Books and Records. I Like These.

First Comes First
Paddingtons

Punk bands sounded like this in 1978. Real punk bands, not Green Day and the like. It isn't subtle, but it is direct and honest and visceral, and a brilliant indicator of just how amazingly fun they are live. Good yelly singing, good thrash guitar, a drummer who keeps everything going forwards without any frills, and songs that do repay a bit of thinking about. They're direct, not stupid. And they're from Hull and proud of it. Love 'em lots, and the second album's a cracker as well (No Mundane Options).

The Afterglow
Anthony Cartwright

This is a brilliant book. Very small canvas, incredibly well-turned Black Country dialect, that makes Brummie poetic. And it's real, and it's convincing, and he makes you care about all the characters, even the lairy ones. Absolutely loved it.

How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher
Simon Barnes

This book is seriously good, and profoundly serious, and never ever solemn. There is a philosophy about the everyday, and paying it due attention, that is awesome (as in.. making me feel awe) and that is exemplified by paying due attention to birds. He is not, I would guess, a bad birdwatcher himself, but I am, and this book made me feel inspired. If I am a bad birdwatcher, why not become a better one? The experiences he writes about, the achievements of identification, the tiny triumphs in species preservation, aren't trivial; or if they are trivial, then it's trivial steps that are going to save the planet, as well as global ones. And my days are enriched more than I can say by the Great Crested Grebes nesting on piles of garbage on the mooring-lines of a floating Chinese restaurant were I walk my dog, and that's very trivial and very profound.
And Pied Wagtails are the bad birdwatchers friend. If you know Pied means black and white, there's a black and white bird, it has a tail, it wags it. Job done. Simon Barnes doesn't mention that one, it's a bonus for reading this.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
F. Scott Fitzgerald

So taut, so precise, so exquisite. A beautifully realised, tiny little story exploring a whimsical idea (a life lived backwards, for anyone who doesn't know) with such deftness. Anyone who has suffered through the three and a half weeks it takes to watch Brad Pitt getting made-up should read the story before reeling home. It's lovely. There's a bigger point in here somewhere. Who reads something as delicate as this and decides it is best realised at the cost of ten squillion dollars and at such unendurable length? What did they like about the story in the first place? Because the central love story isn't there at all; he meets Hildegarde Moncrieff at a dance where she mistakes him for his father's brother, she marries him because he's less flighty than her other beaux, and in ten years he's got fed up with her because she's old and boring. That's it. End of love story. All the paedophiliac nonsense with a 70 year old Brad Pitt fancying a ten year old Cate Blanchett? Not there. Tiny Brad all sad at old Cate's death bed? Not there. All the saccharine crap? Not there. Avoid the film; read the story.

Crossfire
Andy McNab

This is a thick-eared thriller, of course it is. It's for people who really enjoy talking like squaddies and think being told how to field-strip an AK47 makes them manly, so fiction for sad losers, basically. However, it is compelling, I did want to find out what happened, I was rooting for the hero, I did keep turning an awful lot (550!!) of pages, which makes this, I suppose, a 'good read'. Like Dan Brown isn't. And also..waterboarding; it is torture, it isn't acceptable, it was devised by the Yanks and the Brits, and Rumsfeld and Chaney are responsible for its use and justification. Andy McNab, human rights activist. This surprised me, which means I was prejudging Mr McNab, I was wrong, and I apologise. See, liberals can be open-minded, sometimes. A book that does what it says on the tin; if you don't want to read an action-packed roller-coaster thriller (and find out how to field-strip an AK) don't read this. If you do, do.

Public Property
Andrew Motion

Motion has a knack for making small, inconsequential, things consequential. He also works that trick the other way round, which is unfortunate. He ambles through the same terrain as Ted Hughes, but his foxes aren't thought-foxes that tear apart the veil of civility with their innate savagery, they are amusing presences observed on the lawn, while sipping a chilled Sancerre and wearing a linen suit. The best thing in this collection is a prose-poem, "While I Was Fishing", the worst is a trawl through photos of the dear-old-queen-mum, which should be burnt. And I liked "The Dog of the Light Brigade", but that's probably just me.

