Australian Monologues

It’s early in the morning. The light is still new. Leaves drift from trees. Fallen rose petals form a carpet of bruised colour across the lawn. PIP is sitting in the garden.

Pip: This garden is the world. Everything that matters happened here. I kissed my first boy in that shed. I was nine. He was my cousin, Tom. Down from Port Augusta. I don’t know if it counts if it was your cousin. But it was a kiss, nonetheless. He kissed me and then he put his hand down my pants. I don’t know what he expected but I think he got a shock because he pulled it straight back out again. But I liked it. I got so excited that I bit his face. He started to cry and ran to his mother and I was sent to my room. And I don’t know if it was because I bit him or because I liked having his hand down my pants. Somehow, I think Mum knew. I think she knew exactly why a girl bites a boy in the face. But then she always knew the things you didn’t want her to know. She caught us, me and Penny McCrea and Stella Bouzakis with a bottle of sweet wine. We were in Year 9 and we snuck off from school at lunchtime. Penny had stolen it from her parents’ drinks cabinet. We came back here and made a party of it, smoking those long coloured cocktail cigarettes as well. Thinking we were totally it. And suddenly Mum’s standing at the back door. She was meant to be at work. She never came home for lunch. Never. But that day, when we’re wagging school and drinking sweet wine in the backyard she decides to come home. Stella got such a scare she started to vomit. Mum stuck her face in the compost pit and said ‘Vomit there, you silly girl’. I was grounded for the rest of Year 9 and never drank sweet wine again.

Denise: This mother thing sucks. I hated it right from the start. Complete strangers came up and patted my belly as if it was going to bring them luck. And after the birth which was fucking torture, mad people cooed and gurgled and talked in high pitched voices. They smiled at me and expected me to smile back. Like, what the fuck! It’s this, “You’ve got a little baby,” stuff. I go crazy while she sleeps in her cot and you’re at work and my friends have got a life and I’m on my own and I think, Jesus Christ, what have I done? How in hell am I going to get through this? I push her in her pram to the shops because I’ve run out of baby swipes. I push her to the shops to buy disposable nappies and spend my last fifteen bucks. I push her to the shops because I can’t think of anywhere else to push her. Sometimes I think if I leave her there someone nicer might come and get her and it’d be much much better. I meet with other mothers and I pray to fucking God that I don’t look like them, or sound like them, or am like them. They tell me how smart their kid is, how early she talked, or walked. How their three month old baby is reading Shakespeare. And I look down at my fat little bald baby sucking on her dummy and I think, oh, that’s funny because mine’s as thick as a brick. This mother thing is weird. I’m bored. I’m lonely. And it doesn’t stop.

It was my fault. If we stuck together like we said, you and me and Leanne, you wouldn’t be here. But I lost youse all. Now I’ve lost you. And no-one knows how. You should hear the rumours. Someone seen a black Torana with Victorian number plates. It was a stranger in a Megadeath T-shirt, it was a maddie from the hospital, even your stepdad. All these ideas about who did it, who did it, like it was a TV show. It is a TV show. Every night on the news. I want to yell out, this is not a body, this is Tracy you’re talking about. Someone who was here last week, going to netball, working at the Pizza Hut, getting the ferry, hanging out. You were alive. Now you’re dead. But I know you can hear me. I can hear you.

She plays a bit of the song.

Your song. Times we danced to that, you and me and Shana, Shana singing dirty words, remember? Mum hearing and throwing a mental…. I shouldn’t laugh, should I? Not here. But all I can think of is the other words.

She turns off the tape.

You were wearing my earrings. You looked so great. And some guy took you off and did those things to you. Wish I knew how. You know, Trace. Nobody else does. If I knew, but I’d go and kill him. I’d smash his head in. I’d cut his balls off. I’d make him die slowly for what he did to you.

Blackrock Play (Currency Press)

Always ‘us’, ‘all of you’, ‘we’, ‘them’. Never ‘I’, ‘me’, just ‘you alone’. Do you ever think of one individual person? Can you look at one human being and see only one human being, or do you have to see millions of others standing behind in a crowd that stretches to the horizon? Germans who are punctual, Frenchmen who all wear berets, Italians all waving their arms in the air, Americans chewing gum? What do all Australians do? How do you see them? I’ll tell you what they all do: they beat their heads against a wall crying ‘We don’t need you. We’re as good as you. We are happy with ourselves.’ That’s all anyone said while I was there. They would tell me over and over and over how independent you all were, how grown up you all have become, how confident, how open, mature, positive, repeating it all constantly like a chant. But it can’t be true. No one who is happy needs to repeat, ‘I am happy’ a thousand times a day to convince himself. All of you are deeply unhappy, as unhappy as everybody else. You are all paranoiacs. You see, I can play that game, I can put you at the front of a crowd and pretend you represent them all. I can go on and on too. I can say that your newness, your freshness, your freedom from tradition attracted my world-weary, neurotic decaying European sensibility. I can say you represent all the things that are missing from my life: romance, laughter, space, clear dazzling light. But I would be talking in clichés. It would have no meaning…

(in a sad, angry outburst)

I missed you so badly! I missed your jokes. I missed your body. I was happy for a week, but human happiness terrifies me. I wanted to stay with you but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to come home, but I had to. I wish I’d never met you. Being with you again makes me realise how unhappy I really am. I don’t want to see you again. And I don’t want you to go, ever.

