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drama
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< Page 1 - "Sprout" by Laura
Solomon )
MAN: There’s something
weird here. Near your spine. Like a pimple only bigger.
WOMAN attempts to roll
over onto her back so he can’t see it, but he props a hand
under her shoulder and hoists her over, pressing his face up
close to her skin.
MAN: Christ. It’s
massive. Here, let me squeeze.
MAN pushes and squeezes
then gives a gasp, shocked.
WOMAN: What? What is it?
MAN: It’s this thing.
Protruding. Like a weird white stick.
WOMAN: Just leave it
alone. I’ll go to the doctor and get it checked out. I had
a mole removed there a couple of years before I met you.
Maybe it’s just… you know. Old mole bits gone funny.
MAN: Hang on. I think I
can yank it out. Where’s your tweezers?
WOMAN: Don’t yank it.
You’ll only make it bleed.
MAN picks up a pair of
tweezers from bedside bureau.
MAN: It’ll be fine.
Just hold still.
As WOMAN protests he
grips the thing in the claws of the tweezers and, in one
swift movement, hauls it out.
MAN (holding what he has
pulled out up to the light): Holy shit. It’s over an inch
long.
WOMAN: Maybe it’s a
thorn.
MAN: Too slender.
(accusatorily) Brittle.
MAN holds the thing he
has plucked between forefinger and thumb and snaps it neatly
in two.
WOMAN: It’s nothing.
Leans over and gives man a peck on the cheek. Don’t worry
about it.
WOMAN (direct address):
In between bouts of electrolysis I applied hair removal
cream. For most people electrolysis was a permanent
solution; for me it was only temporary. I was spending a
fortune and I dreaded the sessions. The electrolysist was
beginning to ask questions. There were little red lumps all
over my body where the sprouts had been. My face, as yet,
had been spared.
Lights out. Lights up on
MAN furiously beating the duvet with a wooden spoon. WOMAN
enters after a hard day at the office, puts down handbag,
stares at MAN.
WOMAN: What the…?
MAN stops suddenly and
swings round to face her.
MAN: It spat at me.
He gives the duvet
another whack.
WOMAN: It spat?
MAN: Poisonous spit.
Venom. Look.
He
pulls down the collar of his shirt to reveal a welt.
WOMAN: What the hell is
that?
MAN: That was caused by
this
MAN holds up a jar which
contains a single button.
A
button that came from the duvet’s cover.
WOMAN : Are you trying to
tell me that a single tiny button caused that enormous welt?
MAN: Oh, this ain’t no
ordinary button. The little bugger’s infused its buttons
with venom.
WOMAN: But the cover’s
separate,” she said. “The cover’s nothing to do with it.
MAN (melodramatically):
It has become its cover.
MAN throws down the
wooden spoon down in disgust and stomps offstage.
WOMAN (direct address):
And the poor thing lay in the corner, quivering from the
beating it had taken, shaking like a jelly in an
earthquake.
Picks
up jar that contains the button and holds it up to the
light.
So small, so harmless!
Was it possible that he had cut himself on purpose, set the
duvet up, framed it? Or incurred the wound in some other
manner, and thought afterwards to blame it on the duvet? I
didn’t know whom to trust anymore. I found it hard to
believe that the duvet had lashed out unprovoked. Even in
the unlikely event that he was telling the truth and the
button had been fired at will, he must have done something
to cause it to act in such a violent manner.
Over the following weeks
the duvet became a thing ineffable. To speak of it was to
widen the divide between us even further, to do anything
other than ignore it was to make the air too thick for even
the sharpest knife to slice through. The tension of not
mentioning was killing me. Upon entering our formerly happy
home, at the end of my day, I felt myself grow pale, felt
the blood draining from my body, as if leeched by some
invisible vampire. I found myself looking into mirrors in
strange rooms at strange times, as if I would see something
behind me, something that lurked just beyond her right
shoulder, a sinister Spirit of Resentments Past. A thing
unbottled. I knew he could feel it too. Never a loquacious
man, he now became even more sullen, silent and withdrawn,
like a teenager. He had fenced off parts of himself,
erected Keep Out signs. Large areas were off limits. He
was a closed book. His paintings turned black; he had
entered his noir phase. His work became a dark room that
could not be lit. Before he had kept them hidden, now he
left them round the house for her to see, these renderings
of dead birds and spiders and rats. Others were noticing
the strain of these changes. Kathleen, my boss, was the
first to remark.
Lights out. Lights up on WOMAN sitting at desk typing.
KATHLEEN comes over to her desk.
KATHLEEN: Mind if I have
a word.
WOMAN: Sure, what’s up?
KATHLEEN: You’ve always
been such an efficient secretary. One of the company’s
best. I myself have heard a little bird say that you might
be in line for the job of PA to the new CEO when he comes on
board.
WOMAN: That’s great. A
promotion!
KATHLEEN: But, standards
are slipping. You won’t be up for promotion if the
performance of recent weeks continues. We all have our off
days, but an agenda for a meeting was sent out with the
wrong address, resulting in two senior managers lost in the
vicinity of Trafalgar Street when they were needed out at
Richmond. They’re busy people. They need accuracy from
their support staff. They need you to be present in both
body and mind.
