…And Leave Him There

SCRIPT CONVENTIONS:

Text of four sizes appears in the script:

12 point plain text indicates narration

11 point plain text indicates verse

10 point plain text indicates song lyrics

9 point italic text indicates staging suggestions

Indentation, also, is used to indicate the type of text: narration is set margin to margin, verse is indented two tabs and song lyrics are centred.

Staging suggestions are enclosed in round brackets at the point where they occur.
At the beginning of the play, two paramedics are seen wheeling a gurney SR to SL. At the end of the play, they wheel the gurney SL to SR. The action of the play takes place between these movements. Therefore, there are no breaks in the script and no interval; although, I have indicated where an appropriate break might be inserted should an interval be needed for reasons such as commercial or contractual considerations.
THE PLAYERS The Narrator: A man of about fifty years of age

A Young Woman about twenty five years of age

A Young Man also about twenty five years of age

Production Note: The play was written with adaptability and scalability in mind: this version is a three-hander for the commercial stage. Although the directions indicate the presence of a live band and elaborate stage sets, it could be mounted without the band and with a more minimal set. Larger forces; for instance, a variety of singers and reciters would lead to a more expansive feel and bring the Narrator into greater prominence. A radio version needs little amendment and a film/TV/animated adaptation would be possible, given the nature of this work. BM

___________________________PLAY BEGINS___________________________

(Music in background, instrumental, from “Coda”. The setting is in Manhattan in the spacious living area of an apartment in midtown; the date is 11 September 2001. It is a few hours before the event that changed the history of the 21^st Century. The stage is open at the outset- no real sense of location. There are ramps and flies that can be shifted. The sets are fluid. There may be a playing platform for a live band if the production allows, who are sometimes behind a scrim, sometimes in view. The band, as well as playing and singing, may be incorporated into the action of the play, including the verse sections. Two paramedics push an unoccupied gurney across the stage, in a hurry. There are strobe effects and we see the movement jerkily. Strobe off as the gurney and its pushers exit unseen. Then, there is a spot within a diffuse spot into which the Narrator moves, downstage, off-centre. There is a rocking chair downstage, side stage are a variety of movable surfaces and shelves. Should the stage allow, tabs can fly to open up or narrow the width of the playing area. The Narrator is carrying a glass of water and he is wearing a dressing gown and slippers. During the play the gown and slippers he wears will change. A partition, for quick changes on stage, should be part of the set. DSC is a large, tall and wide picture window from which can be seen a familiar cityscape. Skyscrapers fill the window but we cannot see the tops of the largest skyscrapers in the centre because there is a fashionable blind which comes down covering the top third of the window)

I have lived in harbour cities in that global abstraction that we call the West: on both sides of the Atlantic- Belfast on the Eastern edge; New York on the other- and also that Emerald City of the Antipodes- Sydney. Alas, although I would have loved to complete the trans-oceanic set, San Francisco or L.A. were never to be locales in which I have lived…ah, well! He pauses, takes a chased silver pillbox with three or four compartments from his pocket which he flicks open. He raises it to his mouth and washes a pill down with a drink of water and returns the pillbox to his dressing gown pocket.) As a child I met a courteous merchant marine captain named Schnell who knew and revered Hitler. This was in 1959; he had, no doubt, dined out on this for years. As, indeed, have I … (He breaks and crosses to a table the follow-spot brings into view. He sets the glass on the table beside a partly-open book.) That’s done: the introductory dance, that is. I suppose you wonder why you should stay- even pay- to listen to this. I know of those men and women, artists all, who put their all into whatever genre they are presenting- the laundry lists, the diaristic agonies, the close-up of tears, the unendurably sad sobbing of violins. I will not do this. I am much too cold a fish for that. I have been told this. I have been told this. My wife, in fact, compared me to a fish as she left for JFK ten days ago. “Don’t drink like a fish when I’m gone- and don’t forget-you have the infusion at the clinic”. But she did leave me with this. (He takes from his pocket a small device with a red button.) Ha! The panic button! Not so long ago, I thought it was just a saying. Strange. (He puts it away again) Where was I? The violins…the violins. Yes! Nor will I emulate those monsters of ego who tell you nothing but can show everything: who surround themselves with great paintings, priceless first editions, antique furniture and all the uncountable, unimaginable accoutrements of culture in their landmark chateaux, schlosses, castles and penthouses. The sort of people you love to know about even though you may hate everything they have achieved and everything they stand for. You know, I’m just like you, so, it may be a kindness of fate that a recent windfall has come late enough to save me from myself. For I think, I think, that if such great good fortune had come my way earlier- I would have been a monster too. But more of that later. . we are only at the beginning of our journey, after all. (He looks down at his dressing gown, which is a plain, light-coloured affair, plucking at it fastidiously.) I think therefore I am. Descartes. Yes? Don’t flinch; I will not bombard you with Wittgensteinian profundities and obfuscatory perambulations around abstruse philosophical topologies only negotiable by a poindexter with the agility of a mountain-goat harbouring a penchant for semiotics. No! I inhabit a much more moderate tract of intellectual real-estate. I am what you may call- a middle-brow sort of person. No threat, no threat at all. That which I have is, for most part, borrowed rather than grown or owned. But to get back to the courteous captain. As a child of about…oh, I was eight or nine, I listened with only the vaguest comprehension to the table-talk. The table talk. We were on an oil-tanker, in mid-Atlantic, on our way to a vacation that the oil-company insisted the families of its employees took every two years. My father had many contacts among the merchant marine and he had arranged passage from Aruba to Southampton for his family on this occasion during our sojourn in the tropics. As guests of the captain, we were at his table. There was, as well as my sisters and mother, another guest; a young man of mixed race who showed to me on deck one day a miniature camera that was one of his proudest possessions. As I say, I have only the vaguest recollections of the content and import of the captain’s conversation. What registered then, and has never left me, is the icy contempt with which he treated that young man whose name, I regret to say, I do not remember. Captain Schnell would lavish old-world courtesy on my mother; he would smile at me and my sisters indulgently. But as for the young man of mixed race- and what a stupid and vacuous phrase that is- there is only one human race after all. And here, in this place, in this space, I think we can all agree on that. But in that other space, that other time, on that oil tanker in mid-Atlantic- the captain was never rude. He was always punctilious in passing the soup tureen and so on- but everybody knew, everybody knew, the young man included, that captain Schnell despised the young-not-quite-white-man who must have had connections the captain could not refuse. So why did I forget his name? Maybe, it’s been the weight of several decades: the sluice, no, no, the torrent of information that has poured in through my senses- only five, by the traditional way of counting them. All that noise and light; the odour, taste and texture of life itself. Maybe it was that I didn’t care enough then and perhaps don’t really care enough now- or am I being too honest? Can one be too honest? And still, forgetfulness fills us with such terror. I don’t really understand- but, then, I don’t have to- I’m not an explicator, explainer, philosopher. Perhaps something of an observer. (At this point he walks downstage and scans the audience slowly.) And from time to time I scratch that itch that some call the need to create. An observer, then, with a need to relieve the itch. The conceit is not unusual but probably borrowed even though it fits so easily, so naturally. That’s me done with introspection- for now, anyway. I’ve always preferred stories-(He crosses to the table and picks up the dog-eared paperback.) a good read over the worthy canonical tomes you can find under the heading: self-improvement. And, indeed, I’m always surprised to find people who think that I’m educated, even erudite. Having encountered and, in a couple of instances, been friends with people who are- I know my place, my pleasure, my role, if you want to be reductive about it. I scavenge…collect enticing bits and pieces, turn them over close to my face in wonder, then notice something glinting just over there, and either drop what I am examining or stuff it in a pocket (He places the book in a pocket.) as I clamber over, it may well be, the secret of the universe as I reach for the next shining artefact, leaving the real prize untouched. (He takes the pillbox from his pocket and looks at it…) This metaphor, too, is, in all likelihood, borrowed. From now on take it as read that much of what transpires has not been voiced in the universe for the first time. Of course, I have enough vanity left to tell you that I will feel disconsolate, for however short a time, if you conclude, as did a professor after reading his student’s plagiarised essay: this work is both original and good but, unfortunately for you, the good bits aren’t original and the original bits aren’t any good. The icy captain Schnell stirred my interest in history. But have you read a history book recently; so heavy, doesn’t fit in the pocket or the mind very easily. Scavengers only rarely have the time. Much better is to slip a poem or a song snugly into the memory and take it out, when leisure allows, and set it beside some other small treasure that you have found along the way. (He replaces the pillbox and takes out the paperback quickly finding the page.) Let me demonstrate what I mean. . (He takes a rectangular reading magnifier from his pocket. He needs this to make out the words and images of almost every book or picture he looks at.) On the authority of Edwin Brock I have learned that…(Cross-fade, lights down on the Narrator as, advancing across the stage, comes a no-nonsense woman, dressed in clinical whites, perhaps with a clipboard, carrying a slim, silver pen which is used to tick off points on the clipboard. She will appear in later scenes. The click of the pen as the points are enumerated should be audible. Bring in progressively more elaborate set aspects as the play progresses. At the start the set is quite bare; by page 20 it is expressionistic, even surreal.)

