Mosquitoes Read online

ALICE. (oh, yes) she does threaten me, she threatens all of us. She’s the fucking apocalypse.

  (To the POLICEWOMAN, gathered.) Sorry. Sorry about that.

  ALICE goes. The POLICEWOMAN looks at JENNY.

  JENNY. She’s just upset. She’s not. She doesn’t.

  She holds up the croissant.

  This is completely inedible.

  Sudden black.

  A HIGGS JET, DECAYING

  LUKE at home as ALICE enters. He looks up, but she doesn’t look at him. She has been crying but is not crying now. She finds JENNY’s handbag, empties it on the floor. She finds what she is looking for, a packet of fags. She lights one. Smokes.

  LUKE stares at her. He has never seen her smoke before. A small, involuntary cough.

  ALICE turns her eyes to him. Stares. Looks away. Smokes. Pause.

  LUKE puts his headphones on

  ALICE. Plays a track from his laptop. ALICE listens to the music he has made with the sounds of particles colliding. We hear it too. She is captivated. When she looks at him, she sees THE BOSON.

  LUKE. What?

  ALICE. Nothing.

  THE BOSON goes. ALICE puts out her cigarette and listens. The track finishes. Silence. Then:

  Play it again.

  THE LAST EXPERIMENT

  THE BOSON, alone onstage.

  THE BOSON. By the way, there is one other way for the world to end. And that is Gavriella Bastianelli.

  GAVRIELLA enters. She is in a cinema, bored. Material in brackets should be changed to reflect the day of performance.

  A few years after the Higgs Boson has been discovered, after the Nobel Prizes have been handed out, Gavriella leaves the LHC and goes to work at a different collider in Long Island. On a [warm evening] in [July], she is in a cinema watching a big-screen adaptation of the hit TV show [Baywatch] on what she now recognises is a badly misjudged Tinder date.

  After some harsh words with herself about not drinking and swiping, her mind wanders to her work. Lately she’s been struggling with an equation. It isn’t E equals MC squared, we’re not talking Special Relativity. But it’s important to her and she’s been banging her head on it. But it’s dark in here. The air is cool. The conditions are perfect for her mind to go completely blank.

  GAVRIELLA stares ahead. Her brain detached from her body. Thinking.

  And by the time the lights come up, she’s solved it. It’s a small step forward. Her colleagues are pleased. There are beers after work. But Gavriella will win no prizes, no buildings are named after her and she dies eighteen years later of cervical cancer.

  GAVRIELLA goes.

  But the modest discovery that takes place in Gavriella’s brain that night has got legs. It blossoms. It’s the scientific equivalent of eggs. Unspectacular in itself, but crucial to a surprisingly large number of recipes, such as the discovery, decades later, that the leading cause of autism is not a vaccine but an ordinary emulsifier present in ice cream, vitamins, mosquito repellent, hand sanitiser and Crème de Menthe. Other scientists use Gavriella’s equation, build on it, it grows and evolves and mutates and unfolds until centuries later As he speaks, a basement laboratory in a disused theatre in the future appears. A number of SCIENTISTS. THE BOSON can see them but they cannot see him.

  in a flooded city, in a makeshift laboratory in a disused theatre, in a ruined world, a team of scientists work late into the night. They are attempting, using two twelve-foot tubes, a number of crystals and a nuclear fusion containment device, to harness enough energy to birth a new universe exactly like this one from matter so dense it is only just not a black hole.

  The SCIENTISTS take their seats at a control panel. Type a series of commands.

  The experiment begins. A long, tense pause as they wait.

  It is the most expensive, most ambitious, most important attempt at IVF in human history. They are building a life boat. And time is running out.

  But on the thirty-fourth attempt, after many years of heartbreak and hope and passive-aggressive rows and silent breakfasts, they are successful.

  They open a viewing window. On the other side of it, a portal has opened up.

  Celebration. They embrace and gather to watch, tense.

  And then they wait, and watch, and through this portal, they observe the second draft of the Big Bang.