The Rough Guide to Led Zeppelin
Rough Guides

It's very easy to process this book. Simply reverse all the critical judgements: "The Zeps finest hour" means don't touch it with a barge-pole, and "A disappointment after their previous towering triumph" means it could be worth checking out. What an unpleasant bunch of preening, cloth-eared, plagiarising, sexist shits. They give cock-rock a bad name. In fairness to the author, Nigel Williamson, it is an efficiently ordered, comprehensive introduction to a band that quite a few people like, and it does make critical discriminations that I'm sure could be interesting. If they weren't so unspeakable. And Rolf Harris' version of "Stairway to Heaven" is wonderful.

Nick Drake's Pink Moon (33 1/3)
Amanda Petrusich

A quarter of this mercifully brief little essay is a paean of praise for the culturally sensitive and artistically brilliant corporate whores who conflated Nick Drake and car commercials. The first half of the book is a cloth-eared rehash of Patrick Humphries' excellent biography, interlaced with markedly uninformative interviews with people I've never heard of and Robyn Hitchcock. It is woeful and just a little bit evil. It gets a grudging half-star because the framing essay, discussing how Ms. Petrusich came upon "Pink Moon" and then how she listens to it less, was mildly interesting, and had she written that book, I would have read it with some interest. Not much, but some.


Been Here and Gone (Brown Thrasher Books)
Frederic Ramsey

Amazing, beautiful, evocative photographs and stories of the country that Deep Blues comes from. A desperate attempt to preserve what Ramsey identified as a dying cultural form in 1950. And it's not dead yet. I hadn't thought about Basin Street in New Orleans being so-called because it's in a flood-basin. Makes sense now. Beg borrow or steal a copy if you have the slightest interest in the Blues or Black American music and culture, this is Wonderful.

Not to Have - poem

His watch broke when he punched the wall.

It stopped at eight-oh-five

He caught the bus at nine, sat numb

While it wound around the Poplar streets

To home.

He put away the cot. He wrapped

The baby-stuff in blankets, shut it in

To drawers and cupboards, anywhere away.

***

He phoned his parents, phoned hers,

Told them, curt:

“She had a fever. At the hospital, they couldn’t find

A foetal heartbeat.”

He rang two friends, asked them

To tell whoever – not to have

The visits with the baby clothes and small

Stuffed toys, and smiles, and coos, and “Boy or Girl?”

Not to have.

He poured a glass of whisky, stared at it

Went to his bed and wept.

***

On Thursday morning he went back up

To Bancroft Road; they brought her in

From some ward where she had

Been drugged asleep.

A pessary to start the labour;

An epidural to make her numb,

Then on they went

To a place they hadn’t ever dreamed about.

Who does?

One baby in a thousand is still born.

They’d thought about a catalogue of

Bad things. Never death.

***

A living baby struggles to be born,

A living child shouts at the light

And as it shouts, its skin,

Grown in wet dark, begins to glow

Their tiny boy stayed greyish,

Perfect but dead.

***

He held his child’s hand.

“What a bastard thing, eh son?

What a bastard, bastard thing.”

Christopher Lilly,

February 2008.

Picture This - short prose

PICTURE THIS.

I.

Picture this – standing in the doorway of your kitchen, in your left hand a plastic carrier bag just bought from Tescos for 5p. A thin, inadequate carrier bag, the handles stretched to breaking point, full of tins of soup and sausages and cat-food, eggs on the top. One of those carrier bags. In your right hand a door-key, with which you’ve just opened the front door, held between thumb and first finger. The other three fingers on your right hand are holding two pint bottles of milk against your chest, with difficulty because you didn’t open the door, put away your key, and then pick up the milk, you picked up the bottles first and then juggled with them while you opened the door. You do things like that.

And now picture this – the kitchen table in the middle of the room, radio on one side, things from breakfast – teapot, marmalade, butter, bread, all sat in the middle of the table, because it’s Saturday and you didn’t get up till twelve, and then you had breakfast (on your own because everyone else is away this weekend) and then thought of doing Tescos before the match, and rushed off to get some shopping, only stopping to put your plate and cup and things in the bowl in the sink, and not bothering to clear the table.

