Ten Storey Love Song

Luke Barnes, Richard Milward

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781783197491
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783197507
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Ten Storey Love Song follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old truck driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. A love song to a loveless Teesside, Ten Storey Love Song is a ferocious slab of concrete prose, peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon.

Middle Child returned from the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as award winners for their production of Weekend Rockstars and Ten Storey Love Song will look much the same: part play, part house party and a truly good night out.

The stage is prepared for storytelling. There are costumes, instruments, electrical music equipment, projectors and lights. Music plays. The actors say hello to the audience as they walk in.

PERFORMER: Hello everyone thanks for coming to Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward done for stage by Luke Barnes. Tonight we’re going to play loads of parts and have a lot of fun. James is going to play some music and show you some images. Our lighting designer is going to change the lights and Anna is going to sing some songs and that’s about it. Music please James.

It is the hour to be drunken
Be drunken without cease
With wine, with poetry, with virtue,
As you wish.

Welcome to Middlesbrough, a small(ish) post-industrial town in the North-East of England, used to be smog, iron and steel workers and now, like so many towns after Margaret Thatcher had her way, there’s fuck all in it but a chain-gang of chain-stores and a lot of people without work. And that’s where we start our story, at a council tower block in the town of Middlesbrough called Peach House where a lot of these people live, love and try to have the best time they can.

Welcome to Ten Storey Love Song.

It is the hour to be drunken
Be drunken without cease
With wine, with poetry, with virtue,
As you wish.

ELLEN: Hello, I’m Ellen. I love Ecstasy in all its forms, the feel of velour and making little paper aeroplanes out of bus tickets and throwing them at slags. I live to be loved – to enjoy myself, I know that can’t last forever but fuck it, let future Ellen deal with that. My boyfriend Johnny’s dead radged today because of an unfortunate incident with premature ejaculate that I told him happens to everyone but really only happens to him, and it happens to him cos every time we have sex he tries to fuck me like I’m a shag doll. He had a go because I’m on the dole and I had a go back because he deals pills and robs kids. I love being on the sausage roll, I love being a free spirit; having men drool over me but not being able to have me, having Johnny wait on me so I can do whatever I like. I’m a liberal, a sixties girl in an eighties tracksuit.

I’m at Dave Morton’s party – he plays for Boro Reserves and we’re getting monged on balloons and all sorts because he’s injured and after a count of one-two-three, we start sucking blowing sucking blowing sucking blowing our cheeks going big and red like trumpet players, and for twenty seconds the magic magic musics all repetitititititive like a stuck stuck rec rec ord ord with Ellellellellellellellellellen riding a fire engine through pink pink pine forest hissssing of ssssnakes no the hissing of balloons deflating and then I’m back in the flat again. And Angelo’s looking at me.

ANGELO: Hi.

ELLEN: He’s got a yummy hot chocolate head, Pacific Ocean eyeballs, muscles bulging.

ANGELO: Want a pill?

ELLEN: Well aye.

ANGELO: Let’s go back to mine.

They take a pill.

ANGELO: It’s not doing anything for me yet. Is it doing anything for you?

ELLEN: No.

They wait, it hits them both.

BOTH: Fuck me.

ELLEN: David Attenborough should be a made a saint for having such a mint voice.

ANGELO: His voice is like a star. You know with stars we see the light even though the star might be dead. It’s the same with Attenborough. His voice is like a star’s light. And is he even alive?

ELLEN: We talk about the meaning of existence.

ANGELO: And time.

ELLEN: And space.

ANGELO: And how we’re all going to die.

ELLEN: And how the planets are becoming further and further away from each other and how one day we’ll go out of orbit from the sun and we’ll be just a cold rock in space and that and that we need to seize the day because we’re all going to die.

ANGELO: What do you want to do right now in this moment, Ellen?

ELLEN: And I know I shouldn’t, but every single molecule in my body is screaming out for it. To be jolly-rodgered.

ANGELO: The buzz changes.

ELLEN: Like it becomes supercharged.

ANGELO: Our genitals are vibrating like tuning forks.

ELLEN: Resonating.

