Harris Fall

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31911-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Is the settling of scores a necessary step towards restoring peace after a bloody conflict? Set against a war-crimes trial at the end of a civil war, Fall explores the thin line between justice and revenge. Fall is the last play in a trilogy by Zinnie Harris that examines the transforming effects of war. Solstice and Midwinter were performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004/05, and are also published by Faber.

Zinnie Harris's plays include the multi-award-winning Further than the Furthest Thing (National Theatre/Tron Theatre; winner of the 1999 Peggy Ramsay Award, 2001 John Whiting Award, Edinburgh Fringe First Award), How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court Theatre; joint winner of the Berwin Lee Award), The Wheel (National Theatre of Scotland; joint winner of the 2011 Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award), Nightingale and Chase (Royal Court Theatre), Midwinter, Solstice (both RSC), Fall (Traverse Theatre/RSC), By Many Wounds (Hampstead Theatre), the trilogy This Restless House (Citizens Theatre/National Theatre of Scotland), based on Aeschylus' Oresteia and Meet Me at Dawn (Traverse Theatre). Also, Ibsen's A Doll's House for the Donmar Warehouse, Strindberg's Miss Julie for the National Theatre of Scotland and Webster's The Duchess (of Malfi) (Royal Lyceum Theatre). Zinnie received an Arts Foundation Fellowship for playwriting, and was Writer in Residence at the RSC, 2000-2001. She is Professor of Playwriting and Screenwriting at St Andrews University, and is the Associate Director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harris, Zinnie

Leseproben

SCENE ONE

Kate

I was listening to a record.

Was interrupted by his footsteps. I had been waiting for him. Waiting for him and not waiting.

Alone.

You know what alone is.

Only me and the fields.

A magpie swooping over the house.

A stray cat that came looking for milk.

I was cooking beans.

Or I should have been – I had cut the halves up and I remember because I had cut my thumb. I had to go looking for a plaster.

He doesn’t really like beans, but he tolerates it.

He thinks we eat too many beans.

I tried to tease him about it, but he never laughs.

Work is a hard place.

They put pressure on him. It’s a horrible environment.

I understand that.

Everyone told me I had made a good match when I married him.

It’s funny because the first half of the evening is so clear and yet, later, I can’t remember clearing away the meal. Did we eat the beans in the end? We certainly hadn’t eaten anything before the doorbell rang.

The beans were boiling. I remember that because I had to turn them off. A minute later, in the panic, I turned them off. They will boil over, I thought, strange how one has some presence of mind whatever the circumstance. There will be water all over the floor.

He answered the door.

It was Liddel. Our good friend. A doctor.

And we said come in, and he said he couldn’t.

And Hal says, why man, don’t be absurd, don’t just stand there in the cold. Come in and put the door shut behind you.

I have blood on my shoes, says Liddel.

And I looked and sure enough there was blood on his shoes.

I’ve hit something, he says.

And Hal hasn’t heard properly because he is still trying to get him through the door.

He has hit something, Hal, I say. In the car.

Liddel’s voice is shaking.

I thought it was just a badger, but it’s not.

Oh my God, that was me, but in my head. The inner voice in my skull, breathing. Oh my God, we are here already.

And I realise that is what I have been waiting for, all these months I have been waiting, and not knowing why I can’t move from my chair hardly, just about make it to the end of the lane, but further? No. I have to be home because of the man Liddel will hit on our track.

I am kind of momentarily paralysed, but Hal and Liddel, they rush around. They take a torch and go out immediately. It’s dark already.

I turn off the beans.

They are already boiling.

I look out of the window.

I can see the torch, the two men. They are standing over something, looking.

When Liddel comes back in, he is shaking. I pour him a brandy.

It is too late, he says.

Who was he? I ask.

No one, he says. No one we recognise.

Hal comes back in.

I need a sheet, he says.

An old one.

What are you going to do with it? Him?

I am sorry to describe it this way, but that is how it was.

I am going to wrap him in a sheet and throw him in the river.

Liddel is a good man, that is the basis we were working from. A good man, but not a good driver. He has caused an accident before and lost his licence. He shouldn’t have been driving, we both had told him that many times, but he had to go to and from his mother’s door, and out to the surgery three times a week. He had to drive.

The blood, where did the blood come from? I asked.

What blood?

The blood on your shoes. You are covered in blood, and yet even from the window I could see there was none on the man.

He had a dog. Liddel said.

The dog is still on the road.