I can see a beautiful nightclub. Black shiny surfaces, all polished and clean, sparkling glasses full of champagne, gin and tonic, cocktails, liqueurs etc. Women melting into their partners’ bodies, the men wrapped around them like blankets. The band, in a row laid back, handsome. Snacks, cards, cigarettes, money, lipstick, watches, jewellery, high stools, dancing, wild dancing, bare bodies under not much. They abandon themselves here. Get out of their day shoes and set off at a gallop, drinks whizzing down the gullet, talk gurgling up, hands wandering all over the place, anywhere will do, who cares.They have learned how not to care, how here to let go the reins.

They want to show off, they want to fall in love with the moment and it to fall in love with them. Greedy are they? No, not greedy. Hungry.

I love, I love, I love, love they think. Love me, me, me, me, all of me. Fill me up, fill me up. I’ve had a bath, I’ve put on my deodorant, my clothes are impeccable. Now now now do the next bit, come over they seem to be screaming.

Come over here and really fill me up with something significant something – of value. A right word a soft word at just the right moment straight down the ear hole, ping bullseye, right to the hungry spot, ping and then ah, ah, that was it. Got it thank you, now anything I can do for you back? No, yes, not a sure thing at all, perhaps not.

Or someone could walk up their timing perfect, and stand fitting the shape of me. Perfection, it would register. I would breath out, relax and they would sit and put a hand out somewhere on the table, it would contact my hand and ping down the arm would go, the message and it would run up the shoulder into the head, down whiz straight to the heart and zoom, zing the genitals aflame. And my dress would fill up with light. I would wake up and dance I would jump off the end of the pier, free fall. And he would fly over the end after me splash, gurgle gurgle gurgle.

And down we go.

Carol says, “Problem with you, Rhonda, problem with you is that you’re just too fertile. You just got to look at a man and you’re up the duff.” And we laughed but she’s right, she’s fucking right. Woman from Welfare says, “it must be hard. Must be hard for you, Rhonda, with all those kids. Looking after them, it must be hard”. And I say “No. it’s not hard.” Though it is. I know it and she knows it. But I’m not going to give her the satisfaction. So I say, “No. Those kids, those kids are my blessings. Everyone of them a blessing. You understand. A blessing” though it is … hard. But it’s like Carol says I only got to look at a man. Anyway, I’m down the pub playing the bandits when Carol, she’s my neighbour, lives in the flat next door, Carol comes in and says, “Cops were over your place earlier”. And I said, “Oh yeah, what do they want this time? If it’s Nathan, you can tell ‘em he’s not there. Tell ‘em he’s pissed off.” Without a word mind you and with the rent. Bastard. And I’m not taking him back, not this time. No fucking way. Better off alone. Well, that’s what Carol says. But she doesn’t get it, Family Services don’t get it, but it’s how I am. It’s my life and I like having a man around. So I’ve had a few. They don’t stick around. Anyway, Carol says it’s not Nathan they’re after, it’s about your kids. And so I know there’s trouble. Stacey’s probably been picked up shoplifting or something. Doesn’t bother me ‘cause I taught ‘em how. So I go down to the station and they know me there. And I say, “Where are they? I want to see my kids.” You can’t see them”, and I look at him and I say, “I’m their mother and I can see them whenever I bloody well like”. And then he says it. Just a couple of words, he says it: “There’s been an accident”.

(pause)

“What accident?” “A fire. There’s been a fire. In a Brotherhood bin. A candle. The clothes. I’m sorry”.

(pause)

The man in the suit, he says, “They didn’t suffer, the smoke, it would have… “ (she holds up her hand as if to motion him to stop talking) And I say, “They suffered. You don’t know how much”.

I wouldn’t mind looking after him. If he got a fever or disease or something,
turned all slimy like ham that’s gone bad, I’d peel off his shirt, lay him down
on new sheets, and dab him with a washer. Bucket near his head for the sick.
Blender lasagne into custard so he could drink it. Help him pee. I wouldn’t
mind doing that. Cos what we’ve got is worth getting better for. Me and him.
And while I’m holding the coke bottle for him to pee in, he’d look at me and
I’d look at it … and we’d do it. On his sick bed. Cold fever sweat and dry
retching the whole time. Who’d care if it was bad when afterwards the sweat
seals our bodies together like a bandaid … We’d be glowing.

