Barker, Plays Eight

by Howard Barker

  SAVAGE: I heard it.

  BOY: I heard it! Books blew everywhere!

  MACLUBY: And you stayed put. While demolition cowboys ripped the wiring out.

  SAVAGE: KNOWLEDGE!

  MACLUBY: While they smashed the basins kept your seat.

  SAVAGE: KNOWLEDGE!

  MACLUBY: Their curses, their pornographic sentiments.

  SAVAGE: KNOWLEDGE!

  MACLUBY: The clatter of their arid minds and mundane politics.

  SAVAGE: (Pause.) It was a paper overcoat against their spit…(THE BOY holds SAVAGE.) I lost his mother. She could not stomach me. My whine and bite. My sitting in the edge of the chair. PUT YOUR ARSE BACK IN THE CHAIR! I could not. My whine and bite…

  MACLUBY: Give us the kid. (Pause.)

  SAVAGE: Give you the –

  MACLUBY: Give us him, why don’t you? (Pause.)

  SAVAGE: Who are –

  MACLUBY: Harry Macluby. Soap boiler.

  SAVAGE: Soap boiler?

  MACLUBY: Well, do you want him or not? (Pause.) On your sick bed, writhing like a worm on baking bricks, shouting the whole length of the ward, I DID NOTHING WITH MY LIFE, BECAUSE OF THEM, THEY WEIGHED ON ME. Your cry of misery would lift the gutters off the hospital…(Pause.)

  SAVAGE: SOAP BOILER?

  MACLUBY: Ashes of Roses. (Pause.)

  SAVAGE: My mother ditched me also…

  MACLUBY: There you go…

  SAVAGE: A poor boy will find his benefactress…

  MACLUBY: Inevitably, and what use are you?

  SAVAGE: No use…

  MACLUBY: All your kisses papered over hate…

  SAVAGE: I DRINK HIS FONDNESS AND RESENT HIS LIFE.

  MACLUBY: You know, you see, you do know…

  SAVAGE: Love of children, what is it? Self-love. The clinging of a desperate mortality. You have to understand the feeling. Not just feel the feeling or you are a mollusc. What are you, a murderer?

  MACLUBY: Silly.

  SAVAGE: And in five years he will not lend me one stale breath…

  MACLUBY: It’s so, it is…

  SAVAGE: (To THE BOY.) THIS MAN WANTS YOU.

  BOY: Wants me?

  SAVAGE: He says.

  BOY: What for?

  SAVAGE: Apprenticeship in the soap trade.

  BOY: Soap?

  SAVAGE: SOAP, YES, SOAP! (Pause.) Get your things. (Pause.)

  BOY: I think, in spite of everything, although you will probably murder me, I would prefer to stay with –

  SAVAGE: Toothbrush. Flannel. And clean pants.

  BOY: Rather die from you bashing me in one of your fits than –

  SAVAGE: Pyjamas if you’ve got some –

  BOY: LIVE WITH ANYBODY ELSE. (Pause. SAVAGE refuses to look at him.) I LOVE YOU.

  SAVAGE: Love, he says. That word. Emaciated syllable. (He looks at him.) Replace the word love with another. And you will see how thin it is.

  BOY: There is no other.

  SAVAGE: MOLLUSC!

  BOY: You are always calling me a mollusc…

  SAVAGE: Yes…(Pause.)

  BOY: You are so unhappy. And I can’t help…(Pause, then THE BOY goes off.)

  SAVAGE: You see, how I have become his child, and he is burdened with me. I make him suffer for me. (He looks at MACLUBY.) Teach him Ashes of Roses. The man who can smother mortality in scent, or wash blood off the hands of killers will not lack for friends. (THE OLD MAN enters with a plate of dinner. He looks at SAVAGE, pitying him.)

  OLD MAN: (To MACLUBY.) I said to him, travel. Travel the world, go on.

  MACLUBY: He hates the world…

  OLD MAN: The merchant navy, for example. See things while you have the power.

