Stuff Page 3
I kind of want to describe it but it hurts to remember it, in a good way, but also in such an intense way that I just don’t know where to start. And because I didn’t really experience any of this in a linear fashion, at least I don’t think I did, it doesn’t seem so important to include it now. I’ll try to get to it.
SCENE ONE
Amber walks into the kitchen. She seems tired, her head hung. She puts her bag on the counter and switches on the lights, and jumps. Frankie and Frankie are there, sitting on the counter, smoking.
AMBER: What are you doing here?
FRANKIE: Nothing.
Amber is suspicious.
FRANKIE: He said nothing.
AMBER: Fine.
Amber sighs and pours herself some wine.
SELENA: I wear this blank face, like a shroud, like a burqa, because God never wanted to hear me speak. I’m just here for decoration.
AMBER: I’m going to bed.
She leaves. Frankie and Frankie stare after her. The lights go down.
SELENA: Except I’m not here for decoration. I’m not here to sit and wait patiently for you. I’m not here to be patronised. I’m not here to be Twitter-raped. I’m not here to be a punchline for a Lad Banter T-shirt, I’m not here to be piled on and to have my entrails arranged into a sacrificial formation so that the Elder Gods will see fit to renew the patriarchy for another millennium, I’m not here to be told to get the fuck back where I belong, I’m here for something else, I’m here to burst and burn and warp and rush and fuck and smash, I’m here to tear things down and re-build in a better, brighter, more beautiful image, I’m here to grow something if I want to and to not grow something if I don’t want to. I’m here to kill all of you. (Too on-the-nose possibly? Or maybe that’s how it should be?)
FRANKIE: Um, kinda might be my job.
AMBER: You don’t have a job.
FRANKIE: (Something Pinter-esque, maybe? Fill in blanks)
SELENA: I’m here to spit a stream of flaming liquor into the face of everyone who tries to tell me what I’m here to do. (Hmm . . . )
AMBER: I just want to be left alone.
SELENA: I just want my life to have some kind of meaning, and I want to determine that meaning, and I don’t want any outside help with that.
AMBER: I want there to be some kind of safety net. I want what my parents taught me to be true. I want their values to still be respected when I’m old enough to be preaching my own.
SELENA: Their values are not my problem any more.
Frankie and Frankie disappear and Amber and Selena waltz around the kitchen. Somewhere, somebody screams.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MY PLAY GO TO THE BIT ABOUT MY PLAY
TO READ ABOUT TAKING STUFF WITH LEE AND LAIKA FOR THE FIRST TIME, TURN TO PAGE
TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT GO TO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE IN MY LIFE, WHY JUST GO FROM A TO B? LINEAR IS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
MY PLAY
I had big plans for that play. Huge, grandiose plans. I’d always been a starter, a planner, rather than a finisher. Ever since I’d first begun to write. Mum was my main reader, and she would always say things like ‘it’s lovely darling, but I’d like to read it again when it’s finished’, and hand me back the latest print-out, the latest unfinished short story, or the first chapter of yet another soon-to-be aborted novel, or just a scene, out of context, and sometimes I’d show her a plan that was generally longer than the piece of writing ended up being, pages of character notes and plot twist ideas, but it would never come together.
Then, at university, I started to finish things. Short stories. The odd naff poem. And I got cocky again, having drifted away from writing for a few years, pre-uni. I thought I’d write a play. And my play would be my Big Statement. It would be my treatise on what life was like. The life I’d lived, and the collective life of my generation. It would tie together all the strands of politics and society and trends and disasters, and come up with a unifying theory to explain it all, but it would be masked by a complex psychological maybe-it’s-a-murder-mystery-OR-IS-IT plot. And the big ideas would all be in the subtext. So many plans.
Amber would represent me, obviously. Myself as I kind of perceived myself, although with the shyness ramped up.
