Barker, Plays Eight

by Howard Barker

  SAVAGE: It’s twigs…

  CREUSA: Not as bad as you might –

  SAVAGE: It’s twigs…

  MACLUBY: Climb in, Dr Savage…

  SAVAGE: (A terrible connection.) IT’S A PYRE!

  MACLUBY: You are the one who wants the knowledge –

  SAVAGE: A PYRE WHEN I’M NOT DEAD…!

  CREUSA: All right, all right…

  SAVAGE: NOT DEAD…

  CREUSA: Shh…shh… (He mounts the bed. He sits rigidly and apart from her. The occasional rattle from THE CROWD.)

  MACLUBY: And Odysseus went to Penelope, and slew her suitors, and having washed the blood from his hands, undressed her, and she undressed him, and as she did, his eyes travelled her worn and imperfect body, and her eyes saw his decay, and they wept, and pity was the source of his tumescence… what else could it have been?

  CREUSA: Look at me with new eyes, or we shan’t do it…

  SAVAGE: I can’t.

  CREUSA: It can be done.

  SAVAGE: Anything can be done, but not with new eyes…

  CREUSA: Hold my hand, then –

  SAVAGE: Trying –

  CREUSA: Hold it – (Se extends hers. THE CROWD whistles and claps.) HOLD IT… (With a spasm of pain, SAVAGE thrusts his hand into hers. More applause.) It’s all right…! It’s all right…!

  MACLUBY: The Political Fuck! Not for the first time, the Political Fuck! (As THE CROWD chants its approval, HELEN appears pushed by HOMER.)

  HELEN: What can you see?

  HOMER: You’ve got the eyes, not me –

  HELEN: To the left!

  HOMER: Some agony –

  HELEN: The right then! (THE CROWD obscures her view.) Oh, shift you fragrant lawyers!

  MACLUBY: (Watching SAVAGE’s agony.) He squirms, he sweats, but that’s the pain a rebirth brings, is birth was painless, would a child be loved?

  HOMER: What do you see?

  HELEN: (Straining.) A bed –

  HOMER: A bed –

  HELEN: A terrible bed…

  MACLUBY: This is the union from which all stale and mothy marriages will suck their consolation!

  GAY: (Like a trainer.) Kiss him, kiss him, do! MORE LAMPS, THEY ARE OBSCURE!

  (Spotlight heat the bed.) The lips release the tongue, the tongue unlocks the fingers, the fingers free the fastenings, the fastenings ungate the flesh, oh, claim her, do…! (With a desperate effort of will, SAVAGE flings himself on CREUSA. THE CROWD surges as the bed is drawn out of sight.)

  MACLUBY: (Laughing.) Knowledge…! Knowledge…!

  HELEN: Oh, my own madman, does he grin or weep…?

  SCENE FOUR

  HELEN is alone, SHADE’s cage at her feet. THE BOY enters, no longer a boy.

  BOY: My father and my mother have been reconciled. And in spite of her advancing years, she has conceived. They are calling it a miracle.

  HELEN: Miracles happen when desire’s dead…

  BOY: My father wanted me to be an intellectual, but I lean towards business. (Pause.)

  HELEN: You are the soap maker.

  BOY: I wash out minds as well… (He peers into the cage.) Is there meant to be a bird in here?

  HELEN: Yes. He sings all day long.

  BOY: Can’t hear him.

  HELEN: Really? I find him deafening. Why are you dressed like an undertaker?

  BOY: An undertaker? No one has ever said that before. I think of myself as a bridegroom. May I tell you about soap? It is my obsession.

  HELEN: How lucky you are to have an obsession. And you can’t be more than thirty-two.

  BOY: Oh, dear, I think you are going to interrupt me all the time.

  HELEN: Isn’t that allowed?

  BOY: It breaks the flow.

  HELEN: I don’t like flows. The best things can be said staccato.

  BOY: Nevertheless, I will persist.

  HELEN: How can I avoid you? My nurse is old and falls asleep, and it’s not as though an amputee has anything to block her ears with –

  BOY: I came to soap thinking is a product –

  HELEN: You would not believe the sheer variety of human innocence that foists itself on me! Poets, infertile women, men with agony inside their trousers, I have to tolerate the lot –

  BOY: But it is not a product, it is a culture. For example –

  HELEN: (Conceding.) ALL RIGHT, FLOW. (Pause.)