Now, finally, picture this. Standing on the other side of the table, Sue. In her right hand, the bread-knife. One of those quite expensive knives you get called Kitchen Devils, one side with sort of wavy serrations, very sharp, good for cutting things like meat. Surgical steel, made in Sheffield. You know the sort. And in her left hand?

Nothing. Nothing at all. Just blood, because she’s cut across her left wrist with the bread knife, and there’s a spurt of bright red blood, arterial blood, that happens every time her heart beats, and it goes quite along way really, a couple of feet, and there’s lots of it. Sue’s standing by the sink. Sue’s very tidy.

“Oh Jesus Christ.” you say, and you drop the bag of groceries and the two bottles of milk and your door-keys, and you start walking towards Sue, and your head is going chunkety-chunkety-chunk through all those totally forgettable things they tell you on first-aid posters in factories, and the things you did to get your first-aider badge how many years ago? Fifteen? Really fifteen? Fifteen years ago in the scouts. And all you can think of is the recovery position and how to do the kiss of life and how to do emergency tracheotomies with a pen-knife in expensive restaurants when your boss starts choking to death on toast and pate, and none of those things help at all. “Gently, love,” you say, and you sit her down at the kitchen table, and you take the knife out of her hand with your left hand and put it down gently on the table, not looking at it, while you take the left arm, the bloody one, the sticky, wet, bloody one in your right hand, and you try to cover the spurting with your fingers, to make it stop, and it doesn’t, and now your hand is wet and slippery and you still haven’t looked at her face or at anything except the wrist and your right hand, which isn’t your right hand any more, it’s just a right hand that does more or less what you tell it to do. You grip harder, just below the slash, on the other little cuts, hesitation marks they’re called, how do you know this crap?, and the spurting eases because you’ve got a couple of finger tips on the artery, luck not judgement, and you think “There’s a pressure point where you put tourniquets and you have to release tourniquets or they get gangrene and I don’t know where the pressure point is. Oh shit why doesn’t someone else come?”, and you know that no-one else will. And now the bleeding is less dramatic, it isn’t jetting out from her wrist, just sort of seeping, and you still haven’t looked at her, so you do. Very slowly, you raise your eyes to her face, and she’s very wide-eyed; not crying, staring at you, and she doesn’t say anything, she just stares.

You’re calmer now, working on automatic. While your right hand hangs on, you think “Get an ambulance, get someone who knows how to stop her dying. Don’t let her die on me, get an ambulance.”

You take the tea-towel off the hook under the draining board, it’s horrible and grey and greasy but you can’t help that, so you take your fingers off her wrist and the blood squirts right across the room, and you whimper. Not Sue. Sue doesn’t make a sound. And before it can happen again you wrap the tea-towel round her wrist, round and round, and it’s turning red as you do it, Sue’s blood turning it red, you wrap the wrist and close your hand on the bundle, and then you get Sue to stand up, which she does, she still hasn’t said anything, she stands up and you put your left arm round her shoulders and walk her slowly across the kitchen, your right hand holding her left arm across your bodies.

You pick your way over the groceries and into the corridor by the stairs, and up to the phone by the front door, and sit her down on the stairs. She still hasn’t said anything. You reach for the phone with your left hand, it’s awkward, almost too far, but you get it and pull it towards you and take the receiver in your left hand. You think “My right hand’s going numb. I can’t feel my fingers, I’m going to let go of her wrist.” but you don’t. you dial three nines with your index finger, you didn’t realise how much you were shaking, you can’t get your finger in the hole, then you do and you dial. Then you wait.

“Hello, Emergency. Which service do you require?” A voice, calm, anonymous. She doesn’t care what’s happening.

“Ambulance.” you yelp, your voice won’t behave, and then there are lots of whirrs and clicks and another voice says “Ambulance Service?” and you say “There’s been an accident, there’s a woman losing blood fast, can you come quickly please?” and you’re gibbering. Then the voice on the other end, so calm, so patient, all the mothers in the world rolled into one, says “Yes, dear. Just give me your address.” and you do, and the phone number, and she says “Thank you.” and she goes away. Then there’s just Sue sitting silent beside you, and the phone buzzing in your ear, and you’re lost.

