Skeletons

Victor Shortt (with three Ts)

Fourth Instalment

An Ambient Monologue 

Written, performed, edited by Charlie Price

Content Warning:

Infrequent language, horror

Transcript

 IV: Skeletons

Voicemail to Mother (deceased) This is a unified monologue but the text in bold is heard from the point of view of her telephone (as in “over the speaker”)  Her environment is punctuated by strange, fragmentary sounds: faroff shouts, banged doors, electronic beeps, drilling, crows, and cavernous drips. She (or someone) breathes, asthmatically while they listen. 

(PRELUDE: Crescendo of You Tube video about contemporary London trams with inexplicable orchestra tuning up. Then Victor stops video, (with dissonant sting), then calls mother. EE Network and Answerphone etc...   

VICTOR: Hello mother. It’s the eighth-born of your nine sons. When I say nine I am of course disregarding the two stillborn boys and the girl you had put down. I continue to ponder, often, your…superlative aversion to little girls. Perhaps you remember me, perhaps you think about me, specifically, from heaven. As distinct from all the others, I mean. Victor Shortt. Victor with one T, Shortt with two Ts: Victor Shortt with three Ts. 

I’m doing very well, many thanks for asking. 

You are dead. 
 
 

I bought you a mobile phone just before you died. For some reason the number still works, it is not defunct. I still send you texts sometimes, like, “Hi mum, home 7 latest. What’s 4 (with a number 4) dinner. Kiss. (with an X). V.” I close with my first name’s initial, every time. 

Though there is never any reply, it is a strange comfort that the message ends up somewhere, that it is received by a device, even though that device is now ownerless. It comforts me that, from the depth of whatever hole or bin it has been dropped into, the screen lights up and cries out, makes its yelp from darkness: (imitating vibrate mode) zzzzzzzzzm, zzzzzzzzzm. Signs, crowed from one void into another, from blackness into blackness.   

The number should be defunct, ex-directory or whatever, and the text messages should bounce back. Voicemails should be an impossibility. I called you: ring ring, ring ring…no answerphone message. Just a lady, outside our affairs, who says: The person you have called is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone. Beeeeep. Away I went. 

I have nothing to say to you. Nothing about me, anyway. But I wonder if perhaps it is a comfort, from your point of view, to hear my voice. In that spirit, I’ve a story to tell. And perhaps you will take comfort, not from the story itself, but from the fact that it is being told in my voice.

I spend a lot of my time in pubs these days. Alone, you understand. Anyway, yesterday afternoon, I was at the…how funny, I’ve forgotten the name. It’s definitely King’s something. King’s Head. King’s Arms. King’s. Arms, yes. I was cooling my heels at my usual table, enjoying my usual choice of refreshment, when an old woman came into the pub. I say, old. I have never seen anyone so old. I have never watched anything as old as that woman move about and maintain sentience. She should have been dead. She was a skeleton. I have never seen a living thing as ancient as that woman alive. The extent of her age was such that death would have been a kind of courtesy. She had on a long, violet dress. That was the only indication of sex. 

When I say “came”, when I say she “came into the pub”, I mean that she crawled, she crept, she hobbled with amazing slowness, as though she were wading through mud, or marsh, or honey. Once or twice I thought she was going to sink, quite literally, to floor and crawl on her belly to the bar. I watched her with fascination. The way the skeleton asserted itself, up through the flesh, as if impatient with its clothing. Her skin was so wrinkled and dark and thread-bare. It had a feeling of impermanence about it, like it was cloth, like it was a suit, a suit of clothes that had been worn too often, and washed and mended too seldom, that had weathered too many storms, to persist much longer, like it was going to fall to the floor. It seemed as though her heart was stronger than her skin, as though she might carry on living, in skeletal form. Her arms were so thin, like sticks of rhubarb, one could encompass them between finger and thumb. Her head was a skull. Not quite bald but almost. The thinnest, greyest fuzz of hair. The jawline was so angular and hard, I bet it would have clacked if one were to take a knuckle and knock on it. 

No-one batted an eyelid. I half wondered if the staff would refuse to serve her booze. But she hadn’t come in for that. She ambled unsteadily to the nearest two-seat table, her order having been communicated. She waited, seeming quite serene, sitting quite upright, in the armless chair. Five big glasses of water arrived. And two sets of cutlery. She arranged the cutlery on the table: a knife and fork for her, and a knife and fork in the empty place. 

