The Year of the Sex Olympics and other TV Plays (8 page)

Sir Timothy sits back on his haunches, watched by fearful men nearby. He wipes his sleeve across his streaming face and turns again to his notes.

Lavinia looks to Cobb with a desperate trustfulness.

LAVINIA
: Say what this is! I know you can! You must.

But he has no comfort for her. He shakes his head, looking vaguely about—and encounters Tetsy’s eyes fixed on him across Sam’s shoulder. He frees himself from Lavinia and calls to her.

COBB
: Do you see anything?

TETSY
: No—not now.

COBB
: Nor I.

Sam turns.

SAM
: Now you believe me!

Cobb looks round the clearing in a wave of demoralisation. The distant sounds go on—and for the first time it is possible to read some meaning into them.

Nothing that Cobb can understand, as his expression shows—but to listeners of two centuries later, the sounds would be hideously significant.

As they blend more and more it is just possible to discern the rising and falling of numerous air-attack sirens at a considerable distance. Unsynchronised, they tend to merge into a single wavering throb, but even that is unmistakably evocative. Superimposed on it are small, sharper sounds—distant car horns in frantic chorus.

Two men on watch suddenly throw down their staffs and run across the clearing past Cobb. One ducks under the ropes and is away. The other gets tangled. Bells ring and clatter.

SIR TIMOTHY
: Stop them! You there—come back! I need you—

But the men are gone, and the others are on the brink of doing the same.

The second, far louder, type of sound breaks out again—at first in half a dozen rapid, fragmentary blips, then slowing to irregular bursts that last three or four seconds each. The sheer volume of sound is terrifying. It shatters those in the clearing. More men run off.

Glass jars are kicked aside, smashed by running feet. The rope itself is trampled down. A man stumbles through Sir Timothy’s electrical apparatus, dragging wires, scattering Leyden Jars.

Lukey Chase lets go his toasting forks and slithers down through the branches.

Below, Sir Timothy runs from hopelessly trampled apparatus to the next position. There is dread in his face, but he manages to concentrate enough to get the lids on to the jars.

Lukey tumbles to the ground behind him and is about to run after the other men when he sees the squire. He rushes across and grabs him by the shoulder.

LUKEY
: Quick, sir—get out of this!

But Sir Timothy shakes him off wildly. Lukey shrinks as another clap of sound strikes, and runs for his life.

He bolts past Sam, on his knees now and still holding on to the terrified Tetsy.

SAM
: Hear the road now! Hear them running there!

The intermittent bursts of the louder sound are blending into a single roar. And picked out in it, as if close at hand, is the particular sound of running feet on concrete, of many feet, moving fast.

Sam suddenly makes a plunge for the gun and stands up facing the unseen runners.

SAM
: Stop, you—devils or whatever you be! Hold or I’ll shoot! Hold, will ye!

But the noises crash on, and in another moment Sam’s gesture is over. He drops to the ground in abandonment to mortal terror. Tetsy crawls over to him, looking to the others in desperate appeal.

Lavinia is crouching by the fallen tree. Her cloak has slipped off and she is shaking with cold and terror, her arms crossed across her breasts. Cobb is on his feet but seems to be supporting himself against the shattered trunk as if he has lost the power to move.

Suddenly Lavinia starts forward, hands over her ears to keep the battering noises out until she reaches safety. She runs only a few paces before tumbling, tripped by a root. As if the fall frees some paralysed mechanism in her, she starts to scream.

She finds herself lifted, turned about, and looks into the face of the negro.

LAVINIA
: Save me! Oh, save me!

But he glances round at the others who are equally helpless. He tugs off his livery coat and throws it over the shuddering woman—

Cobb stands rigid, hypnotised by the experience.

The running footsteps seem to have passed. And the huge formless roaring that lay behind them has sharpened in its turn—to the engines of innumerable cars. It is as if they are roaring through this very clearing in hundreds. A burst of angry hooting in the distance is echoed by horns close at hand as they scream by.

Jethro is tugging at Cobb’s arm.

COBB
(resisting)
: No—

JETHRO
: Come quick, sir—

COBB
: Listen! It’s machines!

JETHRO
: Please—

COBB
: Machines, Jethro, great machines! This can be nothing of the past!

JETHRO
: Master—

COBB
: I must hear! Leave me!

He shakes off the servant’s grip, clings again to the trunk for support as Jethro goes.

The noises are almost continuous now, and changing their nature. Brakes scream, horns blare close at hand. A rending crash is followed by a rapid series of metallic crunches, as if cars have piled together. Women scream, men shout. There is a brutal revving of engines as if in the worst, most frantic traffic jam of all time. More and more voices are shouting, at first unintelligibly. Car doors are slammed. There are more footsteps ringing out on the concrete.

Sir Timothy totters to the middle of the clearing with his notebook still in his hand. Cobb has not moved.

Sam, flat on the ground with Tetsy at his side, draws the twig cross out of his jerkin and holds it before the shaking girl.

Lavinia is lying where she fell, hiding under the negro’s discarded livery with her hands clamped on her ears. Jethro is nearby. He is bare to the waist, on his knees facing the direction from which the noises first came. He has drawn two spindly saplings together across the track and is fumbling to tie them with a strip of livery braid. He mumbles to himself, half-remembered words from the past. His eyes are squeezed shut as if he is trying to close his mind against the noise.

The camera pans to the ground, to the raw, trodden leafmould.

The strangely blurred voices of the unseen people are clearer, sharp with fear.

VOICES
: Get out of it! Get back there! Where’s the police? Get out of the way! Get back! Back up there! Drive into them! Go on, that’ll shift ’em! It’s a pile-up, can’t you see! It’s hopeless! They’re all shunted up! Dozens of ’em . . .