That’s all there is for eight minutes, because you can’t think of anything to say and Sue can say nothing, and you put your arm round her and hold her while your right hand squeezes her wrist and the sodden tea-towel drips on the carpet.

Then the ambulance men come and they take charge. They aren’t kind or unkind, sympathetic or not. They just take charge, do what they have to do, throw away the tea-towel and put something else round her wrist. You can’t see what they do, they just do it, and Sue is sat in a trolley affair and taken away.

II.

Then the policemen who came in just behind them say; “Can you tell us what happened, sir?”

You tell them all this, which is a lot more than they want to know, and you take them into the kitchen, which looks like an abattoir, you hadn’t realised how much blood there was, and puddles of milk and broken eggs, and one of them says “It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” and you laugh. Why did you laugh? Then the young one with acne says to the older one with a moustache “She must have waited till she heard someone come in.” and you think “Yes, she must.”, and you wonder how long she stood there, waiting for someone, waiting for the slipping sound of a key in the lock, before the knife slashed down across her wrist.

Then the older one with the moustache says “Can you give us a few details about the young lady? What is your relationship with her?”; and you have to sort it out in your head, sort out just why Sue was here.

“She’s a friend, she was staying here for a bit.” you say finally, but it isn’t true. She isn’t anyone’s friend, she’s just someone you know, and it isn’t you that knows her, it’s Laura, and it’s bloody unfair and you didn’t want her here in the first place. Tell them she’s gay, they’ll like that. Tell them she doesn’t want anything to do with men, that she brings home a succession of strange women, all of whom hate you for being male. Then you can tell them about how they all hang about in the living-room so you can’t watch television or use your record-player, so you wind up in the pub on your own. While you’re at it, tell them about the time she came into the kitchen straight out of the bath, and you couldn’t look at her although she’s lovely, because fancying her and disliking her was too confusing, and anyway, Laura was there. Go on, tell them. It’ll make you feel better. You don’t though. They want to know where she comes from, and you say Leicester, then think perhaps it’s Bedford or Hertford, or one of those cities you don’t want to go to, and then think that it doesn’t much matter, that Sue doesn’t come from any of those places in any way that matters, not in the way of going home. She just moves from place to place, using up the tolerance of a string of acquaintances until they ask her to go, and she moves on to the next address in her diary.

When the police have gone, you ring the hospital to find out when visiting hours are, and how she is, and what’s happening to her, and they say “Are you related to the young lady?” and you say “No, just a friend.”, and they say “Well, she’ll be discharged at seven o’clock, if you’d like to come and fetch her.” And they hang up.

That’s when you start crying, sitting on the stairs, holding a dead phone, shaking with tears at the unfairness of it all. Why is it happening to you?

III.

You pick your way through the mess to the kitchen, and put the kettle on. The clock says 5.45, which means it’s been an hour since you got in. if it takes half an hour to get to the hospital, you’ve got till 6.30 to work out what you’re doing. You run water in the sink to rinse away some of the blood, and pick out your cup from breakfast, washing off the blood. You make yourself some coffee, then realise there’s no milk because the bottles got broken. The glass is all over the floor, and the cat is lapping round the splinters to get at the milk.

Then she treads very delicately over the scattered tins and starts to lick at a pool of Sue’s blood drying on the floor, and you pick her up by the skin behind her neck and throw her out of the back door, as she screams at you and bites your hand.

You pick up all the tins, wipe off the milk and egg and stuff, and put them away. Then you sweep up all the glass and broken egg shells, and split paper bags and the milk-sodden loaf of bread, and the other bits you can’t rescue, and put them in the bin. Then you clear breakfast off the table, very methodical, putting away the pot of marmalade and the box of cornflakes. You wash all the crockery and put it away still wet, getting it out of the way, and then you start cleaning.

