Gasping - the Play (10 page)

Now a word of warning, there will also be strong gusting in the
North West, but please don’t get excited, that one’s in from Scandinavia, and
I’m afraid it will have been well and truly milked by the Swedes. Of course it
may have picked up something over the North Sea, but I should leave that one to
the professionals if I were you. Personally I’ll be sticking with my roses ... ha
ha, don’t want them whispering about me behind my back. Ha ha ha. Good night.

SCENE THREE

It is
KIRSTEN’s
flat.
She and
SANDY
have just hosted a dinner party. She is at the door seeing out
guests who we do not see.

KIRSTEN: It
was lovely to see you Geoff,
Christ
knows when was the last time I got a bit
pissed.
Thanks for the
lovely Shiraz by the way, I
love
Australian wine, it always walks away
with the blind tastings ... Anyway it’s been absolutely great, see you again
soon
... mmm, wonderful, bye......bye......
(she closes the door and walks
back in) God
that bloody bloke can
breathe!

SANDY:
What?

KIRSTEN: I
could not
believe
it?
Could you believe it? I couldn’t. I mean it’s not necessary is it? Sitting
there like some great vacuum cleaner
sucking
in great gusts of the
stuff. The man must have lungs like zeppelins.

SANDY:
Seemed perfectly normal to me.

KIRSTEN:
I’m sure he could discipline
himself to take smaller breaths, I mean it’s just
rude,
it’s not as if
the stuff grows on trees. Next time I think I shall
have
to say
something, just a little joke like ‘coo mind you don’t suck up the sofa’. I
mean it is unbelievable don’t you think ...?

SANDY: Oh
come on Kirsten, he’s an active
bloke, I mean he has to breathe. Anyway, you didn’t have to stand with the door
open saying goodbye did you.

KIRSTEN:
Sandy, may I remind you that this
is my bloody house, for which I work bloody hard and if I wish to stand with
the bloody door open I shall bloody well do so!

SANDY:
I’m just saying that if you’re so
worried about your air it’s not your job to supply the whole street. You could
have said goodbye with the door closed you know.

KIRSTEN:
Sandy, working in creative
marketing may not be quite as lucrative as being golden boy to Sir Chiffley
Lockheart but I think I can just about afford sufficient oxygen to open my
front door occasionally.

SANDY:
Well what’s the problem then?

KIRSTEN:
There isn’t a problem! It’s just
the principle of the thing, I just find grunters and honkers incredibly
antisocial that’s all ... and when he laughs! ! Great pneumatic snorts, just
oxygenating the blood for no better reason than to grunt like a pig.

SANDY:
He was laughing at my Stuttgart story
which, as it happens, I told bloody well.

KIRSTEN: I
wouldn’t mind but I was blowing
some really terrific stuff tonight, Sicilian, sucked on the North face of Mount
Etna, completely wasted on him of course.

SANDY: Oh
for God’s sake I hope you’re not
turning into a real air snob, I can’t stand real air snobs, going on and on
about this bloody air and that bloody air, it’s all bloody air to me.

KIRSTEN: I
don’t believe this! I simply do
not
believe
this! Who’s been talking about nothing but air all evening!

SANDY:
Well it’s a bloody worrying time.
There’s a real free-trade backlash on the UK fixed-minimum gulp price, bloody
Yank consortiums lobbying to bring in cheap air from bloody Africa, our stocks
will be worthless ...

KIRSTEN: I
know,
you haven’t shut up about it for weeks!

SANDY:
It’s the bloody EEC. They
have
to
subsidize European suckers, they’re quite happy to subsidize wine lakes and
butter mountains. The air industry’s every bit as important to the European
economy as farming, we must have air
(searches for the word)
... bubbles.

KIRSTEN:
Look can’t we shut up about it for
one night?

SANDY
(getting up and grabbing coat):
Well if I’m being that dull perhaps I should just piss off then?

KIRSTEN:
Perhaps you should!

SANDY:
Right ...
(at door)
Would you
object
terribly
if I took a final big gulp? My car’s a good fifty-yards away
and your local council wafts at criminal levels. KIRSTEN: Oh for God’s sake Sandy,
this is ridiculous.

SANDY:
What?

KIRSTEN:
I’ve been waiting for Geoff to go
all evening so you could give me a right bloody seeing too, and now we’re
having a row.

SANDY:
Well I’m sorry darling ... you know,
pressure etc....

KIRSTEN:
I’m sorry too ...

SANDY
(going to her):
Come here you ravishingly all right bit of grappling fodder you ...

KIRSTEN:
Hang on, I’ll just change the
balloon on the Suck and Blow; if we’re going to be thrashing and groaning and
just having a ruddy good
bonk
there’s no point doing it to best Sicilian
...

