aching forwards. carving in
December 2023
This is a script about a dead boy in a dreamscape. This is me trying to express a single coherent thing about the weight of this grief — it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. There’s so much to say, so much more than any of this, and I can’t ever say it. I don’t know how.
Stage directions are in the centre of the page, the girl’s dialogue is on the left, the boy’s on the right. You will understand as you read, or maybe you won’t. Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this — swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood on every knuckle. Try the words car crash and feel how they burn your tongue.
Another thing. This is not good writing. This is a prayer. It is not meant to be eloquent, or creative, or beautiful. I wrote it the way a dying parent might write a will: hopelessly. Mandatorily. With shaking hands.
It’s a dream. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s the dream I don’t tell anybody, maybe it’s one of those things you invent when you’re scared and want to be rescued, maybe it’s all the truth and nothing but the truth because I cracked my skull a little too hard on the bars of my cage. It’s only sad if you take it as gospel. Only a poem if you tilt your head.
[We open on a garden. We open on the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, all overlooked by a willow, backed distantly by a greying wooden fence which slices gentle behind the entire scene. A pigeon murmurs from the wings, and between each coo we can make out the burble of a stream over rock. It doesn’t matter. The sound doesn’t matter. There’s a boy on the grass, sat with his legs sprawling, plucking at the clover. The grass doesn’t matter. The legs don’t matter. It’s the boy. He’s lit shining gold, too bright to be real, and we pretend not to notice. There is no pulse at his throat and we pretend not to notice. He is dead, and we know this, and we pretend not to notice, and the scene draws on.
We open on a garden. We open on the boy.
Very suddenly, as though shoved onto the set, there is a girl on the stage. Her hands are shaking. It doesn’t matter how she looks; she is a shadow. It doesn’t matter that her hair is cut to look like his, or that their eyes are almost the same blue. She is staring, very intently, unblinking, at the boy. She takes a step forward. Her footsteps leave imprints in the clover. The boy looks up at her once she is close enough, squinting like she’s stood in front of the sun.
She says, very carefully, in time with the first tear:]
Frank?
[A salt track down the planes of her face. Then another. Then it’s a motorway. The audience sighs: you, you the audience, you take this deep heaving breath in and out, exasperated, because Hana’s writing about the dead boy again, and she loves him like a sick dog, and you’re all a little tired of it. All a little bored of the blackened taste to his name. She doesn’t care. She cannot write about anything else. She only knows this because, dear god, over and over, she has tried.
The boy blinks at the word, like he’s not used to hearing so much packed into the monosyllable. He does not yet return the greeting. He does not yet move.
So the scene is set. So she’s seventeen. So it doesn’t matter, the grass doesn’t matter, the girl shouldn’t matter — there’s a boy on the stage, and the boy is alive, and the fact of his being here is enough to shutter the girl’s spine into a bow shape as she doubles over.
She clatters to the ground. The thud reverberates, though it is muffled by the earth between them. And then she is on her knees in front of him. Aching forwards. Carving in.
She lifts a shaking hand to his face, presses a palm to his cheek: soft at first, then with a drag of thumb which leaves his skin white in its absence. Her second hand comes up, her left hand, and then she’s holding his face between her fingers like she’s sin and he’s salvation.]
You’re here.
[She chokes on the words. ‘Here’ is broken, slow, into two tortured syllables.]
It’s actually you.
It’s actually me.
I loved you so much.
Christ, way to start the conversation. It’s good to see you too.
Sorry. Sorry. Shit, I’m sorry. It’s, uh.
[The girl pauses, waits for the right thing to come to her. Nothing does. She loves him so much that her hands start to shake with it in the silence, except it isn’t silence, because we can still hear the background burble of the stream which connects their houses.]
It’s been a while, I know—
Eight months.
[Her response is so automatic that it feels like gunfire. He flinches. Man down.]
Yeah, well. I’m sorry too.
Don’t be. Please don’t be. You weren’t at the wheel.
Doesn’t change much. [He sounds almost resentful.] How’s my mum?
She— I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since the funeral. I don’t think I could stomach it.
Ah.
I’m sorry.
So you’ve said.