I’ve never really been that shy. I mean, I’ve never been super chatty, but I’ve never been a mouse, I’ve always been kind of in the middle. At school, and even later on, I often fabricated personas and stuck to them for maybe three days, maybe even a week. Dyed black hair and laconic one-liners. Frizzy hair and hyperactive comedy. Bright T-shirts and innocence. Then they’d quickly fade and I’d be back to my own middle-of-the-road self.
Laika says I’m not middle of the road. One time she said that I was the road. She said I was her post-apocalyptic highway. She said that I was a tree, and that she wanted to keep picking my fruit, and for it to keep growing back so she could keep picking it.
I’d never fallen in love with a girl.
I’d never fallen in love.
You re-write your story, retrospectively. That guy you were madly in love with? Yeah, you were obsessed, but it was unhealthy, ‘cos God look how it turned out, or whatever, so obviously of course you couldn’t have been in love with him, that’s absurd, I wasn’t in love, God, obvz. It makes you look better if you were just obsessed, unhealthily so, ‘cos God, look how it turned out, and now you can laugh at yourself, and shake your head and be all like ooh how embarrassing, what a mess I was, with my silly unhealthy little obsession, silly old me. It ends up making it more about you, and they become less important, as though you could have got obsessed like that with literally anyone, they just happened to be there.
I have fallen in love, again and again and again and again and again and again. Sometimes only for a day.
Laika doesn’t do love.
So Amber would represent me, more or less. And Selena would be my crazy evil twin who lived within me, sort of what I guiltily sometimes wished I could be, like sometimes you wish you could just be a soulless vampire and kill the living fuck out of everyone you know, even the people you like, just because . . . because I’m not sure. Selena would be that. My that, to Amber’s me. Gareth wasn’t really based on anybody, I just liked the idea of falling for someone much older, sophisticated, wise, but I hadn’t because all the tutors on my course were fairly charisma-free, and also fuck ugly, so sue me yeah I can be shallow too.
I had such high hopes for that play.
TO SEE ME HIT ROCK BOTTOM GO TO THAT BIT. GO ON, POP AHEAD AND HAVE A GOOD OLD LOOK AROUND, I’LL WAIT
I TURN 24
We made an arbitrary decision not to celebrate our birthdays. Well, it wasn’t arbitrary, it was a deep and very very meaningful decision. We decided that we would measure each other from that first time we became one, one from three. That we would re-invent our timelines. I can’t really articulate it, but it was fucking deep at the time, I think.
Anyway, so it was my 24th birthday, officially, and both Lee and Laika knew that, but of course nobody mentioned it. And I finished my shift at the café, I think it was the café at this point, and met up with Laika. Her hair was black and midnight blue, her face pale, her clothes perfect. She said she was going to record some vocals for a friend of hers who was a jungle DJ, and did I want to come? Yeah I wanted to come. I wanted to hear her sing. We were intertwined at this point. Lee had shit going on.
We held hands, though we didn’t really, and we swapped thoughts as we walked. Laika had plans for what she wanted to sing. They became my plans. I didn’t want to go and meet my parents for dinner that evening, but had no choice; it became her lack of choice, and she either decided she wanted to come with me, or I wanted her to come with me and it made her want to come with me, acting on my desire. Either way, we made an unspoken agreement that she would come with me for this godawful horrible dinner tonight, where my parents w
ould make me feel like a child again. Perils of being an only child.
Is your brother coming?
Laika knew all about my brother.
No, he won’t be. He’s living back at home.
I was doing much better than my brother, but they still made me feel like a child when I saw them, even though I was the older one. God, at least I wasn’t living back at home, having utterly fucking failed to get a job. I might not have been great at holding jobs down, but I was really good at getting them.
The thing was, there were no jobs. Except there were. There were plenty, it seemed. They just weren’t jobs that anyone really wanted.
I’m not sure if that’s me thinking that. I’m not sure if I believe it.
At any rate, I had a job. And my parents could suck it.
