Painted gold with wet leaves, the streets of Bristol look
like runways to enchanted lands, and my weekly walk to the Llandoger Trow takes
on an air of unreality as the rains and dark nights of November unclutters the
city of its people. I pass no-one as I reach the river, and see no life in the
pubs and restaurants in the centre. I
half-glimpse hurried figures in doorways and distant avenues, like hunted spies
in haunted spaces. Taxis roam the dark lonely streets, looking for fares. Ghostly double-deckers pass by the empty bus stops.
Nobody is here. Everybody is home, in
the warm, with Netflix and uncertainty about what we’ve all become now in this
Brexit-Trump cold new world.
 |
| Follow the yellow brick road. |
Naomi is there when I arrive, sipping red wine. She tells me of a time when she was in a
doctor’s consultation room in a faraway country, which she sprayed red with fountains
of blood from a cut on her neck. There was so much blood over the floor that
she slipped in it. The doctor, who had
stepped out of the room, came back into a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Naomi’s life is like a horror film – for other people.
We start writing. We
did good work last week, and we both feel inspired when we read it back. It’s unusual, and not as broadly comic as the
other parts of the play, but we’re okay with that. We have soliloquies and talk of
predestination, and it’s all set in a crummy place in a melancholic seaside
resort in winter – it feels like we’re dabbling a bit in the genre of magic
realism and that this is a play that’s writing itself. I mention that I had recently watched scenes
from a TV production of Don Giovanni,
and that I had been struck by the bit when Mr G gets dragged down into Hell by a
legion of writhing red demons, played by sexy women in tight cat suits. Could we do something like that in our play,
I wonder? Naomi comes up with something
inspired, probably just to humour me, and we crack on.
By a staggering coincidence, one of Naomi’s work friends is
in the pub, on a first date. They
matched on Tinder, apparently. Naomi
explains how she borrows her friend’s phone sometimes to idly find for her friend a Tinder
match, but that she feels constantly anxious when she uses the app because she
keeps second guessing herself. Is it right for good, and left for bad? Yes,
that’s right, another friend will say. Okay,
just making sure, says Naomi. But then a
few swipes later she’ll doubt herself again – is it left, or right? This is the modern world’s cupid’s
arrow. This is the twenty-first century. I wonder what happens to all those rejected
smiling, hopeful young men, the ones who were swiped left. There was a wreath of poppies left by the
memorial along the riverside, and I feel a moment’s shame.
Later, Naomi starts singing along to Meatloaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light. Shh, she says, listen to this bit, it’s a
good bit. I listen. Obviously, the bar staff have finally got
bored with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours,
and are giving Bat Out of Hell a
spin. People start coming into the pub. Life
returns. It’s Bristol. We are night people. You can’t keep us in.
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