Lela & Co.

Cordelia Lynn

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848425279
• eBook ISBN: 9781780016566
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro britannico

The story of a young girl trapped in an increasingly tiny world.

In the beginning was the mattress. Gradually, other little changes – more bolts on the front door; the gun; the locked cupboard. And she knew in her heart that change was bad. Based on a true story, Cordelia Lynn's play Lela & Co. premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in September 2015.

Lights up.

LELA and A MAN onstage.

LELA. When I was born the women greeted me with singing. Not my mother, obviously, she was flat out on her back like a felled tree, which seems fair enough given the circumstances, but my grandmother sang me to sleep that first time, and the maiden aunts did their bit till my mother was back to herself again and could join in the task of lullabying. That’s a woman’s responsibility, see? And when my grandmother died my mother and the aunts sang her into oblivion because that’s a woman’s responsibility too, to sing the songs, the early songs and the late songs, the songs of sleeping and the songs of mourning. That’s how it works here, women wake you up and they put you to sleep, they bring you into life and then they ease you into death. Men handle the bits in between. (Beat.) It was a hard birth, and outside a storm was raging, and while my mother struggled me into life and I myself struggled my way out of the dark, the land struggled with the sky and vice versa, wind and rain and rage, and the aunts said that I was a storm child, a storm-born child, and that that meant something – though just what it meant they kept mum on – but despite the struggle I was born healthy and whole and raring to go, and my mother, though she was well and truly felled for a good week after, was healthy and whole too in the end, and that, as they say, was that. (Beat.) Speaking of felling, I’ve seen a great deal of it in my time. I’ve seen trees felled, sure, wind and chainsaws, you name it, but I’ve seen buildings felled too, cranes, bombs, fire and mines. I’ve seen a whole city felled. I’ve seen people felled, men and women. And children. But that came later. (Beat.) I come from the mountains. It’s a nice enough place, if you’re partial to a landscape, which I am. You have to be partial to a landscape, if you’re not, well there’s not much else to be partial to. Sheep, I suppose, but the less said of that the better. Up in the mountains the north wind blows, and the north-east, battling it out for supremacy over the uplands; I’m partial to a windscape too, like I can see it, see the swell like the swell on water, the chaotic eddies, the ripple effect when it crosses over and above itself, how I see it when it ripples the lake. This much I know, I could (and I have, as you’ll soon hear) walk a hundred miles in each direction and my skin would still be dominated by the north-north-easterly winds. So there’s comfort in that.

Pause.

(Singing.) ‘Oh Western Wind, when wilt / thou blow…’

A MAN (taking over, singing). ‘Thou blow…’

Pause.

