No One is Coming to Save You

Nathan Ellis

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786827753
• eBook ISBN: 9781786827746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

An insomniac is watching TV in a language he doesn't understand; a woman is stood in a garden stretching her arms to the sky. The whole world is asleep and something extraordinary is about to happen. No One Is Coming to Save You is the hypnotic story of two young lives lived in social, political and economic fear. Hopeful new writing for the

Act Two

A The garden. The light spills out into the garden and hangs in the space beyond the window. The lights are off in all the houses opposite, rows of windows that overlook the garden are dark.

Everyone’s asleep. Everyone’s asleep? They are all there, sleeping peacefully.

She quit her job this morning. She works as a logger, which doesn’t mean you work in a forest cutting down trees – although those people are also called loggers, incidentally – it means you watch raw footage and you log what happens in minute detail. Things like

wide shot of tree possibly fir tree. brackets coniferous

quite a lot of cloud above tree but small area of blue sky

a man in orange overalls and yellow hat walks towards the tree holding chainsaw

man in orange overalls pulls chain and chainsaw starts

man cuts tree about metre from base

man continues cutting tree with chainsaw

thirty continuous seconds of cutting tree with chainsaw

tree falls

man smiles at camera and puts thumb up

That kind of thing.

R He’s still wearing the clothes he wears for work. He works in marketing and he sells olive oil spread to life-loving empty nesters. Life-loving empty nesters are the key category of people who buy olive oil spread. Life-loving empty nesters, he knows, because he’s read, like exercise and holidays and value honesty and hard work and own a home and have grown-up children and buy olive oil spread.

When he thinks of his life and his future he sees a succession of disappointing sandwiches eaten in traffic jams.

He doesn’t know if he likes or dislikes his job. He likes most of his colleagues. He likes air conditioning. He likes the feeling of being in a meeting. He likes getting paid. And he sometimes likes the feeling of meeting a stranger and saying what he does out loud.

But occasionally he will be in a meeting with a roomful of people and he will look around at the faces of the people he works with and he will feel quite excited about blowing the whole building up and killing everyone around him. Or about standing up and saying something incredibly offensive and then walking out of the room.

A Logging is useful for multi-camera reality shows or documentaries, useful so that editors can then read what you have written and use it to do creative work, creating stories out of your rough text without having to go through all of the footage.

She works nine-to-five, with short ten minute breaks every few hours, and an hour for lunch. She wears headphones and sits in an ergonomic chair, with very good back support. She works in a basement, so there is basically no natural light, like this room, really.

One other person works in the basement, another woman, a woman called Lavender.

She has a pointy face and sad brown eyes. Lavender and the woman are not friends. She does have friends, but Lavender is not one of them, despite the fact they spend the majority of their time together.

Their longest continuous interaction most days is:

How was your evening?

Yeah. Fine. Yours?

Yeah.

And occasionally Lavender will stand just outside the door to the basement on the stairs and speak to other people loudly on the phone. She will speak loudly enough to be overheard and will say maybe every word she knows and the woman will wonder why they don’t ever talk about anything other than how their evenings were.

They always eat lunch at their desks. In silence. Lavender often eats too quickly and chokes on her sandwiches. The first time it happened the woman looked up to check that Lavender did not need a firm hit on the ba...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Act One
• Act Two
• Act Three
• Act Four
• Act Five
• Epilogue
• Endnote
• Acknowledgements