GIRL TWO. To what?
GIRL ONE. To everything. Apparently.
GIRL TWO. Ah, that’s not true. You love those dogs. Wherever they are.
GIRL ONE. I mean, I probably have been a bit… reckless lately.
Pause.
I lost Rachel from S Club 7’s basset hound.
GIRL TWO. You walk Rachel from S Club 7’s basset hound?
GIRL ONE. Until I lost it.
GIRL TWO. She has a basset hound? Weird.
GIRL ONE. Anyway, Waffles was fine. So.
GIRL TWO. Oh god, that could have been terrible.
GIRL ONE. See you always do that, take the other side. It’s so annoying.
GIRL TWO. Oh right, thanks. Then why do you keep begging to hang out with me?
GIRL ONE (suddenly warm). I want to chat, catch up, gossip, whatever. We never see each other any more.
GIRL TWO. We see each other all the time.
GIRL ONE. Not like we used to, not like the uni days.
GIRL TWO. We lived together at uni.
GIRL ONE. We only live round the corner from each other now.
GIRL TWO. I have a full-time job. It’s different. Some of us don’t have time to just lay about drinking, dressed as nineties’ icons.
GIRL ONE. I resent that. I have a hectic schedule, it just isn’t defined by some ruthless corporation.
GIRL TWO. I’m just saying, you haven’t done a proper exhibition for, like… a while.
GIRL ONE. How can you say that? You’ve just seen my new work?
GIRL TWO is blank.
My performance? At Rose’s?
GIRL TWO. Oh. That.
GIRL ONE. Yeah. I am a powerful performer, don’t you think?
GIRL TWO. I didn’t really get to see it, cos I had to help out at the bar, for most of the night.
GIRL ONE. Really? Why?
GIRL TWO. All her friends are meant to.
GIRL ONE. Well being her oldest friend, and the only remotely artistic one of the group, it’s natural that I provide the entertainment.
GIRL TWO. Yeah. I am not sure how appropriate it was this year, but –
GIRL ONE. Um, it was about the absurdity of grief. How much more appropriate can you get?
GIRL TWO. It was… very long.
GIRL ONE. Can a eulogy to one’s dead best friend ever be too long.
GIRL TWO. Yes. And how can you make a… rap piece? Confronting grief? You’ve never confronted it in real life.
GIRL ONE. Look, we all deal with that stuff differently.
GIRL TWO. Clearly. You deal with it on stage.
GIRL ONE. Potato, patata.
GIRL TWO. No one says patata.
Pause.
GIRL ONE. Remember when you dragged me and Rose to your, like, end-of-term seminar? Straight from that house party?
GIRL TWO. Ha, yes my ‘Women’s History’ module. The lecturer was so scared of looking sexist, he didn’t say anything.
GIRL ONE. Even though we’d taken so much mephedrone, we smelled like a garden centre.
GIRL TWO. Oh, for a mephedrone-laced lunch!
GIRL ONE. Amen.
Pause.
Well. How is your high-powered career going?
GIRL TWO. Don’t pretend like you give a shit about my job.
GIRL ONE. I do. You work in… an office.
GIRL TWO. Nice try. I just got a promotion, actually.
GIRL ONE. There we go, great!
GIRL TWO. No, it’s a disaster. I keep trying to leave, remember? Meet a husband, build a family? But every time I mention it, they just offer me more money.
GIRL ONE. Wait, what do you mean, ‘leave’?
You are, like, the most hard-working person I know.
GIRL TWO. Well, that says more about your social life than my work ethic. But for a while now, I have begun to realise that the job I want to do, the one I was, in fact, born to do, is to have children.
GIRL ONE. Wow. That’s… backward.
GIRL TWO. You’ve no idea what it is like. You’ve never had a nine-to-five in your life. And you’ve certainly never had a pervert boss like mine.
GIRL ONE. Sounds dreamy to me, I’ll take a pervert any day.
GIRL TWO. He has these massive moist thumbs, which he’s always massaging me with. He sort of prods them into my ears. It’s, like, the most invasive thing ever.
GIRL ONE. Wow, ear rape. How do you report that shit?
GIRL TWO. It’s awkward, you know? Cos his wife works with us too. And I’m like, ‘Hello, this is not my fault.’
GIRL ONE. What’s not your fault?
GIRL TWO. It puts me in a difficult position, being so young and attractive and female.
GIRL ONE. Tough.