from Five Ways to Kill a Man– Edwin Brock

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man

you can make him carry a plank of wood

to the top of a hill and nail him to it…

Or you can take a length of steel,

shaped and chased in a traditional way,

and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears,

…you may, if the wind

allows, blow gas at him…

…you may fly

miles above your victim and dispose of him by

pressing one small switch…

…Simpler, direct, and much more neat

is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle

of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

(She clicks the pen decisively: lights fade as she exits. A kaleidoscope of colours swirl on a scrim as the opening notes and chords of the song begin. As the song begins we see behind the scrim the shadow of the singer. This figure is the young man dressed in fascistic black and silver. Fly the scrim as the song gets under way to spot another figure dressed in motley; a clown-king, a harlequin, (in fact the young woman after a quick change) who enters. Sound FX of crowds cheering during song chorus words “ooh, ahh”, modulating to crowds screaming on the last chorus.)

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Wallace wrote a poem and put it in a glass jar

Placed it on a hillside deep inside Tennessee

Ah don’t you know that Sunday can be wearing

Strolling in a peignoir mulling on the mystery

Where is that sweet man ooh ahh

The Emperor of Ice Cream ooh ahh

Plot against the giant young girls if you’re able

Summon him with bright cloths whisper in his fleshy ear

But first make sure those sweet smells really check him

Or he will detect your schemes and growl lights out shades down

Recall that nice man ooh ahh

The Emperor of Ice Cream ooh ahh

Look at fat Jocundus staring at a tumbler

Watch the politicians playing cards their fat cigars

Become their batons beating lazy jig-time

As macabre mice dance dreaming of democracy

Send back that white man ooh ahh

The Emperor of Ice Cream ooh ahh

Place a loaf of bread beside a scenic window

Cover up with paint the view that lies beyond the crust

But when you hear the sound of marching feet

It’s time to face the beast the mask is off you’ve lost

Here is that feared man ooh ahh

The Emperor of Ice Cream ooh ahh

(During the final chorus the clown crosses to the singer, takes the radio mic (singer exits) and hands it to the Narrator, which he takes without surprise. The clown sits cross-legged and “his” head sinks. The Narrator switches the mic off, after speaking the first sentence, during which time there are echo and phasing effects. His gown is now white with blue piping.)

A much younger man wrote that song in the mid-seventies: sitting in a Sydney park under the antipodean sun, reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens, watching his two young children playing; a refugee from the cauldron that was Belfast- the first of the harbour cities to give a shape to his life, the place he sought out as a teen for its music and the sweet, sweet girl who was to become his partner for what has been now over thirty years. And now circumstances have forced her to be his warder- (You realise I’m talking about myself here- third-person pretension, I think it’s called?) I have an addictive personality, I am told, and I have to be watched for my own good. And because she isn’t here to watch- she has left this device for me to use if I go over the edge (He takes out the panic device again)…wherever and whatever that may be. Apparently it will summon help: the ever dependable Eddie downstairs or some paramedical service. Ha! Help! Help… Australia, then, was the land of the long weekend, bland but safe. Oh, I know that horrors lurked. But not for us any more – or rather, the beast was safely out of sight for another ten years or so. It was strange to reflect that less than ten years before, I had been part of that sixties’ optimism- all the entrenched bigotries were being swept away by the scornful laughter of rejection as youthful shock-troops kitted out by Carnaby Street and waving the incoherent manifestos of various pop philosophers stormed the tired ramparts of- what else- The Establishment. And 1968 was the annus mirabilis- a time when, throughout most of the western world, change seemed not only possible and desirable but inevitable and imminent. But, in Belfast, other, less fashionably dressed, players were in the game. They, too, had the establishment in their sights. But with them that expression was not figurative. It all went sour very quickly. Anyone who has lived through the experience of a civil society collapsing can attest to this. One day, it seems, all is well, nothing but mundane concerns clouding the horizon. The next day the sun doesn’t rise because, in Yeats’ memorable lines, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. And what was I during the cataclysm? Neither best nor worst. Was I lukewarm, perhaps? To be spewed out of destiny’s mouth! (Replacing the device in a pocket, he now takes out a flask, sips from it, rolling the liquid around) Destiny’s mouthwash perhaps? Once upon a time I would have riffed on that conceit- turned it into a song-lyric, short story or, more likely, barroom bluster. Now I find it a chore merely to recount. (During the opening bars of the song the clown comes to life and starts to dance around the Narrator- The clown, dances DSC and begins to sing. The Narrator crosses to a partition which allows him to quickly change gowns and slippers. From, presumably, a small bar-fridge he takes a tomato, and from a tastefully arrayed set of knives he selects a shining blade with which he proceeds to slice the tomato on an adjacent surface. He clicks on a kettle; we see a coffee mug next to it. The choreography should be arranged to highlight the appropriate moments to bring the Narrator and his actions into view. His gown is now blood-red, as are his slippers.)

