And I felt so bad and no one could tell me why and by this time I wasn’t a kid any more. I was like eleven, twelve years of age, but that hit me so bad.
And I started to cuss the teachers and the cussing led to fighting with the teachers and that’s when Momma said she couldn’t cope with me any more and I had to move away from her.
Saw her a few times at the hospital because they wanted to study us on account of some professor who had a theory that it was something in all those slushies that made me angry with the teachers and something in the fluorescent light in the store that gave Momma her cancer.
I reckon that’s not true and those things just happened to us and that maybe if I get to ask Jesus one day he’ll let me know. Jesus had quite a few cuts too by the end and I reckon he understands why I do this to myself.
I like Jesus, although I never met him. But I believe it’s possible.
. . . Is that what you wanted?
Pete How many cuts you got there, Donny?
Donny I never counted them.
Pete You never counted them?
Donny I never did.
Pete You wanna compare?
Donny I reckon.
Pete Let’s see who’s got the most.
He takes off his shirt.
What do you think about that?
Donny You sure have got some beauties.
Pete But who’s got the best? Who’s the winner here, Donny?
Donny Well, I don’t know.
Pete Who would you say has the most cuts here?
Alain It’s the same.
Pete Oh no. Gotta be a winner. That’s what it’s all about. Winners and losers. Has to be a winner. Has to be a loser. Okay?
Alain Maybe Donny.
Pete Yeah?
Alain Donny has the most cuts.
Donny Well, thank you.
Pete Donny, I am so proud of you.
Donny Thank you.
Pete You wanna cut now? You wanna do that?
Donny Sure. I can cut any time.
Pete Alright. Let’s . . . I cut first, as I lost before. Okay?
Donny Sure.
Pete cuts across his chest.
Pete You getting this?
Alain Got it all on tape.
What do you feel?
Pete Pure. Clear. True.
(Hands blade to Donny.) Now you. See you win this one.
Donny I like to win. Winning’s good.
Pete Winning’s good.
Donny And I know the way. I got the way.
Donny cuts his jugular. Collapses.
Pete Oh shit, man. Shit.
Alain puts the camcorder down quickly and he and Pete rush to Donny.
Alain Stop the blood. Stop the blood.
Donny is writhing. They try unsuccessfully to staunch the blood.
Donny dies.
Everyone very still. Long long pause.
Alain moves away from the body.
Alain Of course, as we look back it will become easier to name the exact date.
Or we may never be able to say exactly. Perhaps we will never agree a fixed point. A moment.
There will be different theories.
/ But in principle we will agree.
Pete Quiet, please. I need some quiet.
Alain At some point, at a moment at the end of the twentieth century, reality ended.
Reality finished and simulation began.
Pete Jesus. Will you . . . ?
Anyone ever tell you you talk too much?
Pause.
Alain For myself, I would suggest fifteen hundred hours on the thirteenth of August 1987.
Others may offer their own alternatives. A few hours, a few days either side. So be it.
But there is a line, a divide and at some point (let’s take my point, fifteen / hundred hours, August thirteenth 1987 as a working model), at this point, although few of us noticed, or sensed that the change was taking place, it happened.
Pete No. Stop.
Stop now.
Why do you have to?
Oh yeah . . . blah blah blah.
Alain Reality died. It ended.
And we began to live this dream, this lie, this new simulated existence.
Pete Reality just arrived.
Alain Some examples?
Before, in the old world, there was an event, a moment, which was followed by analysis, by the writing of history. / Event – analysis – history.
Pete Look at him.
Alain And now?
We analyse, we project, we predict – CNN, talk radio – we anticipate an event before it takes place: the fall of a wall / in Berlin, a war in the Gulf.
Pete Look at what I’m showing you.
Alain And the event itself is just a shadow, a reflection of our analysis.
Pete Look, just look at him.
See?
This happened. We were there. It was real.
This isn’t eyeballs in a shoebox. The Japanese cannibal.
There’s no ketchup.
This is Donny.
Donny is dead. Donny is here and Donny is dead.
Did you think this was gonna happen?
Did you know?
You had any idea, it was your duty to jump in there, to intervene.
Why didn’t you intervene?
He didn’t have the experience, I guess.
Because if he’s used the home page a few times . . . If he’d just read the advice.
Chest, legs, stomach are fine. If you wanna do a vein, then always cut across rather then up and seek medical assistance immediately afterwards.
And don’t ever do the jugular.
He should have known that.
He shouldn’t have gone for the jugular.
I guess he was just keen to prove that he was for real, you know?
Alain kneels by the body.
Alain What we gonna do with him?
Pete Jeez, I dunno.
Alain A person, you know, there is so much.
So much skin and bone.
And brains and eyes.
What do you do with a person with no life in them?