[The air, is tense, awkward, awful. The girl blinks, and doesn’t say anything for a while, until suddenly she’s carding forwards in this tempest-surge shift and then he’s holding her, he’s holding onto her, she’s got her arms wrapped around him and she’s clinging on for dear life. She breathes into him and he lets her. She loves him so much. He’s dead. He knows these things.]
I love you. I love you. I’m so sorry I never told you.
We were kids.
[She lets out this sob. It sounds like a broken rib.]
We still are.
I am. You’ll be eighteen soon.
Frank.
[Her voice is pitched at a whisper. Oh, she loves him so much. Tears stain her face.]
I don’t want to turn eighteen without you.
I know. [He takes a breath.] I know. I know. It’s okay.
I can’t keep writing about you. I don’t know how.
You do. Come on, you do.
I don’t. I loved you too much. It doesn’t fit into the words.
So say that.
I can’t. Frank, please. I can’t. [She clings onto him. Gasps for air.] I keep trying to say it all and it isn’t enough. It’s never going to be enough.
[She chokes out each word. It’s all poison. It’s all killing her.]
Just talk. [A beat.] Just breathe. [Another.] The words are enough.
They’re not. There’s too much to say. I need to tell you everything and I don’t have time. I think I’m dreaming. I don’t think you’re really here.
That doesn’t have to matter.
It does. It does. I need you back. Please, you have to be here. You have to be alive again.
Okay. Alright. I’ll come back from the dead for you.
[So she takes a breath. This is going to kill her, and she is going to let it. She begins, hollow, pinning sentences together like charred photographs to a burning wall.]
Just be here. I’ll say it all to you in time. Just don’t be dead. It should’ve been me. I love you and I never told you. I love you like breathing and you have to know. You have to come back so that I can tell you. You have to come back. I would’ve married you. I wanted to. I wrote your name on the roof of the treehouse. This entire town is saturated in you. You’re everywhere. You’re all over my bedroom, all over the garden, all over the driveway. You’re haunting this place. I look for you in every room. I miss you so much. I had a panic attack outside the co-op the other day because I thought I saw you in the sweet aisle. But it’s different now. The sweet aisle isn’t where it used to be. Neither are you. I have to walk past your house every time I go into town. Your dad hasn’t put up Christmas lights this year. There’s too much to say. I think you’d still be alive if I had stayed. I think it’s my fault. I left you in this town and then you died here. And you were sixteen. I got to turn seventeen and you didn’t. I went to your funeral and it was the worst day of my life. I think I’m going to die, Frank.
[Each word is imbued with this complete lack of grace, of composure, every thought stapled to a new one as the sentences are snapped short, rendered dumb. She’s saying so much, too much, and it sounds ugly, reads even uglier, strips the girl of the intelligence which she holds so dear. This is how we know that it’s real — the desperation. The rawness. She is no longer a writer, no longer a wordsmith: just miserable. Just sobbing, weeping, breaking down as she speaks. But she keeps talking. She keeps going. Despite it all, despite how elementary and awful and stupid she sounds, she presses on. She has to. She has to tell him, because he’s dead, because he haunts every room in her house. This is every thought since April. This is everything he will never, ever hear.]
I need you to come back. Come back to me. Please. Please. I miss you so much. I can’t keep walking by your house. I can’t keep doing any of this. There’s too much to say. Will you come back so I can tell you? Just for a day. I only need a day. An hour, maybe. I don’t even have to say any of this stuff, none of it matters, not really. Just come and sit in my room for an hour, yeah? Watch a show with me. Oh, god, I loved you so much. Let me hug you one last time. You have to come back. You can’t be dead. You’re not dead until I say so. You’re all I write about. It all comes back to you. That’s not fair. None of it’s fair. You’re all I write about. I can’t escape you, I can’t escape this town. I loved you so much. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come back. Come home. I can’t keep walking by your house. I can’t keep coming back to this town when you’re not in it. We took the treehouse down. I’m so sorry. I can’t find the starfish necklace you gave me. There’s too much to say. I tried to write a fucking script about it and even that didn’t work. Look at me. Please, look at me.
[He looks at her. He holds her in his gaze and he does not move.]
