While We're Here

Barney Norris

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786821218
• eBook ISBN: 9781786821225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Eddie and Carol were lovers once, but their lives went in different directions. Now they meet again on a park bench in a town full of memories, and find something still burns between them. Critics Circle and Offwestend Award-winning playwright and novelist Barney Norris has been heralded as 'one of our most exciting young writers' ( Times ), 'a rare and precious talent' ( Evening Standard ), 'a writer of grace and luminosity' ( Stage ) who is 'fast turning into the quiet voice of Britain' ( British Theatre Guide ).

1

The sitting room of CAROL’s house. CAROL and EDDIE are making up a bed on the sofa. CAROL is sorting out a sheet. EDDIE is doing the duvet. His system, inevitably, involves getting inside the duvet cover with the duvet for a bit.

EDDIE: There was this deer, this doe, came and spied on me sometimes when I was sleeping. I’d catch her, looking at the tent when I woke up, stuck my head out. She’d look at me for a minute, then run.

CAROL: Beautiful, deer. Dapply aren’t they.

EDDIE: Only at certain times of year.

CAROL: Yeah, course, when they’re babies. Then they get antlers.

EDDIE: Only the males.

CAROL: Yeah, course. Like cows.

EDDIE: I use to try to work out why she looked at me. Was she afraid? Did she think I could be a source of food? Or just one animal’s curiosity about another, you know?

CAROL: I don’t know Eddie.

EDDIE: No. That’s what’s beautiful isn’t it. You just look in their eyes, you know? And that’s all you see.

CAROL: What on earth are you doing?

EDDIE: This is how I do it.

CAROL: I don’t think it’s how anyone else does it.

EDDIE: Works for me. You gotta do things how you do ’em, Carol, that’s what I’ve found. This is a good duvet, this one.

CAROL: Leanne always used to complain the house was cold.

CAROL has finished with the sheet and moves onto the pillowcases. In a moment EDDIE will have finished with the duvet; he moves onto the pillowcases too.

CAROL: Do you have a favourite animal?

EDDIE: Guess.

CAROL: Guess your favourite animal?

EDDIE: Yeah.

CAROL: I don’t know. Cows.

EDDIE: No. Whose favourite animals is cows? I like otters best. I used to say, what I really want to do, I want to make a TV show called What a Lotta Otters. Isn’t that the best title you ever heard? And it would pretend to be like, a documentary, me going round the world looking at the three main different types of otters. So I’d go to Ireland and look at that kind of otter, yeah? Standard otter. And you’d see otters holding hands and swimming on their back and whatever. I’d interview a fucking otter farmer or something. And then I’d go to the Arctic. And I’d tell you, to camera, the Arctic otter has ten thousand hairs per square inch of its body. Isn’t that amazing? And we’d look at them for a bit. But then, two episodes in, right, the TV show would change. Its true purpose would be revealed. I’d go to Brazil to find an Amazonian otter. You know those?

CAROL: I don’t think so, no.

EDDIE: They grow up to two metres long. Bigger than us. Yeah? Amazing. Absolutely – in a fight, they will fuck up a crocodile. Yeah. Best animal. And for the final show I’d just go searching. I’d just look for one and get more and more desperate, and more and more mad. And I’d be on camera going like, whoa! Whoa! People’d be scared. And then the show would end, and I’d have told you everything you need to know about Amazonian otters. To camera. While I was mad. But we wouldn’t have seen one. And people would realise, that wasn’t a show about otters at all. They’d talk about it afterwards, they’d say. I know. It was a show about something else.

CAROL: What would it be about?

EDDIE: Well there you go. That’s the mystery, isn’t it? That’s the adventure.

CAROL: I don’t think people would get that.

EDDIE: No?

CAROL: There we go. That’s all right isn’t it.

EDDIE: It’s brilliant.

CAROL: I’m sorry. I don’t really go in her room that much, if I’d known she’d left it in such a state.

EDDIE: Don’t be silly.

CAROL: I’ll sort it all out when there’s time and you can be in there, but there’s no point doing it tonight if you don’t mind.

EDDIE: I’m just so grateful to you Carol, you’re so kind.

CAROL: It’s nothing. It’s a pleasure.

EDDIE: Leanne must be a proper grown up now.

CAROL: Oh, yeah.

EDDIE: Where does it go right?

CAROL: Flies by, yeah.

EDDIE: Except when you get a moment like today. Then it’s like there hasn’t been any time ever happened at all, or you’ve circled back somehow. I saw you it was like you were walking up out of the past.

CAROL: Yeah, I know. So funny. I’d only gone out for a breath of fresh.

EDDIE: Yeah.

CAROL: When Leanne still lived here I used to meet her in that park Saturdays, so we could have our lunch together, so I suppose I just wandered out thinking about Leanne.

EDDIE: Oh right?

CAROL: She worked part time in the Wilko’s by there, on the tills. Half the year. The other half the year she’d move to do the camps on Hayling, that’s where she’s moved now, which she really loves, so.

EDDIE: That’s great.

CAROL: She loves it, yeah. Really happy doing that.

EDDIE: That’s really great for her.

CAROL: I met you off the bus there one time, didn’t I, remember?

EDDIE: Oh my God, yeah.

CAROL: And you took me into Gregg’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Characters
• 1
• By the same author