GIRL TWO. It is, in the workplace. Cos the older career women, they look at me, this sexually ripe… peach and they assume, wrongly, that I am going to use my youth and beauty to get ahead.
GIRL ONE. Didn’t you fuck the CEO once in a disabled loo at, like, a charity Easter-egg-hunt thing?
GIRL TWO. Jesus. If I was a man that would not still be an issue. It is so disrespectful.
GIRL ONE laughs.
I am unbelievably good at my job. I do not need to sleep with people to get ahead.
GIRL ONE. You just, conveniently, did.
Pause.
GIRL TWO. Maybe I am more of a guy’s girl? I have always got on better with men. They like me. Women are just so… competitive. And older women are like… broken sculptures.
Pause.
GIRL ONE. Yeah. But I doubt that they are actually that jealous of you, though. Cos I mean, you’re a bit neurotic and insecure.
GIRL TWO (smiling, despite herself). Sorry, are you talking to a mirror?
GIRL ONE (enjoying the ritual). And you’re not even that young.
GIRL TWO. Look at my complexion. Flawless.
GIRL ONE. And it’s not like you are in a relationship.
GIRL TWO. Well that is going to change tonight, so.
GIRL ONE. Oh? Are you going on a date?
GIRL TWO. Sort of, I am going to Lauren’s party, why aren’t you coming?
GIRL ONE. I hate Lauren.
GIRL TWO. Ah, I am so excited. I haven’t been out in ages and I just know that I am going to meet someone. You know how you just know sometimes? You know?
GIRL ONE. No.
GIRL TWO. I have waxed my entire body. I didn’t mean to. I was just doing my underarms and then, like, the pain, sort of numbed my nerves, and before I knew what had happened, I was a Barbie.
GIRL ONE. I’m growing out my pubic hair. Why should I relentlessly try and conform with some male fantasy of the shaved-female image?
GIRL TWO. Cos armpit hair is rank.
GIRL ONE. It actually feels fine. It looks cool too, soon I’ll be able to braid it.
She lifts her arm up.
GIRL TWO. Alright, Cousin Itt. You’re reminding me of my mum. I’m leaving.
GIRL ONE. What? No, don’t leave me. Please?
GIRL TWO. I think you should be worrying about where your dogs are at.
GIRL ONE. Alright fine. But call me tomorrow? Let me know how your imaginary man likes his plastic bride.
GIRL TWO. Whatever, lonely egg girl. You need to get the real thing up there once in a while. Seriously.
GIRL ONE. I am an autonomous, independent, sexually selfsatisfied being.
GIRL TWO. Autonomous?
She grabs the remote and presses it.
GIRL ONE shudders, alarmingly, squealing in forced pleasure.
GIRL ONE. Ah. Ah. Okay. Okay. Stop.
GIRL TWO chucks back the remote.
Bye.
GIRL TWO. Bye.
GIRL ONE (hearing a bark and seeing something in the distance). Mel B, heel!
Sound and light fill the stage.
Scene Four
A café. May. 2015.
GIRL TWO. I think I am a stalker.
GIRL ONE. What?
GIRL TWO. No, really I am an in
credibly efficient stalker, like a hunt dog.
GIRL ONE. Please don’t confess to a hideous crime now. I’m too fragile. I had a lot of cider and ketamine last night.
GIRL TWO. I didn’t even know people still did ketamine.
GIRL ONE. Oh, at hunt balls they do! Fresh from the stables, as it were.
GIRL TWO. You’re so weird and rural.
GIRL ONE. And poor. Will you buy me a coffee?
GIRL TWO. What? No, get your own coffee.
GIRL ONE. I can’t afford that, soya, frappa crap. It’s like four quid, such a rip-off.
GIRL TWO. But you can afford horse tranquilliser?
GIRL ONE. That stuff is like fifty pee a tonne, anyway, I didn’t buy it.
GIRL TWO. Have you ever bought your own drugs?
GIRL ONE. Being an artist in this capitalist hellhole of a city is crippling. You have no idea what it is like.
GIRL TWO. Every day’s a hustle, I am sure.
Pause.
Fine.
GIRL ONE jumps up and kisses GIRL TWO.
Ergh. KEEP AWAY! You stink.
Pause.
So, as I was saying.
GIRL ONE. You’re a stalker, yeah, I have always known that.
GIRL TWO. I mean, I only just met him at Lauren’s party.
GIRL ONE pulls a face.
And well, I don’t know what came over me, I think it was the stress of the last few weeks, you know?
