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  1. Performance - October

    Two of my monologues are being performed at the Speakeasy in Central London over three nights this October. Here’s the official marketing:

    “The Speakeasy - Extraordinary night of monologues” is back after two sell out shows earlier this year. Insignificant Theatre is proud to present the third instalment of exciting new writing and talented actors.

    Come along to the Nell of Old Drury pub in Covent Garden and join us for never-seen-before performances and a friendly drink.
    Eight Actors. Eighteen writers. One night - not to be missed.

    8:00PM - 10:00 PM
    3rd, 4th, 5th October
    Tickets available on the door only £4
    Reserve your tickets now at insignificanttheatre@gmail.com

  2. Phoney

    Long before I was legally old enough to work, I faked my way into a series of telesales jobs. This is my C.V of that time.

    Summer, 1996. Posh double glazing.

    Lasted twenty five minutes into the first shift. How many windows and doors would you replace in your home, does not a sales call make.

    Autumn, 1996, More double glazing.

    Slightly less posh. Get called a starfish everyday for a month in the classic team humiliation game, who is a star, who is a starfish? by a guy I once turned down in the local goth club. Learn the definition of karma, or his definition at least.

    Meet my nemesis, crush him with my superior telesales skills.

    Arrive one wintery evening to find the boss shredding paperwork and staff looting telephones and fax machines. Have to collect payment cheque midweek at noon, difficult because I’m only fourteen and have to bunk from school to do it.

    Winter, 1996. Sex line.

    Turn up to telesales job interview that insists over 18s only. Bring fake I.D. Learn it’s phone sex. Wonder why I didn’t work that out beforehand. Back away slowly.

    Winter, 1996. Assorted.

    Get a job in a three quarter empty Victorian office block. Long halls, red carpet, like The Shining. Just me and a man, maybe 45, in a room. He files papers and watches me make calls.

    I sell milk subscriptions, charity donation box installations and private medical insurance, even though I don’t know what it is.

    Terrified of the corridors, not at all bothered being alone locked in an office with a strange man. By now I am fifteen and therefore convinced I am impervious to all danger, apart from supernatural threats.

    Spring, 1997. Home care systems.

    Old man locks room one day and doesn’t come back. Suspect ghosts.

    New job convincing people to allow a salesman into their home on the pretence of cleaning their carpets. Much like inviting in a Vampire, you’re screwed, at least until you agree to buy a fancy vacuum cleaner.

    Company is American. Get a shaving foam pie in the face at least once a fortnight. Learn all the words to the sales chants of the door to door guys including, what are we? RHINO, what do we do, CHARGE.

    Begin taking on more shifts and am soon working every evening and weekends. Tracy Chapman convinces me to save all my paycheques toward a Ford Capri.

    Win a small bottle of Archers for most leads and mistakenly down it like an alcopop. Never touch the peachy stuff again.

    Get promoted and run the team. Boss goes to America, leaves me in charge of the call centre. Have to fire someone twice my age, cry after shift.

    Lose office keys, climb in through window, find keys in bag.

    Height of summer. Take my GCSEs wearing normal clothes under my uniform. Run out of exams and take uniform off at bus stop. Barely make it to shift on time. Repeat for two weeks, hope no one from work spots me in school clothes. Try not to sweat.

    Call in sick for the first time. Saturday morning. Confess first love has dumped me and I’m stranded, miles from the office. Sales guy drives up to collect me. Gives long speech about getting over first love. Feel cared for by failing salespeople in stained polyester shirts.

    Autumn, 1999. Timeshare.

    Move away to college. Back in the bullpen selling timeshare to people without passports. Have coughing fit in the interview, somehow still get job.

    New boss arrives to shape up the staff.  He is sixty, orange and wears comedy ties. When I look at him I think about cardiac arrest.

    Reunited with my old nemesis, crush him again with my superior telesales skills.

    Get promoted to closer and moved to room full of regional staff taking inbound calls for Scottish Power. People ask what the strange noise is in the background.

    Summoned once a week to receive bonus money in white envelope. Feel like pint sized Mafioso. Have disposable income for the first time. Buy wedding dress from Oxfam and go to raves in it. Believe I am cool and original.

    Boss declares office fit and heads home. I am asked to present him with cake. Everyone cheers. Two weeks later the business folds. No more envelopes. Wedding dress smells of farm.