LELA. Other than when she was flat on her back, circumstances dictating that position, and me being the last of the circumstances, my mother wasn’t anything like a tree. She was small and sprightly, petite (that’s French), bones like husks of straw, my grandmother too, and my aunts. That’s what the women in our family are like, bird-like; twitchy, my father says. I’m the same, and my sister Em, but not my sister Elle who’s different, she’s got curves like a river, I kid you not. Pleased as a peach about it too, always twisting about in front of the mirror, shoving her boobs up and together with her hands, you know, not that they needed it, talking rubbish that she was a real woman – whatever that is – and me and Em being pretty jealous despite ourselves, us being like sticks, although a man once told me I had a waist like a wand. Like a wand. That’s what he said. (Beat.) Anyway, we got a bit sick of all the ‘Oo look at me I’m Marilyn Monroe’, Em and I did, and so we started teasing her saying she was like that because Father wasn’t actually her father but she was in truth the love child of Zed, who’s the fat man that ran the petrol pump. Elle didn’t like that at all, not one bit, even though it didn’t actually make sense because we got it, the sprightliness, from Mother anyway not Father, but we weren’t really thinking about the intricacies of genetics at the time, I can tell you. So we’re singing ‘Fatty fatty boom boom fatty fatty boom boom you’re Zed’s fat sperm child’ and Elle goes running off to Father sobbing and telling tales and he beat me and Em and said we were dishonouring our mother and so we were dishonouring him and he won’t be dishonoured by his own daughters under his own never-anything-but-honourable roof, and that is a sight to see, I can tell you, the two of us running screaming round the kitchen table, and Father running after us shouting dishonour and clobbering us when he can get a handhold, and Mother screaming too because even though she wasn’t too keen on the implication that she’d had a quickie behind the petrol pump with fat Zed all of thirteen years ago, she still didn’t like the beatings, and of course the aunts were screaming, because why not?, and Grandma was screaming too because that’s the thing to do in those situations, as well she knew, sixty-five at the time if she were a day, and then Elle got the same idea and so she was screaming and running after us and Father’s shouting blue murder: ‘Dishonour this and dishonour that’, and beating her too at the end of it because that’s just what happens if you start a scene in a house full of women and just one man but he’s the one with the fists. (Beat.) But it’s not like we couldn’t make him suffer for it afterwards, not one of us looking him in the eye for weeks and making him invisible when he comes into the room and shutting up whatever it was we were saying and he stomps around for a bit then leaves with his tail between his legs (in more ways than one, if you see what I mean), and there’s nothing quite like being made invisible by a house full of women, I can tell you, so one day he comes home with a big box of chocolates for us girls, foreign ones, the best ones, and that was the end of it, because he was a good man really, our father, and I think that sometimes he just needed to remind himself that he existed. (Beat.) And to tell the truth, if there’s one thing I learnt the hard way, later on, and I’ll give you this for free, it’s don’t scream like that, whatever they do, don’t scream like that on your life, no not on your life /

FATHER. Lela!

LELA. It sets something going in them, it really does, I reckon it’s something biological, that there’s a certain pitch in a woman’s scream and it sends them crazy /

FATHER. Lela!

LELA. Like with babies screaming how it can drive you crazy, and they see red and that’s the fact of / the matter…

FATHER. Where’s that girl, I swear to God I’ll beat her black and blue when I get my hands on her – Lela!

LELA. Yes Dad!

FATHER. Don’t ‘Yes Dad’ me shouting in the house like a tramp come here this moment or I’ll beat you till your arse drops off you disgusting child!

LELA. You swear to God you’ll beat me black and blue when you get your hands on me, and you swear you’ll beat me if you don’t, so what do you think I am, stupid?

He chases her round the house, catches her and beats her. She wails.

FATHER (beating her relentlessly). What did I do to deserve this, oh God, what did I do in a previous life to deserve this existence trapped in a house filled with screaming, scheming, cake-eating women!

LELA. Mummeeeeeeeeyy!!!! (Etc.)

FATHER. Oh God, I work myself to death buying treats and presents for my little girls and how do they repay me, how do they repay me, Lela? They eat the cake I’ve slaved for, a week’s wages for one special cake, the greatest cake our village has ever seen, the messiah of birthday cakes, and she eats the cake, my God, she eats the cake like a thief in the night!

LELA. It wasn’t meeeeeeeee… (Etc.)

FATHER. The most ungrateful of daughters! Oh Lord, what have I done to deserve this most ungrateful of all children! This merciless, cake-guzzling, father-into-an-early-graving brat!

Beat.

LELA. That was about the cake, see? My thirteenth birthday cake. Because, and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, despite the beatings and the shoutings and the what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this-ings, my father loved us and spoilt us rotten, and he was proud as you please when his youngest daughter turned thirteen and there he is with his three lovely girls, all women now, though two as skinny as sticks including yours truly, and I hadn’t – but he wasn’t to know this – started bleeding yet because we were all late, the women in my family, except for, predictably, ‘I’m-a-real-woman’ Elle who came on like a burst pipe at twelve and bled to the clock every month like a gutted pig, strewn across the bed with her hand on her brow – just so – moaning and writhing and having the aunts bring her sweet tea all hours of the day and night. (Beat.) But to get back to the point, Father decided we were going to have a special party just for me on my thirteenth birthday, and we’d set up tables in the garden and Moth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Original Production
• Characters
• Notes
• Lela & Co.
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information