SCENE FOUR

Fade out as jets of steam shoot across the stage.
CHIEF
and
PHILIP,
towels round waists, having steam.

CHIEF
(pouring water on a brazier of
coals, provoking a great waft of steam):
Do you
know Philip, I’ve been enveloped in most things in my time, from a woman’s arms
to a bathful of raw mackerel, and I still say there’s nothing quite like the
searing, cleansing heat of the steam-room to brace a fellow up.

PHILIP
(slightly preoccupied):
Uhm, no, absolutely Sir, senior searing.

CHIEF:
I must say I do sometimes allow
myself a wry smile when I hear it suggested that people like you and I don’t
know what it’s like to
really
sweat. I mean, look at us now, positively
evaporating. I shouldn’t think a coal miner would last much above five minutes
in here.

PHILIP
(still preoccupied, not really
listening):
Absolutely not, Chief, we’d have the
grimy blighter thrown out pretty sharp.

CHIEF:
All right young fellow what’s stuck
in your craw? Is it that girl from marketing? Getting serious is she?

PHILIP:
Chief, that’s history, I walked, I was
out of there. I said to her, I said ‘listen lady, I’m dust, I’m a memory, don’t
look for me tomorrow baby because I’ll be long gone.’

CHIEF:
And what did she say?

PHILIP:
She said ‘all right’ which I
respected her for.

CHIEF:
Do you know Philip, I’ve always seen
it as rather a mistake to respect a woman, they see it as a sign of weakness.

PHILIP:
We nearly had it all Chief, we were
perfect for one another, everything was right except for the fact that she
wasn’t interested in me. That was the real problem and I just had no
time
to
deal with that.

CHIEF:
How could you have Philip? Your
life’s a Pot Noodle now. Look laddie, I’ve seen women every shape and every
colour, but I’ve never met one yet who had a first-year turnover in excess of
twenty billion.

(He puts more
water on the steaming coals.)

PHILIP:
Mmm yes, it’s rather this Pot Noodle
business that’s been preoccupying me during our executive steam, Chief, and
making me perhaps slightly less charismatic company than I might have hoped.

(He puts more
water on the steaming coals.)

PHILIP
(pause):
Chief I wonder if you’d mind if I showed you something that’s rather
worrying me.

CHIEF
(worried):
Well I don’t know Philip, I’m not a doctor. I do know a fellow in
Kensington who’s very discreet ...

PHILIP:
I’ve been sent this letter.
(fishes
it out from under towel)
It’s got rather soggy I’m afraid ...

CHIEF:
A letter Philip?

PHILIP:
Yes Chief, it’s a kind of fax but
there’s no telephone lines involved. It inputs via a slit in the door, terrific
concept ...

CHIEF: I
know what a letter is Philip. I’m
constantly receiving them from some people called ‘Freeman’s Catalogue’,
apparently with their help I could look as good as Lulu. I confess I’ve always
found Lulu extremely attractive but then I find trees attractive and I wouldn’t
want to look like a tree would I? So where’s the logic in that? Anyway, what’s
so special about your soggy one? Do we have a legal problem?

PHILIP:
It’s the reply that the American
Indian Chief, known as Seattle, sent in 1854 to the US government on receipt of
their request to buy from him the land of his people.

CHIEF:
You’ve been sent a letter by a dead
Red Indian?

PHILIP:
No Chief, someone has anonymously
sent me a copy of the dead Chief’s letter and it has moved me Sir. I could not
have been more moved if I had been reading it on Concorde.

CHIEF:
Sounds like potent stuff.

PHILIP: I
truly believe that I would
scarcely have been as emotionally affected by the contents of this letter if
they had been written on a Stinger ground-to-air missile and fired up my
trouser leg.

CHIEF:
Strong reaction Philip. Tell me more.

PHILIP:
Well, as I say, it concerns this old
Tomahawk-twirling scalp collector named Seattle, who seems to have carried
senior executive status over a predominantly hunter-gathering workforce
operating out of Northern California in the middle of the last century.

CHIEF:
Go on.

PHILIP:
Well as I explained, he was memo-ing
Washington
vis-à-vis
their purchase offer on certain choice properties
of Red Indian real estate ... Now this is his answer ...
(he reads)
... ‘Every
part of the earth is sacred to my people’ ...
(stops reading)
... Amazing
how little changes in corporate structuring eh Sir Chiffley? This fellow
Seattle had his people just as you or I do ...

CHIEF:
The first rule of the jungle Philip,
is to know how to delegate.

PHILIP:
Every time Chief, and if you’re too
busy to delegate yourself then for God’s sake get someone to do it for you.

CHIEF:
Delegate, delegate, delegate. Wasn’t
it John Lennon who sang ‘power to the people’?

PHILIP:
Becoming the only major star in the
history of rock to write a song about delegation within a management structure ...