She glows a little.

Even if he was dying, I’d sit by him, and even after. He’ll kiss my cheek with his
last breath. Dry-vomit lips on my clean skin. And I won’t start crying cos I don’t
want the tears to wash that last bit of life off my face. And for as long as I live I
wouldn’t let another kiss me there. Not even after all the sick saliva seeps into
my skin – and he’s inside of me forever. Not even then.

MOTHER stirs. It stops glowing.

But how do you lose your virginity when you share a bed with your mother?

There was a spray that Dad breathed in and now I don’t have the eggs. They’ve all been destroyed by radiotherapy and even if they found one, I can’t carry it. The tumour wiped out half my organs, my body can’t support a baby. Grandda, I’m thirty and I’ve just started menopause.

I will never have children. [Beat] I will never have children. [Beat] I will never have children. And you know what? I don’t think I deserve them anyway. When a friend tells me she is pregnant I smile and hug and kiss and ask her dumb questions. ‘How far along?’ ‘Any names picked yet?’ ‘What are you craving?’ But I don’t let on what I’m craving. That despite my big smile and congratulations I’m green and I’m bubbling and I’m thinking, you bitch, I hope it fucking dies inside you, you bitch. And when a pregnant woman walks past me on the street I want punch her belly and walk away when she falls to the ground and just leave her there to deal with it. And when a husband tells me he’s having his third boy I want to put my hand down his pants and rip his fucking cock off and squeeze it dry of any seed. And when I see a baby in a pram…[beat.] I just want to pick it up and smell its skin and hold it to my heart and stoke its little head and never let another person touch it for the rest of its life. Is that normal, Grandda? I don’t know. And I never will. Because the seed stops here.

The Seed (Full Play)

I’m not to blame for every thing that’s gone wrong in your lives. I’m a thinker! It’s my job to think. Because that’s something I do better than other people. You’re all spoiled brats. Go on shoot me, but that’s the truth! Talk about the Me Generation! All this nonsense about personal identity and self-growth and being fulfilled! What a load of self –indulgent crap. Has it ever occurred to any of you that there was a generation of men and women who didn’t wake up in the morning and wonder how the day was going to pan out for them, but leapt out of bed intent on figuring out how the world was going to pan out for everyone? Maybe we got things wrong. Maybe we went too far. Maybe we had a goddamn mission and that was to make this planet a better place for our inheritors than it was for us. You whiners and whingers! What would you rather? That I’d sat quietly back and lead a sweet, unrestrained, anonymous life? So that your destiny as repressed, stupefied, second-class citizens could have gone on uninterrupted? I happened to get famous and now you’re going to use my fame against me because you’re not happy with yourselves? Why don’t you take a little responsibility and, while you’re at it, show a tiny bit of ordinary gratitude?

Gary peers through the mesh of a cage. It’s unclear if he’s inside the cage or out.

Gary: If I think of what I was like, of that man, Gary, it’s like he was in another life, another time, in a bad dream. It was as if he was made up, put together, shaped from paper mache or clay. There’s only the finest thread that connects him and me. He knew…knew is too strong. He sensed there was something else. He caught hold of the thread of it before it was too late, he grabbed it and knew that he must never let it go. When he looked at the moon and it was full, when he heard a bird call, when he smelt something he couldn’t trace sometimes, when he touched something fine, he sensed there was more. I stepped out of Gary, I shed him like an old coat, I stepped out a new and finer man, a man who wants things, who wants to live life, to be part of something larger than himself. I heard the call. I’d been waiting for it for a long time. And finally, finally it came. I promised myself to be open, to new adventures, to be willing to go where most would be terrified to go. I promised myself to be ready, for new experiences, to try anything, wear new clothes, taste foods I’d never known, travel exotic places, hear languages new to my ear. I was ready to endure the heat or cold, to forget about comfort, to find something to fight for, something to believe in, to believe in so completely and worth dying for. What else could a man want for?

