The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night

by Jen Campbell

  The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night

  It’s 3 a.m. Everything’s quiet, bar the sound of a clock on the bedroom wall. JULIAN is in bed. EVELYN is sitting by the window, looking out at the garden.

  EVELYN [whispers]: Julian … Psst. Julian!

  [Pause]

  EVELYN [louder]: JULIAN!

  [There’s a thump as EVELYN throws a pillow at the bed. JULIAN stirs]

  JULIAN: Huh?

  EVELYN: Have you looked at the tree?

  JULIAN [yawning]: What?

  EVELYN: The apple tree, outside. Have you looked at it?

  JULIAN: Apple tree …?

  EVELYN: Yes.

  JULIAN: Evelyn … It’s … it’s three in the morning!

  EVELYN: Well, that’s not answering my question.

  JULIAN: It’s answer enough for three in the morning. I’m not getting out of bed to come and stare at a tree.

  EVELYN: Fine.

  [Pause]

  JULIAN: What’s so exciting about it, anyway?

  EVELYN: I love this tree, you know I do.

  JULIAN: I do?

  EVELYN: It’s the one you proposed under.

  JULIAN: Oh, that one. Is there any particular reason you’re staring at it? I can’t imagine it’s doing much.

  EVELYN: That’s exactly what it’s doing. Absolutely nothing. I’m just trying to catch it off guard.

  JULIAN [confused]: Well, once you’ve worked out how to catch a tree off guard, please do let me know. Come on, come back to bed. You’ve got to be up early tomorrow. Well, today.

  EVELYN: I know, but this is just – it’s been bugging me. You pruned the branches and they’re already sprouting back again.

  JULIAN: That’s what trees do, Evelyn. You’ve got to cut them back so they can grow.

  EVELYN: But I’ve never witnessed this tree actually growing. It was simply not there at all, and then suddenly – bam – it’s everywhere.

  JULIAN: Things creep up on you.

  EVELYN: Hmmm.

  JULIAN: Come to bed.

  EVELYN: But … Where do you think it begins?

  JULIAN: Where does what begin?

  EVELYN: The tree. Keep up.

  JULIAN: Oh.

  EVELYN: When did it begin growing, I mean? It was in the garden before we moved in, but I don’t know if it’s been on the earth longer than we have, for instance. How could we find that out? Is there a record somewhere?

  JULIAN: … I don’t know.

  EVELYN: Where does anything begin, anyway? Where do things start?

  JULIAN: I’m too tired to think about it.

  EVELYN: All beginnings begin at their beginnings, where they belong.

  JULIAN: Right.

  EVELYN: There are many beginnings, though. Somewhere, underground, there should be a massive row of filing cabinets, winding and branching out across the country. And each of them should contain everyone’s – and everything’s – beginnings. Labelled properly. Correctly. Where we can see them.

  JULIAN [sarcastically]: Underground, where we can see them?

  EVELYN: You know, you’re very talkative for someone who can’t be bothered to get out of bed to look at a tree, worrying about me having to ‘get up early tomorrow morning’.

  JULIAN: Not tomorrow, today.

  EVELYN: Whatever. Where do days begin?

  JULIAN: Now you’re just being silly.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: I think, tomorrow—

  JULIAN: —today?

  EVELYN: Today. I’m going to write our names on our tree outside.

  JULIAN: Why?

  EVELYN: I’ll use one of the kitchen knives.

  JULIAN: Don’t go using one of my good knives; you’ll ruin it. Anyway, I thought you’d be worried about hurting that bloody tree, seeing as you love it so much.

  EVELYN: They’re made of strong stuff.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN [sighing]: They won’t cut it down, will they?

  JULIAN: I don’t know. There was another letter through about it today.

  EVELYN: Did you read it?

  JULIAN: I skimmed it. It’s downstairs somewhere.

  EVELYN: Where?

  JULIAN: I don’t know. Somewhere. I’ll find it in the morning.

  EVELYN: They can’t cut it down. It has great sentimental value. And they definitely and absolutely can’t cut it down if it has our names written on it. That would be like taking an axe to our souls.