GIRL ONE is blank.
Anyway, for whatever reason, I got incredibly pissed at the party and ended up giving him…
(Whispering.) A blow job, so unlike me. It was really embarrassing –
GIRL ONE. Yeah it really is. Ha, where did you do the deed?
GIRL TWO. Behind that stupid bike-shed thing, who actually has a bike-shed in London?
GIRL ONE. I know, Lauren’s so anal.
GIRL TWO. And now I can’t stop staring and praying that my phone will suddenly ting, or vibrate, depending on my work situation, and that he will end my torment and finally let me know that he remembers the girl who clamped her lips around his…
(Whispering.) Semi-erect penis.
GIRL ONE. Ha.
GIRL TWO. It’s not funny. Do you realise I have literally, no not literally, that implies untruth or exaggeration for effect, I have actually masturbated thrice every day this week.
GIRL ONE. Thrice?
GIRL TWO. Sometimes more, just to release my nervous energy. I can’t deal with this. I am a busy woman, I can’t be wasting my time… thus… I mean I pride myself on my rational, mature, together approach to life and yet: Boom! I am a teenager, barricaded in my bedroom.
She looks around the café and whispers again.
Now That’s What I Call Music 41 masking the noise as I make myself cum and cum.
GIRL ONE. Why are you whispering? I mean it is a bit weird that you listen to Now That’s What I Call Music 41 but you don’t need to be ashamed.
GIRL TWO. There are kids playing.
She gestures to the families all around.
And I just happened to be looking through my old CDs and Now That’s What I Call Music 41 actually has some really good artists, like Planet Perfecto?
GIRL ONE. Who the hell are Planet Perfecto?
GIRL TWO. You know?
(Sings, quietly.) ‘It’s not over, it’s not over, not over…’
GIRL ONE. Oh yeah.
GIRL ONE also sings, they both get much louder. GIRL ONE raucously so.
‘It’s not over, not over yet…’
Ha, highly appropriate.
She sings again but this time in orgasmic manner.
‘It’s not… oovverrr, not oovverrr not o-o-o-ovverrr yeeeet.’
GIRL TWO. Stop it!
GIRL ONE. God I haven’t been to a good nineties’ night for ages. We used to go all the time at uni. Remember our Hallowe’en party in second year? The routine?
GIRL TWO. Oh my god! Yes! The Romy and Michele High School Reunion routine. Rose was Romy, the cool one, of course, I was Michele, the hot one, and you were the geek boy Sandy Frink. Ha.
GIRL ONE. You were meant to be Sandy Frink, but you kicked up such a fuss about being a man. How very gender normative of you.
GIRL TWO. You don’t even know what that means!
Her phone beeps, she jumps up, very overexcited.
Oh it’s just my creepy boss.
(Whispering again.) The other slightly weird thing is… when I am, you know?
She does an oddly graphic hand gesture.
GIRL ONE. Wanking?
GIRL TWO. Shhhhhh.
(Whispering.) Yes. When I am…
She does the graphic hand gesture again.
The odd thing is, that as I really get going, you know, right up there, I start imagining me, him and a succession of older, random weirdos from my past. Like the fat, balding, middleaged man who once temped at the reception for our university swimming pool? –
GIRL ONE. Ahhh –
GIRL TWO. Keeps coming to my mind. As I am cumming.
GIRL ONE. Oh come now?
GIRL TWO. It’s like the grosser the imaginary orgy, the better I cum? Do you get that?
GIRL ONE. Er, no!
GIRL TWO. Oh my god. What is happening to me? I am becoming obsessed and weird. I am becoming you.
GIRL ONE. Oh thanks. Excuse me, I’m not interested in guys who don’t call me back.
Pause.
GIRL TWO. Bullshit.
GIRL ONE. Ha! Yeah, I know but god it felt good saying it. I wish I could play it cool like, like Monique. She’s so blasé.
GIRL TWO. Yeah, but she’s French.
GIRL ONE. True. Okay, well then like Scarlett Johansson. She’s so cool.
GIRL TWO. She is cool but with those lips and tits, no one is ever not going to call her back.
GIRL ONE. Oh right, yeah. She has ‘SA’, as my grandmother would say.
GIRL TWO. What, a disease?
GIRL ONE. No, ‘Sex Appeal’.
GIRL TWO. Oh, that. I think ‘Sex Appeal’ is really just a fertility thing.