  MACLUBY: The Taj Mahal. The pyramids…

  OLD MAN: The Taj Mahal. The pyramids…

  SAVAGE: The truth is not all in that junk, you –

  MACLUBY: Old Moscow’s onion domes…(THE BOY returns, with a small bag. He stands waiting. SAVAGE looks at him, suddenly weeps. THE BOY goes to touch him.)

  SAVAGE: No…! (Pause, then MACLUBY leads the way and THE BOY follows. Pause.)

  OLD MAN: Football, is it? (He puts the plate down, starts to go.)

  SAVAGE: I owe you nothing, do I? (He stops.) Because you grated on my mother, what’s the debt?

  OLD MAN: No debt, son.

  SAVAGE: And because one not-so-very-mad night I squirmed against his mother, to the ticking of the wedding present and the clatter of the drunkards in the sick-swamped street, so setting in motion the torture of paternity, I OWE NO DEBT, ME NEITHER, DO I? (Pause.) Argue. Argue for your rights to me.

  OLD MAN: No rights.

  SAVAGE: No rights…(THE OLD MAN turns to leave again.) And what is intimacy anyway?

  OLD MAN: Search me…

  SAVAGE: I clung to her and it was two pebbles clashing. (THE OLD MAN looks.) When I was in her, hard against her womb, some razor slashed my head, some miniature blade designed to kill conception YOU DON’T EXPECT TO FIND KNIVES IN THERE OF ALL PLACES. Anyway, it failed, and he was born…

  OLD MAN: (Nodding after THE BOY.) Football today, is it? (A hiatus of pity.) Did I ever thank you for the books?

  SAVAGE: Books?

  OLD MAN: On Homeric metre. By Dr. Savage of the University. To My Father on that great big empty page.

  SAVAGE: Christ knows why I –

  OLD MAN: An introduction to the Iliad. In Memory of my Mother.

  SAVAGE: Barmy reflex of a clever son –

  OLD MAN: No, I –

  SAVAGE: DON’T LICK FEELING OFF THAT LINE OF ARID PRINT. (Pause.)

  OLD MAN: Wha’? (Pause.)

  SAVAGE: The binding was so poor the leaves fell out. As if they were ashamed to hang with such a dedication –

  OLD MAN: Wha’?

  SAVAGE: THE SENTIMENTAL LIAR I HAVE BEEN.

  OLD MAN: Kind thought I thought…

  SAVAGE: Kind thought? I hated you. Your mundane opinions. Your repetition of half-truths. Straddling my back. You burden. You dead weight. HE’S GONE SO WHY DON’T YOU. (THE OLD MAN turns.) No one is here for long. Who knows, some death might be already on me. Some growth in the dark, deep wet. Give us some time for my own needs. Old bones. Old pelt. (THE OLD MAN withdraws some yards behind SAVAGE, and sits.) We can have knowledge, but not in passivity. Knowledge exists, but the path is strewn with obstacles. (THE OLD MAN breaks the plate.) These obstacles we ourselves erect. (He takes a shard.) The conspiracy of the ignorant against the visionary can be broken only by the ruthless intellect. (He undoes his vest.) Pity also is a regime. (He attempts to cut his throat.) And consideration a manacle.

  OLD MAN: Trying…

  SAVAGE: Manners –

  OLD MAN: Trying…

  SAVAGE: Loyalty –

  OLD MAN: Trying, fuck it –

  SAVAGE: Responsibility, IRON BANDS ON THE BRAIN. (HOGBIN enters with a book.)

  HOGBIN: Helen was a whore in any case, it says – (He sees THE OLD MAN.) Oi.

  SAVAGE: KNOWLEDGE IS BEYOND KINDNESS YOU KNOW –

  HOGBIN: OI!

  SAVAGE: Shut up…(THE OLD MAN succeeds, gurgles.)

  HOGBIN: Hey! Fucking hey!

