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Kieran Hurley

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786820952
• eBook ISBN: 9781786820969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro britannico

A teenage girl boils up in rage in a toilet cubicle. A finance worker preaches doom in a busy train station. An absurd coke-addled celebrity races through town on a mission. A paranoid stoner stares blankly at the endless disasters on the TV news. In just one moment, all their worlds will end. Winner of Best New Play at The Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland 2017

A room. A chair. A desk.

On the desk, a microphone, two audio samplers and an unlit candle.

KIERAN enters. He is wearing a suit. He is wearing no shoes.

He sits. He lights the candle. He speaks.

Hello.

This is a story about the end of the world.

It is a story about a city. Like this one.

Here and now.

It is a story about me. And it is a story about you.

It begins, as it ends. With a breath.

An audible in-breath.

*

You hold on tight to the air in your lungs as the glass-walled elevator pulls away to floor 22; the city streets rushing from you as you push up, up, up.

You step into the marble corridor. Your shoes make an expensive-sounding click.

You are Mercy. That is your name. The approving blue light of the security scanner tells you so as you press your finger to its cold glass, the heavy door to your office yielding obediently. Mercy, you have moulded yourself in the image of this world, wearing its clothes like armour, contorting your being in order to fit. And now you fit.

Your leather seat welcomes you, knowing your shape. The contents of your desk lie before you; tidy, neat, pleasing. Keyboard. Monitors. Phone. Your favourite gold fountain pen. The picture frame with the Bible quote from your mum. The God stuff means nothing to you, you just like the words: “And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below.”

Your colleagues – white blokes all – have desks bedecked with motivational phrases like “Go The Extra Mile.” You smile, knowing that none of them have ever truly had to go an extra mile for anything in their lives, the silly tits.

You know how much they resent you. You feel it through the walls, but you don’t care. It’s another driver.

Someone once joked that if the markets are God then you are a high priestess. You didn’t laugh. You know the mystical force of the confidence trick, the enchanted numbers, the illusory words with such real effects in this flesh world. You deal in Futures. It’s what you do.

You read the signs, detect patterns. Watching, analysing, reporting. Last month you had spotted fluctuations in crop values due to unprecedented floods from which you could predict for the shareholders a sharp price hike on rice. So everyone stockpiles rice. Holds on to it. Then sells it for more in the future. The future is where it all happens. The future is where all the money is made. Growth, debt, everything all of this is built on, just a deal we make between ourselves now and an imagined future moment.

To deal in Futures, you tell yourself as you take a deep breath in and steady your mind for the task in hand, is to deal directly in the magic, and the spell of capital.

You don’t eat at work because hunger is a natural aid to productivity. You have not slept in days. You’re too well aware of the close cousinly relationship between crisis and opportunity, of how these corridors have been lately fizzing with the thrill of global catastrophe. National bonds nose-diving with the escalating migrant crisis; collapsing currency triggering a new potential housing crisis; mass investment in military technology in response to the global climate crisis; crises within crises within crisis crisis crisis.

A dying bee twitches and crawls its way across your desk. On the 22^nd floor, you think, that’s weird. You crush it with the butt of your pen. The sound and the feeling makes the skin on the back of your neck tighten. But they’re dangerous when they’re dying. You sweep it to the floor. You focus. You breathe. You get to work.

*

You curl up in your seat, tuck your tiny feet under your legs and chew on what’s left of the nail of your thumb. You’re looking at a screen. On the screen is a map of land. Of a city.

The map of the city moves. It moves before your eyes, in crude graphics. In the top right-hand corner of the screen the name: ASHVILLE. You’d named it after yourself. You. You are Ash.

You’re playing Sim City on a PC SNES emulator that you downloaded about two years ago and basically forgot about.

You like playing the old games. You dunno. It’s cause they’re sort of stupid and funny and you dunno, you just like them. Even though you’re mum’s really worried that everyone thinks you’re weird.

Girls play computer games mum it’s a thing now yeah? Jesus.

You wrap your duvet warm around your shoulders, your baggy pyjama clothes clinging to you like an extra skin.

You’d built it so that there were no roads in Ashville. Because when there were roads you got all these issues with traffic congestion and pollution that you had to fix. So you have realised that it’s best if you just don’t have any roads obviously. You could just have train tracks and that was fine. Matthew always said it was stupid to just have train tracks because that would never work in real life.

But this isn’t real life is it Matthew? It’s Sim City for the Super Nintendo from the fucking olden days. Cunt.

You hate him. Matthew. You hate him even though you can’t stop thinking about him.

You set the tax at seven. That was about the right setting for tax. Seven. Definitely no higher than eight.

You don’t think it feels like a fair reason to be dumped. Matthew had said that now that you were both nearly thirteen it was fair enough for him to get to touch your fanny.

It’s not that you don’t want him to touch your fanny. Maybe you do, in fact, want him to touch your fanny. Maybe.

You just didn’t want him...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
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