GIRL TWO. Sorry. Left out? From what, a threesome? Look, you’re not left out. Well you are from that, we don’t do that. I haven’t ever. It’s not that I’m a prude, it is just that I haven’t needed to, not that you need. Mmm.
Pause.
Anyway the point is, I am sorry if I have been a little distant. It’s only been a few months, we’re in the honeymoon period. Look, don’t worry, it will fall apart soon and I’ll come crawling back to you all alone and depressed. I love you, I’m always here for you…
Looking at her phone and giggling.
How many emojis can he cram onto a screen? Look.
GIRL ONE is stony-faced.
Oh, come on, you know what it’s like?
GIRL ONE. Apparently not, according to you.
GIRL TWO. Oh please. Is this about the Swiss wimp? He was not your boyfriend.
GIRL ONE. No. It’s just, lately, I have been in a bit of a… rut. You know stopping dog-walking –
GIRL TWO. Well I think it was about time you left –
GIRL ONE. Exactly, it’s the time, all the time I now have with my thoughts. My weird little thoughts. And things have got, well, weirder –
GIRL TWO. I doubt that’s possible –
GIRL ONE. I am actually starting to look in at office windows and see all those idiotic little drones, sitting at their desks, and I’m thinking like, ‘I wish I was a drone, at a desk, crunching someone else’s numbers for a corporation who doesn’t give a shit.’
I’m actually thinking that.
GIRL TWO. Thanks a lot for calling me a drone.
GIRL ONE. Don’t get me wrong, I wish I could, like you, I wish I could be satisfied with the mundane minutiae of life.
GIRL TWO. What the fuck?
GIRL ONE. Yeah you know money, restaurants, girly nights out, nails, a two-point-four family: bourgeois shit.
GIRL TWO. You are such a dick.
GIRL ONE. Look this is not about you. I just feel so futile. And if I am not doing… What am I?
GIRL TWO. Well get a job then, Jesus, you’ve been educated enough.
GIRL ONE. I keep thinking about how I am a product of IVF?
GIRL TWO. Not this again –
GIRL ONE. I am definitely not meant to be here, my mum had to try and try and try and this was in the eighties, this was serious sci-fi shit then. Her eggs were extracted from her, examined, hormoned and finally, put into another woman’s womb. If this was my grandmother’s day, I just wouldn’t have been born, I wouldn’t be here.
GIRL TWO. Neither would most of us. Coughs killed people –
GIRL ONE. It has just embedded itself in me, this thought, and I can’t flush it out. I am an experiment, a test-tube baby –
GIRL TWO. You are a test-tube baby, but that’s fine –
GIRL ONE. An experiment that hasn’t worked, a Frankenstein. Not a woman, not a desirable, fecund, normal woman but a barren vessel, who won’t be able to have children, like my barren mother –
GIRL TWO. Stop it –
GIRL ONE. These thoughts, they’re so negative –
GIRL TWO. Oh my god. Get a grip. The world has negative thoughts. Look at the news, for once. We all hate each other. Everyone lives in fear of everyone else. Of being blown up on their way to work. Or of being shot by a policeman for wearing a hoodie. Or of being beheaded by some bloke called John. It’s… depressing but normal, sadly. Have you tried Xanax?
As GIRL ONE speaks, the faint sound of string music can be heard.
GIRL ONE. These thoughts; breeding in me. Lately, walking in a crowd, I’ll close my eyes and lightly step off the pavement. I anticipate the impact, the cold, hard thwack that would knock me up and onto the road, landing with a crack. My skull cracking open, my brain splurging out, oozing out like an… omelette. But just as I can smell the wheels, feel the destruction, some archaic instinct aches into action and drags me back onto the street. And I am relieved, I am really, really relieved. Glad to be saved, to be alive. A happy hypocrite. But what happens, what happens when one day that instinct stops working?
The music stops.
GIRL TWO. Sorry, is this one of your monologues? I can’t tell any more.
Sound and light fill the stage.
Scene Six
An art gallery in a garage. November. 2015.
GIRL TWO claps. GIRL ONE has obviously just finished a performance.
GIRL TWO. Wow. It was… even longer.
GIRL ONE. Thanks. Cool space, no?
GIRL TWO. Yeah, it’s… a lovely garage.
