Scene 9
A pub. Late afternoon. Lemon and Joe are playing pool. In the background are a table football table and VANESSA. CHRIS enters, “fresh” from football. Joe pauses his shot.
LEMON: Well?
CHRIS: Nine!
JOE: Nine’s all right.
CHRIS: Nine’s our season best.
JOE: Nice one.
Joe bends to sink something simple.
CHRIS: All right, Vanessa!
She waves.
LEMON: You still using the old ‘six-four-zero’?
CHRIS: Had Ben hanging back, didn’t we. Just the three goals in the second half.
Lemon is artificial and discomfited.
LEMON: Now you’ve [sic] in single figures, could it be time to start thinking offensively?
CHRIS: Maybe. And I'm not saying we're disappointed with the wretched result. If anything, we're ecstatic. But as the clock ran down, we faced a team increasingly less convinced of the strength of challenge we represented.
LEMON: Turned down the volume, did they.
CHRIS: Of the final five goals, three were accomplished by aerial scissor-kicks, one can be traced to a quite unnecessary hack-down by Ben, and one was an own goal.
LEMON: Deflection, or . . .
CHRIS: Yeah, deflection. To be honest, Ben kicking it in off Batesy’s elbow, so. Both. Ben played well actually.
Perhaps some soundtrack music begins now, or perhaps it has begun earlier. A pool shot, a real mega-hit, splays pseudo-chaos across the table-top. The camera shot lingers until this pool shot’s very last wobble. Meanwhile, floating away . . .
VANESSA: Did you win then?
CHRIS: Christ, Vanessa!
She’s laughing.
CHRIS: Have you not been listening? You must've never’ve been listening for a month to be asking me a question like that . . .
Showing posts with label Vanessa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vanessa. Show all posts
Scene 10
A little later. Chris and Vanessa near the foosball, chatting, not playing. Shish-kebabbed men. It’s only beginning.
Joe is leaving the pub.
The soundtrack is continued from the previous scene. Joe puts on headphones, and we hear the two musics overlaid.
Joe is jogging. Cambridge in the evening. He goes past a small protest, organised by PAN – Pandemic Action Network. The placards say things like “Progress Not Slogans,” “Global Action Against Global Threat,” “Cameron Drinks Blood,” “Solidarity in the Face of Global Disease,” and “Repent, the End is Well F*cking Nigh.” The greater part of the activists are dressed as chickens. One stands a little apart, his head under his wing, relaxing. We hear a chant, dwindling. Joe comes past a chapel, where a choir rehearses. Three musics. He takes off his headphones. He stands and listens. Two musics. The soundtrack music fades. The song.
A little later. Chris and Vanessa near the foosball, chatting, not playing. Shish-kebabbed men. It’s only beginning.
Joe is leaving the pub.
The soundtrack is continued from the previous scene. Joe puts on headphones, and we hear the two musics overlaid.
Joe is jogging. Cambridge in the evening. He goes past a small protest, organised by PAN – Pandemic Action Network. The placards say things like “Progress Not Slogans,” “Global Action Against Global Threat,” “Cameron Drinks Blood,” “Solidarity in the Face of Global Disease,” and “Repent, the End is Well F*cking Nigh.” The greater part of the activists are dressed as chickens. One stands a little apart, his head under his wing, relaxing. We hear a chant, dwindling. Joe comes past a chapel, where a choir rehearses. Three musics. He takes off his headphones. He stands and listens. Two musics. The soundtrack music fades. The song.
Book II: The "Can't-Be-Buried!" Tales
BY THOMAS HARDY
Notes on contagion
I literally cannot say whether Lemon was mistaken about his “emptiness.” As for doom – enough doom for everybody – I don’t want to say. Given:
Then a soul in the “incarnation foyer” should expect to be born nearer to the end of a race than its beginning – there are more places available. Put it that way (the “Doomsday Argument”).
The focus of my essay is a contagion which spread over the world, altering landscapes, but in the case of its Cantabrigian epicentre, not gravely so.
Lemon is comprehended in that focus because a component of the contagion originated with him, at any rate it settled its form in him. This component or “meme” might be described as the strong inclination to move from ontological facts to bodily praxis. Several weeks before Lemon died he passed this “meme” to a woman called Vanessa Curtis, who took it with her to the City Church on St. Albert’s Road. In that faith-clogged environs it bred catastrophically with a “meme” that could be described as the ressurection of the flesh. The bloated and deadly progeny possessed characteristics belonging to neither parent. After Lemon's suicide, incidentally, he was also infected by this hybrid strain.
Chinwag is comprehended in my focus because of his influential role in containing the breakout. He is the one case I am looking at in detail. I had him, Samantha, and the enraged taxonomer to chose from. Angels are reptiles? He would have totally spacked out. Were it not for the latent violence of these three . . . well. It doesn’t bear speaking about.
"[...] I rose at night, and visited
The Cave of the Unborn:
And crowding shapes surrounded me
For tidings of the life to be,
Who long had prayed the silent Head
To haste its advent morn.
Their eyes were lit with artless trust,
hope thrilled their every tone;
"A scene the loveliest, is it not?
A pure delight, a beauty-spot?
Where all is gentle, true and just,
And darkness is unknown? [...]"
Notes on contagion
I literally cannot say whether Lemon was mistaken about his “emptiness.” As for doom – enough doom for everybody – I don’t want to say. Given:
Then a soul in the “incarnation foyer” should expect to be born nearer to the end of a race than its beginning – there are more places available. Put it that way (the “Doomsday Argument”).
The focus of my essay is a contagion which spread over the world, altering landscapes, but in the case of its Cantabrigian epicentre, not gravely so.
Lemon is comprehended in that focus because a component of the contagion originated with him, at any rate it settled its form in him. This component or “meme” might be described as the strong inclination to move from ontological facts to bodily praxis. Several weeks before Lemon died he passed this “meme” to a woman called Vanessa Curtis, who took it with her to the City Church on St. Albert’s Road. In that faith-clogged environs it bred catastrophically with a “meme” that could be described as the ressurection of the flesh. The bloated and deadly progeny possessed characteristics belonging to neither parent. After Lemon's suicide, incidentally, he was also infected by this hybrid strain.
Chinwag is comprehended in my focus because of his influential role in containing the breakout. He is the one case I am looking at in detail. I had him, Samantha, and the enraged taxonomer to chose from. Angels are reptiles? He would have totally spacked out. Were it not for the latent violence of these three . . . well. It doesn’t bear speaking about.
"[...] I rose at night, and visited
The Cave of the Unborn:
And crowding shapes surrounded me
For tidings of the life to be,
Who long had prayed the silent Head
To haste its advent morn.
Their eyes were lit with artless trust,
hope thrilled their every tone;
"A scene the loveliest, is it not?
A pure delight, a beauty-spot?
Where all is gentle, true and just,
And darkness is unknown? [...]"
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