You fill the washing-up bowl with water and you pour in Dettol, and then you wash the blood off the kitchen table. You wash the blood off the cooker and the sink and the draining-board. You sponge down the walls and the dresser and then you scrub the floor, and you put Ajax on the wet patches and scrub again, and you change the bright red water and you rinse it all again, and mop up the milk and egg, and change the water and wipe it all over again, until there’s no more blood in the kitchen. Then you clean the hall and the passageway, and then when you’re sure there isn’t any blood left anywhere, you wash the bread-knife very thoroughly, and take it out to the dustbin and throw it away. You feel a bit sorry about that, because, sharp as it was, it was a very good knife, and expensive.

Then you go to Sue’s room, and look through her diary, being careful not to read the pages of tiny neat writing, till you find her address list. There’s the number of a group of women you know she visits, so you ring it. The first time you say “Hello, could I speak to ….” the woman on the other end hangs up, because there’s nothing you can do to stop your voice sounding male, but that’s not unexpected so you try again after a minute or two, and finally speak to Amanda, who you thought was a friend of Sue’s. Amanda, it seems, doesn’t care for Sue at all, and suggests it was a pity you found her so soon. She isn’t helpful. You say thank you, and hang up, and then you ring for a taxi to take you to the hospital because now it’s half-past-six.

IV.

You arrive at the hospital in ten minutes, since the taxi came much quicker than you thought it would. You ask the man to wait, and go in to give your name to the woman at the desk and tell her who you’ve come for. She doesn’t respond at all, no smile, nothing. Just a couple of flicked switches and crisp things said into the phone while you stand there, lost. When she’s finished she looks up and winces to see you still stood there, intruding on her space. She gestures to the plastic stacking chairs round the coffee-machine, and tells you to sit down and wait.

For half-an-hour you sit there, worrying about the taxi costing more than you have in your wallet, worrying about what’s happening to Sue, worrying that they’ve forgotten you’re here, and no-one will ever come to find you and you’ll have to sit here for hours drinking rotten vending-machine coffee until you find the courage to leave, which would probably be some time around midnight. Then they bring Sue down the corridor. She’s very pale, but she’s not looking manic or strange, or anything much. She has very neat cream-coloured bandages on her wrist, and other than that, there’s no sign. You stand up when you see her, and she smiles, very slight but it is a smile, and you feel a bit better. The nurse who is walking with her looks stern, but quite nice. She says “Goodbye. Let’s not see you in here again” to Sue, then she goes. You take Sue’s arm. It’s the most intimate thing you’ve done ever since you’ve known her. This touch, your hand on her arm. You held her arm this afternoon, of course, but that was different. She doesn’t mind you holding her arm.

You go out to the taxi together, and you sit her in it, very solicitous. The taxi-driver takes you home and charges you three pounds fifty for two ten minute journeys and a forty minute wait. You don’t know if that’s a bargain or a rip-off, you can never tell with mini-cabs. It’s difficult to know what to tip him. You give him four quid and see how long it takes him to get the change. If he’s quick he can keep it, if he takes his time you’ll have it back. He gets the fifty pence out without a pause, and you tell him to keep it. Sue’s standing by the door. She’s holding her arm away from her body, as though it belongs to someone else. You go in, and Sue wants to take a bath, so you go upstairs to run it while she goes into the living-room where she sleeps. You ask if she wants a coffee, and she says she does so you go downstairs to make it. She’s in the bath when it’s done, and she asks you to bring it in. She’s lying in the bath with her bandaged left arm propped on the side, clear of the water. Her eyes are shut and her hair is floating round her head like seaweed, like Ophelia in that painting. Ophelia dead. She looks up. “Thanks” she says, and asks if you’ll put it down on the side of the bath. You put it down and go, proud of yourself for not looking at her body at all. You go into the living room, turn on the fire, turn down her bed. Her clothes are over the arm of the chair, her trousers with dried dark stains on them, her blouse crusted with blood. You take the blouse down to the kitchen and put it into a bucket of detergent and water. The soap suds turn pink. Sue is out of the bath, so you go to see if she wants anything, and she doesn’t. She gets into bed; “I think I’ll go to sleep now” she says, so you turn off the fire and the light at the switch by the door. You feel so responsible, so depended on, standing in the doorway looking at the shrouded shape in the bed, the dark hair spread across the pillow. When you baby-sit, you can stand for hours listening to the little pops and mumbles a sleeping child makes. Little noises, while the night slows down and you focus in and in and in on the creature in the cot. Now you’re doing the same to Sue, who is twenty-six. Odd. Very odd. And you didn’t like her.

