, another ant, make their way down the curb and the wet shoe slips me as I cross, and the traffic continues right through me. In the sky hangs a moon so large and bright it looks like an advert for moons.
We’re parked at the edge of a green, harvesting pulses of sun. Dilys is at a meeting place she built for the Church of the Perpetual Schism, whose interior walls are designed to be easy to rearrange. I go to the bubble wrap van and watch a limousine ant crawl past, its stretch body easily carrying a long lettuce leaf. From the playground a pair of defiantly teenage girls amaze one another with phone videos of their friends, doing a current online craze called crowning: their legs straddling the corners of major buildings and acting as if they are giving birth to them. Oliver Michael God, exclaims one when shown the first clip. Here they advertise lost cats on the side of cats. A 654 bus passes, and I scratch that number off my ambient bingo card. Or would, but it too is ambient.
What’s taking her so long this time? Down the pavement someone has thrown out some geometric bread, and a pyramid of pigeons is shaping up in order to share it. My current could-son throws his drink can into a bin, rattling the rim, and after a brief flutterment, the pigeons reassemble in the exact same formation.
The sun thrums on. Dilys returns to the car and it’s clear once again she hadn’t found what she was looking for. Another of her houses is in the same town, and the family is hosting a children’s party. This time we all go in.