‘Hey L,’ said the dreadlocked girl, who had a bit of a wobble, and a cute pot belly. Laika hugged her and kissed her cheek and introduced me and said I’d be sitting in. That was “cool”. We went in, through a living room full of skeletal people in that peculiar hippie/chav tracksuits’n’dreads combo that many Bristol types seem to like, all sitting and passing a bong around, great thick lines of ketamine dragging themselves across mirrors like disconnective snakes in some dystopian post-rave rainforest. I wondered if everyone brought their own mirrors.
This place is rank.
It’s so cool.
I felt cool for being here, in a proper drug den. I felt cool and that was stupid because I was 24 today, I was literally a grown-up, why hadn’t I done all this growing up already?
You have, thought Laika, stop panicking. I’ll fuck up my high notes.
These weren’t my thoughts, surely.
Or at least . . . they weren’t my thoughts now. They weren’t my 24-year-old thoughts.
I closed my eyes and shut them out, and sat on a small clear patch of sofa in a room full of kit, while the dreadlocked girl played bass notes on a keyboard over skittering jungle rhythms, and Laika sang over it, and her voice was so devastating that I wanted to fuck her right there, I wanted to stick it right in her, right there, right then, throw her down on the floor and go to town . . .
She looked at me, frowning.
That was Lee’s thought.
Lee was thinking that.
Oh God, Lee was seeing her through me, and thinking that.
I think.
I said sorry and ran away, crying.
TRACK 16) REMAINS – MAURISSA TANCHAROEN AND JED WHEDON
It has a similar ‘everything ending’ feel to Massive Attack’s Paradise Circus, which I also considered for the CD. I wanted to be on-the-nose. I wanted Laika to reach it, and to be hit right in the gut with it, I wanted it to stitch a montage on her eyeballs, of the way she – yes she (and also Lee and also me of course) – had ruined everything, how our chance to go beyond normality and to exist in a bubble of perfection (which we had seen, we’d fucking seen it, we’d touched it, tasted it) had been beaten to the ground, crumbled poetically in flames, probably in slow motion, like a house of cards burning. I wanted everything to be summed up in one chord progression, one chorus, I wanted all the meaning to be poured into one vessel, one, fuck it, call it a crucible, and for nothing else outside that to matter. The way nothing else had mattered to me, beyond them. I wanted this song to represent that, and that’s why I included it, that’s why I put it at the end of the CD, and that’s why I know that when Laika switches off the CD immediately after track 15 finishes, it’s because I got my wish, it’s because I managed to sum it all up, and yeah it would obviously be better if I had summed it all up myself, written the perfect poem or the perfect play or the perfect eulogy or the Great British Novel or, fucking hell, the perfect Tweet, even, but sod it, this will have to do, somebody else’s art, well-chosen and deployed with strategic ferocity, right into the exhaust port of the bastard Death Star those two cunts have retreated into. That’ll have to do. ‘Cos it’ll just have to.
THE LUCY TREE – A POEM BY LAIKA, VIA ME
I dig deep in the trunk of a ghost tree
and in the handfuls of sweet sticky sap I see
your wide eyes, smiling, rapt, I see
you cry from THAT smile, see you trapped, I see
that I need to build a spare in case I lose one
always needed backups, never been the type to just choose one
why screw one
when you can screw three?
It’s been my pleasure, hosting you in my ghost tree.
MONTAGE
After that party, the one that ended with Laika and I walking back to Lee’s together, still enjoying the vicarious tingle of his little bathroom liaison, the one that ended with me more sure than ever that I was in love with one or both of them, a lot of time seemed to pass in a very short window, and now I was really aware of the connection, and God the way I’m about to describe it, it’ll sound like the worst possible thing, maybe, like the kind of thing that would just fuck your life up so badly, but in reality it was so, so, so beautiful.