GIRL ONE. One of the artists is squatting in it, it’s her mum’s.
GIRL TWO. Oh.
Pause.
Hey, happy belated birthday!
GIRL ONE. Feeling guilty for missing my party, are you?
GIRL TWO. What do you mean ‘party’? What party?
GIRL ONE. My ‘Female Singers of the Nineties’ party? I still can’t believe how many people came dressed as Dannii Minogue, she used to be so much more –
GIRL TWO. I didn’t hear anything about your party.
GIRL ONE. What? Yes you did. The hilarious e-invite?
GIRL TWO. I didn’t get one.
GIRL ONE. Oh. God. Um. I probably assumed you were too busy working?
GIRL TWO. Yeah.
Pause.
Glad I could make it today, though. I didn’t realise it would be so far out –
GIRL ONE. I always feel like I am going to be picked up in an art gallery. Some bearded… man, or woman, probably the artist, sees me from across the room and is profoundly and inexplicably moved.
GIRL TWO. Definitely inexplicably.
GIRL ONE (looking around the art exhibition). I think that most of my actions are motivated by the fact that I hope to be picked up by someone. That’s like, my main motivation for doing most things. To be picked up.
(Pointing to a sculpture.) Isn’t this piece opaque?
GIRL TWO struggles to comprehend.
GIRL TWO. Any luck?
GIRL ONE. Sort of. I had near-sex with someone last night.
GIRL TWO. ‘Near’? Why does that not surprise me?
GIRL ONE. In so far as we ended up completely naked on his mum’s sofa. Well I was completely naked, he kept his polo neck on, but the important half was bare as a baby.
GIRL TWO. Ewww.
GIRL ONE. It was nice. We fingered each other. I love being fingered, don’t you? Beats everything else if you ask me.
GIRL TWO. I didn’t.
GIRL ONE. Luckily so, cos then he attempted to lick me out, but my pubic hair has all kind of matted now so, no. And by the time we graduated to sex, he was pretty out of it and it all sort of… flopped. Yeah. Probably for the best, good to take things slow.
GIRL TWO. Who did you ‘drug’ into doing this?
GIRL ONE. Well, actually this might sound quite weird, so don’t freak out but it was with – (Whispering.)
GIRL TWO. Whaaaaaaat? What the fuck? What? No.
GIRL ONE. I knew you’d be weird about this. You always drag –
GIRL TWO. He was Rose’s first boyfriend.
GIRL ONE. Yeah, when they were like fourteen.
GIRL TWO. Seventeen. Don’t you find that weird? Like getting with your sister’s boyfriend?
GIRL ONE. That would never happen, she only dates property developers.
GIRL TWO. And what about Lucy?
GIRL ONE. What about her?
GIRL TWO. She’s his girlfriend of four years.
GIRL ONE. Yeah, but he was my friend, well Rose’s friend, first.
GIRL TWO. What are you, like ten?
GIRL ONE. I introduced them.
GIRL TWO. But she’s your friend. You like her.
GIRL ONE. I know, I know, it’s just, you know, there has always been so much love between us. Everyone says it, even Rose would joke about it.
GIRL TWO. So what, are you going to be together? This is so weird.
GIRL ONE. Fuck off. I have been alone for a really long t
ime. And the relationships I have had have been… unconventional.
GIRL TWO. So are you two going to be boyfriend and girlfriend?
GIRL ONE. I don’t know. We were quite drunk and when I woke up he had already left for work.
GIRL TWO. I see.
GIRL ONE. I haven’t been this happy in so, so long. I don’t feel so bleak or like I want to hurt a stranger –
GIRL TWO. Woo –
GIRL ONE. It’s like, the world has… rose-tinted specs on again.
GIRL TWO. I just don’t –
GIRL ONE. I think I might be in love. I might finally be in love.
GIRL TWO. I think he is cheating on me. We never have sex and he keeps having work lunches with a girl who has just started at his office. The other day, I bumped into them on the street –
GIRL ONE. God you really are a good stalker! –
GIRL TWO. And the look on his face was just, pure scared shame. After six months. Only six months.
Pause.
She’s not even pretty. She is short, squat, stubby even.
