Drip Feed

Karen Cogan

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781788500975
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Cork, 1998. An obsessive odyssey through the city. Dancing on tables, 3 a.m. breakfast rolls and waking up, polluted, on the wrong person's doorstep. Brenda and her ferocious best pal are part of the city furniture. But one of them is realising that she's got it all, all of it, horribly wrong and it might be too late.

Karen Cogan's monologue play Drip Feed is an infectious, dark comedy about the messiness of being young(ish), female and queer.

The play was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award 2017, and premiered at Assembly George Square as part of the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in a co-production between Fishamble and Soho Theatre, London.

(BRENDA faces the audience.)

(She lives the past, even in recollection.)

Don’t throw up Brenda, don’t throw up now for fuck’s sake.

(To the audience.) You know that feeling, when you are doing the absolute wrong thing but you keep going, like, as you go to do the thing your whole body says: Stop. Don’t Do This.

I feel like that a lot. I can feel the Nos rise up in me but I’m so used to them now, I just let them wibble up and then ebb away and press on regardless.

Like now.

No. I’m just visiting.

She might want to see me. You don’t know.

She might bloody be delighted to bollocking see me.

She wanted to see me when my head was between her legs.

Look at me Brenda, keep looking while you do it.

I thought I was going to get lockjaw trying to do the deed with my mouth and make sultry eyes at the same time, I looked demented. But it did the trick.

She was delighted with me then. So, maybe she’ll welcome me with open arms now.

Come in, come in you gorgeous lunatic, what are you loitering out by my bins for? COME IN.

This woman? She’s my hired help. Ignore her. Ignore her gleamy mirror hair. I’ve no interest. It’s you. It’s always been you Brenda.

No.

Okay.

She is Olivia, she is my girlfriend and I am hiding in her bin hut, balancing on a wheelie bin.

Who has a house for their bins?

But she was always immaculate; she would line up all her toiletries in the bathroom in order of size and make sure that the labels were facing the right way like an army of hygiene.

Frizzy hair Brenda, is a curse. You’re so lucky with yours.

Her hair wasn’t frizzy at all like, it was perfection but that’s not relevant.

What is relevant is her gorgeous attention to detail so… no wonder her bins are housed.

Three different bins.

I can’t work out what the square blue bin is for? Blue bin is a bit far to go investigating and I’m already in very real danger of my rain-soaked Converse sliding me off the one I’m on. But I am very curious now to know what’s in it.

Should never have started thinking so deeply about the blue bin but here we are.

What is in it?? I thought we were only supposed to have one bin. She’s always extraordinary, always different from the rest of us, a bit… better.

Fuck it. I have to know.

If she sees me I will…

(She prepares to investigate, from her precarious position.)

Okay. Be wide and stay low.

Crouching as small as I go, I slant my whole body to the right, clinging onto the timbery wall for balance, the smells of my feet and the bin rot creep deeper into my mouth but but I just manage to grab the lid of the blue bin and launch it upwards. It twhacks against the back of the bin house though and I teeter and then bin totters underneath me.

I freeze. If one of them comes out to me I will be in Such Shit.

But.

Silence.

I’m okay I think.

And

The blue bin is full of paper, it’s full of paper, oh.

But thick paper and kind of coloured canvases.

I pull one out, just about and hold it up to see, and it’s her.

My girlfriend, a picture of her in thick colourful crayon strokes and she is knotted laughing and she has no top on.

Laughing in the nude, all the colours blurred together and beautiful, it is beautiful in fairness but

It’s signed

Sam.

Sam.

Why are you painting my girlfriend naked Sam?

Why is Sam painting pictures of Olivia naked?

Fuck it. I’m taking it. She threw it away. Olivia is mine not hers. Fuck it.

I shove the bright colours of her down the back of my pants and edge out of their garden, swift and damp and careful.

Cork Streets

Walking through Cork now, streets on streets of badgering memories

I used to have salami and cheese rolls with Olivia from that

Spar deli there, by the river.

Garlicky salami always defeated me, so I had to eat the whole big slice at once instead of spreading the bites evenly through the roll.

Olivia laughed at me and called me an idiot but she kissed my nose, it’s very intimate to kiss a nose. She’s always kissing my nose. Even though I look like Barbra Streisand without the cheekbones.

Barbra Streisand is in a film right called The Mirror Has Two Faces and she is ugly as anything in it and she falls in love with this fella who only likes her for her personality because she is a brilliant teacher. I am not a brilliant teacher.

I’m teaching no one nothing. I am on the part-time dole, queueing on Tuesdays in a clump of people I know who don’t say hello to me.

Over Nano Nagle Bridge and down the Grand Parade. Nearing the Coal Quay and my loins start to twist. My feet go shivery and I walk slower, expecting her to pop out of Flat 19 over the pub and go.

What are you out here for? Come on in and we’ll bunker down out of this rain? I got a new Angelina Jolie DVD and a pizza.

I’ve always wanted to see her more often than she wanted to see me.

Give me time to miss you.

But the feeling of her is kind of insidious. Like, my ears miss her. It’s not all vaginas.

It’s the sad eyes she makes when she’s half-asleep and the way she cocks her head to the side like a Fraggle. It’s the anxiety, like the constant crushing in my chest, the sense of falling and of my mind resetting and forgetting… things.

And her. The artist. Sam. Cunt

Sam is.

Sam is English.

And a lovely painter apparently, which is, y’know…

They could be naked and having the craic together right now for all I know: laughing or riding I don’t know which is worse.

Oh God, the notion of them sitting in silky pyjamas, drinking something, tea or beer with their legs interlaced like an ad ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Original Production
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Characters
• Drip Feed
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information