WOMAN ONE
: Oh God, oh God, oh God—!

MAN ONE
(almost sobbing)
: Clear it, make them clear it!

MAN TWO
: All lanes blocked—it’s hopeless!

WOMAN TWO
: More to the side there, quick! On to the hard shoulder—

MAN TWO
: It’s no use!

WOMAN TWO
: They’re all doing it!

MAN TWO
: No bloody use—

WOMAN TWO
: Quick, before he does!

MAN TWO
: It’s all blocked solid.

MAN ONE
: That crash did it. If it hadn’t been for that—

WOMAN ONE
: Oh God, oh God, oh God—

MAN ONE
(bellowing)
: Let us through! For Christ’s sake let us through!

MAN THREE
: Out of the car—quick!

WOMAN THREE
: What’s the use? It must be time—

MAN THREE
: Come on, kids! All out, quick!

WOMAN THREE
: They said four minutes! It must be about that—

MAN THREE
: Quick, I said!

WOMAN THREE
: Oh, Charlie—

MAN THREE
: Now we’re going for a run—first to reach the signboard gets a shilling—

WOMAN ONE
: Oh God, oh God, oh God—

MAN ONE
: We can crawl across the bonnets!

MAN THREE
: Run like hell! Run, damn you, run!

WOMAN ONE
: Oh God, oh God—!

She slurs into helpless sobbing.

MAN TWO
: Four minutes, it’s far more than that now—

MAN ONE
: What’s the time, then?

MAN TWO
: Far more than four minutes—

WOMAN TWO
: P’raps it’s not going to—p’raps it won’t—p’raps it’s all a mistake—

She goes off into hysterical laughter.

The voices blur again, yelling, arguing and simply gibbering with helpless fright.

Close shot of Cobb. He gives a sudden moan, a curious formless cry at the impact of a sensation too great to bear.

COBB
: Oh, there—

Tetsy, on the ground, covers her eyes even from the rough cross. As Sir Timothy drags himself towards the fallen tree:

COBB
: I can see them! I can see the road!

Appalled, he stares along the leafy space of the clearing.

SIR TIMOTHY
: What are they?

COBB
(vaguely)
: People—

The voices sharpen again.

WOMAN TWO
: Why don’t they come! I want them to come! I want the rockets!

CHILD
: What rockets! Daddy, what rockets?

MAN FOUR
: Shut up!

WOMAN TWO
: Send them quick! Send the rockets quick! Get it over—get it over!

Cobb rubs a hand hard across his eyes.

COBB
: I can’t see—it’s gone again—

SIR TIMOTHY
: They said—“rockets”—

A wide shot of the clearing with its few crouching figures, as the sounds and voices go on. The traffic roar has died away. Instead, there is a huge, murmurous lull. A few voices, far off, are singing a hymn.

Car doors slam in increasing numbers and the walking feet move rapidly, between the unseen halted vehicles.

Close shot of the ground, all grass and earth, with Sam’s shaking hand in frame clutching his twig cross. The footsteps clatter only a few feet away, and voices are clear and close.

MAN FOUR
: Quicker! Quicker, darling—gimme the baby!

WOMAN FOUR
: Can you manage?

MAN FOUR
: I can manage another! Now then—
(Roars)
Ronnie!

WOMAN FOUR
: Ronnie, hold on to Sue’s hand! Keep together among the cars!

CHILD
: We’re walking on the motorway!

WOMAN FOUR
(with dreadful, anguished firmness)
: That’s right. Walking on the motorway. Isn’t that a funny thing? Because you’re not supposed ever—

Wide shot of clearing.

The individual voices are lost in an extraordinary human sound. A vast anguish that seems to start far off along the motorway and sweep it along, growing. A multitude in total desolation.

The camera cranes slowly towards Cobb.

COBB
(crying out)
: I see them! All—!

The wail dies slowly. Only a few tiny, sporadic sounds—a dog barking, babies crying, a bell—break the relative quiet.

The camera reaches close shot of Cobb and halts as a thunderous nuclear roar crashes out from an explosion perhaps twenty miles away.

Cobb convulses at what he sees. The camera cranes in closer and closer as—

Demoralised, random cries break out again, close at hand. A woman screams in short, sharp barks. A man’s voice is shouting in hysterical relief:

MAN
: They missed us! We’re all right, we’re all right—

The camera is tight on Cobb’s staring eyes.

All sound cuts dead.

Cobb’s eyes squeeze shut. He claps his fingers upon them, as if to crush the eyeballs and destroy the sight in them. And the colossal sound of a thermonuclear blast wave, sweeping outwards from the point of impact, thunders out and spreads and fades.

A low, wide shot of the clearing. For some seconds there is hardly a movement. Jethro, his bare torso glistening with sweat, looks fearfully round from the crossed Obeah branches. Lavinia lies there with one fragile hand extended to clutch the charm like a drowning creature. Her eyes flutter open.

Cobb is on his feet, shuffling forward in tiny steps. He takes his hands from his eyes at first fearfully. His face has curiously collapsed. He stares straight before him.

SIR TIMOTHY
(at his side)
: What did you see? Who were they? You
did
see—tell me! Tell me!

Cobb nods almost imperceptibly.

SIR TIMOTHY
: I must know!

Cobb nods on. There is a sound at their feet like an animal worrying. It is Sam, his face distorted as he rocks the limp shape of the girl.

SAM
: She’s dead! I felt her heart burst!

LAVINIA
: Dead—

JETHRO
(whispering)
: She saw too—

They move towards Sam and the body he holds. Sir Timothy is crouching there, opening the girl’s eyelids for a sign of life.