A THREE THING DAY
Script Extracts
PROLOGUE
Does that make me
weird? I sit or stand and let my mind drift and see where it takes me.
I wondered who makes those detailed architectural models of banks and vaults and streets for criminals planning heists and getaways, and whether they then balance out that villainous work by building similar models for cupcake bakeries or puppy hospitals pro bono.
I thought momentarily about a friend who has a white goatee beard, and how if his face was a map of the world his chin would be Antarctica.
I used to believe that the singing of Happy Birthday was like an alarm and blowing out candles on your birthday cake was an annual display of fire safety guidelines; that by celebrating with this action in front of friends and family, you carry forth into your next twelve months a public appreciation of the perils of flames.
FROM THE FIRST THING OF THE DAY
And just then I get another feeling of vertigo.
That if you graphed the presence of a person, there is an enormous amount of time between the beginning of the universe and the end of the universe – all time, in fact – and we each exist on a tiny peak somewhere there, looking down behind us at the massive past before we were born, and then the vast future after we’ve gone, and meanwhile we have to cram in everything we can on that needle point of existence.
We have to experience birth, childhood, youth, work, standing in queues, sleeping, smiling, worrying about speaking, shopping, sneezing, and all the Thursdays of our lives in that relatively minuscule moment.
And it’s a lot.
No wonder people skip breakfast.
FROM THE SECOND THING OF THE DAY
The home shows
signs of missing. Her wife was competing in the Melville Challenge – a round-the-world
yacht race that involves every ship having a writer-in-residence on board who
has to produce an entire novel by the finishing line.
The catch was that the completed
literary work could not mention the sea at all.
Her boat was called
the Please Oceans, Don’t Sink Me! And
she’d last heard from her in the Southern Atlantic writing about cakes.
Or
maybe wool.
The signal out there was horrible.
FROM THE THIRD THING OF THE DAY
The carriage is
identical to the one I sat in on the trip to W this morning, a restaging of the
setting of Scene 1.
There are travellers already here, further along their
journey; other pilgrims board with me, a cohort of seat prospectors becoming
settlers as we move off. Someone has left a magazine on the table and I flick
to an article about Werewolfing, where you dump someone, but on a full moon,
send a howling voicenote to let them know you’re still thinking of them.
Across the aisle
are a team of teenagers, tagging each other in to continue a noisy assault on
the quiet. They’re discussing Killing In The Rage Of The Machine or something,
and I get that weird generational cultural disconnect like when you learn a
band you’ve never heard of is playing an enormous venue, and how is that
allowed to happen?