  There is nothing. Nothing explodes.

  Another small celebration. The scientists keep watching, as 13.75 billion years of the universe’s evolution appears to happen in fifty-three seconds.

  It plays out exactly like the first time round

  as unimaginable amounts of energy are released

  as something comes of nothing

  all matter is plasma, a pea-souper that lasts three hundred thousand years

  the Higgs field forms, gives particles mass

  the universe becomes transparent

  elements are born

  stars

  a thin disc of galaxy that looks strangely familiar

  followed by a solar system

  and finally in front of them there is a planet

  the size of an apple

  not because it is small, but because it is far away

  not because it is small, but because it is far away

  now it comes closer, and closer

  the scientists watch as asteroids rain down on it

  oceans boil

  an ice age comes and goes

  and another one

  and another one

  and another one

  and another one

  life appears and multiplies

  trees, lichen, crabs, ferns, sea urchins, dinosaurs, mosquitoes, hagfish, ratfish, parrots, loons and short-faced bears

  and but because this process is taking place in a dimension with a completely different sense of time from ours, to the scientists watching, this process appears to happen in under a minute.

  Some of the SCIENTISTS are crying. Others watch with their hands over their mouths.

  Some of them want to hold each other. Some of them want to be alone.

  Fourteen billion years pass in fifty-three seconds

  as chaos congeals into something that looks

  a

  lot

  like

  home.

  And these scientists – and by the way as people, they’re all very different, they speak five different languages and practise three different religions, half of them think bread stays fresher in the fridge, half believe this – vehemently –to be bullshit, two of them are droids with separate and non-compatible operating systems and one of them believes if she does not wear the first pair of knickers her hand touches in the morning then something catastrophic will happen, even though by this point in history that word has become basically meaningless – they are really as different as it’s possible to be, it’s unthinkable for them to be united in anything and yet and yet as they stand there, turning off the lights of the old world, preparing to step through this portal into another dimension they are all thinking exactly the same thing, they are looking at this lush this fecund this generous blue-green carbon copy they have created, the child that will allow them to go on living, and they have the impossible delusional indulgent but nonetheless necessary thought that any creator has, they think

  this time

  this time

  this time

  we’re going to get it right.

  The SCIENTISTS grab suitcases, plants and equipment and step through the portal.

  THE BOSON looks around at the old, abandoned world. Sudden black.

  SFB

  November 2008. England. Behind a pub. ALICE perches on a stack of beer crates, waiting. JENNY enters with two half pints of orange juice. Gives one to ALICE.

  JENNY. Sorry about that. Manager’s a bell-end. She’s about twelve. Can’t even pull a pint of Guinness properly.

  JENNY sits on a stack of crates. ALICE rummages in a plastic duty-free bag.

  ALICE. Um, I brought you…

 
; She pulls out a carton of cigarettes.

  JENNY. Oh, no, thanks, but. Given up.

  Pause.

  Go on, give us one then. No, don’t. Fucking hell it’s boring isn’t it? People talking about their addictions, it is, it’s fucking boring, it’s as bad as dreams. It’s, all it is, is it’s something to do with your hands, isn’t it? That’s, it just makes me really aware of my hands which.

  Pause. JENNY takes ALICE’s hand. Neither of them acknowledges this.

  Thanks for coming.

  ALICE. No, that’s. You said you had something to tell me

  JENNY. Oh. / Okay but

  ALICE. because I’m still, I’m still so angry / but

  JENNY lets go of her hand.

  JENNY. I know

  ALICE. I know you know, but I thought, I felt if you were ready, to explain, what happened that night then we might be able to, because it still doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t make sense that you could hate me so / much

  JENNY. I don’t

  ALICE. no but that you could have such, such spite towards me and, and my work, to want to, to destroy me like that and because I don’t hate you. I don’t hate you at all. I don’t understand you but I don’t hate you, and then I got your email and it was full of light and it was full of love and I was so happy. I was so happy

  She tries not to cry.

  sorry, and but what I wanted to say is that I know how hard this must be for you and I respect you for that, no, I do, and whatever you have to say, however, you know, I am ready to hear it.

