Light Falls

Simon Stephens

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350154018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND TELL ME YOU'LL NEVER LEAVE ME.
A woman wakes up with a stranger beside her. A student argues with his lover. A single mother fights to feed her baby. A married man flirts with two younger women. And far away, one devastating event is about to change all their lives forever. Artistic Director Sarah Frankcom says goodbye to the Royal Exchange with an extraordinary new play by Simon Stephens, with original music by Jarvis Cocker. Connecting five relatives in five disparate English towns, from Blackpool to Durham, LIGHT FALLS is a richly layered play about life in the face of death, about how our love survives us after we've gone – and about how family, community and kindness help the North survive.

Part One

Christine There’s nobody looking.

Nobody sees me as I head east past Thornfield Park and turn from Balmoral Road onto Heaton Moor Road and head past the estate agents and the laundry that also does dry cleaning and towards the shop that I’ve not been inside now for nine whole months.

It’s a warm day. Warmer than it usually is at this time of year and I’m starting to regret the decision I made to wear a coat. My coat is a blue woollen coat that Jess got me two Christmases ago. I’m wearing it as a kind of disguise.

There are three kids sitting on the bench outside the shop but they’re all too busy looking at their phones to pay the slightest bit of attention to me. A woman is pushing her baby in the direction of Gladstone Grove but there’s something wrong with the baby’s blanket so she’s paying attention to that and she doesn’t notice as I pass. Every single driver on the junction at Green Lane is paying far too much attention to the road to notice any of the pedestrians. A middle-aged man seems to just be staring into the window of the shop as though he is searching for something, which is just downright peculiar if you ask me searching for something in the windows of a Co-op on a day like today on a high street like this one in a town like this. But the concentration on his search means that he doesn’t notice me either.

So I go inside.

I tell myself over and over again, like a kind of prayer that I know where I’m going. I know where I’m going. I’ve been here before. I know where I’m going.

I get my bearings as soon as I can and try to check that they’ve not altered the layout of the shop since the last time I was here because sometimes that happens in supermarkets doesn’t it?

They haven’t.

I try not to look at the staff as they move about me and pack the shelves with breakfast cereals and cat food and fresh milk and pasta and chocolate bars and ice cream and tinned fruit and mineral water and I dance around the movements of the shopping trolleys of the other customers who all appear to have suddenly come from nowhere and I head towards the section that I have been thinking about for hours and hours.

Since the last time I was here the staff must have changed. None of them will remember me. None of them will care.

I know where I’m going. I know where I’m going. I know where I’m going.

Stop.

I don’t stop.

I push past an old man who is blocking the aisle looking at the ingredients of a Breakfast Smoothie. He’s standing stock still in the middle of the aisle and I want to get past him, I need to get past him, I try to say ‘excuse me please’ but I can’t seem to speak properly so I push him to one side, which takes him by surprise but I don’t have any choice in the matter.

I get to where I want to go.

I reach up to the glass and the liquid and the liquid and the glass.

Time does not move forward. We don’t live our lives in one direction. Everything we have ever done we are doing now. Everything we will ever do we have already done and we are still doing it and it is ongoing.

I think the Duty Manager recognises me. I think he’s seen me push the older man to one side and perhaps heard the man’s reaction or sensed something in the way that we do sense things. We do. We do. He looks at me, the Duty Manager. I remember his face from the last time I was here. He looks away again at a flip chart he is carrying in his hand. He looks back at me again.

I have to go home to take the washing out of the dryer and put a fresh load of laundry in there to dry. I have to get rosemary for the marinade for Sunday. I have to delete my internet history. I have to drink more mineral water.

It is February. It is Monday.

It is twelve minutes to five in the afternoon.

I think for a moment about how time seems to keep going and I panic like a passenger on the Titanic with the boat rearing and bucking and the water rushing towards me. I try to remind myself that it’s not true. Time doesn’t move forward. Not like this.

At that exact moment for one pound in sterling you can buy one US dollar thirty-three cents; 1 euro twelve cents; nearly nine Chinese Yuan; a thousandth of an ounce of gold and about one and a half Mars bars. At that exact moment a complaint is being made by lawyers representing several of the world’s leading corporations against the attempts by the President of the United States to ban Muslim immigrants from getting access to the country. At that moment avalanches on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan become ferocious and murderous. At that moment the floating vegetation on the Venezuelan Lake of Maracaibo is photographed by the NASA satellite Aqua for the first time. At that moment the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom notices the way the colour of her jacket counterpoints the colour of her eyes as she steels herself against the possibility of rebellion and prepares herself for the celebrations of the start of the Sapphire Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

The place where the carotid arteries at the front of my neck come to meet the vertebral arteries at the back of my neck is called the Circle of Willis. From here smaller arteries deliver blood throughout my brain and because of my age or the things that I’ve done or an accident of anatomy or the body I’ve inherited, at that moment, at that precise moment in the movement of time, a weakness in those arteries causes the blood between the covering of my brain and my brain tissue to haemorrhage. The exact word for this is a subarachnoid haemorrhage.

The blood spills throughout my brain.