Harlequin’s Poles

Harlequin dances round the poles in the hall

We dance along singing his song

And now we’re falling

Harlequin glances at the writing on the wall

He speeds the dance we’re in a trance

We hear him calling

He seems such a nice guy

With his painted on smile

Hope he’s going to stay a while

Harlequin chances on some people won’t heed him at all

He takes their lives with his long knives

And now they’re fallen

He seemed such a nice guy

With his painted on smile

As the bodies pile up high

Harlequin dances round the poles in the hall

We dance along trapped in his song

And now we’re fallen

(Exit clown. Light fx of swirling smoke on scrim. The Narrator moves downstage holding his mug of coffee. We note he has finished his tomato and his first words may be somewhat muffled as he swallows the remnants of his collation. He warms his hands on the mug and speaks quietly to the audience.)

I had a friend, once upon a time, who lived in the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. From a new house with bloodwood timber floors and views across a wilderness of eucalypts, he only had to step outside to walk for hours in any direction through one of the most glorious landscapes the world can offer. But he was bored; dissatisfied with his lot. You see, entering into his fifth decade, he had never experienced history. I reminded him of the ancient Chinese curse that wishes the enemy a life in interesting times. Drink your steaming, gourmet coffee (He looks sardonically at his own sad beverage.) as the sun burns the early morning mist off the mountains, I said, and read about it from the comfort of your hillside retreat. You teach in a multicultural school in the city. Do you wonder why that seventeen-year old Croatian girl’s eyes are full of pain? Remember the expulsion of the Afghani youth whose behaviour was seriously alarming? It’s safer to read about the Taliban’s treatment of dissidents than experience it. Too young to have seen service in Vietnam, he had at least one student in each of his classes as a consequence of Australia’s involvement. A good person, he had helped repair the damage done to some of those who, in fact, had the misfortune to be living in places undergoing interesting times. And he had worked and scrimped and saved with his beautiful wife to build the beautiful house of their dreams to share with their two beautiful children. But he was bored; dissatisfied with his lot. So, he set out to experience history. We threw them a going-away party and our kids played together in the backyard as we drank a wonderful red wine around an open fire, yellow-box wood was burning in the brazier and I can smell it still. He was killed by separatists outside a model school… somewhere in the Himalayas as I recall, burned to death in his car with his wife and two pre-teen daughters as they were arriving to start the new school year. (During this time he has been downstage, pacing, drinking his coffee. He crosses to the side and places his cup down. He returns with a spray-bottle, as he continues speaking he sprays, from time to time, a sizeable bonsai garden set in a trough suspended from chains that may be flown in. From the audience p.o.v. the hanging basket should be shaped as a half-vesica, a miniature island with small bonsai plants and rock formations) As I watched our kids playing in that Sydney backyard I was reminded of playing on the patios of Aruba- the adults would drink and talk and never think our little ears were listening. But they were. For a few years, it was evident that a change was coming. My dad would talk about the new crew he was training up; my mum would ask “But when will they…?” “Shhh, Big ears is just over there…” In 1964 we returned to Northern Ireland, for the last time from the sunny sojourn that was my childhood; from the Lotus Land that was the small Caribbean island of Aruba where my father had worked for twenty five years as a tug-master for the oil company founded by old man Rockefeller, one of the icons of Capitalism. From time to time, to break the monotony, I would rummage about in the attic of a rainy day- and the small coastal village of Cushendall had more than its share of these that year, as I remember it. There was, in an old, green steamer trunk, brass-bound with an ornate hasp and decaying leather handles, piles of newspapers, copies of The Irish News from the years of the Second World War. And I began to read: there in black and white was the frisson of living in exciting times. A newspaper that doesn’t know if it will publish the next day, courtesy of a German bomb, has rather more focus than the indulged rags of peaceful epochs. A bit like a man facing execution- as Doctor Johnston said- it concentrates the mind wonderfully. At any rate, this was history. My father and mother were in its pages, in very, very, small print- he hadn’t been a general at Stalingrad but has watched a U-Boat blow a friend out of the water, literally. Strange how glibly that phrase “blown out of the water” falls from the mouths of those who have never been closer to conflict than raised voices, a shove or a drunken slap. They were on the Maracaibo run bringing crude oil from Venezuela to the oil-refinery in Aruba. He never spoke about it to me- it was part of the family legend and some things you knew better than to broach. My mother, meanwhile, an ocean away, helped console the shattered survivors of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Belfast. They made monsters in those days, and even the ordinary people seemed larger-than-life. But I was born into the next age, the Age of Anxiety. In the early sixties, Castro was a renegade on the rampage not too far to the north- but somehow comic with his beard and cigar, a Latin Groucho Marx rather than the more imposing German Karl. However, the missile crisis sparked nervous cocktail conversations in the patios of expatriate Americans: You can bet the refinery will be hit! (He aims his spray gun at the audience “shooting” them in a wide arc.) The periodicals were full of details of how to build bomb shelters. The commie bastards would, of course, be utterly destroyed. MAD was more than a magazine title, in those days. That magazine, by the way, provoked in me spasms of hysterical laughter one day in 1961- I don’t remember what, in particular, set me off but I remember my mother regarding me oddly as I pointed gasping and shrieking at the source of my merriment. In memory it seems to be in vivid colour even though I know the magazine didn’t abandon the black and white form for decades after that. The other magazine I remember from the time was US News and World Report which, unlike MAD, featured prominently on the periodicals display in the High School library. And, from that sober source I learned about an invisible, mysterious killer- Radiation delivered in its hellish sacramental form- Fallout. (He points the spray gun vertically overhead and sprays, lighting should show the droplets falling around him.) My learning was from the printed page. In 1945 on a clear August day the people of a Japanese harbour city learned about it much more directly (Lights out, The Narrator exits as the drone of a B-29 fills the theatre and fades. Brilliant strobe flash, bright, tight spot picks up the young woman dressed in white who speaks the poem; other effects or none as your conception of the piece dictates)