Scene:
I would be serving a drink in the posh pub, some holier-than-thou fuckwitted business wank taking a long liquid lunch on the company, and he’d be asking me to fiddle his receipt somehow so he wouldn’t get in trouble with his boss, and I have to be nice to you I have to be nice to you I can’t believe I have to be nice to you I can believe it’s my job TO BE NICE TO YOU and I would be explaining calmly that I can’t do that sir, sorry, I have to be nice to you but I can’t break the fucking law, you dipshit fuckface, and this douchebag, this arse-ing great shit balloon, Herbert Wankington of Dickrag Boulevard, Clifton, or wherever, would start being REALLY FUCKING UNPLEASANT to me, as though his request were perfectly reasonable and I was the gaping arsehole, and I would get a shiver, I would feel Lee feeling my anger, and he would be angry on my behalf, and feed me all these savage little lines that would play in my head, like wow, amazing, a dipshit so humongous you can see him from space, hey mate, how about you take your company credit card and fuck yourself in the arse with it until you jizz out an initial public offering, or maybe that was Laika, one or the other or both, and they would both feel my frustration and I would feel them feeling it, and then they would both, from other angles, be soothing me, making me feel better about it, like they were in my head looking out through my eyes, giving me a commentary, while still managing to get on with whatever they were doing, and I would just smile at Herbert Wankington and tell him to fuck the fucking fuck off that I was very sorry but I couldn’t do that for him, and I could get my manager if he wanted but it probably wouldn’t do any good, and he would just pay his bill with a humpf, and Lee and Laika and I would all high-five one another, in one another’s heads.
Scene:
Or I would blink as I poured someone’s coffee, and be staring through Laika’s eyes at a computer screen, see all the funny little multi-coloured lines and boxes and blobs that represent bass and drums and treble and vocals, and I’d feel Laika hugging herself, feel her breathing in and out, be her breathing, and she sings, God she sings, and both Lee and I are in there, in her head, looking out, being the singing, being her voice, being the sound becoming the colours on the screen, and we’re both singing too, both of us singing, so loud, the three of us, all in variations of Laika’s voice, three-part harmony even though neither Lee nor I can sing for shit, and at the same time the three of us are remembering sharing a bath after a seriously poky hit of Stuff, and finding that above the water is Lee’s bathroom, as usual, and us, and bubbles, but below the water, God, below is the Great Barrier Reef, below are hundreds, thousands of multicoloured fish, living breathing rainbows, up bathroom, down below the ocean, feeling, tasting and touching, and the fish, the multicoloured fish, they are the lines of bass and drums and hi-hats and piano, and rippling through them, an undulating waveform tentacle, is our singing, our three-part harmony, so close that it’s just
one line, one line, and up we’re back up in the bath again, blowing the foam on each other, foam that, by the way, is a whole load of snowmen dancing, dancing around, ‘cos I’m making them do that with my brain which is making Laika’s brain make them do that which is making Lee’s brain make them do that, and I can’t even remember worrying about this, about being naked with them, genuinely there might have been a time when I was self-conscious about it, terrified even, worried about my shape not being quite right, and about seeing Lee again, and seeing Laika for the first time, what I knew would be Laika’s perfect body, me in the shade of that perfection, once upon a time I was worried about all that, but for fuck’s sake up is the bath and below is the Great Barrier Reef and bodies do not matter because we can all remember every atom of feeling, it’s all in the singing, all in the singing, and up is the bath and below is the ocean and up is the bath and then up again is Laika singing, doing what she’s actually doing right now (right then), and then up once again is me, and in the space of that blink I’ve been away, away with Lee and Laika, experiencing each other, and my body has just carried on with what it’s supposed to be doing, my voice has even responded to what people have been saying, and it’s all gone very smoothly thank you very much, hasn’t even been a problem, people don’t care so long as they get their coffee, nobody even noticed that I went away, completely away, but a whole hour has finger-snapped by, and hahahahahahahaha this is my life oh God how I love it.