    Spring, 2000. Back to double glazing.

    Last telesales job. Barren estate miles from town. Bloody double glazing, but a record £5 an hour basic wage in two hour shifts per day.

    Meet Nemesis again, this time the roles are reversed. I am in the gutter, a real starfish. His eccentricity just makes people confess they want to replace their windows. They can feel his fun Hawaiian shirt through the phone.

    After two weeks without a single lead and an £80 pay cheque, I beat a noble retreat and resign to the bleach blonde 22 year old college dropout running the place. She tells me she’s impressed at my candidacy. Manage not to correct her.

    The nemesis bids me farewell, his smug grin 40% gum, 60% braces. I leave with my telesales reputation in tatters. I see him again, by chance, fifteen years later on Oxford Street. He’s still in sales and Hawaiian shirts. I don’t tell him what I’m doing.

    Summer, 2000. Get a real job.

    Sorry to the countless people I called during dinner, to all the guys I promised to go on a date with after they had given me a lead and finally to Mr Turtle, for laughing hysterically at your name and having to hang up only to call back five minutes later and do the same thing.

  3. Work

    Everyone has terrible stories about their first job. I had several friends who worked in the local lettuce factory, twelve hour shifts, standing up, halving icebergs – hallucinating beheading their enemies, or maybe their supervisors.

    Others, who worked boxing carpet samples, or worse, boxing boxes. I knew one man, whose entire role consisted of weeding insects from an endless conveyor belt of raisins for a major cake producer. An exceedingly bad position.

    My own introduction to work came in the form of a two weeks experience in an accounts department, locked inside a secure wing of the local mental hospital.

    There were many problems to this post; the most prominent being my utter lack of mathematical nous that saw me banished to the back room with the important role of shredding confidential documents for eight hours a day.

    Like a scene in a cheap sitcom, I opened the door to a windowless room, empty but for a shredder and paper stacked from floor to ceiling, waiting to meet its maker.

    I spent my days sweating over the machine, door closed because the noise disturbed the accountants. I would emerge at intervals to heave the plastic bags of waste through the department and across the hospital grounds to the industrial bins behind what I thought was an incinerator, but found out much later, was in fact just the boiler house.

    Big black plumes of smoke circled the Victorian buildings. I had visions of amputated limbs and secret still births in yellow biomedical waste bags piled outside, waiting to be burned. We had been studying Auschwitz at school and I saw death everywhere.

    It wasn’t helped by the stories my Mother had told me about the mental hospital detaining unwed mothers in the twenties and thirties, then holding them for the duration of their lives. I pictured these women, once coherent, slowly driven out of their minds by their hopeless situation.

    In another circumstance I would have been fearful of seeing the ghosts of these women wandering the sterile linoleum floors. There was no need to conjure up spirits; the walkways and my mind were occupied with patients.

    As soon as I left the double locked security wing of the accounting department, I would begin to eye up anyone who passed me. The block I worked in was supposed to be staff only, but the patients still wandered in, some zombified and lost, others acutely alert.

    People in shirts and ties would occasionally break into incoherent shouts, or flail their arms. The person opposite you in the cafeteria would aggressively flip their tray without warning, spraying milk and pudding all over their neighbours.

    I should have realised that one, how many balanced adults select milk as their drink of choice?

    I went home and told my Mother. How do you spot a mental patient? She shot at me, Easy, they look like just like you and me. With that piece of wisdom I looked for menopausal women and sullen teens.

    Now, I am equipped with the social skills to converse with people sitting on various positions of the mental health scale, half a lifetime ago I was an introverted bag of hormones intimidated by a building that emitted dark smoke.

    Lunchtimes were the worst: I’d wander round the expansive grounds, between boarded up Victorian villas and open grass fields. Sometimes I’d hunt for conkers, occasionally I would dare to listen to my walkman, but the staff warned me against this so I’d be able to hear anyone approach me.

    During my first week, I got into the habit of breaking the monotony of shredding by sulking in the staff toilets, slumped in a cubicle, walkman blaring Sisters of Mercy.

    One afternoon, I pulled my headphones off, slouched out the cubicle to find a woman, around forty, vigorously brushing her teeth.  She asked me if I brushed mine, a pretty normal question from an adult to a kid.

    I curled by lip up like a rodent, exposing my double train track braces for her to examine. She mimicked me, revealing a very nice set of teeth coated in blood. I leaned toward her, saw the blood on the bristles of her brush and smeared on her lips and cheek.