WOMAN: Yes, I’m sorry
about that, I..
KATHLEEN: You’re not
indispensable you know.
WOMAN: I know, it’s just…
KATHLEEN: Mind on the
job, please. And if you want to talk, I’m always here.
Kathleen reaches out to pat WOMAN’s arm, then jerks back in
alarm. Grabs woman’s arm, examines it.
KATHLEEN: Lumps! What’re
all these lumps?
WOMAN: Oh, I’ve just had
a bit of a reaction to the electrolysis.
KATHLEEN looks at her in
horror and disbelief.
WOMAN (direct address):
Every day I sprouted a little more, sprouted painfully and
unfairly. Every day he said nothing. He had given up, was
pretending not to notice. I began skipping work, calling in
two or three times a week to say I couldn’t come in that
day, lying around the house, giving the odd desultory
pluck. Fighting a losing battle. I pleaded illness, family
crisis, dental appointments, death. I kept a list of
relatives whose funerals I’d already given as excuses for
not making it in, so that I never gave the same name twice.
On the days I did go in, I baked, boiled beneath my long
trousers and shirts and feathers. It was like wearing a
sleeping bag underneath my clothes. I saw the other girls
giving me glances. Kathleen had been talking. Cruelly,
somebody printed out a copy of Metamorphosis and left it on
my desk for me to find.
I thought he might say
something, comment, call a doctor. Instead, he simply spent
increasing amounts of time away from the house and down at
the pub, coming home and passing out on the sofa, where I
would inevitably find him the next morning, snoring in a
pile of his own puke. When he wasn’t drunk he was working,
holed up in his studio, producing yet more pictures of
creatures that crept or crawled or flew by night. The bat
phase I found particularly disturbing, entailing as it did,
his endless visits to the zoo, where he would lurk in the
nocturnal enclosure for hours, frightening small children
with the sketchings of vampires that he would give away for
free.
And then one night…
WOMAN
gets into bed under duvet. Very cosy. Duvet starts to
glow. WOMAN starts caressing duvet, kissing it, etc,
simulates sex with duvet. MAN, half-drunk, enters and
stands at foot of bed, looking at WOMAN in horror and
disgust.
MAN: Of all the people (stops,
choking)
MAN grabs WOMAN by the
arm and drags her out of bed. She is covered head to toe in
feathers. He pushes her in front of a full length mirror so
she can examine herself.
MAN: I just never thought
you’d betray me like this. Look at yourself, just look!
Pause as WOMAN examines
herself in the mirror.
MAN: I can’t stand it!
You can’t even see what’s happening to you. I’m leaving.
I’m leaving you to it.
WOMAN shrugs.
MAN: That’s it? That’s
all I get? A shrug? Seven years of my life and you brush
it off with a shrug? The love of my life starts turning
into a fucking chicken and all I get is a shrug? You start
an affair with a duvet, a fucking quilt that I willingly
allowed into our home and you expect me to just stand by and
watch you being taken from me? Spirited away? I can’t
stand it. I am OUT OF HERE!!
MAN packs a few
belongings into a suitcase and storms out of the room.
WOMAN snuggles back under the duvet. Lights out.
Lights up. WOMAN picks
up telephone, dials.
WOMAN: Hello is that
Kathleen? Sorry but I can’t come in today. Woman’s
problems. Terrible pain. Yes, yes I should be able to make
it in tomorrow but I’m afraid I can’t promise anything.
I’ll just have to see how it goes.
WOMAN crawls back under
the duvet.
WOMAN: I went out at
first. Braved life as a feathered thing. Attempted to
adjust to life’s strange changes. When I went to the pub, I
wore long trousers and a polo neck, left my gloves on as I
clutched my pint of beer. The only parties I attended were
fancy dress, where I strapped on a beak and went as a
chicken, or a goose or some other kind of flightless fowl.
Party noises. WOMAN
enters, fully feathered with a beak strapped to her face.
She mingles with various (imaginary) guests. SECOND MAN
comes up to WOMAN.
SECOND MAN: Hi there.
Haven’t seen you at one of Shirley’s dos before.
WOMAN: I’m a friend of
Caroline’s. Shirley’s sister.
SECOND MAN: Ah! Well,
might I just say, you look absolutely fantastic! I just
love that costume. God, it’s so realistic. Where on earth
did you get it?
WOMAN: Oh, it’s just a
little something I picked up overseas. In some other
country.
SECOND MAN hovers,
mesmerised. He reaches out and tries to stroke WOMAN’s
arm. She pulls away. Fascinated, he moves in closer and
tries to stroke her arm again, won’t leave her alone. Tries
to grab at her beack to see if it pulls away from her face.
SECOND MAN: Jesus, these
look and feel so real. Incredible, incredible.
SECOND MAN stares at
WOMAN, the expression upon his face a strange mixture of
wonderment and repulsion. It never went further than that.
SECOND MAN: Still, you’re
not exactly the kind of girl that you could take home to
mother, are you? ‘Hi Mum, meet my new chicken lady’.
WOMAN: It’s just a
costume! I can take it off if I want to.