I remember your eyes. I remember so much about you but I’m so scared that those memories are going to fade because you’re not around to remind me of them. What happens when I start to miss you more than I remember you? Come back. Come back. You were my next-door neighbour. You still are. I have to walk past your house just to get into the town, just to go to the co-op, the post office, just to get groceries. I remember the sound of your laugh and I remember the way you used to do everything. I keep trying to list specific examples, the sinkhole, the pool, the bike, the Lego, the cat, Halloween, the Xbox, the Squashies, the Nokia, the cinema, oh, god, the cinema, the bus, the bedroom, the move, the fire, the marshmallows, the horses, the laughter, the form group, 7F2, the French lessons, the school book, the scaffolding, the roof, the videos, the shows, the sled, the snow, the hill, the message, the dog, the rec, the way I left you here to die and then you did, you did, you did.
[The words tear from her like wounded soldiers — like a dam burst. This reservoir which pours past her lips, blood from a wound. It’s ugly. Hideous. This is not good writing, and the audience (you, the audience) knows it. People are slumping in their seats, getting up to leave. The door keeps slamming as they exit, the lights keep flickering at the sound. How tiresome is this? How repetitive is every stupid, simple sentence? How endless is this fucking grief?]
I have to drive past the gap in the hedge where your car crashed every single time I come back to this town. There’s no other way in, not from London. I threw up the first time. It’s this huge hole, this massive exit wound, and it isn’t healing. The leaves won’t grow back; the hedge won’t knit itself together again. There’s too much to say. I don’t have time. We just— in another universe we had five more minutes, come on, come back to me, we only need a little more time—
[The girl is gasping, choking for air, clawing at him. He holds her, because this is a dream, and she knows it, knows that this is only real until she wakes, and she continues anyway. Between sobs. Between ribs. She misses him so much, and each new word is a stab wound. It doesn’t matter. Reader, audience, I am taking you by the shoulders and shaking you back and forth. Listen to me. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Only him. Only him.]
You were an artist. A baker. You were going to be an architect. Your first ever project was going to be your mum’s dream home. You used to tell me about that, every day, all the time, between rounds of the James Bond game on your Xbox and Call of Duty on mine. The first time we met my mum brought you a box of oatmeal and raisin cookies and you never let me forget it. One time I went with you to get Chinese from Evesham. You loved cricket. And football. And horses. And your mum. And your dad, and your brother. And I hope that you loved me, but I’ll never know, because I never asked. We used to watch Suits together. And Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Come Fly With Me. We made brownies together one time. I took my first ever bus with you, to Stratford. To see the Lego Movie 2. We went another time to see a Spiderman film. We would always go to Poundland just before and smuggle in bags and bags of sweets. I see you everywhere — I remember everything. I remember your hands.
[We can see from the way the words seem to hollow the girl out that this might really be the death of her. This grief. She arches forwards into him like it’s enough just to touch him, enough to pretend like matching each curve of his body could ever bring him back. We hear her frantic breathing in the break between sentences. Nothing is eloquent. All is lost.]
Our houses were separated by a fence but we always used to sneak beneath through the stream. We built a steppingstone bridge. I remember the path so well. I remember all of it. I’m sorry. You know this. They’re your memories too. You used to invite me over for Sunday roast every week. I loved you so much. I never told you. It doesn’t matter that I’m telling you now. This isn’t real. I never told you. Your dad hasn’t put up Christmas lights this year, man. I’ve spent every day since your death wondering if I could’ve saved you. If there was something I could’ve done to stop you from getting in that car. I met your cat before I met you. I’ve forgotten his name. There’s Rory, and Murphy, and the other which I met but I can’t remember the name of. I want to ask you but I can’t, because this isn’t real, and I can’t talk to your mum because I think that that would kill me. There are so many things that I want to ask you. Jesus Christ, would you come back? There’s so much. It’s too much. I loved you like the sun. I’d start with… oh god, will you answer? Can I make you answer just because you’re written down?
[He looks at her with an expression almost like pity. The answer is no — he is a figment. He is not the boy she knew. His mouth opens anyway.]
I can try.
That’s not enough.
Nothing will be. I died in April.
Don’t say that.
Your questions. You were going to ask me questions.
This isn’t how you talk.
It could be. It might be. It’s been months.
Okay. I’m sorry. I miss you so much.
These aren’t questions. Do I say your name? Did I ever call you by your name?