Pete I guess you bury them in the desert.
Chop them up, boil them, but those guys always seem to get found out.
Hey, they have a whole crate of ice in the yard out there.
We fill the bath with ice and we put him in the bath until we figure out what we’re gonna do.
Alain cradles Donny’s body.
Alain Donny, you’re gonna be okay.
Pete Donny, you’re gonna chill.
I haven’t got this [disc] and held on to it all this time for some . . . kid who doesn’t know how to use a blade to fuck it all up for me, okay?
Sixteen
Chorus Donny knew. Donny knew what he was gonna do.
He told me:
‘I’m heading out now for a real meeting. Had enough of just communicating with all you guys in a virtual kind of way. Had enough of it all just being pictures. See, some guys out there want me to make it real. So, I’m gonna meet them. Motel room and I’m gonna make it real. Totally real. I’m gonna go for my jugular.’
And you know something? He made every TV show, every talk show. Ricki and Oprah both got the same show: ‘Death on the Net’.
And Stevie, he already has a song about it. Which he has performed unplugged and is now showing three times an hour on MTV.
Which seems to say to me that maybe Donny wasn’t so pathetic after all and he knew what was happening in his life and figured out a way to make something good come from it.
Seventeen
Motel room. Three days later. Empty.
Enter Alain. Looks around.
Enter Pete.
Pete I sorted Donny out.
Alain You got rid of Donny?
Pete I got rid of Donny.
Alain How did you do that?
How did you get rid of Donny?
Pete Doesn’t matter. Donny has gone. Donny has been sorte
d out, okay?
We have to go.
I’ve packed.
Alain Where do we have to go?
Pete I don’t know, someplace.
Just move on.
I’ve cleared our traces here.
Few more minutes and we’re moving on.
Alain You don’t want to stay here?
You don’t want to conceal yourself?
Pete That’s not possible any more.
See, word is out. The word is out there.
They’re all looking for us. They’re checking each and every motel in the state and we stay here, they’re gonna find us.
Alain You want to keep running?
Pete That’s right.
Alain All the time, you just want to keep running?
Pete That’s the only thing to do.
Alain You can’t think of another possibility maybe?
Pete There are no other possibilities.
Now, come on, move.
Alain No.
Pete Don’t argue with me.
I don’t need this.
Alain We’re not gonna run around like this.
I have the disc.
Pete You have . . . ?
Alain Last night, you were sleeping.
I got the disc.
I’m staying here.
Pete produces a gun.
Alain I’m staying here.
Pete approaches Alain.
Alain I’m staying here.
Pete You come with me.
You give me the disc.
Alain Who was cruel?
The Dutch woman or the Japanese man?
It was the woman, the woman was cruel.
Because she understood the use of metaphor and he understood nothing.
Pete shoots Alain.
Alain falls.
Pete retrieves the disc.
He cradles Alain.
Pete I think that many people here would consider that the Japanese guy was cruel.
Because he shot her. He ate her.
And I think that many people here would find that cruel.
And that woman, see?
She would never have found that mailbox.
Eighteen
Chorus Looking back, now I’m an adult, I think I used to cry at night not because the world was such a bad place. Well, okay, not just because the world is such a bad place.
But also because I wanted the world to come to an end. Like Armageddon or Hellfire or Total Meltdown or some such catastrophe. And I cried because I felt so guilty because it was gonna happen any day and it would be all my fault for wanting it so much. But the world hasn’t ended. It’s going on and on. And I keep on looking for signs that it’s getting better like Momma told me. But I can’t see them. So, it hasn’t ended and it’s not getting better. It’s just going on, on and on and on.
And I wonder if I should feel something about that.
But – you want the truth? – I don’t feel a thing.
See, I’m the kind of person who can stand in the middle of an earthquake and I’m just like ‘whoa, neat earthquake’.
And I wonder what made me that way.
Nineteen
Hospital room.
Alain is on a drip. Pete is reading from a piece of paper.
Pete Because man is dead. For so many centuries, we have believed in his existence. This thing, this construct, this thing we called man. But one day, some day in the twentieth century, he went and died. Sometime after Belsen, sometime after Kennedy, sometime after MTV, he went and died. As surely as, several hundred years ago now, God died and we trembled to live in a universe without him, so now we look around and see that man is no more.
What do you think?
Alain Well, yes, this is . . .
Pete Is it good?
Alain Yes. This is fine.
Pete Shall I carry on?
Alain Please.
Pete But now we see, we feel that we are no longer the subject but the object of forces, we are a confusion, a collision of . . .
A beeping sound.
What is that?
Alain It tells me to take my pills.
Pete You wanna get them?
Alain No.
Pete Okay.