Not far away, there was a couple. The man was strong as an ox, vast upper body strength, huge muscles which shone in the marmalade light. When he walked he walked like a being of stone, hard and fixed and unadaptable, unable to breathe with his body. The breaths issued from his neck, his chest and abdomen and diaphragm were all like concrete. Incidentally mother, I am an elite musician. Re. bassoon and singing: it is all really starting to take off. And I can breathe with the earth, from the earth. I can breathe from a place deeper than the souls of my feet. 

Let’s breathe together, mother.

Breath.

Different Breath.                      

I cursed her mother. The woman who was with him. They kept photographing themselves; she kept prodding him and slapping his arms. At one point, she went to the toilet. She was some time. I found her superficial. Outside their intimacies, how could I help but fail to understand them. I used a word about her, mother. But I know it’s a word you don’t like, so I’ll not utter it aloud.  

Another thing: there was one of those government emergency alerts, a test of nationwide warning system infrastructure. I didn’t know what it was at first. There my mobile phone was on the table in front of me, flashing, aghast and pale, showing its warning, buzzing. The whole pub filled with an unpleasant, hissing chord. A bit like this:

Chord (+ Distortion)  -----------------------------------------  Diminuendo…

It died down in a perfect diminuendo, as heads stopped turning, as heads looked to their own devices and registered the alert, pressing “OKAY” or “YES” or whatever. Merciful quiet was restored again.

Well, not “quiet”. Not cacophony. This:

Pub ambience -------------------------------------------------- Diminuendo… 

Whatever that is. Pub ambience.

Anyway, after about ten minutes, two plates of fish and chips came to the old woman’s table. Old woman. It’s such an understatement. “Ancient” escapes the reach of “old”. Two portions of fish and chips, one in her place, one in the empty place. She had come in alone, she was uncompanioned, it was definitely some kind of ritual, some kind of enactment. I imagined how long she might have been alone. Perhaps she had married when she was twenty and her husband had died at sixty two, when she was sixty, say. If she was now, say,…a hundred and one: (calculates) Forty one years, bereft, spouseless. I like that word. Spouseless. Spouseless. Spouseless. Spouseless. Spouseless.

Anyway, very slowly and steadily, sipping the water with hectic regularity all the while, she ate every single bit of her fish and chips. It made no difference to her figure. The meal seemed to have been instantaneously assumed into her, fully absorbed, every calorie and nutrient a necessity, not a single one wasted. I had half expected her to swell up, with all those hand-cut pan-cooked chips, that enormous slab of battered cod drizzled in lemon and dabbed in tartare sauce, the plate-pot of mushy peas. The plate beside her remained untouched of course. It is indicative of the length of my stay, that I was there to watch her demolish the entirety of that plate. I toyed with the idea of approaching her table and asking if I might eat the untouched plate of fish and chips. I didn’t of course, I wouldn’t. I did not and would not. I have too much respect for and identification with private and ritual idiosyncrasy. Do you remember my rituals, my private madnesses, my idiosyncrasies, mother? I remember yours.

The muscled man and his whore had moved onto other pastures by this time. (Coyly, noticing that he has used the word “whore”) Oh, whoops! Sorry, mother. I know you cannot stick that word. But it’s too late now. [BEAT] Whore. Whore. Whore. Whore. 

I went for a piss. When I came back the old woman was gone, the table had been cleared. It was as if she had never set food in The King’s Head. Arms I mean, The King’s Arms, the least trace of her was expunged. I finished whichever pint I was on and left the pub. Like the couple, like this ancient old skeleton, I too was ready for pastures new. Maybe a cathedral, perhaps a playground. Maybe another pub, maybe a betting shop, perhaps a cable car, or a strip club. 

I was leaving. The nearest tube hole was within gobbing distance. For whatever reason I looked behind. I fancied I heard the squark of an unusual bird. Piled outside the pub, copious against its walls, riding up the windows, almost as high as the awnings, unnoticed and unremarked upon by the smokers in the smoking area, were endless bones. Skeletons broken into their components; entire ribcages shattered into every single one their component ribs, ankles detached from feet and lower legs, toe-bones like rice, lower jaws separate from the skulls they helped sing, from the minds they helped be understood.

Bye mum. Kisses. X X      X. Love. V.