The Girl Who Fell

Sarah Rutherford

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786829689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Sam's dead at fifteen. It's a social media thing. Maybe. When bereaved mother and chaplain Thea sets off on a mission to
follow her daughter somehow, she's joined on her journey by bickering
teen twins Billie and Lenny, plus Gil - a lost soul whose life collides
with theirs in a way that can only ever get messy.

SCENE ONE

LENNY (15) bounds into the park, closely followed by his significantly smaller twin, BILLIE, who propels herself along on a single rollerskate.

They’re both in black outfits.

LENNY’s is a pseudo-gangsta-style ensemble with a saxophone incongruously slung on a strap over his shoulder.

BILLIE wears sparkly silver shoes, a rollerskate strapped to one of them.

LENNY: It’s like being eaten up from the inside.

BILLIE: (Still going – circling and spinning.) It’s not like being eaten up from the inside. It is being eaten up from the inside. By your friends. Go on, play.

LENNY: I’m not playing.

BILLIE: Shut up.

LENNY: What do you mean, eaten by your friends?

BILLIE: Friendly bacteria. Gut flora. When you’re alive, you’d be lost without them. Hence the marketability of the probiotic yogurt drink. Play your fucking sax or I’m going home.

LENNY: So when you’re dead

BILLIE: That’s why they don’t seal coffins any more.

LENNY: What, why?

BILLIE: Think about it. What are the by-products of the digestive process?

LENNY: I dunno. Gas…es?

BILLIE: Methane. As in

LENNY makes a spectacular farting noise.

Exactly. There have been cases of extreme post-mortem bloating, leading to…

LENNY: No.

BILLIE: Exploded right out of the final resting place.

LENNY: And people chat about worms.

BILLIE: ‘We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.’ That’s Shakespeare. More likely you’ll burst if your body’s intact to start with, though.

LENNY gives this some thought.

LENNY: When I die, yeah? Crush me flat.

BILLIE: Wicked Witch of the East style.

LENNY: Use one of them junkyard car crusher things.

BILLIE: With great pleasure.

LENNY: And if you die first?

BILLIE: I won’t. Why did you bring your sax if you’re not going to play it?

LENNY: Selling it.

BILLIE: What, today?

LENNY: Said I’d meet JD later and show it him.

BILLIE: JD doesn’t play sax.

LENNY: No but there’s this fit girl in concert band, so. Unless you want to learn? Do you a good deal? Friends and family?

BILLIE: Mum wouldn’t let you sell it to me, it was Uncle Derek’s. Anyway, you’re the musician. So you say.

LENNY: Not my style any more.

BILLIE: Here we go. Not fooling anybody with your fucking makeover you know.

LENNY: It’s called growing up.

BILLIE: You were shit at jazz anyway. This is your way of saving face.

LENNY: What, like when you gave up singing after I got Grade 1 Distinction and you got Merit?

BILLIE: How do you even remember that? We were like seven.

LENNY: Don’t pretend / you don’t remember

BILLIE: Most people die on the shitter you know.

LENNY: No they don’t.

BILLIE: All right. Most people die in bed. But after that, the most common place is on the double-you-cee. You going to ask me why?

LENNY: No.

BILLIE: Because, if you have like a massive heart attack, or you’ve got a clot on your lung, which are common terminal events, what it feels like is that you need to do a humungous pile of faeces.

LENNY: So you rush to the bog and you go (he mimes straining and then dying). Brilliant.

BILLIE: That’s how you’ll go.

LENNY: And it’ll be you that finds me. D’you think they did a post-mortem?

BILLIE: Definitely. Sudden and violent death. Want to know about that too?

LENNY: No.

Yes.

BILLIE: Well they start with an incision from the sternum to the pubic / bone

LENNY: Would we have been allowed to see her?

BILLIE: … We saw her.

LENNY: No, I mean like in the funeral home. Did they have like a viewing?

BILLIE: Did you want to press your mouth to her lily lips, her cherry nose, her yellow cowslip cheeks, her eyes as green as leeks?

LENNY: She didn’t have green eyes. I don’t think.

BILLIE: I’ve got this:

She produces a length of red hair tied with a ribbon.

LENNY: Fuuuuuuuck! What the fuck is that?

BILLIE: She brought it to school. Think she thought maybe I could stick it back on for her or something.

LENNY: She wasn’t stupid.

BILLIE: Didn’t say she was stupid! I know she wasn’t stupid, I knew her better than anyone.

LENNY: Really.

BILLIE: Tried to plait it – there was this long bit hanging, did you see? I tried to weave this bit in with that, to make it look like a plait. Didn’t work. Here.

LENNY: I’m not touching it!

BILLIE: And you reckon you’d’ve fancied seeing her corpse without swooning?

LENNY: I’m not scar...