  BOY: There has never yet been a society that could tolerate the smell of human flesh, can you explain that? The individuals who live with most intensity the odour of mankind have always been the outcast, the vagrant, the dispossessed. We are born with a profound revulsion for our own scent, an antipathy formed during some nightmare travel down the birth canal – I speculate – but certainly the odour of the mass can turn the stomach and I believe the essence of the human smell to be a lethal toxin. This soap’s justification and the fulcrum of an honourable career. (He smiles.) But my concentration on the subject led me further, as indeed all concentration will, no matter how banal the subject. The great banker also knows the human heart. So soap revealed its laws to me. (Pause.) Your eyes are shut but you hear everything, I know –

  HELEN: You have his voice, but without the edge of panic that clung to all his vowels…

  BOY: My flow, please… (Pause.) Soap makes harmony, and made with proper inspiration, lets imagination compensate for impossibly demanding life. Which brings me to my point, that you might understand the need for what I hope to call Essential Helen, as Hogbin’s body, all kindness and purity, pervades the Trojan spirit now. (Pause.) Respond, by all means. (She is silent.) Sometimes the horror of an idea is only the boom of its essential truth… (Pause.) And now you won’t talk…! (Pause.) We see in your life spectacularly the price or Eros. I don’t stoop to criticize, but simply draw to your attention the fifteen thousand orphans of the Peloponnese, the wail of widows and wounds of conscripts whose total ache would lift the mountains off their feet, I am not judging, you understand I am not ethical, the children of these wars eat murder with their breakfast. I don’t judge.

  HELEN: What you describe is consequence. I refuse the blame. Every conscript had his choice and every widow could have blocked her man. But if they died for Eros, where’s the tragedy in that? In other wars they’ll scream for flags, sometimes for banks, or even books, I’ve heard. No, cunt’s a worthy cause as slaughters go.

  BOY: You garb the argument! Beauty has this effect, it stirs the blood, and yes, it is a truth of sorts.

  HELEN: Truth…? Oh, don’t drag truth in, I’m over sixty –

  BOY: Very well, but whether it’s a truth or not, it cannot be a lie –

  HELEN: Beauty is a lie! Of course it is a lie! (He shrugs.) It is simply the best available lie on the subject of truth… (Pause. He smiles, shaking his head.)

  BOY: My flow…my flow… (Pause.) But I proceed. However great the pain your Eros brought, we cannot dispense with Eros. It lives in all of us. It cries, and breathes.

  HELEN: In you? It cries, and breathes?

  BOY: (Charmingly.) Now, that is sabotage –

  HELEN: Preposterous claim –

  BOY: All right, it cries in varying degrees, but because I don’t stand out at passing skirt is no –

  HELEN: He must defend his sprig!

  BOY: Really, you will not disorganize me by –

  HELEN: I won’t disorganize him –

  BOY: By some phallic contest which –

  HELEN: He’s not disorganized –

  BOY: Is both grotesque, pernicious and –

  HELEN: He’s not, he’s definitely not disorganized –

  BOY: No –

  HELEN: And I don’t want to disorganize you, God knows the mayhem if you were, I shrink to think, the uncaging of, the swollen veins, no, no, you stay as you are! (Pause.)

  BOY: (Coolly.) You are piqued.

  HELEN: The flow, for pity’s sake.

  BOY: You are piqued and I know why.

  HELEN: Me? Helen? Piqued?

  BOY: Because I
look at you with cool and level eyes. (Pause.)

  HELEN: You do. I grant you that.

  BOY: Which you are unaccustomed to.

  HELEN: (Pause. Then with inspiration.) The story of the Actress in the Penal Colony! The star who had made a million men throb in the stalls found the interrogator unyielding and her breasts showing though the dirty quilted jacket moved his lust his pity his ambition NOT ONE BIT so solid and so thick the plating of his IDEOLOGY, and this made her weep. But when she had been returned to the cells he locked his door and stropped himself. AT THAT MOMENT THE SOUL OF THE PARTY DIED. (Pause.) You are so oblique and so well-mannered, a proper skater, as black as a fly and impossible to swat. A man for the age. Why do you want my body?

  BOY: To give all women, so all women may be, at moments of their choice, Hellenic… (A terrible howl comes from HELEN.) You howl – yes – you howl but –

  HELEN: MY – OPIC PER – FUMIER!

  BOY: The lending of transgression to the ashamed, the loan of passion to the guilty, the licensing of total love to the domestic –

  HELEN: FASTIDIOUS SYCOPHANT!

  BOY: YOU DON’T LIKE PEOPLE –

  HELEN: No –

  BOY: You scorn their simple pleasures, you mock the scale of their imagination –

  HELEN: Yes, every day!

  BOY: IT’S UNFORGIVABLE! (Pause.)

  HELEN: Could I ever forgive myself if I were forgivable? (Pause. He looks at her.)

  BOY: Your lonely and malevolent life… (Pause.) We terribly want to help you –

  HELEN: Afraid –

  BOY: Who –

  HELEN: You. Afraid.