  JULIAN: That’s a bit dramatic.

  EVELYN: It would be, though. Carving our names into the wood would indicate that the tree contains our inner selves. As though we’d put them into another living thing. For safekeeping.

  JULIAN: Hardly safekeeping if there’s a threat of said tree being cut down by the council.

  EVELYN: That man next door is such a pathetic git. What was it he said? That the branches block his sunlight? Well. It’s our sunlight, or lack thereof, too, and I enjoy both that and our tree in equal measure.

  JULIAN: You would. But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that the roots of the tree are going into his garden and are damaging the base of his house.

  EVELYN: Evil man. Making up rubbish.

  JULIAN: Evelyn, he says that his living-room floor is beginning to tilt.

  EVELYN: He probably only thinks that because he spends his afternoons drinking. Everything tilts to him. He can’t even walk straight.

  JULIAN: Now I think you’re talking rubbish, Evelyn.

  EVELYN: I have seen that man drinking!

  JULIAN: When?

  EVELYN: Well, I er … He drank that wine we offered him when we invited him over for our house-warming a few years ago.

  JULIAN: I seem to remember you drinking your fair share of wine that night, too.

  EVELYN: Yes, but I’m not the one who says her living-room floor is tilting.

  JULIAN: That’s because ours isn’t.

  EVELYN: Hmmm.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: Julian?

  JULIAN: … Yes?

  EVELYN: Are you still awake?

  JULIAN: … No.

  EVELYN: Oh.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: Julian?

  JULIAN: … YES?

  EVELYN: I think you’re lying.

  [JULIAN sighs]

  JULIAN: OK, fine. I’m absolutely awake. What is it you want to talk about?

  [EVELYN climbs back into bed, gleefully]

  EVELYN: I want to talk about beginnings.

  JULIAN: Fine. Once upon a time …

  EVELYN: This isn’t a bedtime story.

  JULIAN: Heavens above, and here was I thinking I was in a bed. What a fool.

  [EVELYN giggles]

  EVELYN: A complete fool. So, are you sitting comfortably?

  JULIAN: No.

  EVELYN: Excellent. So. In the beginning … there was nothing.

  JULIAN: Nothing?

  EVELYN: Nothing at all. Nothing apart from the darkness and the stars.

  JULIAN: Stars aren’t nothing.

  EVELYN: OK, OK, there were no stars. I’ll put them out with a cosmic fire extinguisher.

  JULIAN: You don’t have a cosmic fire extinguisher – nothing exists.

  EVELYN: You are ruining this story.

  [JULIAN laughs]

  EVELYN: So. In the beginning. Where there was nothing and no stars and no cosmic fire extinguishers to even put out metaphorical stars—

  JULIAN: —hang on.

  EVELYN: What now?

  JULIAN: Surely a beginning is something, too.

  EVELYN: Well, I—

  JULIAN: A beginning denotes a period in time, and, for you to pinpoint it, time must exist, and if time exists then something exists. So, therefore, thus and henceforth, there is no such thing as nothing.

  EVELYN: But—

  JULIAN: It’s true, you know it’s true.

  EVELYN: No, no, no – there was no one there to witness time because nothing was there. And if nothing was there to witn
ess it—

  JULIAN: You mean, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it?

  EVELYN: Exactly. And don’t talk about trees falling down.

  JULIAN: Sorry.

  EVELYN: So, am I allowed to continue?

  JULIAN [yawning]: I suppose.

  EVELYN: Thank you. So … In the beginning … In the beginning there was nothing. Not a ripple moved throughout the universe because there were no atoms, and there was no energy. And then – because that’s always how things go – and then. And then there was something. It was a dream. Dreams don’t need atoms to form themselves because they are made of something less definite. They are able to form out of air that is only just on the brink of existing behind the darkness. The very thought of air. Nobody knows who dreamed the dream, or where it came from. Perhaps it was a dream that floated over from another world, no one knows. It was ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing comes nothing. And that was OK, because this was a time before the word logic had been formed. Before the alphabet had been carved out of stone and time, and before we, as humans, had even started to think of existing. The possibility of us, and of all life, was sleeping. And we emerged from a dream.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: And because we come from a dream, we never really know if we’re awake.