from The Shadow– Toge Sankichi

That morning

a flash tens of thousands of degrees hot

burned it all of a sudden onto the thick slab of granite:

someone’s trunk.

Burned onto the step, cracked and watery red,

the mark of the blood that flowed as intestines melted to mush:

a shadow.

Ah! if you are from Hiroshima

and on that morning,

amid indescribable flash and heat and smoke,

were buffeted in the whirlpool of the glare of the flames, the shadow of the cloud,

crawled about dragging skin that was peeling off,

so transformed that even your wife and children

would not have known you,

this shadow

is etched in tragic memory

and will never fade.

(She turns and watches as the singer, the young man dressed in a bomber jacket WWII vintage, begins to sing.)

Airman

When I was a young boy on the farm

I didn’t believe that bad men could win in the end

I thought evil was stealing cars

Or getting drunk and wrecking dimly lit bars

But then the depression rolled along

The bank foreclosed the family took to the road

I joined the Army Air Corps just in time

To go to war and then go out of my mind

Above the clouds lies the land of our dreams

They say everything is beautiful

But it ain’t what it seems

We gathered in early light the wind was chill

A general made a speech we yawned half asleep

Thunder of engines rocked the dawn

A few hours later a city was gone

Above the clouds lies the land of our dreams

They say everything is beautiful

But it ain’t what it seems

Above the clouds lies the land of our dreams

They say everything is beautiful

But it ain’t what it seems

(The singer and reciter see each other, pace slowly until they are face to face. They look into one another’s eyes, then walk slowly side by side upstage and the Narrator walks downstage between them. The singer-pilot pauses, reaches in his pocket and hands a small black oblong object to the Narrator who advances towards the audience as the others exit.)

I first held a switchblade in 1962. We were bored. All those movies of youthful rebellion, the stories of the streets brought back by boys from New York City or Chicago fed our hunger for connection in the tropical nights. Sneaking out was a test of manhood. While our parents snored we would slip away to an assigned meeting place among the cactus and coral. We would throw eggs or almonds at passing police trucks, steal Coca Cola from crates in the backyards of bungalows and crash parties of younger or uncool kids. I remember the shock on the faces of teachers shortly after we showed up at the High School Halloween dance dressed in jeans, black jackets and white, white T-shirts. It was prize-giving time. The scariest costume or theme was supposed to win. We swaggered up, five of us, stood in a semicircle before the judges, who, as the younger and less powerful members of the teaching staff, had been allocated supervision duty for the night. They smiled indulgently… how could we hope to compete with the assortment of ghouls, ghosts and goblins standing about in the hall? On a signal we each produced our knives. The click (He presses the button on his held object and the blade swings out.) as the blades locked in place was executed with the precision of a US Marine honour guard hefting arms. We didn’t win. Our shiny blades were confiscated and we got detention for a month. We were that Junior High’s coolest gang and we were bad- in a middle-class, pampered, sort of way. Innocent, really, now that I look back on it. We were never going to be a match for the real-life counterparts of The Sharks and The Jets: West Side Story was causing a sensation at the time. And, of course, we were not even in the same universe as those teenage gangs who called themselves the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the seventies. The lesson I learned as I served my detention time was that the wielders of authority decide who is going to win, regardless of what the rules may say, even when they solemnly intone that everyone has to abide by them… especially then : (He crosses to side-stage. There is a bookshelf with a variety of tomes. He looks silently at the array during the song. Occasionally, he extracts one and looks at the title on the spine before replacing it. The young man sings.)

Outlaws

He never walked in Sherwood Forest

Or twirled a six-gun in the west

But here on the line live his people confined

They love the outlaw

Take Robin Hood or Billy the Kid

Not much in common but they lived

Outside the law hold our children enthralled

They play the outlaw

So raise your glasses to the Sheriff

Cheer Marshal Garrett till you’re hoarse

The people outside you scorn and deride

They toast the outlaw

Who do you turn to when times get rough

When the keepers and the guardians are corrupt

Oh oh oh oh

Don’t point to facts they have no force

A body count brings no remorse

Just look past the eyes of the zombie inside

We need our outlaws

(Exit the singer. The Narrator now selects a slim yearbook and may look through it from time to time as he approaches the audience talking. In it he sees photographs of himself and his friends and scenes of some of the activities described.)

The following year I took my Dad’s Chevvy for a drive. It was 1963 and I was feeling a bit of an outlaw. I’ve always looked younger than my age and among the well-fed North Americans I was the Irish runt- always the smallest in my class. In yearbook after yearbook I’m that really small kid at the end on the left-hand side. The police sergeant smiled as he handed the keys back to my father saying that at first he thought the car was driving itself. It was time to bail out. A criminal life was not for me. It’s hard to sustain the persona of an underworld czar when your victims only laugh at your exploits. But, hey, it was the sixties, and rebellion didn’t have to take the form of serious law-breaking. There was a new music being born. And I started to listen. An older girl who could actually drive legally- she was sixteen- showed me a Martin guitar. She was raving about the coffee house folk scene back in the States. Her name was Mary Ann and she, with her friends Bonnie and Cheryl, took a shine to me and my friends. They adopted us as mascots and drove us around, gave us beers and smokes and complained about their boyfriends. They were seriously cool chicks; they read widely, knew about art and music and told us that women actually dug men with brains above the pelvic region. Not that this stopped them whistling at the senior basketball team at practice and singing rude songs, the content of which would make a rugby team blush She didn’t need liberating, Mary Ann. Bright academically, really striking in looks, (although, funnily enough it isn’t reflected in her yearbook photographs) she laughed at the teachers at the school and called them greys- even though they were mostly in their thirties and selected for their above average academic record. I almost cried when I told her that I had to leave to return to Ireland. She laughed, gave me a cigarette and handed me a bottle of Amstel beer. She leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Don’t go grey.” (He touches his receding grey hair) Now, I never thought she was advocating that I dye my hair in later years. It took me years to realise that she and her friends were an extraordinarily deviant group, but deviant, only in the sense that they were just about as far from the conventional 60s norm as you can get. Then, I just took it as read that the other half of the human race, in whom I was just starting to take hormonal notice, were wise and witty and funny beyond anything that we could come up with. (The Narrator stands downstage to one side looking at a page of the yearbook as the young woman- advances. She accompanies her recitation with large gestures, jazz-ballet style. Obvious light effects will suggest themselves but it’s OK to resist them. On the line “people will stare forever” the narrator gazes spellbound at the young woman.)