SECOND MAN eyes WOMAN
sceptically, like he has rumbled her and knows her secret.
WOMAN (direct address):
I got by. There was one terrible incident at the
supermarket in which I forgot to keep my gloves on, grew hot
and pulled them off absent-mindedly, an incident in which
some stupid young checkout chick mistook my feathered right
hand for some strange unclassified product from the poultry
section and passed it over the scanner. When the hand did
not bleep, the checkout girl looked down and saw what she
was holding, then started screaming hysterically. Seeing
the manager heading towards me, I dropped my groceries and
sprinted from the store, ran all the way home, heart beating
double time. I cowered beneath my beloved duvet and did not
leave my room for a week. When I finally did emerge, I took
to ordering her groceries online. The duvet had its own
mind.
WOMAN picks up duvet.
WOMAN: Right, mister, you
need a wash.
Duvet starts to fight
back, doesn’t like being picked up by the WOMAN, duvet is
dreading the wash
WOMAN: Stubborn little
buggar, aren’t ya. Come on, in here, into the washing
machine.
WOMAN attempts to shove
the duvet into the washing machine, but the duvet kicks and
protests and slithers out.
WOMAN (throwing up hands
in despair): Fine! You win. Be grubby. See if I care.
(under breath, to self) You’ve won the battle but not the
war.
WOMAN puts duvet down and
walks away, pretending to ignore it.
WOMAN (direct address): I
snuck up on it one morning as it dozed, lying like a cat in
the sun.
WOMAN creeps up on duvet,
pounces on it, drags it towards the laundry tub. Acts as
she narrates – i.e. acts putting it in the tub, wringing it
out, etc
WOMAN: I dragged it into
the laundry and turned on the taps. It reared up like a
horse and whacked me in the face with a fore corner. I
slapped it back, pushed it down in the tub and gave it
another good dousing, then shut the door and left it in
there to soak. When I returned half an hour later, it lay
there dormant, as if all the life had been rinsed out of
it. I wrung it with my hands and hung it out to dry. When
I brought it back inside it sulked for a week, wouldn’t
glow, wouldn’t snuggle. It would turn itself freezing cold
in the middle of the night, so that I would awake
shivering. My feathers started to fall out, leaving small
white scars from the places where they had grown.
Eventually I gave in and apologized and promised never to
wash it again. It acquiesced, but a rift had been created.
I was driving everything away.
Item by item, his
belongings were disappearing from the house. He still had
his keys. I hadn’t changed the locks.
He was sneaking in when I
was out, gathering up what was his. I stood outside his
studio, that forbidden place; that place that he had never
allowed me to enter. It had always been his private room,
his space away from me. I wanted to see what he’d been
working on, before he took all his work away. This Pandora
pushed open the door.
WOMAN pushes open door.
WOMAN finds a stack of
paintings. Begins to look through them. Again, acts out as
she narrates.
WOMAN (direct address):
I went through his belongings with curiosity, looking for
something, some letter, some diary, something that would in
some way incriminate him. The paintings were stacked in
chronological order. I began at the beginning, with the
pictures of myself seven years ago, poised and smiling, a
target of somebody else’s imagination. He’d been into
bright primaries at the time and I had been rendered in
violently bright shades; my eyes like cornflowers, my lips
glowing red, my mouth open, like an invitation. My skin
jaundice yellow. Later, with the bank tellers and the
thirteen year old, he’d turned to fleshier tones; dusky pink
and beige, shades of muted orange. It was like looking
through a photograph album; snapshots that his mind had
taken. I found the design for the material from which the
duvet’s cover was made; little seagulls flying across an
endless ocean. More pictures of birds. Hawks and vultures
and gulls. Birds exotic and extinct; macaws and moas and
dodos. On his desk, a copy of The New Encyclopedia of
Birds. Turning to the relevant pages, I could see that he’d
adapted the drawings from this book, enlarged, envisioned,
coloured them in. And then the hybrids. Men with sharp
claws and beady-eyed women with beaks. Paintings which grew
increasingly outlandish, featuring characters which looked
like extras from Alice In Wonderland. Pictures, which, when
put together, told a tale, a story book, something sinister
and not for children. I sat down on the floor, surrounded
by these things which had been made by my Brother Grim.
Pictures of myself with beak and claws. My own self as
winged thing. Some strange voodoo.
WOMAN
begins to transform into a bird.
Something was tearing at
the inside of my skin. Something inside wanted out. I was
bursting, transforming, becoming something other. I saw
sideways now, and not straight ahead. The world had become
peripheral. I beat one wing against the window, dug my
talons into the sill.
Lights out. Lights up on
KATHLEEN sitting in a bar.
KATHLEEN: I’ll have a
glass of merlot please.
MAN enters, sits down
opposite KATHLEEN.
MAN: Sorry I’m late.
Have you been waiting long?
KATHLEEN: Five minutes.
MAN: Vodka and tonic
please.
KATHLEEN and MAN smile
knowingly at each other. MAN takes off his jacket, relaxes
back in his chair with his drink.
MAN: So, you don’t have a
fear of flying, do you?
Curtain.
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