  JULIAN [sarcastically]: I know I’m awake right now.

  EVELYN: If you can do better, then I’d like to hear it.

  JULIAN: You want to hear my story on beginnings?

  EVELYN: Yes, I do.

  JULIAN: And then I can go to sleep?

  EVELYN: I’ll consider it.

  JULIAN: Right. OK, here goes.

  EVELYN: And you’re not allowed to be logical in your beginnings.

  JULIAN [clearing his throat]: OK … OK. In the beginning … In the beginning there were several worlds. They were sewn together like the pages of a book you could walk through, and each footstep took you through to another world. It was like stepping onto the first page of a new story. And in one of those stories, there was a man. But the man hadn’t always been a man. He had been born out of a star, and that star had been thrown out of a black hole. Spat out, saliva and all, into the navy expanse of nothing. The star pulsed with its own energy, propelled about the universe at high speed because there was nothing to stop it. It was free. And because it was free, it was able to think. And because it could think, it could will things to happen. The star willed itself to slow down and it began to lose speed, gradually, until it stopped, in one spot, at the far end of the universe, looking out over the darkness. The star was amazed by the sheer vastness of what it saw, and it was afraid. And because it was afraid, it meant it had something it feared losing, and that, in turn, meant that it could love.

  EVELYN: Love?

  JULIAN: Shhh. Over time, the star changed from a star into a heart. The heart pulsed light out across the universe, and from that heart grew limbs, one by one – until it was a man.

  EVELYN: Not a woman?

  JULIAN: This is my story.

  EVELYN: Sorry.

  JULIAN: The heart grew until it was a man. This man was the first man to see the universe. He looked around, and didn’t think he liked it much. There was nothing there. So, he started imagining a world that had things in it. A world that had trees—

  EVELYN [interrupting]: How did he know what trees were, if he’d never seen one before?

  JULIAN: I thought I wasn’t allowed to use logic.

  EVELYN: I know, but—

  JULIAN: This is reverse creation, Evelyn. Things existed in this world because he thought of them.

  EVELYN: Oh, how clever, that a man thought up everything in the world. And were there people native to this world that he’d conveniently forgotten about? That he had perhaps killed off with a thought?

  JULIAN: Evelyn.

  EVELYN: Hmmm.

  JULIAN [trying to continue with the story]: There was a man …!

  EVELYN: OK, OK.

  JULIAN: There was a man who thought of trees. And he thought that he’d like to walk among them, so he moved one step forward and suddenly he was surrounded by trees. But it was dark. So, he thought that the world needed something to give him light. He stepped forward again and the world changed into a place that was lit by a thousand stars in the sky. They glowed orange over all of the trees – it was beautiful. But there was nothing to eat, and nothing to drink, and, because the man was thinking about these things, he suddenly realised that he was thirsty, and hungry. So he stepped forward again and there were vegetables, and also water, and fish in the sea. Yes, the sea. The sea was another thing that he had imagined – a shade lighter than the navy sky that hung above it.

  EVELYN: And then, in this new world, he found a woman.

  JULIAN: Are you taking over my story?

  EVELYN: Yes. It’s time for my beginning. There was once a world that a woman owned. She had formed it through years and years of hard work and imagination. It was amazing. It was out of this world. She looked around her, at the trees, and the land, and the sea. She sat down, cross-legged, and started to make a fire with a stick and a stone. At that very moment, a man stepped out from between the trees. He was gazing at the sea as though he’d never seen anything like it in his life.

  ‘Hi,’ the woman said, getting to her feet. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been here a long time, actually – where the hell have you been?’

  [Pause]

  JULIAN: I supposed I asked for that.

  EVELYN: Yes, I suppose you did.

  JULIAN: OK. How about this one? In the beginning there were several beginnings, and they were all talking at once, because they all wanted to be heard. They talked louder and louder, their words crossing and colliding with each other so forcefully that it built up a large amount of pressure. This pressure expanded out across all the beginnings and pressed down on their ears, growing and gaining more power from all the conflicting stories until, quite suddenly, it exploded into a massive ball of fire. A fire that coiled itself into a snake. Everything was orange. And from all that energy, the world was born.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: You can’t say that.