I go to the cupboard to give Hal a sheet. I am not happy about it, I mean not the sheet. I would have given our best sheets, but I am not happy about Hal’s plan. I ask him about it.

By the morning he will be out to sea, he says.

He is some mother’s son, I say.

I can see that cloud over his face again, he doesn’t want an argument.

People do worse, he says.

We are trying to be civilised now though, aren’t we? I answer back. I know it sounds silly that I said that, but back then that was how we were thinking. I was thinking. I was conscious in everything we did, we had to try to break a mould. Think differently, approach things with a new gaze.

We will pick some flowers, Hal said.

Throw them in the river after him.

It is autumn, the flowers are dead, I said.

So is he. So is he, Kate.

He is completely DEAD.

Liddel watching all the time.

He had seen me and Hal lots over the years, knew what we were like.

We disagree, it doesn’t matter.

Hal goes on.

Know what we could do?

What most of the country would do?

Don’t, I say.

Why not? Others would. All we’d have to do is strip him and shave him, and say we found him somewhere. OK, we might have to put a match up to his face, burn the skin a little, break a few bones, take away any distinguishing marks. Then we take him to the nearest grieving widow and we knock on her door.

There are so many desperate women out there, Kate, we won’t have to look hard. And when she answers the door, she will look us in the face, and we will say, good news. Good news. We have found your old Tom Hindler or Sam Oldbody or whoever. We found him lying in a field or thrown from a prison or lynched from a tree. Look, here he is.

And the old dear is so split in two by the moment that her face almost goes as grey as the corpse itself. Don’t look at me like that, Kate, I see this every day of the week. You wonder why I need a drink when I come in, I see this every day. And yet somehow, because they are amazing, these old women, most of them not even that old, somehow she has enough dignity instilled in her, from watching her mother and grandmother, that she knows she must have the presence of mind to feel into her pocket and pull out a few coins. A pound or two. A dollar. All she can afford.

And she’ll press it into our hands and she will even thank us.

You might not like it. But read the papers. It happens every day. If you ever stepped out the door –

I know what goes on, I say.

Then don’t talk about being civilised. Hal again. Don’t think that all this talk of a new government means we are civilised.

And it is true if we were like our neighbours, a dead old man, newly mutilated, battered and shorn, would soon be lying in a grave belonging to a man he never heard of, and being visited every day by a woman he never met.

But we aren’t like our neighbours, I say.

Exactly, says Hal, let’s take him down to the river and send him out to sea.

Maybe we ate the beans while we decided.

We got some brandy out, I know that. Liddel’s hands still shaking.

Hal’s face clouding over.

It’s the curious thing about him, and I told him so. It’s the thing I always forget and yet at the beginning I most loved.

He never asks for help.

He works for this new government, did. He was one of the people that hands out the new helpline numbers, the new initiatives they come from him. Or the department he worked in anyway. And yet when it comes to it – he won’t call.

Liddel, he says, I told you. He will go to prison.

He doesn’t even like Liddel. I should have realised then. Liddel if anything is my friend. I like having him around, just as a third person. Another person sitting in another chair. Stopping us being two.

If Hal had had his way, Liddel would have stopped calling years ago.

You make up another explanation of why we have a dead man on our drive and I will call. Hal again.

Liddel drinks his brandy.

I’ll bury the dog, I say.

I pick up the shovel.

He doesn’t try to stop me. Doesn’t say, don’t go out, stay in where it is warm.

He lets me go.

He must have been sure you were dead.

It’s not all that cold. I’m sure you were freezing, but it was still a mild night. The week before we had had frost and so all the trees were losing their leaves, and I had said that to Liddel, while we were in the kitchen, there were leaves all over the roads, no wonder it was skiddy.

He didn’t really answer.

He still hadn’t taken off his shoes.

I followed his footprints back to the car.

I could see that he had walked round twice. It looked like he had got out once and got back into the car. Had maybe sat there thinking, what do I do next, or perhaps just sat there thinking nothing at all, like I do.

Hal and Liddel must have moved you, that was my first thought. They must have moved you clear of the road, because where you were and where the car was, they didn’t add up. You couldn’t have been thrown that wide.

They must have carried you carefully and laid you down.

Like a little child. Asleep.

Only not, of course.

I had only seen one dead body before, and don’t say how did I manage that. I know I was lucky, in some ways. Or lucky not to have seen. The people I lost were taken away and shot and never returned, so one didn’t have to see them dead, didn’t have to go to funerals with open-topped coffins and stare at...