  JENNY. Right. Yeah. It’s.

  She takes a deep breath.

  Sorry, just I’m not sure / I really

  ALICE. It’s okay. Take your time. Take as much time as you.

  Pause. ALICE touches her own cheek, suppressing a wave of pain.

  JENNY. How’s Mum?

  ALICE. The same. Not the same, she keeps leaving the gas on but, but, fine, and Henri is moving in / and

  JENNY. Big step

  ALICE. yes and Luke is

  JENNY. how is he?

  ALICE. He’s. Actually he’s good, / he’s

  JENNY. Good, that’s good.

  ALICE. Yeah, he’s moved schools, he’s much better. He wanted to come today actually which I / thought was

  JENNY. Did he?

  ALICE. Yes, but I thought, I didn’t think you’d want him to see you like this.

  JENNY. ‘Like this’? This is how I am, I don’t mind. Should bring him, next time. How’s the, what about the Collider?

  ALICE. We’re still repairing it. Hoping to be online again within the year, what?

  JENNY is smiling.

  JENNY. No just, it frightens me actually. Your brain. Mike says in twenty years every job I’m qualified to do will be done by an algorithm invented by someone like you. Do you think that’s true?

  ALICE. Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.

  JENNY. Fucking hell. D’you know what I mean though? Fucking hell.

  Pause. ALICE attempts to look at her watch discreetly.

  ALICE. So?

  JENNY sighs.

  Sorry, rushing / you, it’s fine

  JENNY. Why do you even need to know?

  ALICE. Because I need to.

  JENNY. Yeah, well you can’t know everything, can you?

  ALICE. What?

  JENNY. You just can’t. Even those bitches on Mumsnet don’t know everything, they still talk about me you know. They’ve got an acronym and everything. SFB, they call me.

  ALICE. I don’t

  JENNY. Shit For Brains.

  ALICE. That’s not / very

  JENNY. No it’s not is it? But there you go, expect I make them feel better about themselves, when they’re having an MC, or an EP, or they’re TTC or whatever. That’s all it is really.

  ,

  ALICE. What’s TTC?

  JENNY. Trying To Conceive. Do you want to get some lunch?

  Pause. ALICE stands.

  Cos there’s a Pret, round / the

  ALICE. I’m an idiot, aren’t I?

  JENNY. Don’t do / that

  ALICE. No, I am, I’m a moron, one email you probably wrote while you were pissed and I get on a plane, I cancelled a dentist appointment for this, I have an abscess, I’m on / codeine

  JENNY. Alice.

  ALICE. and you can’t even, what?

  JENNY. Do you still pray for me?

  ALICE. To be honest Jenny, no I don’t. Not any more.

  JENNY nods. ALICE pulls her coat on.

  JENNY. I’m pregnant.

  A very long pause.

  ALICE. No.

  JENNY. Yeah. Yes. That’s what I wanted to, I’m pregnant.

  A long pause.

  ALICE. How many, how many months?

  JENNY. Um, four. Four and a week.

  ALICE. So you were… when Amy died… you were already?

  JENNY. Uh-huh.

  ALICE. With Mike?

  JENNY. Don’t rub it in.

  ALICE. No but is he

  JENNY. He’s taking some time. He’s having a think

  ALICE. and so, sorry, this is it, is it, this is what was so / important I had to

  JENNY. felt weird. Not telling you

  ALICE. oh well if it felt weird then. Okay. Okay well presumably you’re going to, I mean I think you have to

  JENNY. What?

  ALICE. don’t you think?

  JENNY. What?

  ALICE. well don’t make me say it

  JENNY. No but what are you saying?

  ALICE. You know what I’m saying.

  JENNY. Oh.

  ALICE. Yes.

  JENNY. Oh!

  ALICE. Because

  JENNY (Dalek). Exterminate.

