The Voices Project: The Encore Edition

ATYP

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781925359282
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Since its inception in 2011, ATYP's Voices Project has been cultivating the talents of the best young Australian actors and writers. Every year, twenty young Australian writers are chosen to each write a seven-minute monologue for a young actor, bringing to audiences the cutting edge of Australian theatre.This selection of seventeen monologues takes the reader through the themes that have been explored in the Voices Project over the years, varying from first love to food, telling the stories of Australia.By turns witty, touching and chilling, the monologues of the Voices Project explore, deconstruct and subvert our perceptions of modern Australian life.

WE LIVE IN THE CITY, DON’T WE?

HOLLY BRINDLEY

Pause.

Sorry, fuck, fuck, that was a dickhead thing to do, to kiss your—instead of—

I didn’t mean to kiss your head. You seem pissed off?

I wasn’t sure what to do, I didn’t mean to treat you like a little kid or—

I know it was really fucked up and rude when I said I wanted you to leave and go home, but, I didn’t say that because I don’t…

Pause.

The thing is, what I want to tell you is that—

You make me feel sick.

In a good way! Don’t go inside yet, please.

It’s because, okay—

Usually when I’m fucking someone I don’t realize that I’m naked.

But when we fucked I did realize I was naked and it made me feel kind of sick. But also it made me more, sort of, it made me happy, as if all the other times I’ve fucked it wasn’t really fucking. It was like I was fucking a thing, or, actually a someone, don’t worry it was a someone. But it was just me. Not um, it wasn’t me with someone else, being there together and…

Your skin was so warm which made me realize that I have skin. Cause unless it’s really hot or really cold you don’t usually notice that you have skin on your body and that it can feel things. But because your skin was so warm, it made me realize that I have skin.

And you have the shiniest hair, it’s slippery and kind of a mirror, I’m, it’s hard to look in your eyes and explain, but I want to, because—

I wish we could start this day over because—

If I let my mind think, if I let it go off on its own, then it won’t ever stop thinking so I always do whatever I can to make sure that I’m never left alone with my thoughts. There’s got to be noise all the time to drown everything else out, there’s got to be noise or things to look at or things to do or someone to fuck and sometimes all that shit gets in the way of having a conversation with someone, of having a real conversation with you. I wanted you to go home so that we could start again because I think with you I might not mind so much if it’s quiet, or—

I have to be drunk all the time. I like to be drunk so that all my conversations mean nothing but then I’m also scared of getting too drunk because then my conversations might mean everything. So I go away and there’s… things. There’s, see I want you to know that I’m… I go away, I walk down the street right to the end where there’s a car park, do you know it? No, you don’t know it, and so it’s a car park but if you jump the fence into this one section of it there’s a patch of grass which I love cause it’s just this patch of grass in the middle of the concrete which is crazy, so when I sit on it, on the patch of grass, I feel like, I dunno, like I’m sitting on a magic carpet or something and I like to go there, it’s a patch of grass. Nobody knows. And if I squint my eyes I can see a lake in the distance which is weird because… we live in the city, don’t we? I just sit there and, just sit there to be there.

And I can watch the cars going past on the road nearby and the speed limit is sixty which isn’t that fast but it’s fast enough that it takes my mind away from my thoughts. There are heaps of things to watch and it’s not far from that road that has all those hookers, where all the hookers work. So sometimes they wander back up past the car park and I can see them and they look, I don’t know, like they’re always cold. Even if it’s a sunny day. Why don’t they bring jumpers? And one time I thought about running over to one of them who was walking not far from me and she had her arms crossed and her head was down and she had the longest hair down to her waist and it was messy but it looked really clean and um, it was… so she seemed as if she might be cold and I thought about taking my jumper off and giving it to her. I’d take it off and say, ‘Arms up’ and she’d put her arms up and I’d slide my jumper over her hands, arms, head, chest, stomach and she’d be wearing my jumper and it would probably be too big for her.

Don’t you think? Do you need somewhere to go? I mean, please don’t go in, don’t leave, I asked because I don’t know if you’re like me. I think you’re like me, I hope you’re like me, at least in some ways I do, in some ways I wouldn’t wish that on you, because, anyway—

I go to the car park and there I am. But actually I’m not there, my mind is there, but look, my body isn’t, my body isn’t there on the grass, my body is not there on the grass. It’s not. Because I’m not there because there’s definitely no lake and maybe, probably, definitely, no patch of grass actually because why would there be a patch of grass in the middle of a car park next to an apartment block?

My point is, that I didn’t mean to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• The Unpublished Collection: Introduction by Fraser Corfield
• Encore Edition
• Copyright Page