GIRL ONE. Hardly.
GIRL TWO. A man looks at you and those motherly, child-bearing hips, and thinks, ‘Take me now and let’s fertilise those eggs.’
GIRL ONE. Lucky lady.
GIRL TWO. Yeah. He can’t help it, he’s genetically programmed to think like that. That’s why Nigella’s so successful, cos she’s curvy AND she cooks.
GIRL ONE. Yeah, men cream themselves thinking about all the babies she could bake in that womb.
GIRL TWO. My womb is getting ready to have a baby.
GIRL ONE. God, stop saying this.
GIRL TWO. I am a year and a half older than you. You’ll feel the same way too one day. It’s biology.
GIRL ONE. Er, with my mum’s fertility record? Not likely… IVF children are –
GIRL TWO. Boring, heard it all before. Just you wait.
GIRL ONE. No. Thanks. Women only have children to fill a void left by a society that fetishises youth. It’s a massive vanity project designed to keep women feeling loved and needed when they’ve been passed over by everyone else.
GIRL TWO. That is just so… not true.
GIRL ONE. Hey, I get it. No one wants to be old and lonely.
GIRL TWO. By the time you realise how wrong you are, it will be too late.
Pause.
GIRL ONE. Cher.
GIRL TWO. Who?
GIRL ONE. In her nineties’-dance phase. You must remember the video for ‘Believe’? Rose used to love it. She was like, an alien in a glass cage. So pretty cool. But, actually, she was really fiery. She’d, like, turn back time if someone didn’t call her back. She looks cold though, sort of pinched, taut, you know?
GIRL TWO. Yeah, it’s called plastic surgery.
GIRL ONE. Ah.
GIRL TWO (looking at her phone). Oh my god!
GIRL ONE. What?
GIRL TWO. He still hasn’t messaged me, this is unbearable.
&n
bsp; GIRL ONE. Just get in fucking touch.
GIRL TWO. I know. I know. It’s just I have started to be a bit reticent about the whole, taking-charge thing, lately. Because, well, various ex-boyfriends have told me, after we broke up, that my overwhelming enthusiasm and passion at the beginning of our relationship sort of well, overwhelmed them and blinded them to the fact that we, in fact, had nothing in common.
GIRL ONE. Ouch.
GIRL TWO. Yeah and so it’s sort of made me rethink my ideas about the breaking-down of gender roles, cos even though I am empowered to chase a guy, and time is of the essence and all, it usually leads me to be with insecure fuck-ups who suck me dry like a vampire.
GIRL ONE. Point taken.
GIRL TWO. Yeah, but I am also really impatient and impulsive so ahhhhhhh, I’ll just message him now.
GIRL ONE. What? No. Wait!
GIRL TWO. Oops too late. Do you think that bicycle emoji was a bit much?
Sound and light fill the stage.
Scene Five
A supermarket. August. 2015.
GIRL ONE. You never reply to my texts. You never answer my calls. What, do you see it’s me and just reject them?
GIRL TWO. Sorry, what are you doing here? Have you been following me?
GIRL ONE. No, I always shop here, at this time.
GIRL TWO. You always shop at this vegan supermarket at 8 p.m.? What for?
GIRL ONE (looking about her). Quorn. Mainly.
She grabs a packet of nearby Quorn.
And the few times I have managed to get through to you, you just go on about how busy you are.
GIRL TWO. I am. I don’t see anyone, work is really demanding.
GIRL ONE. That’s not true, you are always going out.
GIRL TWO (texting). What are you talking about, like where?
GIRL ONE. Can you stop looking at your phone?
GIRL TWO. Sorry. I am expecting a work call. Where?
GIRL ONE. Olivia’s party.
GIRL TWO. She was leaving to go live in Moscow, of course I went.
GIRL TWO’s phone vibrates and she instantly goes back to it.
GIRL ONE. Anna’s dinner?
GIRL TWO. She lives next door to me, it was hardly ‘a dinner’.
GIRL ONE. There were seven guests, that’s a party.
GIRL TWO. Okay, are you stalking me?
GIRL ONE. No! I mean, yes. Look, I know that you have just fallen in love. With old ‘Blow Job Bike-shed’, who would’ve thought it?
And I am so happy for you. I just, I am a bit sad sometimes, from time to time, at the moment. And I – need – would like – to talk to you about it and instead… I feel a bit left out. AND I KNOW YOU ARE TEXTING HIM!
Plays from Vault Page 2