Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane

Dylan Coburn Gray, Carys D. Coburn

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781788502122
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre britannique

'This is a memory, a threnody, a memorial, an elegy,
they're all salves when you can't just McCartney and let it be.'

A play about losing someone close to you, about the human need to remember and connect.

Carys D. Coburn 's Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane was first performed at Galway Theatre Festival in 2016 after a work-in-progress showing at Project Arts Centre as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2015.

This is a memory, a threnody, a memorial, an elegy, they’re all salves when you can’t just McCartney and let it be. When the hurt is unhalveable, no less or better whether kept close or shared openly,

of a hopeless kind not tearable to pieces of peaceful mind. But being seen to sing is at least less lonely: you can sing to remember what’s gone so it won’t be.

This is London in January, and double as many undone resolutions trouble this wired city as live in our entire republic. The whitest month’s bleakness is still equal to it, correspondingly larger.

I am in a pub and my early twenties, nursing a lager on my own, waiting for my best friend to join me. My phone rings.

For the last time with that ringtone: I changed it right after hanging up, as the barchange and laughter laughed on and clinked on.

My ma, once married to your older brother, had just told me that you were dead.

I must have felt something, then and there, had some thought, prayer or question pelt through my head to my mouth, but that’s lost to me. My friend arrived, I passed on the news because he had known you, and we proceeded to throw back drink after drink until we passed out and over the brink of forgetting.

I know these facts, but not what I felt, or thought.

Here’s what I feel and think now:

That life is like a Junior Infant’s butterfly painting. It unfolds itself not into new newness, but old things made new. Ever so neatly the patterns repeat themselves, now laterally inverted. I am thirteen, in Cork, and my father dies in London.

A decade and then some, I am here in England, and an uncle almost more than parent dear to me dies there.

We’re Cork, from a small town that Dublin would call country. But if our accent’s black to the Jackeen’s white then Towntalk’s still Milkybar next to the Bogger’s Crunchie.

How are you and HOWARRU.

Teeth and TAITH.

Peaches, BLAICHES.

King Crisps, KING TAYTO.

Fifteen hundred people now, and never before bigger. One main road, one school, but seven pubs purveying liquor. A not-so-lucky number, there used to be fourteen, and I don’t know what mortal blow struck down but left seven.

An ex-cinema that sells couches nowadays, the holsterless gauchos of yesterwesterns themselves held up by upholstery.

A ball-less ballroom, where once buses bused in attendees in their hundreds, that remembers rocking for Dickie and rolling out red carpet for Joe Dolan, now locked up, dis-membered by disco.

Minus music or the pictures where do a lad and a lass go when they go out together?

Five out gay men, all under thirty or thereabouts, and one beangarda who flirts with me and no one’s really sure about. Maybe they added something to the water in the eighties? Slipped in some man-but-not-woman-turning chemical, some infernal flipper of the internal switches that tell us if it’s buachaills or bitches we desire. Or was it the arrival of Madonna, more like a fiery comet than a virgin, did the honours? Did she do it and do for the pubs into the bargain? Are the demise and rise of houses for drinking and men aroused by men perhaps linked?

Regardless. It’s our town, and though you didn’t grow up here, you visited not but nearly every summer. This town you were yearly the banterous talk of the planted stalk of a blooming life in London. First-generation Irish in England. Your mother and father, newly husband and wife, made the move together but never actually a life. Four years at the outside before your father, my grandfather, died a young man of an aneurysm. He died like a drink spills, leaving a young wife half-lived but fully-billed and with three kids to boot. Three, two and nine months, and one woman with one teacher’s wages raising them, so is it any wonder that you came home for the holidays to her family?

In times like those a friendly face can turn hopelessness to coping.

She must have been lonely. And you must have known that. Maybe not when you were tiny, but difficult times mean growing up fast, even for the baby, the nine-month-old at the graveside. And maybe you felt lonely too, because you and her shared a life, till the end and the end.

That’s something you did tell me, on our last Christmas, over and under drinks and technicolour treelight.

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Original Production
• Note on Text
• Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information