    That’s when I decided to leave.

    Two more days of sweating and shredding, punctuated with occasional failed attempts to flirt with a female accountant, who looking back was a, an adult b, just being nice and c, clearly not gay, I learnt the art of calling in sick.

    I like to think it wasn’t the crazy that got to me, it was the monotony. I could have stuck it out with a bathroom full of compulsive brushers if only I was allowed to alphabetise a file, or answer a telephone.

    Looking back, it’s more likely I was a lazy teenager who thought she was too good for day long shredding.

    To all the patients I remembered but misunderstood, I’m sorry. To all the accountants, who I remember nothing about, perhaps if you’d thrown milk all over me, you might have earned a place in my memory.

  4. Four Stories, Part One

    Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

    I               Gloria

    I met this Journalist today, this woman. She told me I was the strongest female she had ever met.

    Me.

    She has met a lot of important people. People in Government, people who make decisions.

    She said that even though I was half her age, I had seen the world and lived through terror. I had made it out the other side.

    I didn’t know what to say. There are sixty other children on the bus, and back home in Uganda, there are thousands of us, too many to count.

    How can I be the strongest? I’m a fourteen year old girl.

    We have been in England telling our stories to Journalists for two weeks. It is cold here; I always keep my coat on.

    The other girls tease me for being so skinny. I can’t help it. I’m not good with food.

    Sometimes it is so cold, I shake. The Journalists think it is fear. It’s not. I don’t know what fear looks like to me now.

    Sometimes I cry. You tell the same story eight, nine times a day, but it’s still your story, it’s still your pain. This is what they want to know:

    How old were you when you were taken?

    Did you know what the rebels would do to you?

    Did you have a choice?

    Were you beaten?

    Were you raped?

    How many times?

    How many men?

    Did you cry out?

    Did you try to get away?

    I tell them all of it, all of it and more.

    The Journalist kissed me goodbye.  She asked the same questions as the others, but she was the only one to cry when she heard my story.

    I think maybe she was crying for her own pain, for her own personal terror.

    Just before we said goodbye, she told me about this English Queen, long ago. The Queen said, I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too.

    That’s you, the Journalist said. You are that Queen. 

    I knew then, that she was right.

    Some of us are trapped in fragile bodies and our blood will spill and our bones will be broken.

    Our hearts will remain strong. My heart will remain strong.

  5. Four Stories, Part Two

    Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

    II             Albert

    The first thing I want to say to the people of Britain is that forgiveness is a two way street.

    You have to let go of everything that has happened to you and to your family. You have to forgive those who harmed you.

    Really forgive.

    In return, you can let go of your own sin.

    When you do you can almost see it drifting out of you, like smoke.

    Now you are thinking what has this boy experienced that he needs to forgive?

    What has he done that is so terrible?

    The rebels stole my Father from me. They shot him, on his knees, in our kitchen.

    When his body hit the floor I thought this life could not get any worse. Three months later, I was wearing their uniform, killing my neighbours.

    They train you to be a soldier, a child soldier.

    The training ends when you get a gun and a uniform. The only way to get these is to pick them from the dead bodies of government soldiers.

    The rebels would give you two weeks to get your uniform, if you fail or refuse, they would say, forget it, we will kill you.

    Many children refused to get a gun, or just couldn’t get a gun, and they were killed.

    It was a very hard thing to do. Some of my closest friends were killed that way – they failed to get a gun.

    I got my gun.

    We entered an ambush on government soldiers and, just like when we trained, we would trail all the way around to the back of the facility and get behind the government soldiers.

    Rebels who already had guns shot them. Their bodies crumpled. One dead soldier was close to me and I took his gun and his uniform and wore it. I was thirteen.

    Much later, during another ambush I was shot in the leg by a government soldier. They held me captive, at gunpoint, pinned to the forest floor. There was no way I could run – I was scared they would kill me.

    I was strong enough to tell them, I was abducted, please don’t shoot me, but those soldiers, they had friends the rebels had killed.

    Somehow, they were kind enough not to shoot me. Forgiveness is a two way street.

    They left me outside a hospital. I stayed at the hospital for a long, long time.

    I didn’t know where to go.

    I had been forced to be a rebel for so long that I didn’t know where I was from, I couldn’t remember my name.

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