  BOY: Afraid, of what?

  HELEN: Afraid I’ll cling in the imagination of a girl, or in a boy’s head, make all his thoughts unscholarly… (Pause.)

  BOY: Helen – if I may call you Helen –

  HELEN: Well, don’t call me anything else –

  BOY: Helen –

  HELEN: That’s it, though you say it oddly –

  BOY: You have not seen yourself for years.

  HELEN: No. I have no mirror.

  BOY: I think, if you were to – examine your appearance – you might understand that your capacity for mischief is now, sadly –

  HELEN: You talk like a shrivelled priest, and the language shrivels when you talk it – do you mean I’m ugly? I was born ugly. You think that slipping and sliding word circumscribes my power? You’re not – though a lipstick maker and a skin-cream bottler – so bereft of knowledge as all that surely? (Pause.) No, you cannot have my fat to let unsuffering women play at deepest life…better the crabs get dinner off me… (He goes out. FLADDER comes in, carrying the gong.) They want to smear themselves with essence, the new Trojans. Think with a soap called Helen they might temporarily contract desire. Sign nothing. And when I’m gone, in the sea with the remnants, they will boil me otherwise and use my fat to humiliate some unborn class… (Pause.) Tell me, is it possible for Helen to be old? (He gongs. Pause. A CHILD enters, without arms.) Oh, look, she has in her the same appalling gift…! (HELEN grins.) It’s in her hip…the tilting of her head…OH, THE WRECK OF DOMESTICITY AND THE TEARING OF MEN FROM REGULAR EMPLOYMENT…!

  CHARITY: What?

  HELEN: Shh! Your mother!

  CHARITY: Tear men from regular employment? How?

  HELEN: I can’t be told, it happens!

  GAY: (Entering.) Listen! The Festival of Families! And we’ll be late! (THE CHILD runs off. GAY follows, then stops.) May I kiss you?

  HELEN: Kiss me…?

  GAY: Yes. (Pause, then GAY kisses her, goes out. Pause.)

  HELEN: (Apprehensively.) I think I am going to be killed. (Pause.) Beat the gong then… (Pause.) So they are killing me, WHO IS. (Pause.) You know and you’re not telling me! (Pause.) WHO IS. (Pause.) You? (Pause.) Well why not you? Because it isn’t in your character? WHAT IS YOUR CHARACTER? To think any one of us is knowable, when personality is only crystal grinding between stones, DON’T COME NEAR ME YET. (He is still.) I want to be killed. But in a gush of violence. I wanted to be beaten out of life by some mad male all red about the neck and veins outstanding like the protesting prostitute in the bite of the night, discovered all brain and sheet and stocking NOT THIS COLD POLITICAL THING, hacked to shreds among the bed things NOT THIS, the wonderful gore that trickled underneath the door, NOT THIS THOUGH! (Pause. He is still.) Who signed the warrant? (She looks at him.) THE ENTIRE POPULATION DID? Oh, come on, even the children? AND THE AS YET UNBORN? (SAVAGE enters, stops. She glimpses him.) Don’t come near. I would rather be blind than see you again. Oh, suddenly the air is thick with stale longings, and sweats gone acid with betrayal, OLD HUSBAND AND OLD LOVER, I would prefer to be slashed by a passing killer than you two set about me kindly, considerate in strangling, considerate in suffocation, THE CONSIDERATE LOVER WAS ALWAYS THE WORST – (SAVAGE makes a move.) DON’T COME INTO MY EYE LINE, I WOULD RAM MY SIGHT OUT RATHER ON A BRANCH! (He freezes. She averts her face.) Oh, this purgatory of flowerbeds, in Old Troy temper was the rule, I don’t belong and – WHERE’S HOMER! (Pause.) Oh, my maker’s gone… Someone has extinguished him… what for? A POET’S SOAP? (She looks at SAVAGE.) It must have been you…what was it? Did his weeping anger you? We do feel bitter, don’t we, towards the genius whose final statements are so trite? But he was silent at the end…the spectacle of me…robbed him of speech… Whereas you…are shameless…which I loved… (EPSOM enters, with a cloth. She sees him, from the corner of her eye.) The knacker comes. (She grins.) One for the soap yard!

  EPSOM: Got a job to do…

  HELEN: A job, he calls it! Magnificent monster! And for a terrible hour I thought there was no one left who hadn’t changed!

  EPSOM: Change, for what?

  HELEN: For what! Exactly! Look at him, as unredeemed as when a dirty boy he worked his snot between his tutor’s teeth… (Pause. EPSOM goes to HELEN.)

