Keyhole

KEYHOLE

(A dark room lit to about waist height. A door USL, the keyhole is lit.
Light shines. Boy watches. Brings his blanket over to huddle.)

Having achieved the same height as Eric Arthur Blair I am making my enquiry into the outer world.

Watching to see whether or not it is desirable I am making notes to analyse at a later time convenient to me.

In here it smells a bit. Sorry about that to you, and to you, and, mostly, to myself. I am sorry to myself that this room smells.

I don’t know why I haven’t cleaned it. It’s not like I’m locked-in or anything. I have soap, somewhere. I have water. I have cloths, and a brush and a will, I even have a will sometimes. And yet it remains dark, and somewhat funky.

I was told, and I don’t know that it’s true, that ‘funk’ was the word for Sexual sweat. Sweat created when the body is in lust. Lust for communion with another body. A holy communion we are blessed to know even once. Blessed to know even once. It smells funky in here. Funky dunky, like a monkey. Funky.

I must have another look (he returns to the keyhole)

I had a wee monkey. A playful little darling who’d sit upon my knee and cuddle my arms like trunks that held the world upright. Pillars of her safe little world here with me.

I miss my little monkey. I miss the way she used to look at me. Miss the way she’d run and hide. I miss feeding her. Holding her. Washing her. Scolding her. Loving her. Her loving me. (looks. Pause)

Although that could have been projected.

What I miss most, of course, is the companionship. “Ave Maria, go insane and out of your mi-ind.” The companionship of the radio and all its delights is what I have to contend with now. Drowling out my compassionate side and flooding me with tairs in my ears. (Screams as the ears tear. Moans a little.)

(Quiet. Puts ear to the keyhole. Laughs loudly, he is alone)

Cunt. The wee fuckers. I knew they couldn’t stay there forever. I wonder if they caught me listening. Oh, I’m sure they realise I’m here. Who wouldn’t, after all, with only a thin partition between us. Separating right from wrong. Penitent from spectacle, lust from anger, hatred from vice. Stuck in here like Buddha Prince Siddhartha shaded from, pah! Shaded from the ills of the world. OH BUT I SEE.

Thing was, the Prince managed to get out there. His servants were no match for his princeliness. They, like mine, had been told to keep him pure and innocent. To see no old people. No violence. No decay. But seclusion is violence. Existence itself is the very food that decays with passing down the gorge of time. Pleasantries cannot be passed in the wilderness where there is no one to share them. (Flings himself at door)

Come back! Come Back. I forgave you!

I forgave you…

…

(Falls prostrate and crawls about the floor like an insect. Burrowing in waste for food scraps and uselessly tidying objects and rags.)

(ceases)

This keyhole’s just one of my viewpoints.

I made my own observation portal down here, amongst the cobwebs and the wiring where the rats won’t go. You can see all sorts of joy through here. Scenes put on for my entertainment. My horror at what I’m missing out on. We keep tissues by for the good times. A hatchet by for the freak occurrences. But outbreaks of anger of that kind are generally under control. Sir Yes Sir. Generally speaking.

Let’s see now (looks for a long time, his left hand finding and unwrapping a bon-bon. He turns back to eat it. Gloats, sucking)

A man sat on the bench. Reading his book. The book is a good one. It talks of grand things. Of respectability. Of manhood. It was written full of hope. The man is uncrossing his legs and bunching forwards slightly on his green, flaky bench. He’s seeing two schoolgirls sitting on the grass. Their blazers off and their socks rolled down. The man is still reading. But slower now. He keeps having to read and reread sentences over and over again. Over and over again his eyes rove back and forth, scanning the little (black) and white forms lithely stretching before him. Dancing in and out of focus these works of God, are opening up to him. Full of knowing they raise themselves forth and spread before his hungry eyes. Back and forth, his finger stroking tenderly the narrow page. Back and forth his eyeballs dart, shifting, flicking, roaming. On and on for hours he sits day after day till come the weekend he can drive his daughters to church in their Sunday best, his good book (still) undone. And wash away the Sins of the World. (He examines a dirty crumpled tissue from his pocket and gently puts it down away from him.)

Oh God Give Me Strength.

(He darts back to the keyhole.)

(Stands up into a cone of light. Different Char./Voice?)

Rationale and reason. Two arguments against the spiritual divine. But divide the cosmos into bits and bits and bits and we’re left with energetic charges. Smaller and smaller positive and negative charges of energy attracting and repelling in just such a way as to create stable matter.