You go down to the kitchen to make another cup of black coffee, to look at the book you meant to read today, still sitting on the sideboard. You haven’t eaten anything since noon, so you think of toasted cheese. Toasted cheese doesn’t really need much thought. Yesterday’s bread will have to do, but you can’t cut it, there’s no bread-knife. The cat starts twining herself around your legs, prepared to forgive you for throwing her out if you’ll feed her now. You give the cat her supper, then go out to the dustbin, take out the knife, take it back into the kitchen, and wash it. While you’re eating the toasted cheese, you notice a spot of blood on the top of the cooker. Leave it, go to bed. You go to bed.

Consider First a Bird (1 Act Play)

CONSIDER FIRST A BIRD…

A hill on the Essex-Suffolk border (which is more than 20 miles from Ilford) on August 12^th. Enter, first, Gary, then David.

GARY So then…will this do?

DAVID Yes, of course. Yes, this’ll do fine.

GARY Only this is the fourth hill we’ve tried. The first three were wrong and I don’t have a fucking clue why, so I just wanted to make sure. Will this do?

DAVID Yes. Yes, this is fine. Look, what do you see?

GARY Nothing. Miles and miles of fuck-all. Is that what we were looking for?

DAVID Fuck-all is fine as long as it’s dark fuck-all. Dark’s what we want. No street lights. No headlights. No house lights. Dark. That’s what we want.

GARY Like this?

DAVID Dark like this. Exactly so.

GARY So how far are we from Ilford?

DAVID Don’t know. Twenty miles?

GARY And what is it we’re looking for again?

DAVID The Perseids.

Enter Rosa, upstage, unseen.

GARY The who now?

DAVID Perseids. It’s a meteor shower, it happens every August, it’s famous.

GARY Not to me. Never heard of it. Them. It.

ROSA I have.

GARY Hey! Where did you come from?

ROSA That bit of the car they put behind the front seats, where you can store children and shopping and women and the like.

GARY I never saw you.

ROSA No, well, that’s back seats for you, always full of surprises. But here I am.

GARY And you know about these Percy things?

ROSA Meteors. The Perseids. Yes.

GARY So what are they?

ROSA Meteors? Bits of stuff from outer space. When they come into earth’s atmosphere they burn up, sort of astronomical fireworks, so we see the flare trail, and say “Oh look, a shooting star” but they aren’t stars, which are really, really big, they’re meteors, which come in all sizes from quite big to tiny, and these ones seem to come from the same point in the sky..

DAVID ..which looks as though it’s the constellation of Perseus, so we call them the Perseids.

ROSA As opposed to the Leonids, which happen in November and look like they’re coming from Leo, or the Geminids, which happen in December, and seem to originate..

GARY ..in Gemini, I get it. Shut up now.

DAVID My book said the Perseids were the best. Is that right?

ROSA You get clear skies in August, and you get lots of meteors. I haven’t seen any meteor showers for ages, but these are good ones. Like starting bird watching with pied wagtails.

DAVID Sorry?

ROSA Well, if you know that pied means black and white, you see this little black and white bird, in a car-park or somewhere really open and obvious, and it’s wagging its tail, and you go: “Oh look, a pied wagtail” and there you are, you’re a bird watcher.

DAVID Astronomy for idiots.

ROSA Astronomy for beginners. Looking, that’s where you start. First you look, then you find out what you were looking at. But first you have to look.

GARY So you’ve driven me twenty miles to watch space-crap burn?

DAVID You didn’t have to come. I said “Anyone want to drive out and look at the Perseids, because it’s the twelfth of August?” and you said “Hold me back” and ran out of the house shouting.

GARY Tennants.

DAVID Per-se-ids-per-se-ids-per-se-ids actually.

GARY No. It was eight cans of Tennants. Eight cans of Tennants and I’ll agree to anything. Even this. Must have a slash.

Gary off.

DAVID You wanted to see them, didn’t you?

ROSA Me? Yes. Very much. Thanks for bringing me.