  JULIAN: I can’t say what?

  EVELYN: That the world was born out of conflict and hatred.

  JULIAN: Plenty of good things come about because of bad things, Evelyn. That doesn’t, in turn, make them bad.

  EVELYN: Well, it’s not very nice.

  [Pause]

  EVELYN: Julian?

  JULIAN: Mmm?

  EVELYN: What if this is our beginning?

  JULIAN: What do you mean?

  EVELYN: I mean, what if this is our beginning, right here, now, in this bed, in this room, in this house?

  JULIAN: It can’t be; we’re not babies.

  EVELYN: There are many different types of beginnings. And who’s to say we haven’t imagined our lives up to this point? Who’s to say we haven’t been propelled into this world from a parallel universe? One that’s just come into existence? This could be the very beginning of it, now. I mean, there’s no one else here. Listen. It’s completely quiet.

  JULIAN: But—

  EVELYN: No, listen.

  [They both fall silent. The clock ticks in the background]

  EVELYN: Can you hear that?

  JULIAN: Hear what? The clock?

  EVELYN: No, that’s just time. Time’s always there. What else can you hear? Listen.

  JULIAN: I can’t hear anything.

  EVELYN: Exactly. Nothing. We are the only people here. In this room. What’s outside of this room?

  JULIAN: … Our house.

  EVELYN: Is it? Have you checked recently?

  JULIAN: I don’t need to look outside the bedroom door to check to see if our house is still there.

  EVELYN: Then I’m not sure you understand how the world works.

  JULIAN: I understand how my world works. I’m not sure what planet you’re on.

  EVELYN: Our planet. Our very own. What is it J
ohn Donne said: ‘For love, all love of other sights controls. And makes one little room an everywhere.’

  [JULIAN scoffs]

  JULIAN: You should get that printed on a Valentine’s Day card.

  EVELYN: At this rate, I won’t be sending that card to you.

  JULIAN: Cards, Evelyn. Paper. That requires people to cut down trees.

  EVELYN: An e-card then.

  JULIAN: What is this, 1997? And, anyway, there’s no computer in this room – which is apparently our world. So I think you might be screwed. No card, no e-card, no sending of love poems to me or to anyone else.

  EVELYN: Then I shall recite one to you. A one-woman show.

  JULIAN: Can’t wait.

  EVELYN: A show for us. The two of us. The only people in the whole wide world.

  JULIAN: Like a new Adam and Eve?

  EVELYN: Quite. [She clears her throat] In the beginning, it was silent …

  [The phone on the bedside table starts ringing. They both look at it in disbelief]

  JULIAN: Who the hell is that?

  EVELYN: I know. We’re supposed to be the only ones who exist!

  JULIAN: That’s not what I meant. I meant it’s three thirty in the morning.

  [They stare at the ringing phone]

  EVELYN: Maybe … maybe it’s God.

  JULIAN: Oh, yes, all angry at us for making up different beginnings to the world. [Pause] I’m going to answer it.

  EVELYN: Don’t. I should be asleep.

  JULIAN: Yes, but for some miraculous reason, you’re not.

  [JULIAN reaches out to pick up the receiver. EVELYN stops him]

  EVELYN: Please don’t. It’s probably just my sister.

  JULIAN: Your sister?

  EVELYN: Yes. She’s developed an annoying habit of calling me at all hours of the day and night to see if I’m OK.

  JULIAN: That’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you be?

  EVELYN: Exactly. I’m fine.

  [They both stare at the phone. It stops ringing]

  EVELYN: Hopefully she’ll think I didn’t answer because I’m asleep, like a normal person.

  JULIAN: You’re not a normal person.

  EVELYN: I’ll take that as a compliment.

  [There is a long pause]

  JULIAN: Speaking of phone calls, I saw there was a voice mail, earlier, left by our dear next-door neighbour.

  EVELYN: What did he want?

  JULIAN: He wanted to check that you’d received the letter about ‘that blasted tree’ destroying his house.