So we’re . . . there’s . . . okay, okay, I got it . . . so the question is: How will we live our lives? For just as surely as there was a great battle between the centuries-old myth of God and and the newcomer Science, so the next millennium will see the fight between those who embrace and those who deny the death of man.
Would you say it’s in any way derivative?
Alain What would you say?
Pete I’ve included examples of ‘original thought’.
Alain Then, fine.
Pete For instance, well . . . for example, you make no references to MTV. I guess because you didn’t have MTV when you wrote the book, right?
Alain Exactly.
Pete So that’s an original thought, yes?
The beeping returns, louder and shriller.
Keeps on going, doesn’t it?
It’s important you take your pills.
Alain It’s nothing.
Pete I’m joining my dad.
He’s taking me on as a sort of number two. We did a deal on the whole chaos disc thing.
Because, see, I don’t believe you.
Sure, I get your point. See, I can do the whole Death of Man speech thing, you know?
But where’d it get us?
It got us Donny.
And I don’t want that any more.
He screws up the piece of paper.
My dad built this house.
Well, hundreds of guys built this house out of my dad’s . . . vision.
And in my father’s house, his vision of the future, of perfection is realised.
Well, look, you own a painting, okay?
And that painting has a mood. But some days that may not be your mood and here is this painting mooding out the wrong mood down on you, you know?
But my dad has solved the problem.
He buys the exclusive rights to like hundreds of total masterpieces and then programmes them into walls and if your mood changes, click, whirr, the pictures change also.
And many, many other problems, he just went right ahead and solved.
I hate my dad.
But you offer despair, you know that? And it may be true, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.
I’m sorry, I have a meeting to go to now.
I really want you to get better.
I really think you should take your pills.
Alain I don’t want the pills.
I don’t want to get better.
Pete Got you a present.
He hands Alain a present in wrapping paper.
To remind you of Donny.
See ya. Wouldn’t wanna be ya.
Exit Pete.
Alain opens the present.
A shoebox.
He opens the shoebox.
Enter Donny. No eyes.
Donny I was on the boat to heaven and my momma was there and she told me you were going to die and go to hell. So I came back because I didn’t want that.
He’s gone now. Gone to his daddy and they’re gonna take over the world.
I’m not gonna leave you. It’s okay, I ain’t ever gonna leave you.
Come on now. Take your pills.
He pours water into a glass and cradles Alain’s head as he feeds him two pills.
That’s it. Okay.
Handbag
Handbag, commissioned by Actors’ Touring Company, was first performed at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio, London, on 14 September 1998. The cast was as follows:
Tom/Cardew
Tim Crouch
Lorraine/Prism
Faith Flint
Phil
Paul Rattray
Suzanne/Constance
Julie Riley
Mauretta/Augusta
Celia Robertson
David/Moncrie
ff
Andrew Scarborough
Directed by Nick Philippou
Designed by Gideon Davey
Lighting by Simon Mills
Sound by Christopher Shutt
Produced by Hetty Shand
Characters
Mauretta
Suzanne
David
Tom
Phil
Lorraine
Prism
Augusta
Cardew
Moncrieff
Constance
The first production of the play doubled the characters as follows: Mauretta–Augusta, Suzanne–Constance, David–Moncrieff, Tom–Cardew, Lorraine–Prism.
A slash in the dialogue (/) is a cue for the next actor to start their line, creating overlapping dialogue.
Scene One
Suzanne, Mauretta and David waiting.
Mauretta I hope he’s alright.
Suzanne It’s probably just a bit difficult . . . performing . . . to order.
David It means a lot to Tom. It means a lot to both of us.
Mauretta To all of us.
David And when it means so much . . . to all of us . . . then it must be difficult to have a wank.
Suzanne . . . A wank?
David Alright. It must be hard to spill your love seed. / Summon up the spirits of the ancestors of fertility.
Suzanne I’m not saying . . . no. Just wank’s a bit . . . functional.
David Alright.
Pause.
Mauretta If Tom’s finding it a bit difficult. . .
David He’ll be fine.
Mauretta Yes, but if the pressure’s really / blocking . . .
David He’ll get there.
Mauretta Then maybe you / should . . .
David No. We agreed. This is Tom’s . . . I mean, I’m right behind Tom . . . but Tom really wants to . . . I mean, no kid wants to end up with my gene pool.
Mauretta You shouldn’t be so / down on yourself.
David Gene swamp, really. I’m still trying to sort myself out. Tom’s more . . . sorted.
Pause.
Mauretta Maybe we can help him.
Suzanne A helping hand?
Mauretta Well, I think that’s David’s territory.
David I’ll give it a go.
Mauretta I mean . . . I don’t know. Music or something.
Ravenhill Plays: 1: Shopping and F***ing; Faust is Dead; Handbag; Some Explicit Polaroids (Contemporary Dramatists) Page 11