At that exact moment my right knee buckles from underneath me. The whole right side of my body feels as though it is weaker than I have ever known it and the weight of the left side of my body is suddenly unbearable. I try to speak or to call out for help but I can’t. The sounds that come out of my mouth aren’t words at all. Somebody must have turned the lights in the supermarket up. That makes no sense. But the lights are suddenly brighter than they have ever been. I can feel sick rising in the back of my throat and I try to hold it down. I do. I do try, Bernard. I do.

In just a few minutes I am going to die.

At the moment that I die I will want to know where my children are. I will want to know if Steven is having a better time in his second term. I will want to talk to Jess. And I will have to see Ashe. I will have to go and find her and talk to her and persuade her to talk to her father about the photographs that I found. And at the very precise moment that I die I will want to hold my grandson, Leighton, in my arms.

At the moment that I die I will smell something very familiar and it will smell like eggs frying in a room next door but it can’t be eggs because nobody would fry eggs in the drinks aisle of a supermarket but there you go. Or is it burning toast? Or is that just something you read about but it isn’t actually true?

At the moment that I die I will feel my clothes tighten around me. The fabric on each individual garment of clothing will tighten and somehow stop me from breathing a little. I will feel a wetness but I won’t know if it’s blood or if it’s something else. Am I having a nosebleed? How embarrassing! I know what to do with a nosebleed. Pinch the bridge of the nose. Don’t tilt your head back. Just pinch hard.

At that exact moment six thousand three hundred and sixteen other people throughout the world will die too.

Fifteen thousand people will be be born.

When people die they move from the first person to the third person. They also move from the present tense to the past tense. At the moment that I die I will feel this happening to me.

She grew up in Wakefield an only child. Her mother made biscuits and sold them to the local shop to help pay for her family.

As a little girl she wanted to be a conductress on a bus.

She wanted to go to finishing school like the women she’d read about in books.

She wanted to be a trapeze artist and then she wanted to be Rudolph Nureyev.

Her mother left home when she was twelve years old.

She started drinking at fourteen to help the feeling that she didn’t fit in. She stole cider and cigarettes from local shops so she always had some to offer the other kids that she would spend time with just to get over that sense of not fitting in.

She got pregnant when she was seventeen to a man who didn’t love her as much as she thought she loved him and she had her first baby who she called Jessica.

When she was nineteen she married another man from Ulverston who she knew she didn’t love. Bernard. She had to, to get out of Wakefield. She grew to love him though. He was very lovely with Jessica who she started calling Jess. His mother was lovely. His father was furious. They moved to Stockport and had two kids together. Steven and Ashe.

Then, after a time, when the kids had got older, the drinking started again.

Eventually she would keep three large glasses of vodka by her bedside when she went to sleep to have in the event of her waking up gulping and shaking in the night.

She hid bottles around the street on the way back from the shops. She hid bottles all over the house, leaving one in every room so if she was ever alone she could have a slug of vodka.

She smuggled bottles of wine into McDonald’s, which Steven and Ashe never liked, and on two occasions doing the school run she was drunk in the school playground, which made Jess unhappy. She was caught shoplifting from the Heaton Moor branch of the Co-op supermarket. When she was arrested she was found to be eight times over the legal alcohol driving limit. She spent a night in police custody and neighbours had to collect the children from school.

One time Jess found her crawling round the floor of her living room. She was sure she was looking for something. She just couldn’t remember what it was.

At the moment that I die I will remember the feeling of sitting in the garden outside my house drinking a glass of white wine with one ice cube in it while Bernard watches the cricket on the television inside.

I will remember the feeling of sunshine on my back on a beach on the south coast of Wales.

I will remember the taste of the ginger biscuits that my Mother used to make and how bits of the biscuit got caught in the gaps between my teeth.

I will remember my mother and her smell and the smell of her jumpers and how when I was a little girl I would always like to wear her jumpers if I ever got cold and I did. I did get cold. I did.

I will remember the colours in her eyes. Sometimes when I looked deeply into those eyes I could see the flecks and the flashes in the colours. And the way the light fell on her face.

And the day that she left home.

At the exact moment that I die the rain will start to pour all across the North of England from Blackpool to Durham. It will fall suddenly. It will be torrential. It will seem to come from nowhere. It will seem to rain without there being a cloud in the sky. Meteorologists will be astonished.

There will be no warning

For one clear moment when I die I will see exactly what is going to happen to the rest of my family for the rest of their lives and to the rest of the town and the rest of the country and the whole of the world and there will be nothing I can do to stop it.

Three months ago in a Travelodge in Bristol my daughter Ashe tied a belt around a light fitting and tested its strength with as much weight as she could and she tied the belt into a noose.

Where’s my phone? I can’t find my phone. I need my phone. Can you help me?

I’m sorry. Have you got any money? I need to borrow some money. I need to find my phone. I’m terribly embarrassed.

The song’s started.

She sings a-capella a line from The Hymn of The North.

The music’s stopped.

The credits are rolling.

Hold my hand.

Sign here. Sign here. Sign here. And here.

Don’t go.

Breathe in.

Part Two

Jess and Michael are in a bedroom of a flat in Blackpool.

Jess Were you watching me?

Michael No.

Jess You were weren’t you?

Michael I wasn’t, Jess.

Jess Open my eyes. Bang. You’re there.

Michael I was looking at you. That’s different from watching.

Jess It’s a very disconcerting sig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Cast
• Contents
• Characters
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• eCopyright