When I go to a party, people text me after to say how much they enjoyed speaking to me, how engaging I was. They like me, I am a hit. Not too in-your-face, but punchy, flirtatious but in a non-threatening way. Magnetic. Eloquent and still a tiny bit street, both confusing the poshos and intriguing the hipsters. Intelligent but nothing heavy. Sparky. And no one can believe I am nearly thirty. No one. I know because I play this little game where I get people to guess my age, people love it, and without exception they all presume I am in my early to mid-twenties. Not a line on my face, hair, bouncy and luscious, eyes like Nutella, body as tight as a… whistle.
She whistles.
And. Oh fuck it. I was just about to do it. Breeze through it. Smash through the brick wall that is thirty. Secure, smug and snug as a bug in a rug or whatever and then, then? That short, fat, fucking stub of a Thumbelina has to come into my life and, I don’t know? Wow him with her innate ability to give him a blow job standing up?
Breaking down, crying.
Oh fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.
Sound and light fill the stage.
Scene Seven
Sitting room. December. 2015.
Mica Levi’s ‘Love’ plays through out this scene.
GIRL ONE is on the phone to GIRL TWO, who is rushing around, preparing a dinner.
GIRL ONE. Have you seen Under the Skin?
GIRL TWO. Are you calling for anything in particular this time? Cos I’ve got friends coming over for a Christmas dinner in an hour.
GIRL ONE. Oh.
Pause.
GIRL TWO. It’s a work-ish thing. You’d –
GIRL ONE. So have you seen it? Cos I think you would really connect to it too. You know, cos it’s about being alone –
GIRL TWO. Alone, what are you talking about? –
GIRL ONE. Scarlett Johansson, plays an alien who just drives around some rank town like Swansea, or Slough? Picking up men in a van, taking them back to her lair, where she does a striptease and then kills them in a vat of space oil and the whole time she is wearing, like, Primark.
GIRL TWO. Primark, really?
GIRL ONE. Yeah, she looks all normal and chubby with, like, a flabby belly, a brown wig and kitten-heel boots.
GIRL TWO. Errr!
GIRL ONE. And it just made so much sense to me, cos that’s it. That’s what I have been trying to explain to you. I feel like such an alien. A hatched thing. This creature who has the shell of a woman but inside is just this weird little alien, just taking it all in, totally confused by everything. Unable to really understand what the fuck anyone means.
GIRL TWO. Isn’t that what Scientologists believe, that we are all aliens?
GIRL ONE. I am serious, like, I don’t understand humankind, women, friends, men, lovers. I literally have no idea. And I never have. Just like Scarlett Johansson, I can look, seem, right but in fact know nothing and understand no one and –
GIRL TWO. So what, you’d be Scarlett Johansson in this scenario?
GIRL ONE. He didn’t even mention it, he never phoned. It’s been weeks! I finally saw him at a drinks party I was waitressing at. I had an apron on!
GIRL TWO. Ouch.
GIRL ONE. I threw down my tray and walked straight up to him and you know what he said? He said it was too weird, because of Rose. ‘Too weird’? They went out ten years ago! Then he scuttled back to Lucy, clamped his arm around her waist. The coward. Then she, she came up, kissed me, on the cheek… I –
GIRL TWO. Look, it was always going to be a sensitive –
GIRL ONE. I wish I’d actually fucked him, you know? Then I would’ve been able to be legitimately mad, to have really made a scene. But a bit of mutual masturbation? It just sounds lame if I bring it up.
Pause.
Shall we go? Like right now, find some strangers and have actual sex? It would cheer us both up, no? Being lonely is so shit!
GIRL TWO. What are you talking about, I am not lonely. I am in a committed, mature relationship?
GIRL ONE. But what about the Thumbelina?
