Notes For A Novel On Chaos
The mother sits motionless at the kitchen table. Her silence has a timeless ring to it, coffee beams feel their way through air. A Cigarette burns. She stares into space. The usual questions abound; how could this have happened? The table is matted with a selection of newspaper articles about her daughter’s death. The one she is now no longer reading bears an article that measures a few inches across by a few more down, too small for the Jessica that her mother remembers – it speaks of a charming and beautiful young girl (newspapers cannot pass comment without noting a person’s looks) fresh out of Cambridge with glistening recommendations, marked for a bright and swashbuckling career in whichever public service she wished to grace – hit by a car, killed instantly, as she walked to her new job as research assistant to former Cabinet heavyweight, Lord Spencer Hosbein-Lovell. The distinguished name brings the brief moment of relief to the mother as she remembers pride and the swelling of future prospects. But it is brief. Hosbein-Lovell, now a dusty, if grand, member of the old elite, had been a yesteryear hero of Jessica’s during her political-science course – to work for the man who stood tall and boorish in a mythical past when the statesmen were like warlords, fighting for the rights of women in higher education and the work place. For Jess, her education was just beginning.
The policeman, who has not long departed from the house frozen in time, not one of those young boys that the Mother hears about, tells her it was a case of the worst luck – Jess had darted up from the subway just as a Mercedes mounted the curb – the worst imaginable timing. For the mother there is no consolation in the chaos theory. Somewhere she is trying to answer questions that nobody has ever answered satisfactorily.
In the subway Jess pauses as she approaches the steps, an ethereal light pouring down them, she thinks quickly of Eurydice and looks down to a rugged faced man, all autumnal colours and ground in dirt, sat against the wall, coins at his feet – she has a rule not to stop, her good deeds would filter through the system, a grandly naïve thought even Lord Hosbein-Lovell is willing to allow her for the time being. But on this morning the tramp’s sign reads, “Please spare some change for cider and fags.” She looks twice before agreeing to a half smile and tosses a couple of shiny pound coins into the splayed sweater. There is a higher intelligence at work here, she thinks, these are words of a once brave and now defeated man. There is no mockery in these words, only naked honesty – the pain of all society, too fatigued to carry on the fight, the tramp is the unknown soldier in a continuous war of which she will one day be the victorious commander-in-chief. Life is rich, she thinks, as she hops to the first step.
The tramp was once Simon Kilvenny, pensions advisor and depressive. Since losing everything to the local county court he has found, what people without pensions might term, his soul and now looks forward to each day as if it were a long needed holiday. As far as he knows his wife and child by now must consider him dead, it has been several years since he vanished from the face of earth. He revels in the poetry of his disappearance, a poetry he could never have understood when his life was made of figures. He yearns for nothing that has gone before, family included. On dark days he concludes a man made of this has no shame in reducing himself to a memory and a puff of smoke.
His wife, Diane, who famously married down, had been a beautiful if stern looking young lady who turned simply into a stern looking thirty something trying to avoid the company of a child she has no feelings for. Her husband has taken to going out early and coming home very late. This must all be punishment for something. Her mind can only go as far as ‘marrying down’. After several months of living with a sinisterly cold child and the spectre of a husband she traps him and sits him down by staying up past one, in a dark corner of the living room. He enters with glazed eyes, his tie loose, hair ruffled, in the uniform of a drunk. He is startled to see her, but not ashamed and answers none of her questions. As she gets up to leave, perhaps even forever, she has yet to decide, he mentions that he is broke and needs to attend a conference in the morning. She says nothing, he sleeps on the sofa – they are like stage markings for a Shakespearean denouement. He wakes late the next day, the house is empty, he tries not to think how used to this he might have to get. On the kitchen table is three twenty-pound notes and a short message in his wife’s slashed handwriting, “here’s your money for cider and fags.” As self-satisfyingly sarcastic as Diane can get, it makes him laugh. She has never said ‘fags’ in her life.
The child, April, now ten, wishes her mother had the sense to tell her that her father had died in the war, a hero. But no, she knows exactly how worthless her dad was and how the world is better off without him. In school, Mr Giffen, feels it odd to find a lump in his throat after all these years of teaching. As an introduction to his English class he is presented with a daunting pile of badly spelt mini-essays on each pupil’s family. He sips a scotch under a dim orange light in his study and re-reads April’s offer. She speaks with remarkable earnestness for such a small child, and draws gothic sketches of her parents. Her mother walks about the house with the wine glass as a perpetual ornament, eyes glazed as the golem. Her father was a cruel and awkward man that left for no other reason than to shatter her world and leave her with the carcass of a mother. If nothing else, thinks Mr Giffen – second scotch – it explains why April doesn’t look like the life and soul of the party.
His third scotch is an attempt at summoning courage. What do you say to a woman who has lost a daughter so tragically when you have been out three times? Mr Giffen had not met Jess, but when her mother spoke of her it changed her entire shape, from a timid and intelligent woman to that of a brave and wild-minded indulgent. It was mesmerising, charming – he found the passion erotic but stable, it made him nervous for his own feelings and his own missed chances. All around him had always been the shrapnel of exploded families. His wife was long gone, his children abroad. He had met his wife at a concert in ’71, young, high, every day could have been their last. His son was on his third marriage in Melbourne. His parents had died hating each other at the ashen end of an intense and mythologized relationship – he was a brilliant mathematician, she was his pupil. Mr Giffen looks over to his bookshelf with these sprinkled thoughts. His father’s most revered tome always stands out like a throbbing ghost at around about the third scotch, “The History and Future of The Chaos Theory”. The title was as pompous as the work.
As performed at the Hay-on-Wye Fringe Festival, May 2007