3. An alley (second attempt)
Overhead, up in the lights and the bars and the wires, thousands of shoes. They clip clop on their way to work. The audience looks up and they see high heels clopping and men’s boots tapping and a river of business trampling overhead.
Down here, nothing moves except one drop of water which drips
drops
drip
drop drop
drop
It spells out D.A.N.K. in morse code and it plops from puddle to puddle never at rest
plop
plip
plip plip
plop
Down here Merrick drags Martha with Bones stumbling behind them.
MERRICK: It happened long ago that I was a little babything and before too long there was another little babything next to me. Our mama was the waves and the rocks and the phospherescence and the sound of crabs clacking and fish jumping and before long me and my little brother could both say ‘Mama’ which in our case was the sound of a wave smashing into a rock in the dark and pulling the seaweed this way and that.
Now papa on the other hand was not a rock nor a weed nor a fish nor a splash nor the moon nor the cold wind nor the sand nor the stroke of a stingray’s wings or anything so simple. Papa was a skinny shred of hair and a pair of eyeballs and fingers that moved up and down and cut blue lines on white paper. Papa was a real piece of work and me and the other little babything learned to run after him on the rocks because his mind was always going Flash! Boom! Zap! That was our papa’s mind, and his voice always not far behind.
Now little babything one which was me and little babything two which was my little brother whom you have already met learned a lot from our mama – in fact we learned everything that there was to learn from our mama, and she gave it all freely and without restraint. And certainly we two little babythings were all the better for that learning. But our papa, our papa who knew a whole lot about living in society, giving and taking, being as one with the people, the education which mighta transformed us into responsible babythings of society, that education was left lacking. See you remember how it was, Bones?
BONES: He turned the lights on us.
MERRICK: He opened up the jaws at the end of the ocean
and between the teeth of the sea
and the teeth of the sky
there was a sun. And we fell down the sun’s throat.
BONES: The sun swallowed us
MERRICK: And when he’d lifted up the lid on the sunlight our papa ran away
BONES: Scratchy and small
MERRICK: He ran away, and we were eaten by the fires that live at the bottom of the morning.
BONES: It was a bad time
MERRICK: And that is why you might say we are less than what we ought to be
BONES: And not responsible members of society
MERRICK: No not responsible members of society at all.
3 - An alley (first attempt)