  SAVAGE: I know. I know he is. (HOGBIN stares at him. THE OLD MAN dies. SAVAGE suddenly seizes HOGBIN, in a horrified embrace.) KISS ME, THEN! MY TRIUMPH! KISS ME, THEN!

  HOGBIN: Oh, fucking –

  SAVAGE: KISS ME!

  HOGBIN: Oh, bloody ‘ell –

  SAVAGE: MY LIBERTY! MY APPALLING LIBERTY!

  HOGBIN: (Tearing from his embrace.) Oh, shit and shit –

  SAVAGE: Don’t leave me.

  HOGBIN: HE – LP

  SAVAGE: (Grasping him tightly.) Did it…did it…did it…(They rock to and fro. Pause.)

  HOGBIN: Blood’s tickling my toes…warm tickle…old man’s contents…old man’s drain…(He shudders.)

  OLD MAN: We left the lorry on the road, looking for crashed bombers on the scarp, sun in, sun out, behind these towering clouds and dark drenches of rain, I wa
s alone and saw the tailplane in a smudge of trees, or wing was it, with roundels of the R.A.F., and my boots went swish towards it, swish through downland flowers while the wind creaked faintly in the beached boughs of the thorny trees, alone and hot, smell of tunic, smell of blanco, swish went the poppy heads, alone and hot UP SHOT LIKE RABBITS FROM A DIP TWO NAKED ARSES brown as polish, gipsies fucking to the rhythm of that wing in scattered tracer belts and navigation clocks, swish the pelting of their feet, leaving her arse print in the turf, her shoulder blades were printed in the turf until with little jerks the grass stood up again. (Pause.)

  SAVAGE: The death of my father necessitates the cancellation of our next tutorial.

  HOGBIN: For grief, is that?

  SAVAGE: Grief, yes.

  HOGBIN: The socialized consequence of death is naturally bereavement but under grief the individual might conceal some inexplicable delight. (Pause.) I pose the question only –

  SAVAGE: I SAID YOU HUNGRY ADOLESCENT NO TUTORIAL.

  HOGBIN: Not a tutorial, no, but –

  SAVAGE: My old man’s dead, whose dry hand was the only proof of goodness I knew yet, I carried him through Troy! (Pause.) ‘To think my boy taught brilliance here’, he said, to reprimand the red-backed bastards ripping off the roof. He never read books but still he hated televisions, he chucked them out the windows of the flats, some instinct he had for shattering mendacity, the incorruptible old sod…

  HOGBIN: The spontaneity of violence is surely the formal resistance of the proletariat to –

  SAVAGE: WON’T TEACH. (He goes to arrange THE OLD MAN.)

  HOGBIN: Give us yer handkerchief…(SAVAGE gives him a rag. He wipes the blood from his feet.)

  SAVAGE: I’m sorry I was born, and sorry I was cured, sorry I fell in love, and sorry I was married, sorry and sorry again for every choice I –

  HOGBIN: (Wiping himself.) Yeah, but was it a choice? You presuppose the possibility of refusals –

  SAVAGE: Oh, you arid youth, I think the young are barren as a shaft of concrete in the Sahara sun.

  HOGBIN: Bollocks, you rhetorical shitter –

  SAVAGE: WISDOM, not cleverness. KNOWLEDGE, not retorts. TRUTH, not wit. One bit of truth felt in the veins!

  HOGBIN: You are a pile of metred drivel, why I sit here fuck knows, when –

  SAVAGE: One truth! One truth! NOT A LOT TO ASK IS IT!

  HOGBIN: Read Buka on the nature of hyperbole, it’s ‘ere somewhere – (He pulls filthy pages from a pocket. SAVAGE kicks it across the floor.)

  SAVAGE: GOT TO SUFFER!

  HOGBIN: (Gathering the precious pages.) You are a plastic bag of urine –

  SAVAGE: SUFFER, YOUTH!

  HOGBIN: Tossed against a corrugated fence – there, now I’m doin’ it. (MACLUBY appears. Pause.)

