Fast Monologue

	Stephen, in huge close-up, monologises at really quite ripsnortingly 
	immense speed.

Stephen		When I was seventeen I had already tried fourteen different
		jobs, married twice, fathered many many many children, eaten a
		perfectly enormous quantity of food over a long time period,
		been weaned off six types of class A dangerous drugs, given up
		smoking, taken it up again, given it up again, taken it up
		again, given taking it up and taken giving it up again and
		again and again. By the time I was twenty, alcohol had never
		passed my lips, yet I was a reckless and predatory alcoholic:
		my life was in pieces, my marriages were shattered, my children
		lay in ruins, my coffee was tasting incredibily bitter, I was
		paying alimony along the sinuses, behind the dark interior
		passages of the skull and through the nose. Nothing smelt felt
		dealt me right. My friends, ha! Friends? Friends, more like. My
		friends shunned me as you might shun a cigarette lighter or a
		brown caravan. In my twenty-fourth year I had increasing
		problems coping with live music. I lost my sense of utterness,
		and all feeling and movement in both testicles. Testicles? Did
		I say testicles? Testicles, more like. Rashes came and went:
		more wives, more children. My first daughter was severalteen by
		this time and inclined to chat. Nothing, nothing had prepared
		me for this. Life, they call it. Life? Life? Life? A living
		life, I called it. Desire, mood, memory, heat, sweat, effort,
		power, diction and a great quadratic equation of violent
		wanting, needing and rinsing. Words tumbled from me then as I
		knew that the answer lay, not in poetry, not in music, art,
		sculpture, drama, dance or investment analysis. The answer lay
		in a new way. A new way on. Some infection gripped me by the
		kidneys and said "a new way, Randall, a new way". So still
		barely twenty-five and three-quarters I rode that mountain, I
		trod that vineyard, I slept that great sleep of destiny, I
		danced to that music of memory and pogoed my soul to the insane
		rhythms of the heart's mind's vapid texture of journeys.
		Journeys? Gurneys more like. No, journeys, I was right. Still
		the fat gathered to my sinews and the corpuscles sang in my
		veins. Answers? No answers: fate had dealt me a dog turd and I
		read it as a full house. No answers, just the dead timing of
		those twin tomb-black, doom-muffled husbands of decay,
		Bitterness and Rice. But then, then: opportunity knocked once
		for no, twice for yes. The labial seam of lead-grey cloud
		opened its fiery slit and showed me one glimpse, one escape,
		one chance to cut and run and never look back, no not once,
		just run, dead-run, blind-run. Fortune shat gold and told me
		under whose pillow to hide it. No wives now, no children, they
		had all grown up, got married themselves, got safe oh-so-
		spittingly-secure jobs and retired to golf-villas in the
		Algarve with beige cardigans, Beefeater and slimline and
		heavily descended testicles. But at thirty, that chance, that
		chance to ... is "redeem" the right word? That chance to redeem
		a bin-liner of broken shards and sworn devices. If I didn't
		take that chance what would I be? What would I become? Just
		another friendless acid spot on the back buttock of a weeping
		society. So I took it, took the chance, picked up the ball and
		ran, went for it, threw caution to the teeth of the gale, never
		look back, just keep running, I did it. Forget the past,
		there's nothing there, not even memories, just a road you never
		travelled unwinding backwards to a place you never came from...

	Hugh enters behind Stephen, looking worried.

		... where fruit grows on trees you never climbed, in an orchard
		where you lost your virginity to a boy called Timothy who died
		of Horlicks poisoning before you were born. No answers there. I
		went on. I ...

Hugh		Stephen?

Stephen		Yes?

Hugh		Lie down for a while.

Stephen		OK.

Hugh		(as a woman) I've got three. Amanda, Lucy and little Emma. Just
		the three: I'm a busy woman, I think three lesbian lovers is
		plenty.