I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro– Moniza Alvi

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro.

Barely distinguishable from other dots,

it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.

And from my dark centre

I’d survey the beauty of the linescape

and wonder- would it be worthwhile

to roll myself towards the lemon stripe,

Centrally poised, and push my curves

against its edge, to get myself

a little extra attention?

But it’s fine where I am.

I’ll never make out what’s going on

around me, and that’s the joy of it.

The fact that I’m not a perfect circle

makes me more interesting in this world.

People will stare forever-

Even the most unemotional get excited.

So here I am on the edge of animation,

a dream, a dance, a fantastic construction,

A child’s adventure.

And nothing in this tawny sky

Can get too close or move too far away

(The Narrator walks towards her but never gets too close. The young woman exits appropriately and the Narrator returns and replaces the yearbook on the shelf. He mixes himself a drink. It’s a stiff one, he shouldn’t really be having it. Stage business here, as elsewhere should not, unless dramatically necessary, impede the fluidity of the play’s unfolding.)

I have never forgotten Mary Ann. I would like to think that she took her iconoclastic insouciance into her future life. If she still lives, and if she, by some magic of mathematical chance, hears me now, can I say, Mary Ann- I took your advice, I didn’t go grey or tried not to- I read (present tense) read (past tense) widely, listened to music from everywhere I could manage, sought out art and sculpture and tried, even if in a small way, to create. Although, I would be the first to concede- I will never be among the pantheon of your artistic heroes. But, as I said, I read voraciously and still can’t resist a big, really big, Art Folio or an extravagantly outré exhibition- and Manhattan is just the place to be for that! Music still has me enthralled, and I have gorged on jazz and rock and experimental and classical over the past months of my Big Apple residency and I still haven’t been satiated and, alas, I think something else will intervene before that happens. Oh, I never will forget her laughter at a world that was horrible and risible at the same time. Her laughter was the sound, you know, the music that made me first look at life with a clear, cold eye. I have basked in the glow of memories such as those starlit car-rides out through the police gates, guarding the segregated housing of the employees of the oil company, into the more anarchic multiracial streets of San Nicholas- a mini-Manhattan in it’s own way- and I have derived strength from something created in those few short months that has endured to this day. Thomas Hardy wrote a poem, The Self-Unseeing, where he set out that universal truth: that it is only long after the event that we can actually appreciate the significance of our actions and of the people in our lives. Not long after I had the privilege of knowing you, Maryanne, (and, also, Cheryl and Bonnie) I was heading towards a new life in the Old World. Tired old Europe and tired old Ireland was to be the setting of the next phase of my life: the gates of Eden closed as we drove to the airport, my older brother and I, to take a flight that was heading north to Miami and New York, then east, over the Atlantic, towards the emerald isle. As we soared above the clouds, I persuaded my brother to order a vodka and coke for himself, which I drank. He didn’t drink at the time and, reflecting on this small episode, you might well wonder how the diminutive youth could be so persuasive. Years later I asked him about it and he said that I had an appeal, then, that was hard to resist. His use of the past tense hurt somewhat. We lose so much, as we grow older, don’t we? I wasn’t trailing clouds of glory, but the fumes of that spirit, high above the Atlantic, helped to kill the pain. I knew I was leaving the walled garden, that Eden, in Aruba and that the coming years would be…well, I was to find out: (He crosses to a shelf of books and takes one, returning to his rocking chair. He carries his drink which he places on a small table beside the chair. During the song-sung by the young man- he reads the book with intensity- but closes it, with a sigh before the song ends.)

Cannery Row

With Mack and the boys out on Cannery Row

Laid into the wine jug we sat

On a log placed outside the Flophouse and Grill

We watched the sun painting the hill

As the armchair romantic sinks into his dream

He forgets that his life is constrained

How he wrestled and lost with a thing that was dead

How emptiness entered his head

A handful of notes won’t buy you the soul

That you traded for being assured

For the pages must turn then the book’s cast aside

Another you has just died

My cheek on one shoulder I walk past the shelves

Of the library just before dark

I needed to borrow a chart for the mind

I had lost and was searching to find

Then to the Mojo Motel book a table for two

The Moonglow quintet plays requests and old

Standards for you it’s true

Home again we make mechanical love and you

Say it was okay

But Mack and the boys are still living it up

And the Doc has returned from the tide

And those good working girls are preparing to go

To the party on Cannery Row

Yes Mack and the boys are still living it up

And the Doc has returned from the tide

And those good looking girls are already at

The party on Cannery Row

(The singer exits. The Narrator places now empty glass on a surface, side stage, and he replaces the book on a shelf.)