  ALICE. No don’t, it’s not. Don’t, seriously, don’t, because you took all those pills. You were permanently pissed, you were wasted for about two months, charcoal and and and and smoking / like a

  JENNY. I know, it’s mental, it should be just a ball of fingers. Doctor says it’s alright though.

  ,

  ALICE. You’ve had the ultrasound?

  JENNY. Had one. Got to go back for another one. Find out the

  ALICE. gender.

  JENNY. yeah.

  Pause.

  ALICE. And it’s… okay / is it?

  JENNY. Yeah. Far as they can

  ALICE. But it can’t be… it can’t be… it can’t / be

  JENNY. No, but it is. It is. It’s perfect.

  Pause.

  ALICE. I just have to say

  JENNY. Can we not

  ALICE. I really think / this is

  JENNY. Just I feel like we’ve covered this, and I don’t want you to say something you can’t take back so.

  ALICE. I think it’s unhinged

  JENNY. There it is.

  JENNY sits.

  ALICE. and psychotic, you’re on your own.

  JENNY. Well…

  ALICE. No, I’m telling you, you are on your own.

  ALICE sits. A plane goes overhead. JENNY looks up at it. Her eyes follow a bird as it flies into her vision and lands. She salutes three times.

  JENNY. Good morning mr magpie good morning mr magpie good morning mr magpie.

  ALICE joins in the final salute. JENNY moves to sit beside ALICE.

  It’s alright. I really think it’s going to be alright. My organs are moving. I can feel my stomach up here. I might move to the country. There’s a lot of noise, living round here, you don’t even realise how much cos it’s just like constant, you know. Too much information. And I won’t have a telly, radio, nothing, I’m just going to do like… jigsaw puzzles, not jigsaw puzzles, something better than jigsaw puzzles but that sort of, and I will keep my phone I think, I wouldn’t like to be without my phone but. Yeah, apart from that. Just. Try and be quiet. Mike says I’ll go mad in five minutes but it’s not up to him is it, cos actually who’s in charge Alice?

  ,

  At the end of the day, Alice, who’s in charge?

/>   ALICE. You are, Jenny. You are.

  JENNY smiles. Puts ALICE’s hand on her stomach. Holds it there.

  Above us and around us the whoomph of ultrasound waves as loud as a train coming into a station

  deafening, terrifying

  the sound of JENNY breathing

  a hum of mosquitoes

  and our heartbeat, growing louder

  as the experiment begins.

  End.

  LUCY KIRKWOOD

  Lucy Kirkwood’s plays include The Children (Royal Court); Chimerica (Almeida/West End); NSFW (Royal Court); small hours (co-written with Ed Hime; Hampstead); Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast (with Katie Mitchell; National Theatre); Bloody Wimmin, as part of Women, Power and Politics (Tricycle); it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now (Clean Break/Arcola); Hedda (Gate, London); Tinderbox (Bush). it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now won the 2012 John Whiting Award, and was nominated for the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Chimerica won the 2014 Olivier Award for Best New Play, the 2013 Evening Standard Best Play Award, the 2014 Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.

  Manhattan Theatre Club

  Under the dynamic leadership of Artistic Director Lynne Meadow and Executive Producer Barry Grove, Manhattan Theatre Club has grown in four-and-a-half decades from a prolific Off-Off-Broadway showcase into one of the United States’s most acclaimed theatre organisations.

  MTC’s many laurels include 20 Tony Awards, 6 Pulitzer Prizes, 48 Obies and 33 Drama Desk Awards, as well as numerous Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World Awards. MTC has won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Achievement, a Drama Desk for Outstanding Excellence, and a Theatre World for Outstanding Achievement.

  Founded in 1970, MTC is committed to the creation of new plays and musicals through an intensive Artistic Development Program that offers commissions, script evaluation, dramaturgical support, readings and workshops. Using the work on its stages, MTC’s Education Program promotes active participation in the arts through in-class instruction, student and family matinees, teacher training, internships and internet-based distance learning. In constantly seeking new ways to innovate, MTC keeps theatre alive and relevant.

  A Nick Hern Book