GIRL TWO (laughing, maniacally). Oh, her. No. No. I was just feeling, so silly, insecure about my relationship. Mad, even. No. The moment we sat down and talked about it, I realised I was being totally irrational and, more than that, I was being unfair, to us. Because rather than ask him, I just harboured these negative accusations, which, once he had the opportunity to defend himself, seemed ludicrous. Innocent until proven guilty. The girl is married and is French, which is why they are always meeting up. Because she is teaching him French, which his boss says he needs for the Paris office, he wanted it to be a surprise, we are moving to Paris. We have never been so great, we’re so much more respectful, mature –
GIRL ONE. No sex, sex, sex, sex, sex sex, sex. I am going mad. I’ve started walking around the streets. Cruising the streets, like Scarlett. Fat, little Scarlett. No dogs, just me, in a Uniqlo puffer, walking, eyeing men. I’ve definitely freaked a couple out. I have quite intense eyes. But when I do make eye contact, what then? I am not a prostitute, or Scarlett, I am just a well-spoken, strawberry-blonde from Sussex. I can’t actually approach them. I’d get mugged. Then I am like, ‘Maybe I’ll call a prostitute’, but that’s even worse. Desperate. Only pudgy businessmen and women with receding hairlines need to pay for it? Then I think, ‘Just phone a friend.’ A good old booty call. But what if, what if they say:
‘No’?
‘Oh, I don’t think of you that way.’
‘Who do you think you are, you fat, fugly, freak. As if.’
GIRL TWO. Look, if it’s sex you want, though I think counselling is what you really need, why don’t you just go on a night out with some friends and like, flirt, people are always having drunken sex which they regret on nights out… it’s easy.
GIRL ONE. No. I feel too distant from my generation to go out.
GIRL TWO. Listen to yourself!
GIRL ONE. They say that most crimes are performed by sexually frustrated men on a largely sugar-based diet.
Pause.
I eat a lot of Maoams.
GIRL TWO. Okay, I am not quite clear where this is heading?
GIRL ONE. Do you, do you ever… when you see a pregnant woman, on a train or waiting next to you at a bus stop, so she’s side on to you, her rotund stomach, protruding past you… her belly button, poking out prominently… her smooth, plastic skin, stretched like canvas, or clay, around her new life form. Firm yet so, so delicate. Fragile. When you see her, do you sometimes get an urge, an uncontrollable urge to stab her, right there, in the belly? To puncture that round, taut ball? With an iron rod or better yet, a bare, clenched, fist? The feeling of destruction, the warm, sweet, sticky destruction as both lives bleed out of her? Pump out of her? Wail out of her?
GIRL TWO. Oh my god, no. Stop talking now. I’m pregnant.
GIRL ONE. What? What do you mean?
GIRL TWO. I mean I am pregnant. So stop speaking.
GIRL
ONE. What? Since when?
GIRL TWO. Since I found out last week. You’re not meant to tell people –
GIRL ONE. I obviously didn’t mean I would actually hurt anyone. You. I.
Pause.
Yay. Congratulations. I guess.
GIRL TWO. ‘I guess’? Is that the best you can do?
GIRL ONE. You should call it Scarlett if it is a girl.
Sound and light fill the stage.
Scene Eight
A night club. New Year’s Eve. 2015.
‘Not Over Yet’ by Planet Perfecto plays.
GIRL ONE dances enthusiastically. GIRL TWO stands still, awkward.
They are both dressed in nineties’ clothing.
GIRL ONE. I can’t believe your orgasm song is playing, how great is this?
She does the same orgasmic singing as before.
GIRL TWO. Stop it. When I said ‘friends’, I didn’t mean me. I am pregnant. I shouldn’t be at a club.
GIRL ONE. Oh come on, you’re like a week pregnant. A couple of drinks and some MDMA are not going to hurt.
GIRL TWO. Where the hell are we? I thought Peckham was far, but this place? My Uber driver hadn’t even heard of it.
GIRL ONE. Hey, I spent ages looking for a cool night for us to go to, stop being so negative.
GIRL TWO. I’ve never seen so many men in black mesh. They look like they’ve all just stepped out of art school.
GIRL ONE. Yeah, well, they sort of have.
GIRL TWO. What?
GIRL ONE. This night is run by Goldsmiths.
GIRL TWO. You brought me to a student night?
GIRL ONE. Oh come on, they are not all that young. Anyway it’s not term-time so technically it’s not –
GIRL TWO. Oh my god. These children weren’t even born in the nineties.
GIRL ONE. No, they were. Circa 1995, probably.
GIRL TWO. Oh my god, these children were BORN in the nineties. YOU ARE SO YOUNG!
GIRL ONE. Stop it. I am meeting a Tinder date here. Please don’t go around shouting at people. Come on, let’s get a drink.
GIRL TWO. No, no I am not going to drink.
GIRL ONE. Oh, please. I can’t drink alone.
Plays from Vault Page 3