  MACLUBY: I gave the boy a ball. His eyes went big. He’s nine and he can’t catch.

  SAVAGE: I hate balls. The ball returns the idea after every revolution. No effort, no struggle of the intellect. Give him a polygon to kick. (MACLUBY turns to go.) A FATHER ALSO LOVES BUT THROUGH A GRATING. Tell him that…

  SCENE THREE

  HELEN with A HUSBAND, seated.

  HELEN: I’m back. (Pause.) My arse in the marital chair. (Pause.) My piss in the marital pan. (Pause.) WELL, BE DELIGHTED. (Pause.) You ache to touch me, but you won’t. And silence is your knife. Twist away! (Pause.) Troy was full of intellectuals. I saw their corpses. Their corpses hung on wires. DO HIT ME IF YOU WANT TO, OTHERS DID. (Pause.) And all of them kept diaries, always their diaries in a miniature hand like lice had crept through inkwells. ANY PALTRY THOUGHT THEY DEEMED IMMORTAL. Fevered note-takers and every scrap was burned by troops, every leaf! (Pause.) The comedy of history. (Pause.) BURST MY FACE OR I SHALL GO ON TALKING. (Pause.) I saw one on his knees to drunken squaddies who said not SPARE MY LIFE, not like the shopkeeper who offered them his wife to whip to pulp, but I BEG YOU SMUGGLE OUT THIS BOOK. I saw the thing kicked down a gutter, the pages bound in fat and sweat, the banality, the futility! I AM PHILISTINE AND LOVELESS…(Pause.)

  FLADDER: Helen fucks the wounded in the wards, they said. (Pause.) Which aroused me. SHAMEFULLY. (Pause.) Or dogs, some ventured to suggest. Which aroused me. SHAMEFULLY. (Pause.) The filthy infantry. The long lick of their dreams. (Pause.) I crept to the canvas in the dew, sodden and erect, to eavesdrop what malpractice their knotted maleness would inflict on you. (Pause.) Our suffering. Our ecstasy. (SOLDIERS enter, with CREUSA.)

  GUMMERY: Every light bulb. Every cage bird.

  SADE/EPSOM: PULVER!

  GUMMERY: Pity was our banner, as you wrote in final orders. So the tarts we spared…

  EPSOM: And infants, if they did not cry too loud.

  GUMMERY: Troy’s gone. Nothing to block the wind off Asia now. ARSEHOLES TO THIS BITCH. I must say that. (He bows to HELEN.) Your servant, etcetera.

  SHADE: Ten years goes by in a flash…

  EPSOM: That final bugle made my heart sink. I never smelled depression like it, even in defeat. It hung over the trenches like a fog, and the champagne corks were miserable squibs. No one could work up any speeches, we drifted past old weapon pits and put out our lips against the hinges of burnt tanks. Go home? My wife is fucking with the priest, I had it from my brother. What did he think, I’d put a pistol in my gob and make him heir to seven dirty acres? Not that I blame him. Nor the priest, him neither. I blame no one. ARSEHOLES TO THIS BITCH, HOWEVER. (He bows to HELEN.) I must say that. (He sits on the floor.)

  CREUSA: (Looking at her.) Helen…!

  FLADDER: (Pause.) The word. (Pause.) HELEN. (Pause.) The idea. (Pause.) HELEN. (Pause.)

  CREUSA: Alive!

  FLADDER: She stinks like a horse. I say this, I announce this, I announce this because the idea has got around she is ethereal. No, I assure you it is not the case. I know she stood naked on the battlements in the seventh year –

  GUMMERY: The eighth –

  FLADDER: The eighth year, was it, stood naked and the wind sneaked round her parts, the cool wind out the Caucasus, fresh with snow and hibiscus, but still she had the odour of the mare, why did you do that? The army laughed, seeing you less than perfect. Seeing your body rather flawed. Of course they knew sex is not in the proportions, but still they laughed, calling the cooks out of their tents, staring and jabbering, why did she do that? (Pause.)