One of my first discoveries in the Old World was the existence of old people. Aruba was an expatriate society with one purpose only: to refine the crude oil from Venezuela and send it off to the gas guzzlers of the American Dream. Hence, it was an artificial social construct using any index you might select. Even the water was, in a sense, artificial. It didn’t fall from the sky or run in rivers but was piped in from a desalinisation plant and was more valuable than the crude oil. I recall where an employee of the company, actually one of the rising young executives, was summarily dismissed for tampering with his water meter. Through youthful eyes all the adults were old- but, in reality, they were mostly in their thirties or forties. Really old people, like my parents, had attained the impossible age of fifty- younger than I am now. The houses, schools, clubs, boats, cars, clothes, toys, tools, furniture, fittings, fixtures- all new. Set down by American Capital on a small desert island only a generation before. Aruba, at that time, was owned by Holland but the Americans built a refinery and constructed a quasi-colonial enclave- we actually called it the Colony- on one end of the island which was walled off from the rest of the island, the gates manned by armed police to ensure its isolation. The food also was, for most part, freighted in and sold from a commissary. Now, Ireland was different. When my father returned upon his retirement from the company- I had preceded him and my mother to start boarding school some months before- he took me up a narrow, rutted, lane in the country to visit his stepmother. It was a small one-storey Irish cottage with whitewashed walls and thatched roof. The wooden half-door was open and inside was an open fire with an iron kettle swung over it. There was an open dresser with gleaming crockery, an old wooden bench and a dog asleep on a rug. Decades later I was to visit a theme park in the south of Ireland with an almost identical cottage, outside and in. My father knocked and we entered. A small, stooped, wizened woman with deep fissures in her face smiled faintly at us as she hobbled out of a darkened room off to one side of the main living area. This was his step-mother. After introductions, he told me to go play by the stream that ran close by, while they talked. There I had one of those almost preternatural encounters that puzzles me to this day: across the stream was a tinker lad- one of the travelling people of Ireland. Commonly called the Gypsies, they are the subject of prejudice wherever they go. He called across the stream to me but I could not understand what he was saying. He repeated his words- still no comprehension. The next thing I remember, we were throwing stones at one another. Then I heard my father call my name; the tinker-lad dropped the stone he was about to throw, laughed, and disappeared into the bushes lining the stream. I walked back feeling, feeling…and the feeling persists to this day…somehow cheated. When we were settled in the car I asked my father about his real mother, but he answered only that she had died when he was a small boy. It wasn’t until thirty five years later that I was to receive a fuller account. I saw old people on the streets, at Mass, when I visited relatives, or in attendance at the funerals and wakes that were a not unusual feature of country life in the Glens of Antrim: I ought, in short, to have been inoculated by the…Methusaleh-isation of my life in a society with a more natural demographic spread than the one I had been living in but remember being shocked to the core by the evidence of rampant geriatric carnality encountered when I worked for a summer on the Isle of Man at a holiday camp a few years after my return. I was sixteen years old and, for the first time in my life, truly on my own, away from the influence of adults who had an interest in or responsibility for me. I had completed my O- Levels and flew to that strange island in the middle of the Irish Sea with Sean Flynn, a friend from school a year older than me. He was a day boy who travelled by bus from Ballymena and I travelled by bus from Cushendall- a day boy too, apart from a few months boarding- of which, more later. But to get back to the rampant geriatric carnality- which I wish I possessed in greater measure- the easy English sexuality in the mid-sixties was somewhat in advance of the Irish kind practised in the repressed Catholic country parish I lived in. One night, returning to my cabin after washing the pots and pans in the cavernous kitchen which catered for the happy campers, I heard low grunts and thumps coming from the other side of my very basic sleeping quarters. Thinking it was a dog at the garbage cans placed there, I rounded the corner to confront Ernie and Madge engaged in what I was later to learn was called a knee-trembler. Ernie was a janitor, married to Edna who was head of the cleaners at the camp. Madge was one of the cooks in the kitchen. What was said to me was short but not incongruent with the activity I had so inconsiderately interrupted. Whispering my revelation to Sean, after I had prodded him awake upon my stunned return, I was puzzled by his failure to fall out of his bunk at the enormity I had just related: But Jesus, Sean, I said, they’ve both got grey hair! (The Narrator has grey or greying hair.) Sean just yawned. Sean, yawn- ah…anyway, Sean didn’t think much of a previous… epiphany… I had related it only months before, when we were planning our Isle of Man adventure in the study hall of the college. After I returned from Aruba I was shoe-horned into a prestigious boarding college that my parents had arranged for me to attend. I was domiciled in St Marys one of the Houses of the college. It was the most recent addition to the boarding accommodation of this august institution- at least that’s what we were told- the college, in fact, was a relatively recent response of the Catholic bishops who were determined to use education as the wedge to overcome the sectarianism of the Northern Ireland statelet. And so, a castle overlooking the Irish Sea was bought and filled with callow Catholic boys. And it grew, and overseas students helped to fund its expansion, the latest of which was St Marys which was a three-storey honey-brick construction. It was, unlike the more communal arrangements of the other Houses, a single-room complex. One room and one student. No dormitory living for us! And the priest who had charge of it had, on what my memory can only remember as Walpurgis Night, been called away suddenly to a family emergency. Don’t ask me how it got out. But seeping through the walls of our individual minimalist rooms- seeping through the walls was the information- we’re on our own. WE’RE ON OUR OWN! I had been caned just that day by that very same holy man, that guardian of our Catholicity, that warder in charge of St Marys. It happened this way: we were up on the slopes overlooking the Irish Sea, up above the college, four friends and I, playing poker and smoking, and we missed curfew. So, as we trooped into St Marys, the four recalcitrants and I, Father Grinsin was waiting with his thin instrument at the door. Ten times the cane hissed and thwacked- one on each hand. With pride, I can relate that not one of us yelped in pain. We sucked it in. But, you know, I can still feel it to this day. I was sitting at my desk, reading and taking notes on the novel we were studying in English, rubbing my smarting palms between my legs. I was really getting bored by Ralph and Piggy so when the seeping seeped into me-I was ready. Knock, knock, who’s theeere! I opened my door and was hit in the face by a wet mop. Fabulous. Was I ever waiting for this! I charged out of the room and pursued my attacker down the corridor. He dropped the mop and I ripped the handle out and threw it at him. It sailed past his head and stuck in a prefect’s door at the end of the passageway. It was brilliant! The door opened and I screamed an obscenity and the door shut. Ha! Water bombs, pillow fights, beds upturned, it was brilliant! Although we didn’t say brilliant back then. Brill was the in-word at the time. It was Brill. The strangest thing was…there were no repercussions to speak of. We all just tidied away as best we could (mind you, the place was still a bit of a shithouse!) and, when Grinsin returned the next day and conferred with his prefects and the powers-that-be, well, nothing. It was as though nothing has ever taken place. We all agreed that it had not, really, happened! But the boys of St Marys were guilt-tripped big-time. The prefects were scathing over the next while as they condemned our utter disregard for the proprieties, for besmirching Grinsin’s grief, for sullying the memory of an old, old man who had lived an exemplary life and brought Father Grinsin into the world to look over us. Yeah, right- I thought then, and now… And Sean Flynn yawned then too, when I related the details of glorious anarchy- or is that just memory playing its delicious tricks (The young woman ironically declaims the poem.)

from Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death– Roger McGough

Let me die a youngman’s death

not a clean and inbetween

the sheets holywater death

not a famous-last -words

peaceful out of breath death

When I’m 73

and in constant good tumour

may I be mown down at dawn

by a bright red sports car

on my way home

from an allnight party…

Or when I’m 104

and banned from the Cavern

may my mistress

catching me in bed with her daughter

…cut me up into little pieces

and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman’s death

not a free from sin tiptoe in

candle wax and waning death

not a curtains drawn by angels borne

“what a nice way to go” death

(It should not be as obvious as a paroxysm of coughing, but the Narrator is drained by the effort and he crosses side stage where he sits on the rocking chair. He takes his pillbox out and, reluctant to get up and cross to where he can get water, pulls from another pocket a hip-flask with which to wash down his medication. From time to time he may take a medicinal swig during the song. The band plays unseen behind the scrim- the young man sings- onto which are projected vignettes, images, symbols, etc mimicking memory. The young woman appears during choruses, watched by the Narrator.)

Everybody’s Story

Oh if I start to talk today

Of all the wonders of my youth

Pour me another glass of wine

And let me go rambling through

Those memory lanes again

I’ve been a resident for years

Thank you for filling out the forms

I know you want to hear my news

But I’d rather ramble through

Those memory lanes again

Yeah everybody’s story’s got a point

Lost friends heroes and lovers

They rise and they shine again

Everybody’s story’s got a point

Lost friends heroes and lovers

They rise and they shine again

I won’t forget you in my will

I will not alter it at all

You are my son I wish you well

Now please let me ramble through

Those memory lanes again

Next time you come bring in the kids

I still remember their soft smiles

If you won’t do that bring some wine

And let me go rambling through

Those memory lanes again

Yeah everybody’s story’s got a point

Lost friends heroes and lovers

They rise and they shine again

Oh everybody’s story’s got a point

Lost friends heroes and lovers

They rise and they shine again

(The singer exits. The Narrator, who is, after all, only about sixty although his illness may have aged him somewhat- during the final choruses crosses to the bar fridge and prepares himself another drink. The young woman watches, then exits. He crosses to the shelves and takes down a photograph. This is a family grouping. He holds the framed photograph and looks at it, then sets it down, picks up his drink and confides in the audience.)

Small children have an affinity with those the all-conquering youth generation and their go-getting parents call old. They respond to the easy tolerance and gentle understanding of their grandparents. Alas, I didn’t experience this at first hand as both sets of grandparents had died before I was born. And I regret that I am not fated to become an indulgent grandad surrounded by the progeny of my progeny. But I have one grandson, one link to the universe beyond, the only way in which my being can truly live into the future. My God, how I quake at the idea that anything will happen to him before he…I don’t buy, and never have, that hogwash that claims all parents as evil, warping pathologies in the development of their children. The strident attacks on the supposedly artificial nuclear family by ideologues of left and right never quite rang true- the generation gap, for me and lots of people I know, was not a yawning chasm boiling with hellfire, but a difference, not all that astounding, comprising difference in age, experience and changing culture and expectations. As the kids of Seroe Colorado Junior High in Aruba would have responded, as they did to any fatuity: Duhhh!! Of course, what I have said is a generalisation and I was to encounter in the stories of other people’s lives a vast, often dark, forest where fiends do, indeed, lurk. However, the tabloids of paper and TV would have us believe that behind every vicarage curtain a satanic coven meets and …you know as well as I the variety of paranoia peddled, the range of hypotheses hyped by those who profess an interest, not all of it well-intentioned, in the care of children. As young parents, we were anxious to do the right thing, and, like so many of our generation we read the Spock child-rearing manual with the same avidity that theological students use scouring Scripture for the meaning of existence. I wish I had found out earlier than I did that we would have been better employed assimilating the words of wisdom uttered by the pointy-eared Vulcan of the same name. Appropriately enough, Star Trek lives on. As do so many innocent and enabling fictions. . (This might be a good point where the separateness of Narrator space, Recital space and Musical space- the three main playing constructs and their conventionally discrete roles- is subverted. There is an opportunity here for the Narrator to sing the next song which is simple and undemanding: a lullaby, in fact. The director may feel that the preservation of the separate spaces is to be kept. The alcohol is taking effect, but larger than might be expected in a veteran imbiber.)

Cycle of Love

Me mother told me the greatest pack of lies when I was young

Not an ugly duckling I but the finest whitest swan

Me father was complicit in this conspiracy of love

He swore by the sun and moon and stars up above

That I was special

I’m grown up now and married and it should come as no surprise

To our children we have told the same old pack of lies

Knowing that they all add up to something that is true

Knowing that most people know this is nothing new

Our kids are special

The cycle of love rolls through the years

The cycle of love cuts through the tears

The cycle of love rolls on and on…forever

I have to smile sometimes when I am walking far and near

As I pass a family these words I often hear

You are no ugly duckling but the finest whitest swan

You are the moon and stars above you are the shining sun

Oh you are special

The cycle of love rolls through the years

The cycle of love cuts through the tears

The cycle of love rolls on and on…forever

The cycle of love rolls through the years

The cycle of love cuts through the tears

The cycle of love rolls on and on and on…forever

(The Narrator crosses to the bench and sets down his glass. From a shelf he picks up a small, oval cameo brooch, looks at it and advances, yet again, on the audience.)

In our house in Cushendall, my father set up, in a front room overlooking the lawns, his beloved hi-fi gear, B&O of course…his AKAI reel to reel, state of the art when he proudly purchased it a couple of years before- a retirement present to himself, perhaps?… his writing desk and chess sets and comfortable chairs. An ornately carved chest smelling of camphor gleamed dully in one corner and, around the walls photographs in polished wooden frames peopled by grimly countenanced Victorian and Edwardian gents and ladies. Two photographs in oval frames on adjacent walls, stared into space at right angles to one another. One his father, an imposing moustachioed man in his sea-captain’s uniform; the other a pale and delicate young woman in a ruffled blouse closed at the neck with a cameo brooch – his birth mother. (He looks, for a couple of beats, at the cameo brooch in his hand. The audience can draw what conclusions they wish.) He was comfortable with reminders, not of his twenty five years in the sun, but with the mute artefacts that recalled the early years of the century. (He walks back and replaces the cameo brooch on the shelf as the young woman, dressed in raffish Edwardian male garb, breezes on stage. She is cheery and rubs her hands briskly as she instructs the audience. The Narrator clutches his gut and walks offstage. When he reappears he will be wearing a much finer gown and slippers suggesting emperor-like opulence)

from History of the Twentieth Century– Joseph Brodsky

Nineteen-fourteen! Oh, nineteen-fourteen!