ANGELO: Throbbing.

ELLEN: He’s looking at me like a lapdog and our lips accidentally fall on each other’s.

ANGELO: And they keep on falling.

ELLEN: No, I’ve got a boyfriend.

ANGELO: I don’t care.

ELLEN: I live with him and he’ll be able to hear through the walls.

ANGELO: Yes, but how good does this feel!

ELLEN: As he licks my vagina I think of Johnny next door and what he’s going to do to Angelo. I keep thinking about it as I stroke his knob through his trousers but I don’t stop.

ANGELO: Suck me.

ELLEN: And I’m still thinking about it as I kiss Angelo’s buffalo skin and mouth and crawl into the girl-on-top position. And we start. And I still don’t stop.

She lives to be loved,
Is that enough?

Fuck me

She lives to be loved,
Is that enough?

Fuck me

She lives to be loved,
Is that enough?

Fuck me

ANGELO: The buzz is gone and I’m left with an overwhelming feeling that her boyfriend is going to fucking kill me.

ELLEN: Johnny is going to fucking kill me.

ANGELO: Well, it’s getting late.

ELLEN: Yeah, I probably should be going.

ANGELO: Thanks for that, was fun.

ELLEN: Yeah. See ya.

JOHNNY: Johnny. I love happy hardcore, Aitor Karanka and I dislike non-regulation haircuts.

Good night?

ELLEN: Yeah. Angelo had these mint pills. You should try them.

JOHNNY: I’ve got my own batch haven’t I, under the floorboards. Are you alright?

ELLEN: Yeah. Just going to bed. Need a shower first. Night babes, love you.

JOHNNY: Love you.

She has almost definitely just been shagged.

ALAN
I’m an orange that’s been eaten
They’ve thrown away the peel
I’m just sitting and rotting
And no one likes the smell.

ALAN: Alan Blunt. Alan Blunt The Cunt, some say. I love Frank Sinatra, The Police Force, Old Peculiar, Clarkson and today (not for the first time) a condom has landed on me windowsill. The place is going to shit. I’ve seen the corner shop changing from McGregor’s to Patel’s, churches to mosques, chippys to Indians and with it the whole community starting to vanish quicker than my belief in the Labour party. I worry about the babies because they won’t know what it is to be English. If they could at least speak English then my dad, Larry Blunt The Cunt, could have at least told his darkie nurse he was dying and she could have at least tried to save his life. Life was easy when I was a pig, used to twat those with dark skin to blow off steam and I got away with it, was kind of accepted but now that they can’t afford me I can’t get away with it so I just sit here like so many angry indigenous people of this isle whilst Middlesbrough goes from being white to brown, like ale shits in the toilet. I know what people say about me behind shut doors – having seen me gawping through the gates at the kiddies of Corpus Christi. I don’t think of myself as a pervert or a peado. Just that Tiny Tina, plagues my beery dreams every night, so perfect she is in her dining-cloth dress with her pigtails and rosy legs. I imagine her sat on my lap giving me a big squeeze. Aah.

ALAN
I’m an orange that’s been eaten
They’ve thrown away the peel
I’m just sitting and rotting
And no one likes the smell.

I’m bored so I whack out the tissues and turn on YouPorn to watch two midgets spit roast a bird in a burkha. I turn on Sinatra and hope no one can hear what I’m doing over the sound of Old Blue Eyes. Whenever I put on Sinatra it has to be at a pleasant volume, otherwise you lose all the subtlety of the strings, the swooping arrangements, and Frank’s voice farts at you instead of showering you with perfume. I finish, crack open another bottle, clean myself then chuck it out the window as the sky blisters with some nauseating call to prayer.

Shalom motherfuckers.

ALAN
I’m an orange that’s been eaten
They’ve thrown away the peel
I’m just sitting and rotting
And no one likes the smell.

BOBBY: Bobby, I love love and peace: My dream is to live in some sort of happy Shangri-La, where everyone’s nice to each other and it’s hot and you can have any haircut you want. Round here, everyone loves taking the piss out of each other – groups of lads will go out at night, call e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapters
• By the Same Author