Hope and Joy & The Return. Ellie Stewart
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I’ll get someone to bring you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Plenty of sugar.
HOPE: I don’t take sugar. It makes me sick.
JOY: You’ll be sick anyway. At least you’ll have something to bring up.
***
JOY at home. She is on the sofa with a goldfish in a bowl. She has a bag of crisps.
She talks to the goldfish.
JOY: What do you think? Flying Doctors? How to Train Your Hamster? Grand Designs?
…
I know, it’s not your favourite.
…
It is a special though … it’s on stilts.
JOY opens the bag of crisps and crumbles a wee bit of crisp into the goldfish bowl.
JOY: ¡Que aproveche!
Banging on the wall from the next room.
JOY puts the bowl down.
JOY: (To goldfish.) Don’t go away.
***
The next day in the hospital room. HOPE and JOY. JOY is cleaning.
HOPE tries to move. She winces.
JOY: Sore, are you?
HOPE: Only when I move. Or cough. Or pee. It’s worst when I pee.
JOY: You should pee in the shower. It really helps. You have to …
JOY mimes hosing her own fanny with a shower head.
JOY: But it really helps.
HOPE: How long does it last?
JOY: Which bit?
HOPE: The stingy as fuck bit.
JOY: Not long.
Pause.
HOPE: Are they talking about me?
JOY: A bit.
HOPE: What are they saying?
JOY: That you’re a grunter.
HOPE: A grunter?
JOY: Don’t worry about it. Everyone does something. There’s the grunters, the honkers, the growlers, the beaters, the screamers, the whoopers, the greeters, the ones that bellow, the ones that low.
You are a grunter.
Beat.
HOPE: It’s not what I expected.
JOY: They all say that. I don’t know what they expect.
HOPE: Well I wasn’t expecting … an egg.
JOY: An egg?
HOPE: No one’s saying anything but it’s clearly an egg.
JOY: An egg?
JOY looks in the incubator.
JOY: Oh.
So it is.
HOPE looks at JOY.
JOY: It’s a beautiful egg.
HOPE: Is it?
JOY: Gorgeous.
They look at the egg.
JOY starts talking to it in a high pitched voice.
JOY: Are you coming out? Are you? Are you?
JOY makes cooing noises to the egg.
HOPE: Joy. I’ve had an egg.
JOY: It still likes regular baby stuff.
(To the egg.) You like that sort of thing.
Don’t you?
Yes you do.
Yes you do.
Beat.
JOY: Go on … give it a cuddle.
HOPE won’t take the egg.
HOPE: I’m scared I might drop it.
JOY: Course you won’t drop it.
Pause.
HOPE: I’m scared I might drop it deliberately.
JOY puts the egg gently back in the incubator.
HOPE: What if we don’t bond. What if it’s ugly?
JOY: Oh it’ll be ugly all right. Newborns are always ugly. But you won’t think it’s ugly.
Pause.
HOPE: But it’s … different.
JOY: Hope doll, it is hatching out of an egg. There is a strong chance that it’s going to be different. But all it’ll need is love … and somewhere to spread its wings.
HOPE: How do you know that?
JOY: Eh?
HOPE: How do you know it’ll have wings?
JOY: What?
HOPE: ‘Somewhere to spread its wings’?
JOY: That’s just something people s…
Beat.
JOY: It’s going to have actual wings?
A big moment.
JOY: It was a bird?
…
A biggish bird?
HOPE: …
JOY: Goose?
HOPE shakes her head.
JOY: Stork?
A look. (Do you think you’re funny?)
JOY: Swan?
HOPE: Whooper Swan.
A moment.
JOY: What was he like?
HOPE: They’re bigger than a Mute Swan, and the beak’s a bit more pointy.
JOY: I actually meant the sex. What was the sex like?
HOPE: It was … fine.
JOY: …
HOPE: He was … unbelievably graceful.
JOY: Unbelievably graceful? There’s a thing you don’t hear every day.
So where is he now?
HOPE: Langisjór in Southern Iceland. Sixty-four degrees, ten minutes and one second North, Eighteen degrees, nineteen minutes, fourteen seconds West.
I’m tracking him with a forty gramme solar powered satellite transmitter.
A look from JOY.
HOPE: Oh … I’m not stalking him.
It’s my job.
At least it was my job.
Researching the impact of climate change on the migratory habits of Icelandic Whooper Swans.
…
I was meant to be going to Iceland. To visit the Highland Meadows.
JOY: Maybe he’ll come back and see you.
HOPE: I doubt it. Last year they nearly didn’t come back at all.
A moment.
JOY takes the egg out the incubator.
JOY: Here … have a wee cuddle in.
HOPE: What if I crush it? What if I roll over and it falls out the bed?
She gives the egg to HOPE.
JOY: Here.
See?
It’s like