Ah, some years shouldn’t be let out of quarantine!

Well, this is one of them. Things get raw:

In Paris, the editor of Figaro

is shot dead by the wife of the French finance

minister, for printing this lady’s/ steamy letters to

-ah, who cares!…

…a socialist and pacifist

of all times, Jean Jaures. He who shook his fist

at the Parliament urging hot heads to cool it,

dies, as he dines, by some bigot’s bullet

in a cafe. Ah, those early, single

shots of Nineteen-fourteen! ah, the index finger

of an assassin! ah white puffs in the blue acrylic!…

There is something pastoral, nay! idyllic

about these murders. About that Irish enema

the Brits suffer in Dublin again. And about Panama

Canal’s grand opening. Or about that doc

and his open heart surgery on his dog…

Well, to make these things disappear forever,

the Archduke is arriving at Sarajevo;

and there is in the crowd that unshaven, timid

youth, with his handgun…

(In the last four lines the air seems to go out of her and she walks slowly offstage. The Narrator is not in sight, and the now deflated young woman pauses on her way and looks at the cameo left on the shelf by the Narrator as the opening notes of the song fill the theatre. There is only a singer-guitarist on the playing platform; any vocal support for choruses is from unseen band-members. He walks downstage playing the intro on his acoustic guitar, which should be amplified in wireless fashion, if possible, and sings into a mic. This is the young man. Delete guitar references for non-players.)

Rose

Your name was rarely mentioned Rose when I was growing up

A closed book on a high shelf unopened and uncut

A picture in an oval frame that’s staring into space

Waiting for a mention and waiting for a place

Inside our family history then just the other day

A letter from my nephew came and swept some dark away

Telling of internment in that war to end all wars

And your return to Ireland with anguished mental scars

Rose runs in her asylum clothes

Fleeing from her demons down a darkened Antrim Road

She’s running towards her husband in that distant German camp

Crying to the stars what’s happened to her man oh Rose oh Rose

In ‘14 you were happy gave domestic life the slip

Sailing with your husband as he captained his fine ship

To the port of Hamburg oh did you find release

Did you find what you were after and did you find some peace

Why did you take that fateful trip into the jaws of war

Why did you leave those young boys behind on Ireland’s shore

The answers all are buried now and sunk into the clay

Or hidden is a dusty file that’s yet to see the day

Rose runs in her asylum clothes

Fleeing from her demons down a darkened Antrim Road

She’s running towards her husband in that distant German camp

Crying to the stars what’s happened to her man oh Rose oh Rose

Forgive me Rose if I have used your pain to write this song

People I respect tell me they wonder if I’m wrong

To use you to fill a drunken room with feeble sound

Have I desecrated what was once your holy ground

But Rose I am your grandson and surely I should know

The people I have come from so that I might show

My children that there is a point no matter what the cost

Nothing that’s remembered is ever really lost

Rose runs in her asylum clothes

Fleeing from her demons down a darkened Antrim Road

She’s running towards her husband in that distant German camp

Crying to the stars what’s happened to her man oh Rose

Runs in her asylum clothes

Fleeing from her demons down a darkened Antrim Road

She’s running towards her husband in that distant German camp

Crying to the stars what’s happened to her man oh Rose Rose

(Exit the singer. Fly in emblems representing Mammon; also, 1984-ish formulae such as LOVE=HATE; PEACE=WAR. The set should now be transforming and becomes garish, resembling a tawdry game-show. The Narrator reappears, we really can’t have him advancing on the audience yet again, but to have him rise from under the stage or have him flown in seems, well…excessive. The dressing gown and slippers of the Narrator suggest opulence and decadence.)

The texts from those times are as dated as the flock wallpaper of an Edwardian drawing room. The inheritors of modernism, those pop mavens, working in animation, the written word, sound and stone as well as on canvas have made everything glowing and immediate. Simple, bold, fluorescent statements replace the mandarin meanderings of those sonorous artistic aristocrats of the first tranche of the twentieth century. Purple prose and blue blood is replaced by an apotheosis in green- Warhol’s wall of dollar bills becomes the central image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of our imagination. Radix malorum est cupiditas- croaks the Pardoner- the love of money is the root of all evil. Well, those roots have spread under the foundations of our civilisation. So what’s new? Maybe nothing, there have been greed and violence as well as selfless love and self-denial since Adam was a lad. I’m not a pundit; I can’t predict what my cat will do next never mind the whole damned shebang. But I know that the language has been ripped back to reveal…what? Orwell was wrong; it wasn’t the thought police of a totalitarian state that eviscerated expression. We did it to ourselves, pursuing the dream, once called American. It responds only to monosyllables or those articulated words that it sanctions: words like Proactive, Functionality, Multitasking, Consumerism. And in the race the swift make sure there is nothing left for those who lag too far behind. Not even what our predecessors would have called language. (The Narrator watches as the young woman, dressed in a very contemporary fashion, makes yet another entrance.)

from The Lads– Eleanor Brown

The lads, the lads, away the lads;

we are the Boys, who make this Noise: hoo, ha; hoo, ha;

a-way, awayawayaway, a-way, away;

ere we go, ere we go, ere we go;

we are the Boys, who make this Noise;

hoo ha;

Away the lads, I love your poetry,

It strips the artform down to nakedness,

distilling it to spirituous drops

of utter poetry.

I like the way you shout it all so loud,

revelling in the shamelessness

of its repetitiousness; the way it never stops

delighting

you. You’ve every right to be proud

of your few, brief, oral formulae-

any of which will do for Match of the Day,

on Friday night, Lads’ Night Out,

lagering up and fighting-

you are the lads. You’ve every right to shout.

(As the band rips into the riff of the next song the young woman responds enthusiastically. So taken by the ambience is she that she joins the singer in the chorus, becomes, in fact, a member of the band. The young man, who is the singer, and indeed the whole band, is dressed, at this point, in post-punk style- she won’t look out of place, really.)

All I Did

I was born to a mother there was a father somewhere

I had brothers and sisters we hung out sometimes

And all I did all I did