DAVID Oh, pleasure. Have you seen them before?

ROSA Oh yes. You haven’t?

DAVID I’ve only just started trying to look at the stars, if you get me. It’s really hard in London, there’s just like little glimpses through the haze, it’s really a piss-off, but yes, I’ve started looking.

ROSA First you have to look.

DAVID I want to know what I’m looking at. I look at all these stars and I can’t see the patterns. I can see the Plough, and Polaris, and the “W” thing..

ROSA Cassiopeia

DAVID Yes, her. That was dead good when I got her, because everyone can do the Plough, but she was new to me, so I was dead excited. And Orion, I can spot Orion. Then I’m pretty much done.

ROSA My dad had a telescope, and he’d take me out on clear nights and point them out to me. I like Lyra, she’s pretty. Like a kite, sort of. See Cassiopeia?

DAVID Yes.

ROSA Well go round that way. See the bright, bright star?

DAVID That one?

ROSA Yes. That’s Vega, she’s the brightest star we see, I think. She’s right next to Lyra. See the sort of wobbly kite, four stars just next to Vega?

DAVID Yes. Yes. Got it. That’s brilliant!

ROSA So now you know Vega and Lyra. Onwards and upwards.

DAVID That’s so brilliant. I’m ever so glad you came.

ROSA Me and my sister were well into Phillip Pullman. We called Vega Pantalaimon.

DAVID Why?

ROSA He’s Lyra’s daemon. You’ve not read it, “Northern Lights”?

DAVID Isn’t that a kid’s book?

ROSA I like it.

DAVID So will we see the Perseids, do you reckon?

ROSA There’s no moon, not much cloud. And they aren’t hard to spot. Kind of like stars, only shooting. There’s one.

DAVID Where? Rats. Missed it.

ROSA There’ll be more. There. There.

DAVID That’s amazing. How come you can see them and I can’t?

ROSA Relax. Corner-of-the-eye stuff. There’ll be more. There.

DAVID Yes! Got it. I think. That little flash?

ROSA That’s it. What were you expecting, colours and stuff? The Northern Lights?

DAVID I don’t know what I was expecting. It’s really simple, though, isn’t it? Beautiful. Can I wish on them, or will I get thrown out of Junior Astronomers Club?

ROSA Just don’t confuse astronomy and astrology. Star-gazers are quite relaxed about wishes and stuff, but you mustn’t mention astrology.

DAVID Got you. So don’t mention being a Libra, then?

ROSA Don’t mention that.

DAVID So what are you? What’s your sign?

ROSA No Through Road. Keep Left. I don’t know. December. The third.

DAVID Ah. Sagittarius. That makes us compatible, I think.

ROSA If we were, that wouldn’t be why. If we were. Your friend Gary. He’s very loud, isn’t he?

DAVID Just one of his qualities. Loud. Annoying. Rude. Pain in the arse. Drunk and lecherous. That’s Gary.

ROSA Yes. Great.

DAVID Also kind, generous, loyal. Warm. Possibly steadfast, if I knew exactly what that was. But always loud.

ROSA I’m imagining one of those guys who sell dodgy white-goods off a market stall. “I’m not asking twenty, I’m not asking ten, all I want from you today is five pounds and this beautiful hair-dryer cum food-mixer cum toaster is yours to take away. You sir, five pounds and it’s yours.”

DAVID He’s a lawyer.

ROSA No! Really? What sort?

DAVID Solicitor. Biggish firm in Chingford. Don’t know much about it but I think he’s quite good.

Gary on.

GARY Who’s quite good?

DAVID You. Rosa was asking what you did.

GARY I’m a lawyer.

ROSA That’s what he said. What sort?

GARY Solicitor. Intellectual property. I represent lots of people in the music business.

ROSA Bands or management?

GARY Oh, management. I like getting paid, see. Why so interested? Is it because I is black? Or do you fancy me?

ROSA Really not.

GARY Because I wouldn’t mind. I don’t even care if you just want me for my body. If you have me and cast me aside like an old sock after you’ve had your way with me. I think I could survive that.

ROSA Good. Really, really not.