  EPSOM: (Intimately.) Be yer mate…

  HELEN: (Not grasping his meaning.) Why not be my mate! What’s a little strangulation between friends? I have seen torturers play chess with their victims, and the mothers of drowned infants fuck the perpetrators, no, it’s all right, it is! (He goes to cover her.) SAV – AGE! (Pause.) Can you watch this? (Pause.) You can. You can watch this… (EPSOM silences her by dropping the cloth over her face. He puts his hands about her throat. He exerts. He stops. Pause.) No, that’s wrong, surely… (He grimaces, as if at effort.) The way you handle my neck, Les, I’ve been loved better –

  EPSOM: DIE! (He exerts.)

  HELEN: Yes, I long to, but –

  EPSOM: DIE! (A pause, her head drops forwards. An immediate cacophony of factory whistles.)

  FLADDER: The revolutionaries are flunkeys, too! The terrorists transport dominion in their handshakes!

  WE KNOW BUT WE STILL ACT!

  WE KNOW BUT WE STILL ACT! (EPSOM drives away THE AUDIENCE which has gathered at the scene. FLADDER runs out.)

  EPSOM: Fuck off! Scarper! (A WOMAN is going near THE BODY.) Off yer vermin!

  WOMAN: Cures tumours, whore’s blood!

  EPSOM: No, it’s ‘angman’s spit yer thinkin’ of! (He gobs at her. She flees. He laughs. Others risk his blows to touch HELEN for luck, and run.)

  SAVAGE: I can watch. I can watch anything.

  EPSOM: It’s a gift, mate… (THE PUBLIC are repulsed by EPSOM.)

  SAVAGE: I think to believe in every lie is better than to see through every truth…

  EPSOM: (Fetching a broom.) Sweeping up…

  SAVAGE: (Draws near HELEN.) In passion, the woman births the man. The convulsions of her flesh are births…

  EPSOM: (Sweeping.) I wouldn’t know…CLEAR OF THE BODY, PLEASE!

  SAVAGE: Imagine, then.

  EPSOM: Who, me?

  SAVAGE: Why not you? (EPSOM shrugs.) I INSIST THAT YOU IMAGINE. (EPSOM stops sweeping.) To have had Helen, imagine it…

  EPSOM: Trying…

  SAVAGE: Yes, but to have had Helen, and to have no longer, IMAGINE THAT. (EPSOM shrugs.) T
he greater the love, the more terrible the knowledge of its absence. No sooner did she love me than I longed for her death, AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A MONSTER! (Pause.)

  EPSOM: I think –

  SAVAGE: YES!

  EPSOM: I think –

  SAVAGE: I AM WHAT YOU ARE ONLY IN YOUR DREAMS. (He goes to HELEN, and takes her in his arms.)

  EPSOM: (Horrified.) CLEAR OF THE BODY!

  SAVAGE: Down the tunnels of her ears, I whisper… (He mutters.) Down the chasm of her throat I murmur… (He draws the cloth from her mouth and kisses her.)

  EPSOM: ALL RIGHT…! (SAVAGE lets the cloth fall, goes out. Pause. Then EPSOM goes to HELEN and removes the cloth. Pause.)

  HELEN: Not dead…

  Until he spoke…

  Not dead….

  WHY NOT, BASTARD…!

  EPSOM: Search me –

  HELEN: Any death I would have welcomed and you spare me to hear that!

  EPSOM: I thought –

  HELEN: What was it, pity?

  EPSOM: I suppose –

  HELEN: Pity…!

  EPSOM: I take life and I’m criticized, I give life and I’m criticized, CAN’T I PITY SOMETIMES, TOO?

  HELEN: Oh, utter decline… Helen pitied… And I thought…for a moment… I dared think you had spared me for lust… (She laughs.)

  SCENE FIVE

  CREUSA comes in, an old woman pregnant. SAVAGE is alone.

  SAVAGE: It’s time. (Pause.) It’s time to write the book.

  CREUSA: On what? Soap wrappers?

  SAVAGE: Your interventions were always so mundane.

  CREUSA: There is so little paper here and one time it was blowing down the gutters, wrapped around the lamp-posts, fine cartridge, too, but who remembers Paper Troy? Collect today for tomorrow may be barren! As for pencils…!

  SAVAGE: Can’t write the book, then…

  CREUSA: And reading’s out of date…

  SAVAGE: (Relieved.) Can’t write the book… (She shrugs, sits on a stool.) Inevitable. The greatest document fails to exist. (CHARITY hurries in.)

  CHARITY: Skipped Hygiene! Skipped Good Citizens and Family Love! Don’t tell! (She is about to run out.)

  SAVAGE: Seen a bit of paper?

  CHARITY: Paper? What’s that?

  CREUSA: You see…!

  CHARITY: Oh, that stuff the soap comes in?