by Lisa Evans
GWEN: There by the birches.
FLORA enters wearing a Walkman and jigging about to the tune only she can hear.
ALI: I swear to God I’m going to confiscate that thing. She forgets the time when she’s wearing it.
GWEN: What on earth is she doing? Out there all on her own?
ALI: She’s dancing.
GWEN: I wouldn’t call that dance. Compared to what you do…
ALI: No comparison. You’re right.
And she is. I was a dancer but my daughter dances. Flora’s not the same. She’s totally herself. I’d love to be inside her head just for one day. That’s what I regret the most about our journey so far – my inability to know her world. Watching her struggle with adversaries I can’t begin to imagine, then, in the turn of her head, lose herself in a dream so tranquil it’s as if my changeling child is listening to the sounds of another sphere, belonging somewhere else entirely – that’s love by a different name.
Scene Nineteen
Trio
KITTY and MILENA enter.
MILENA: I climb the hill, looking back down on the red tiled roofs and the bombed bridge, the blackened patch of ground where the mosque was destroyed, the town I once called home. There is no such place for me any more. I turn towards the trees. This forest, like the river below is full of blood. They tried to kill all of us, pretend we were never here. They tried to kill history. But in the winter when the wind sings in the bare branches, the trees tell of the corpses beneath their roots, lying close together, their limbs tangled like briars. I go there sometimes and on some days bitter twisted plants grow from my child’s grave, and on others flowers.
KITTY: I can’t leave, can I? It’s the only thing I know I am, a mother. So I’ll be here, waiting, just in case, she finds her way home.
MILENA: There are some things from which you do not recover, only survive.
ALI: I was a dancer but my daughter dances – to her own music I shall probably never hear but know in my bones is sacred.
FLORA carries on dancing then throws her head back smiling as she hears something. Fade up sound of children’s laughter. Voice-over of excited happy children shouting.
VOICES: (Off – Montage of happy children’s voices at play.) Mum, look! Look at me! Look how high I can go! Watch me fly!
FLORA dances, smiling.
The End.