GARY You say that now, but you’ve only ever seen me indoors; the artificial light makes me all pasty. I’m much prettier in daylight, aren’t I Dave? Tell her.

DAVID Probably best in the dark, though. I think, all things considered, pitch black is the best light to appreciate you in properly.

GARY I am officially wounded. I shall lie here on my back, nursing the mental wounds yous have inflicted.

DAVID Actually, lying on your back is a dead good way of looking at the - there’s one - sky.

GARY Also a dead good way of looking up Rosa’s skirt.

ROSA If I was wearing a skirt, I’d be quite cross. But since I’m wearing jeans I just think you’re weird.

GARY In my head, you’re wearing a skirt. One of those white cheese-clothy ones, that let your knickers shine through, and then I wonder: “Does she know that I can see her red pants? Is she trying to entice me? Or has she never looked at someone else in a skirt like hers and thought: ‘Hang on, I can see her pants.’ ” Anyway, that’s what you’re wearing in my head. And a thong.

ROSA I don’t have a thong.

GARY In my head you do. It’s black, red’s vulgar and you’re much more tasteful than that. The little whale-tail bit sticks up over the waist-band of your skirt, then there’s three or four inches of beautiful brown back before I get to your top. In my head.

ROSA I don’t know, it seems a bit unfair; that I can trigger these erotic flights just by sticking on an old pair of jeans and a Guillemots tee-shirt.

GARY That’s only what you’re wearing. What I see is something else again. Plus it’s because you’re a girl, not ‘cos you’re special. Any girl would do.

DAVID I’d never looked at the sky properly, you know? I mean, I knew it was there. And Patrick Moore and stuff. But looking… it’s really big, and it’s full of stuff you’ve seen, of course you’ve seen it, everyone’s seen it, but you’ve never really… looked? And it’s brilliant. And I sit under it thinking “What does it all mean? What’s it all for?” All that old malarkey. “Is there a god? Was it all made?” You have to think that stuff when you’re sitting in the back-garden contemplating the heavens, that’s the rules. And then I thought, or I read somewhere.. random assembly of atoms. Them, you, me, this hill, Rosa’s underwear, all random assemblies of atoms, and that’s what it means, right? It means we’re random assemblies of atoms, and that’s wonderful, and what makes us, thinking people, or even people who don’t think they think but they do really, what makes us special is we know it. Some of us sort of pretend we don’t, we make up stories to get away from the scary random, but really we know. Us. We know.

ROSA Yes.

GARY So no god then? He’s out of the picture?

DAVID Yes.

GARY And also no thong?

ROSA No.

GARY Except in my head. Which is, I can tell you, full of thongs. Crawling with them. And the good thing about old Dave’s revelation there, no more god, all that, is I’ve got loads more room for thongs. Delete god, I free up gigs and gigs of memory, and now I’ve got room for cupboards full of thongs. Plus quite a few cars, and lots of episodes of The Mighty Boosh and Top Gear, and a whole area for the Chelsea. Most of it for thongs, though. Look, one of those star thingys.

DAVID And there. There. There. Dozens of them. Wow.

ROSA I’m a bit cold.

DAVID Let’s go back to the car then.

ROSA If you wanted, we could come back with dad’s telescope. If you wanted.

DAVID With your dad?

ROSA If you wanted. Or not.

DAVID Just us?

ROSA If you wanted.

DAVID We might have to bring Gary.

GARY Not me, mate. One night at such a high pitch of excitement and I’m quite worn out.

DAVID Tomorrow? Where’s your dad’s telescope?

ROSA He lives up by Archway. Pick me up at fourish, we can collect the telescope and drive fifty miles into Buckinghamshire.

GARY Fifty? You said twenty.

DAVID I lied. Coming?

GARY You two bugger off to the car, I’ll be down in a minute. I need another slash.

DAVID OK. See you in a minute.

David and Rosa off, Gary alone lying on his back, looking at the sky.

GARY See you... there’s another one. And another. And another. Fuck me.

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are,

Anything your heart desires

Will come to you.

Goodnight, Johnboy.

Fade to black, with the meteors doing their meteor thing all over the stage.

Christopher Lilly, June 12^th 2008.