Laden

Laden

Five female characters, Jean, Ava, Jane, Lucia and Sophie leap youthfully from upstage left and progress diagonally across the stage, gleeful and childish. 

JEAN                Jump. Don’t stop. Don’t slip.

JANE                Don’t fall into the gaps.

SOPHIE            The cracks will break your back!

AVA                 Watch out. 

The characters freeze centre stage. When they emerge from their frozen state, they have stiffened slightly and huddled into whispering groups. 

LUCIA              Don’t fall.

JANE                They’ll see you, and you’ll be lost.

SOPHIE            Don’t lose it. You want to keep your nerve.

JEAN                Your rep’s our cred and we’re not safe without it. 

Slowly they disperse again. Their movements get slower and their bodies seem heavier. Ava and Sophie appear to be pushing old fashioned perambulators along. Lucia starts to handle Ava’s bundled baby. Jean and Jane take Sophie’s baby out of its pram and pass it between them. 

AVA                 Don’t cry. Oh. (gesturing to Sophie who has picked up the baby out if its pram)

LUCIA              (Gesturing towards Ava’s baby) Don’t pick him up for too long.

SOPHIE            (Gesturing towards Jean and Jane, who are miming holding her baby) Oh, let him hiccup.

JANE                Let all the wind come out! Yes! Gurgle, ah what a cute gurgle.

JEAN                Don’t.

SOPHIE            Mind.

JANE                Relax.

Their gesturing continues. Ava and Sophie stoop to push their prams and Lucia, Jean and Jane crouch over the babies inside them. Their crouching loses its balance and self assurance and becomes a kind of crookedness. They inch into new formations, continuing to move, all in roughly the same direction, but more slowly. Each woman is less balanced and less confident in their surroundings. They now have a greater self awareness, although their postures have changed very little. 

SOPHIE            (Clutching hold of Lucia, who stumbles somewhat, walking beside her) Oh dear, there. I’ve got you.

JANE                (To Lucia) Are you alright?

AVA                 And they let me deliver a blue lipped boy, and then told me off for undressing him an hour later.

(Ava is veering off away from the others, Jean, more youthful and less crocked than Ava, stays trailing her, listening out of courtesy and because she is going in the same direction, rather than kinship. Ava starts to speak directly to her rather than to all the women).

AVA                 Afterwards, they told me the antibiotics they’d put me on had had no effect. No wonder I got post-natal depression. I’m on steroids now. They said to me, when I went to the next hospital, oh, they weren’t very good to you there, were they Ava? They left you with a hole in your chest. And I wanted to tell them, yes, and a hole in my mind too. They left me with.

JEAN                Sorry, gotta cross here. Nice to see you anyway.

Jean makes towards a busy road, waits attempting to cross it for some moments, and finally crosses and exits. The others remain on stage. Their actions become more static and repetitive. Jane and Sophie bring two chairs on, placing both on either side of the stage. One chair is further upstage but both are within comfortable speaking distance. Ava sits at the chair closest to the audience, while Lucia sits at the chair further away. It becomes clear from their actions that both are alone at single tables in a café. Jane, who is standing to one side, looks around at Ava slowly.

JANE    (sympathetic, friendly) Shall I get ya another cuppa tea then?

AVA     Yeh, I could do with one.

JANE    Won’t be a minute

Jane turns carefully and steadily, with the movements of a person whose body is prone to aches. She leaves to get the tea, as a friend rather than a service provider. Sophie turns to Ava from the other side of the stage. 

SOPHIE            So, you’ve finished that one, have ya? (She gestures to an empty tea cup on the café table in front of Ava)

AVA                 Yes, yes. I have. Or, well, actually, there was a little bit left in there at the bottom that I wanted to sip.

SOPHIE            Oh, alright. But don’t be long. We’re closing up at 5.

AVA                 Yes, I know. Sorry.

Sophie bustles out, with the impatient air of a coffee shop employee keen to get home. Ava is seated upstage. She steals a furtive sip of her tea. She is reminiscent of someone long drained by public services, of those who wait in long morning queues outside public libraries in central London boroughs in the hope of finding a warm desk furthest from the returns desk for half an hour’s sleep.

Lucia, who is still sitting at a corresponding café table across the stage, turns to her. 

LUCIA              Hello. I think I’ve seen your face before.

AVA                 (startled) Oh, really? Where?

LUCIA              Here or there. Know it well. Not sure where from.

AVA                 Well, I’ve been living here for over 25 years. When I first moved in, I wanted to buy that house on the corner (gestures through a large window in front of them). One with the big garden, see over there? Plumbing was all still outdoors, but that didn’t seem to matter much when I was 34. Was being sold off on the cheap by the family of the leader of a gang leader who’d just gone inside. He went on to run the largest racket which copied videotapes in the 1980s after he got out. Think the house went to a mate of theirs. His son sold it for a small fortune a couple of years back. Not trusted any of them round there to this day. Like for like.

LUCIA              A leopard doesn’t lose its spots.

AVA                 No, nor me back its pimples (pause). Thanks for the chat. Saved me getting up and going over to complain about the snoring man over there (gestures to another table). Didn’t know whether I should, really. I mean, sleeping here in full view. It’s absurd. But they let it happen. Never would up the road in those chain places, where they’re all shine and smiles.  Here they’re all growls and groans, and yet they let you get away with things like that. Partial to a kip this time myself. But only behind the confines of my own lace curtains, not here, all in the open, if you hear what I’m saying.

LUCIA              Not everyone has the luxury of choice, mind.

AVA                 Choice? I ain’t got no choices. They’ve all been made for me already. Written in me book, as my mum used to say.

LUCIA              When I ask myself how she’s remembered, I’m not sure I really know. Been gone 20 years and you always think a sort of finality would come with death, don’t you? Not with her. My mother, a tangle of fraying threads. Was her life a success or failure? Just don’t know, can’t tell. Was she the angel I sometimes saw her as? Or the devil I also used to suspect she might be? Exactly as I’ll be remembered, I suppose, no worse and no better.

AVA                 A conundrum (pause). Well, wrinkles just tangle things up, I’ve always thought. That’s me main problem with the television, just don’t believe it when the problems all get cleared up just before the story ends.

LUCIA              Yes but being 17 weren’t easy. Can’t you remember it? All that heart ache? All that significance in the smallest things? I see those girls on the bus now, like lopsided twigs hanging off at right angles, about to snap and fall off the nest. And wanting rid of their family and missing them at the same time.

AVA                 But that passed. I don’t think this does.

LUCIA              This draft is getting to me. It ain’t soft or light anymore, seems to be whispering secrets. Can you hear it?

AVA                 Almost 5, isn’t it?

LUCIA              Still a little shy.

AVA                 I was always shy. Sometimes think I wasted all my life away being shy. Didn’t really, you know, engage with things like others did. Was better than them saying I was crazy, though, wasn’t it? Better than losing all me friends for going too far.

LUCIA              Well, too far seems much further when you get to our age, don’t it?

AVA                 But we still live within boundaries, and that’s what keeps us us. My skin around me, which is what I used to say to my kids, don’t live with someone else’s skin around you, make sure it’s your own.

LUCIA              Well, it’s the ones with the words that know, isn’t it, not us, the minions. Learn about yourself, that’s what all the magazines say. I wanna learn about meteorology and geometry. I don’t wanna learn about myself.

AVA                 Nothing we ain’t seen before and we should know.

LUCIA              So we should (pause). Anyway, gotta be off. 

(Ava and Lucia slowly rise from their seats, fumble for their things and start to walk off stage together)

AVA                 Me too. See you soon then! I’ll try me best to recognise you this time.