  CREUSA: I’ve been passed round a bit myself…not bad…not the worst thing in the world, to have no choice. (Pause.) Not the worst thing.

  EPSOM: (Nudging his neighbour.) Oi…

  CREUSA: The worst thing is –

  GUMMERY: (Indicating FLADDER, who weeps.) Oi…

  CREUSA: To imagine choice exists…(Two of the soldiers go to FLADDER placing their hand on his shoulders.)

  HELEN: Oh, the solidarity of weeping men…(HOGBIN enters, stops.)

  HOGBIN: Europe’s a mess…(They look at him.) I say the only ideology is total scepticism…That’s not an ideology, he says. (He looks them over.) What’s this..? (They examine him.) This is a university, so point yer firearms downwards, there’s a love…(They make no move.) What’s this…? (Pause. He is undeterred.) Ruins or not, it’s still a seat of learning and so is any place where questions are still asked. Balls to chancellors and piss on economics. THE TROJANS DID NOT SCATTER, why should we? Some remained, he says so, fat guts says they fucked their conquerors, MESSAGE FOR THE OPPRESSED! (SAVAGE enters. HOGBIN bows mockingly.) The wobbling residue of culture! (He rises.) He imitates the amoeba, which cannot be squashed by jeeps.

  HELEN: I know him.

  HOGBIN: She knows you…!

  HELEN: Staggering through courtyards under books. Boiled in your sweat. A stew of anger and unhealthy fat…

  HOGBIN: She knows you…!

  HELEN: And looking along the wires of dangling intellects I thought, the fat one has escaped my husband’s spite…

  SAVAGE: Eventually the camps will shut, and rusty execution sheds fall down in gales, and guards retire to plants begonias. ALL FORGOTTEN! (Pause.) But
one still excavates the files, plucks memoirs out of bonfires, and keeps testimony safe in his archival head…(EPSOM moves to threaten SAVAGE, who shrinks to the frowns.) Don’t spill the head! (EPSOM stops, bemused.) It contains the agony of others, like a cup…(He looks up.) You are Helen of Troy…(She weeps suddenly, cradling him in her arms.)

  HELEN: Yes…and now…obscurity…! (Pause. SHADE picks up his kit.)

  SHADE: Home, James…!

  FLADDER: Home?

  SHADE: Bands playing on the quay. And similar shit. Flags in babies’ gobs. And similar shit. (To CREUSA.) Carry my loot, you!

  FLADDER: This is home.

  SHADE: Wha’?

  FLADDER: Where so much hate has concentrated, that must be home also.

  SHADE: (To CREUSA.) Mind my mirror!

  GUMMERY: IT’S HOME HE SAYS. (SHADE stops.)

  SHADE: Wha’? (Pause.)

  GUMMERY: I never knew a Trojan, nor heard of Troy. And yet, no sooner had my boot touched Trojan pebble but –

  FLADDER: You hated.

  GUMMERY: Just like that. Peculiar.

  SAVAGE: Not peculiar. (Pause. They look at him.)

  HOGBIN: Careful, clever…

  SAVAGE: May I speak?

  HOGBIN: CARE – FUL…! (Pause.)

  SAVAGE: The war was already in you. Do you think hatred has no life? It’s born with you. It howls in your first howl. Impatient loathing coiled behind your tongue which on the pretext ROLLED OUT LIKE A PYTHON, a hundred feet of scales…(Pause.) The kind man racks his mind how thousands might grapple in the mud for a single woman. The disbelief! Or the lout stab the pensioner’s eyes! The kind man should stare down his own throat…(Pause.)

  SHADE: (In realisation.) Whad’ yer mean, this is his home?

  FLADDER: (Leaping up.) Nobody goes!

  SHADE: Fuck that –

  FLADDER: GENDARMES! (GUMMERY goes to grab the mirror from CREUSA.)

  SHADE: MY MIRROR!

  FLADDER: Home the lie, home the sentiment!