No. Maybe. I don’t remember. I think maybe I’m a terrible person.
You’re not.
I left you here.
That doesn’t make you terrible.
It doesn’t make me good.
Not much does. Ask your questions.
Were you still alive when you got to the hospital?
Yes. You know that. They kept me alive there long enough that my parents could get there and decide to take me off life support. And donate my organs.
I know that. I memorised the details. I mean you. Were you alive, not just being assisted. Were you still breathing on your own?
I don’t know.
You have to.
Okay, so I do know. But you don’t. And you’re writing. You have your suspicions but it doesn’t matter. You think my brain died at the scene, that there was never any hope for me, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m dead anyway.
That’s what I mean. Come back. Just for a little while. Just so that I can know for sure. I can’t staple facts to a boy who isn’t alive to dispute them.
Exactly. This isn’t fair to either of us. I’m going to haunt you either way.
[The girl looks up at him. There’s an emotion, unreadable, written into her features. She’s still crying. She grabs hold of his hand without taking her eyes from his face.]
I know. I see parts of you in everything. Your dad didn’t put up any Christmas lights this year.
[The boy frowns. He doesn’t say anything else for a while. They’re quiet for so long that the audience once again starts to register the pigeon cooing in the background.]
Do you believe in the afterlife?
I’m asking the questions.
Not very well. Do you?
I didn’t.
But you do now.
I don’t know. I want to, for you. On the good days I try to.
Yes or no. Do you believe in the afterlife?
[Beat.]
I believe in you.
[A long, long pause. She exhales and it seems to just empty her — the weight of the confession. Is it a confession? He fixes her with a terrible, heavy look.]
And that’s enough?
It was. It could be. We used to lie in my brother’s bed and watch episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine on my phone.
Ask your questions. Get this over with.
Did you love me?
I don’t know. We were young.
You’re saying that like sixteen is old.
It was to me.
[The heft of that seems to strike them both at the same time. He continues, very quietly.]
I’ll never be seventeen.
I celebrated your birthday. I drew your name in the sand.
Yeah, well. Stuff you do for a dead kid.
It shouldn’t have been you.
And yet. Ask another question.
Did you love me?
I can’t answer that. Not when it’s you writing.
But you could. I could make you answer.
So make me answer.
I don’t know how.
You don’t know how.
[…]
You never will.
Please come back. Please. I need to know. I should’ve asked.
But you didn’t.
[And she won’t again. He can’t answer. This is not real. Her head drops to his shoulder.]
You were good. You said earlier that not much makes a person good. But you managed.
So I was good. So what?
So it doesn’t matter. So you’re dead anyway.
I’m dead anyway.
You’re not me. You don’t talk like this. Say something real.
Okay, fine. I loved you very much and I wasn’t always completely good.
I don’t know if the first one is true. But I think it is.
[Her face falls. Her chest constricts. She lifts a hand to his face again, watches as his expression settles in a mirror of hers. He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t have to.]
Oh, god, I think it is.
Which is enough.
What does that mean?
Keep going, the second thing. I wasn’t always completely good.
Okay. So what.
So accept it. Stop calling me beautiful in everything you write.
No.
Okay, well. Worth a try.
No it wasn’t. I’m sorry I didn’t write anything about you on my website while you were alive.
That’s okay.
Would you have wanted that?
I think so. You think so.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You said the loveliest things about my writing.
It’s too late now. I meant every word.
I know. I know. I still wake up with things to tell you.
It’s too late. That doesn’t matter.
Your funeral was the worst day of my life. Your casket had photos of you on it.
Why are you telling me this?
I don’t know. I’m being selfish.
And? The words don’t matter.
What?
You’re tired. The words don’t matter. The funeral doesn’t matter. I’m not coming back and you need to learn to walk past my house without almost doubling over. I’m not in there anymore.
Don’t say that. I’m getting tired.
I know. I’m getting harsh. It doesn’t matter that you’re selfish. This is grief.
I’ve forgotten how you talk.
No you haven’t. You’ve forgotten a couple of specifics and you’re writing too posh. That’s not the end of the world.
I’m tired.
So sleep.
I’d miss you.
You’re mad. I’m not real.
It’s still you.
I’ve been dead for months.
It’s still you.