No, no, no… ya can’t turn back now. I’m startin’ to see you as the voice of a very misunderstood section of our society. But you know… there’s a million of me gettin’ round, mate. And they’ll all tell ya they had a tough life. You know, beaten up by their dad, in trouble with the cops, pisshead mum, rough school. A million fuckin’ excuses why they turned out to be bad eggs. And I got all of the above… Oh yeah! Truth is, most of ‘em are just bored. They leave their shit-ass state school and live on the dole in their diddly bumfuck nowhere suburb. Before ya know it, ya got some girl up the duff and no money. She spends the day with a screamin’ sprog and a fag in her mouth plonked in front of a daytime soap wearin’ her tracky daks all day, dreamin’ of bein’ swept away by some Fabio and she just gets… fatter. But… her Centrelink payments have gone up and all her fat friends are waitin’ in line behind her! It’s a career move for ‘em. Gettin’ up the duff. And you… drink with ya mates, watch the footy and the highlight of the week is the local tavern has a skimpy barmaid every Friday. And ya know the rest of the world is havin’ a better time. Ya just know it. The magazines are tellin’ ya that, the newspapers, the telly. Everybody’s richer, everybody’s more beautiful, and everybody’s got more… purpose. And ya thinkin’, how do I make sense of this dog-ass life? And then one day ya just get hold of a gun. Ya don’t even know what ya gonna do with it. It’s like the sound of a V8 in the distance. It takes ya… somewhere else. [Pause.] I didn’t see ya writin’ any of this down. I’m spillin’ my guts out in the name of art and you don’t give a shit. What sort of writer are ya?

Full play 

What a great place. This area’s like something out of Thomas Mann or Kafka. God it’s exciting being in Europe. So alive, isn’t it? So… pulsating. I’ve had a great morning. I saw your Roman mosaic. Went on a tour of that poet’s house. Had a look at the inn where whatsisname wrote his opera. And I went to this great exhibition at the big gallery. There’s some amazing things in there. Stuff I knew quite well. And that altar they’ve got! But there was this performance art thing. Incredible! There was this big pool full of fish, carp, I don’t know, and this guy, nothing on, you were right, with all these crucifixes and beads in his hair, wading through the water, dragging this little raft behind him; he had the rope in his teeth. On the raft was this pile of animal innards with candles sticking out of it. Then these other people dressed as astronauts and red indians ran round and round the pond screaming and then they lit this fire and threw copies of the Mona Lisa into it. And then, I don’t know how they did it but the water turned bright red. Just incredible. You must see it. It’s great being here. Everything’s so exciting. I’ve been keeping everything I get. Every little item, every bus ticket, gallery ticket, the train tickets. Every postcard. Every coaster from every bar, every café.

You selfish little bastard! You listen to me – we come down here for the layoff, five months of the year, December to April. That leaves another seven months still hangin’ – what d’yer reckon Olive does in that time? Knocks around with other blokes, goes out on the loose every week? No, she doesn’t, she just waits for us to come back again – ‘coz she thinks our five months is worth all the rest of the year put together! It’s knowin’ that that brought me down this time, broke and – and when I would have given anythin’ to have stopped up there. But I couldn’t let her down – and if I hear you mention either grapes or the Murray to her now, I’ll kick you so far they’ll have to feed you with a shanghai.

(Beat)

Now remember what I said.

Roo has been struggling with a great loss of pride recently, and has a lot of built up emotion, it is here he finally snaps. Barney, who he is speaking with in this monologue, is his larrikin best friend. Roo is typically a reserved character, but here he is putting his friend in his place.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Play

Are you looking at the sunset? (Startled BETSHEB turns around. Smiling) I’m not a monster… No more running. Look at us reflected in the water, see? Upside-down. (He smiles and she smiles back. Silence) So quiet. I’m not used to such silence. I’m a city boy, born and bred. You’ve never seen a city or town, have you? Where I live there are dozens of factories: shoe factories, some that make gaskets, hydraulic machines, clothing. My mother works in a shoe factory. (Pointing to his boots) These came from my mother’s factory.
(Silence)
These sunsets here, I’ve never seen the likes of them. A bit of muddy orange light in the distance, behind the chimneys, is generally all I get to see. (Pause)
You’d like the trams, especially at night. They rattle and squeak, like ghosts rattling their chains, and every so often the conducting rod hits a terminus, and there is a brilliant spark of electricity, like an axe striking a rock. ‘Spiss!’ On Saturday afternoon thousands of people go and watch the football. A huge oval of grass. (Miming a football) A ball like this. Someone hand passes it, ‘Whish’, straight to me. I duck one lumbering giant, spin around a nifty dwarf of a rover, then I catch sight of the goals. I boot a seventy-yard drop kick straight through the centre. The crowd goes wild!

(He cheers wildly. BETSHEB laughs at his actions. He is pleased to have made her laugh.) Not as good as your play. (Pause.)

This is your home. My home is across the river, Bass Strait.

(Silence) What is it about you people? Why are you like you are? Don’t go.

I was watching you pick these. My mother steals flowers from her neighbour’s front garden so every morning she can have fresh flowers in her vase for Saint Teresa’s portrait. She was a woman centuries ago. God fired a burning arrow of love into her. (Smiling) When it penetrated her, Saint Teresa could smell the burning flesh of her heart.

Full Play (Currency Press)