(Back to reality. Whoompf there goes gravity) ‘Horseshit’, that’s another word for stable-matter. And how exactly do you, does one, do I reconcile a horse, or for that matter his dung with positrons, gluons and quarks of static charge? I don’t! There’s your answer. I see one as being here, now, and distasteful in a French butcher’s window. The other I perceive as the preserve of madmen in an ivory tower, in a Large Hadron Collider. But which is more sublime? The pure and simple theory of matter as energy? Or the infinitely complex, and more knowable and experience-able gee-gee I see on telly and hum along to (hums Black Beauty theme)

( Flings himself to keyhole with intent of an exclamation ‘BITCH’)

(Has another looks through his own portal. Beckons for us to join him. Expects to share the scope. Realises. No one has. Shrugs. Looks. Excited he returns)

They’re coming to tea! They’re coming to tea. I know they are, or otherwise why would they be pulling-up so late? The vicar and Mr. Handley and the cousins, oh the darling cousins so dear to us all. he he! I’ll never get it done in time if I stay here peeking all day. It’s an obsession, it really is.

(He tidies the room, properly now. Stopping frequently he debates) But why bring the vicar with them? Very nineteenth century I must say: “Let’s visit the family, we’ve an invite.”

“Oh, but, daddy, can’t the vicar come too? Daddy? The vicar. Do say he can come. He can come, can’t he, daddy? In the car with us. All the way? We can pick him up from his dental appointment, if that’s going to be more convenient for him.”

(he builds a table from elements. Lays it with elements and illumines 2xcandles)

So there’s me, two cousins. One uncle. One parson and his nose. I’m sure nanny would join us, if we had one. Now, let’s see. Someone’ll have to cook. Someone’ll have to welcome the guests, serve aperitifs and good-natured small-talk. Someone to seat and someone to serve. Well, now, that’ll be me! ME ME ME ME ME, all me! No one else around to do it.

The servants can wash-up.

(stands admiring his work. After several hours it’s gotten dark. He manages to go and look through the peephole again.)

Gone. There’s no one there. Not even any little chickens, or their father, nor their pastor. The trees are shady, the night is dark. I hope they travel home safely.

You know, the funniest thing, I can’t even remember what was talked about at dinner. Oh, the cousins laughed (amongst themselves). Their father sat gloomy and hard. To one side, never joining in. And the vicar and I stared at one another. But, though everything was there, somehow it’s all a bit of a blur. A distance and a mystery. A dystery. Ha ha!

Still, time for bed. (He jumps to lie on the table upon the crockery and burning candles)

(He dreams: Children’s laughter. Aeroplanes. Frogs. Fanfare. Pulpit sermons. Sex noises. Theatre announcement not to take photography – a dream voice rises out of the chatter of steam trains)

On Swanning Night came wandering home
A loose-chinned man, parched and alone
Rest - he take it; thirst - he slake it
And gnawed the cheese down to the bone

Wondered I what jiggered him so,
When what should come along but, "Ho!
Got anything bigger than an Old, Bold Whigger?"
So I offered-up my toe

At this affront took he fright-flight
Swishing off in the Ebon night
Whence came a shriek, and the sound of Teak
Boxed round a slickering light

When dawn flipped-up as so and so
I foun' him where, waving my toe,
He'd danced a jig in the light of The Pig
And now rested accordingly so

Therefore my friend don't tread in the wake
Of a sleepy-eyed toad or a dawdling snake
Else you'll find you've died and consequally fried
In a moribund moss-scape of cake

(He sits up and eats a triangle of cake before getting down having a poop and returning to the keyhole for a look)

Upon returning to this, the keyhole, potentially ‘my’ keyhole. At least from an observer’s point of view. I find myself retracing the routes and habits of many. Is it wrong to want to know. Is it wrong to yearn.

Patterns and routines are the mark of the individual, as they are of cultural identity. Patterns and routines define where we go, what we do and how we get there to do such. Praying is routine. Loving is routine. Bad habits are all routine in fact!

They say that time speeds up the older one gets because there is less and less new to discover about ourselves. It all becomes just routine. That’s what they say. Whoever ‘they’ are.

I’m biding my time. (keyhole) You see. I like to make changes, once in a while. Discover new things. ‘Life’, they say. Not the same ‘they’, you understand, it’s a different ‘they’ this time; ‘Life’, they say, is a journey. With stops and travels and friends and adventure upon the way.

When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!
(repeats) With magic in my eyes (Plumped out with an SFX prerecord)