Spine

Clara Brennan

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783196654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Winner of a Scotsman Fringe First Award 2015 Spine charts the explosive friendship between a ferocious, wise-cracking teenager and an elderly East End widow. Mischievous activist pensioner Glenda is hell-bent on leaving a political legacy and saving Amy from the Tory scrapheap because 'there's nothing more terrifying than a teenager with something to say'. In this era of damaging coalition cuts and disillusionment, has politics forgotten people? Can we really take the power back? Amy is about to be forced to find out.

Dusk in the front room of a mews house in London. Silhouettes of mysterious household clutter behind AMY, a teenage girl.

She is alone in the house, but impersonates GLENDA, an elderly cockney woman. She does not have to be excellent at mimicry but does enjoy doing it.

Text in italics indicates when she speaks in the voice of GLENDA.

AMY: I rock up on her doorstep and she opens the door.

She’s a shrunken little biddy with shocking died red hair. And she’s standin’ there in nothing but a negligee, a cream silk one. And round her ankles are baggy beige pop socks, not pulled up. She’s lookin’ up at me…but she doesn’t seem to clock I got a massive fuckin’ shiner and dried blood all down my top.

Instead of slammin’ the door in my face she turns round to lead me into the house and I see there’s this little smudge of shit on the back of her nightie, and I think, that’s the saddest…that’s like the most vulnerable thing I ever saw.

An’ anyway she says, ‘I can’t show you the room meself ’cause I live downstairs and I’ve got a home help comes three times a week but she’s gone for the day’……and oh my god!

Looking round as she bangs on, the place is a shit hole, big and everything, massive old house, but it’s – a mess, not like, of dirt, but of stuff, years full of stuff! Worthless fuckin’ knickknacks, everywhere!

And she says, ‘I can’t get up them stairs, it’s my knee you see.’ And she’s saying all sorts of random shit like. She’s the widow of a man called Louie, and she said he died upstairs, having a tug of his ‘clickety click.’ You what?

‘Ooh I hadn’t heard a peep out of him for a few hours, so I struggles up them stairs and I find him there, dead to the world! Caught ’im with ’is trousers down, well an’ truly, I can tell you! Sat at ’is bureau desk with a lingerie catalogue opened up in front of ’im, trousers down round ’is ankles an’ ever such a look o’ surprise on ’is face!

I’ll say that for ’im, my Louie was a real go-er! He was stiff as a board, stiff as anything!’

Oh my god, this is fuckin’ sick. She’s actual nuts.

‘But don’t be a-feared my gel, ’e’s too embarrassed to be a ghost.’

She gives me this big cold Victorian key, and says first floor, second door on the right, that’s the room. And I go up her stairs thinking what the fuck am I doing here? She’s talked me into – I think I ain’t taking the room, I’ve been blown off course by this gross old bird, what the fuck am I doin’?

But I’m climbin the stairs in-I?

I go into a back bedroom, and it’s got two doors coming off it. It’s got this big what you call a bureau desk in it –an’ the top of the desk has like, an eyelid, the roller bit is rolled back, so the desktop’s thick with dust. An’ there are fingerprints around a leather rectangle, and a proper old ink well, like fuckin’ hell this is where the old bloke died! Fuckin’ ’ell if I stay ere any longer I’m gonna be stuck in the Victorian times! And this – now – is when I get cold. A chill just rises up from my ankles, and I shudder. I shudder.

Look on another day I might have turned the room over and rinsed the place but this is some creepy-ass shit –

There’s something’s there.

I leg it back downstairs, start making my excuses but she’s got the damn kettle on and keeps me there, draws me back to the kitchen, says she’s got ‘things she wants to ask me,’ she puts cloths down as stepping stones on the tiles because she’s just mopped it, and she leans on the kitchen table in front of me, makes me sit at it. And I do. ’Cause I’m fuckin’ knackered.

And slowly she puts her little leg up on a stool and rolls up these tan pop socks, and I remember thinking ‘Ames mate, this cannot get any weirder’, ’cause it’s like she didn’t know who I was suddenly? And she’s leaning down and slowly, ever-so-slowly pulling up this tan pop-sock up her shin, rollin’ it up like she’s a stripper and she’s pulling on her sexy time stockins! It’s properly a bit sexual or something! Like maybe she was a right babe in her day you know? I think she was; I think maybe she was.

But – rank! She’s got bandages covering the oozing of her varicose veins just like my Nan did! Except I’m here with an old bird I don’t know, in her underwear!

And this is when she turns and looks at my black eye, like she only just seen it. And she says: ‘Don’t tell me you walked into a door.’

An’ I dunno what it is, I just start talkin’, just to like, not watch her, I go an’ start the whole story of…

Well my ex-best mate Faye, yeah, texts me about some guy she’s just met, and he’s apparently sent her pictures of his knob. And she says they’re not even good pics, you can just see a Sky Sports menu in the background and his little willy lollin’ about in front of a flat screen? So she texts me LOLROTFWMLITA, which is ‘Laughing Out Loud Rollin On The Floor With My Legs In The Air’. You’d have to meet her but she’s got this way of deliverin’ a punchline with this really serious face on her, and it kills me. Anyway, my nine year-old sister enjoys pointin’ out it’s an ACRONYM.

Faye an’ me. We’re in what from the outside, to the untrained eye what might look like a girl gang. Until I meet this knob-photographer she’s on about: Swanny.

He drives after me that day and he’s all like ‘Baby girl, how can I get to know you?’ And I’m like. I stop dead, right by his car, and I go: ‘Trust me, you don’t wanna know me.’ An’ he keeps drivin’ round the blocks til I get to my estate and I’m like, ‘This is stalking.’ We end up going for a wine and he’s acting all machismo, talking about his job at a garage and how’s he a kick boxer and that? Anyway, he says he can teach me self-defence, and we start off sorta, well from that day on me going to the club, watching him in the ring, and then him for a laugh gettin’ the pads out and getting me to punch at ’im? And I gotta say, it feels pretty good punchin’ the shit outta them pads. I’m a southpaw, and yeah I’m weak as fuck at first, but I get well into it. And then soon we’re like, watching Enter the Dragon – and he teaches me Wing Chun.

So it starts with Swanny as like, my mentor. Now Wing Chun’s what like, Ip Man taught to Bruce Lee, and it’s perfect for little people. ’Cause instead of swingin’ a punch and leaning back to assess your next move, it’s close range. Meanin’ you just like, barrel into someone – you move ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Cast And Creative Team
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter
• Other Clara Brennan Titles